The Dark Horse Resolutions

My best resolutions always come quietly, usually emerging from some area of my life I hadn't even known I was thinking about changing. This happens approximately two weeks into the new year, when I have had time to nurse my Christmas cookie hangover, and deal with the official aging that happens in that time. For example, this past week I celebrated my four year anniversary of quitting smoking. Not coincidentally, I also celebrated four years bronchitis-free the same day.

This year, after my last post considering what I should do to better myself and immediately alter my life so that it includes either louder desperation or less deperate quiet, I have given myself permission to have twelve mini-resolutions. So, I shall try on new lifestyles, habits, thought patterns, shoes, what-have-you for thirty days each and see which ones are worth keeping. Hell, 98% of resolutions die by February anyway, right? Might as well build in obsolescence and give myself a chance at twelve small victories rather than one big eleven-month long failure.

Ten days in, I decided January is vegetarianism and intellectual reawakening month, because I am bored as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!

I'll start with vegetarianism. I wish I could say this was a moral choice and I'm a good person and all that. I can't make such lofty claims with a straight face, though. Anyone who has ever heard me talk of my experiences as a toddler and small child being sent out to feed the miserable bastard chickens knows that I cannot be compelled to eschew meat based on the helpless animals theory. This is a lifelong vendetta, friends, and the chickens clearly started it. No, this choice is mainly to give the kidneys a break from all the very hard work they have been doing, force myself to find those vegetarian recipes I keep swearing I'll find and learn, and just give myself a challenge big enough to shake my deadly-dull life up a bit. Nothing says paradigm shift quite like steamed asparagus and almond slices, after all. It's now day 8 of the 30 day vegetarian challenge, and I have had some success. I found a veggie chili recipe that is very yummy, for instance. Since I am not going vegan for the month, I also find I can have a slice of what passes for pizza in DC without feeling gross about it because I have been eating vegetables all day.

So, the first week went very well, and was quite an easy transition. I mean, rice and beans, peanut butter and apples, carrots and hummus are all quite good. I have lots of energy, and wake up annoyingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the mornings. My diet alerts come when I get to the end of a day and realize I have not eaten enough fat! Emergency bruschetta, heavy on the olive oil, STAT! There is a challenge looming, however, in that for the past two days I have been fucking starving, no matter what or how much I eat. My calorie intake is just fine, I've been checking, and my protein intake is low normal, but normal. So, I hope I will be able to figure out the trouble there before I eat the houseplants or gain fifty pounds in excess pasta.

Intellectual awakening is lumbering along in fits and starts.

• I started by trying to read popular non-fiction and self-helpish type stuff, when it occured to me that the authors of such books assume that their primary audience is barely literate, a little simple, and unable to suss out the great piles of festering herring said authors deposit on the page. I mean, generally. I'm sure there is a self-help author who is brilliant and insightful, but my local library does not feature that author's works.
• Due to a little known corollary to Newton's First Law which reads "An object in sweat pants tends to stay in sweat pants," I have not been able to drag my sorry ass out to the (free and metro-accessible!) museums that all exist within ten miles of my house before their 5pm closing times on weekends.
• I have signed up for a Continuing Education class that is technically supposed to be at graduate level, but having perused the syllabus I will say that it is clearly not. Still, it's a chance to think new things, buy new books, and have new conversations with people I didn't previously know.
• I have been using the tubes, catching up on blog posts by more serious minded individuals than myself, and reading the letter collections put up by Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Epistolæ. There are letters from Hrotsvit!

So, that's all you never asked about my January. Fascinating, no? Alas, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

As Yet Unresolved

God, I'm always late! The Gregorian year started 37 hours ago and I still don't know what direction I want it to take. This is not unprecedented. Slightly over four years ago, on January 14th, I quit smoking. A few years before that, on April 1st, I started exercising. I have to start that up again, actually, but I'm still feeling a nasty foot & ankle sprain I suffered this summer. I feel it a lot more after half an hour on the treadmill, so that now my mind believes that I should avoid the gym, as that room contains pain. I also live in a building with a lot of military folk, and I tend to get competitive. So I keep hurting myself trying to prove to Navy Seals that I can totally do everything they can do.

I tried resolving not to be late anymore for about 15 years straight, and all that did was increase my guilt about my perpetual lateness. I was born a month late. After fits and starts that lasted a decade, I finally settled on two majors and committed myself to completing a university education at 27. That was the commitment, not the finish date. Lateness is not a trait I can easily overcome.

My entire diet yesterday consisted of coffee, oranges, water, and ghirardelli squares, so I think making this the year I eat perfectly is quite out of the question. By the way, oranges and ghirardelli squares go really well together, provided you avoid the mint ones.

I have already lied to my journal.

My niece showed me how to play Sims 3 over the break, and I had a commitmentphobic panic attack when my avatar's boyfriend proposed to her. I'm talking cold sweats here, people. So, perhaps better relationships might be a bit farther off than twelve months.

So, my remaining candidates for 2011 are:
1. Get rid of as many old debts as possible.

• Student loans will take a bit longer than a year, provided I don't win the lottery, but there are some $30 kitchen gadgets I have paid the credit card companies for twice over in minimum payments, while still owing $20. That pisses me off.

2. Get more selfish with my time.

• At Work: I have been working insane hours to try to make every lesson a) fit the new profile my admin is demanding based on whatever they saw in their last meeting, and b) be a little fun for the kids. Fortunately, combining the perspicacity of my admin and coaches and the number of different things that have to go on simultaneously in a room that is truly serving the needs of all 36 students, I think I have a little room to wiggle out of much of (a) without anyone being any the wiser.
• At Home: Some (a lot) of those work hours spill over into home hours. And so, though I want to read, I find myself reading mostly YA literature, when I really want to be reading books I enjoy because I enjoy them, and not books that I am vetting for kids.

3. Spend more time with friends, even if the friends are long-distance, and the time needs to be spent over the phone.

4. Recultivate the interests and passions that make me a person worth knowing. I have become mind-numbingly tedious lately. I mrean, I would walk away from me in an effort to find someone better to be around if I weren't attached. All work and no play, you know. So: Go to the theater. Go to the museums. Enjoy what the world has to offer.

5. Finally get good at typing "the right way." My hunt and peck typing is about 75 wpm. When I go to the home keys and try to be fussy about it, I slow down to about 25 wpm. Which would indicate that I should keep to hunt and pack, except the 11 year-olds who are coming in from Teach For America have apparently been typing since they were zygotes, and can type 'properly' at between 100-125 wpm. This makes me jealous. See previous point about Navy Seals and injuries.

6-10. I'll come up with five more things tomorrow. Maybe something about procrastination?

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season, and wish you all a joyous new year. For my part, I got to see the sunrise over the NYC skyline as I drove home this morning, and I take that as a good start to this year!

(This is not my picture. I was driving. I swiped this one from Google images.)

Happy Spring!

I managed to get out among the cherry blossoms for an hour or two today. Yay! I guess all of us who experience a winter get a little goofy in the spring. I tell myself that is so because otherwise I'm just a slightly modernized version of my corniest relatives. And that can't be. Because I'm not corny. I'm weird, which is way better than corny.

Anyway, a bit early ...

Sumer is icumen in.
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wde nu.
Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lowthe after clave cu,
Bulloc sterteth, bucke verteth
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu,
Well singes thu cucco
Ne swik thu naver nu!

Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu!
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu nu!

And sunshine and flowers and hooray!

Slainte!

Hope you are enjoying a fine celebration.*








*Unless you're British, then confusticate and bebother you! (Only for today, though. Regularly scheduled Anglophilia will resume tomorrow.)

Happy Memorial Day

I've spent my weekend trying to get ahead on grading and planning (Yikes, the paper! When will I no longer feel assaulted by paper?) and intermittently dashing off on the Metro and bus lines to local memorial sites. It is very nice to be DC-adjacent when the national holidays come around. I mean, you can choose to go to a barbeque and just have a day off to relax, but it's also really easy to choose to commemorate the dead by going to the places we have designated for commemorating the dead.

Happy New Year!

I was listening to NPR on my drive home from Microburg to Charmingly Historical Edge City yesterday, lost in thought, and the woman on the mid-Pennsylvania NPR station read this poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem is, I think, the perfect New Year's wish for this year.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson

Happy Saturnalia, Everyone!

As is tradition, I'm visiting friends and family, being excessively mirthful, exchanging gifts, and congregating about waxen candles and earthenware religious icons. ( I haven't been able to arrange nude carolling. Rats!) However you chose to celebrate the Winter Solstice and time following, I wish you the greatest possible joy.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
By William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

1892

Yes, I know this poem is a St. Patrick's Day Cliché. But I also know that this poem actually manages to make my soul still when I read it. If I were a better linguist I would know why it does that, but I'm only mediocre at the linguistical business. So, I offer you an inexplicably peaceful soul today.


And, perhaps a little laugh:

May those who love us, love us.
As for those who don't love us, may God turn their hearts.
But if He can't turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles,
so that we may know them by their limping.