Okay, maybe THIS will be the year where everything bets betterish!

A Word From The Future: I'll surely recap my New Years Resolution progress at some point later in the year, but......Jesus, if only I had known...

As always, the start of a new year means that people everywhere make promises to themselves, usually involving weight loss, that they probably have no real intention of actually keeping, to be perfectly honest. It's almost as grand a tradition as making films about how not believing in fictional characters is just plain wrong around Christmas, or having the President pardon a turkey that has been wrongly convicted of the heinous crime of being a turkey around Thanksgiving!

• Social skills, yet again. My personal lack of adequate social skills has, really, always been the evil archnemesis of the sizeable portion of me that needs people. Every year, I convince myself that maybe that year will be the year I finally start nailing it. Well, maybe this year will be the year I finally start nailing it! The thing about being a quiet, socially anxious person, of course, is that your silence often comes across as uncaring coldness to anyone else, and so I resolve to be friendlier and generally more outgoing. One of the fundamental secrets to succeeding here, I think, is surrounding myself with other friendly, outgoing people, as opposed to flimsy introverts. I'm already making relative progress on this one, actually! So that's awesome. But it could be a lot better. And it will be a lot better.
• Stop living in the past already. Why should I waste energy worrying about the dicks and dickettes who have wronged me? I shouldn't. That should be a no-brainer, but all anxiety disorders come with an element of fun, fun obsessiveness that I intend to brutally slay in 2012. Hopefully. Brutally. Hopefully.
  
• CREATIVITY. Creative projects, be it writing or drawing or some combination thereof, or even low-grade crafts, have always been one of the few things that could reliably buoy my mood and keep it from sinking into the depths of the Sea of Self-Loathing (which I think is in Europe or something). And yet, my laziness always keeps me from engaging in them, which is just bonkers. Taking care of myself includes indulging that stereotypical liberal-bi-guy love of the arts, after all, because I'm lame like that. But really, aren't there far lamer ways to be lame? I'd like to think so! So I might as well go ahead and be lame in the way that benefits me the most. (And, um, I might as well take that opportunity to advertise the early stages of a project still very much in development!)
  
• Weight loss. Just because I complain about everyone else resolving to eat healthier and exercise more, and then completely failing to do so, doesn't mean I couldn't stand to do so myself! Minus the completely failing to do so part. As with, I imagine, most people, my major roadblock here is that I simply fail to cook for myself often enough. Processed foods aren't doing me any favours, after all. The homemade version of pretty much anything not only tastes better, but is also fundamentally healthier just because they don't have to smother it in chemicals and fat and especially excessive cheese. Ew. (No offence to the cheese fetishists out there.) My quest to cook healthier meals for myself actually started about halfway through last year, though it's still not perfect - ideally, I'd like to get to the point where I can do so every night. And it'll be tasty, and you'll all be so fucking jealous you won't be able to see straight. :)

...and regular healthily pleasurable prostate massage.

Now, we all know the routine by this point. I start out the year by saying, hey, this is where things finally start to get awesome. ("Apartment life with a friend will be fun and totally work out in the end I'm sure!") And the, by the end of the year, I'm feeling down because of a stark lack of awesomeness. ("As it turns out, the economy in some places is very much subpar and long story short Jim is a cunt!") So why should I think it'd be any different this year? Well, I know myself better now than ever. I understand what I want and what will make me happy. I understand that, yes, I'm capable of a lot. I also understand that now I'm only surrounding myself with friends that are fundamentally decent people. Smiley face emoticon. I have less doubt than usual in my mind right now that 2012 is gonna be something decent!