Moodspins | Hodgepodgeatorium

Politics

Hodgepodgeatorium - Resolutions

By mathan erhardt ⋅ February 10, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment | Email the author

So, I’m just over a week into my new year and I’ve yet to fully commit to a resolution. I know, I know, I know; I’m supposed to have these things sorted out beforehand, but when your new year starts a month after everyone else’s you tend to procrastinate on things like that. So on my new year’s eve, I didn’t really want to be bothered with things of that nature and, fast forward, here I am writing about my lack of a resolution.

But I’ve got some ideas. And hopefully writing about them, will help me decide on one of them.

Giving my various names distinct personalities - Everyone reading this knows me as “mathan.” But when I go to Starbucks (or really any time I order something that requires a name) I go with “Matt.” It’s easier, it requires much less of me repeating myself and frankly I get tired of my auto response “Eh, I can’t take the credit for it, my mom gave it to me” to the inevitable remark “wow what an (interesting, unusual, unique, distinct) name.”

I’ve also been known to semi respond to “Chris.” Y’see I’ve got this Krispy Kreme work jacket and the embroidered name is “Chris.” And while I don’t wear the jacket year round, in the winter months I’ve been known to give passive acknowledgment to the name “Chris” being uttered in my general direction.

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to branch out and give those names something to distinguish “them” from “me.” Not everyone has the opportunity to create a new personality and here I’ve got two and an doing nothing with them. Some people might call that squandering.

Have Sex - It’s been over four years of this self imposed exile from sexual intercourse and I think that’s probably long enough. I’ve been celibate in Sin City. I’ve proved my point. I’ve resisted temptation, spurned advances and shown that I possess an impressive amount of willpower and self control.

But I mean this isn’t really a difficult resolution to achieve. I could literally fall into something if I wanted to, but it’s about quality, right? So perhaps I should refine this one and go with it.

Finish What I Start - I suppose this could refer to anything, but I’m speaking strictly in terms of video games. I’ve had a Wii for over a year and I’ve beaten a title of one game and I didn’t even do that completely.

I rushed through Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess because a coworker got a Wii and I wanted to let him borrow it. So I beat the game, but not all of the side quests.

In addition to Zelda, I’ve also got Super Mario Galaxy, The Godfather and Marvel Ultimate Alliance all in various stages of completion, except of course for actually completed. And that’s not even counting the old school Virtual Console games that I’ve downloaded.

And since there are games out and on the horizon that I’m interested in getting (the Trauma Center series and Bully), I figure I should probably start beating some of these games at some point.

Write More - I really don’t know why this is in the running. Last year, in my second year of trying, I actually completed National Novel Writing Month. I wrote my 50k word work of fiction. But of course that story wasn’t done. And then my computer crashed.

I didn’t back it up or email it to myself, because I wasn’t really that attached to it. Now everyone I’ve talked to about my computer mishap seems to be much more devastated than I am. I think it’s because they can’t imagine spending most of November averaging 2k words a day and then losing it computer crash.

But really, being the critic that I am, I wasn’t really that happy with what I was writing. I had a goal (50k words by November 30th) and I wrote to that goal. But the story that I was writing kept evolving and it wasn’t even written in a consistent tense. It was a first, very rough draft, which was going to require tons of rewriting and was probably never going to be shown to anyone. So, if a book that no one was ever going to read gets erased, is it a horrible event?

I say all that to say; I don’t really know how to quantify “write more.” This November I’ll likely begin on a new work for the contest and I’ll either succeed or fail. But beyond that what else should I write to achieve my resolution of “write more”, should I choose to go with that resolution.

Or maybe I’ll just forgo the whole resolution thing? I mean, while I’m hardly perfect, I don’t know if self-improvement is really my thing? I don’t eat that horribly. I don’t drink or smoke. I’m not overweight and I’m not really curse. Those are the stereotypical resolutions and they don’t apply to me. So maybe I’ll just resolve to be true to myself, which is kind of a resolution in itself, because so few people do that.

Eh, we’ll see what happens down the road.