Resolutions, anyone?

Posted on January 2, 2006 9:36 AM

It is the second day of the new year and I don’t have to go to work today because it is our first company holiday of 2006. So what will I get done today? I have a nice little list that I made for myself because I find that if I don’t make a list, the things that I would like to get done don’t.

I have some semi-resolutions for this new year as well. I want to get into better shape. I am 35 years old now, and I am probably in the worst shape of my life. I don’t look that bad, in my opinion. I’ve always had the body type that looks like I am in decent shape, but looks can be deceiving. I’m tired of talking about how I used to work out a lot. It’s been many years since I worked out in a regular routine. I have a gym membership and my gym is only 1 mile away or so from my house. These days, I really have no excuse for not using my gym membership, except for laziness.

Since they say that about 85% of people who make New Years resolutions fail, I need to give myself a couple easy ones to knock out. The working out resolution is one of the harder ones, believe it or not. Another thing I’d like to do this year is, be more organized. There are a couple of hotspots around my house that show how organized I am. My office, here on the 2nd of January, 2006, is a disgrace. One of my failings is that if I have a clear horizontal space, something gets put on it. I have a huge desk that is mostly used to stack papers and other sundry objects, until I just can’t see the surface any more. Don’t get me started on the garage, or the basement, or my closet, or the attic. :) My hope is that when I start to get better organized, I will start Getting Things Done. ™

Resolution #3, if we’re counting, is to write more. When I was in school, oh so long ago, my writing skills were pretty good. I remember when I first transferred to the Middletown campus of PSU, I had to take an English writing test. I think the outcome of that was that I needed to work on my writing. However, I know that most people who took that test probably received the same result or worse. I had an English 101 class in my first year of college, after leaving the Marines, and I know that my basic writing skills at that time were better than a lot of my classmates who had just graduated from high school. One of my biggest problems is converting what I think are coherent thoughts and ideas to words on the screen or on paper. Typically I will have a collection of thoughts coagulating in my brain and when I take the time to sit down and write them out, I lose what I thought was a coherent chain of ideas. I think it has something to do with the process of changing gears from free thinking to the mechanics of grammar and spelling and all the mundane parts of writing that will come naturally once I get into the habit of just sitting down and banging the words out.

Part and parcel to writing, is reading. I’ve been reading the novel, Lonesome Dove for the last few weeks. The version that I have is in Spanish, so I’m not sure how much that will help my English vocabulary and grammar. My Spanish is much worse than my English, but it’s getting better, judging by how many times I have to crack open my Spanish-English dictionary now, compared to when I started.

The final resolution for today is to get better at finishing these posts. I usually reach a point where I just don’t have anything else to write, and I have to leave the reader at an abrupt stop. This paragraph is my lame attempt at a conclusion for this post. :) Add/View Comments (2)

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