(Fringe will be back next week!)
Now, we all know that the whole “New Year’s Resolutions” are mostly crap. “Lose 10 pounds and/or otherwise change the way I live my life” and those resolutions do a good job of being some variant of unattainable and depressing.
As such, I’m wondering if we don’t need to rethink the whole thing and come up with A Single Attainable Non-Backslidable Goal. Like if I said that my New Years Resolution was to Finish That Children’s Book, I’d be able to have a goal that couldn’t be undone. I mean, if I lost 10 pounds, I’m pretty sure I’d find them again. If, however, I wrote the book, the book would Stay Written. More than that, if I said that my goal was to lose 10 pounds and someone asked me in March about “how much weight have you lost”, I’d either go out and eat a double cheeseburger with bacon or I’d go out and eat a triple cheeseburger with bacon. If, however, someone asked me about the book in March, I’d be able to say “I’ve got 10 of 32 pages done” (assuming, of course, I had 10 of 32 pages done).
And no shame spiral.
So that’s my Single Attainable Non-Backslidable Goal for this year.
Do *YOU* have one? One that you wouldn’t mind one of us asking you about in March?
I’m simplifying in the new year. Cutting dead weight from my friend list, getting rid of junk in the house we don’t need, reading fewer blogs, reducing my digital life, etc.
Wait, you don’t need the junk? Or the house?
I am going to read some classic work I’ve never gotten to. Not sure what, though. A la Recherche Du Temps Perdu and Finnegans Wake both seem like foolish things to commit to, and something as approachable as, say, The Scarlet Letter doesn’t seem worth a resolution. Anybody have any suggestions for something in between?
Something Greek, perhaps?
*eyes her copy of Herodotus*
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? Not the 200-volume long one, but the abridged one.
Goethe’s Faust?
The Purgatorio and the Cliffs Notes for Paradisio?
If you haven’t read ER Eddison, you should. It’s all about the beauty of language. Often, I’ll read each page twice.
Obviously I don’t know what you read or how we are defining classic so:
1. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Basani
2. War and Peace by Tolstoy
3. The complete short stories of Anton Chekhov
4. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
5. Pedigree by Georges Simeon
6. Life: A User’s Manual bu Pepic
7. Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon
8: The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
9. Ada or Ardor by Nabokov
Classics, in this crowd, has double meaning. That said, the lady writers always seem so silent, and their voices rarely heard, rarely recommended as essential.
Some George Eliot, Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters. . . good for the soul. Middlemarch would get my vote as resolution worthy.
I loved Pride and Prejudice. What would you suggest for a second Austen?
Emma or Sense and Sensitibility. (I haven’t read Northanger Abbey,.)
But also, Middle March or Jane Eyre.
Also, I’m currently reading The Satanic Verses and enjoying it tremendously.
Great suggestion. I’m leaning towards something by Nabokov, maybe Pale Fire. (I’ve read War and Peace and the Decline and Fall. Both of which are pretty good reads, not chores.)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my all-time favorites, and is infinitely shorter and more accessible than either Finnegan’s Wake or Ulysses.
But you should also be ready to read Beowulf soon.
I’ve read all of Joyce except for the Wake.. (In retrospect, it would have been fine to skip Exiles.) And I’d recommend Ulysses. Almost a century of stream-of-consciousness writing has made it far more accessible than it was in 1922, and parts of it are hilarious.
1. Write more.
2. Run a marathon.
3. Lose some goddamned weight. (If 2 doesn’t highly correlate with 3, I’m going to punch things.)
Also, per 1, I’m going to finish a post about sobriety that I’ve written eleventy billion drafts of.
I’m working on developing brain function, and I’ll likely go on to other similar things; like the exercises noted by Ouspensky, etc.
And get the API 510 cert.
When we set goals with children, we talk about them being specific, measurable, and attainable.
“Become a better reader” is sort of meaningless.
“Read 10 books, at least 5 of which are a level J” is much better.
I took this to heart when I set my own resolutions, which are numerous:
– Run 1000 miles
– Bike 500 hours
– Bench press 315lbs 8 times
– Squat 350lbs 8 times
– Read 25 books, only 10 of which can be work related
– Maintain a weight of 180lbs
– Finish watching “The Wire”
What I like about the ones I’ve chosen is they contain within them a bunch of other goals that wouldn’t make great resolutions. “Spend less time dicking around on the computer” is a hard one to measure progress on; but I won’t be able to complete most of these on here if I don’t get better at that.
Also, when I first read, “Finish that children’s book,” I thought you meant finish READING a children’s book. I was starting to get a little worried about you, Jay.
Happy New Year!
I’m sorry, that should say bike 150 hours. 500 hours! CRIKEY!
Laugh more. Every day.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
(Wait for it…)
(Wait for it…)
MOOOOOOO!!!
That’s a brilliant opener.
One can then explore the various interrupters: (e.g., Cowboy: Yee-haw)
The one I close with is “interrupting sloth”.
“Interrupting sloth who?”
(wait a second) move hand like it’s a claw, very very slowly.
hahahahaha.
How does one make an online laugh explode from the belly?
Fun fact: Grew up on a dairy farm. Father’s name was Merle. As a wee sprout, I thought the kine were calling my Daddy, merrrrrrrrrrrrrrrle.
JB, have you read “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn”>Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks?
Sloths feature large in this strange, strange story.
No, but I bet Maribou knows about it.
Four-year-olds love the interrupting cow, if only because yelling moo at someone unexpectedly is uproarious to them. They don’t necessarily get the “interrupting” part, as the moo will often come long before the other person starts a response or long after. But, hey… “MOOOOOO!!!”
Go to yoga (or zumba) class *every* week.
Have one healthy romantic relationship. No pressure there, right? Ugh.
Paint every room in my house. Start today!
colors?
I’m starting with an eggshell color in the living room. My house is over 100 years old and some rooms have 7′ ceilings, including the living room, so is like to brighten the place up a bit. My ex husband like things to be darker, so it’s time for a fresh, bright look. I haven’t picked colors for the other rooms yet.
I’m going to write. I can’t even say ‘more’ because I’ve not been writing for a good 7-8 years.
Okay, here’s one I will be able to keep:
Read more Neil Gaiman.
A super-awesome friend gave me Anansi Boys for my birthday last week. I’m eating it up. It’s my first Neil Gaiman.
I may follow Tod’s lead below and try for a book a week.
Mine:
1. 30 lbs by July.
2. 1 new recipe a week or two
3. Read 1 book a week, with review posted
Since your book recommendations included many Asian cookbooks, I thought you might like find Burma, Rivers of Flavor interesting.
Corby Kummer’s review:
Moderation and apparently muddled html tags.
I gotcha.
Last night, a country blues song wailed through my dreams, with the line:
Stuck in moderation
With the HTML tag blues.
I hope to finish the defense draft of my dissertation by March 1.