Tuesday, January 04, 2005

New Year's Resolutions

Or is that New Years Resolutions? Seems like it should be possessive and so have the apostrophe, but i'm not certain. Here are mine anyway:
  • Learn to use apostrophes
  • More adventures. There's this bit in, i think, The Day of the Jackal, where Forsyth talks about how the assassin keeps in practice by stalking and killing something every day, even if it's just a fly on the windowsill. In a similar way, without the killing part, my goal for the year is to have some sort of adventure every day, which might be nothing more elaborate than standing in the rain or running a new trail. More big adventures though too.
  • Listen to the Drive-By Truckers song "Carl Perkin's Cadillac" until i get completely sick of it.
  • Get a better tan on my feet. I promise to do this every year, but i never quite achieve it.
  • More horizontal search, less vertical search. One of my favorite books is The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. In the book the main character, Binx Bolling, describes his personal effort to find himself in terms of a vertical and a horizontal search. His vertical search is, roughly speaking, a search for knowledge or an attempt to understand the fundamentals of the universe. The horizontal search is an attempt to place himself within his immediate environment, his neighborhood, and connect with it. As the character says "Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and i sit and read as a diversion". I figure i've got the vertical search covered, so it's time to wander seriously.

1 comment:

l said...

I really like the bit about the horizontal versus the vertical search. It seems to sum up a bit of what I've been struggling with lately. It's inspired me to check out The Moviegoer, which is one of the favorite books of a good friend of mine who also, coincidentally, lives in San Diego. Thanks for a great post that helps me articulate my New Year's goals a little more clearly.