Resolutions are stupid. Goals are not.

So here we are on the eve of a bright and shiny new year. 2011.

According to many people, it was a pretty horrible year, what with the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the BP oil spill, the recession hanging on for dear life, and Ke$ha.

For me, it wasn't a terrible year. It was a bit up and down, more up than down, really. I flew to LA to see Barbara get married, and I got to be her maid of honor. I got a random, out of the blue pay raise at work, which was really nice. And Andrew proposed. :) Not getting diagnosed with a disease this year ALSO helped, I think. Low expectations and all that.

I have a lot of friends who are in their late twenties who are doing all these lists of things they are going to do before they turn thirty. I am a bit late for that, since I turn thirty in less than 2 months. But, I do have a list of things I want to do this year, so here goes! Yay for bulleted lists!

• I want to run a 5k. Just to do it. I want to start training and follow through, and run a 5k before the summer is over. Along those lines...
  
  
• I want to finish losing weight. I've got about 35 pounds to go before I'm back to the weight I was in high school. It's a lot less daunting to look at it as 35 pounds to go rather than 100 pounds to go, I must say.
  
  
• I want to elope to someplace fabulous. This one is already in the works.
  
  
• I want to get a passport. And use it!
  
  
• I want to be less wasteful, and more organized. I've already started on this by tackling my spare room. Combining households hasn't been bad, but some stuff has got to go. I've also bought a planner, and unlike other years, I'm actually going to use this one.
  
  
• I want to keep saving money. This is the first year that I've managed to put some money away, and I want to keep doing it.
  
  
• I want to write more. I don't do it as much as I should. In fact, every time I sit down to do it I feel like I have to knock three inches worth of rust off my my pathetic attempts at prose.
  
  
• I want to be more creative in general. I made three knitted gifts for Christmas, and it seems to have sparked a return into knitting, which I pretty much ignored for most of 2009.
  
  
• I want to read more, and be in front of a computer less. We'll see if I pull this off.
  
  
• I want to be off of my diabetic medication completely by the end of this year. I went down by half this year, next year, the whole thing!

Most of these goals seem attainable because they aren't starting anything particularly new, mostly, it's just me building on and refining things that I have started a while ago. It's gratifying to not start from ground zero, and to feel like I've got a certain amount of forward momentum.

So here's to 2011. May all of you who read this blog (yes, all ten of you) have a fantastic new year. Things can only get better.

I don't know why I write best when I should be sleeping...

Someday, I'm sure, I'll be able to coordinate this whole writing thing to times when I shouldn't be sleeping or otherwise doing other things. But when the urge strikes and the thoughts continue to circle, it's either getting it out or slowly driving myself crazy.

But then the thing that kills me is that I feel like I don't have anything that's worthy of saying. Everything that I want to express is so much bigger than me, and my attempts to nail it down into a blog post do nothing more than strangle the life out of anything interesting that could be going through my brain right now.

I could elaborate at how everything in my life is changing, and has been changing for the past year and a half, but... a growing life is something that's always in flux. Change is nothing new. Change is actually welcomed. Change pretty much scares the living shit out of me, but is ultimately for the best.

To follow that theme, I probably should say at this point that I'm engaged. It's been a fairly surreal experience. That's not saying that I'm not happy, because I am. Besides a short, ring-less engagement when I was 19 years old, I've never done this before. Completely new and foreign territory for me. Sometimes I look down at my engagement ring and it seems like it's been beamed down onto my hand from some kind of foreign planet.

I think the thing that scares me the most is how much the Wedding Industrial Complex has gotten completely out of control, because after all, now I am a BRIDE, and I should be compulsively researching weddings on The Knot, picking out ugly, expensive dresses for my friends to wear, and picking out the *perfect* party favors. Things that I could seriously care less about. In fact, the more I think about the kind of pressure involve in a big (or even a small wedding, because they are never *small* weddings) wedding, the less I want it. Too much fuss, too much money. Money we could put into a really awesome honeymoon or first house. Which, since we'd be footing the bill for whatever we do, is what I'd prefer, and thankfully, Andrew agrees.

This week, I go back for another diabetes checkup. I've been diabetic for a full year now, this month. My side project has been sadly lacking, because I've been entirely too busy fighting the diabetes to write about it, but I plan to pick it up soon, to fill in my story before I completely forget it. I've lost over fifty pounds since January of 2009, and I have about 30 some more to go before I am finished. While the numbers on the scale haven't changed in a while, I am so much stronger than I ever was before. I actually have some pretty serious arm and leg muscles now. And I can do a wheel pose without trying really hard. I promise, that's pretty impressive. I keep chipping away at it, and I feel that soon, I'll be finished. I was able to cut my medicine by 50% my last checkup, and there's an outside chance I could get off of it for good by this checkup. Striving to be the diabetes valedictorian has its plus sides, I suppose.

Last month I got to see my very favorite band, The New Pornographers, in Chapel Hill. They brought an awesome show, of course. Dan Bejar came to the performance, and stumbled on and off the stage like a drunken uncle, singing his songs and playing with his back to the audience, and generally just being delightfully weird. We had seats on the mezzanine, and I got to bang my hands into the railing in time with the music, and I bounced so hard in my seat I was pretty sure I was going to owe UNC a new one by the end of the performance. I could see everything and everyone without having to fight Tall Guy Syndrome (TM), which was really nice.

Before the encore, Andrew and I raced downstairs and bought a signed poster that's now hanging in a space of honor in my apartment. And I do metaphorically squeal like a little girl at the thought that for at least five seconds, I have something that Neko Case touched. She'll be filing that restraining order any day now, I'm sure. :) It was a perfect night. Standing during the final encore, with Andrew's arm around me, thinking about just how far I've come as the music swirled around me. How lucky I was to be with someone who's been patient and supportive while I put my life back together. There was no false note to break the moment, and I got to float back to the car, singing and dancing the whole way. One of those nights that you file away in your memory, if only to remember how wonderful life can be.

I've started reading again, with a vengeance. I bought Blankets at a used book store during that Chapel Hill trip, and it was beautifully written and illustrated. I hope to get myself together to start doing book reviews for the newspaper soon, Heather's been sending me great autobiographies of women in rock. Thanks to my downstairs neighbor, I've finally read To Kill a Mockingbird, and I wish that I'd had to read it for something long before this. I really love Scout.

And now it's almost 2am, and time to try to sleep again.
m.

You better watch out for this girl, she's got a gun for a tongue...

Writing? I still do that?

Someday I want to sing this at karaoke.

Help! I keep listening to this song and I can't stop!

More thoughts on IRM tomorrow.

call me the tumbling dice...

My relationship with The Rolling Stones has been complicated. So often with music, we allow ourselves to get an innocent band ensnared in the maelstrom of emotions that surround a certain time, a certain place, or a certain person. That's ok, because I think the one thing the Rolling Stones have never been is innocent. So if they pick up some unnecessary guilt by association, it's okay. They are probably guilty of something else just as bad.

I remember watching "Start Me Up" on MTV when I was a little girl, and listening to my mother (or one of my grandmothers) make a comment on how Mick Jagger's lips looked completely obscene. And the moves he made! Oh my! But despite Mick's propensity to throw himself into performing like a demented man-pixie on cocaine, the music stuck. Do you know anyone who can't hum at least a few bars of a Rolling Stone song? Do they currently have a pulse? Exactly.

This is the Rolling Stones that I grew up with. Hypersexualized, brutally masculine, oversized caricatures of themselves. Listening to their greatest hits albums (conveniently packaged for mass consumption with a minimum of thought) I would get disturbed listening to their music after about twenty minutes, no matter what era it was from. I had heard the early hits. And the late hits. I had a passing awareness that when Mick and Keef had started this crazy band that they were both lovers of the blues. But the product that I was exposed to left none of that in view... just some killer hooks and "come on baby, let's *fill in the blank*" I could see why my riotgrrl heroines had such problems with their music. I could understand why Liz Phair (back before the masses turned on her) wrote a song by song rebuttal of "Exile on Main Street."

But then tonight I sat myself down and listened to "Exile on Main Street" in its entirety. And tonight, I finally got it. Finally, I heard the magic that the true believers of the Stones cling on to so desperately, tour after tour, transparent grab for money after transparent grab for money. Those boys are playing with dynamite, and they did it in much cooler ways, many many years before I was born. Listening to "Shine a Light" stream through my speakers changed the way that I understand their music as a whole, and that music is much better than what is when it's crammed down into those greatest hits collections. Obviously. I still don't know if I've managed to reconcile myself with the image that they project, but I am interested to learn more. But only with the good albums, of course :)

rattling around in my brain this weekend...

So good.
Also, I am probably going to buy the new Charlotte Gainsbourg next weekend.

Check it out here:
http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb/mb100127charlotte_gainsbourg

Also, after seeing Lady Gaga's ensemble for the Grammy's I've been humming "Poker Face" under my breath all night. Ugh.