In the year of our lord, 2008...

With the end of the year approaching, and my trans-continental sage smudging scheduled for later tonight, I feel compelled to write out my New Years Resolutions, so to speak. I actually think New Years Resolutions are pretty lame, especially because people don't think them through. Typical New Years Resolutions: lose weight, eat healthier, get out more, exercise more, etc etc. Notice anything? There are no measurable goals or strategies for implementing these resolutions. Call me PIRG-y, but I just think that if you're really going to try to change your life in a new year, you should have goals, strategies and tactics. Thus, here is my New Years Campaign Plan...

Goal: Do not gain any weight in the New Year.
Strategies: No cheese for the month of January: I really feel like this is a big piece of why I've maybe put on a few pounds during December. I've eaten nothing but cheese, for the most part. So none of that for one month...also because I am sort of obsessed with cheese...maybe I just should see if I can get by without that.

Fresh juice each morning: My mom gave me a juicer so I feel like this is a gimme.

Each meal out only once a week: Breakfast once, Lunch once, Dinner once.

30 minute walk every day: With my doggie because Ms. Abby needs to watch her figure too. We're not teenagers anymore.

Goal: Stop being so twitchy about being alone.
Strategies: Don't pursue a man in any way for all of January: I've been doing all the work for a while now when it comes to men and I gotta tell you, it's exhausting. This is an exercise in practicing my patience...don't worry I am not trying to turn into one of those girls who sits nicely and looks pretty and waits for a boy to ask her out. I'm just taking a moment to look around and be patient and see what happens. I may re-evaluate the length of time at the end of January...it's possible that it might take more than a month for me to learn anything from this experiment.

Start new activities: I'd like to garden in one of those Denver Urban Gardens community gardens. I'd like to rock out more. Stuff like that. I think these kinds of activities can help to fill my mental real estate (see post below.)

Goal: Stop being a stress freak about work.
Strategy: Say no more: we don't say no nearly enough in the IOD. Can I get an amen?

No working at home: seriously, I am not that important. If I can't get it done from 8-6, it can wait til the next day.

Other general goals that are not as interesting as these:
Finish grad school. Strategy: GO TO FUCKING CLASS AND GET THE SHIT DONE ALREADY!
Move out of this shitty apartment: Find a place, buy it, move in. Easy as pie.

So those are my goals and strategies for the new year. Now that I've committed them to the interwebs, there's no going back. I can't just pretend that I never said it. And I just hate it when I can't achieve my goals, so my guess is this will make me accountable and then I'll get all crazy over it and next year I'll have to make a resolution about not being such a failure freak. But hey, baby steps...

I need a new tenant!

So this weekend could have been better. That boy I'd like to make like me stood me up publicly again, which basically confirms two things...1) I can't make him like me. 2) I don't want to.
I mean, I can't really decide if it's worse to be stood up and left at home alone to think about how lame you are or to be stood up in front of all your friends. What could be worse than that? Oh, I know, if it was on your birthday. Or, wait, if the excuse you got was "My phone died." That might be worse...unless that's the excuse you got BOTH TIMES.

Ok, now that my little ranty pity party is over, I'll move on to the real content here...mental real estate*. This little nugget of wisdom is passed along to me by relationship sage Will Frechette and it couldn't be more true. Is it just that I am trying to occupy some mental real estate by having this pseudo relationship? It's a thing to think about, and if it wasn't there, what would happen to the Boy-Crushing plot in my brain? It would start to get overgrown with weeds, the homeless would move in, start pissing on everything, and pretty soon the property values plummet and everything smells like pee. And is it possible, says Will, that the Boy-Crushing plot of my brain is perhaps larger than average due to my recent long term relationship...perhaps some subdivisions were developed, maybe we moved in an Olive Garden and a Starbucks.

This is all sage wisdom and very much true. Yeah, even though That Boy I'd Like To Make Like Me is a bad tenant...never pays the rent on time, loud parties, etc etc, I am hanging on to him because I don't want the place to fall apart, and I want to line up a new one before I let the old one go. Except it turns out that the homeless are moving in anyway and everything already smells like piss...so aren't I better off without a tenent?

When I broke up with the last one, I really had a vision of what my life would be like and how I would interact with these kinds of situations...but it's not really turning out to be true. I thought I'd be evolved, independent girl who didn't need a tenent, so I think the hardest part is accepting that I am not that girl. So fine, I embrace my Boy-Crushing plot. And if there has to be a tenent, so be it, but let me not forget the reason that I reserve this space for this kind of thing instead of using it for crafts or reading or innovating solutions to our energy problems...it's supposed to be fun.

So, I want to know what your crushing mental real estate looks like. Tidy? Crowded? Does it smell like flowers? Hamburgers?

* The concept of mental real estate is copyrighted by Will Frechette Industries, Inc. and may not be used without permission. Any resemblence to actual people or events is probably real, considering that we all tend to our crushing plots. All rights reserved.