POPGEEK

I love new year’s resolutions; I’m just absolutely horrible at them.

There’s some perennial favorites that I never get tired of resolving and then totally screwing up: Eat better, exercise, be a better friend, communicate more effectively. Then there’s the random weird ones that really go nowhere fast; in 2008, I vowed to watch every episode of the original Star Trek and review them over at Alert Nerd. I made it through three.

This year, inspired by another blog I enjoy, I’m going to write out some resolutions, and then they’ll be here, and everyone can see them, and maybe that will help me stay focused. Also, I’ll check in every month or so to see how I’ve been doing, and I’ll force myself to write about it here. Unless I lie like a cheap toupee, this will hopefully keep me honest.

Ready? Here we go…

Eat better. There’s just not any good reason I shouldn’t be doing this now, other than my compulsive need to eat poorly as a way of making myself feel better when tense/depressed/restless. I’m not saying I need to only eat leafy greens three times daily for all of 2009; just mostly good things, and bad things in moderation. It’s not a big sweeping decision; it’s a lot of little choices. I need to be much, much better at making the right little choices.

Exercise. I’ve flirted in the past with jogging in the mornings, and maybe I’ll try that again. At the very least, there’s no reason why once every weekend I couldn’t make time to go for a run around the block. Sure, once or twice a week is a shitty exercise schedule. It’s better than my current one, which is less than zero times a week.

Stay in touch. I have a horrifying habit of letting e-mail fester in my inbox for months, sometimes years, and then looking back regretfully at all the friends I used to stay in touch with (or once tried to reconnect with) only to just lose the thread completely. It’s not that hard to make a phone call or shoot off an e-mail; I need to be better at it. First goal: Cleaning out all my inboxes.

CREATE more. I spend an immense amount of time writing. I’m not sure I spend all of it as wisely as I should. I have the work writing, and the freelance writing, which is essential to my livelihood. Then there’s the blogging, which I don’t think I could give up if I wanted to…although the BlogCritics stuff, that may need to go away once I get caught up with the raft of crap I have to review. And then there’s the eons I spend surfing the web, replying to inane message board posts with equally inane responses, twittering (which is crazy fun and good for making pals but a sinister time sink), and other ephemera.

I want to get some music out there and put out a comic with Jeff in 2009. Critical to both of these objectives is time. Freeing up time will mean giving up some things I do to waste time, so less spinning my wheels with time killers and time wasters and more focus.

This is really hard for me–I constantly feel like I’m not working hard enough, even when I’m working way too hard, and I am so legitimately busy with actual paying work that sometimes just crawling home to peck the wife and tickle the kid seems a chore. But it’s gotta be done. SOMETHING has to be done, even if it’s baby steps.

Watch a DVD a week. This will be my “idiotic compulsive project that will probably get forgotten about in a month” for 2009. I have a lot of DVDs, many of which I have never watched. I was a “collector” for a while; now I still like to buy movies and shows I enjoy, but I try to be more discriminating. Anyway, I am going to try to watch a DVD a week–a movie, or part of a TV series, or extras, or something–and write about it, either here or over at Alert Nerd. I’ll try to crosspost links which will give me some fun opportunities to do “crossovers” between my two blogs, which almost never happens.