New Year's Resolution and Ramblings, Of Course
Nearly midnight! In seventeen minutes, a new year begins, and - arguably - a new decade. 2010: it sounds new, never mind the numbering systems. (Does anyone really care that, technically, the 21st century started in 2001? No, not really.) I am nestled in my bed with the heater on full blast, ready to go to bed, and quite impressed with myself for having been up and about for six and a half hours today - entirely unmedicated. In the end, I was too tired to feel that it was quite a good idea to go out for New Year's Eve, but I do finally feel like I'm recovering. There's no expressing how wonderful that is!
For the quick recap: I spent the greater part of two weeks bedridden with neck pain, resulting headaches, and all sorts of unpleasant side effects from the medications I was prescribed a few days in. Christmas? What Christmas? I slept through most of it, and spent the rest desperately trying to keep down enough food to take my codeine. Codeine, let me tell you, is not my friend. Neither, it seems, is dragging luggage along through four buses, the cobblestone streets of Boston, and two airports: I managed a hideous flare-up of the whiplash I had back in June when my truck was rear-ended in stopped traffic on the freeway. Thus, my various agonies. Turns out it's not a good idea to exacerbate unhealed injuries - fancy that!
The last few days have, happily, involved real improvement, and no more codeine. I'm seeing a wonderful physical therapist and feeling optimistic. I intend to take far better care of myself than I have been and avoid such incidents in the future. On a positive note, the near total impossibility of eating for two weeks has resulted in my having lost eight pounds. Hardly the method I would have selected, but as a silver lining, it will do.
Because, you see, I will turn 25 in March, and I am rather determined to lose twenty or thirty pounds by then, because it seems like as good a deadline as any, and I'm tired of being put off. There's no sense going through life feeling like something just isn't satisfactory, but could be made satisfactory if one simply made enough effort. Well: effort it is.
Is that a New Year's resolution? Not really, since I made it months ago.
So here's a real one, with three minutes on the clock:
I am going to live my life with more sincerity. I love Frank Capra, and I love Lucy Maud Montgomery, and I am tired of being and pretending to be cynical, jaded, sarcastic, and sophisticated. Oh, there are places for those things too, but at the heart of it, I believe in happy endings and love and friendship and honor and decency and truth. I do! And I - at the stroke of midnight - resolve to stop pretending to believe otherwise.
And I will really, really try to stop chalking things up, dryly and with an arched eyebrow, to “intimacy issues.” I have entirely too many tidy little noncommittal answers for things, and really, really, really - life is just too short to pretend all the time.
So here I am, at three minutes past midnight on January first of 2010, alone in my room and not minding it - not really! - and trying to put my life in order, again. More so than I can ever recall in the past, this new year feels like a new beginning for me, primarily due to the coincidence of this start to my recovery from this terrifying ordeal, and I am running with it. Taking care of myself so as to not feel worse tomorrow: very sensible of me, don't you think?
One last thing, before I carefully arrange myself for spine-friendly sleeping and commence praying that the rampant fireworks all over Pasadena don't set my house afire and murder me in my bed. I find myself, of late, for the first time in literally years, not desperately (or, in fact, even mildly) hung up on any of my exes. It's a novel sensation. Moreover, there is no one in my life or dangerously close to it who qualifies as bad news - and there have been, let us say, a few. My taste in men is, alas, rather notorious at this point, but I really do think that I've learned a lot from all of it. Especially recently.
And so it is that, at ten past midnight, I go into this new year with a whole heart: all my shattered pieces in one place and in my own keeping, apart from those delicate slivers I have given into the keeping of my nearest and dearest, whether or not they realize it. In 2009 I accomplished more than I could have expected, albeit not everything I set out to originally. Piece by piece, I began fulfilling my life's dream, and that is no small thing. What's more, I found strength inside myself that I didn't know I had, and this year - this year will be better, because I begin it a year older and wiser, and I begin it with my whole heart, unreservedly.
That was, alas, somewhat more than one thing, but you are welcome to file a complaint if you object on that point or any other.
Happy New Year!
For the quick recap: I spent the greater part of two weeks bedridden with neck pain, resulting headaches, and all sorts of unpleasant side effects from the medications I was prescribed a few days in. Christmas? What Christmas? I slept through most of it, and spent the rest desperately trying to keep down enough food to take my codeine. Codeine, let me tell you, is not my friend. Neither, it seems, is dragging luggage along through four buses, the cobblestone streets of Boston, and two airports: I managed a hideous flare-up of the whiplash I had back in June when my truck was rear-ended in stopped traffic on the freeway. Thus, my various agonies. Turns out it's not a good idea to exacerbate unhealed injuries - fancy that!
The last few days have, happily, involved real improvement, and no more codeine. I'm seeing a wonderful physical therapist and feeling optimistic. I intend to take far better care of myself than I have been and avoid such incidents in the future. On a positive note, the near total impossibility of eating for two weeks has resulted in my having lost eight pounds. Hardly the method I would have selected, but as a silver lining, it will do.
Because, you see, I will turn 25 in March, and I am rather determined to lose twenty or thirty pounds by then, because it seems like as good a deadline as any, and I'm tired of being put off. There's no sense going through life feeling like something just isn't satisfactory, but could be made satisfactory if one simply made enough effort. Well: effort it is.
Is that a New Year's resolution? Not really, since I made it months ago.
So here's a real one, with three minutes on the clock:
I am going to live my life with more sincerity. I love Frank Capra, and I love Lucy Maud Montgomery, and I am tired of being and pretending to be cynical, jaded, sarcastic, and sophisticated. Oh, there are places for those things too, but at the heart of it, I believe in happy endings and love and friendship and honor and decency and truth. I do! And I - at the stroke of midnight - resolve to stop pretending to believe otherwise.
And I will really, really try to stop chalking things up, dryly and with an arched eyebrow, to “intimacy issues.” I have entirely too many tidy little noncommittal answers for things, and really, really, really - life is just too short to pretend all the time.
So here I am, at three minutes past midnight on January first of 2010, alone in my room and not minding it - not really! - and trying to put my life in order, again. More so than I can ever recall in the past, this new year feels like a new beginning for me, primarily due to the coincidence of this start to my recovery from this terrifying ordeal, and I am running with it. Taking care of myself so as to not feel worse tomorrow: very sensible of me, don't you think?
One last thing, before I carefully arrange myself for spine-friendly sleeping and commence praying that the rampant fireworks all over Pasadena don't set my house afire and murder me in my bed. I find myself, of late, for the first time in literally years, not desperately (or, in fact, even mildly) hung up on any of my exes. It's a novel sensation. Moreover, there is no one in my life or dangerously close to it who qualifies as bad news - and there have been, let us say, a few. My taste in men is, alas, rather notorious at this point, but I really do think that I've learned a lot from all of it. Especially recently.
And so it is that, at ten past midnight, I go into this new year with a whole heart: all my shattered pieces in one place and in my own keeping, apart from those delicate slivers I have given into the keeping of my nearest and dearest, whether or not they realize it. In 2009 I accomplished more than I could have expected, albeit not everything I set out to originally. Piece by piece, I began fulfilling my life's dream, and that is no small thing. What's more, I found strength inside myself that I didn't know I had, and this year - this year will be better, because I begin it a year older and wiser, and I begin it with my whole heart, unreservedly.
That was, alas, somewhat more than one thing, but you are welcome to file a complaint if you object on that point or any other.
Happy New Year!