New Year's Resolutions

You read it right: New Year's Resolutions! Management at the Global Headquarters of the Stranger in a Strange Land Blog are not immune to the general trends in society and one of them is to plan for all the great things that you want to do in the coming year. Yes, great things because nothing has been broken yet. Back when I was an innocent and little kid, I was big in New Year's Resolutions. Oh my God, I always had things I wanted to change, new plans I wanted to undertake, sometimes I even wanted to become a brand new boy by the time the lights of the new year could touch everything around me. Walking down memory lane for the last couple days, I remembered that past resolutions included to love more my family, to do better in school, to exercise more, to stop cursing, to learn to do something specific, and stuff like that.

As time went by and I started going through the whole process of growing up my resolutions started changing and evolving. For example, when I was eighteen I said that I will stop smoking cigarettes (it took me seven more years to quit that awful shit); few years before that I said that I was gona improve my tennis game to a level that could place me in the top ten of my former country club's chart (today I still can't hit the damn ball); I also said that I will fuck certain number of girls before the end of the year (one of the most stupid shit I ever came up with. I liked to set high goals in this one, but with not much luck in all honesty); and specially I will say, year after year, that the first of the year I will become a more outgoing and more forthcoming boy/teenager/dude/man in my personal relationships.

Cynicism is a trend that everybody should avoid in this life. To become a cynic is to be disenchanted with life, with yourself, and with the magic that exists out there. Cynicism is a general distrust on the motives and integrity of other people; a believe that everybody out there is just motivated by selfishness, and the cynic's outlook is overall negative. That shit doesn't hit you one day out of the blue but is created over the years and engraved in your brain little by little (by for example, coming up with New Year's Resolutions only to forget about them and then blame yourself for being good at nothing for not sticking to them). To grow cynic to yourself is the worst poison that can come to anyone's heart; that's perhaps hell on earth. And I fell on my own trap for a long list of reasons that I don't fully know or understand, and became Mr. Cynic himself. Among other things I stopped doing New Year's Resolution because for what? I'm not gona follow them, so what's the fuzz about it? Fuck that shit and those stupid resolutions! A new year means that you just have to write a different number when filling a check or a form. Period.

And as a matter of fact it is; a new year is not gona bring any change to anyone's life unless you want that change. Perhaps a brand new year can be a good excuse to do things that you've been procrastinating on. It's very easy to say "I'll do it next Monday", because there's always a new Monday around the corner, or a new month and you can postpone things for ever; but to seriously consider doing something in the New Year is a bigger commitment, and a good excuse to try to straighten one's path.
So this year I'm gona break the spell and I'm gona come up with some resolutions and I'm gona lay out the challenges that Jean-Francois will face this year. Hopefully this will help me keep my perspective in the coming months.

Anyone who has studied Organizational Behavior has came across the Needs Theory of Abraham Maslow. He says that people work to satisfy their needs; first they will try to satisfy their basic physiological needs, and then they will progress over time to satisfy their safety and security, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization needs. Very boring stuff. But for this post I'm going to take the very basic needs exposed by Maslow and will adapt them to my life in order to paint a picture of what I want in this year and the challenges that I'm gona be facing. Here let me point out that according to Maslow's Needs Theory the most basic needs of any individual are Food and Water, Shelter, and Sex (yes, sex, I'm not making this up, seriously).

FOOD AND WATER

This section of my New Year's Resolutions is not really related to food and water, but I'll give an overall list of little goals and health-related stuff I would like to focus on.

The bottom line is that you are what you eat, and how you feel physically. So one of my resolutions this year is that I'm going to re-join a gym. You see, my old gym wanted to rise my monthly fee from a subsidize $12 to a full metro membership worth $40, so I decided to quit and exercise on my own. I did it the first few weeks but as there wasn't any hot and sweaty blondes running around me, as opposed to the cardio area of the gym, I had no motivation and I've been a very lazy boy! This month I'm going to either re-join my old gym (YMCA) or find me another one a little bit cheaper; and I'm also planning in going at least around twice a week. At the end of the year I expect to have achieved a bit more than a hundred visits to the gym. And some killer abs, like *someone* I know.

Food related stuff, to follow on the title, I'm also going to learn to cook better and a wider variety of dishes. It doesn't really take much to fulfill this resolution, just a couple of cookbooks and some time to practice and burn whatever new stuff I'm trying to cook. Don't plan to have a feast on every meal coming out of my oven, but if I come up with a nice dish that I can memorize once in a while, I could say that I meet my resolution.

And now that I'm at it and before I lose trust let me mention some of the other resolutions that I have for this new year before moving to more pressing topics: I have the bad habit of procrastinating when it comes to folding my laundry and there's been entire weeks that I've lived out of the drying machine, pulling out of there whatever I need whenever I need it. I'm not planning to be like a Swiss clock when it comes to folding my laundry, but I'll try to do it more often.

I'm also gona use less my check card to pay for stuff and gona start using cash: I'm gona withdraw a generous amount at the beginning of each week (or every two weeks) and will use it for whatever I need (my spending went so-fucking-out-of-control this last month that I'm afraid to read my seriously depleted balance in my bank statement).

And I'm also going to learn how to change the break pads in my car and how to do an oil change, and I'm actually gona do it! One thing that I've always wanted to learn is how to typewrite with all my fingers. . . instead of the two four that I'm currently using. I don't have high hopes on this resolution but let me just say that this year I'm gona get a software to learn that shit and I'm gona try it.

SHELTER

This is a very hard topic for me to blog about and one that makes me edgy just by thinking about it. This year, 2006, is when I'll find out if I'm worth more than a dime or I'm just a lost cause. In the next months I'll learn whether I can stay here in the US for good or pack my stuff and head back to South America never to look back again. This year is when I'm gona make it or break it, I'll learn if I'm gona stay here or if I'm just gona put my MBA under my arm and finish my days speaking Spanish.

I've always thought that jokes are not just a stupid comment that catches you off guard making you laugh, in part due to its implausibility. For me a joke is something completely different: It is a statement or a comment that makes one laugh because it wraps the true in a way that one's conscious self thinks that it's impossible; but one's subconscious self thinks that it is perfectly possible, and the struggle between conscious and unconscious self sparks a short circuit in the brain that is exteriorized as laughter (pretty clever, uh?).

On the first appointment I had with my very own blood sucker vampire with an "immigration law" title hanging on his office, he said that what I should do is to get married to an American citizen. He called that "the fastrack to become a permanent resident". Of course we both laughed, he more than I did. . . And now I know why: that shit ain't easy at all! and he knew what he was talking about (and at $250 an hour, he better knows what the fuck he's talking about). And before anyone misunderstands my words and thinks that I'm soliciting for a wife, my whole point here is that the process to become a resident is very long and tedious and the system is stretched too thin that there's entire months when the only thing you can do is "wait". If I knew it was gona cost so much money and time, I would have spent all that money and time on a girl! (<-- that was a joke BTW).

So this year is when I'm gona learn if my original plan of moving to the US came through or not. And I'm tempted to say that is this category, Shelter, the one that sits at the heart of many issues and struggles in my life at this point and is by far the most important thing in my whole universe. Actually is the second most important thought right now in my head, being the first one what am I gona wear Tuesday night to go to my Life Music Tuesdays! Now you see that I do know how to keep things on perspective. . . (<--another joke, just in case you missed).

SEX

Just as the two previous categories of Food and Water, and Shelter, this category carries more than your usual night of hanky panky. More than coming up with a number of sex encounters for this year (or the life of love without love as the author once said) as I used to very foolishly do, I'm gona focus my energy in finding someone. And I'm not just looking for someone for the sake of the company, but someone worthwhile (there's a very special and interesting *someone* actually, even though that's a looong shot).

Anyways I've noticed that when I'm with a girl I really care for (when Jean-Fran's little heart is pumping love to every corner of his body), I become a complete different person. I turn into someone who I really like, someone that is not just nice and perhaps fun, but a guy that is driven and optimistic and happy. When I'm in love I'm able to get a better grasp on daily life and the sun actually shines in my world and the little birds sing more often than not. When hanging out and making out with someone I really care for my horizons expand and I can see well beyond my nose and ahead into the future. The tea leaves at the bottom of my cup actually talk to me and encourage me to go even further; my cracked crystal ball starts showing a lot of good things happening to good people, as I turn into a very good human being.

And the truth of the matter is that I miss that guy that I turn into when I'm with someone I feel comfortable with. I know very well the type of girl that I'm attracted to and I know very well what I'm looking for in a female -it doesn't make it any easier to find it, but to know who you want and what you can bring into a relationship helps you keep focused. And even if my conscious self doesn't recognize that special girl at the very beginning, as it has happened before in my life, my subconscious mind sets off all possible alarms for me to realize it and to open my eyes. Here I would like to say and to make the resolution that I will not, under any circumstances, set my eyes on a girl who is planning on leaving the country or the state, as the last fucking thing that I want in this life is another farewell. But I'm also fully aware that the struggle between the brain and the heart is like a fight between a hungry tiger and a donkey tied to a tree. The donkey is the brain. . . and there's just no chance.

In this category I'm going to include a resolution that I used to come up with year after year and that I know is going to take long time to fulfill, and hopefully I'll never be able to say that I accomplished it. This year I'm gona try to be more forthcoming with people I care for, to show them and to tell them that they're important in my life (and the opposite too). Sounds very easy but you have to understand that I'm a shy guy, and everytime I say this to someone they burst in laughs. I know that I'm shy because I've been fucking dealing with my own self for longer than anybody out there and I know what I'm talking about. I also know that one of the personality traits that I carry with me is that I try to show that I'm outgoing as a way to hide the fact that I'm shy. Sounds like the most fucked up shit I've ever written but is exactly how I feel! It just takes long time and a lot of effort for me to open up to someone, and even though I don't look like, that shit is hard for me. So a resolution for this year is to keep working on the aforementioned issue and. . . I don't know, let's see what happens.

So there you have it: a whole new set of resolutions, plans and challenges for this brand new year! What would the next twelve months will bring into my life? Time has the answer, and this little blog will witness it.