New Years Resolutions: the 2012 Edition

I am really excited about my New Year’s Resolutions this year.  Since I’ve decided that I no longer subscribe to the notion that resolutions should wait for a new year, or even a new day, I’m starting them immediately.   While I have in the past sworn off resolutions, made a list of 20 resolutions (to increase the likelihood of success), and had one all-important resolution (also to increase the likelihood of success), this year I am going to have four.  I’ve already written them down, and in the interest of full disclosure, I feel that I should note that they’re in outline form.  My whole mind works in outline form.

First, I’m going to read every day.  If you know me at all and are now laughing, you hush your mouth.  I have loved reading every since I learned how, and I almost do read every day.  However, the convergence of a few factors have made me decide to make it a goal to put aside a minimum of fifteen minutes every day for reading. One factor was the fact that it’s taken me a good three months to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Given, LOTR is a thousand pages of relatively slow reading.  However, and this will only make sense if you love reading too, I’ve now spent a fourth of my year reading it, and the only thing that really scares me about the concept of mortality is that I can only read so many books in one lifetime. I’ve loved LOTR, but I did not intend to spend a fourth of the year reading it.  In reality, I’ve read it in large chunks, with often two or six days in between (ok, and a whole other book.  I cheated.)  This to say, I love reading and there are so many hundreds of books that I want to read and dozens of books that I want to reread reread and I want to make better progress.  More than likely, intentionally setting aside fifteen minutes a day to read means that I will usually spend a lot longer than fifteen minutes a day reading, and that sounds good to me. 

Next (my little sister recently informed me that the word “secondly” is not actually a word.  I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’m now afraid to use it), I’m going to write every day.  I love writing.  About a year and a half ago, I started this blog, and I updated it a good bit, and I loved it.  I love words, and staring at a sentence until it rearranges itself in a way that makes me happy.  I love the idea put forth in a college writing class that “there is only ever one right word”, and I love finding that word and hearing the satisfying mental click as the sentence finally expresses what I really mean in the most beautiful way possible.  I have learned in the past few years that in order to truly appreciate reading you must write, and that to truly appreciate writing, you must read.  My writing comes in bursts to a much greater degree than does my reading, so I think that this resolution will be a little more of a stretch.  I make this resolution in hopes that writing truly is like exercising a muscle, and that practice will make it easier and better.  I will write by hand, which is easily my favorite, and I will write online.  This is preferable for potential readers, because if you keep up with my blog, you don’t have to read all of it! 

I gave the next resolution away early- I’m going to blog again.  I’m going to blog because I like it.  I’m going to blog because I’m going to be reading a lot and I love to tell people what I’m reading and why I love it and why they should read it, and then get really offended when they don’t immediately rush out, buy the book, and read it all in one sitting.  I’m going to blog because I like posting things that I write on my blog, and then getting a disproportional ego boost when someone comments that they love it, or that they like it, or that they find reading it slightly better than studying.  I’m going to blog because I want to show you my thoroughly amateur photographs, and tell you what I think, and give you updates on my life, and show you things I’ve seen, and share with you my endless, endless lists.  I’m going to blog because everyone I love is not in the same place, and I don’t have time to talk to all of you on the phone.

I know you’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here – the obligatory “get in shape” New Year’s resolution.  Well, I’m not calling it that, because I’ve made it before and it doesn’t work.  This year, and I am going to start this one on January 1, I’m going to run 365 miles. You’re right, that is one for every day! I promise not to update you about it more than once a month. 

            So read my blog, if you want. Maybe you could even start one that I could keep up with? If you have one, let me know.  I’m going to post mine on wordpress and tumblr for the time being, until I decide which one I like better.  I have some pretty interesting and significant life changes coming up in the next few weeks (omgz cliffhanger!), so maybe it will even be interesting.  Then again, maybe it will just be about how much I’m obsessed with my dog.   
              You never can tell.

A Love Letter to a Friend

I wrote this several months ago for no good reason. I just found it on my computer and it made me smile, so here it is.

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I apologize for my blogging hiatus, if it is anything to apologize for. I imagine that it is not. As it turns out, I appear to have forgotten how to write, excluding only really horrible stuff. If you would like to read pages upon pages about how I feel when I can’t sleep, what I think when I’m looking at a room upside down, my ideas on the stages of major transitions, or my thoughts on my various relationships, let me know.

You don’t actually need to let me know, because there’s no way I’ll let you read that stuff. It’s awful, and since I’m not Taylor Swift no one is going to give me millions of dollars for being pathetic in a public forum.

I’ve decided to jump back into the deep end of blogging by doing something a little bit different. Stages in which you spend a great deal of time reflecting, such as the one I am currently coming out of (please), inevitably cause you to think about the people that are important to you. Like it or not, we are wont to define ourselves in terms of those around us. I am going to describe to you one of the most important people in my life, a person who is part of that group of people by which I define myself.

The mind games start, of course, when you think about how this is a person by whom, in part, I define myself. However, all of my stories are from my perspective and therefore pre-filtered through my perception of the world and myself that is in part due to my relationship with this person.

I hope for your own sake that you skipped that last paragraph. It makes sense, just not on this exact planet.

So here goes. To protect this person’s privacy, I will call her Lauren P. Whitton.

Lauren P. Whitton was born one month and two days before I was, and I like to tell people that we’ve been friends since then. Having spent the past weekend with a set of infant twins who I’m relatively sure don’t know that the other one exists, I know that this is untrue. However, I’m finding lately that truth is in and of itself quite relative and, with regards to my life, sometimes rather irrelevant.

We’ve been friends since we were born.

A lot of my vague memories from my early childhood that were more than likely created from pictures I’ve seen a lot in lieu of actual memories are of myself and Lauren. When we were three, we were dressed up as clowns together. (My parents felt the need to dye my hair red for the costume. I vividly remember the dye being washed out later that night. Perhaps this partly explains my fascination with the Ginger). Later that year, I would have my first sleepover with Lauren when my parents rushed off to the hospital to have my little sister (I think I have previously mentioned that this was a fake out and she was not actually born that night). We had matching Little Mermaid sleeping bags, and life was idyllic.

I knew from a very early age that Lauren had some sort of innate coolness that I was utterly without. Retrospectively, I think it may have been due to the combination of her being the youngest child and having older brothers, while I was the oldest, slowly gaining sisters as I aged. She just knew things that I didn’t.

Lauren was also very athletic from a young age, and I was anything but. I was infinitely jealous. We decided at an early age that our Indian names were “Running Feet” for Lauren and “Running Mouth” for myself. They did and still do apply quite nicely, I think. She was an excellent soccer player from sometime around age four and actually went on to play for a while in college. I played for two years and was harassed by a member of my own team for my inability to take the ball up the field and score (incidentally, that girl has now had a baby, and I have not. I think I won)* Lauren and I played church basketball together for six years, in which I scored as many goals. I was also harassed by a member of that team (I’m just now realizing that that’s a theme, and I’ve felt better about myself). I distinctly remember Lauren yelling at her during practice “Shut up. We are on the same team.” Incidentally, that girl has had a baby too (and not a cute one).**

I read back over that last paragraph and realized that perhaps the best description of our relationship is that Lauren and I have always been on the same team. That won’t change. I think that knowledge, that we’ll always be friends, is what will enable us to always be friends. I know that her love is something that I will never have to work for, and that nothing could ever make me not love her back. This is the way things are.

Lauren and I have had too many adventures and misadventures to chronicle here. I’ve broken my clavicle at her house trying to wrestle her older cousin without any knowledge of what wrestling actually was. Since we were the only girls in the 6th grade at our church, we went to Six Flags over Dallas with her mom (who I affectionately call my evil step mother) and called it the sixth grade church trip. We stopped to pee every fifty miles or so and she sang Don McLean’s “American Pie” the whole way. Ten years later, that song is still stuck in my head. I almost pushed her out of the car. We nearly burned the house down trying to make a message written in orange juice show up when held over a fire (turns out Sunny D is not an appropriate substitution for orange juice in this equation). We’ve watched the Lion King about fourteen million times, the last one probably being much more recent than it should’ve been. We’ve talked each other through horrible relationships and great ones, knowing all the while that we’d be there for each other longer than any boy would. We’ve had fist fights**** and we’ve sat in my driveway and cried. We’ve gone to school dances and the beach and everywhere.

I’ve read back over this five times and it seems ill written and inconclusive. This is in part due to the fact that I will never be able to convey why I love Lauren, how much I love Lauren, or what all we’ve been and done together. There is not time or space.





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*I am a horrible person.
**Think about this before you are mean to me.***
*** Really, really horrible.
****My version of a fist fight is not nearly as violent or as effective as what you’re probably imagining.