Random Thoughts, Notes, & Incidents

I suppose it's about that time for a year-in-review type post where I get all serious about my accomplishments (or lack thereof) over the past twelve months, and my good good intentions to do something more positive in the coming twelve months.

2001 was an interesting year indeed. On the personal side, I was fully employed for about five months (two at the start, three at the end), sort-of working (part time, as an "independent consultant") for about five months (in the middle), punctuated by about two months of no work at all.

On the public side, well, hell, I'm sure you've heard about what happened on September 11 and the ensuing war by now. That pretty much obscures just about anything else that may have happened, although I seem to remember something about the year starting with the Supreme Court picking a new puppet president, but it's all kind of foggy right now.

I was at the chiropractor a couple of days ago (yeah, I threw my back out again) and he asked if I had any resolutions for the new year. I hadn't really thought about it, but off the top of my head I said, "Try to remain employed." It seemed like that would require enough effort - no point in getting it mixed up with a bunch of other stupid resolutions about losing weight, getting rich, or finding the key to inner peace and happiness.

The next day I saw an article someplace (I don't recall where, sorry) about how detrimental new year's resolutions really are - far worse than the vices they're designed to rid us of. The reason is simple: holidays are stressful, change is stressful - only a friggin' moron would try to combine the two and expect miracles overnight. Then there were some statistics on kept resolutions and broken ones and, frankly, your resolutions don't stand a fighting chance.

The article was a little nicer about it than that, but the message was the same: making resolutions you know you can't keep is guaranteed to lower your self-esteem when you fail, which you will, which will make it even harder for you to [loose weight, get rich, find the key to inner peace and happiness, etc.] when you do get around to it.

So, no other resolutions for me. Just, "Try to remain employed." "Try" being the key word.

Of course, I have one or two other goals in mind - but I'm not going to make big-deal resolutions out of them, or be foolish enough to announce them publicly here before I'm sure I can pull them off. You'll just have to keep reading my blog through 2002 to find out if I'm successful.