New Years Resolutions

[Seil]

This is the first time I’ve written anything in a long while – and I don’t know why I’m restarting now. I just… want to do things that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do. So I guess I’ll call them my New Years resolutions, since that’s the sort of thing we do ‘round this time of the year.

I want to be finished with school, or at least start on a strong enough note that I can figure out what to do. That’s one of the things I’ve got trouble with, is figuring things out. I get led around a lot – I’m not a leader. Which is strange, because I know what I want… it’s just that I never have the courage to step for it. I know that that’s stupid – that the things I want will remain things I want rather than things I have, but it’s just so much easier this way. Not to make excuses, just not going for things. I’ve usually taken the easy road, because it’s, well, easier.

There’s no real consequences I can think of but my pride. There’s nothing really holding me back from doing what I’m doing now but a lack of, I dunno, determination? Would that be the right word? I want the whole white picket fence, two-point-five kids, a loving wife, a dog, the ability to travel – I even have a few destinations in mind. I’d love to travel to Budapest, Finland, Ireland… I don’t know any of the languages, but I want to go there. I want to drive. I want to finish school. I want to live on my own, under my own rules. I want to not just get in shape, but to have a beach body with the stomach and the chest and the muscles and everything. I want money to support a big music and movie collection. I want to work in journalism, or writing, or… really, anything that’ll let me put a pen to paper and get paid for it.

There’s so many things that I want. I know how to get them. It’s not like anybody’s holding me back from jogging, or someone’s not letting me get a diploma, it’s not even that there’s any serious repercussions if I don’t succeed. If I fall flat on my face, at least people will say “At least he’s tried.” It’s all that “It’s better to have loved and lost…” rhetoric we’ve been hearing since forever. The thing holding me back is me.

I stay here because it’s safe. Because I don’t want to see me fail. Because if I don’t succeed at what I need to make me feel good about myself, how am I going to make other people happy? One of the things people might say right now is “George, you shouldn’t need to make anybody happy but you.” That’s true…ish. There’s a lot of things that make me happy that doesn’t make those around me feel happy – my smoking, for instance. That’s not going to change though, it’s one of the things that I do, something I don’t want to change.

A lot of what makes me nervous about changing is that I’m comfortable enough right now with who I am as a person. I have my likes, my dislikes, my favorite films, my favorite books, my favorite video games… But the thing is that what I feel helps to define me isn’t anything I’ve done to make a mark, it’s what other people have done. Talented writers like Leonard Cohen, film-makers and musicians like Kevin Smith and Bruce Springsteen. These are things that I’ll go to a party and talk with someone for hours, on and on, and afterwards realize that the person I’ve talked to knows nothing about me except that I’m a fan of “Jungleland.”
It’s not new to me that I need a change in my life. There’s many forces openly stating this. As I’m sure there’s many people in other peoples lives insisting that they need change. That they need to quit smoking, they need to go out more, they need to work harder. But the thing is that we’re not really working at all to anything but our own ends – sometimes not even that. I was told once that “Nobody knows what they’re doing,” and I think that’s right.

We all know what we want, and how to get there. Society has laid it out for us, giving us little pieces of paper along the way – from a birth certificate to a dearth certificate. Passport, Social Security Card, Care Card, to the most important of all: money. We get all of these little bits of paper and plastic, and muddle along as best we can. We strive after what we want, in the hopes that we’re doing right by everybody else - which is exactly what the guy sitting next to you is hoping. That he’s doing the right thing.

We’re all just trying to get by, and sometimes we use that excuse to stop ourselves from doing what we want. It’s not even hoping to climb Mount Everest in our lifetime, or to be the first person to colonize the moon, it’s just that “I can’t watch this movie, I need to finish that account for work on Monday.” We become so bogged down in what we need to do to get by that shooting for something higher strays outside of our comfort zone. Our safety zone. That place where we can come to a home and just sit down for a minute. To know that what we’re doing right now is working okay so far, we screw with that?

There are a lot of things I want to do, though. I’m going to procrastinate on them, I know, because that’s who I am. That’s what I do. I don’t really know why I do it – it’d be far easier to do some things then it would to get in trouble for not doing them, but I’m just the guy who doesn’t do them. I want to do them, though – and I don’t think writing them down on a piece of paper is going to help me to accomplish any of them. So anything I want to do, I need to do, and I guess if I need to get a bit of paper or pieces of plastic to do them, then that’s what I need to get.

It’s easier to sit here and write about what it is that I want to do then it is to do them, which is something that’s initiated inebriated bar patrons for years, so I guess I’ll just focus on what my opening line’s going to be for me future loving wife and leave you with this:

“Is it better to have done and failed, then to not have done at all?”

while I start in on my jog.