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I’ve never had a New Year’s resolution before. Well… I think I had one once in high school, and I think it was to not have a resolution. They just seemed silly to me, like a list of promises that you pretty much just jinxed yourself into not keeping. For the most part, they still do.
I’ve got a couple this year… two, actually. They’re not silly promises I don’t really want to keep (like “I resolve to suddenly become a vegetarian”) or couldn’t keep no matter how hard I tried (like “I resolve to blog once a day, every day for a year” or “I resolve to keep my room shiny clean until 2009″). No, these are actually… attainable.
The first one, I can’t share. It’s a wee bit embarrassing, actually, and pretty personal. I’ll gladly leave you in the dark on that one.
The second one is one that I should have made… well, ages ago. This is the one I really want to check up on in a year, to make sure I’ve done what I said to do. I want to get my life moving again.
I’m almost twenty-one. I need to get up, get moving, and start living. Carpe diem and all of that. I need to get my license. I need a car. I’d love to go back to school. I’d love to get out and just do things, be someone besides an extension of what I used to be. I’ve got an entire year… and an entire lifetime. I don’t want to just be taking up space anymore. I want to do whatever it is that I’ve been put here to do… and do it wholeheartedly. Whatever that means — whatever it takes.
It was really entertaining coming home to my loyal feed reader today after work and reading entry upon entry of “Merry Christmas!” and “Happy Holidays!”
Pardon me for being a little Scrooge-y today, but today at work I saw a lot of cranky Christmas shoppers. Seriously, everybody was grouchy, hurried, and had awful attitudes. It’s like the entire town was PMS-ing on the same day.
You’re probably thinking I’m just saying that because I don’t even celebrate Christmas, but I used to, and I noticed it then. I feel bad for God on days like these, because the entire world’s gone greedy and grouchy, and all in His name. Unfair for him!
So this Christmas, remember why it is you are all celebrating, and try to smile and be nice to people for a change. As for me? Happy Hanukkah, guys!
I have a confession to make. I saw High School Musical. I liked it. A lot.
Edit: And now I’ve seen HSM2 as well. I liked it… just not as much as the first one.
The last couple of days, Oklahoma has seen a crazy ice storm. It’s mostly melted by now, but half of my town is without power still (and it’s spotty, block-by-block), and most of the roads look like a war zone… trees down everywhere. We lost electricity yesterday for about twelve hours, and my work lost power yesterday and it didn’t come back on until this evening (which meant a crazy day at working at another store!). They say that power might be iffy or so for the next couple days… or a week or so.
I’m just glad I’ve got electricity, and so does my store. Today was truly insane.
It was beautiful, though, for the first day and before the trees really started coming down. I wish I had thought to grab my camera!
“Peer pressure” was one of those big buzzwords (buzz-phrases?) when I was growing up, and I remember thinking that it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of. I couldn’t comprehend a situation where I had to go along with my friends or they wouldn’t be my friends anymore. I thought that real people didn’t have to deal with peer pressure, that it was just another of those weird adults-trying-to-understand-kids things.
I still don’t buy it, even being older. Maybe it’s just because I have good friends, or maybe it’s because individuality is “cool” now.
However…
Have you ever had a lot of people tell you the very same thing, so many people that you start believing they’re true, or at least wondering if you’d had it all wrong. I mean, if your brother came up to you and told you that the sky really isn’t blue, it’s green, you’d laugh at him. If, later that day, you talked to a cashier at the grocery store, and she told you the same thing, you’d think it was a funny coincidence. If you kept hearing it over and over from seemingly unrelated sources, you’d start to look at the sky funny and doubt what you were seeing, wouldn’t you?
I guess that’s what peer pressure really is… it’s just the power of people. Hearing that you’re ugly your entire life until you believe it wholeheartedly. Having people tell you that aliens live on Mars until you start peering at the sky at night. Advertisements telling you BUY THIS, BUY THAT, until you start wondering how it was you survived on this earth without some kind of mp3 player. Myriads of people accusing you of having a crush on someone you’re just friends with until you start looking at him sideways and thinking, why not?
Does this happen to you guys, or am I just a pushover?