Another thing I do every year is talk about how the previous year has been the worst one of my life. I'm also doing this again. I can say without hyperbole that 2009 was the worst year that I've had so far (though I also said the same thing about 2008).
It was just...a huge fucking waste. I can't even really say that it had a lot of blown potential -- I started out 2009 in a really shitty way, and I figured that nothing major was going to change. I kind of want to try to blame the shittiness solely on my attitude, but there was more to it than that.
At any rate, I'm (at the moment) really committed toward making 2010 count for something. If I'm trying to force any kind of positive spin on 2009, I can say that I definitely learned how NOT to conduct myself in a way that is conducive to health, vitality, and happiness. Keeping that in my mind, I'm going to compile a short list of things to work on in 2010 and beyond.
-- Less internet. More constructive use of the time I DO spend on the internet.
If 2008 had a lot of wasted time pumped into Pokemon, 2009 trumped that with my discovery of Farmville. It's crazy and completely pointless. I've put off SEX for Farmville. I let my reading, writing, and exercise all fall off to the side so I could fuck around on Farmville and reload Facebook over and over again. It's a fucking compulsive sickness for me at this point -- I can't pass a computer without clicking refresh. The rest of the time is wasted looking at Tori Amos and figure skating stuff (gaygaygaygaygaygaygaygaygay).
I'm not going to give up on Farmville completely -- I'm too competitive for that -- but I want to make it so that I give myself an allotted time slot for it so that it doesn't eat into the time I should be spending doing other things. If I'm really not in the mood to do anything else and really do just want to sit at the computer, instead of sitting here mindlessly reloading all these fucking things, I can be replying to emails/messages, researching stuff, and writing.
-- Try to pretend that my alarm clock doesn't have a snooze button.
Seriously. I can divide people into two groups -- those that are snooze people, and those that aren't. I am a chronic, helpless, hopeless snoozer. I despise it. I'll never do it to the point where I'm late -- I'm actually NEVER late for work -- but I'll do it until the exact last minute that I have to get out of bed, shower, and leave the house to get there. Which means I don't eat breakfast, don't work out, don't write, don't RELAX, just so I can fucking keep my lazy ass in bed and do nothing. It's not like I'm SLEEPING for that extra time -- it's so fucking counterproductive and ridiculous. I end up being much more tired than I would have been otherwise because I end up having to rush instead of being able to get ready at a leisurely pace. This morning I had my alarm set for 11:30 and didn't get up until 1:30. Two hours of getting up every ten minutes to hit that fucking button. I wish there was a way I could program my alarm clock to give me an electric shock every time I try to touch it. Maybe I can get Chris to work on that for me.
-- Be less sexually driven. Value people for other things.
I can usually only force myself to leave my house for two reasons: work and sex. If not the actual physical act of sex, then at least to be put in situations where it's either a possibility, or at the very least, planting seeds for future encounters. It leads to very boring thoughts and very boring writing and I'm tired of going back and reading pages and pages and pages of innocuous nymphomaniac bullshit in my journals. Also, a VAST majority of my stress in 2009 was boy-related and sex-related. Find other things to do with people. Talk to more lesbians.
-- Drink less alcohol.
This isn't a huge deal -- my drinking has never been dangerous or out of control. I'm way too neurotic and self monitoring for that. I'd really just like to save myself a little bit of money and calories. I rarely go out and get fucked-the-fuck up, and when I do it's usually a nice/fun change of pace, but I'd like to keep it to just one or two drinks, one night a week. I generally go out to Pieces on Tuesdays still, and that's fine. Every now and then I'll add in a second bar night if I'm meeting up with someone or have a specific reason to go, but that's it -- I spent way too much money in bars in 2009.
-- Do more drugs.
This probably seems contradictory to the less alcohol thing, but it's not really. I'm not going to turn into a heroin/coke person. But I have good experiences with the lighter hippie shit, and plan to continue doing so as long as I use them in a constructive way and not as an escape.
-- Communicate more.
I want to be a better and more emotionally available friend. I'm usually a really lazy communicator and over-use things like texts and facebook comments in place of more personal/direct communication. I'm going to try to write more emails and letters and use AIM a little more when I'm having computer time, see more people outside of a bar context, and... gulp... talk on the phone. Not often, mind you, but I'd like to start slow and have maybe one or two phone conversations a week, and see where it goes from there.
God, I hate the phone.
-- Eat more moderately.
Notice that I didn't say "eat better" or "eat healthier" or "NO MORE DESSERT!" or anything ridiculous that we ALL know I won't actually follow through with. I feel like this is the best way of phrasing it if I want to stick with it.
My sister bought me a wonderful huge box of brownies for Christmas and I love it. I find myself opening the box several times a day just to smell them and look at them. Ordinarily, these would have been gone in a day or two. But they're individually wrapped, and I've been trying to savor them. One (okay, sometimes two) a night has been working really well for me. I don't feel deprived or insane/angry. I'm going to try to bring this mindset with me into the rest of the year. Likewise, smaller portions, more fresh fruit/vegetable crap, a LITTLE less carbs/sugar, blahblahblah whogivesashit.
-- Learn Italian, at least a little bit.
I have The Rosetta Stone Italian program now and I've been fucking around with it a little. I want to get more disciplined with it. I'm around a lot of Italian speaking people now because of work, and so I have no excuses. If possible I'd like to find a way to get to Italy at some point either this year or next and maybe take a class. I can't really explain why this is so important to me -- practically, socially, and, um, sexually, it makes a lot more sense for me to learn to speak Spanish or Japanese, but this is the one I really want to do.
Besides, there's something kind of hot about not understanding a word that the person I'm fucking is saying, and pretending I don't know what "no!!!" means. Most boys decrease in value considerably if you have to listen to them talk.
-- Write more.
I'm going back and forth about whether or not I want to add "read less" next to that. I don't think I'm going to -- I think that I should read the same amount and just find more time to write from the time I spend on Facebook or jerking off. I want to have at least the skeleton of a short novel done this year and a few stories finished, as well as a fairly prolific blog and an updated journal. No matter what I have to write SOMETHING every day, even if I'm just talking about sex.
I have such a huge amount of fear tied up with my writing, and I constantly surprise myself with how deeply it goes. I'm really fickle with most things, but there have been two things in my life that I've always wanted to do and never felt wishy-washy about: I wanted to go into outer space, and from my earliest memories of my grandmother reading me bedtime stories and my grandfather showing me his encyclopedias, I wanted to write books. I don't really remember a single thing from my last year of highschool, but I still remember how excited and proud of myself I felt the first time I read The Cat in the Hat by myself, how "cool" (heh) I felt reading my first Babysitter Club book in 1st or 2nd grade, and the way that I could see whole entire worlds open up for me the first time I read Matilda, my first Roald Dahl book, and every other literary milestone in my life. It's all I ever REALLY wanted to do with myself, and I feel like I really should be working on that more seriously -- or at least, more than I work on getting laid.
If I would write half as much as I fucked, or spend a quarter of the time I spend THINKING about fucking thinking about writing instead, I'd probably have at least six books written already.
-- Be more adventurous with baking. Be less afraid of cooking.
I love baking, but most of the shit I want to make is expensive and time consuming and then I get too lazy to do it on day off. And I NEVER cook -- I'm not gonna lie - as much as I like Food Network and I'm obsessed with food, I really, really, REALLY do prefer it being made FOR me, preferably by someone I can fuck in return for it. I'm never gonna be this OMG AMAZING COOK!!!!!!!!!, but I want to at least get better at cooking for myself and not be so neurotic/tense about it.
-- Exercise. Shut up, stop whining, just do it.
(Self explanatory. Never gonna like it or enjoy it, but it's a necessity, unfortunately.)
Okay, this dragged on way longer than I meant it to, and it's already almost 5am. Motherfucker. I might add to this list later on. As for now, I want to try to get in some book time and then pass out.
Rob
3 comments:
You don't, as usual, give yourself enough credit. To have the impetus to even start some of the things you did - P90X, for example - is indicative of having the will to change, even if you continually sell yourself short on the value of that. And you went through 12 weeks of what the program itself declares to be something not intended for beginners.
And yeah, I kept up with P90X, but I also half-assed my way through my second iteration so that I was basically repeating the same three weeks over and over again, and here I'm still skipping days here on my third. Nobody's perfect, but you keep trying to jump back onto the wagon and I think that's not something to be valued too lightly. (I almost said esteemed too lightly. Even the mention of Jane Austen makes me want to explode into a bouquet of floral prose.)
You've made resolutions. That counts for something. If you need help keeping at least the most valuable to you, I'm here for you. On an incidental note, I'm mostly referring to the writing here, since that's definitely on my 2010 resolutions as well. :) God, this fucking novel is never getting finished.
Gahh, thank you :p
I can't wait until you can start showing me parts of what you're writing!
That's not happening until I'm in my second revision. The first draft of this piece of shit is getting locked away in some place, and getting referred to only when I want examples of rambling, directionless writing.
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