NEW YEAR RESOLTIONS, FAR-FETCHED AND OTHERWISE

Happy New Year, Cyberspace!  I've meant to get back into blogging, today, New Year's Day, is the perfect time.  Of course, it has to do with New Year Resolutions.  As an honest blogger, I already clearly pointed out, in the title, that some of these goals are far-fetched.  The far-fetched ones will be denoted with FF.  Here we go!

• Back to blogging!  Hopefully this blog post is the start of a long streak.
• Lose twenty pounds.  Work, bad eating habits, etc got me back at 200 pounds. I need to lose the extra weight for the Long Island Marathon in May anyway.
• Borrowing a page from Jonathan Coulton, I want to try his Thing A Week.  No, I cannot write songs or play instrument, but once a week I'll do something artistic.  In my book, that would include comics, caricature, animation, origami, GPS art, haiku, limerick, Cubeecraft, etc.  FF
• Among the Thing A Week project will be a Where's Waldo large drawing featuring any Facebook friends who agree to be drawn.  FF
• Scan a few complete yearbooks for my high school.  FF
• Get more uncluttered.  FF
• Find a more permanent job.  This current one will end, supposedly, end of the month March.
• Be more connected with people in real life or outside of Facebook.
• Learn to play the harmonica, via YouTube videos.  FF
• Learn Spanish AND get better with the Mandarin Chinese, via podcasts, movies, and newspapers.  FF

That's it!  Let's see if any of these goals will be completed by Jan 1, 2016.

New Year Resolutions, With Feasibility Ratings

All right, here we go with the usual New Year Resolutions, but this year they come with Feasibility Ratings.  Yup, "feasible" is my preferred word over "doable", which is so lame.  For crying out loud, it's just "do" with "able" tacked to the end.  Any decent wordsmith should avoid words formed from a verb and "able".

Here's the list, with Feasibility Rating, 10 being easily achieved and 1 being impossible.

1. Lose twenty pounds.  That's 9.07 kilograms for us Metrics-lovers.  I would have said 10 kilograms but the scale I own has only pounds readings.  Maybe some day when it breaks I will buy a dual scale.  While my exercise regiment from more than a year ago has resulted in some weight loss and a general good feeling, my weight seems to plateau at 190 pounds, my spare tire is still there, if not bigger, and my running pace is still around 11 minutes/mile.  It's time I add a better diet to the formula.  Lose some weight which I believe in return will result in better speed.  Feasibility Rating, or FR for short = 9.
2. Digitize everything I own or can lay my hands on.  Like photo prints and yearbooks.  My mother has a great collection of photos, many in black & white, brought from Viet Nam, as well as more recent photos of our lives in America.  What a treasure trove for the family tree!  I am almost done with my own high school yearbook, but there is the junior high school one, college, and wife's high school.  Someone from her year was looking for it and I offered to scan the whole thing in.  FR = 2.
3. "Possess Less", that's my new motto.  Possessions possess the possessor, so I heard.  At this point in life, I think I have all that I need.  Well, an iPod touch would be nice.  When you know you have something but don't know where it is, or cannot easily locate it, that's when you have too much.  Or not organized enough.  Having less will help you be more organized.  Being a green pack rat does not help, of course.  I just hate to simply throw things out, but at least I live on a street with heavy foot traffic, so things will, mostly, disappear fast when I put them out on the curb.  FR = 5
4. More production, less consumption.  I fancy myself a producer - via this blog and the occasional cartoon or other artsy works.  Of course, Facebook can be a detractor, but I can work my productions into FB, too.  I just hope my contributions won't get lost among the many "status updates" that some of my FB friends churn out by the minutes.  Writing a series of tutorial on how to avoid polluting the FB news feed, or how to keep the news feed free of pollutants, would be a win-win product.  FR = 7

Resolutions 2009

I just reviewed the resolutions I made for 2008 and not surprisingly, I did not stick to any of them. I might have had a short period when I actually went to bed at 11 PM and got up 6 AM the next day to go jogging, but alas it did not last that long. I did not get any handier around the house. I drew a whopping handful number of cartoons, not the twelve I should have done for the months of the year. And so on. What can I say, resolutions, rules, promises... they all are made to be broken. But what the hey, I'll make another list for 2009, a shorter list, with preferences for things I want to do and things that I need to do.

1. Health is a popular topic for resolutions, so here again I would like to make it the top of the list. Yes, I will try again to have better sleep hours. On those mornings that I stayed up til 1 AM the previous nights, I felt really crappy. Why I kept doing it to myself I don't know. Early to bed, early to rise, let's hope it will come true in 2009.
2. I hate my job so much more lately I really need to change career. Again working with the slippery concept that I can succeed in the cartooning world, I will again try to put more effort into it. It is no longer true that I don't have any ideas of what to draw. I actually have two right now, one with the punchline "I want to make my numbers look good", as in when managers make their underlings do ridiculous things just to arrive at some numbers on their dang reports, regardless how wasteful of the underlings' talents. The other has the punchline, "If you do not stick your head in, you won't get whacked." Like those times when you are supposed to be off from work. As long as you don't appear on Instant Messaging, nobody will ping you. Whatever, here's hoping for twelve cartoons for January through December of 2009.
3. Learn a new technical skill. My job has gotten so tiresome there is no time to learn anything new. It always is sink-or-swim. Work just piles on and on and mistakes will be made. Or poor maintenance will occur. Working in parallel with my cartooning path, I want to pick up some new technical know-how. There are many free computer-based training courses on the corporate network. I will just need to invest some of my own time to take them. Maybe some of those courses will even help me earn a few points in Yahoo!Answers.
4. Be more organized in meatspace. Spend at least a day each month de-cluttering my room. My house does not get any bigger with time, so the stuff in the house must be cleaned up more frequently. There is only so much room for so much stuff.

That is all. Instead of ten things that I cannot fulfill, for 2009 I am less ambitious and have just four things to not fulfill. What are your resolutions?