Hopelessly Rafael: A Brief Parisian Anecdote

It was on my third day of my Paris trip, after my brief day trip to Versailles, that I met Rafael. I had not, up until that point, actively made any effort to seek company. I would even go so far as to say that I had been avoiding interacting too much with anyone from the hostels and was appreciating the self explorative tone my adventures had taken. But there he was...

I was standing outside smoking a cigarette when he approached me, and though I can't remember the details of the beginning of our conversation, I do remember that he began to ask me questions as openly and inquisitively as a child, that I found it hard not to answer or to keep my little self imposed wall up. I was trying to maintain a quiet silence in my head which is sometimes good for writing. I found it nearly impossible. His smile was king, green eyes unwavering and he had a small patch of grey hair just behind his left ear (I've always found something completely endearing about prematurely grey hair, maybe I find it instantaneously warm and disarming through stereotypes of my own creation).

He loved the american language, be it in book, film or music. He seemed to love the words "nice" and "good." Often telling me, "Oh, Marcia, you are verrry nice" or "KFC was verrry good." He was from São Paulo, Brazil and we discussed in length the corruption and the danger of growing up there (it was verrrry bad). We also discussed crowded trains, families, awkwardness in front of cameras, the Parisian weather, the importance of soccer, writing, art and whatever else that crossed our minds. I introduced him to a few phrases in English and tried to help whenever he was struggling with explaining a certain concept.

We stood outside smoking cigarettes and talking till it began to rain harder (there seemed to be a little drizzle on almost all my Parisian days) and he invited me in for a drink. He told me about the night before (Verry Bad). Rafael had just arrived at the hostel, early before he could check into his room and needed to use the pay phone at the corner to let his parents know he'd arrived safely. On his way outside he ran into a girl who also happened to be from Brazil, they struck up a brief conversation in Portugese, both excited to find someone that reminded them of home. Much later when he returned to the hostel he ran into the same girl again, this time drinking with a few other people. She invited him over for a drink. Drinking turned to dancing. (She was verrrry attractive). She seemed to like Rafael a lot. So he, being 'nice' and 'good' Rafael, told her he had a girlfriend at home that he loved.

He looked at me his eyes all big and earnest, "but she didn't care. It was not very nice. You could tell that she had too many glasses of wine. I tried to leave and she kept saying stay, stay, stay. She buys me a glass of wine. I said no and she buys it anyway. Just like that. Then, do you know what she did?"

I had a guess.

"She kissed me!!"

He briefly explained the logistics between a brazilian kiss and an american kiss using hand motions (though I'm fairly sure a drunk kiss is a drunk kiss) which seemed to involve her nearly sucking his entire face. He pushed her away, maybe a minute too late, but he felt incredibly guilty. He had to tell his girlfriend because they told each other everything but he kept telling me how horribly bad he felt and how he'd left. (I sat there maybe wanting to tell him that he shouldn't tell his girlfriend, that it was just a slip in judgement or that it was she who kissed and maybe therefor not such a big deal. He'd stopped it anyway. But I said nothing. ) The girl was upset that he pushed her away and Rafael felt bad about that too. He reiterated how attractive the girl had been.

Then he said, "The Man in me wanted to go upstairs and lie with her, but the...um..."

"Boyfriend," I supplied.

"No...the Human in me. The Human in me that loves another Human knows that my love is much bigger than that desire."

At that moment, I fell a little in love with Rafael myself. I saw in him something great and desirable which I'd felt once and had been lost along the way. He was a hopeless romantic.

He believed that he could tell his girlfriend what had happened and because they loved one another it could be worked out. That any problem could be resolved. That love was powerful. Maybe I'd even stopped completely believing that men like that could exist.

Still there is a part of me of course, that thinks, that thought, he's young and that the world will teach him a thing or two.

But I really hope it doesn't.

My Ten Text*

It was promising to be another quiet day in marcia phone land, but then I got these in the evening. I wasn't going to post 'em cause I like to keep it relevant and reflective, but they really made my day:

• hi
• sending you as many messages
• to reward you for leashing up that twitter
• to make you feel less lonely
• you
• should watch some felicity or watch anything to
• distract yourself
• don't worry be happy cus i'm
• so awesome
• .
  

Good friends are hard to find.

(*what's the plural of text? texts? that sounds like it referrers to ancient literary scrolls...)

A lot can change in a year.

Its been exactly one year today since I packed an overnight bag and moved on with my life. A lot can change even in a day. I had no idea what I was giving up, but I didn't know what I stood to gain either.

It puts things in perspective. How many of the people that I know will I still speak to in a year? Which of the things that feel immediate and important are still going to matter?

"Reality is flowing. This does not mean that everything moves, changes, becomes. Science and common experience tell us that. It means that movement, change, becoming is everything that there is. There is nothing else; everything is movement, is change. The time that we ordinarily think about is not real time, but a picture of space."
- Henri-Louis Bergson

(If this post lacks coherence or eloquence its because its seven am in the morning and I've been up since four....there are so many things I wanted to write between the bed and the screen that aren't really translating into real coherent thoughts)

Zero SMS

Its been over 24 hours since I received a text message. Only two personal calls, one from my roommate and one from my mother; and bare minimum in the chat department. It is indeed an odd and isolating event. A great deal of silence. A little refreshing and a little lonely at the same time.

Its hard to imagine that a year ago this was sort of the way life went, sans blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, tumblr, etc; I chatted with only one person online on a regular basis and I only received one personal email on the exact same day last year.

I did finish finally finish one book and start another. Write a great deal. Bake a casserole and drink a bottle of vino. It was a good day, a great evening.

On Self Respect: Part Deux

A few people ruminated on the recent post quoting Joan Didion's On Self Respect and whether that would mean my slowly fading web presence/willingness to be as "accommodating"as I've been in years pass. And yes I've been answering fewer emails, sign into chat less frequently and considering the invasiveness of twitter. I offer a few comments back and would be curious to hear any one else's opinion (not on myself particularly but on the quote)

From a Chat:

Creative people.... need/love to find their own solutions to everything and will rarely have it any other way. No matter how sweet they are. I think, that's the essence of being creative. Problem Solving.

But yes you need to be more selfish.

From a Comment:

How is lack of self-respect related to a lack of self? What if - sometimes, or to some extent - this problem is caused by the fact that we don't perceive ourselves as well or as thoroughly as others perceive themselves? Then we overcompensate to try to demonstrate that we know what it's like to be human, that we can empathize and communicate.

The sad part is that it usually works - who would call us out? Who (especially there in NYC) is sufficiently unconcerned with him/herself that they'll see your behavior as your own madness, and not a reflection on them?

From an Email 'Twitter could be your calling":

Because I am in awe of your self-disclosure, and because this makes it sound like I won't see you for a good long while as you reconvene with self, I offer you the slightly contradictory words of Viktor Frankl:

"I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this sonstitutive characteristic 'the self-transcendence of human existence.' It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter."

The Dreams are Killer

My dream life has been rather interesting. I'd been trying to think of the context in which to write about it, but honestly, they need no context. They're a little insane and a little unstable and make only a little sense. (I try to avoid writing about dreams because well, usually they're quite boring for someone else to read about, but this one was quite interesting in the oedipal sense...and the fact that I dream greek mythology):

I dreamt of a boy, I'd never met. Dark and small and african and the beginning of the dream he was told "you will kill your father by the nights end." And it was a joke that no one believed. A smallish man that resembled the boy, except for his expansive chest and his wrinkled face. His wide flat nose and his strong demeanor. I dreamt of a trip that we all took by bus. The greyhound variety with grey seats and a pattern sewn into the strip down the middle that hearkened back to the tetris days. People who were familiar to a life that I am no longer leading, I was surrounded by them. Faces and names that my subconscious recall, but I, in my waking life, do not. The place we went was uneventful. Everything was bright and lit up (this I recall from a recent event).

Skip the uninteresting details. The what we did in between or who we spoke to or why. Skip to the hotel room, which is most important. Again, I can't recall why I was placed in a hotel room with a father and son, I think I thought it odd and questionable. But there were no other rooms and nothing to be done, so I went. We sat the father and I, face to face. He on the bed looking down to me on the floor (the boy sat in the corner on a chair, a single lampshade illuminated his dark face and was the only light...shadows crept up like vignetting, around the edges of the room). He seemed upset, and he talked and talked. We fought and fought, to varying degrees of intensity, for what seemed like hours. In the end, he was convinced that I should marry his son. It seemed ludicrous. I might have said so. He continued on and the boy looked on his face set into a grim stare. His face a mask, two white eyes bobbing in the darkness. Pulsating. You could nearly see his neck tha-thumping which each beat. Quickly. I wish I could recall what made him so angry. But only the lounge from the chair to the bed was memorable. Only that he was on his father before I could firmly grasp the situation. Seeing someone strangle another person in their dreams is still unnerving. Even if the man had never lived and there for couldn't really die, I can still see it when I close my eyes. Something so passion filled and heartless, even imagined, stays with you.

The man jerked and jiggled. He twisted alarmed and batted at his son, but the boy stayed fixed like a 500 lb weight on the mans chest. Impenetrable.

And then it was over, almost as quickly as it had begun. He stood up. He wiped his brow. He looked at me as though I had stumbled into the room mistakenly while he committed his crime. We stared like that for a beat, unsure of what to do.

"You have to leave," He told me. And just like that he began to move around the room, tidying things up. Wrapping his father in a blanket as though the man had never lived. It felt like he had done it in my honor, even though I can't recall why, killed his own father just like that. He hurried around as I stood there in shock.

Sirens began to wail...nothing is ever easily explained in dreams. But there they were, officers, the entire party of our trip standing in anticipation. He pushed me toward a door that separated our room from the next. His face again impenetrable and I felt a tenderness sweep over me. For what he'd done for me, for what he'd lost, for what he'd been told would happen and could not avoid. Maybe for all the things we can't avoid. And he pushed me through...and moments later I walked into the light where everyone stood waiting. Police looked with fire arms held. Someone wrapped me in a blanket and I watched and waited for him to turn himself over.

Awake.

On Self-Respect

I read this quote in September when is was published on Maud Newton from Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, told myself to buy the book (and I would have today had I not had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.) I've referenced it more than once in conversation and today I felt the need to bring it up again within the context of the conversation I had with a friend today. It revolved around a writers discipline and the art of saying no:

If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous…

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something so small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — their lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

"And lead us not into temptation" as the scripture goes. I've got to have a little more self respect, when it comes to my writing, my friendships, my relationships. I've got to learn to say no and distance myself. I cannot be apart of it all and still give time to my writing.

Just my thoughts on today.

Are You Normal?

Last night I found myself engaged in a discussion about normalcy in regards homosexuality, but it ended up spreading into the larger idea of normalcy itself. Normal is by definition confining to social norms; living up to social expectations set by the society in which we lived. (A redundant statement but one which I found myself repeating) It might have been normal in the 1500 or 1600's to wear tights and a large brimmed hat but would not be considered by today's standards unacceptable. It might be normal during the Roman era to partake of homosexual relationships with young boys, but again would be condemned by today. This is not a praise of one set of standards over the other or not saying that the world should exist without morals. Just that viewing one thing as normal and another thing as abnormal can plunge us into a different sort of immorality. Especially when morality, in and of itself, is such an arguable thing.

To bring it back to more modern ideas, normalcy still exist in America in nuclear families, while the western civilization is changing to include a large variety of mixed familial types not bound by blood. Normalcy still dictates that women over a certain age should be married. I'm just getting started and am not quite ready to go into full rant mode, but once we begin to examine our lives we realize the ways in which we might all fall outside of normalcy's radar. I think of my own current affairs, which have not subsided to "normal" coupledom, but which have, at least for the time being, tried to find a way to work beyond the current ideology of the status quo relationship. It may not work but at least we pushed the envelop. And this is only looking at one way of thinking. I feel that once we begin to entrench ourselves in the idea of normalcy we lose the motivation to find and/or try something new.

Let the fundamentalist hold fast to their views of normalcy. And...as the saying goes, "I am human and therefore nothing is foreign to me."

it might be a better argument were it not four am, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Yes....

...I am posting love letters.

Heck its valentines day and I have a vagina.

So enjoy.

The Internet has Murdered My Already Fleeting Attention Span

Last night I stopped to write my friend a letter, on the train ride home I'd been composing it in my head, working out all the nuances and thinking of the perfect turn of phrase. Its one of the things I find fun and exciting.

Once home though I turned on the computer and it all fell apart.

During the course of writing my letter I stopped numerous times to check tumblr, flickr, facebook, twitter and god knows what else; despite that nothing had conceivably changed I stopped again to check it a second or even a third time. I stopped to write a shorter email to someone else. Even during the course of writing this post I stopped and clicked on the headers in my tabs section, which seemed to have no apparent purpose except to give myself a mental break.

The last few times I've picked up a book I've found the task of focusing on each page equally as difficult. On average, in a book that I find quite enjoyable I get through about a page and a half before my mind starts to wonder. Hopefully I start writing micro fiction because I can barely get through what I'm writing lately, averaging about five or six hand written sentences before I stop to do something else. This blog post began yesterday, was written partly this morning and will hopefully be completed now, this afternoon.

I've always had a bit of difficulty focusing on things over a long period of time, most of all on movies, least of all on books. But it seems over the past couple of months as my dedication to various sites has increased, my attention span has completely decreased. My productivity on the job has become a problem when every two to five minutes I feel like I need to check my email or see if I've missed a twitter. I'm always online and I'm always available but it feels like I'm getting less and less done. Apparently a BBC article reports that I am not the only goldfish in this internet ADD pond:

If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone.

The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

"If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Great, first it was commercials breaks now its the internet.

I feel like I should join a IA support group.

Adventures in Sobriety Part Trois: Temptation and Dancing With My-se-elf*

And lead us not into temptation...

In clubs and at parties, not having a drink is not particularly a problem, but throw in a rainy friday and the type of bars where the only thing to do is have a reasonably priced drink and there you have a recipe for temptation. Small quiet bars certainly offer more reasons to suck from the sweet nectar of jack daniels. I was alternately slightly repelled by the liquory sweet smell and drawn to partake of its goodness. Not to mention that week one didn't provide as much challenge as week two, when the craving to involve myself in some sort of debauchery finally started to overwhelm me. Plus it always strikes me that NYC was almost designed with the drinker in mind, there is hardly a place you can go that doesn't at least offer wine and 90% of all the people I know are in a constant state of partaking.

* * *

The dancing part took place at a small dance. club that a few of my friends and I occasionally frequent. The last few times I went out was with a group of girls, which was sort of different being that usually in their various stages of drinking, from beginning to end they're usually still a little ready to dance. Where as the fellas were a little more willing to post up on the wall and gawk at the fly girls on the floor (and they were fly). The problem was that I suddenly became aware of myself when it seemed that I was dancing alone in the corner of the room, standing next to girls who looked like they had just stepped out of magazines. Usually this sense of self doesn't strike me in a club setting, if it strikes me at all, but last night was a little different without anything else to focus on (besides my sober bust a move) I turned inward. I did eventually venture out onto the large part of the dance floor, but it was so hot and crowded that there was barely room to move amidst the wriggling bodies leaving me after a few songs slightly uncomfortable (especially with random guys pawing me) and drenched with sweat.

It reminded me of a passage I recently read in Alain de Botton's On Love in the chapter titled "Mind over Body" about the corrolation between thinking in clubs and during sex:

If the mind has traditionally been condemned, it is for its refusal to surrender control to causes supposedly beyond analysis; the philosopher in the bedroom is as ludicrous a figure as the philosopher in the nightclub. In both cases, the body is predominant and vulnerable, so the mind becomes an instrument of silent uninvolved judgment.

I did in retrospect attribute this to the battle of the sexes (hanging with guys vs. girls) but I think that it was just having people around who were occasionally willing to indulge you and join in OR having a place that was sensible for solo sober dancing i.e. somewhere that your nuts didn't start sweating the second you entered the room. I say this because my first crew was comprised almost entirely of persons of the male variety and while I usually preferred for them to indulge me a bit (there was one guy who was always and is still always down to shake his grove thing); I was also okay with the singular dancing. Maybe also I should consider the order in which it happened, it usually tended to be that we ALL started dancing together and then they got tired and left me to my own devices, by which time I was usually so comfortable it didn't matter that I was dancing alone. Plus I hate to attribute too much of my enjoyment on others which (it seems unfair and lacks personal accountability), though I do believe sans drink I'm much more likely to feed off other people's energy.

Whatever the case, I did have fun while it lasted even if I felt slightly removed from the scene.

*My favorite song to grove it alone to.

Adventures in Sobriety Part Deux: The Frat Party

What can be said about a frat party that hasn't already been said.

The guys were all big burly meat heads. The girls were all lasciviously drunk and grinding horribly on the dance floor. There were drinking games (flippy cup). There was jungle juice. Everyone looked suspiciously similar. People kept handing me beers. There was a gaggle of fifteen (maybe eighteen) year old boys mysteriously occupying the middle of the room. The girl that went to t he restroom before me threw up in the sink.

Thats not saying the night was without its fun or mischief. I was sober to catch a few video gems.

Adventures in Sobriety : Part Un

I'm not drinking.

This will shock and amuse my friends. It will please and humor my mother.

No its not a sort of take it easy for a while, which quickly descends back into drinker-ville, but a real life down to earth month long break from the bottle.

It began with a casual handshake (to be fair I was still recovering from the weekend long hangover and hardly realized what I was agreeing to) for a two, wait three, nope count 'em four week break which allowed the occasional glass of wine (red because its heart healthy).

Last night marked my first night out sans alcohol. At a Rolling Stones Magazine Malibu Open Bar nonetheless. A few observations:

1. The drunk girl- she's kind of obnoxious and makes you feel a little embarrassed for her; not necessarily the person you want to become when you're wearing a satin dress and knee high boots (or a gray AA t-shirt and a vest for that matter).
2. I miss dancing sober- When I was a freshman in college I used to go to Lotus, when it opened in 2001 and you could still go see the not yet famous Paris Hilton being cock slapped on the basement dance floor (I mean this literally) ; I was poor, there were no open bars, yet somehow every wednesday I made it out on the dance floor and stayed till four in the morning without a buzz. Long after all my friends had abandoned ship, I rocked on. I missed that, it was nice to remember that I don't need two beers and a shot of jack to shake my thang on the dance floor.
3. Not drinking on the one night all your girlfriend's finally get together, sort of makes you the butt of all their jokes. Take it in stride, they still love you.
   
4. Not having a hangover Friday morning is quite supreme.
   
5. Unless you're completely lame, the night will be just as fun sober and more memorable to boot, as it was when you were drinking.
6. Once you stop drinking all your usually sober-ish friends will decide to pick up the bottle and invite you to a bar. They will then ridicule you for not drinking when they're drinking and try to tempt you into drinking again. (This is really an amendment to number 3, maybe they don't still love you. Bastards.)

(Forgot: Seeing Mario Van Peebles parade around the party like the B celebrity that he is, second best part of the night. Running through the windy street with city grit whipping our faces and acting like goofballs was the first.)

Damn You Idiotarod!

Every year right after it passes I say how much I wish that I had gathered a group of people and a shopping cart and run. This year, of course, I realized it was coming up before it passed, could probably rally the people to do it but happen to not be drinking at the moment. And what fun would racing down the streets of Brooklyn, costumed and in the freezing cold be if you weren't fairly close to pissy drunk.

So Damn you Idiotarod 2008. We'll try again next year.
Also if you've never heard of it before check out the website and find out what it is, there are some traditions that you won't find anywhere else except for New York.

When Life Hands You Lemons...Go to Paris

I finally bought my ticket to Paris today, which is quite possibly one of the most exciting things to have happened in a long time. I was thinking, Life may not turn out the way you want it to and People aren't what you'd hoped or expected they'd be and there will always be things around to go wrong, but I can always control myself at least (and that self is going to buy a ticket to Paris, whether she can afford it or not).

So here I am headed to Paris on March 30th for 15 days. I haven't got much figured out (though I do have one friend in Paris) and I've still got a lot of saving to do (The plan is to read as many books between now and then as possible, write a lot, learn a little french and rent as many seasons of various shows as I can consume between now and then so as to suck up all the time I usually might need to spend money), but I'm just as confident in things working out as I was on Sunday that I would purchase my ticket this week.

Blogging and Not Blogging

Its been a week or more since my last post, which seems weird considering the amount that I posted when I had so much free times during the holidays but I suppose it isn't. The first full week of being back to work felt a little draining. Though I can't say I minded it much, I just ended each day feeling the need to veg out and relax. Mostly I spent a lot of the time with friends, discussing politics. discussing life. discussing art. discussing reality. discussing happiness. discussing music. discussing dreams. discussing for the sake of discussing. Smoking too many cigarettes. Drinking too much whiskey. Overcaffeinated. I hadn't realized how much I needed a post holiday mental vacation.

It was fun but now I'm trying to get back to work. More post to follow?
I hope so.

Mudita and the Pursuit of Happiness

This past week I met a buddhist writer and the founder of a meditation center, named James Baraz. We talked casually about writing with all the distractions from modern technology and he encouraged me to come to a talk he was giving at the NY Insight Center about "Awakening Joy" a course that he teaches at Berkley. Though I've always been hugely curious about Buddhist practices the new agey title of the seminar made me feel a little wary. I decided to go on a whim, he was standing there gazing at me expectantly with his hippie mustache, how really could I have said no.

I took a few notes while I was there but the idea that captured me the most was Mudita- the buddihist word for rejoicing in another's happiness. The wiki definition is finding pleasure in another person's well-being. It is supposed to be the most difficult of the brahmaviharas (buddhist virtues) to cultivate which I've find generally true in my dealings with people. We, selfishly, may be less happy if for instance, whatever makes someone dear to us joyful simultaneously takes them away from us or if someone does well while we experience misfortune, but Mudita encourages people to connect with a sympathetic sense of joy We meditated on the principal. I think it was my favorite part of the whole experience.

The whole thing strikes me as a bit over the top, but it was moving and cheesy and kind of great. I'm quite glad I met Mr. Baraz and look forward to keeping a regular correspondence with him.

Viva la Difference

A letter I found from an old friend, who taught me a lot about living and gave me words to live by. Dated September 10, 1999.

"My mother died this summer, and the months leading up to her passing and the months since have been times of great introspection and soul searching. I think you will be pleased to know, Marcia, I have decided I kind of like the person my mother taught me to be----the kind of person who in today's world is a little different---different because I wear a smile and am happy most of the time; I speak to people; I look at the positive side of things rather than the negative; I think of other people and encourage them and notice them and make them feel special; I show care and compassion and respect to all; I don't make fun of other people; I don't gossip; I don't backstab and I'm not mean-spirited, boorish, sullen, secretive, flippant, rude, spiteful, vindictive nor two faced; I don't hold grudges I'm enthusiastic; I show my inner happiness; I like to have fun. If thats being different, viva la difference!"

A big box of old things

One of the goals of my road trip was to bring back personal belongings that were left in Texas years ago. It amazes me all the things we forget we have owned once they're packed in a box out of sight.

I get the feeling that a lot of my post over these next couple of weeks will incorporate things that I come across in trying to sort through everything.

Bare with me, with the end of one year completed and the beginning of another underway, a little nostalgia should be permitted.

Resolutions 1998

I didn't actually make any resolutions this year although I answer the question mechanically whenever asked "Read more, write more, travel more."

I stopped making yearly resolutions a while ago.

Its the same every year, you achieve some things, don't achieve others and you try to make it better than the year before (both in what you achieve and what you intend on achieving).

I did however find my resolutions written down ten years ago at the age of 14. I find it striking how little everything and nothing changes:

1. Be less Annoying (the age when I became self-ware)
2. Do school work and get better grades
3. Eat more Healthy
4. Clean More
5. Ask for less
6. Be less sarcastic (never achieved that one)
7. Have more self confidence
8. Read more
9. Write more and better
10. Write in my journal more