Resolutions

It's that time again, and I figured that I might as well do a short blog about my New Year's Resolutions.
I dislike the enormous amount of celebration for New Year, since it's amongst the most arbitrary of all the things we like to celebrate. However, it is convenient to use the fact that we're back to January to start a new thing, and quite frankly it's a good excuse for me to sort my life out!

So, my New Year's Resolutions in no particular order, and some more important than others:

1. A press-up for every day of the year
This is something my brother-in-law did last year, and managed to get about half-way through before failing* if I remember rightly. Essentially, I'm going to do a press-up for every day of the year that has gone so far. So on the 1st of January I did one press-up. Yesterday I did two, and today I'll do three. I suspect that when we get towards April, this one will start to get difficult!

* Upon reading this my brother-in-law (who incidentally forget that he is such) would like to make it known that he didn't so much "fail" as "stop because doing press-ups was not a priority that day in June when he was curled in a ball hallucinating after a whole night of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea." Sorry for the confusion Andy, that sounds much better.

2. More pride in my appearance
I don't spend much time in a morning making myself look presentable, but I want to change that for a couple of reasons. The first being that the vast majority of people will judge you based on what they see, so I want them to get a good impression before I open my mouth and ruin all. The second is that it just never hurts to look good, and I find that I actually enjoy looking my best. I've already been doing this one slowly but surely over the past six months or so: cutting my hair and losing my flesh tunnels chief amongst the changes I've made. I'll be shaving more often and trying to get fitter with this one as well.
The nice advantage to this resolution is that I'm easing myself in. By the time getting fitter actually becomes an issue, I should have a little more will-power stored up to succeed!

3. Practise Japanese more regularly
At the moment I'm still on holiday, though the days remaining are running short and I could do with getting some revision in. But I want to start revising every day: a grammar structure, or a set of words, or a thirty minute conversation; whatever it takes to just keep my Japanese ticking over.

4. Finish Maia's Lullaby
Maia's Lullaby is a piece of music I've been writing on the piano for the best part of two years and it's high time that I got it finished. If I get my act together, I can have it done, tweaked, written out neatly and recorded in time for her second birthday. And that's the target I'm setting myself.

5. Learn a new skill, or get a new hobby
This is probably the most generic of resolutions out there, but hear me out. Whenever I talk to my brother, I'm struck by how many things he has going on: he tinkers with cars, he plays most instruments you care to name, he plays Bloodbowl, and fiddles around with magic; all the while still managing to go to work; feed himself, his girlfriend and their menagerie of animals and generally get on with life. And right now, if somebody asked me what my hobbies are, I'd be able to say music and occasionally blogging. So I'm going to learn a new skill, or rediscover an old one. I'm going to make myself more interesting!

I think five resolutions is enough to be getting on with. And I also think, that in the first week of every month, I'll do a resolution update, to let the Internet at large know how it's all going and if I've given up on any of them yet.

Tally ho!

Sleepless Nights

It's been a long time since my first post. I think that first post (which I recommend you read if you haven't yet) was necessary for a little personal catharsis, as the thing in question was eating me from the inside. As it turns out, I should probably have saved that for a later post, because quite a lot of my motivation to write had simply vanished. But now, at 4.22am - and having survived the apocalypse predicted by the Maya* - I am still awake and in need of something to do.

Something that happens to me just about every time that I go on holiday from school (or as is the case now, University) is that my sleeping pattern very quickly degrades into what is more or less nocturnalism.** This can normally be put down to me having nothing to be up for in the morning and thinking "well there's no need to go to bed yet, I'll just finish [insert random activity, usually involving computers or consoles]".
For example, tonight I spent a great deal of time messing around with my laptop and installing cool little programs that won't actually benefit me in the slightest. Then the little app-indicator thing for one of my new bits of software didn't look quite right, so I spent half an hour tweaking that so it fit in with the rest of my theme. After having done that I messed around with google chrome, installing a few new extensions (again, with no real need for them); read a few emails; updated my google+ account (incidentally, everybody should use G+: it's vastly better than Facebook); and played a computer game for the best part of ninety minutes.
And now, it's not even that I don't have anything to get up for. It's simply that I've been going to sleep later and later and earlier and earlier (see what I did there?) that come 4 in the morning I'm just not tired. Then again, a couple of years ago when I was working every day in the winter holidays from 7 until 4 - completely missing out on any sunlight in the process - I still did this. Though at that time I just felt I was getting precisely zero time to myself to just chill out, so I'd end up working quite intensively on sometimes less than 3 hours' sleep. So maybe it's not that there's no reason to be up before noon on the morrow.
I think what I'm trying to say in all of this is that I feel that the older I get (because 20 years old is just ancient) the more and more I feel that there aren't enough hours in the day. But perhaps that's because I waste so much of my day doing nothing at all, that had I really done something useful with the hours of freedom, when it gets to the time I'd start to do something to relax, I've been doing it for hours already and just decide to continue.


Of course, I'll have to fix this minor mental malfunction (have some alliteration!) come January, and my exams. But in the long-term, I could do with getting it fixed permanently. Eventually I'll have a job, and it's likely that this job will require me to be up early and work from 9 until 5; ultimately leaving me with much less free-time than I would like. Plus there'll be meals to make and a house to clean and all manner of other things to do that are necessary.

...

I seem to think that when I started writing this that I had some kind of clear goal in mind as to the stopping point. I am beginning to suspect that I've lost my way a little, but can't quite decide if I have or not.
The moral of this story, then, is that I must start to do some more useful things with my days, and stop just wasting time. Carpe diem and all of that.


*If anybody is having difficulty pronouncing this word, consider that its pronunciation is not the same as Maia.

**I assume that nocturnalism is actually a word, but my browser's in-built spell-checker is objecting to it. I think I may have mentioned this in a post over on Diary of a Gaijin... But I'm not massively sure, and have no inclination to go and check, either. But if it isn't a word, then I shall begin a campaign to have it wordified, because it's clearly necessary.