Month: December 2023

a Resolution by any other name

I hate New Year’s resolutions almost as much as I hate waiting for equipment at PF from January 2nd until mid-February. See, the “resolutioners”, who drunkenly “resolved” to get in shape in the new year all join Fitness clubs in January, take all the good parking spaces outside and park their asses on machines and play with their phones and keep the regulars from getting in a good workout. Statistically, 79%+ of them quit within 2 months and things go back to normal. It’s not that I don’t applaud the effort.
My problem lies with the timing.
Why wait until January 1st? If you feel the need for change then act on it then and now! If you want to quit smoking, throw that pack away now. Drink too much? Pour it out and toss the bottle. If that doesn’t work then get help. Act on inspiration and bouts of motivation. Not by societal norms and and what day it is.
That is how I ditched the “resolution” mentality and learned to go with motivation when it hits. Still, as the New Year approaches I like to take inventory and outline things I want to work on.

The first thing I want to work on is my thinking. Nothing is as dangerous to a man as the quality of thoughts and I need to remind myself of what I have been through and how lucky (do I believe in luck?) I am to be here. I must never forget about my good fortune and resist letting negative people and adversity take away my attitude of gratitude.
I would like to stop saying that I don’t care what other people think of me, and instead actually live it. Am I living my life for me or for others? If I am likeable, live with a good heart and do no harm to others, what do I have to prove to anyone? Small minds worry about what others are doing and I do not have a small mind.
I have made decent inroads in my motivation levels but I need to do better. I have done much better in taking care of my body by exercising. But I’m not as committed as I would like to be. Eating better, drinking less and smoking less are the answer. Now I need to live it. It’s just as easy to order a salad as it is a Double Burger with fries.
I would like to be less lazy. It really bothers me how I sometimes have to force myself and perform even the most basic of tasks, such as cleaning my living area and putting things away where they belong. I don’t know when I got this way but it needs to stop.
I want to write more. I have actually made decent progress at that, I had a book in the works last year and I hit a wall. I recently picked it up again and now the ideas are starting to flow. But I want to blog more. I need to continue, in the absence of a good therapist, to share my thoughts with an admittedly nameless and faceless readership and see if I can recapture the passion and grit that first drew readers to my page. If that story has already been told, then I’ll tell another. I love to write and I enjoy the catharsis of it. Maybe I’ll finish the book this year.
I need to value myself more. After more than one disappointment in both romance and friendship, I wallowed in self-doubt and made the ridiculous mistake of blaming myself for failures. To make matters worse, I didn’t listen to myself when, after over-thinking things ad nauseum, I didn’t believe myself when faced with overwhelming evidence that I did nothing wrong. No more, I know what I am and who I am and I will not lower myself to chase anyone ever again.
Lastly, I need to learn to not only tolerate solitude, but to value it. I am a dangerous combination of alone and lonely. This has caused me to seek company in people who weren’t right for me. That will hopefully change in the near future. I would rather be alone for the right reasons than be with someone for the wrong reasons.

These are all things to work on. Not because it is December 31st. Maybe because the New Year is a refreshing time in which people everywhere are thinking about ways to improve themselves. That is never a bad thing. I would like to think that I am doing this as a reminder to myself to always continue to work on myself. After all, is there anyone who can honestly say that there is nothing about themselves that needs work?

What does it matter,I still learned it

Before I got married I was at a cocktail party rubbing elbows with my fiance’s family. I was talking to a distinguished and clearly educated gent and the subject of the Korean Conflict somehow came up. Now, I did have a fair amount of knowledge on that because, like I said, I later educated myself. But there I stood, a pizza cook on the threshold of a potential conversational Armageddon. But I held in. Fortuitously, he came to an impasse in the discussion and was stuck on the parallel that the US military failed to cross, the one that would have been an act of war. I chimed in,
“That would be the 38th Parallel.” I was then complimented as being a smart young man. What he didn’t know is that I got that from the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School.
I was reminded of that today as I was reading an excerpt from one of my favorite books, A Prayer for Owen Meaney. There is no shortage of reasons why I love the book, I have always been a sucker for a coming-of-age story and it’s a great one. The excerpt that caught my eye was dedicated to the birth of the all-time opiate of the masses, the Television (my apologies to Karl Marx), in which the narrator observes the progression of the power that the television eventually held in his home. He told of how his Grandmother, who was always staunchly opposed to TV finally caved, and how the grandson reluctantly fell under its spell as well. Our hero Owen Meaney, ever the virtuous one, chastised the Grandson for watching TV. At which time the Grandson defended it by offering how many ways that it was educational. Owen promptly dismissed this, his unsolicited opinion was that TV was a slovenly way to educate oneself.

I was amused and a little embarrassed when confronted with this. While I consider myself adequately educated, I have attained a fair amount of passable knowledge, some decent Trivial Pursuit-ish information as well as some solid nuggets of pop culture as well as high society through TV and movies.
Now, of course, TV was not educational in 1958, the time period in discussion. You watched what was available and a lot of it was garbage. It’s not a fair comparison to today’s Cable and streaming options that offer many educational options. Which I take advantage of. Despite even that… some of my greatest stories that deal with gaining “knowledge” through unlikely and slovenly sources occurred many years ago.

Most of my knowledge of Opera, Classical Music, American society during the Great Depression, Prohibition, wartime, etc., comes exclusively from Bugs Bunny cartoons. That’s right. “Kill the Wabbit” taught me about Opera.
In addition, most of my understanding of politics I can directly attribute to Berkeley Breathed and Gary Trudeau, of Bloom County and Doonesbury fame, respectively. As a skirt-chasing teenager (and young adult and well, forever) dedicated to doing the bare minimum, it was Bloom County and Doonesbury that piqued my interest in the news of the day as they lampooned politics and known as well as not-so-well-known cultural figures. It was through Bloom County and Doonesbury that I learned of the colorful figures and their stories that dominated the era such as Anita Bryant and her Anti-gay activism, the anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, the disappearance of known American atheist Madalyn Murray-O’Hair, the Televangelist scandals, the Contras and Sandanistas, the Star Wars antics of the Reagan era, I could go on but I won’t. Suffice it to say that otherwise boring (to me) subject matter and events were portrayed comically way or ironically and consequently raised my interest. An interest in being current and informed on the matters of the world, and in being able to take a humorous, even absurdist interpretation. In the case of Bloom County, the political landscape was portrayed often through Children and anthropomorphized naive but politically charged meadow animals. Think of a Hedgehog, a rabbit, and a Penguin having a caucus to nominate a dead cat for President.
That shit was funny!
And it had the right effect on me, it got me interested. Which fortunately led to a lot of self-education of the shit that I should have learned in High School.

Snob appeal, slob appeal. Whatever. Learning can come from many sources, highbrow and otherwise. What matters is that I learned something, and I received the added bonus of getting a good laugh in the process.

“Slovenly” Perhaps. Effective? Absolutely.