resolutions: enero

more time here

I'm back from a whirlwind trip to Wisconsin; we made it in pretty good time yesterday, considering that bands of snow and snush were moving west to east at the same time we were trying to move east to west, and that many cars were spun out in the ditches, and that I am so sick of the drive from Indiana to Rockford that I want to shout NO, THANK YOU! at every Illinois toll collector I see. One last dinner at the only decent restaurant in Whitewater, where the margarita tasted like summer, and then this morning I woke up early and hit the road with a cup of Dunkin' Donuts. I also ordered an egg-flatbread sandwich at DD, which based on the picture I knew would be a complete mistake. If you ever find yourself at a Dunkin' Donuts with somebody you don't really like very much, recommend this sandwich highly to them! You should stick with a French cruller yourself.

I did score a pretty tasteless 2009 calendar for my office, though, so it wasn't a total wash.

So yes, anyway, classes are in swing and the B's been returned, which means that the holiday break/travel extravaganza has finally come to an end. This evening finds me camping out in an hoodie, with curry to prepare and thank-you cards to write. I'm overhauling my classes this semester, which should provide me with enough work to keep me busy, but I still can feel winter outside trying to break in.

Last year I had to run down to Atlanta twice in two months to stave off a pretty terrible case of seasonal affect (granted, I also sort of hated my life at the time), so it's probably a good idea for me to make some plans so that January, February, and March do not kill me again. So, in that spirit, I've decided to make monthly resolutions. Why monthly? Because that way I only have to beat myself up for thirty days if I fail at one (and only twenty-eight days in February), and because I have the attention span of an insect.

Therefore, during the month of January, my goals are to:

* join the Y and get back into the habit of running three days a week. The last month of runs have been pretty compromised, seeing as how there is five inches of icy shit caked on the sidewalks around here; I have also fallen like twenty times.

Also, my friend E has promised me that at the Y downtown, each treadmill comes equipped with a television, so I can run and watch Lenny Briscoe do his thing.

* drink more tea. I usually think of tea as coffee's little sister, the one who always comes downstairs when coffee and I are in the basement hanging out and playing Barbies and wants to join our merriment when really we have no use for her, but maybe a cup of decaf tea on a cold winter afternoon will be just the thing.

* continue to wear black boots to class, which I re-discovered in the back of my closet last week. I forgot how good these boots make me feel, and how surprisingly walk-able they are, and as a bonus, snow cannot get into them and they make an authoritative clack-clack noise when I walk around the computer labs.

* write letters to people; Lake2Corn's recent letter-writing campaign, and a letter freshly arrived from the P, have inspired me. Also, I can brew some tea and sit at the window and glance out at the snow thoughtfully while I write, and this will make me feel very Dickinsonian, until I grow impatient and jump online to read Daily Intel posts and pretend I know anything about living in New York.

* send Colleen in China the care package that I have been promising her since August 2007.

* read something that is not student writing once a day, preferably before getting into the first season of The West Wing that the B left behind.

* spend more time in the kitchen.

* not kill some new succulents.



Now your turn. Remember that if you fail miserably at keeping any, it's only three weeks until you get to make new ones. I also suspect that mine will get far less ambitious in the coming months (sample February: try to keep out of the Jameson until at least four o'clock and brush teeth EVERY DAY), but then again, that's sort of February's fault for sucking so much.