Another year has begun. Will humanity never end? So as usual it is time for me to make some resolutions and promises that are the same as I've made every year at this time, never learning that ultimately I am doomed to failure. I never change.
Aside from visiting at least one model village at some point, here are my doomed plans:
For once I am not going to give up drinking, even though in December I was seriously considering stopping drinking for an entire year and writing about the effects and differences it made to my life. This year I am going to try and moderate my drinking and not get drunk on a work night, unless there's something really good going on or I am really depressed and there is no other way to blot out the pain. It would be nice to believe that I am capable of controlling myself, rather than living a life of either abstinence or excess. You, better than anyone, know that I can't, but it's the first of January and I am allowed to try and fool myself. I have decided to stop drinking beer completely and see if just drinking wine will mean I lose weight. I would rather have a wine belly than a beer belly in any case, because it would make me sound more sophisticated. I have a lot of work to do this year and can't afford the week day man hours lost to hangovers. Yet I would like to be loved by the public in the same way as George Best, so as always I am torn.
Generally as always I want to get fitter and lose weight. I actually find that I am half a stone lighter than at this time last year, which is at least slightly positive, even if I was a stone lighter in the summer. As long as it's going down then that's something. I am going to get back into running and exercising and eat more healthily. Yeah, you may scoff. But I am not going to and hopefully that will have the desired effect.
I have decided to give up playing poker online. It takes up too much of my time and although I have started getting to the point where I am making money and cashing in I think that ultimately it's become a negative in my life and I need to stop. I will carry on playing poker as a social thing against actual people that I can see, but I spend enough time on the internet as it is. I have just uninstalled the software. I am free. Even though I feel weird about abandonning that 8000+ Frequent Player Points I had accrued (I won 6500 of them in a competition. I'm not
that addicted).
I am also going to resolve to not necessarily write Warming Up every single day from now on. It has been an incredible unbroken run and it is something that the autistic part of me is loathe to let go, but I feel that some days, when I really am busy and have done absolutely nothing of interest, it will probably be more useful for me to do actual proper work. I have a lot to do in the next few months and feel this year could be make or break for me in some ways (or at least the stuff I do this year will have a lot to do with what direction my career takes from here on in). I have toyed with the notion of making Warming Up something that I only do on week days (after all the idea is that it is supposed to warm me up for work - even if this has rarely proven to be the case), but so far have relented from depriving you of my wise thoughts. But you look at some entries and maybe wish that I hadn't bothered. But I am not about to stop doing the exercise altogether, just to loosen its clutches slightly and I will definitely write something as long as I have something worth attempting.
Having said that I am also keen to remember what is good about writing this and which entries are the most successful and I think it's when I am observant of the world around me and when I make an effort to get out and do things. So I am going to try and push myself to get out more and watch the world more closely and take risks and do things I wouldn't usually do. Which will probably mean I have plenty to write about and also should hopefully make sure that what I do write is funny for you and useful for me. And it's going to be a weird day when I don't write something. So we'll see.
Having said that I slept most of the day and then watched TV for most of the rest of the day today. But I didn't play internet poker or drink any alcohol and ate very healthily, so all is not lost.
Happy New Year readers. Thanks for sticking with me all this time. I hope 2006 will be a happy and successful year for us all, though obviously this is another unrealistic expectation. There's over a thousand of you. Things are bound to go wrong for a couple of hundred of you. At least one of you will probably die this year. Please try not to. I don't have enough supporters to lose any of you. So stop being selfish and think about me before you die. All right?
On that positive note let's get on with 2006. It's going to be the same as all the other years, but at this point we at least have hope for change.
