New year, new decade, new me!
Posted by mofembot Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:59:00 GMT
Well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Back in the days of my hyper-religious youth, I would “celebrate” New Year’s Eve/Day by writing down a list of all my faults and bad habits and symbolically burning it at midnight. (No, really, I did this for several years running during my teens. No snide remarks about my social life, s’il vous plaît.) I am not so obsessed by the never-ending pursuit of perfection as I once was, that’s for sure, but I’m still a Goal-Oriented Person, at least on virtual paper, so here’s what I’d like to accomplish over the next decade, and hope to get a good start on in 2010 itself:
• Lose Weight. The tonnage is hard on my hips, knees, and feet, and I don’t need to read any more articles on how bad “belly fat” is for women, thanks very much.
• Blog More Often. Off to a roaring good start on this one, I’d say. (But then, I would say that.)
• Finish Writing the Damn Book. And deal with the several other book ideas I’ve had floating around in my head and on bits of paper for decades (literally). Publish the Damn Book (online or some other way). It would be nice if the writing and publishing were followed by fame and fortune (and movie rights and all that). I guess I might be willing to settle for not getting sued and/or kicked out of France, along with some kind of cathartic effect, but I’d frankly rather have the money from a mega-bestseller.
• Learn the ins and outs of shooting in RAW. This means buying a camera that shoots RAW. This means paying attention to the content more than the form and language and syntax of my Paris client’s website (dxo.com).
• Get back into music.
• Master certain technologies that I have shied away from up until now. I have Serious Doubts about social networking, twittering, and the rest. But I should at least reject them for reasons other than my own fear of and ignorance about how they work (procedurally, I mean). I guess this means using my iPhone “better” as well. But by “certain technologies,” I’m also referring to music notation and art/illustration apps and so on.
• Get back into serious art much more.
• Deal with memorabilia/scrapbook stuff (as in sort, organize, etc. … see final item below).
• Find a way to be able to use the same time-slots over and over again. I mean, seriously, doing everything I’d like to do requires time. I recognize that hitting “refresh” over and over again while online (reading, say, DailyKos) has become a Huge Time Sink. This needs to stop. Discipline, discipline, discipline. (Good luck to that. But I will try, regardless of what Yoda thinks of trying. What a stupid philosophy, come to think of it, brought to us by a fictional creature out of George Lucas’s head. Given Star Wars 1, 2, & 3, it’s hard to imagine giving any credence whatsoever to anything coming out of Lucas’s head.—But I digress.)
And finally… after an entire lifetime, I think I need to do something about how poorly I sleep. Given sleep’s role in memory creation, it’s a frickin’ miracle that I can remember anything at all, but the scary/sad thing is that I have huge gaps in medium-to-long-term memory. The kids ask me if I remember thus-and-so, and depending on how expectantly the question is asked, I may respond that I do remember even when I don’t. (Saying I don’t remember often provokes such distress and disappointment and incredulity and so on that I find it’s easier to pretend that I do remember. Fortunately, further discussion/verbal clues often actually awaken the deep-down, deeply-hidden memory fragment. But sometimes it’s just a blank. I probably can’t do much about that except perhaps refresh my mind via memorabilia and such. … Sorry, kiddies. Sorry, Mr Mo.)
But I’d like to be able to sleep better for its own sake as well. Losing weight will help, as should following such advice as “don’t read in bed,” and so on. Do I have apnea? Unknown. But it’s been longer than I can remember, quite literally, since I had what I’d consider to be a truly good night’s sleep — when I wake up feeling refreshed and renewed physically as well as mentally. (I dream well, I just don’t get enough of the deep, dreamless, restorative sleep.)
Such are my thoughts as we head towards 14h00 on this, January 1, 2010… the Aughts over, and marked particularly by our Becoming French (but more on this at another time).