Resolutions for 2010

Now that it's a couple hours into 2010, for those of us on the East Coast at least (most of the world is well into 2010, and the west coast and some of the Pacific are still laboring behind in 2009) I thought I'd actually think a bit about the time honored tradition of New Year's Resolutions.

I don't really do this normally. It's really a pointless exercise to set some goals that 95% of us never remember or meet. Some people just forget, some set goals too high, some set goals too general to ever really be fulfilled. For me, maybe I'm a touch lazy some times, but the truth is, I get distracted easily. I've a touch of ADD I think and often have several things going at once. I usually get everything done, but I have to work on the focus part sometimes. At least, when it comes to things like this. Give me a project at work, or something that needs to be done yesterday and I can work wonders, but sit me down with my own pet projects and I bounce from one to another spastically.

With that in mind, these are my resolutions for 2010, and I swear I'll try to keep them :)

1: Continue Learning I love learning new things. Whether it is new skills for work, or just something that caught my eye and piqued my interest, I enjoy learning it. I will continue learning new things and building my mental library of obscure and useless trivia.

2: Get into better shape I'm still not at the weight I want to be, and not as active as I used to be. Let's face it, I ain't gettin' any younger. I will try, emphasis on try, to get into better shape, work out more, and be more active than in the last few years.

3: Get out of debt Everyone has it. I know I can't get completely out of debt, but at least I can get rid of some of it. Of course, emergencies tend to cause debt to grow, but I'll do my best to get rid of what I can on my meager salary.

4: Reconnect I reconnected with two good friends this year, neither of whom I had heard from in over 10 years. Both of them hold special places in my heart, and fill me with warm, fond memories. I want to find more of my friends, the ones I've lost touch with who changed my life, who made me better, the ones who made me ... me.

5: Live more This most of all. There was a time in my life when I lived from adventure to adventure. From midnight hikes to Dragon's Tooth or McAfee's Knob on the Appalachian Mountains to late night drives to the beach to watch the sunset, I had a varied and fun life in my 20s. After moving and becoming part of corporate America, I lost something. This year I plan to get into trouble. I will do bad things. And I will have fun doing them. I don't know about any theoretical fluffy afterlife, reincarnation, or whatever, but if it turns out that this is the only life I get, I want to go out knowing I experienced and enjoyed as much as I possibly could.

6: Reply to e-mail I'm really bad about this some times. Well, honestly, most of the times. If something is going on, I do well keeping up, but when it's the more usual simple communication, I can be pretty bad about keeping up my side of the conversation. It's not that I don't care, but more about that tendency to become distracted and lose track of time. So I will do my best to be better about getting back to people when they call, write, text, or whatever.

Unofficially, I will try to do better to actually blog about things and keep this site going, in addition to posting more weirdness from the internet and news around the world.

So there you have it. Six of them. Specific enough that I can't get lost in trying to figure out what the mean later, but general enough that I don't have to go out of my mind trying to keep them. Maybe this year I can beat the statistics and actually keep some, or hopefully, all of them.