My long "Almost the end of the Chinese New Year" post
Hey, when I did my New Year's resolutions last year, I told one of you to remind me about it! I've just gotta do all the work around here I guess...
for those of you keeping score at home, here's how I did against my drunkenly proposed goals from 2005:
1) visit an eye doctor Well, I didn't do this, but I did see that I had an option to get vision insurance for 2007 at a reasonable cost, so I signed up for it. Therefore, I didn't see the point in going in 2006 since I'll have an incentive for next year. So this one was sorta kept.
2) learn 50 kanji I am proud to say that I went above and beyond the call of duty and learned my 51st kanji character yesterday. In fact, on deadline weekend I learned "rice", "warm", "plate", and "white", those all important "rice-cooker kanji" characters that will allow me to finally understand what I'm programming on our model at home. Up to this point, I've had the Neanderthal "hit this button twice, then this one once" instructions so I now feel the same way A-chan does when she sees a duck and yells "duh-DUH!" (which I count as her first word).
3) be more proficient in my other japanese speaking skills This one could be debatable, but I did sign up for 2 Japanese classes this year and I most certainly picked up a fair amount of knowledge. I also made 2 trips to the mothersland and ordered at restaurants and took the trains by myself and such. Nowhere near where I'd like to be, but at least I didn't backpedal. And I'm to the point now that when I visit the plentiful taquerias near my workplace, I have to hesitate because Japanese is now entrenched as my "2nd pathetic application of a language" instead of Spanish. Being able to bungle multiple languages - now that's progress...
4) donate $100 to a different charity every month here's another one I accomplished in a way. One of my favorite things to do on the quick work internet connection was to peruse the highly recommended Charity Navigator website, picking a cause I wanted to support and seeing their recommended organizations. I did this on a regular basis up until THE INCIDENT, after which my websurfing wiped out. Our connection at home was too slow to really follow through, so I decided to pool up the remaining $600 and make one big additional donation to my favorite of the 6. Not to show off but to advertise the causes, here's where my money went: The International Campaign For Tibet (nuff said), Amnesty International (who will send you constant emails and phone calls), Americares (funding for the Pakistan earthquake), ANERA (American Near East Relief Agency, helping the families in the Middle East, particularly those in the occupied territories), CARE (particularly in response to the flooding that took place in Indonesia), the Alliance For Global Justice (an organization working in Nicaragua - daniel_1980 doesn't keep an lj anymore, but you might be able to read his old stories which was the root cause to add this resolution last year), and Room To Read (an organization founded by a former Microsoft bigwig who uses his money and donations to build libraries in countries that need them - my Japanese teacher is actually the chair of the Atlanta leg of the organization). Oh yeah, I guess that's an extra hundred bucks because I gave twice in the month of the Indonesian tragedy. I gave the remaining $600 to the International Campaign For Tibet, since they've got a clear strategy, tell you what they're doing, and have a lot of work cut out for them as they're trying to get very public prior to the 2008 Olympics.
5) learn how to prepare 5 more dinners I screwed this one up bigtime. I didn't learn a single goddamned thing in the kitchen this year, just cranking out the old favorites. Although I did work on my risotto a lot more this year, with mixed results.
6) floss at least 3 times a week I started this one off well for the first month or two and then everything went to hell. My last dental cleaning was undoubtedly the most painful one I've ever received - heredity has given me a very strong set of teeth and I rarely get cavities, but my gums were so in pain that I couldn't really eat for a day or two without the tingling. Of course I started right back up but now I've been out of practice for about a month. I read something in the current issue of The Economist about a guy who, after a life of normalcy, got wound up into pedophilia and committed a violent act that got him almost sentenced, when a brainscan discovered he had a tumor. He had surgery to remove the tumor, and the pedophilial impulses vanished. They started to come back again at some point, upon which a scan revealed the tumor was coming back also. In some warped self-conscious way, I wondered if this might explain my flossing attitudes.
7) maintain my body weight according to my post last year, I woke up on 12/31/05 weighing 0.5 pounds above my ideal upper weight limit. This morning, I woke up and weighed 1.0 pounds above that limit. So I guess I did stay relatively consistent, although I got as high as 5 pounds above that limit twice (including once in the past 2 weeks). I have started exercising again in the past month though, after a vacation of about 3 years, so I'll blame it on my impressive muscle weight gain. Yeah.
8) maintain a daily journal In the context of what I was referring to by that, meaning that I would keep a little notebook in which I would record the events of the year in play-by-play format, I failed back in April. On the other hand, I did maintain my money journal notating my expenses, a food journal notating every meal I ate, and a "stuff journal" indicating the following: albums purchased this year, books/zines purchased, movies purchased, movies rented, movies watched, albums listened to (this one was interesting), books read, trips taken, gifts given, and beers drank & rated. I only watched 15 movies in full this year (well, 16 as of today: S and I went to see For Your Consideration, the first trip to the theaters for us since A-chan was born and the first one since mid-05's Klaus Nomi documentary) and listened to 600 albums. Worst beer of the year, discounting the Budweiser and Coors that were mandatory workmate drinkings, was Rogue Chipotle Ale - I say unfortunately, as I love chipotles and I even like those Corona-style beers that have jalapenos in the bottle, but this one made me gag. Best ranking beers were, among others: Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout (the first stout I've truly loved), Dupont Foret (an organic version of Saison Dupont, had on tap in Decatur's incomparable Brick Store Pub), and the old favorite brews from Trappistes Rochefort. In fact I'm about to crack open a Rochefort 8 to ring in the new year with slurred swagger.
9) spend christmas and new year's in japan Obviously this didn't happen, but then again I didn't expect to visit Japan twice during the year either. I used up almost all of my vacation time with those events. So I didn't get to have my dream of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and strawberry shortcake (basically the official Christmas food of Japan) at a love hotel (Christmas being a sort of Valentine's Day there), but on the other hand I did get to witness cherry blossom season and Obon. And you got to read all about those, didn't you, so consider yourselves lucky you didn't get another massive "Here's my brilliant insights on Japanese culture Part 7" series. Places I did visit throughout the year aside from Japan: Tamarac FL (don't ask, it was a business trip at a place situated between Ft Lauderdale and Miami), Providence RI (for Terrastock 6), Boston/Cambridge MA (for half a day after Providence), Las Vegas NV (first proper trip to the west), New York NY, Dallas/Ft Worth TX (my new favorite museum location in America, even moreso than NYC), Tuscumbia AL, Asheville NC, and a couple of trips to Athens GA that I count since we actually used a hotel.
10) be the greatest husband and father ever thankfully I got a list of a lot of dead people and the election should have been successfully rigged.
Surprisingly I haven't seen anybody do one of those end-of-year memes, so I don't have a convenient form to emulate. But if I had to think of new experiences in 2006, this is a brief off-the-top rundown of what I'd say:
1. Dance in public on a main stage Back in 1999, I nearly had this opportunity at a Mr. Quintron & Ms. Pussycat show when Mr. Quintron, just after saying "I feel like giving someone a French kiss tonight!", strolled through the audience and then came up to me and said "How would YOU like to break the barrier between audience and performer tonight?" I had a total Cindy-Brady-and-the-TV-camera moment (geebs probably remembers this better than I do) because, even though I agreed with the ladies that Quintron is a pretty sexy sumbitch, I had the fear that he was going to thrust his tongue down my throat if I dared utter a response (it later turned out he was only wanting to invite people on the stage to dance). This was my only opportunity to show my stuff (and oh what stuff it is) to the world until I went against my better judgment onto the platform in Yokohama for the Obon dance, which I wrote about in embarrassing detail right here.
2. Play in a casino with a human dealer I went to a casino in Biloxi, MS back in 2001 but I only played the blackjack machines. In Vegas, I got drunk enough (and really, coming from the repressed south it surprised me how openly you can drink in Las Vegas) to stroll up to a table at our hotel in Circus Circus. I promptly lost $20 and moved on - not exactly a high roller but in a world with online mailorder CD distribution outlets available I have to be responsible occasionally.
3. Subscribe to grown-up magazines. I'm going to make a story extremely short by saying that I lost a lot of my internet indulgences around the midpart of this year. The two areas where this made an impact on me was in personal relations (I think there are a few of you who I still haven't gotten around to replying to since June in email form) and in news information. Being a daily visitor to The Guardian's website, along with Yahoo's browser being my home page (yeah, I know there are better options), and then having it cut off meant I was really in the dark on a lot of things. I had quit really paying attention to magazines in general after cutting off my Wire subscription in 2003, but all of a sudden printed media became my only real news outlet in my TV-ignorant way of life. I now subscribe to The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's, giving me what I think to be a reasonable outlook on the world in politics and interesting stories. All of these magazines have caused me to turn into a reading madman, especially with 2 of those magazines having weekly issues, and there are other nice-looking ones out there but I shudder to think there's any more I can read. I would love some kind of magazine that's a printed equivalent of the radio program "Democracy Now!" but sadly I haven't found one if it exists...
4. Receive a phantom traffic violation ticket S was asleep when I wrote this post last night but apparently she was much better at thinking of new experiences last year than I was (mind you, she wasn't drinking 9.2% Belgian ale either). Georgia, and I assume other states in this country, are starting to go Big Brother and are installing multiple video cameras at every major intersection. Apparently they added one on my work commute, and so it was that one day in the summer I received a ticket showing that I ran a red light 0.3 seconds after the light had turned red from 3 different angles across multiple time frames (it was almost like an old Voltron episode, I swear). I won't bitch about it since the pictures didn't lie (I even remembered doing it) but nonetheless it gives you an odd feeling. If they're going to be that technical about it, they should install some kind of aural device that can determine the dB level and tempo of your car stereo at the moment in order to help out us poor defendants. As it is I then went to pay the ticket online and saw, upon entering the ticket number, that they had my correct name, address, and car but that my birthdate was listed as January 1, 1900. And ain't that a hell of a way to make an old man suffer for his crimes.
5. Eat grits I can't believe I forgot this one. I've mentioned here that I hate Southern food. More than once. Southern food is God's way of saying to the Bible Belt "Maybe if I let you kill yourselves off with this artery-clogging overcooked garbage, you'll quit giving Me such a bad name". That said, I did the unthinkable a month ago. One Saturday night, we went to a new restaurant in College Park near the airport called The Pecan that's an upscale Southern restaurant (ie not a meat-and-three). I find it odd that I love every cuisine in the world except my own, it seems, but I wanted to give this place a shot. And I decided to have their shrimp and grits for my main, something that is apparently played out as an innovative idea according to the food critic press, but it was a bold new venture for me. When I think of grits (to be honest I even have a hard time saying this word out loud, it repels me such), I imagine some Waffle House concoction of ome semi-liquid gray otherness on a plate that quickly reminds me that I need to look at nobody's food but my own in that establishment (my unchanging WH order: one plain waffle, no side orders, no syrup, no butter, just plain please, and lots of bad coffee to go with it). But The Pecan made it sound more polenta-ish, and I suppose they're generally the same thing, but normally grits don't look like no polenta to me. The Pecan offered them mixed with Pepper Jack to go with the shrimp, adding to the appeal, and I have to say the plate was extremely good although I think I needed to jog home from College Park to balance out the calorie intake. I'm still no convert, but at least I did cross into the great unknown and I survived to tell the tale.
and resolutions for 2007?
1. Learn 50 more kanji I certainly want to learn more Japanese too, but I'll just include this as a subset of this resolution since I can't quantify that necessarily but I can this. 51 kanji is a heck of a lot more than I originally knew, but considering that you need to know 1800 to be considered literate, its a tad bit lacking. Even still, I was astonished to visit in August and recognize some of those characters and put together useful information based on them. I was even more impressed to see a tracklisting of a Puka Puka Brians song called "大森山" and say to myself, "Omori-san?" and realize I was correct ("Omori-san" meaning literally, "mountain of big forests"). If I can translate a whole CD's worth of underground Japanese sounds, I know I'll be onto something.
2. Actually lose weight Because there never can be enough cliched wishes in your life. I thought I'd be happy that I didn't stray too far from the path this year, but it meant looking at the scales every day and thinking "I'm not really content but I'm tolerable." Tolerating something shouldn't necesarily be a resolution. Of course, I'm now in the midst of a calorific Belgian ale but it is made by monks so its probably divinely blessed.
3. Learn tourist Dutch It appears that I will be travelling to Amsterdam in September of this year to hang out with inuitmonster and henry_the_cow and bolshy_spice and all the other wonderful people from Franks APA. I've visited non-English-speaking countries before, but (not counting Japan where I am a language leech) they were countries, Spain and France particularly, that I had schooling in back when I had school. I would imagine the Netherlands are probably pretty accommodating to the ignorant, but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to be ignorant. And after all, my 2 years of Spanish didn't get me anywhere in that tapas place in Madrid when I had to go to the bathroom and couldn't figure out if the men's room was the one with an "S" or a "C" (it turned out to be "C" and I guessed wrong, but thankfully I escaped the country revealing my nudity to my wife only).
4. Get involved with something in Fayetteville We've lived in this god-forsaken town for almost 3 years and know nobody. I'm extremely happily married and very proud of my daughter, but outside of this apartment this is the loneliest life we've ever liven. We don't actually have any friends at all in a 45-minute distance, just workmates, and its honestly a little sad. And the friends we do have, wonderful as they are (well, I think geebs might be more "curious" than "wonderful"...kidding), we only see once every month or two for just a few hours at a time. Its especially hit home as I've lost access to some of the message boards I used to use and realized just how little contact with the outside world I actually have. The main problem I think I'll find with this resolution is that I don't know if I'll find anything interesting to be a part of in Fayetteville. This is exurbia after all, not very culturally aware and an extremely red county in an extremely red state. I've always been a wallflower, but I've always seemed to have friends of some sort. Nowadays I can count them on two hands, and most of those fingers are part of a network. I don't think I honestly need friends to survive, but I'd surely like to have them...
5. Implement new budgetary plans regarding CDs, books, and charities I learned in 2006 that I could afford to donate $100 a month to a charity, or $1200 annually. I'd like to make it $1500 in 2007, but I won't make it monthly since its not such an easy thing to dole out anymore. Obviously, the increase in money for that means I need to tone down in other areas, and there's no more areas in dire need than CDs and books. So I just came up with an ambitious plan, like 30 minutes ago, for how to justify spending. For CDs: 10 regular-price CDs a month, maximum. No price quota, just 10 full-price CDs whatever their cost, vacation luxuries exempt. For books: no book purchases (excepting thrifts) until I've read at least 5 things already sitting on my shelf. As I just bought some stuff today (book-length interview of David Lynch, collection of 3 Tintin volumes, and a compendium on beer by Michael "No Not That Michael Jackson" Jackson) I have areas to improve in.
Man, how long have I been writing this? Too long. I will close this by saying that, personal connections aside, I was pleased to meet the following lj personalities in real-life manifestations this year: ikahana, vertamae, pilote, and tabletop (the latter for about 4 drunken minutes in Providence but still). The world of social networking is a very silly world indeed, but honestly you people are all perhaps my biggest connection to popular culture and my life is truthfully richer with your presence. Thank you all for being there and for writing. Okay, I'm being all huggy, its truly a sign that alcohol is taking effect. 2006, you were a good year, but its time for you to go. May I get 50 minutes' worth of kiss-ass points by saying Welcome, 2007!
for those of you keeping score at home, here's how I did against my drunkenly proposed goals from 2005:
1) visit an eye doctor Well, I didn't do this, but I did see that I had an option to get vision insurance for 2007 at a reasonable cost, so I signed up for it. Therefore, I didn't see the point in going in 2006 since I'll have an incentive for next year. So this one was sorta kept.
2) learn 50 kanji I am proud to say that I went above and beyond the call of duty and learned my 51st kanji character yesterday. In fact, on deadline weekend I learned "rice", "warm", "plate", and "white", those all important "rice-cooker kanji" characters that will allow me to finally understand what I'm programming on our model at home. Up to this point, I've had the Neanderthal "hit this button twice, then this one once" instructions so I now feel the same way A-chan does when she sees a duck and yells "duh-DUH!" (which I count as her first word).
3) be more proficient in my other japanese speaking skills This one could be debatable, but I did sign up for 2 Japanese classes this year and I most certainly picked up a fair amount of knowledge. I also made 2 trips to the mothersland and ordered at restaurants and took the trains by myself and such. Nowhere near where I'd like to be, but at least I didn't backpedal. And I'm to the point now that when I visit the plentiful taquerias near my workplace, I have to hesitate because Japanese is now entrenched as my "2nd pathetic application of a language" instead of Spanish. Being able to bungle multiple languages - now that's progress...
4) donate $100 to a different charity every month here's another one I accomplished in a way. One of my favorite things to do on the quick work internet connection was to peruse the highly recommended Charity Navigator website, picking a cause I wanted to support and seeing their recommended organizations. I did this on a regular basis up until THE INCIDENT, after which my websurfing wiped out. Our connection at home was too slow to really follow through, so I decided to pool up the remaining $600 and make one big additional donation to my favorite of the 6. Not to show off but to advertise the causes, here's where my money went: The International Campaign For Tibet (nuff said), Amnesty International (who will send you constant emails and phone calls), Americares (funding for the Pakistan earthquake), ANERA (American Near East Relief Agency, helping the families in the Middle East, particularly those in the occupied territories), CARE (particularly in response to the flooding that took place in Indonesia), the Alliance For Global Justice (an organization working in Nicaragua - daniel_1980 doesn't keep an lj anymore, but you might be able to read his old stories which was the root cause to add this resolution last year), and Room To Read (an organization founded by a former Microsoft bigwig who uses his money and donations to build libraries in countries that need them - my Japanese teacher is actually the chair of the Atlanta leg of the organization). Oh yeah, I guess that's an extra hundred bucks because I gave twice in the month of the Indonesian tragedy. I gave the remaining $600 to the International Campaign For Tibet, since they've got a clear strategy, tell you what they're doing, and have a lot of work cut out for them as they're trying to get very public prior to the 2008 Olympics.
5) learn how to prepare 5 more dinners I screwed this one up bigtime. I didn't learn a single goddamned thing in the kitchen this year, just cranking out the old favorites. Although I did work on my risotto a lot more this year, with mixed results.
6) floss at least 3 times a week I started this one off well for the first month or two and then everything went to hell. My last dental cleaning was undoubtedly the most painful one I've ever received - heredity has given me a very strong set of teeth and I rarely get cavities, but my gums were so in pain that I couldn't really eat for a day or two without the tingling. Of course I started right back up but now I've been out of practice for about a month. I read something in the current issue of The Economist about a guy who, after a life of normalcy, got wound up into pedophilia and committed a violent act that got him almost sentenced, when a brainscan discovered he had a tumor. He had surgery to remove the tumor, and the pedophilial impulses vanished. They started to come back again at some point, upon which a scan revealed the tumor was coming back also. In some warped self-conscious way, I wondered if this might explain my flossing attitudes.
7) maintain my body weight according to my post last year, I woke up on 12/31/05 weighing 0.5 pounds above my ideal upper weight limit. This morning, I woke up and weighed 1.0 pounds above that limit. So I guess I did stay relatively consistent, although I got as high as 5 pounds above that limit twice (including once in the past 2 weeks). I have started exercising again in the past month though, after a vacation of about 3 years, so I'll blame it on my impressive muscle weight gain. Yeah.
8) maintain a daily journal In the context of what I was referring to by that, meaning that I would keep a little notebook in which I would record the events of the year in play-by-play format, I failed back in April. On the other hand, I did maintain my money journal notating my expenses, a food journal notating every meal I ate, and a "stuff journal" indicating the following: albums purchased this year, books/zines purchased, movies purchased, movies rented, movies watched, albums listened to (this one was interesting), books read, trips taken, gifts given, and beers drank & rated. I only watched 15 movies in full this year (well, 16 as of today: S and I went to see For Your Consideration, the first trip to the theaters for us since A-chan was born and the first one since mid-05's Klaus Nomi documentary) and listened to 600 albums. Worst beer of the year, discounting the Budweiser and Coors that were mandatory workmate drinkings, was Rogue Chipotle Ale - I say unfortunately, as I love chipotles and I even like those Corona-style beers that have jalapenos in the bottle, but this one made me gag. Best ranking beers were, among others: Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout (the first stout I've truly loved), Dupont Foret (an organic version of Saison Dupont, had on tap in Decatur's incomparable Brick Store Pub), and the old favorite brews from Trappistes Rochefort. In fact I'm about to crack open a Rochefort 8 to ring in the new year with slurred swagger.
9) spend christmas and new year's in japan Obviously this didn't happen, but then again I didn't expect to visit Japan twice during the year either. I used up almost all of my vacation time with those events. So I didn't get to have my dream of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and strawberry shortcake (basically the official Christmas food of Japan) at a love hotel (Christmas being a sort of Valentine's Day there), but on the other hand I did get to witness cherry blossom season and Obon. And you got to read all about those, didn't you, so consider yourselves lucky you didn't get another massive "Here's my brilliant insights on Japanese culture Part 7" series. Places I did visit throughout the year aside from Japan: Tamarac FL (don't ask, it was a business trip at a place situated between Ft Lauderdale and Miami), Providence RI (for Terrastock 6), Boston/Cambridge MA (for half a day after Providence), Las Vegas NV (first proper trip to the west), New York NY, Dallas/Ft Worth TX (my new favorite museum location in America, even moreso than NYC), Tuscumbia AL, Asheville NC, and a couple of trips to Athens GA that I count since we actually used a hotel.
10) be the greatest husband and father ever thankfully I got a list of a lot of dead people and the election should have been successfully rigged.
Surprisingly I haven't seen anybody do one of those end-of-year memes, so I don't have a convenient form to emulate. But if I had to think of new experiences in 2006, this is a brief off-the-top rundown of what I'd say:
1. Dance in public on a main stage Back in 1999, I nearly had this opportunity at a Mr. Quintron & Ms. Pussycat show when Mr. Quintron, just after saying "I feel like giving someone a French kiss tonight!", strolled through the audience and then came up to me and said "How would YOU like to break the barrier between audience and performer tonight?" I had a total Cindy-Brady-and-the-TV-camera moment (geebs probably remembers this better than I do) because, even though I agreed with the ladies that Quintron is a pretty sexy sumbitch, I had the fear that he was going to thrust his tongue down my throat if I dared utter a response (it later turned out he was only wanting to invite people on the stage to dance). This was my only opportunity to show my stuff (and oh what stuff it is) to the world until I went against my better judgment onto the platform in Yokohama for the Obon dance, which I wrote about in embarrassing detail right here.
2. Play in a casino with a human dealer I went to a casino in Biloxi, MS back in 2001 but I only played the blackjack machines. In Vegas, I got drunk enough (and really, coming from the repressed south it surprised me how openly you can drink in Las Vegas) to stroll up to a table at our hotel in Circus Circus. I promptly lost $20 and moved on - not exactly a high roller but in a world with online mailorder CD distribution outlets available I have to be responsible occasionally.
3. Subscribe to grown-up magazines. I'm going to make a story extremely short by saying that I lost a lot of my internet indulgences around the midpart of this year. The two areas where this made an impact on me was in personal relations (I think there are a few of you who I still haven't gotten around to replying to since June in email form) and in news information. Being a daily visitor to The Guardian's website, along with Yahoo's browser being my home page (yeah, I know there are better options), and then having it cut off meant I was really in the dark on a lot of things. I had quit really paying attention to magazines in general after cutting off my Wire subscription in 2003, but all of a sudden printed media became my only real news outlet in my TV-ignorant way of life. I now subscribe to The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper's, giving me what I think to be a reasonable outlook on the world in politics and interesting stories. All of these magazines have caused me to turn into a reading madman, especially with 2 of those magazines having weekly issues, and there are other nice-looking ones out there but I shudder to think there's any more I can read. I would love some kind of magazine that's a printed equivalent of the radio program "Democracy Now!" but sadly I haven't found one if it exists...
4. Receive a phantom traffic violation ticket S was asleep when I wrote this post last night but apparently she was much better at thinking of new experiences last year than I was (mind you, she wasn't drinking 9.2% Belgian ale either). Georgia, and I assume other states in this country, are starting to go Big Brother and are installing multiple video cameras at every major intersection. Apparently they added one on my work commute, and so it was that one day in the summer I received a ticket showing that I ran a red light 0.3 seconds after the light had turned red from 3 different angles across multiple time frames (it was almost like an old Voltron episode, I swear). I won't bitch about it since the pictures didn't lie (I even remembered doing it) but nonetheless it gives you an odd feeling. If they're going to be that technical about it, they should install some kind of aural device that can determine the dB level and tempo of your car stereo at the moment in order to help out us poor defendants. As it is I then went to pay the ticket online and saw, upon entering the ticket number, that they had my correct name, address, and car but that my birthdate was listed as January 1, 1900. And ain't that a hell of a way to make an old man suffer for his crimes.
5. Eat grits I can't believe I forgot this one. I've mentioned here that I hate Southern food. More than once. Southern food is God's way of saying to the Bible Belt "Maybe if I let you kill yourselves off with this artery-clogging overcooked garbage, you'll quit giving Me such a bad name". That said, I did the unthinkable a month ago. One Saturday night, we went to a new restaurant in College Park near the airport called The Pecan that's an upscale Southern restaurant (ie not a meat-and-three). I find it odd that I love every cuisine in the world except my own, it seems, but I wanted to give this place a shot. And I decided to have their shrimp and grits for my main, something that is apparently played out as an innovative idea according to the food critic press, but it was a bold new venture for me. When I think of grits (to be honest I even have a hard time saying this word out loud, it repels me such), I imagine some Waffle House concoction of ome semi-liquid gray otherness on a plate that quickly reminds me that I need to look at nobody's food but my own in that establishment (my unchanging WH order: one plain waffle, no side orders, no syrup, no butter, just plain please, and lots of bad coffee to go with it). But The Pecan made it sound more polenta-ish, and I suppose they're generally the same thing, but normally grits don't look like no polenta to me. The Pecan offered them mixed with Pepper Jack to go with the shrimp, adding to the appeal, and I have to say the plate was extremely good although I think I needed to jog home from College Park to balance out the calorie intake. I'm still no convert, but at least I did cross into the great unknown and I survived to tell the tale.
and resolutions for 2007?
1. Learn 50 more kanji I certainly want to learn more Japanese too, but I'll just include this as a subset of this resolution since I can't quantify that necessarily but I can this. 51 kanji is a heck of a lot more than I originally knew, but considering that you need to know 1800 to be considered literate, its a tad bit lacking. Even still, I was astonished to visit in August and recognize some of those characters and put together useful information based on them. I was even more impressed to see a tracklisting of a Puka Puka Brians song called "大森山" and say to myself, "Omori-san?" and realize I was correct ("Omori-san" meaning literally, "mountain of big forests"). If I can translate a whole CD's worth of underground Japanese sounds, I know I'll be onto something.
2. Actually lose weight Because there never can be enough cliched wishes in your life. I thought I'd be happy that I didn't stray too far from the path this year, but it meant looking at the scales every day and thinking "I'm not really content but I'm tolerable." Tolerating something shouldn't necesarily be a resolution. Of course, I'm now in the midst of a calorific Belgian ale but it is made by monks so its probably divinely blessed.
3. Learn tourist Dutch It appears that I will be travelling to Amsterdam in September of this year to hang out with inuitmonster and henry_the_cow and bolshy_spice and all the other wonderful people from Franks APA. I've visited non-English-speaking countries before, but (not counting Japan where I am a language leech) they were countries, Spain and France particularly, that I had schooling in back when I had school. I would imagine the Netherlands are probably pretty accommodating to the ignorant, but that doesn't mean I necessarily want to be ignorant. And after all, my 2 years of Spanish didn't get me anywhere in that tapas place in Madrid when I had to go to the bathroom and couldn't figure out if the men's room was the one with an "S" or a "C" (it turned out to be "C" and I guessed wrong, but thankfully I escaped the country revealing my nudity to my wife only).
4. Get involved with something in Fayetteville We've lived in this god-forsaken town for almost 3 years and know nobody. I'm extremely happily married and very proud of my daughter, but outside of this apartment this is the loneliest life we've ever liven. We don't actually have any friends at all in a 45-minute distance, just workmates, and its honestly a little sad. And the friends we do have, wonderful as they are (well, I think geebs might be more "curious" than "wonderful"...kidding), we only see once every month or two for just a few hours at a time. Its especially hit home as I've lost access to some of the message boards I used to use and realized just how little contact with the outside world I actually have. The main problem I think I'll find with this resolution is that I don't know if I'll find anything interesting to be a part of in Fayetteville. This is exurbia after all, not very culturally aware and an extremely red county in an extremely red state. I've always been a wallflower, but I've always seemed to have friends of some sort. Nowadays I can count them on two hands, and most of those fingers are part of a network. I don't think I honestly need friends to survive, but I'd surely like to have them...
5. Implement new budgetary plans regarding CDs, books, and charities I learned in 2006 that I could afford to donate $100 a month to a charity, or $1200 annually. I'd like to make it $1500 in 2007, but I won't make it monthly since its not such an easy thing to dole out anymore. Obviously, the increase in money for that means I need to tone down in other areas, and there's no more areas in dire need than CDs and books. So I just came up with an ambitious plan, like 30 minutes ago, for how to justify spending. For CDs: 10 regular-price CDs a month, maximum. No price quota, just 10 full-price CDs whatever their cost, vacation luxuries exempt. For books: no book purchases (excepting thrifts) until I've read at least 5 things already sitting on my shelf. As I just bought some stuff today (book-length interview of David Lynch, collection of 3 Tintin volumes, and a compendium on beer by Michael "No Not That Michael Jackson" Jackson) I have areas to improve in.
Man, how long have I been writing this? Too long. I will close this by saying that, personal connections aside, I was pleased to meet the following lj personalities in real-life manifestations this year: ikahana, vertamae, pilote, and tabletop (the latter for about 4 drunken minutes in Providence but still). The world of social networking is a very silly world indeed, but honestly you people are all perhaps my biggest connection to popular culture and my life is truthfully richer with your presence. Thank you all for being there and for writing. Okay, I'm being all huggy, its truly a sign that alcohol is taking effect. 2006, you were a good year, but its time for you to go. May I get 50 minutes' worth of kiss-ass points by saying Welcome, 2007!