Mental Cobwebs

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions, probably because they were always doomed to fail. One Kevin Smith discussed the notion of people having a "present bias" -- their future selves are perfect beings with which they can place all of their dreams and aspirations, confident in the fact that they will achieve them, just...later. There's a really good TV show on right now.

A New Year's resolution is the epitome of that. Everyone makes them, but probably something like 0.001% of them are ever achieved. So, I usually spare myself the disappointment of realizing I've failed to complete the tasks I've given myself for the year. But then I was reading through Pete Davison's first One A Day post and was kind of struck by the idea of making attainable and broad resolutions that I can easily achieve if I put my mind to it. I'll check back with you in a year and find out what my percentage was.

1. Take back my pant size: I keep telling myself I'm gonna drop a good 60 pounds and lose the beer gut that has never even had any beer in it. In all likelihood I never will, so I'm going to start taking baby steps toward that goal. This year? I would love to be able to put on the 38 waist Dickies pants I have without sucking in and stretching. I can still wear other pants in size 38, but Dickies are much tighter.

2. Improve (or take steps toward improving) our life: A new job; signing up for some sort of classes that might help me in working toward a new job; finding a house that we can afford. I'll take anything, really.

3. Keep somewhat up to date on the video games of 2011: At the end of every year I get a harsh realization of how little current gaming I did in the last 365 days. I'd like to at least play enough 2011 releases to be able to make a top 10 list.

4. Make a sizable dent in my gaming backlog: I always feel guilty when I buy a new game because of all the games I have sitting around that I haven't even touched. I'd like to start crossing games off of that pile of shame I've got going.

5. Read more: I don't have a ton of books lying around, but the percentage of the ones that I've actually read is embarrassingly high. By the end of the year I will have read these books that have been on my shelf for far too long:

We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001 by Eric Davidson
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer
Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens
Igniting a Revolution by Various Authors
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger
Syrup by Maxx Barry
On Writing by Stephen King
My Boring-Ass Life by Kevin Smith
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Of course, if I find any of them particularly boring I can stop reading and still cross them off my list. Some of them have been lent to me with the insistence of quality, others gifted to me at Christmas or such, and a few were purged from the belongings of an acquaintance with whom I haven't had contact in several years -- so who knows if I'll like them. I've gotta leave myself an out if they completely blow.

And those are my modest resolutions. Wish my future self luck in completing them. I certainly could use it.