It's a New Year

This is the spot where nearly every blogger will drone on about what their goals are for the coming year.  I toyed around with doing something completely different - like compare and contrast the Miniature Poodle and Bichon Frise, but then realized that perhaps this is an area where I should conform.  "The people want to know", I thought. Besides, who can tell those two dogs apart, anyway? It's like determining the sex of hamsters...sure it's possible, but what difference does it make?

So, what I need is a list of grandiose plans for self-improvement, blog improvement, financial improvement, etc.  The problem is, that when I sat down to give this some thought, I was more distracted by wondering if there was more Diet Dr. Pepper in the house, than any real "improvement." 

At first, I was somewhat troubled by this, but then realized that perhaps I'm actually thinking in the right direction!  Sure, there is all that other stuff that I want to do...I even have plans in certain areas.  I'll give you one of these "goals" as proof: I plan to wear out the shutter on our new Nikon D60 this year.  I don't know if this will happen or not, but IF it does, I won't be alarmed.  You see, cameras have a finite shutter life and I've taken over 8000 pictures since the end of May when we bought the camera. I'm well on my way to wearing that shutter out. What would the point be in "saving" the shutter so the camera lasts?  Nothing.  The point of a camera is to take pictures. I took more pictures just this past week that I am proud of than I took in many years with my film SLRs.  The near immediate feedback that digital photography provides you is a fabulous learning tool.  My photography and editing skills have improved every single week with this camera due to this single fact.  WHEN it wears out, I will have the shutter replaced, or buy another camera body. If the shutter does in fact wear out, I will count that as an achievement in 2009!

Back to my goals/resolutions in general. Imagine little squiggly lines coming down your screen right now as I bring us back to the original point.  So, after briefly worrying about the fact that I apparently wasn't willing to put in the effort to write down some goals for the coming year, I went into a deep deep deep self-analytical mode to figure out why.

Here's what I came up with: MANY of the goals or resolutions that people come up with involve time and effort. This takes away from your available pool of time and effort, right?  I have very little I'm willing to give up..other than that obligation of working for a living, but you gotta do that, right?  So most of the items I could think of would come at the expense - to some degree - of the things that bring us the most joy and satisfaction!  For example, my whole family works on musicals.  This basically means MONTHS of nothing else getting done.  This isn't going to change. We have a whole list of other things we do that are also big and require enormous blocks of time away from home and a "normal" life.  If you had any hopes we would become "normal" in any of these ways, forget about it for 2009.

So, I can hear you collectively telling me to "get on with it" and tell you my genius goal for the coming year that I've arrived at after copius amounts of introspective thought and all of that jazz, right?

OK, fair enough.  Here it is in all the glory I can muster with plain text:

Eat more Gooey Butter Cake.

There you have it! That sums it up for me, and here's why.  While all these other goals are certainly worthwhile on some level, we spend SO much time beating ourselves up about our failures in these areas that it is counter-productive. Soon, you don't want to try, because of fearing to fail. I'll attack this from a different angle. So my goal, as summed up above, basically says, "Enjoy life."

I think the rest will just fall into place.  Working on making things "better" is fixing the symptoms, I think.  If I keep my "Eat more Gooey Butter Cake" mantra in my mind, perhaps I will "fix" other areas that get in the way of my Gooey Butter enjoyment, right?

I've got some baking to do.

Happy New Year!

Comments

[ilinap]

OMG! We have dear friends in Chicago who always brought gooey butter cake to our parties. They gave me a cake pan and the recipe as a parting gift when we moved away to North Carolina. I treasure that recipe (and the friendship). No one makes gooey butter cake like my friends back in Chicago, but I give it the ole college try. I'm adopting this resolution too!

[Todd Jordan]

Yay for gooey butter cake resolution. Cheers to having a great new year.

Gregg,
Bring it big.
Todd

[Patrick D.]

Finally! A resolution I can get behind. More gooey butter cake for all!

[Amy (chaseafterwind)]

If you have not already tried it, I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend Gooey Louie.
http://www.gooeylouiecake.com/

[Kathy G]

You've set one more goal that *I* have!

[Wendy Kienbusch]

I like your thinking...it's alongside my husband's. His philosophy of low expectations and striving for perfect mediocrity fit in with the Gooey Butter CAke. Personally I won't spend calories on anything non chocolate.