P.S. on resolutions: not amusing enough for you?

If my resolution (see post below) left you disappointed, let me tell you, there are many more out there on the Net that you can peruse and reflect about. I’ll leave you with a few choice samples from lounge.bust.com, where a number of commenters have resolved the following:

From jilliec:
- Devote more time to playing my fucking guitar.
- Smoke more pot.

From spunkychick:
- replace the 'blech' items in wardrobe with new funky fun items

From rebookie:
- Have sex again

From dusty:
- stop slacking with housecleaning, work, paying bills, hair care answering emails and basically anything in my life that involves responsibility.

From mandolyn:
- cut down on the alcohol and drug-consumption.

From isotopia:
- stop picking at my skin

From tyger:
- stop pulling the hair out of my knees and knuckles as stress relief

From nanuk:
- Finish grad school applications

From pinkpoodle:
- Moisturize more

From Venetia:
- Publish three things in refereed journals.
- Go to Italy (or else Poland, but probably Italy)

[I was with her until the last one. Definitely she should go with Poland. Italy is everyone’s choice. Poland is for the lovers, the intellectuals, the truly forward-looking.]

Resolutions for the New Year: the final post on this topic

The house is quiet. Everyone is out doing things that for one reason or another I do not want to join in on. It is VERY quiet. Eerie almost. Very very quiet. In the still of this silence, I can write down the resolution that will have to do for this blog, for the coming year:

I resolve to write more, rather than less, in 2005.

That’s it. Nothing more.

A post on my longstanding attachments to letter writing

Forget about blogs, emails and the entire technological revolution. I love letters. I want to go back to letters. I admire them and the people who write them well. Some of my favorite books are compilations of letters. I refuse to throw out the recent New Yorker because it has the letter exchange between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I love it. Completely totally.

On the strength of that, I went to Borders today and looked again at their (meager) collections of correspondence. People are private about their letters -- not much is made available for publication. But in my search through the anthologies I came across something almost as enticing: A Chance Meeting – Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854 – 1967. W.E.B. Du Bois and Charlie Chaplin. Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell. Gertrude Stein and William James. Etc. Private history (a term coined by Mark Twain). You can’t ever conclude anything on the basis of the scant information that we are presented with, but still, it can give you pause: a chance meeting and we have a changed person. That it then has an impact on her (his) art or writing goes without saying. The Mystery is absolute though, because the reader can never fully understand how different things may have been without that little pod of influence.

Just a fragment from “A Chance Meeting:”

In years later, Gertrude Stein used to tell the story that one beautiful spring day, after she had been to the opera every night for a week and was tired, she had to take an exam in Professor James’s class, and she found that she “just could not.” Writing in the third person, she described herself sitting there: “Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today, and left.” He wrote her a card saying that he perfectly well understood and, according to her, gave her the highest mark in the class. That she actually passed with a B seems to have been solidly obscured in her mind by her preference for her own version of the events – one that illustrated the deep sympathy between Gertrude Stein and William James.

Ann says yes to cell phones on planes, I say take them to the bathroom and stay there

On second thought, why should you have the privilege of the limited washroom facilities? Ann claims that the plane is a noisy public place and that if you are in need of quiet, buy and iPod!

No no no, do not force me to dangle white strings from my ears, I do not want an iPod. But I also do not want to listen to Gidget discuss her shopping trip with Aurelia for two hours right as we are flying over Buffalo.

People who use cells in public do so loudly and without attention to the other. It has become such a nuisance that trains on the East Coast, in Europe and in Japan (and the world over for all I know) have created quiet cars. Seats there fill faster than in the “regular” cars. I wonder why.

We are generally a noisy people. It is said that Americans stand out abroad and I can see that: we boom and bang our way through most chatter. But if the rest of the world is to be trapped with us in tight spaces, can’t it at least request of us that we shut the little hell-toy up for a few hours? Let’s get email on the planes up and running. Yes, yes, I’m all for that. But please, keep that little cell jingle on silence mode while in the air.

Resolutions for the New Year: surfing for ideas, continued

Still not satisfied with yesterday’s web-based suggestions, I am digging deeper into other people’s failed lives and unaccomplished goals from years past. Maybe in these heaps of botched effort I’ll find inspiration – or at least nuggets of wisdom on what to avoid for 2005.

When I need to find the weird, the obscure, the original weblog, I go to the cool, the wonderful, the prolific boingboing.net. After all, they were the source of the link to Shizzy’s Page, where a guy recounts how he developed an email correspondence with a lowly employee of Starbucks while pretending that he, the blogger, was the CEO. [A handful of Ocean readers thought the prank was mean beyond mean and they threatened to boycott Ocean if I posted a link to it, so I restrained myself. I agree that it’s mean beyond mean, juvenile, impish, vile even. To agree along with us, check it out for yourself, here.]

Boingboing did not disappoint. They offer a link to 43folders.com where a geek (Merlin Mann) recounts his implementation of principles articulated in the popular “Getting Things Done.” Yeah!

Reading just the last few entries floods me with the realization that things are slated for failure unless you keep your projects small and you get rid of ambitious and complicated to do lists. I am staring at my ambitious and complicated “to do” list as I type this. Dare I tear it up for the New Year? Wee hoo! Merlin writes [emphases are my own]:

I try to ensure that any action I identify as a next action can be finished, front to back, in less than 20 minutes time—preferably in fewer than 10 minutes. So, forexample, while “Write an article on GTD” is practically useless (that’s a project!).

[Furthermore:]

In a previous life as a producer and project manager for some good-sized web projects, I once approached my work with a completely baseless optimism and sense of possibility that I had absolutely no business feeling—let alone foisting off on others as way to guide big projects... Yikes. Simpler times.

The reality is that projects change, and projects break; that’s what they do. It’s their job. The smaller your project is, and the shorter the distance there is between “here” and “there,” the less likely you are to have to chuck it and start over for reasons you couldn’t possibly have foreseen when you were knitting up them fancy GANTT charts for Q3/2007.

Okay, resolve to resolve small things, and get rid of grand plans and unwarranted optimism. I'm getting warmer now to the day when I can actually resolve something! Stay tuned.