Twenty Ten Resolves

New Year. New attitude. New resolves. I don’t just wanna make resolutions I wanna make some life changes. It’s a new decade, kids, let’s kick out the jam, turn the page and all that nonsense . Which means you may notice a few blog posts missing. No point in looking back on what I didn’t do. It’s time to plan for what I will do.

Let’s start over. Get this thing set right. With a list. Bam.

1. Blog everyday for the next 100 days. If I plan on being on vacay or away from a computer or some such apocalyptic nonsense, I’ll post via the publish later option. Meaning, I’ll plan them out. It’s not cheating. It’s planning ahead.
2. Pack my lunch at least three times in a work week. I know this is a random decision, but I bought a new lunch bag and I want to leave work early to beat traffic. How is this done? Lunch packing! Applesauce and juice box optional. Also, moneys are saved.
3. Work out 45 minutes twice a week. Obviously, I should be doing more than twice a week, but I’m trying to set goals I know I can achieve right now. This is something totally doable.
4. Read one book a month. When I was a receptionist, I was averaging about 5 books a month, so this should be easy to do.  Book reviews/synopsis to be posted here.
5. Do a writing challenge at least once a week, with four weeks in a month, post at least two of them a month. Y’all don’t need to read all of my brain farts, but I should let you see how I’m challenging myself. Writing challenges count as a blog post.

These goals are pretty easily accomplished. With goals it’s best to set something that’s time sensitive and quantifiable/measurable. These goals meet that, yo. They’re small but simple… I have a few other goals I’m considering testing out. But we’ll see how this goes. They have to do with dating, jobs and living arrangements. Stuff currently too embarrassing to share with digital strangers such as yourselves. But don’t worry, you’ll share in my silliness soon enough.

Oh. In other new year news, I’m a part of Second Cinema now. So, lookout world!

Sweet. So, one post down, 99 more to go. Promise.

Cliche about starting anew and taking the first step and yadda yadda

So, I suck.

Just lemme check and make sure the mood has been sufficiently set. Everyone flummoxed? Groovy. Now to start off about explaining why I suck. For those not in the know, explaining your thesis is generally the first point of order of any persuasive piece, so I’m not really breaking any new conventions. But let’s get this party started, shall we?

1.) I’m completely unoriginal. Clearly, if I wanted to start off strong I’d go in with a hook about how I was awesome, then cleverly dissuade this notion through satire. But even satire’s been around since before Jesus, so, ya know, not even the delivery of my self-deprecating jokes is original.

2.) I’m boring. The best evidence of this is that I have a blog.

3.) I’m a self-deprecating, whiny, little, white girl who should be grateful for what she’s got. Well, everyone should be grateful about what he or she has, but this is beside the point. The point is I suck because I have a job, but I whine about it only being a temp position. I receive money from said job, but I fret about being broke. I was born into a land of opportunity where I could make something of myself by changing my stars and all that, but I’m a neurotic little procrastinator.

4.) I talk way, way, way too loudly. Like, even my whisper can be heard five cubicles over.

5.) Like. I use filler words so much in my every day conversations that they have long since seeped into the very fiber of my writing giving my style a very… shall we say, obnoxious tone. We shall. We shall not, however, talk run-on sentences, comma splices, pronoun antecedent agreements or misuse of parenthetical asides. Those subjects are a tad bit too personal.

6.) I love writing and I don’t do it. This is probably the most unforgivable error. Ever since I could pick up a book I’ve been fascinated by stories. Literally, consumed by the arc created by a well-disciplined writer’s hand. When I was in elementary school and middle school if I wasn’t reading I was writing and I was even noticed by my peers for my passion for putting hideously colored gel pens to paper (oh like you didn’t have one as a tweener girl in the late nineties/early aughts). But something weird happens when the compliment everyone in your class gives you is that you’ll be a writer some day… You get scared witless. I remember reading Stephen King’s On Writing and feeling the pang of truth when he described the neediness of a writer. It’s terrifying to think that your audience (no matter how large or small) might pick a part the piece of your essence you felt confident enough to actually commit to ink. And so it came to be that I let my neurosis dictate my will to follow what made me happy. Telling stories, creating characters, et al. used to be all I wanted to do and I let fear hold me back.

So, in an effort to suck less (because trust me, I will always have a smidgen of suckage to my name), I’m kicking fear in the testicles and pushing my debilitating neurotic hang-ups out the door. I’m going to write. It won’t always be great good decent legible entertaining, but it will be an exercise that I need. So, read it or not. Comment if you have a thought. Regardless of the response, this blog’s for me.

7.) I’m a narcissist. 😉