New Year's Resolutions

I have dreaded the thought of 2012 for a while now. It's not the end of the world thing. It's not that I think it will be particularly horrible year either. In fact, I think it may be a great one. The damned thing is that it contains my five year high school reunion. It's not that I hated the people I went to school with, because if that was the case I wouldn't go. It is just a sobering reminder of what I haven't accomplished in five years. All I seem to have is college credits that don't really amount to anything and a blog for that time. I know that I have a lot more from that time, but it's not really tangible.

That sounds so much more self-pitying than it actually is.

I was thinking about the ritual of the New Year last night and decided that I absolutely love it. The ball dropping and partying is nice, but it's more than that. It's a time where I think a lot of people reflect and decide to make improvements. I think it is wonderful that people take time to look book as well as look forward at the same time. It's remembering the good and bad of the old and wishing for a better new.

There are always a lot of cynics about things. I get that New Year's Eve to New Year's day is really just one insignificant day to another. It's not even a significant moment in Earth's orbit around the sun*. However, meaning exists only were it is given, so I felt differently at 11:59 last night than I did at midnight. I know it doesn't need to be a significant moment, but I let it. It is a dividing line between past and future and just like that.

So along with that comes the New Year's Resolution(s). I don't have very many this year and frankly they aren't all that exciting. In fact one is a repeat. Still, here they are:

Rename The Blog

My initial goal was not to have this place called "Pastafraina07's Blog." I had wanted to create a blog in the summer of 2010 and couldn't think of anything more clever, so in went that place-holder name. Now it's a year and a half later and it still has that name****. Also, having Blog in the name of your blog is like having Car in the name of your car*****. This one shouldn't be hard, you all could remind me if it doesn't get done.

Stop Saying God

I tried to do this last year, but I horribly failed. Saying god before I curse is just so deeply intrenched in me. My goal is to either just not say it or replace it with "Pallas". This will probably be a losing battle, but I'd really like to stop acknowledging something I don't believe in. I shouldn't yell curse-ridden commands at my video game to something I doubt exists.

Imagine People Complexly

I just need to do this. It's kind of hard, because it's really hard to not think of others as 2-D; to not vilify or deify them in your own mind. This is one that I'm definitely going to fail at a lot, but I think it's best to try to make myself better at imagining others complexly.

Thanks for reading

-Michael
*It also takes roughly** 6 more hours to orbit the sun than 365 days, so relative to the sun the earth is in a slightly different position at midnight on New Year's Eve each year.
**It is actually slightly less that 6 hours***, so once in a very great while a leap year is skipped to compensate for that difference. I believe the next one will be long after we're all dead, but it's cool to think smart people have figured this shit out.
***A blog post and an Astronomy 101 lesson.
****My one moment of naming brilliance went to my sparsely used sports blog and no one is going to convince me that "Pasta Salad Tackle Football" is not an awesome name.
*****I don't actually name inanimate things, but named cars have been prominent in the books I've been reading.