Two-Thousand and Eleventeen

Ok the thing about December is that it sucked. With the exception of Christmas and New Year's Eve, I was in a bad mood approx. 97% of the time. It is with this in mind that I make the sappy admission that the nascent new year actually feels like a clean slate for once.

I've always found it strange that people base their ideological renewal on the period of rotation of a giant rock in infinite blackness, but this time around I'm jumping on that dizzying bandwagon and saying "Huzzah for 2011!" Therefore, let us look back on 2010 and examine my accomplishments (snort). Then I will tell you my two REAL resolutions as opposed to the bullshit ones I do every year.

My accomplishments in 2010 are varied and numerous. They include such monumental feats as "continuing to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide using a complex scientific process most of you don't fully understand" as well as "playing Final Fantasy XIII for 20 hours without killing myself." I'm also quite proud of "having a better attitude than most of my coworkers about my office moving to a shitty neighborhood" and "gaining 5-6 pounds, thereby slightly throwing the earth off its orbit and contributing to climate change and the eventual 2012 disaster that sources say only John Cusack will survive."

But my most astonishing feat of 2011 was definitely "maintaining a romantic relationship for three months (and counting!) without losing interest at a decisive moment a month and a half in and waiting for the relationship to disintegrate on its own." That'll be with Wine Store Guy a.k.a. C.C. Babcock a.k.a. Fafner a.k.a. whatever other nickname I might have used. (They are all the same person. This has been confusing to some people.) Anyway, he didn't know about the threat of sudden disinterestegration so don't tell him. It's past the point of no return for that to happen anyway, so all is well.

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Ok now it's time for everyone to care about my resolutions! I have two this year.

1. Make something every day -- This sounds ambitious, but it's not. Basically, I resolve to do something creative every day. So far, so good. On the 1st, I made a Happy New Year flip book that features Stick Man drinking, passing out from drinking and creating floating Z's, and then the Zs disappear and he dies from alcohol poisoning. I wish I had a scanner so I could make an animated gif for all to see. Then yesterday I came up with the concept for my performance of LoveGame in karaoke league this weekend. Today I am making the costume... or at least buying all the elements of the costume. You may call it lame that so far I have nothing to show for the 2nd and 3rd days of my resolution, but I declare that I spent a lot of time thinking, and that is creative enough and also your resolution to lose weight is boring and shitty.
2. Make New York big again -- I resolve to not sit at home so much is basically what this one says. There was a time when I was constantly out and about, but last year I stayed in my (admittedly comfortable and amenity-rich) apartment. But that's not what I live in New York for. So this year I've subscribed again to Time Out New York and Cory has subscribed to NY Mag, so the goal is more music and art and restaurants. Especially I would like to do free things as long as my BOYFRIEND shows up on time and not at the last possible second so there are no seats left for the Monteverdi Vespers performance.

So that's that. I hope fulfilling those two convictions will lead to a third unspoken resolution: I promise to blog more. This is a resolution that I make every month and it never happens, but if all goes well, I will tell you about all the cool free events I go to and all the shitty little art projects I do at home.

Happy 2011 everybody! Your resolution is "read my blog every day"!

New Year's Resolutions 2010

• I promise to blog every now and then, srsly.
• I promise to weigh 170 librae by March 15th using nothing but the power of my mind and my friend's Wii Fit.
• I promise not to burn down the crappy new office in the crappy part of town they're making us move to in 2 weeks.
• I promise to listen to more Depeche Mode. I dunno why.
• I promise to enact my awesome party idea even though nobody will come.
• I promise to keep the same hairstyle and color for the entire year, probably.
• I promise to stop being attracted to Disney channel teen stars and being sad when there is only one picture of the guy from Wizards of Waverly Place in an issue of Tiger Beat magazine.
• I promise to like Lady Gaga more than Hannah Montana.
• I promise to cook more because I'm damn good at it!
• I promise to stop being offended when people think my stuffed pillbug, Klappar Skalbagge, is creepy.
• I promise to stop eating sour cream straight from the container.
• I promise to do my origami page-a-day calendar every day so that by this time next year there will be 365 shitty folded disasters strewn about my workspace.
• I promise to embody Bree van de Kamp in everything I do. (I'm going to need the basket back.)
• Finally, I promise that this year will be a lot less lame and unfruitful than 2009.

New Year's Resolutions 2008

Keeping in the spirit of years past, I waited a few days before posting my New Year's resolutions to let the "spirit of the season" wear off and life return to normal. Everyone gets all wrapped up in New Year's and makes these stupid resolutions that are at once boring and unattainable. "I will lose 20 pounds this year." Yeah, good luck, cow. "I will be nicer to people and pet animals and feed starving babies." Yeah, not if you're feeding yourself, cow.

Anyway, my resolutions are way better. Last year, there were 14 resolutions (we don't count the last one), and I didn't keep a single one. This year, I hope to build on that success:

• I promise to dress like a rich kid and forego meals to afford to do so. Style and weight-loss in one!
• I promise to call more people cow.
• I promise to continue yelling hateful, racist things at the television when I'm alone. (Guaranteed success.)
• I promise to stop telling people about their friends' weird penises as if it says something about their personalities.
• I promise to finally take the Harry Potter 7 countdown clock off of my blog.
• I promise to stop talking about my hair for 2 seconds (nonconsecutive).
• I promise never again to affect an Australian, British, or Slavic accent and say "I'm not from here" just because I don't feel like giving someone directions.
• I promise to stop shaping meat on my plate into a model of the animal it used to be.
• I promise to stop sleeping with the unemployed.
• I promise to masturbate to a picture of Zac Efron just once to get it out of my system.
• I promise to care about the presidential election. HAHA just kidding, no I don't!
• I promise to read a book to a child. HAHAHAHA, ok, I'm not even taking this seriously anymore. I guess I'm done.

New Year's Resolutions 2007

• I promise to stop giving strangers nasty looks for having more fun than me in public.
• I promise to feed my cat on an "every day" basis rather than the current "whenever I feel like it" basis.
• I promise not to yell hateful and racist things at the television when I'm alone and assume my neighbors know I'm not serious. This includes obsessively repeating "I am Dr. Tang from Pyongyang" in a stereotypical accent every three seconds when an Asian doctor is on screen.
• I promise to stop assuming people are idiots and instead wait until they inevitably prove it to classify them as such.
• I promise not to sort everyone I know into their Hogwarts houses and use that information to decide whether I like them or not. In a similar vein, I promise not to assume I'm better than people because I'm a Ravenclaw.
• I promise to go one week without hating toddlers.
• I promise to start sending people coded messages in Wingdings font like we used to do in junior high. Because that's cool.
• I promise to judge movies on their quality instead of the hotness of their characters.
• I promise to watch Nanny McPhee once a week.
• I promise to start admitting I don't know important people and facts when talking online instead of looking them up real fast on Wikipedia and acting like I already knew.
• I promise to replace light bulbs when they go out instead of calling it "mood lighting".
• I promise to stop pushing my cat off the table while she is sleeping.
• I promise to stop using exaggerated cat abuse to get a laugh.
• I promise to stop singing "Jesus on the Mainline" when I see skinny bearded men on the subway.
• Finally, I promise not to pretend the new year is a time for intense introspection and renewal and think I'm making myself into a completely different person because emotional plastic surgery happens on its own, not when the calendar says so. If you can't do it in May or September, you can't do it in January. So I promise to put no pressure on myself by worrying about changing myself and then feeling bad for myself when I fail. But furthermore, I promise that in 2008, I will look back on what has changed and give myself due credit.