New Years Resolutions

I, like most Americans, I believe, made some New Years Resolutions. Mine don't tend to be anything earth-shattering and are usually a cross between goals and a to-do list.

Also, I don't usually have them figured out by New Years. I keep adding as I wish. So, my list to date:

-Floss
-Beef up
-Find my fulfillment in God
-Become a stagehand
-Get curtains for my bedroom
-Learn Krav Maga
-Read 100 books

Now that I type them out, they look weird. I put down floss because my dentist (I just started going back last year, after eight years of not) keeps making my gums bleed and says flossing would make them better. I hate flossing. It makes my gums bleed. And swell a little bit. And I have a fixed retainer, which is basically a metal wire glued to the back of my front bottom teeth. To floss behind that, I have to loop the floss around a tooth and then pull it through until it comes out of one side of the tooth, leaving it sticking out in the back, somehow grab that tiny bit of floss and pull it back until I can thread it behind the retainer. Way more work that I usually want to commit, and it takes me several tries. My compromise tends to be doing it while watching something.

Beef up is my summary of my fitness goals for this year: not gain weight (except muscle weight, as applicable) and gain muscle and toning.

Find my fulfillment in God. Uh, this isn't something I generally want to discuss on a blog. Suffice to say that in considering my plans for the future, I realize I am still not placing desire for fulfillment on the proper source, and recognize that all other efforts toward fulfillment will come to disappointment. Also recognizing that my disappointment can range from mild to explosive.

Becoming a stagehand is a rather silly goal, as all that supposedly takes is being at CY Stephens for six months and still be taking calls. So if the management actually pays attention, I should be a stagehand around March I think. I might even have another part time job in the works... how do I tell Facebook that my work includes three part time jobs and two volunteer ventures? Facebook likes to guilt me sometimes with stuff like, "Where'd you go to high school? Where's your hometown?" I didn't and I don't know. Lemme alone!

Get curtains for my bedroom. That is obviously to-do list with a loose time component. I usually balk at price tags, though.

Krav Maga is one of the best martial arts for self-defense. It can be fairly well grasped within a fairly short time period. My Marine brother said that the Marines don't use it because they wanted escalation of force, something like a three step process: Threaten, Beat Up, if necessary, Kill. Krav Maga goes straight from Step 1 to Step 3. It was designed by an Israeli boxer for use by the Israeli military. And they teach it in town. I want to know enough self-defense that I can keep myself safe. And, preferably, make the attacker regret it.

Read 100 books... Goodreads has something on their page that lets you enter in a goal number and then adds everything you add with a date finished within the year to that count. Honestly, I'm already regretting this one. Part of my problem tends to be I love rereading books. Books only count once on Goodreads, so I have to read new books. One year my goal was to read 52 books, one a week, and I got that pretty easily. So I'm like, "I can read two books a week!" Today Goodreads told me that at 12/100, I am now one book behind. And when you start looking at books just to get finished, it will push you towards short books that are easy reading, and away from difficult or longer books. I picked up a book on Queen Elizabeth (who was nicknamed the Pirate Queen) because I was interested in her rule of loose capitalism and privateering against Spain. Except I haven't been reading it since it's a long book and if I'm going to read, I've got a deadline to make. I've been judging books by their thickness, Kindle books by how many dots they have, and Audible books by time length. The Snow Queen on Audible is under two hours? Sign me up! My largest motivation for reading "God's Chisel" from the in-laws is that it is slim and with big print. "The Landmark History of the American People" will probably continue to sit on my desk. So I don't like the pressure, albeit subtle and self-applied, to edge away from big books and toward stuff like YA fluff, that I also like, but isn't terribly edifying. I said I wanted to focus on historical books and sci-fi. Which was also poor planning, as those both tend to be heavier genres as well. A better system (or one that would work for me better, anyway) is counting pages instead of books.

Maybe I'll take a quick overview of children's books. Little Golden Books are educational, right?