Brian's World

Another New Year

2009 is well underway now.  I try very hard to be optimisitic, even in the gloomiest of times.  If there is a speck of hope, I embrace that to the best of my ability.  Typically years end without much hope.  The big ticket items on my todo list from previous years have barely been touched, and I usually find myself making very little progress on the “better yourself as a person” goal.  The holiday season doesn’t help much, usually reminding me how lucky I am to be surrounded by people who have a poor understanding of what I may enjoy.  2008, like many years, was no different.. but I’m not going to spend too much time recapping that.  There are dozens of blogs you can read to review the progress I’ve made over the past year.  Lets talk a little bit about the future.

No, you won’t be finding any New Year’s Resolutions in here my friend.  I do not believe in such nonsense.  If I really want to change something I’m not going to wait to resolve to do it on the first of the year, I’m just going to start to do it… waiting for one special day is just a procrastination technique.

So far, the first 3 days of January 2009 have not been off to a great start.  I’ve had trouble motivating myself to wake up as early as I’ve planned, which may be in part due to my later than desirable bedtimes.  Upon waking up, I find the house continues to lack good breakfast food; an indicator that mom did not resolve to start the new year off with good breakfast food.  After eating, showering, making my bed, etc, I attempt to head to the computer to get some work done.  Katie sleeps far later than I, and as a result I usually have an hour or two where I should be able to focus on some programming.  Of course that never happens.  My parents have managed to find tasks to keep me busy every day until around 2:00pm.  Going to Kohls to buy coats I don’t like, taking down the Christmas tree, shoveling, helping dad plan a vacation online, etc…. all fairly time consuming tasks that I haven’t allocated time for.  I would be a bit better if there was this list, even if it was long, of things others want me to do over vacation.  I have a fairly strong sense of what I need to do, and it would be really helpful if others could just add their ideas to that list so I can assemble some sense of a daily todo list.

So I wrote all that this morning, now it is night and I have a few more/different thoughts.

I guess 2008 was a baseline sucess, and that is how I will record it in the history books. Let me take some time to recap things that went well:

• I managed to avoid dying on many occasions.
• I lost no mission critical data
• I do not recall being abducted by aliens
• ECOM was significantly upgraded
• “Morally” I remained steadfast

I tried to keep that list pretty short, I didn’t want to spend extra time recounting things that went well.  That is unhealthy.

Tonight I had the opportunity to watch several episodes of “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”  I will most certainly be writing more about this show in a later date, but I wonder what part of their lives is secret.  Anyone who is a teenager or remotely connected to teenagers these days has exposure to teen pregnancy.  I guess that could be the “secret life” if I lived on a farm without children in the middle of nowhere, but my gut tells me the show is not targeted at that audience.

If you ask me, which by visiting this site you did, one secret in this show’s portrayal of the life of a teenager is that if you look like Bob Saget in your teenage years, you can have a pretty successful high school career.  I certainly wasn’t aware of that secret part of teenage life, were you?