New Year's Resolutions

We all make 'em. We all break 'em. It's nearly the end of January and -- surprise surprise -- 2004 is bearing a stinky resemblance to the undisciplined ways of 2003, at least here at The Balcony. I didn't make any resolutions this year, not just because it is perennially futile, but also because there's nothing more fun than a weekend of debauchery, say, and having all those resolutions go to pot in one fell swoop.

At some point over the holidays, I even considered making up some mock resolutions to be more uncouth, self-indulgent, and adopt a more devil-may-care attitude than in 2003:

** SWEAR MORE **... not that I'm self-censorious on my blog -- this is the way I talk normally -- but in a recent spate of nostalgia I cast my mind back to my Australia days in the early '90s, when I was swearing like a sailor, living communally on a campground, sharing a tent with this wacky French guy named Bruno (with the wildest dreadlocks and teeth that threatened to fall out of his mouth when he spoke his very limited Aussie slang bastardized English), laying around swimming pools and the beach all day to escape the heat and playing pool all night to win free beer. At that juncture in our relatively carefree lives Berit and Jez were picking tobacco in Mareeba during the week and would hitchike into Cairns on Saturdays to meet me and play volleyball so we could get a free BBQ... Those were the days!!! I would phone home occasionally, and after six months I had this bizarre broad northern Queensland accent and it was all I could do to spit out a sentence without danger of offending my parents. Not that swearing more today would evoke a magical nostalgia and miraculously draw me out of my current funk, but sometimes a little swearing goes a long way to making one feel better. In those days the phone calls home would usually end with either party hanging up angrily, so swearing became not only habitual but as natural as breathing. After 13 months in Australia, my speech was so deep in the gutter it was in danger of never seeing the light of day again. (Then I went to Scotland for two years... ha! ha! -- where it got even worse at one point.)

As far as the usual resolutions go, there are certain items that appear on every New Year's Resolutions list because self-improvement is drummed into us from birth (especially those of us who are the children of the '80s):

LIVE HEALTHIER, i.e.
* exercise more
* eat more fruit and veg

--blah blah... -- for others, that might include 'watch less TV', 'read more', 'drink less', 'shop less', 'save more money,' what-have-you. However, these are behaviours that wouldn't necessarily impact our lives in a major way if we didn't follow them. We could just carry on as is. Then, there are the things that bear influence on work ethic and our ability to self-finance or advance ourselves vocationally:

WORK HARDER, i.e.
* be more disciplined
* stop procrastinating
* put more effort and energy into work/school/etc.

Then there's the stuff that pertains specifically to me, and anyone who knows me will recognize my bad habits and tendency to self-neglect:

* go to bed earlier, get up earlier (or, go to bed at all!)
* don't be late for appointments of any kind
* spend less time on the computer and go out more (believe you me, this wasn't the case until I started working from home then going to uni)
* be a bit more girly, like maybe get my hair done professionally more than once per year
* look after my feet (when boyfriends lodge complaints, it's time to get out the pumice stone)

I mean, I pride myself on being low-maintenance, but sometimes I take things a bit too far...

So, here I am, tomorrow is the last day of January, and I am one day behind on my first assignment of the term. There's no REAL excuse for it. In fact, I was discussing this with a colleague today, how hard it seems to get my act together on a paper similar to one I wrote a year ago with perceptually less difficulty. Here I am, typing into my blog, NOT doing the paper. She suggested to me that I've got a case of the 3rd-year-unmotivated blues. I think she's right, but for different reasons -- it's not that I'm down on getting this degree, it's not that I don't think it's worth it, or that I'm even wondering what I'll do at the end of it... I've come to the conclusion that I'm still mentally burnt out from the end of 2003. I thought the Christmas break would cure me, would revitalize me, would give me a renewed sense of resolve. I was hoping it would recharge me, and I did show a glimmer of promise when I did cover some of the assigned reading a couple of weeks ago, but then -- POOF! -- it was gone, and I'm back in my bad old procrastinating ways. My brain just doesn't seem to want to co-operate. I procrastinated plenty before, but I always managed to get the assignments done ON TIME. I never handed in anything late, and by the marks I received, I kept the calibre of the writing consistently decent. But now...

NOW...

Do I need to check myself into an ashram or something? Go to a spa? What?? (I'm not going to a spa, though, that's too far a leap into high-maintenance territory.) Maybe when I hit 40. Am I going through some kind of pre-mid-life-oh-no-I'm-past-30-crisis??