Seen on a sign outside of a church. . .

“May your troubles be as short[-lived] as your New Year’s resolutions.” (insertion mine)

Every year, I make a set of New Year’s resolutions. I know there are lots of folks who find such things useless – why make ’em if you’re going to break ’em? – but the process of figuring out what to resolve helps me focus my attention on what’s important to me. Usual categories include my faith, exercise, personal achievements on my life to-do list that I want to make progress on, and areas in software development that I want to learn more about/work on. I’m behind schedule, though – today’s December 31, and the list hasn’t even been drafted, much less culled to get the set for this year. Resolution #1: no more procrastination on New Year’s resolutions! By the end of tomorrow, in order for me to feel like a completely on-top-of-things individual, I will have come up with my set of New Year’s resolutions. Whether I’ll post them or not, I haven’t yet decided.

My hubby and I have been debating something recently, and this afternoon brought to mind those old Meyers-Briggs personality tests. (That’s the test that gives you your own set of initials based on Extraversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving.) At one point in our discussion, I said something along the lines of “I understand that’s how you feel, but that doesn’t help me get any closer to us deciding whether to do this or not!”. Conversations like that frustrate me horribly! I want an action plan to come out of the conversation – if we’re going to do X, then we need to do Y and Z on this timeline to prepare for X. If we decide we’re not going to do X, then we can do A and B instead. This fuzzy feeling stuff doesn’t resolve the X or not X question!

Luckily, we’ve been married long enough, and worked together through enough conversations like that, that they usually just make us laugh. My poor husband, though. . . he’s got a wife who wants to set up a Gantt chart for her life.

No more carols ringing forth from my radio and my computer speakers. No more plotting the approach to the mall parking lot. Christmas – come and gone, in the relative blink of an eye. Pondering it as a kid, I spent weeks refining my list for Santa. Now as an adult trying to grasp and hold onto more and more of its meaning to me as a Christian, still it sneaks up and surprises me. I thought I was in the Christmas spirit as I floated around work on Tuesday, enjoying the relative peace and quiet, and the snowflakes falling outside. Then I thought I had the spirit when I was in church, singing Silent Night in the glow of candlelight and contemplating the birth of our Saviour. And then Christmas Day, watching my daughter open her presents, enjoying them one by one (she’s _still_ got presents she hasn’t opened yet), I thought I caught yet another glimpse.

Today, somehow it feels like I still missed it, like I’m still looking for it. I could give some smarmy feel-good statement, like Christmas isn’t just one day of the year. But I know that it really is, in all sorts of senses. Christmas has always seemed like that one day where the world doesn’t seem quite so messed up. The day after Christmas, that feeling of purity still echoes faintly, but doesn’t ring through nearly so clear. I’m not saying that my life is messed up in any sort of unusual way – this isn’t a confession to the world of some great character flaw or tribulation. Just the regular character flaws and tribulations brought into the world with that apple back in the garden. The Christmas spirit I look for year after year is that glimpse back into the garden, before the serpent slithers in. And I know I’m doomed to be disappointed – we’re not granted that sight here. But Christmas always seems to be just a hair away. It’s sort of like a child’s excitement about the chance to see Santa if she just got up at the right time. If I just looked at the right time in the right spot. . . sang (in the right key!) the right hymn. . . gave of myself to the right person. . .

I remember hearing some Christmas story somewhere about an offering laid at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary and her babe. Something about one particular offering making the baby Jesus smile. That’s the sort of thing I’m looking for, I think. And that’s the sort of Christmas spirit I want to teach our child.

Traffic into work was non-existent (everyone’s soaking up their vacation time), there’s a chance of snow in the forecast for this evening, I’m dressed up to go to church this evening, and life just generally seems wonderful! Merry Christmas, everyone! I’ll be piping Christmas music into the nearly empty hallways here at work, and caroling along through my coding.

Ever just been so overwhelmed with the thought of all that you ought to be doing or want to do that nothing gets done?

(From Fast Company) “Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity — if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.”

More quotes: “The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means ( whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be ).” For quite a while, I dreamed of being a financial planner, helping folks figure out how to live this particular thing out. (Turns out, while I love the idea of helping folks figure it out and get there, I’m not too enamored with the actual work itself of financial planning.)

The article is adapted from a new book by Po Bronson, called “What Should I Do With My Life?”. It’d be a wonderful Christmas present. . . (hint, hint)

OK, ’tis snowing. NOW you can show me the news anchors and how deep it is and how bad the road conditions are. I’ll watch from my couch, where I’ll be loafing around the house today. Wait a minute – that was my dreamy, not-quite-yet awake self talking. I’ll be chasing my daughter around the house, catching up on some cleaning, putting up my Christmas decorations, and hopefully even getting a crack at playing with some J2EE.

Our local area’s under some sort of snow advisory. We are advised that it’s going to snow. A lot. Judging by the hype on the news, an awful lot. Every news anchor that they can find, they’ve stuck outside with a microphone to tell us if it’s snowing yet where they are. I don’t care if it’s snowing where they are. I don’t even really care if it’s snowing where I am. I’ll care in the morning whether I have to shovel my car out from a lot of snow or a little snow, and I’ll care if it’s still snowing then and expected to snow more, but I don’t care if it snows while I sleep. I do feel bad for the news anchors out there in the cold, though. Snowing or not, it’s freezing out there!

I’ve spent the weekend contemplating friendship, off and on. Saturday I got to spend some time with a friend, just sort of hanging out. Sunday I was at a baby shower where the guest of honor was surrounded by lots of friends who had known her from various stages in her life. And then yesterday I finally put in that phone call to another friend I hadn’t talked to in close to two months (and I count her as a really good friend – shame on me!). Had to put in that phone call – seeing the folks at the shower made me think about whether I’m putting in enough into some of those relationships – whether I’m letting them wither on the vine, and if so, why.

Folks claim that life is busy – that there’s just no time to cultivate friendships. But I look back at folks in times past, and I really can’t see that they were any less busy. If you go back to a farming era, well, cows certainly don’t let you put them on hold or screen their moos for milking. And if you worked in a factory, the 40 hour workweek is a relatively recent idea. Life is always busy – that’s probably just a characteristic of life, whether you’d count a busy life as well-lived or not.

I have a working theory that we don’t put enough priority on our friendships because those folks aren’t stuck with us the way our spouses and families are – because we actually have to pay attention to something other than just us. And we don’t, and we just sort of justify it with the excuse of ‘busyness’. Was I too busy to play too many rounds of GLine (my latest stupid PC game addiction, replacing Minesweeper), or to browse JavaRanch, or to write this blog entry? Couldn’t I have put in a call, tried to make some sort of connection\?

Wish I had a magic potion answer, a resolution that I’d avow to keep. Unfortunately, I know me too well. . . I’ll make more of an effort, to be sure, but it’s just too easy to say, well, they haven’t called me, either. Periodically I’ll poke my head up and look at the ‘fruits’ of my friendships, and realize they’re woefully underfed. And I’ll mentally whine about it, and then go back to putting dots on a GLines gameboard.