I'm not a big fan of
New Years resolutions. Those ideas that seem so achievable about
half an hour before the
big event rapidly sour as reality (and the next morning
hangover) sets in.
It's almost fashionable (or certainly very excusable) to fail, and it's almost funny to fail them
before the hangover has even set in. Of course, lots of things seem
funny when one is drunk, which may go some way to explaining that video of me
dancing to Shania Twain, or the popularity of
Tits on a keyboard.
The concept of picking a
time to set goals, and following through with them, has always fascinated me somewhat, not least
because I usually fail more or less
spectacularly at the planning stage. The everyday hassles of daily life mire me down, and I find
myself, usually less than a week later, trying to answer the police when they ask me exactly what the hell I was thinking
when I spray-painted a statue of Ghandi day-glo pink. In broad daylight.
Considering the whole process some time around Christmas, I realised that perhaps my goals were not
inaccessible, but that they were poorly conceived, and were unaccompanied by much motivation. It's
all very well to say that one wants to club baby seals for a living, but unless one
breaks that lofty goal into smaller components, it will remain as elusive as petrol in Zimbabwe. One would have to find companies that practise seal-clubbing, or at least groups
of people who do it as a hobby (possibly though Greenpeace), and get in touch with them, find out
what skills they would be looking for, where they operate from, and make enquiries as to job
openings. It may be necessary to buy your own club. Then travel arrangements would need
to be made, accomodation found, and several other factors taken into consideration. Each step is not
only possible, but actually pretty simple, until one day one steps out onto the tundra, club in
hand, and prepares to make to make baby seal paté.
Hence, the concept of February resolutions. They're made at a point in time when things are usually fairly quiet, can be planned for more easily, and if you only want to keep them up for a month, well, it's a short month.
My own goals are not quite so lofty - all I wish is to move about half a planet away, break an addiction
more severe than heroin, and reach the nigh-mythical level four on some internet
website.
I can hear you now: "Why should we care? These goals are paltry, pitiful aspirations! Aim for
something truly great, like spray-painting the Queen Victoria statue!" I would, but there are...
complications involved. On an unrelated note, I'm the only person to ever receive a restraining order from a statue. Besides, to reach
that third goal, I'm going to need to post here fairly often, so you'll be hearing a lot more from
me. Learn to deal with it.
My goals, then:
- Move half a planet away - While some might argue that since the Earth orbits the sun at about 29.8Km/s, and the diameter of the
Earth is 12 756km, I accomplish this feat, along with everybody else, roughly every 3 and a half minutes, but this is not quite what I mean. I've found myself
caught up by wanderlust, a desire to experience a new way of life, and the
best way for me to do this is to find employment elsewhere on the planet. My eyes are on the UK, mostly due to my British passport, but I'm open to suggestions. The job does need to be
IT related, as it's what I know - particularly networking and
general systems administration. To do this, I'll need to:
- Dust off and update my
CV
- Find out what offers are available overseas
- Apply, and actually get
something
- Make arrangements so that my current clients are left stranded
- Make
appropriate plans to move there
- Quit smoking - This one scares me a little. I've made the plunge before, and succeeded
for more than six months, but smoking is an integral part of my life, and has been for about ten
years now. I've heard good things about Varenicline though, so it
may be time to try again. To do this, I'll need to:
- Reach level four on E2 - I'm not actually into reaching level
four just for the sake of reaching it; rather I feel I need to give more back to a site that's given
me so much over the last few years. I need to node more, and to get
into the swing of that, I'm going to node at the least a daylog every two days, more if I can. Since
my access to computers outside of work is spotty since my hard drive keeled over, this may be a
difficult one to follow, but I'm certainly going to try. To do this I'll need to:
- Write at
least 14 nodes this month
- Try not to make them all daylogs
Looking at what I've written, I'm left feeling slightly awed by the amount of work I've set myself -
but the key thing is that it is set, and all that is left is to start.
The first step is the
hardest. Wish me luck.