I Love the Smell of Failure in the Morning

Okay, I'll just face facts now rather than later: I am, as one observant commenter said a week after my last post, the lamest blogger ever. When I made a pact with myself to post once a week on this blog, I figured that the plan would fall through after about a month. I seem to have outdone myself, because that New Year's resolution actually failed before it began. Hopefully, this is just due to the pressure of jumping into a new routine, and I'll just "ease into" posting once a week.

...God, I have enough blind faith in myself to plan on being a creative writer when I grow up. Oh wait, I do want to be a writer when I grow up. Shit.

Anyway, all this thinking about me being a failure led me to realize just how lame I am. Remember how I said I made around 20 New Year's resolutions? I won't bore you by listing them all; just enough to demonstrate my wonderful ability to plan and then do nothing. Anyway, here's some of my New Year's Resolutions:

1. Exercise regularly. Needless to say, this hasn't started happening. I'm pretty sure that this is one of the routines I'm going to ease into next week, and then I'll ease out of it by the time February rolls around.
2. Eat healthier. According to the number of fat rolls I can count on my stomach now, versus the number I counted at the end of break, I think I've actually made negative progress on this frontier. (NOTE: I do not actually count my fat rolls. Thank God for that.)
3. Manage my time better. HA. Today I stayed up until 10:30 doing homework, when I could have finished at 6:00. The good news is that I don't really mind anymore; I guess I just hit bottom a while ago and am gradually buoying upwards. Bye-bye, soul!!
4. Get 7 hours of sleep every night. Mmm, I'm averaging 5 right now. Woohoo for noon-time couch sleeping!
5. Read constantly. Unless "read" means "read about Hiroshima," this resolution is definitely not being resoluted. My copy of Anna Karenina is sitting on the dining table right now, waiting for me to read it while eating breakfast tomorrow. Again, there's still some good news: Tolstoy is a much less obnoxious author than Boris Pasternak (who wrote Dr. Zhivago), meaning that I even though I'm 50 pages into Anna Karenina and am already juggling 17 main characters, I can still remember who each one of them is because each of them goes by ONE NAME ONLY.

In reality, I never thought I'd get very far with any of these. Even though I have surplus amounts of hope, my lameness isn't too much of a surprise for me (note that I'm laughing at myself here and not just trying to whine at you). What is a surprise is the fact that, given this exponential failure, I'm feeling FINE. I know that the stress and the angst and the nausea will probably kick in soon, but right now, I'm almost enjoying throwing all of this self-improvement out the window.

And now I'm going to go to sleep. Aiming for 6 or more hours tonight!!

Don't forget to be awesome.

A Toast To Occasional Cars

I know that most of you, for one reason or another, scoff at the idea of New Year's resolutions. And to some extent, I do too. I think that New Year's resolutions are the most popular vehicle for false hope in the U.S. right now...except perhaps the Democratic Party. I mean, they give the impression that you can kick around with your bad habits and your unsatisfactory lifestyle, and then completely turn things around as soon as the clock strikes twelve. Which is both lazy and delusional for you to believe. (Note that I am talking about New Year's resolutions and not the Democratic Party. Maybe.)

But this notion of mine hasn't stopped me from coming up with about twenty resolutions anyway. And since one of those resolutions is to post at least once a week on this blog, I figure now's as good a time to start as any.

I will not bore you by talking about fond memories of 2007, nor about dreams for 2008. I'll just tell you about now. Now I have a crick in my neck from leaning against the back of my bucket chair. Now my desk is very "organized," but there's still a heck of a lot of stuff on it, and one of the tidy piles of stuff consists of a page-a-day calendar, a journal, and a candle. Now I am very warm because I have a quilt draped over me, and because my feet are swaddled in wool slippers. Now there is no sound except for the occasional car zooming by in the distance. Now it is blue-black outside my one small window, because the fireworks ended about an hour ago. Now it is 1:00 in the morning, and my dad is sleeping in the next room, and some of you are at parties or in cars or asleep, and I am here typing up a blog post on my keyboard.

Happy New Year, everybody!