New Year's Resolutions

Every December, I make a long list of things I want.  This isn't a Christmas wishlist, but a several-page list of New Year's Resolutions.  The list is impossibly long, and some of the items on it are irreconcilable.  I want to travel the world, to keep a spotless home, to garden, to write, to save lots of money for retirement, to throw fabulous dinner parties, to read all the books, to be a better wife/sister/daughter/friend/lawyer/driver/pianist/baker/Scrabble-player.  I always want this to be the year I finally sew myself a designer wardrobe, become fluent in five languages, run a marathon, and put an end to all the injustice in the world.  And so I end up making a list with literally hundreds of resolutions.  Twelve months later, I've inevitably achieved at least some of them ("find a job," "make bread from scratch at least once," "don't end up in the emergency room") but nevertheless discover these accomplishments haven't changed me into that person (witty, fearless, intellectual, tireless, fun, gracious, healthy, talented, vibrant, extraordinary) that inspired me to make the resolutions in the first place.  At the end of the year, it turns out there are never enough hours in a day (nor, I suspect, in a century) for someone as unfocused and tired as me to transform life into perfection.  But, as Elder Holland said in our sacrament meeting a few days ago, that's ok... the point is to keep trying.

Between launching into my career, becoming a home owner, and adopting a dog and two cats, 2012 brought a lot of new responsibility, so I'm mostly just hoping I'm up for the challenge.  Here's to 2013.  Whether or not I end up traveling to a foreign country, kicking my 3-a-day bottled water habit, or making a cheesecake, hopefully twelve months from today I'm a better person than I am today and, more importantly, that there's at least a little bit more happiness in the world because of my efforts.

Given that one of my resolutions this year is not to kill anyone, I'd better wrap up this blog post before things get any more suffocatingly cheesy.  Happy New Year!

Confession:

I'm only one Team Jacob t-shirt and one Justin Beiber album away from middle school.

When I was thirteen, I essentially acted like an adult.  I watched movies like Citizen Kane, read Dickens and Vonnegut, and listened almost exclusively to classical music, with some classic rock occasionally mixed in.  At youth gatherings, I inevitably ended up in the corner talking to one of the adult leaders about Ibsen's feminism or something we had both read in the New York Times.  I didn't fit in well with the kids my age, and I didn't know how to relate to their obsessions with make up, boy bands, and middle school drama.

Now I'm twenty two, it's almost as if I'm making up for my lost adolescence.  Sure, I'm still a reasonably responsible individual, and I still probably wouldn't fit in well with a group of tweens (somehow I don't think they'd appreciate my fondness for words like "bucolic" and "effervescent" or want to discuss the pros and cons of legal positivism).  At the same time, however, my tastes have become remarkably juvenile.  From what I usually feel like watching (10 Things I Hate About You, Post Grad, Clueless) to what I usually feel like listening to (Glee, High School Musical, and Taylor Swift [sorry Britny!]), I ought to be fourteen years old.  I prefer Seventeen to Cosmo and Forever 21 to Banana Republic (although the latter is purely because, if I have $30 to spend on clothes, I'd rather get eight t-shirts and a headband than one camisole, especially if it might be made by child labor either way).  I worry about who I'm going to sit with at lunch, and I'm still mildly scandalized when I find out two of my classmates are sleeping together, even if they've been dating for months.  This week, to celebrate the mid-term break, I checked two books out of the library:  James Joyce's Dubliners (a collection of literary short stories) and Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls (a young adult novel about an eleven year old who gets kidnapped by Vikings).  Guess which one I loved, and which one I found boring and may never finish.

P.S.  It turns out the secret to enjoying Notre Dame football games is to sit with one's friends, at least ten rows behind obnoxious sophomore boy and his sophomoric friends (who, more than halfway through the semester, still haven't managed to figure out that their assigned seats are not in the middle of the law student section).

A Ramble Inspired by My Inability to Focus on Fiduciary Duties in Sole Proprietorships

At least five times over the past month (mostly when I was procrastinating homework), I thought to myself "Wow, it's about time that I wrote another blog post." I would then pull up blogger.com, click to open a new post, and sit and stare at the blank box until I got sufficiently bored to return to reading for Business Associations.

At one point, I even looked for blog prompts, but the thought of writing an entire post responding to "What does mayhem mean to you?" brought on some rather severe flashbacks to unpleasant grade school writing assignments. Me, in tears because my hand hurt from gripping the pencil too tightly and my head hurt from not being able to spell anything (at the age of nine, I still frequently used the byline "LaShel Wihte"). My mom, insisting that 20 words really wasn't a monstrous assignment and imploring me to attempt writing a word with more than three letters. As a child, I had so much I wanted to write and so little ability to express myself in writing. Now that I'm an adult, with a decently fast typing speed and a reasonable ability to spell most English words (at least with the help of spell check), all the ideas have disappeared. Well, except for the age-old fall back of writing about how you don't have anything to write about.

I thought that the answer to getting over my writer's block was to have something exciting happen to me, so I would have something to blog about. I was mistaken. Turns out, the best method for overcoming that blank stupor is to be procrastinating something you really don't want to do. Like outlining for Business Associations *blech*