Dawning of a new year...

So here we go again! The usual resolutions plague my mind as I step through the door to welcome 09, and bid a tired and much needed good bye to 08.

This has been a bad year in every sense of the word to the whole world. If there is a mother nature and a mother earth, they would both be putting their feet up with a big beer in their hands, and taking a deep breath.

I am actually excited by the dawning of this new year, as I feel change in the air (not an Obama reference). A make or break sort of a moment. I'm not too optimistic about the change, but a change is needed anyway, good or bad, but change nevertheless.

The process of growing up is actually a process of accepting change more graciously. The more gracious you become in your acceptance, the more grown-up you are. Gone are the final days of high-school where you would sit down on your favorite bench, stationary in your resolve to hold time hostage. Gone are the promises of always being this together. Gone, too, is the feeling of irrepressible loss and heartbreak. Everything changes, but most of all, we change. Given the current state of affairs I feel we all need to change. Change into beings more in tune with empathy, or change into such heartless shits that nothing matters but us.

Boy! Isn't self-preservation just lovely. It can take us places we never thought we'd visit, and justifies our being there in the most resolute of manners. Heck, given the proper opportunity, it would even justify buying a house in Newark and settling there!

I guess I am very lucky to be saying good-bye to 08 with plans of celebrating new-years eve to the wee hours of the morning, and then sleeping though most of the first new day of the year. Heck, I could have been scampering about trying to save my life, not even aware, or rather conscious of the dawning of the new year. So yes, I do feel truly blessed with good fortune (albeit bad or no hair).

So to follow tradition, here are a few of my new documented resolutions...

I will quit smoking
I will talk to more strangers
I will be more self-absorbed (notice, please, the focus on "I")

My other resolutions are in my head, and will remain there (hopefully not getting lost in the pot-infested labyrinths of my brain). The rest, as they say, is history and the making of it.