New Year's Resolutions: 2015 Edition

It’s that time of year again. Time to pull yourself out from under the tree, apologize for your horrible behavior the night before, vow that this year will be different from the last and then go about living your life exactly the same as before other than writing a different date on your checks except that you don’t even write checks anymore so the entire concept of a year is effectively irrelevant. Anyway, as always I have put together my list of resolutions for the year and since I have my own website I figured that I would post them in an effort of personal accountability and public ridicule. Here we go…

1)      Weigh less than 180 pounds and maintain that weight: I’ve actually gotten my weight under 180 several times over the past few years, which is great given that I maxed out at about 215 back in 2009. But, I can never seem to maintain the weight and over the past few months, which have been extremely stressful personally with the added addition of people continuing to put holiday cookies in front of me, I’ve fallen back to 195. So, back on the weight loss program, back to DDP Yoga (I swear it works. I don’t know how or why but it really does work.), and back to fixing my diet. This time I’ll keep the weight off.

2)      Take Landen for one long walk daily: Of our two dogs Landen, our black lab / border collie mix, has taken to following his daddy’s example and gained weight as well. So, in addition to my weight loss efforts Landen will join in the action as we will have scheduled daddy – doggie bonding walks around the neighborhood. He’ll love it because he will get to be outside more, I’ll love it because I will get away from looking at a computer screen for every hour, and hopefully we will both be healthier for it. If you’re wondering our other black lab Katie has seniority over me in the household and I can in no way tell her what to do. If she wants to go for a long walk I will take her. Hell, if she wants to go for a ride she’ll grab the car keys and bring them to me.

3)      Get Lasik surgery: This has been a point of contention between Kim and me for years and between myself and everyone else I know since third grade. As most people know I have worn glasses since I was nine years old and have absolutely horrible vision without my glasses on. However, unless most people who get glasses as a kid I did not convert to contacts as I grew older event though I looked much better without glasses and the glasses that I wore made me look like I was intentionally trying to get the role of “third guy in the computer lab” in every college movie ever made. The idea of contacts and touching my eye just goes entirely against my internal programming. I’ve discussed Lasik for years but have always pushed it off in that it was a new procedure. Well, twenty years has passed and Kim personally knows one of the best doctors in the country so I really don’t have an excuse anymore. Plus, finally I would be able to wake up in the middle of the night and get to see what is causing that noise.

4)      Write one blog post a week: Yes, this resolution has been scaled back over the years. I’ve had this blog for more than a decade now and have gone from a five day a week posting schedule for years to a more sporadic schedule to the current, “let’s try to start writing again only to quit after two weeks.” But I was thinking about some writing advice I heard last year from Philip Margolin, who I met at a book fair. When he started writing he was a criminal defense attorney and I could not imagine just how he found the time to write. He explained to me that he set up an agreement with his wife where he had four hours on Saturday morning and four hours on Sunday morning where he could close the door in his office and spend that time writing. He figured that gave him a full day’s work every week and it was done in a way that he could work it in with his personal and professional life. My old method of writing five nights a week means finding a half hour every night and I just can’t do that anymore. But an hour or two once a week is doable so I will go at that pace. Plus, I hope that less content will equate to more quality but who knows. I’ll just be happy to be writing again.

5)      Listen to a different album every day: Ok, this one may seem odd. I have a massive music collection but I have discovered three important facts over the past few years 1) I only listen to a few albums, 2) I am really, really out of touch with the current music scene and 3) I feel a lot better when I am listening to new and different music. So, I am bringing back the random CD project, which because I am running it involves spreadsheets, random number generators and surprisingly complex algorithms just to pick a CD. Hopefully this will bring me back into music and help me to fill in the gaps in my collection. I’ll be posting the random album daily to Facebook so if you read my Facebook feed expect the spam and consider it revenge on all the people who continue to send me Farmville notices as if Farmville is still a thing.

6)      Read forty books in the year with at least ten different female authors: Forty books is for some reason a difficult threshold for me to break. I have been keeping track of every book that I have read since 1998 (no, I am not OCD, why do you ask?) and only once have I ever broken that milestone. Last year I read 38 books, 37 the year before so you get the picture. More embarrassingly, of the 38 books I read last year only four were written by women and the year before that the total was five. If you ever wanted quantifiable data that I am a sexist pig there you are. Thus, time to at least get the number of books I read written by women up to a quarter of my total.

7)      Listen to everything Kim is saying before acting on the first request: Like all husbands I am flawed and in my case probably more flawed than most. Sometimes they are sins of omission, sometimes they are sins of commission and sometimes they are things that may be completely out of your control. But, I feel that I should at least try to address one of the things that I do that drives Kim insane. She will be talking to me and say, “Put the sheet in the dryer,….” and before she can finish pausing for the comma I am immediately walking away with the sheet in my hand because I am a robot and will perform the first task given to me regardless of the fact that she hasn’t even finished her sentence yet. I do this all the time. I’ll walk away in mid-conversation because somewhere in there was an action I was told to make and it’s as if I operate on a one task at a time, complete immediately basis. It’s annoying and rude as hell and it is a habit that I need to break.

8)      Kim’s choice: As always, I feel that one of your resolutions should be to do something that someone else tells you to work on so Kim gets her choice here. Keeps a bit of mystery to the process as well.

9)      Update five year plan and note cards: Roughly eleven years ago this week I sat down and on a set of note cards wrote down the goals that I had for the next five years of my life. I then folded them up, put them in my wallet and whenever I needed to remind myself what I should be doing with my time I would look at them and see how I was progressing. The amazing thing is that, for the most part, I’ve accomplished everything I put on those cards. Sometimes it took longer than five years, sometimes they took on different forms but those note cards with my overall goals were always with me and it worked. But it is time to update them and figure out what I want to do in the next five years and redo the note cards.

10)  Take Kim on a work free vacation: I cannot recall the last time I went on a vacation and did not work. I’ve taken conference calls in Disney World, Las Vegas and the French Quarter. Kim has had it even worse and has emailed clients from Iceland and called people from the emergency room in which she was the one who had been taken to the emergency room. We need to get away and spend some time away from work, email, phones, computer screens and everything else that we cannot escape. Not sure how we are going to do this but it is a necessity.

There you go. Should be an interesting 2015 even if I still don’t have my freaking hoverboard yet.

New Year's Resolutions: 2014 Edition

As someone who believes in public accountability here are my resolutions for the year for the world (or at least the twenty people and / or robots who seem to read my blog posts) to see.

1)      The Sincerity Project: I’ve already discussed this as it is one of the main reasons for restarting the blog. In essence, my goal is to change from being a cynical bastard to someone who is an actual caring human being. To be honest this has been absolutely brutal to put into practice. I don’t know if it is humanly possible to watch Brent Mussberger announce the BCS title game and not be sarcastic but I am certainly trying. You’ll occasionally catch me stopping myself from saying something and saying “sincerity check” instead. Hopefully I’ll end up a better person for this at the end of the year.

2)      Complete the 13 week advanced level of DDP Yoga: I’ve mentioned it before but I am a huge fan of DDP Yoga. I firmly believe that the best fitness programs are developed by former professional wrestlers as they are clearly medical experts. I’m serious here, I’ve been doing DDP Yoga on and off for the past nine months and the degree that my flexibility and fitness have improved is amazing. I’m in the best shape I have ever been in and my weight is now under 180 pounds, which is thirty pounds less than it was five years ago. I really want to make it through the advanced level and see what the results are.

3)      Keep the blog going all year: Huge challenge but I feel so much better when I write that this is something I need to do. You may see more posts like last night though where I hit a few points and then just end it. I can’t spend an hour staring at a screen trying to figure out what to write any more. Trust me, I really wish I had that much free time again.

4)      Read forty books: I’ve come close the past few years but I typically end up falling short. This year I want to actually break the forty book barrier. As always, my yearly goals of 1) read one classic novel, 2) read something by a female author and 3) read a Shakespeare play still hold and I can say that over the past decade the second point is no longer a challenge. I had too many years where if it wasn’t for Harry Potter I would never have achieved that goal.

5)      Travel someplace new this year: This is a nice way to say that Kim and I need a vacation that is different than ones that we have taken before. We are in a bit of a rut in terms of trips and just need to escape to someplace fresh. Obviously we will still make our trip to New Orleans for the Krewe of Barkus and all of the fun associated with our second home but I particularly need to find myself in a new place.

6)      Reader’s Choice: I’ve done this before and it is always interesting. Place your suggestion in the comments for what my resolution should be and I promise to do it (legality permitting of course). This is how I ended up doing yoga in the first place.

7)      Run a 5K: An easy fitness goal but one I would like to do. After so many years of being scared of doing anything physical due to fear of causing myself harm I want to go back to trying something athletic. Plus, I will now be in the 40+ category so I might actually have a decent chance at placing somewhere in the top 90%.

8)      Take at least five minutes each day to just be: I don’t think that I will ever believe just how lucky I am in life. I’ve achieved so many of my dreams that I feel guilty about it. However, I’ve learned that the man who gets everything that he has ever wanted finds himself pulled in a thousand directions without time to appreciate or be grateful for any of it. If there has been anything that I have lost over these past few years it is that sense of appreciation of just what this world is. I’m hoping that by just making myself to take five minutes in which I turn off everything, avoid the digital noise that surrounds me and just let myself be and think I will be able to improve myself in countless ways. That is the idea behind the Sincerity Project. Modern life forces you to be tired, over-stimulated and cynical. I want to be open, honest and thankful instead.

Wednesday Night Music Club: The best album of 2013 was easily Jason Isbell’s “Southeastern.” It is a haunting and piercing collection of songs that stay with you for days at a time. He is an amazing songwriter and while this album can’t be considered uplifting (it deals with addiction and its aftermath) you will not forget some of what he sings. This song, which closes the album, ends with what might be one of my new mantras in life. “Here with you there is always something to look forward to. My lonely heart beats relatively easy.”

The Sincerity Project

“Man, I had the weirdest dream last night…”

“Why, what was it about?”

“An angel came to me and showed me how everything would be if I had never been born.”

“Wow! What was that like?”

“Well, it would have been a lot better if everyone hadn’t been so damn happy.”

I posted this to Facebook a few weeks ago as a status update. I have been using this joke, or something like it, for at least a decade. Hell, I think I stole it from the Beavis and Butthead Christmas special. But in writing it and posting it I just felt wrong. Partly because the format made it less funny but mainly because the person who made this joke ten years ago is not the same person I am now.

When I was a teenager I perfected this persona of a sarcastic, cynical, world weary geek. In many ways it was a defense mechanism. I was never going to be the athlete or the life of the party. I was a shy, awkward kid who was always more comfortable talking to a teacher than a classmate. I was the kid who no one called unless they needed to know the answer to problem number seven. In my mind the only way to protect myself from being picked on was to be as self-deprecating as possible because I knew that I could make funnier jokes about myself than anyone else could. Plus, you don’t bully the guy who bullies himself and makes you laugh in the process. This view of me, as the geeky loser who takes a darkly comic view of the world, has lasted for almost thirty years.

At times it worked. As someone who didn’t really know who I was, and certainly had no confidence in front of people, I realized that this façade helped me to be social. It didn’t get me a girlfriend but it got me out of the house and as strange as it is to say that was a huge victory. Plus, there is a huge thrill in just being a sarcastic bastard who tears into the world and the hypocrisy around him. Better than just sitting there blankly.

But somewhere a little over five years ago things began to change. I kind of got a better sense of who I was. I had a job I didn’t care for in a town I wasn’t a fan of and that gave me the freedom to finally let myself just be and weird things started to happen. I started to go out and enjoy myself, I had my employer pay me for four months to just stop showing up at the office and this led to me lucking into the job I had been working towards for my entire career. And when the woman of my dreams called me up I was ready for it and somehow, through a series of events that still mystifies me, we get married. Everything was how I had always wanted it.

Yet I remained a cynical bastard.

That is a nice way of saying that I could often be a complete asshole. A well-meaning one in that I never intentionally tried to hurt people but an asshole nonetheless. I would just say mean spirited things on the nature that they would be funny and maybe they were but they usually weren’t. It certainly wasn’t funny to those people who had to deal with me regularly and I kept on feeling that I wasn’t myself even though I once again did not know who I was. I had been the cynical loser for so long I didn’t know how to be the successful married guy. I kept on struggling to figure out what was missing in my life. What had been lost from my world view that I needed to make my life worthwhile again. Then I figure it out…

Sincerity.

We live in a world where sincerity no longer exists. We live in a world of snark, where once a news story hits we are all rushing to Facebook and Twitter to crack the first mean-spirited joke in some hope to gain immaterial internet points. We have to have arguments on whether people have the constitutional right to be assholes in public forums. It is almost impossible to watch the news due to the constant rhetoric and complete lack of compassion or consideration for the viewpoint of others. And I hate to admit but I am as guilty of this as everyone else.

So when I was thinking about resolutions this year I decided that I would do something different than saying I would work out more or lose weight or eat eight fruits and vegetables every day. My resolution this year is to be a sincere human being: a considerate, caring non-judgmental person in a world full of sarcasm and noise. I read somewhere that if you want to be avant-garde in the world today you should be sincere so in some strange way this is just me reliving my punk rock fantasies in an incredibly productive way. So for 2014 I am embarking on (and hopefully documenting here) The Sincerity Project. The dream of a cynical bastard to become a better human being by being open to some of the wonders of life instead of hating everything. I have no clue if this will work, or how I will even accomplish it, but the journey should be fun. 

My 2011 New Year's Resolutions

After much delay here are my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions. Keep them handy in order to taunt me about how horrible a person I am. Or at least so you can refer to me as an utter failure. Anyway, here they are.

Resolution #1: Get my weight down to 185 pounds: I’m at about 195 right now with 190 being the high end of the “normal” weight range for my height. I think that 185 will be a good weight for me to be at and is certainly achievable. That would still take another ten pounds of fat off my frame (and 30 pounds from the heaviest version of me that has waddled around the planet) and should leave me fairly healthy. I use weight because it would be a good measure of fitness but I have another resolution that fits into this category…

Resolution #2: Run a 5K in less than my age: That would technically be in under 37 minutes (though if I wait until after September I can do it in under 38 minutes). I know that doesn’t sound too impressive and in college I was able to run consistently under 30 minutes (not superstar speed but better than a couch potato) but I think this would be a big accomplishment for someone with my background. I’ve already cut my time on the treadmill down from about 44 minutes to 39 minutes but I really want to do this in a real, outdoors, 5K.

Resolution #3: Write 125,000 words in the blog this year: That is the equivalent of writing five 500 word posts a week for 50 weeks. I know that for years I kept a solid five days a week writing schedule but because of my life and my job that has gotten much tougher. My laptop is not always conveniently by my side and some nights I just have more things to do. That said, if I can’t write a post one night maybe I can make it up by writing more detailed posts another night. It is worth a shot.

Resolution #4: Get 100 visits in a day per Blogger stats: I would still like to see this blog get some real traffic if just because I think it would be cool to know that 100 people checked out what I wrote on a given day. I’ve certainly gotten visitors from around the world and had commenters from everywhere but it would be nice to increase my overall readership.

Resolution #5: Learn how to cook healthy meals: I still don’t really know how to cook and I certainly don’t know how to cook a healthy meal. I basically know how to heat things that came in prepackaged materials. This is actually a good thing since it means that I have no bad habits to unlearn as I start on a path towards being healthy.

Resolution #6: Read 50 books this year: It is certainly a stretch goal as I don’t know if I have ever read that many books in a year but I think it would be great if I can read a book a week. It is interesting that in the past few years I have started to watch much less television but have spent more time reading (which would probably hurt my chances at trivia now that I think about it.) Reading forces me to spend less time watching television or surfing the internet and that is a really good thing.

Resolution #7: Reader’s Choice: Yes, once again I leave it to my faithful readers to tell me what I should do this year. What do you think is the best step that I could take to improve myself? What fun task must I do to prove my worth? Put your best ideas in the comments.

Resolution #8: Send out my monthly email reports: After I finished grad school I started sending out monthly emails about my life to a group of my friends. As I’ve said on a few occasions I never really did it because I felt that my life was that interesting. I was living in KC at the time; by definition it could not be interesting. But it was my way of staying in touch with everyone and it worked wonders. Over the past year I really fell out of the habit though and I would really like to get back to the old days of every month writing my friends and updating them on what is going on in my neck of the woods. I just find it a neat thing to do.

Resolution #9: Be More Assertive: One of the really strange aspects of my personality is that while I am really smart and typically know what needs to be done I have no assertiveness at all. Hell, at times just making a phone call can be rather difficult. That is a silly habit that just needs to stop. I’ve accomplished too much in life to not feel the initiative to take a hold of things.

Resolution #10: Be the best husband that I can be: Sometimes it is hard for me to grasp that it won’t be long until I am married and I will add husband to my list of duties. I have to admit that I am still learning how relationships work (I’ve now been with Kim longer than every other relationship I’ve had put together and that is being nice and counting girls I went and had coffee with as a “relationship”) and I screw up a hell of a lot of the time. But I am learning from my mistakes and I’m improving. All I want to do is be the best version of me that I can possibly be for Kim. It’s a nice goal to have.

New Year's Resolutions Revisited

Everyone has their own traditions for New Years. Maybe it involves spending the day with family or trying out the latest hangover cure or, if you are the Big Ten, losing every single game you possibly could. For me the New Year marks several things. It means that I start a new Word document for my writer’s journal which is now entering its fourteenth year. Yes, that means essentially fourteen years of keeping a diary. I’d say that I am a teenage girl but even teenage girls don’t keep diaries for fourteen years. But my main focus of the New Year is making my resolutions.

However, before I post my 2011 Resolutions I thought that I should check how I did on the 2010 edition. Because resolutions are meaningless without public accountability.

Resolution # 1: Get my weight down to under 190 pounds: As of this morning I weigh 196 pounds. Technically I did not reach my goal but this is down from my peak weight of about 215 earlier this year so it is still a loss of 15 to 20 pounds which is pretty impressive for a non-Biggest Loser contestant. The even better news is that I have been able to keep the weight off all year. I still have more to lose, especially going into the wedding, but at least I made progress on this one.

Resolution # 2: Be more attentive: I have worked a lot at not being so much a slave to multitasking. Essentially what would happen is I would be talking to Kim and she would notice that I was fading from the conversation because I was doing something online. I used to think that I could do two things at once but now I’ve come to realized that I just tend to do two things badly in that instance. I still fail too often (Triple Town on the Kindle can apparently take control of my mind) but I would like to think that I am in the moment more now than I was at the beginning of the year.

Resolution # 3: Complete a 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle by myself: Done. Took me four months of sitting on the floor of my apartment with the most evil jigsaw puzzle ever made (I swear to God it was one third sky and the sky was the easiest part of the puzzle) but I did it. It is sad to think just how much joy I take out of completing something like that. There are times in my life where I have to take on a challenge where for me to succeed I have to have the will to finish more than anything else.

Resolution # 4: Have breakfast every day: Technically true if you consider coffee on its own as breakfast. Horribly untrue if you believe that breakfast should consist of something other than a Fiber One bar (and trust me, there is no joy in eating a Fiber One bar.) Given how much effort I am putting into losing weight you would think that eating breakfast, which is always stated as the first thing you should do to lose weight, would be easier to do. Focus for this year, obviously.

Resolution # 5: Get to work earlier: Sigh. Yeah, I failed at this one. I have no idea why it can be so tough for me to get out of bed in the morning. I will be awake, listening to NPR, but can’t take those few steps out of bed. I even keep an alarm clock on the other side of the room but when it goes off I get out of bed, turn it off, and then promptly get back under the covers. Maybe my bed is just too comfy. Or I’m lazy. One of the two.

Resolution # 6: Learn to cook to the point that I can make dinner for Kim: Well, I never made dinner for Kim so I guess this one should be considered a failure. I still have a desire to learn how to cook and I am making some progress but I still have a great deal of distance to go before I could legitimately say that I know how to cook. But again, given that I am going to be really health focused this year I think this might show up on my new list.

Resolution # 7: Reader’s Choice: If I remember correctly the reader’s choice for this year was to take up swimming. I don’t believe I swam at all this year. I didn’t even buy goggles though let’s face it; the goggles do nothing. I apologize to all of my readers out there.

Resolution # 8: Have 100 people read the blog in one day: I’m not sure if I broke this level or not. I did have some pretty popular days per Blogger stats and I became the number one link on google for searches for “strawberry shortcakes enemy”, which should count for something. Plus, I had a reader from Greenland and a Greenland reader must be worth like, 20 Canadians. I’ll admit that I really fell out of the blogging habit this year for a lot of reasons but it is nice to know that I still have an audience.

Resolution # 9: Expand my musical tastes: I surprisingly failed at this one. I probably bought less music this year than at any point since I was 16 years old. And I didn’t download stuff for free either; I just simply did not search out new music. On some level I blame the death of the music magazines and my lack of concert attendance as it is much tougher for me to find out about new acts than it used to be. But mainly I think I just needed to give my ears a year off. Maybe this year I’ll be able to hear new music without being so blasé about it.

Resolution # 10: Prepare to be the best husband that I can be: If there was anything this year was about it was this and I am still a work in progress. I always thought that being in a relationship would be easy; I am a nice, caring guy so just being myself would be all that is required. However, I never noticed the selfish guy who also existed there because when you aren’t in a relationship being selfish really isn’t that big of a deal. Plus, I have now been with Kim longer than all of my previous relationships put together and that is even if you consider going to get coffee with a girl to be equivalent to dating. In essence, I’ve never dealt with the issues that arise when you are in a real relationship.

I still screw up from time to time. More often than that to be precise. But I am pissed to no end at myself when I screw up and am trying everything I can to be the best that I can be. I am the luckiest man alive to be with Kim. It’s the least that I can do to try to be my best in return.

Best of 120 Minutes: Old school Wilco tonight. I just can’t find the time to write my mind the way I want it to read.



The five random CDs for the week:
1) Cowboy Junkies “Rarities, B Sides, and Slow, Sad Waltzes”
2) Rilo Kiley “More Adventurous”
3) The Tragically Hip “Road Apples”
4) Belly “Star”
5) Alejandro Escovedo “Gravity”

Resolution Review Part Deux

Let’s see how I’m doing on the second half of my New Year’s Resolutions

Resolution # 6: Learn to cook to the point that I could make dinner for Kim: I can’t really say that I’ve made progress on this one. Yes, I am cooking better for myself and what I am eating is in fact healthier but I still haven’t done anything that could be considered making a meal from scratch. That is kind of the point of this one; to take multiple ingredients and make an actual meal out of them. I am getting more comfortable in the kitchen and have learned that when it says “cook for 3 minutes” you don’t have to sit there with a stopwatch but I really do need to take a recipe one weekend and see if I can actually make it. What is the worst that could happen?

Resolution # 7: Reader’s Choice: I believe that this one turned out to be take up swimming as part of my workout routine. This could tie into a slightly bigger challenge of my learning to swim. Well, see, that is not entirely true. I do know how to swim. If you dropped me in a pool and asked me to swim laps I could do that. I’d even survive swimming in the deep end. The thing is that if you asked me to swim to the bottom of the deep end, touch the bottom, and come back up I’d say “hell no.” Doing the swimming underwater bit is something I never really learned. So that is something I need to learn especially given that Kim loves swimming and grew up near the water.

Resolution # 8: Have 100 people read the blog in one day: Ugh. Maybe I’ve hit 30 readers in a day this year but probably not more than that. It is what happens when you stop writing on a regular schedule and have the quality drop a bit. I’m going to try to get back into the habit, I swear, and I hope that I can figure out what my topics should be now. As someone once told me I am my best as a writer when I am bitter and cynical and depressed. That made for basically five great years of blog material. Sadly the fact that I am happy now makes my writing suffer. I’ll figure out the fix for that soon; one that hopefully does not involve my becoming unhappy.

(By the way, after I finish the jigsaw puzzle I think my next big project will be putting together my best of the blog book that I have been promising for a few years now. I’ve finally figured out how I would do it and while it would take a couple of months I might be able to finish it by the end of the year.)

Resolution # 9: Expand my musical tastes: Hasn’t really happened unless you count listening to Jason Isbell’s solo work in addition to his time with the Drive-By Truckers. I’m a little disenchanted with the whole music biz right now. I’m not even sure where to learn about new music now as my two old methods (going to concerts and reading music mags) don’t really correspond with my current life. Then there is the whole fact that I am now older than that 18 – 34 target market. I’m not supposed to be an Of Montreal fan. To be honest I’m not even sure if there is a band called Of Montreal. It sucks being uncool especially when for one brief, shining moment you actually were cool.

Resolution # 10: Prepare to be the best husband that I can be: I am going to be completely honest here; I sucked at this at the beginning of the year. You know the old story about how a dog chases a car and what would happen if the dog ever caught the car? That is the best analogy that I can think of. After years searching for the woman of my dreams I finally found her and she said yes and my reaction was “Oh thank God, I can finally stop running now.” I didn’t realize that the car would keep on moving. So I screwed up more than a few times to a greater degree than I ever imagined possible.

But, as Kim and I have said, it is better that I screw up like this before we get married than after the fact. And I have worked hard at becoming the best that I can possibly be and to address some of my mistakes and understand what it will be to be a married couple. It’s sad to use the word maturing when you are about to turn 37 but that is exactly what I’ve been doing. Next June we will be married and I really wish that day would hurry up and get here because there is nothing that I want to do more than to see her on that day.

If you ever wonder what life is like on the inside of my own head this video is pretty much exactly how I view everyday life. Watch it and you’ll understand.



(Thanks go out as always to my good friends at ImprovEverywhere for this one. They are the only reason that I would consider moving to New York.)

Since we are at the midpoint of the year it is time for me to start reviewing my New Year’s Resolutions and seeing where I stand with six months to go. I posted 10 of them in January so I’ll go through the first five tonight and the rest tomorrow.

Resolution # 1: Get my weight down to under 190 pounds: The max I’ve weighed this year is around 215 pounds, which is pretty much the heaviest I have ever weighed. Right now I am down to 202 and that equates to a good ten pound weight loss over the past two months since I’ve really tried to work out and eat right. I’m really focused on this goal and should be able to accomplish it. The important thing is that my focus is on getting fit and eating better. If I can do that then I assume the weight will come off. Though I must admit that I miss having Five Guys for every other meal.

Resolution # 2: Be More Attentive: Well, bit of a mixed bag on this one. This came about due to my habit of surfing the internet while talking to Kim and completely missing what she is actually saying. I’ve become much better in terms of focus but I’ll still find myself distracted by a book that is in front of me or a shiny object. I’ll say that I am getting better at this but I still need a great deal of work.

Resolution # 3: Complete a 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle by myself: I’ve actually been working on this all summer. I’m probably a third of the way through (I’ll post a picture tomorrow) and I have hopes of completing it by the end of August. It is challenging as hell especially given the nature of the puzzle (it’s of a painting as opposed to a picture so there aren’t nearly as many clear sections) but it has done wonders for allowing me to calm down every night. I have also completed a 500 and 1,500 piece puzzle by myself this year so I’m thinking that this one will be conquered.

Resolution # 4: Have breakfast every day: On the bright side I’ve done better at this than I have in previous years. I probably average having an actual breakfast before I go to work once a week. Of course that is completely horrible especially as one is trying to diet so I will just have to get myself together on this. I can only live on FiberOne bars for breakfast for so long. As their advertising slogan states “You won’t believe that you had one third of your daily fiber requirement in one bar until you’re in the bathroom three hours later.”

Resolution # 5: Get to work earlier: Tied in with the breakfast and wow have I sucked at this one. It really does upset me because I don’t have a great reason other than I am simply tired in the morning and staying in bed is rather nice. Now I don’t want to go nuts and try to be at work at 7 each morning because my body simply isn’t wired for that type of lifestyle given my no caffeine rule. But I could use to get to the office 15 minutes earlier and there is no reason why I can’t do that. This will be a big focus for me (along with eating breakfast) for the rest of the year.

Wednesday Night Music Club: The Gourds version of Gin and Juice. Possibly the greatest cover song every recorded. Because if there was one thing the song was missing it was clearly a mandolin solo. Warning contains NSFW language because it is a Snoop Dogg song after all.

You say you want a resolution

I am going to keep with tradition and post my New Year’s Resolutions. It worked out rather well last year. There is something about posting your goals for everyone to see that makes you feel required to do everything possible to accomplish them. Plus, it just makes me feel better to know that I am starting the year with a list of ten things that I must accomplish. Here we go.

Resolution # 1: Get my weight down to under 190 pounds: Ok, I had this resolution last year and I failed. But this year I really need to accomplish it. For one thing, I’m not getting any younger and carrying excess weight is just going to get worse and worse for me healthwise. But more importantly I have a wedding to prepare for and I have to do something to make all in attendance not wonder exactly how I ended up with someone as amazing as Kim. Well, they’ll all be thinking that anyway but at least my weight will not be a factor. In a perfect world I’ll be walking down the aisle lifting up my shirt to show off my six pack abs. (Ok, maybe I’m watching a few too many episodes of Jersey Shore.)

Resolution # 2: Be more attentive: I used to be the king of multi-tasking. I could watch TV, surf the web, run equations and hold a conversation all at the same time. Now I can barely do one thing at a time yet I haven’t done anything in my day to day operations to account for this. The perfect example is that I will be talking to Kim on the phone and surfing the web at the same time and it becomes readily apparent that I am not listening to anything she says. This is made all the more worse by the fact that I have the horrible habit of saying “Yes” and “Uh huh” during any lull in a conversation when I haven’t been paying attention or even understand a single world that has been said over the past minute. This is one of those habits that I just simply need to break. So I vow to be more attentive in conversations this year.

Resolution # 3: Complete a 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle by myself: I have one sitting in my living room at this moment and it has been taunting me for the past year. I just feel the urge to try something extremely complex, time consuming and utterly meaningless just to see if I can do it. Plus, it will help me relax in what I assume is going to be an extremely busy year.

Resolution # 4: Have breakfast every day: And I mean a real breakfast. A granola bar or a bagel will not count. Everything I have ever read about staying healthy and losing weight emphasizes how important it is to have breakfast. I pretty much never have breakfast and have been living this way for most of my life. Well, at some point we all have to grow up and become adults and start our day with a good healthy breakfast. And speaking of starting your day…

Resolution # 5: Get to work earlier: It is nice that I work in an office where I have some flexibility in my start time as I am simply not an early riser. Or at least I am not a morning person. It takes me a while to get going and I have set my schedule to take advantage of that so I don’t start my workday in a state where typing in my password is about all I can accomplish for the first half hour. But, I still think I can shift my schedule forward if just by getting out of bed when my alarm goes off instead of hitting snooze time after time. I really feel that this slight change in schedule will make my life so much better.

Resolution # 6: Learn to cook to the point that I can make dinner for Kim: Every year I say that I am going to learn to cook but I never quite get there. Mainly because I am cooking for me and, well, when you have spent so many years eating processed foods due to convenience it is tough to break the habit. Now I have someone in my life who makes me want to improve myself in every way and this is one of those ways. Kim does the cooking when we are together and while that is awesome I feel the need to help. My big goal is to be able to cook for her, single handedly, one of the meals in John Besh’s cookbook “My New Orleans” and have her enjoy it. Tall order but it should be fun trying.

Resolution # 7: Reader’s Choice: This worked out well last year so I am trying it again. What do you want me to accomplish in 2010? What lofty goal or comedic endeavor should I undertake? The only limit is your imagination. Post your ideas in the comments and I will choose the best, or quite possibly only, suggestion.

Resolution # 8: Have 100 people read the blog in one day: Usually I have a writing related goal with regards to completing a book such as writing a novel or a collection of short pieces or the best of the blog. The thing is that takes a lot of time and with work and wedding planning and losing weight and everything else in my day to day existence I just don’t know if I have enough time for something that big this year. But, I certainly plan to keep blogging and if this is going to be my creative outlet I might as well make it the best I can be. Last year I aimed for 50 people and reached it several times. This time I’m going for 100 unique hits in a single day. For that to happen someone must read the post and link it or email it to their friends. I will have to write something clever enough so that people who have never met me will read it. Big challenge but I might be able to pull it off.

Resolution # 9: Expand my musical tastes: For someone with a CD collection the size of mine my tastes are really, really narrow. For the past few years I have picked up nothing outside of the Alt-Country genre and I have some huge gaps. No jazz or blues really, even those by the classics. No Miles Davis or John Coltrane or any of the other legends. If what is being released now doesn’t speak to me (and I’ve reached the age where popular music is not aimed for my target market) I think I might as well explore the past. Hell, I might as well pick up some old school punk while I am at it and listen to the stuff that scared me when I was a kid growing up.

Resolution # 10: Prepare to be the best husband that I can be: It is so strange to think of myself in that term. Husband. All my life I have searched for the woman of my dreams but I have never really focused on what it will mean to be a husband. That is what this last resolution is about. Searching myself to realize what I must do in order to be the best that I can possibly be for Kim. We’ll work to have the wedding we want and the life that we want but I will have to realize that I will be changing from an I to a we. And trust me, I can’t wait for that day.

13th Best Album of the Decade: Rufus Wainwright “Want One” (2003): I became a Rufus fan in a real roundabout way. People who knew that I was a huge Jeff Buckley fan kept on telling me to listen to Rufus because he also sung a version of Halleluiah and was using Jeff’s rhythm section for his band. I also knew enough of his background (the son of Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle) to know that he was worth a listen. I don’t think that I ever anticipated to hear a baroque pop masterpiece like Want One. Really, really stunning.

2009 Resolutions: The Final Scorecard

15th Best Album of the Oughts: Lyle Lovett and his Large Band “It’s Not Big, It’s Large” (2007): I’ve decided to do the albums of the decade as a daily countdown in order to keep the posts from become just a huge pile of YouTube posts. For this entry we are going to go with my favorite release from the incomparable Lyle Lovett from the decade. The fact that most people still know him as the funny looking guy who married Julia Roberts is sad. Others at least know him as a pretty much classic country artist. But it is his work with the Large Band that makes your jaw just drop. I am dropping my hatred of douchebags with video cameras in the front row just so I can post this footage of “I Will Rise Up.” If you don’t get chills by the end you officially do not have a soul.



With the end of the year upon us I’ve decided to take a look back at my New Year’s Resolutions that I posted on January 1st and see how I did. If I am anything it is accountable for my actions.

Resolution #1: Learn how to juggle: I would like to state that on Wii Fit Plus I have achieved three stars in the juggling mini game and that is taking into account that my Mii must stand on top of a large ball in a circus costume while juggling. I would have four stars if it wasn’t for the fact that at a certain point they start throwing bombs at you. Ok, it’s not really juggling but at least a virtual version of myself can juggle three balls at the same time. I consider that to be an accomplishment.

Resolution #2: Get my weight under 190 pounds: As of this evening I weighed 207 pounds soaking wet. Barring a crash diet or the loss of a limb I do not expect to achieve this by the end of the year. I have made some progress as I’m down from the 215 I was at one point and I did have a nice run of constant workouts going for a few months. I’ve lost all that momentum though and have gotten soft and flabby again. This will be a big focus of mine in the new year as I have to be the best looking groom ever.

Resolution #3: Learn how to actually cook: Kind of mixed results on this one. I still do more heating than cooking but I have gotten a lot more adventurous in that regard. I cook up fish and shrimp a lot more and am getting much more comfortable with the fact that cooking with detailed directions and a stop watch is not the proper way to cook. I really want to experiment more with cooking in the new year and, you know, use actual ingredients in making a dish as opposed to whatever comes out of the bag.

Resolution #4: Increase blog readership: My lofty goal at the start of the year was to have 50 people read the blog in one day. Well, on my best day I just missed getting 100 people so I have to say that was a success. Sadly, I’ve lost a bit of that momentum though I can still have a good 30+ hit day every week or so. I’m not too upset about that as now that my adventures in the dating realm are over I am working on what the main topic of the blog is going to be. I think I’ll be settling on a new tone soon and will make that next charge at blog superstardom. Until then I will just have to be happy with my Norwegian fan base.

Resolution #5: Focus on the positive in my life: I’m pretty sure that I’ve accomplished this one. I certainly feel happier and more positive though that is at least in part because my life is going so well at the moment. Whether one led to the other or the other way around is a matter of argument though. At the end of the day I just can’t say that I am as much of a cynical bastard as I used to be. Sure I’m still sarcastic as hell but I am just a lot happier with life and more confident with what I have around me. Quite a change from a year ago.

Resolution #6: Get back into the concert going scene: Complete failure here. I did not go to a single concert all year. I did not even see Wilco when they played within walking distance of my apartment. Even from a purchasing point of view I took most of the year off from music. It’s not that I don’t love music anymore, obviously it is one of the biggest aspects of my life. It’s just that age may have finally caught up to me. Driving an hour on a weeknight to see a band that I haven’t heard of just to be tired at the office all day isn’t as much fun as it used to be. At least in KC all of the shows were close (and my job was less demanding or at least people paid less attention to my alertness in my cubicle). I’m kind of sad about this one but it is just how life goes.

Resolution #7: Complete the Best of the Blog: This one still hasn’t gotten off the ground and my novel is still floating around partially written on a few laptops. Basically the idea of the Best of the Blog (a compilation of my best blog posts) is great but has two slight problems in that a) I have to dig through 1,300+ posts to figure out which were actually good and b) even the good ones could use a rewrite. I still have one big writing project that will end up with a bound book in me. I’m just not sure when that will appear.

Resolution #8: Reader’s Choice: Thanks to long time reader Dennis this one turned into “Take a yoga class”. Now I technically did not take a yoga class though I did find one nearby. However, thanks to Wii Fit I became well aware of yoga and did perform the poses on a daily basis. True, most yoga classes are not focused on keeping your center of balance within the yellow circle but I found it to be relaxing and stimulating. Yoga is now part of my fitness routine. Not bad at all.

Resolution #9: Take a real vacation: Kim and I went to Iceland. Never in my life did I ever expect to be sitting in a geothermal spa in Iceland. Nor did I ever expect to find myself looking at a menu that had both puffin and whale as featured proteins. Can’t get more real than that.

Resolution #10: Meet the woman of my dreams, fall in love and get married: Smiles. Well, I’ve completed the first two parts and am well on my way on the third. I certainly didn’t see this coming when I wrote the resolution but hey, that is why you have resolutions in the first place.

I’ll write up the 2010 resolutions next week. Let’s see what I can accomplish in the new year.

Resolution review

Well, we are now officially halfway through the year. Time for me to dust off my New Year’s Resolutions and see how I am doing. This is the exact list that I posted on January 1st for those who are thinking that I am making this up as I go along.

Resolution # 1: Learn how to juggle: I can juggle one bean bag very well. Two bean bags are more of a struggle but I can make a passable effort. Three is a pain and a half. I swear one rainy weekend I am going to sit down (ok, more like stand up) and just force myself to practice and practice until I can juggle. Once I perfect this skill then I can move on to learning the unicycle.

Resolution # 2: Get my weight under 190 pounds: Sigh. At the start of the year I weighed 200 pounds. Two weeks ago I found that I was up to 213. When Kim went through my closets we decided to toss out much of my wardrobe: partly because it is hideously out of style but mainly because none of it fits anymore. While I am more than happy to look at my closets and see clothes that I actually want to wear I am making losing weight the number one priority for the rest of the year. Just over the past few weeks I have restarted the workout program and am eating healthier and as a result I’ve already lost a few pounds. I really need to get fit and get to a healthy weight and stay there.

Resolution # 3: Learn how to actually cook: Haven’t made as much progress on this as I would like but I am happy to say that the majority of my meals do not require a microwave. That is an improvement over past years. This is another one of those items that I should really dedicate an hour or two every weekend to addressing. Just try once or twice a week to make an actual meal from a recipe. If it comes out well, awesome. If not, I’ll put in a pizza. I can say that while I haven’t accomplished this goal my fear of the kitchen has been reduced to a more acceptable level.

Resolution # 4: Increase blog readership: Initially I didn’t think I would do this one but I’ve already hit my goal for the year. My hope was to have a 50 reader day and I had a 90 reader day and a few others in the sixties. My average for the year so far is 21 a day with the past few months being in the 19 a day range. I still need to work on it and would like to increase the focus a bit (and I would kill to break 100 on a day) but it is nice to know that I have cultivated a rather significant worldwide readership base. I’m huge in Europe.

Resolution # 5: Focus on the positive in my life: Hmmm…tough to say where I stand on this one. On one hand I am happier than I have ever been and am satisfied with pretty much every aspect of my life at the moment. On the other hand I am still a cynical bastard at times. I’m one of the few people who can love their job but come in grumbling every morning that they have to spend another eight hours looking at computer screens. I’ll just say that I am improving in this area (especially when compared to some of my darker days in Kansas City) but there is still a lot of runway ahead of me.

Resolution # 6: Get back into the concert going scene: Haven’t gone to a single concert this year. I’m not sure I am entirely happy about that but my social life has been filled in other ways. My biggest problem is that a) a lot of my favorite acts (meaning the incredibly unknown alt country acts) don’t play around here and b) when they do they are either an hour drive away or at one of the beach resorts and I just don’t feel like making the trip. Maybe it is a good thing to give my ears a bit of a break.

Resolution # 7: Complete the Best of the Blog: Wow, this one just hasn’t gotten off the ground this year. I still want to do a major writing project. Hell, I really want to write a novel and have for years and have a plot and characters waiting to go. The problem is simply a matter of time. I only have so many hours to work on everything I feel like working on and some things get tossed to the side for a moment and this is sadly one of them. While I might be far behind on being a novelist after 1,200+ blog posts at least I can call myself a writer.

Resolution # 8: Reader’s Choice: Thanks to my good friend DJ this became “take a yoga class.” I still haven’t taken a class but I have located a yoga studio near my home that offers beginners classes. Maybe I can tie this into my weight loss goal. If anything, my experience in a yoga studio would have enough embedded humor in it to make the entire experience worthwhile

Resolution # 9: Take a real vacation: I’ve already gone to New Orleans this year. I’m planning on heading to San Antonio for the Notre Dame game. But I have one real vacation that is still in the planning stages that when I go on it will put all other trips to shame. It is just so out of the ordinary, so unexpected, that I don’t want to ruin the surprise by discussing it before I go. But it will be legen…wait for it…dary.

Resolution # 10: Meet the woman of my dreams, fall in love, and get married: When I wrote this list I threw this item in at the end to make for a nice even ten resolutions. I didn’t think that it would actually happen. To my surprise and amazement and joy it has. The past few months with Kim have been better than I could have ever dreamed. My life has become a movie script and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Wednesday Night Music Club: If you want me to sum up the first half of this year in a song I am going to go with Josh Ritter’s “Me and Jiggs.” A bar with a jukebox and you on my arm. Heaven and earth seem pretty much the same.

A bit of the big easy

Three topics tonight for the price of one…

I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the blog yesterday as I had my biggest traffic day ever as a result of my Oscar blog. 61 hits yesterday, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that I don’t think I actually know 61 people. In fact, that amount allows me to cross one of my New Year’s resolutions off the list as it was my goal to break 50 readers in a day. Looking back at my resolutions (posted on January 1 for those interested in seeing the list) I am surprised at just how much progress I have made in the past two months. Just wait until I actually buy a yoga mat…

On the topic of resolutions today is Mardi Gras and that means tomorrow is the start of lent otherwise known as the second chance at new year’s resolutions for Catholics. At this time of year those of us who were raised in Catholic schools feel obligated to give something up for lent. Now I always feel like I must point out why we do this and why for the next few weeks I will no longer eat meat on Friday. It is not that cows are suddenly evil or that the Catholic church has a great deal of investments in the fishing industry. No, the entire idea of giving something up is to remind ourselves how blessed we are in life and to clear our minds of some of the superfluous fluff that overtakes it.

People always have interesting choices for lent. Many people give up beer, which always confuses me as I assume that God wants us to enjoy life. For the past few years I have given up negativity for lent. It never works and usually by Thursday my snark level is at unprecedented heights but at least I try. This year I am going to do something a little different. I’m giving up junk food for lent. After putting on a few more pounds over the winter (and realizing that I have been eating like crap) I’ve decided that I must really focus on how I am treating my body. So I am putting away the Twinkies and the Chewy Chips Ahoy and the I Can’t Believe It’s Not a Large Tub of Saturated Fat. Sigh. It’s going to be a long lent.

Since it is Mardi Gras I felt like I should share one small story from my trip to New Orleans last week. This explains all that I love about the city…

It was Monday and my travelling partner and I had spent an eventful weekend in the Quarter. Given that it had been the weekend before the weekend before Mardi Gras the Quarter had been filled with people and parades and energy. We had no real plans when we got there so we were just sucked into the entire atmosphere of joy and excitement and energy. On Monday though there was nothing scheduled and the two of us just planned on walking around, making those last purchases and enjoying our last moments in the city.

One of the things that I enjoyed seeing on this trip was that all of the people who make the city interesting were back. The painters, the fortune tellers, the people who ask you where you got your shoes at, they all had returned to the city after a brief respite after Katrina. They are what gives the city its unique charm. There is no organization or structure behind them, you are not quite sure where they came from or where they go at night, but they create this other worldly atmosphere to the city. They make it unlike any place else.

My travelling partner would always carry money on her so she could put a few dollars in the hat of all of the performers. She would occasionally go into a bar with the intent of getting change just so she could tip the next person she came across, even if it meant crossing the street to do so. That just amazed me. Most people (including myself, sadly) are all too tempted to just increase our pace as we walk past and not appreciate the fact that there is a human being behind the performance. That this is not a theme park employee; this is someone for whom this moment is their life. To say that she impressed me with these small acts does not do the word or her justice.

So on our last day walking around the city we came across a guy with a mane of rather wild, curly hair playing a cello. On the list of instruments one plays to impress tourists a cello is rather highbrow. It is Mardi Gras after all and the drunken frat boys are surprisingly uninterested in classical music. We pass him by and she puts a few dollars in his hat and he thanks her. We walk around for a few hours, make a few purchases and while walking in a different part of the Quarter we walk by him again. She once again drops a few dollars in the hat and as we are about ten steps away he yells out “Thanks again!” as we both turn to see him waving and smiling at us.

Day turns into night and we end our trip with just a fantastic dinner and one last walk back to our hotel. We step onto Jackson Square and from a distance I can hear a cello playing. There is our friend, in his third location of the day at least, set up in front of St. Louis Cathedral as the last bits of light are fading from the city. I pause for a second, look at her, and went “Let’s make this guy’s day.”

The two of us rush over to him and put enough money in the hat to cover a few nights at the youth hostel. I know this because he told us exactly what he needed for the night and how he was hoping beyond hope that someone would give him enough just so he could go back and go to sleep. And instead of just doing this and walking by we talked with him to find out his story. His name was Bracken and he was from Wisconsin and he was doing this as part of what could only be described as a musical dream. He wasn’t sure quite what he was trying to accomplish but he knew that if he could go to parts of the country and just play the music that he loved and survived that it would make him a better person and a better musician. He missed his family, he missed his home, but something told him that if he made his way to New Orleans everything would work out. That this was a place he was just meant to be. When we last saw him he was making his way through the Quarter, cello in hand, with the biggest smile on his face.

I’ve often said that what I love about New Orleans is that it is an actual place and the US has very few of those. On the surface that means that the city itself is not a Xeroxed version of every other city in America with the same strip malls and chain stores. But what I really mean is that the people in the city are a wonderful set of madmen and dreamers who want to see what will happen if for one moment in your life you try to make your wishes come true. The city is built by people who pursue their art and their joy of life come hell or high water, literally.

Why do I always visit New Orleans? Because dreams permeate the city in a way I have never seen anywhere else in the world. And it is the most intoxicating sight one can imagine.

Happy Mardi Gras everyone. Enjoy some Cowboy Mouth.

The path for 2009

Every year when the calendar flips I have to do one very specific task. That is to create a new Word document for my writer’s journal. Back in the days before the blog (going all the way back to the dark days of 1998) the writer’s journal was meant to be just that but in the end it focused more on the journaling than the writing. Since I started the blog the two have essentially merged in that I write my posts in the journal first and then upload them. This does mean that yes, I do have grammar and spell check running as I type but yet I still don’t bother to pay attention to them. It also provides me with a rough word count and I estimate that I wrote over 200,000 words (or the equivalent of about three novels) in 2008. That is pretty impressive, I think.

But the biggest thing about starting up a new journal is that I am beginning on page one. Everything is new and fresh. Keeping that in mind I have decided to post my New Year’s Resolutions tonight in the hopes of making myself keep them given that I have publicly proclaimed my desire to do so.

Resolution # 1: Learn how to juggle: I feel that it is vitally important to have one skill that is completely and utterly pointless and would only serve to entertain a six year old niece. Also, this would provide me with another possible career path if I ever decide to run off and join the circus.

Resolution # 2: Get my weight under 190 pounds: A few years back when I weighed 215 pounds I looked in the mirror and wondered how the skinny kid who literally weighed 145 pounds in college had suddenly become someone who, for all effective purposes, was overweight. I’ve since cut my weight down to 200 pounds but I would like to break 190 because then I will officially be within my official range on the BMI charts. That should at least keep the doctors off my back for a while. This is tied to some of my overall fitness goals in terms of working out, lifting weights, and dreaming of running a 5K in a time that is less than my age. I’ll focus on the weight as the only way I will get there is through exercise.

Resolution # 3: Learn how to actually cook: I once told someone that I took pride in the fact that as a single male I could cook for myself as opposed to ordering takeout every night. She looked at me, shook her head and said “Chris, you don’t cook. You heat.” A sentiment that is sadly true. My culinary skills pretty much max out and defrosting a chicken breast, sprinkling it with spices, and tossing it on my Foreman Grill. Either that or taking one of those bagged pasta meals, pouring them into a large pot, and stirring occasionally. At some point I would like to actual be able to make a meal of multiple ingredients. It just feels like something I need to learn how to do.

Resolution # 4: Increase blog readership: So as many of you know my favorite new toy is the little map thingy on the right side of the blog. It tells me a) how many unique visitors I received yesterday and b) that for some reason someone in Latvia decided to visit my site. On a good day I can get between 20 and 30 readers, which is a lot more than I ever thought I had. But I really think I can top that and now that I have a reliable metric I am going to do my best to try. My initial goal is a 50 reader day. That means I will, gasp, have to promote my blog a little more to the rest of the world. Nothing will change, I just want to see how many people I can bring over to my side of the world.

(Side note: last night I went through a few years of old blog postings and I saw just how much my writing has improved recently. The jokes are funnier, the writing is tighter and there seems to be a lot more purpose to it all. That is the benefit of writing five nights a week for four years straight. You are bound to get better.)

Resolution # 5: Focus on the positive in my life: Yep, this one is going to be a challenge. As some of you know, I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch as of late and the vast majority of it is due to circumstances outside of my control. I have an incredibly hard time coming to terms with things like that because I never like to admit that there are things that I just can’t fix. I always think “well maybe if I just work a little harder or if I become a better person the universe will change to my liking.” But things just don’t work that way. Add to that moving to a place where I am a complete stranger and dealing with the sheer fact of being 35 and it makes for a few trips to the dark corners of my soul.

So to combat it I am going to make a concerted effort to focus on the positive. Surround myself with people who make my life better. Remember how blessed I am and all of the amazing things I’ve accomplished. Yes, I’ll still be cynical and sarcastic but I want to have an upbeat twinge to it. Once I get a few wins under my belt everything will be better.

Resolution # 6: Get back into the concert going scene: Do you know that I have not seen a single concert since I moved here? Ok, that has to change pronto. I need to get back to being the guy in front of the stage. It just makes me feel alive.

Resolution # 7: Complete the Best of the Blog: This gets much easier if someone realizes that being my editor would require, you know, editing. The idea is really simple. I’ll go back through the first 4 years of the blog and pick out the best bits, clean them up so they at least resemble English, add in a few of the pieces that I have written that have never found a proper home and self-publish the result. It would give me a book on my shelf that I wrote as opposed to a stack of print outs and computer files. In a perfect world (meaning I get started on this on Sunday) I could be done by end of June. If not, sometime later. But this is something I really want to do even if it means rereading 1,000 posts just to find one funny Lindsay Lohan joke I wrote in 2006.

Resolution # 8: Reader’s Choice: Yes, I am opening my New Year’s Resolutions up to public debate. Put in what you think I should do for the new year in the comments and I will choose the best (or the funniest) to be part of my official goals. Anything is fair game.

Resolution # 9: Take a real vacation: Do you know how often during my five years at Sprint that I took a full calendar week of vacation? Once, and that was when I went to New Orleans as a volunteer and spent the entire time tearing down moldy drywall. I think I had entire years where all of my vacation was used on trips to Chicago and South Bend. No wonder I got so burnt out on my job. I need to take advantage of the fact that I have time off and just get away. Don’t know where just yet but I need to drop myself in a new environment every once in a while.

Resolution # 10: Meet the woman of my dreams, fall in love, and get married: Hell, got to have something to strive for over the course of the year.

Have a good weekend everyone. I’ll try to post another story from the KC dating scene on Saturday in which I discuss the biggest dating mistake that I have ever made. Worth reading if just for the cringe factor.