can't hardly wait, for 2008 - it's gonna be good, it's gonna be great

I was so excited to bid a not-too-fond farewell to 2007 and welcome 2008 with open arms. I just have a feeling this is going to be a big year for me. 2007 wasn't all bad (just mostly)... but 2008 is going to be awesome.

I've fallen into this kind of nasty rut lately in which I simply wait for things to happen to me instead of making them happen for myself. I don't usually make resolutions because I know I don't have a shot in hell at keeping them. This is the year that I'm going to climb out of that rut, make a promise to myself to get some shit done, and actually go out on a limb and make a resolution or two. Actually, five.

1. Make a point of saving more money each month.

I don't want Suze Orman to have a heart attack - especially since I'm enjoying her book Women & Money so much - but for a long time, I didn't have a savings account. I just let all my funds sit in my checking account... which, admittedly, isn't much. I opened a savings recently and set aside a measley amount of my bi-monthly paycheck to be automatically deposited. By January 31, I'm going to open another account at a different bank - one with a better interest rate - and set aside a bigger chunk of my check to be deposited.

2. Stop biting my fingernails.

Every so often, I get the urge to have long, beautiful nails, so I vow to stop biting mine. I use the smelly, tacky clear polish with the taste so horrendous that you barely want to use your hands for eating, lest your tastebuds happen along even a miniscule trace of the horrid stuff... and it works. For about two weeks. For two weeks, I'll drum my fingernails and revel in the sharp tap-tap-tap-tap on the desk and listen intently to the new sound of my fingers striking the keyboard. Then I'll get bored or stressed and bite them off, nevermind the icky taste. I don't stop there, though. I bite my cuticles and the skin beside and under my nails, so that more often than not, my fingers are nothing but painful, gnawed stumps of flesh. A person can only have so many Bandaids on her fingers before people start to look at her differently.

3. Organize my photos of family and friends.

For Christmas my sophomore year at SJC, my parents bought me a digital camera. Since then, I - probably like many other people - have neglected to print out the photos I've taken. I leave them in a folder on my computer and look at them once or twice a year, if I'm lucky. This year, I want to print out all the photos I've taken over the years and organize them into albums... and if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'd like to explore something like mypublisher.com for special events. 2007 was the loneliest year of my life, and I can't bank on my living situation to make a miraculous change anytime soon... so instead of missing the people I love, I'm going to make it so that I can be reminded of them everyday.

4. Eat healthier foods.

I know this is on everyone's list, so I'll be brief. Especially in the last year or so, I've gotten a lot worse about eating healthy foods. I live in a town where there's not much going on social-wise, so I work late a lot of the time. When you're getting home after 8:00 each night, it's a lot easier to pick up something for dinner rather than go home and cook. I'm not going to make an outrageous claim about never eating-out ever again, but when I do, I'm going to try to be a lot more conscious of my choice from the menu and limit the meals I pick up. I really enjoy cooking - I want to make an effort to do it more often.

5. Write my own stuff more often.

Having a job that consists of writing original copy for the majority of my day, every day, does something to drain the writing spirit in someone who used to think she might like to write for a living. Well, that's not entirely true. Plenty of people are full-time writers for their jobs and still manage to write and publish their own stories easily. I'm just not one of them. The sad thing is that I can count on one hand every creative thing I've written since I graduated from college over two years ago. This coming from a girl who used to stay up all night, skip class, and not go to the bathroom all day just to finish a story or poem. I want to see if I can get back just a piece of my former dedication.


I have some other things in the works that I can't talk about yet - things that I'm just bursting at the seams to discuss - and others that are getting lost in my mind because all I can do is focus on the larger, more secret-y things. So I'm going to try to dedicate more posts to some of those not-as-immediate-but-still-very-important things on the backburner. At least until I can stop being a secret squirrel. :)