New Year's best friend is time

Happy New Year!

I can’t believe it’s already 2011. Ever since 8th grade, back in 2003, I only really focused on two years: 2007 and 2011. 2007, I’d graduate from high school. Check. 2011, I’d graduate from college. Almost check – two more semesters left; I’m graduating one semester late. Time has flown by way too quickly and took me by surprise. Some nights, I’m ok with this pace, but other nights I absolutely loath it. I have this on and off acceptance thing going on, but most times I slip on a denial mask and forget my age, or the date, or the time even, and just live. Live.

This past New Year’s Eve I celebrated Christmas with my mom’s side of the family. Ate Maricel’s got three little ones: Jarian, Kelsie and Kaden. What do I think of when I see little kids? Generic thoughts, really. They can be super excited, or quiet and shy (clingy to parents), or somewhere in between those two extremes. By eight or nine, I’ve noticed, kids usually start to develop their own personality, based on any and every input of the world they’ve been exposed to up to that point. I realize that’s an arbitrary age I chose, but I truly believe we don't really develop a strong personality until our high school years, or even college years, (if you were lost in the motions and throws of high school drama and couldn't find yourself, as I think I have), in my opinion. For instance, you could predict a specific reaction of your friend's that only he or she would have. Now Kaden’s only two, I think. [Chuckle]. He’s just plain cute.

So, as I sat here to write, I was wondering how to go about saying good bye to 2010. But then I realized something. You can’t really say good bye to a specific year, or time in life. Although you can say, “I’ll see you again whenever you pop up,” because what went on in your life, how you’ve developed, or how you’ve been impacted or influenced by experiences felt during a time period, will always have some affect on your present state, or personality. There's this connection among time, experience and self- perception (how you see yourself as you are living, I mean). I claim that all life is the building of background knowledge, essentially. I like to think of it as an on-going movie or story with lots of foreshadow moments. “Of course he’d become a doctor; he always liked fixing other kids’ boo-boos,” or “of course she ended up in this mental hospital, having grown up in that messed-up household she called, ‘family’,” or when a family needs to call the dog whisperer to fix the dog they got from the dog shelter for Christmas, the dog having been abused by his previous owner. The past is always affecting the present, interfering it. Enhancing it on a good day. Or making sense of it, most importantly. Like, if someone decides to change his or her life drastically, there has got to be a reason for doing so. Perhaps in the past he or she "learned the lesson the hard way" as the saying goes, and decided to do something about it, whatever it is.

So anyway. Change of topic. Resolution-making time, is it? Last year, my New Year’s resolution was to produce awesome abs. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make a four pack or a two pack even – I was realistic. So I just aimed at having not washboard abs, but surfboard abs, nice and flat. Lord knows that didn’t even happen at all; that was a lost goal that went in the opposite direction, lol.

I don’t know what my goal for this year should be. Should I go selfish or selfless? Or both?

Both.

My goal for 2011 is to keep in contact with people, and to help my friends however way I can. My goal is also to write more and give more time for writing. Speaking of time, I will also strive to have better time management and to lessen the number of times I procrastinate (no more staying up at freakin' 4:30 in the morning working on something due at 9:50am!).

So those are my goals. I hope I’ll have better luck with them, than I did with my humble abs.









I wonder what personality 2011 will have . . .