Resolved

I have read some impressive  resolutions for the new year. Some of them seem attainable, but most do not, just because they are too ambitious, and life has a strange way of being inconvenient.

I’ve been thinking about it because of how much I used to hate Personal Progress. If you’re not familiar with it, that is a program the young women do in my church. It is somewhat similar to scouting, in that you have areas of focus where you set and complete goals. Where it is different was that it is not so much arbitrary skills for merit badges, as looking for ways to improve. That was the part that irritated me. If you notice something is wrong fix it but otherwise just be happy!

Of course, back then I was someone with a gaping hole inside, and I didn’t want to be looking at it. Part of that was the sense that it would hurt, but I think more of it was believing that it was not fixable, and so it was just rude to look at what was wrong with me, because I was stuck like that. Really, though, it was all more felt and sensed than thought.

I guess I have come full circle now, where I am all introspection all the time. The hole is still there, and I still suspect it can’t be fixed in this lifetime, though I may be wrong about that. The thing is, I thought its size and shape were worse than they really were, and it has become something I can live with by examining it, and also, there is so much more to me than that, and that required looking to see.

So now I totally see the value of goals and of milestones, and yet I’m still not setting any resolutions really, and people get silly. New year, new me? No, almost certainly not. I will spend this many hours exercising/reading/drawing/practicing? Maybe, but probably not.

That’s not to say that you can’t change and accomplish things, which I totally believe it, but sometimes I think we get this euphoric belief in the power of mind over matter and let it go to our head, leaving the mind inadequately prepared for the matter.

2012 was an amazing year, and I did change, and that was good. Some of it was intentional, and some of it was not, but it led to other intentions. I did set long-range goals, and I am working on those, but those happened right after my birthday. I will probably do some follow-ups there. That was intentional.

Part of the writing goal was blogging, and I did try and capture something about love songs, and I did share it with someone, and that did lead to me listening to the Misfits and falling in love with My Chemical Romance. That was not intentional.

Falling in love with My Chemical Romance led to blogging more, listening to more music, and getting traumatized enough by one music video that it led to my pouring all of my hurt and their music into 415 pages of fan fiction, that then led to a lot more blogging and exploring of new technology, including more social networking media. Not intentional.

And of course, the whole social networking thing led to one day where just as soon as I thought “Follow Friday is stupid” I thought, that’s not fair, and accepted all of the suggestions for that day, and suddenly my feed was full of teenage angst and acronyms I did not even understand. Exactly what does “ratched” mean? It is like “wretched” or is it based on that cog-like adjusting thing for socket wrenches? I have no idea. And yet, I have really grown to love them and sometimes I think I am even helpful to them. Not intentional!

The biggest thing that I planned to do and did this year was that I finally broke the computer game habit, which took much longer than it was supposed to, but to write at the level I want it was necessary, and I am glad it was there, and although I could easily fall back, I won’t, even though I know I could be awesome at SongPop and Words with Friends, but it’s better this way.

Oh, and the exercising more was deliberate, and it has paid off, though certainly I have not met my ambitions or my full potential there. I am maintaining it though, and I would probably not be able to maintain what I think I should be doing, so there’s that.

So this is what has happened this year. I wrote 480 pages of script. This is not my most productive time period, back when I wrote the first six screenplays that was 570 pages. However, those happened over a somewhat longer period of time, during which I was mostly unemployed. There is also daily blogging, the revival of the other two blogs, and 185 pages of journal, while working full-time and getting healthier.

Beyond that, I am writing better. My descriptions are better, my dialogue is more natural, and I am doing more things to share it, though there is still a long way to go. Those were totally things that I wanted, that simply did not happen in a predictable way.

It’s not that I don’t think New Year’s resolutions are good; they totally can be, but I can think of two ways in which they can be bad. If you make them, and then don’t take them seriously and completely forget them, that is not helpful. If you set overly ambitious goals and then hate yourself for failing, that is actually destructive. So, find something that is helpful.

What I did put as kind of a resolution is that I will be kind and appreciative. This is not a big stretch for me. Part of it is my nature. As a geek I notice things and get excited over them, and as someone soft-hearted I try to be kind. However, I keep seeing more and more how important it is, and so then I want to do it more, and I look for ways of doing it better, then that does kind of become a resolution, though it is more of of an evolution, actually.

So, I have no idea at all how many books I will read this year, how often I will exercise, or what I will weigh at the end of 2013. I know someo of what is coming up, and what I want to do, and there will be updates, because I do still intend to be blogging daily, until such time as that doesn’t work for me, and then I will find what fits next.

Certainly, something important will be to work out an amicable balance between sleep and writing.