Jenny has said she's not one for resolutions, and I'm with her: pulling "gonnas" out of your ass, as in "I'm gonna quit smoking" or "I'm gonna get in shape" or "I'm gonna quit pulling things out of my ass", is a recipe for feelings of personal failure and severe depression in the cold, holiday-free months of the new year. She prefers a "theme", such as "revival" or "more love" or "less putting of things in quotation marks." (Oh, wait, that's mine.)

I do like and believe in making plans, it appeals to the listmaker in me, and will probably take another, more serious crack at the Best Year Yet, "values-based" goal-setting system, for 2007. But before I even get to BYY, which I have actually SCHEDULED on the CALENDAR (December 23rd, you're on yer own that night, The BF), I came up with a theme for next year: Expand and Focus.

While I realize this seems like a contradiction in terms, I like it for precisely that reason: it's like a zen koan, and it's custom-made for overachieving type-As like me. Why? Because it will slow me the fuck down, that's why. You try being an overachieving type-A for 45 years. Hell, try it for a week. If you're unused to it, I can almost guarantee you'll suffer adrenal burnout in 72 hours.

Of course, I may still pick "Slow Down" or even "Slow the Fuck Down" as my 2007 mantra, but it has such negative connotations for me now, I feel glum just typing it. In contrast, I feel good about the sort of limitless possibility attached to "Expand and Focus". Also, I can monkey with this sort of stuff indefinitely, until things reach such a disastrous state of disarray, it becomes like deck chair rearranging on the Titanic. And believe you me, I'll keep shuffling those things till there's no deck left to shuffle on.

Still, some of you out there know me pretty well by now. Perhaps you have an even better deck chair arrangement to suggest...

xxx c

Photo by nickherber via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license