The Big To-Do List

Tuesday 6th January, 2009.

I thought of some other things I need to do this next year, so I am adding them to my overall overwhelmedness of the big to-do. A bit of Lancashire humour there - a "big to-do" is a huge kerfuffle, which explains nothing but is apropos.
So, I need to get my immigration stuff sorted - it is six months since the wedding that is too much procrastination - it does not matter that I hatey, hatey hate all that kind off stuff, some things you just can not put off. This is actually way easier than some on my more esoteric goals like being nicer and stop telling fibs. What else, I want to keep in touch with my friends and family more consistently - hey, I can just tell them to follow my blog - joke. I want to have a good hard think about my spirituality, and then I expect to tiptoe quietly away, as usual. I want to climb Coniston Old Man, because it kicked my bottom last time I tried. I want to know more about particle physics ( can't really say why). I want to assess my charitable giving - anything will be an improvement on the occassional $20 to St. Judes and the odd dollar to the annoying singing-man on the subway. Some kind of service, somewhere, sometimes - ah well, best not to get bogged down in details - the inkling of the idea is there. Make some new friends. Join some kind of group. Go to some of the medieval events in Manhattan that I keep getting notifications about, plan to go to, and then come up with some excuse not to be able to make it this time. Oh and to wear make-up more often and keep my brows under an inch thick.

Progress Report:
Diet: well we are following Dr Fuhrman's "Eat to Live" diet. So far things going quite well. Weight has been lost. I weighed 177lbs between Christmas and New Year when I weighed myself, and now I weigh 166lbs. So many veggies - I need a double-wide of chiller space in my fridge.
Wii exercise - 1hr: Yoga is getting better: I think I am becoming more stable (yeah right!)
Fags and Booze: None.
TV: none - well except for a couple of episodes of "The IT Crowd", which I HAD to watch because it had just arrived as a Christmas pressie from my brother.
Arguments: A few - it is just that unlucky combo of the extremely irritable and the extremely irritating.
Stuff done I want to do: Some knitting (about 20 more lines, yeah), waltzing with hubbikins 10 mins, 10mins plinking on the keyboard, wrote long e-mail to my Mum, my mother-in-law and my BFF Rachel (can nearly 40-year-olds have BFF's? - 29 years is a lot of BFFing). And, of course, I have started a blog, with which to share my self-centered inanity with the world. Much cheaper than therapy, and for free I can imagine complete strangers nodding sagely and going "h-hmm" every few minutes while I blather on.

Some sad news today - my Mum called me and her cat had to be put down. She was fifteen and a crazy little sweetheart. I remember when we first got her and she was so tiny and wouldn't eat, so I feed her with a little pipette, while she was wrapped in a towel so she didn't claw my eyes out. We called her Titch, but she grew up big, feisty and very funny. Oh dear, I'm misting up. Blow nose, take a swig of tea - back on track.

Just had to run out and post Hubby's mother's flash-drive back to her, which Hubby had mistakenly picked up at Christmas, had looked for twice since and swore it was not here, and which I found within ten seconds of a frantic request to please check once again. And thus the color of life keeps us amused - which is me trying to be more pleasant - what I really want to say involves expletives and the word "strangle".

Tomorrow I tackle the immigration paperwork (ptwah! ptwah!).

Six Months Either Side of Forty

Monday January 5^th, 2009.

For some reason making a New Year’s Resolution was particularly hard this year, my thirty-ninth. For one thing I had so many things I wanted to fix about myself: I wanted to reduce my drinking, give up smoking, try - once again - to lose weight, sleep normally without pills, get fit (whatever that is!), eat healthily, get out of debt, regain my sense of smell, fix my sex-life, stop telling pointless lies, stop being unnecessarily argumentative with my spouse, and become magically able to handle my job without obsessive perfectionism and pointless worry and exhaustion.

For another thing I also had so many positive things that I wanted to achieve this year: I wanted to learn the piano, take up knitting (maybe even crochet), have more dinner parties, try to regain my lost knowledge of Latin, record myself singing, paint more consistently and improve my technique, find a publisher for my dissertation, climb a small mountain, figure out what to do with my hair, and make a final, firm and mutually happy decision about whether or not to try for a baby.

Lastly, I had a whole other list of reasons why I would probably not accomplish any of the above: I have no time, I have tried before and failed, I am too old, I am too lazy, I lack commitment, I am just me and I suck. And so, instead of making any firm New Year’s Resolution, I wallowed in self-loathing, self-pity and apathy. My thinking being that if I did not make any resolutions, I would not have to waste energy beating myself up when I, inevitably, broke them.

When I woke up on January 1^st, 2009 I had a huge hangover and a very bruised pinky toe on my left foot (don’t ask I can’t really remember), and no motivation to do anything about myself whatsoever, or so I thought. Here I am four days later, not had a drink or cigarette, lost six pounds, 40 rows down an “interesting” looking scarf, exercising on my Wii, eating pounds of vegetables and even some fruit, learning to waltz with my hubby (with whom I have had far fewer spats by the way), and I actually feel quite happy. Scary, even writing those words down makes me feel like I might jinx it.

What on earth is going on? I can only assume that faced with all the life-changing stuff I wanted to accomplish this year some part of my brain made a unilateral decision that I could not handle the pressure and conned me into passivity while it just got down to business. I guess that what I wanted was not actually all of those things listed above or even any of them individually; I needed a new way of looking at things - no, not just things - everything. But, don't get me wrong, I am not looking for a new me and nor do I need to find myself. I already knew who I am, and at the heart of things I think I am pretty okay (excuse me while I bowl you over with me self-esteem). In some ways what I needed was a to-do-list for my life, which makes sense, I have one at work and could not function without it. Now, I understand that putting things on a to-do-list and actually doing them are two different things, but it is a start. The next step I suppose would be scheduling - wow, I am talking about running my life as a business.

What I need is self-control. If you are like me, you will probably always have associated self-control with the deprivation of desires, and not with something that actually promoted happiness and creativity. I, of course, am not the first to realize that our desires seldom make us happy - I think that was Buddha - but cut me some slack, knowing stuff like that and actually trying to apply it to ones life are two different things. For too long I have felt that I was being pulled along by my life – racing, lurching and swerving behind my personal runaway train. It has brought me to some good places, as lives go, mine is actually pretty amazing, I have a great job, wonderful parents who love me and I am a newly married to a great guy. So I guess what I am going through maybe a classic case of "done everything I set out to do - now what" syndrome (copyright pending :-{), or more simply - a mid-life crisis. Can I have one of those when I am still in my thirties?

Anyway, as I lay in the bath this evening it occurred to me (and not for the first time I assure you) that I will be forty in six months – on June 25^th to be precise – and, as my friend, Kate, was fond of saying, "Life is not a dress-rehearsal". So I decided (why do all great decisions come when the body is immersed in water - wasn't Churchill famous for calling the shots from his bathtub) - anyway, I digress because I want to avoid commitment on paper (monitor, whatever) - so I decided to try - no, scratch that - to accomplish self-control and get behind the wheel of my runaway train: I will give myself a year – my six months either side of forty.