TRH Updates – The Sickness

It’s been a hard week, I’m not going to lie. In a way I had worked myself up for it, knew that by taking the prednisone for a month this past December, and by how I was feeling that the disease was flaring. Finding myself again at the crossroads: my body working against me and me working hard to change my life only results in more disease activity. Sometimes, it just gets you down. There’s a lot of protein in my urine and my creatinine is sneaking up again — key markers in terms of the Wegener’s being active in my body. It’s nothing dramatic, it’s just me being back on medicine.

At least this time the Super-Fancy disease doctor asked me what treatment I would prefer. I rallied hard against the methotrexate. I really don’t like giving myself and injection once a week. But maybe that’s just because my RRHB and I have been watching way too much Intervention (holy crap is that show addictive; how ironic). Plus, I can’t gain back all the weight I’m trying so hard to lose. I managed a month on prednisone with really no change and I can’t go back to marshmallow ragdoll on methotrexate. Kindly, SFDD agreed to let me go back on imuran. Baring any dramatic episodes like the last time, let’s hope my body responds well and my bloodwork starts coming back with some improvements.

I have to say, though, that after months of feeling awful, of catching everything that wandered by, of battling just to get out of bed in the morning, that I’ve starting fresh in the New Year with better eating habits (no sugar [we’ll see how long that lasts] this week; no dairy next week) and walking both ways to the subway in the morning. You know, I’m actually feeling better. I had energy all week and only one bad day (due to mucho stress at work) where I crashed the moment I got home. Overall, I’ve been reading more, sleeping fine (yes, chemically induced but without it the prednisone crazies will come up and bite me on the ass), and getting a lot of stuff done on a day to day basis. My horoscope is on my side, that’s got to mean something, right?

Now the goal becomes squeezing in some writing.

#5 – Little Brother

Sometimes, even before I begin, I’ve got to digress. We’ve been watching The Wire, and after I finished reading and blogging on Tuesday I had no idea what to read. Pulled down a few books from the shelf, looked at them, and was not inspired. I gave up, put a novel beside my bed, and then started to watch “Dead Soldiers.” The teleplay was written by Dennis Lehane. The literary lightbulb went off and, when we paused for a moment, I grabbed The Given Day down and read before bed.

The next morning was snowy, cold, miserable and full of bad news. I read the book waiting (an hour plus, weather delays and general mayhem) for the Super-Fancy Disease Doctor, and then went in to hear my fate. When he was asking me about the dose of one of my meds, I had to pull the book out of my bag. He picked it up, started going on about how a “buddy” had been raving about it, and that it’s the best book he’d read in a long time. I said, “You can have that copy.”

SFDD said, “Really?”

I said, “I have another one in my office, it’s our book, we publish him.”

He looked a little shocked for a moment, thanked me, laughed, said that he never takes gifts from patients and winked, “But I will take this though.” Heh.

So, there goes my copy of The Given Day. On the way into the office via the TTC, I started reading The Picture of Dorian Gray on my Sony Reader until I got into the office. I had to run into a meeting the moment I got into work; afterwards, Liza (the key person for kids books in sales) pulled me into a little meeting and said, “You have to read this book.” She handed me a copy of Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother. So suddenly, in the span of 12 hours, I’ve been through three different books and not finished a single one.

And I loved it, Little Brother. In some ways it reminded me a little of War Games, but for this century. Marcus and his friends are out and about in San Francisco, bunking off school to play in a large-scale game organized online and played in the real world. And then a giant bomb goes off in San Francisco — a terrorist attack upon the city. Marcus and his friends, Darryl, Van and Jolu, are scooped up and taken to a form of Guantanamo Bay. Eventually they let Marcus go, but after five days inside, the entire world has changed and DHS (Homeland Security) has taken over everything, tracking people by their public transit cards, their internet access and all kinds of other complex and unseemly stuff. While three of his friends get out, Darryl’s left behind, and this spurns Marcus on to buck the system. To force his freedom as far out as humanly possible to make the point that living in a police state means the terrorist win.

There’s a lot of complex material in the book, loads of interesting tidbits of information, and Doctorow dispels them in ways that pull you further into the story without making you feel like a dolt because you’ve never heard of arphids or Kerouac. There’s a sweet love story, a kid with a great relationship with his parents, and a brain big enough to have DHS running around in circles until it all comes crashing to a head. Writing intelligent, engaging fiction for young adults isn’t easy, the tone has to be just right, the subject matter can’t alienate the audience, and if it has cross-over appeal to the adult market, all the better. Little Brother hits all of these points and then some. But mainly, I had fun reading it, completely unexpected, totally giddy fun.

And because Kerouac’s one of my favourites too, I couldn’t help but mark this lovely passage:

There was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, I could hear it being read aloud in my head. It made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to LA, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff.

Me too.

READING CHALLENGES: Doesn’t count toward a single one. In fact, knocked me off course completely in terms of my reading but when someone at work says, “you’ve got to read this,” really, you don’t have a choice.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Given Day.

The Pros and Cons of New Year’s Revolutions

I know. I’m only two days in and I’m already fed up with my New Year’s Revolutions. Yet, I’m only two days in and feel the need to write a little so here’s another list:

1. Bringing your lunch means less garbage for the environment (pro) but it also means doing dishes at work (con) with the gross-ass, nasty jclothes they’ve got piled up in the sink where rude-ass people leave their dirties for the cleaning lady to pick up. (con)

2. I have been walking up to Landsdowne in the mornings to get in an extra walk. Now, um, I’ve been trying to use natural deodorant. Let’s just say that I caught myself today and went, “WHAT I HAVE B.O.?” (con)

3. Watching less TV means more time thinking (pro) and reading (pro) and writing of to do lists. Currently, I’m 1/3 of the way through the one for this week (Jan 5th). (con; only because I’m tired, really, really tired, stupid prednisone)

4. “I will be zen at work. I will be zen at work. I will be zen at work.” (pro/con).

5. Bringing your lunch means not seeing your friends. I like my friends. I miss them. I am giving myself one day a week for an “out” lunch. This week it’s Friday with Munro. (pro)

6. I see the Super-Fancy Disease Doctor tomorrow for a check up. No fear. (pro)

7. Post-holiday gift baskets piled high with chocolate and other yummies remain untouchable to me. (con)

8. Detoxing and not eating sugar makes me one crabby person. (con)

9. Music is good. And I’ve been listening to tonnes of it lately as I’m writing as I’m cleaning as I’m working. (pro)

10. Next week as I add in the no dairy clause to the cleanse, I am sure I will be a nightmare to deal with. (con)

How you all doing with your resolutions?

#4.5 – "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Oh Sony Reader, I do love you. Before the holidays, I dumped a bunch of ebooks onto my reader, classics from 1001 Books that I could always have on hand in transit. Stuff that I could read when I finished whatever novel I was carting around at the time. One of the stories I put on was “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and I’m not going to tell a fib, primarily because it was short and I’m all about the numbers these days.

I love how 1001 Books states, “It seems to be stretching the definition of the word to its very limits to describe The Fall of the House of Usher as a “novel.” Note they use italics and I am sticking to quotes because you can’t tell me this isn’t a short story. I’m not complaining, I’m just clarifying for my own edification.

Annnywaay, this story scared the living crap of out me. It’s creepy, chilling and totally gothic in that yummy way that only Edgar Allen Poe can accomplish. A young man returns to the house of Usher where the only two remaining family members, Roderick and his sister, Madeline, live in a decrepit and decaying house. They’re both sick, Madeline from an illness that confounds the doctors, and Roderick from something that reads a whole lot like depression to my modern eye. The narrative creeps up to the last fateful night, and what Poe achieves in 61 electronic pages is really astounding. Stories within stories, pages devoted to mad poetry (as in its being written by a madman, not “mad” in the means “awesome” way), and a narrator who spends more time describing in intricate detail the abysmal surroundings than he does talking to his childhood friend.

One line in particular that I bookmarked: “Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady…” Maybe I need to make that into a t-shirt it’s so fitting to my life. Now, one question: why is it that in ghost stories, things always happen in threes? It was the same in A Christmas Carol. And why does it take someone three utterly terrifying occurrences before they wake up and, um, get the fark out? I read a lot of Poe in grad school, but because my mind is terrible with titles, and well, let’s face it, entire plots, I haven’t counted off any of the stories in 1001 Books. I am going to go back to Project Gutenberg, though, and download some more. They’re just perfect for a stormy night barreling through the city in the red rocket.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001 Books, natch.

#4 – Babylon Rolling

Shall I be honest? I mean utterly, unflinchingly honest? I almost put this book down after the first page after the prologue. Amanda Boyden’s second novel, Babylon Rolling starts off with a love letter of sorts to New Orleans, beleaguered already prior to Katrina and devastated afterwards, and it’s touching if a bit affected, the use of the pronoun “we” and all that, and then the book itself carries on like a thunderclap before a storm. She’s a powerful writer — there’s no denying it. When I finished the novel on the way home, there were tears in my eyes.

Now I’m going to digress. I know I’m sick of how much I’ve been talking about The Wire lately so I can only imagine how sick the rest of the world must be (listen me, the world, pshaw). For someone who doesn’t live in the middle of a raging gang war or a city almost overrun by crime, I always feel there’s an authenticity to The Wire that could be horribly misplaced. It’s an ivory tower appreciation for something I have never experienced; the “realness” of it makes me feel like I’m involved in some way in the defeat of human society, if we’re being honest. ‘It’s not a war,’ The Wire keeps reminding us, ‘because no one wins.’ And this theme, the decay of civilization, in a way, pervades much of Babylon Rolling: people cheat on their spouses, horrible and traumatic accidents happen, dope slingers and their gangster counterparts reign in some corners, and tragedy seems to define a place that hasn’t even seen the worst of it, the hurricane hasn’t even hit yet.

But I felt like Fearius, the self-given nickname of a young boy christened Daniel, whose voice is written much like the dialogue in The Wire, wasn’t as authentic as I would have imagined he could and/or should have been. So I found him and his bad grammar and his lack of punctuation and his misapprehension of vocabulary a little off-putting in ways that I would have never criticized had I watched him in the television show. Yet, the other characters, some mentally challenged, others simply lost, were so completely whole that it kind of made up for Fearius’s terribly annoying everythingness.

I loved Cerise, a 70-year-old grandmother who loves her husband so fiercely she endangers her own life to save him, and her voice broke my heart all over the place. The simplicity and wisdom from which she lives her life is inspiring. The troubled marriage of Ed and Ariel reminded me a little of Tom Perrotta, and their actions not only underscored the main themes of the book, but they heightened the whole sense of troubled America in microcosm. But like Fearius, I felt Philomenia was a little over the top at times. The idea that all of these people live on the same street and that so much happens to them felt contrived, a little too Crash for me. But I can’t say I didn’t get caught up in the story and I can’t deny that there’s a powerful strength of voice to the book. I’m glad, too, that I didn’t put the book down after the first few pages. It certainly showed me, didn’t it?

READING CHALLENGES: Babylon Rolling is one of my Cleaning Out the Closet challenge books. That’s one down and 19 more to go, and since Boyden was born in Minnesota, I’m counting this book as the United States for Around the World in 52 Books too. I’m sure as sh*t not going to get stuck reading so few countries this year. It’s not exactly cheating to knock off all the easy ones first, is it?

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Blogging “The Fall of the House of Usher” for 1001 Books, I finished it too this evening. And reading? Who knows. I’ll wait until something calls for me.

Sunday Evening Ramblings

It’s back to work tomorrow. After over a week off, and a good time to decompress, I’m still not sure if I’m 100% in the mind set. Most of today was spent fiddling about with my to do list — remincient of the last time I spent an extended period of time at home — and trying to finish as many as humanly possible before starting to make dinner. Some things:

1. I tend to write the same item in different ways forgetting that I’ve listed it already, hence three or four entries relating to budget, charity payments and/or swapping out our new chequing account information.

2. Can you learn French simply by listening to Edith Piaf?

3. For two of my items I will need to pull out a needle and thread. Um, yeah, like that’s going to happen…

4. Is it pathetic to have “read the paper” on your to do list so you don’t forget and leave it sitting for two weeks before cutting out the crossword and then tossing the whole thing in the recycling bin?

5. I have grown quite attached to GOOP. Huh. It’s actually full of good recipes, solid lifestyle-type content and the newsletter’s really easy to read. The name, however, still sucks.

6. My RRHB is now completely and totally obsessed with Gordon Ramsay.

7. I managed to put off ANY work whatsoever until this afternoon. The break was brilliant. But it just made me think of how much I could get accomplished if I stayed at home all the time.

8. Procrastination is also a wonderful tool. I didn’t write a single word for my own work but my house sure is clean. No more excuses.

9. The Wire is still the best show television has ever produced.

10. In the end I had 102 items on my to do list and managed to cross off 61 — that’s not so bad. Now I need to rewrite it for tomorrow! Whee!

#3 – In a Free State

The last thing I expected this morning was to get caught up in V.S. Naipaul’s truly excellent In a Free State. I woke up early, as I usually do, crawled out of bed, grabbed my book and cuddled up under the duvet on the couch. My RRHB slept. I read. He slept. I read more. He woke up. I crawled back into bed, fell asleep for a bit, and then finished the book. What a perfect lazy day before the craziness of real life picks up again the moment the alarm goes off tomorrow morning.

The last Naipaul book I read was A House for Mr. Biswas way back in second year university. I was captivated but that never brought be back to Naipaul. My post-colonial reading in later years turned back to Canadian, I left university, did my M.A., and never picked up another of his books. Another of the surprises that I found on my shelf, I must have ordered this book back when 1001 Books came out. In a Free State was first published in 1971 and it won the Booker that year. Bookended by two diary-like travel journals, the collection contains two short stories and a novella, from which it takes its title.

The first story, “One Out of Many,” follows a servant brought to Washington from Bombay. One day he steps away from his employer, leaves everything behind in the cupboard where he was sleeping, and becomes an illegal immigrant with an under the table job at a local restaurant owned by a fellow countryman. The story explores themes of alienation as Santosh makes his way in the United States, and slowly he discovers that he’ll need to leave almost 100% of his old life behind to survive.

This idea, of the cost of freedom and the impact of the realities of immigration, is carried forth into the second story, “Tell Me Who to Kill.” Leaving everything he knows behind, the narrator picks up and heads to London with the intention of giving his brother a better life, a life of studies, so he too can become “something.” He works hard, saves his money, and then as so many stories go, makes a bad decision that ruins everything. Told through flashbacks as he takes the journey to his brother’s wedding, the story becomes alive through his rich dialect, the obvious affection he feels for his brother, regardless of how he disappoints him, and the necessity of change when faced with adversity. It’s a crushing and heartbreaking story.

“In a Free State” inverts the situation. Here a white, homosexual man has come to Africa to serve the government,under ideals of serving for the greater good. Away from the safe collective where he lives, Bobby attends a seminar and then must make his way back during a time of political upheaval. His passenger, the wife of a British journalist named Linda, makes pleasant enough conversation to begin with, but it soon becomes obvious she isn’t happy either on the journey or in Africa. As their trip becomes even more arduous (they miss their curfew and are forced to stay at a ramshackle colonial resort), the polite nature of their relationship disintegrates. Armed with a sense of misapprehended colonial idealism, Bobby soon finds himself in all different kinds of trouble, some of his own making and much as a result of the political situations, and it’s damning. Like in the first two stories, Naipaul explores themes of alienation and separation, of family and work, of place and displacement.

I couldn’t put this book down. It’s a book I’d love to study. A book that reminds you how words can sever a problem from its root, pull it apart and set it down in a way that makes you see things more clearly, even if in the end, for all three protagonists, little changes despite how hard the world presses up against them to force their currents in a new direction.

READING CHALLENGES: In a Free State is on the 1001 Books list, and so I’ll cross it off there. But Naipaul was born in Trinidad, so I’ll count this book on my Around the World in 52 Books list as well. It’s actually a perfect book for that challenge. The landscapes, from the unknown African country that’s the setting for the novella to Egypt, from London and Washington as seen through the eyes of those who settle and are not born there, there’s an interesting sense of place that grounds the entire collection.

COMPS AND OBSERVATIONS: I couldn’t help but think of Blood Diamond when I was reading “In a Free State,” not because the stories are at all similar (it’s a terribly mediocre film in the end), but because when Bobby speaks to an African man in the book, he uses that patois that Leo uses at the beginning of the film: “Who your boss-man? Who?” As Naipaul describes the country as it slips from colonial to post-colonial rule, I kept hearing, “T.I.A. This is Africa, right?” from that scene at the bar. In terms of comps, for much of the story, I kept thinking of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” despite the fact that it’s obvious that Bobby and Linda are not at all lovers, their conversations have that same read-between-the-lines feel to them and the dialogue is excellent.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I picked up Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling while my RRHB was using the computer. Fingers crossed I’ll finish it tonight, which means I’ll have managed to finish 7 books while I’ve been off for vacation. Not bad indeed!

#2 – Shakespeare

Years ago when I worked at History Television, I wrote a series of articles about Shakespeare. For a few weeks, I was obsessed by the Shakespeare question and read a pile of books both for and against the Bard’s “real” identity. I’ve seen Shakespeare in Love about a million times and even wrote an article for the now-defunct Chicklit.com (I wish I had a copy of it to share; it was a fun article to write) about the differences between the writer’s life and how he was portrayed in the film, tying everything back into the research that I did for my job at the time. Needless to say, I think I’m more obsessed with the idea of all the controversy around Shakespeare’s identity than I am by the man’s work. Is that a bad thing? And let me just say for the record that I believe, as does Bill Bryson, that Shakespeare was the author of his work, not Francis Bacon or any number of other writers put forth in the years since his death and ultimate canonization.

Part of the Eminent Lives series, Bill Bryson’s excellent Shakespeare: The World as Stage contextualizes the little known facts of the Bard’s life into a compact and utterly readable package. As Bryson continually reminds us, there are very few known facts of Shakespeare’s life: the date of his baptism, his marriage, the number of children he had, how many signatures exist (6), his will, etc. The rest is conjecture, scholars over the years uncovering new evidence, failing to prove their theories, and wishful thinking. What Bryson does so ingeniously is fill in his own spaces with interesting bits of history from the time period, padding Shakespeare’s life with surrounding information, giving the reader a spirit of the age rather than trying to pull a biography from thin air. He addresses the Shakespeare question toward the end of the book, and I enjoyed reading about the interesting characters who contributed to seemingly never-ending debate.

I have to admit that I found the chapter about the plays themselves a little dry, but then he grabbed me again by making the point that part of Shakespeare’s lasting impression on literature goes so far beyond the plays. So much of the language we use today, so many expressions that hadn’t been used before are attributed to him, parts of our speech that we take so for granted that we barely give a thought to the fact that he wrote “be cruel to be kind.” The book is full of information that could give anyone an edge should they end up on Jeopardy faced with a Shakespeare category, but it also has a grand sense of humour and a calm approach to sifting through what must have been miles upon miles of scholarship. By the nature of the lack of information about Shakespeare’s life, it must have been hard to write a biography about him, but I think that Bryson’s done a smashing job of it: a little Tom Stoppard, a little The Professor and the Madman, and a lot of what Bryson does so very well, write history so that it’s engaging, interesting and utterly compelling.

READING CHALLENGES: The first book I’ve finished in the Shakespeare Challenge. Next up I think I’ll read Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer, but who knows when I’ll get to it — the master list for 2009 is a little overwhelming.

#1 – A Hard Witching

Happily celebrating the new year, I read most of this book in between bewitching viewings of The Wire and during a sleepless night on the day before New Year’s Eve. I enjoyed Jacqueline Baker’s novel, The Horseman’s Graves for my Canadian challenge last year, and when I was cleaning off my shelves (have you noticed the trend?) I found a copy of her book of short stories. We were at writer’s group yesterday discussing the merits of short books, quick reads of under 200 pages — books just like A Hard Witching.

Comprised of eight stories, surprisingly not-interlocking, the sharp edges and hard lives of the characters are softened only slightly by Baker’s expert eye when it comes to detail and storytelling. While the easiest comp that one could make about Baker’s writing would be to Annie Proulx, but A Hard Witching lacks the “gothic” edge that colours many of Proulx’s stories (this is not a bad thing; I count Annie Proulx among one of my favourite writers). Set exclusively in or around Sand Hills, Saskatchewan, it’s impossible for the people within not to be affected by the landscape. It’s a popular, familiar Canadian theme, but Baker allows herself to take it a little further, to flush out the emotional lives of her characters in ways that feel fresh and not simply a reaction to their environment.

In terms of my “favourites,” I’d have to say that I enjoyed the title story most of all, for its somewhat strange, utterly compelling main character, a widow caught between the idea of how to lead her life post-her husband’s death and who she was while she was married, and for its stark, captivating ending. I loved this line to death: “Oh, trouble comes in threes all right, Edna would say generously, but it’s the weak who let it stay.” As Omar from The Wire would say, “Indeed.” An echo of sadness runs through many of the stories as well, not that it becomes overwhelming and certainly not to the detriment of the writing. They’re real honest people within these pages and Baker tells their stories without unnecessary frills. In a way, a nice compliment to A Hard Witching might be Tim Winton‘s The Turning and I’m so glad I found this little volume just waiting to be read on my newly organized bookshelves.

READING CHALLENGES: As Jacqueline Baker is Canadian and a lady, A Hard Witching counts toward my Canadian Book Challenge. I’m going to swap out Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau because my copy is buried in our closet and my RRHB convinced me those books would be out in the open soon enough that they didn’t need to all be pulled out for the sake of me finding it and Moby-Dick. I’m also going to count this as Canada for Around the World in 52 Books because it’s so evocative of our prairie landscape.

COMPS AND OBSERVATIONS: Baker has a talent for writing adolescent characters and their stories, similar, I think, to Kate Sutherland’s excellent All in Together Girls. Not exactly YA, they do capture the awkward and utterly alienating time one spends as a teenager and both explore how your teenage years stick with you well into adulthood.

OTHER REVIEWS: Melanie also read A Hard Witching for her Canadian challenge last year.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I finished Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare this morning and pulled Sometimes a Great Notion off the shelf to start this evening.

New Year’s Revolutions 2009

Last year I had 5 New Year’s Revolutions (thus named because it’s so easy to break a “resolution”, natch) and a few of them I actually managed to integrate into my life.

Revisiting 2008 and 2007
I did finish an entire draft of my first novel, much to my surprise. I have lost weight, about 14 pounds so far, and know that it was the methotrexate contributing to my being unable to lose it. Now that I’m back on prednisone, I’ll have to work even harder to try and keep it off. And while I’m not sure if I’m less judgmental, I have learned from my mistakes, am more positive, and my life is certainly is better for it. Again this year I failed to watch less TV, and I did cut down on my celebrity gossip (with a few slacker “internet coma” days where I relapsed), but the budgeting has gone haywire over the past few months. I am still saving, though.

New Years Revolutions for 2009

I think I’ll do a top 10 list this year just for fun:

1. Try to Live with Less Clutter
I’ve spent the past few days gutting my house of clutter. Our ENTIRE giant recycling bin is full of stuff I have purged — from old credit card statements to useless office accoutrements (why did I hang on to those strange mesh-like inboxes from Shift magazine when the office closed, oh, 10 YEARS AGO?). My bedroom closet is clean and organized. My drawers have all been vacuumed and neatly organized. I know where things are and plan to keep it that way. As my RRHB says, “the problem starts when you bring all that stuff INTO the house.” I am a packrat with a sentimental streak; it’s in my nature, but I simply can’t live with all the junk anymore. Something has to give. There’s a great article here on Style at Home that’s already helped me in terms of decluttering.

2. Be Zen About Work
One of the greatest lessons I’ve had in my life came in the form of being let go from a job that I hated in the first place. I spent a lot of time being angry about it. I spent a lot of energy despising the woman who was once my boss. I spent a lot of time worrying about what I’d do differently. In the end, all it did was make me sick, all the stress from that situation kicked off fighting the disease for another five years, and I vowed I’d not make that mistake again. But here we are, all these years later and the week that my job imploded happily corresponded with the death of my mother and my father-in-law’s heart attack. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life.

I’ve decided that my job might not be perfect, it might not be everything I’d hoped it would be, but I’m going to give it a chance and not make all the same mistakes I did when I worked for the television empire. So far, it’s working: I’m calmer, I don’t react with my temper, I do my best, I do what’s asked of me, and I’ve started asking for things in return. By “zen” I don’t mean to debase anyone’s religion, it’s more the approach I want to take about work: I can’t change the fact that I have to work, I can only change my response to it. Taking more deep breaths, not getting worked up, thinking before I act and then acting responsibly — all in order to achieve a sense of balance, that’s my goal.

3. Watch Less TV
TV is the ultimate time waster, as much as I do adore it. I’ve only watched a little bit in the evenings this past week and have accomplished so much. I’m going to try and watch less TV on the weekends and try to limit weeknights to just a couple of hours.

4. Bring My Lunch
This one’s simple: we’re sitting on the edge of broke right now. We need to save more, spend less and one easy way of doing this is bringing my lunch more than once a month. I also want to eat more wholesome food, more soups, less bagels, more vegetables, less candy, and this is one way of eating better. That doesn’t mean I won’t go out once or twice a week, it just means I’ll stop running to the food court when I feel desperate.

5. Buy Less, Use What I Have, Create More
As above, we’re trying to finish the house so every penny is allocated and I need to break the bad online shopping habit. I know I won’t be able to NOT shop at all, but I can cut down on the amount I spend, buy things on sale, wait until I have more than just one item to purchase so that there are more bits and pieces in each packages (better for the environment). I’m also going to try to use things I already have: wear all the clothes in my closet; buy and then eat the groceries we have in the fridge and in the cupboard; fix things before throwing them out, etc. I also want to knit more — but that’s a separate entry. I’m also thinking of pulling out my sewing machine, getting it tuned up, and taking a course or two in dressmaking. I love skirts and wish that I could make some of my own. Maybe this is the year to try. I’m also including gardening in this revolution: it’ll be bigger, better and yummier this year, I’m already feeling positive — the photo for this entry is one of my bean plants from last year, and it just reminds me how much I enjoy eating, cooking, and growing my own vegetables (even if I hate gardening).

6. Stop The Internet Coma
I remember the heady days of my first internet usage where I surfed for literary magazines and sent off all kinds of submissions. I remember doing research for grad school and discovering great information. Fast forward 10 years and I can spend entire days reading celebrity gossip, hounding the IMDB for who knows what and chasing down obscure pop culture references. I’m not saying any of this is a bad thing; it’s who I am, a pop culture junkie, but when it takes over AN ENTIRE DAY of my life, it’s more of a symptom of boredom than anything else. It’s time that could be put to better use.

7. Get More Regular Exercise
I know, this is on everyone’s list. Over the past few years I’ve managed yoga, dance classes, biking, walking, swimming — but all sporadically. There’s a community centre around the corner from our house. My to-do list for this week includes stopping by and finding out the swim times, the gym times and membership-type stuff. My RRHB also had a wonderful suggestion to combat my winter blues: “get outside for winter activities.” He says that if we just did more winter-type stuff, ice skating, skiing, walking, we’d find it less depressing. He’s right.

8. No Fear
So much of my anxiety comes from being afraid of things, of what might happen, of the disease, of getting fired, of people thinking poorly of me, of my own self-imposed criticism — and it all contributes to a knot that sits in the middle of my chest on an almost daily basis. I don’t know what makes me so afraid and I don’t know how to change this part of my personality. But I do know that it’s a great part of where my stress comes from and I’m going to need to figure a way through it. I don’t want to live in fear anymore. I’m too young and too old to be dealing with such a basic nothing in terms of what really matters.

9. Finish What I Start
Another self-explanatory item, but it’s so true, I have half-done knitting projects, unfinished manuscripts, outstanding to do lists, and it’s never ending. 2009 is The Year of Finishing Dangerously. I need to complete projects before moving on to the next one.

10. Read Even More
Books are glorious things. There are so many I want to read so again I’m setting the goal at 100 books that I can blog. I think I probably hit about 90 this year with Harlequin and books I read for work and didn’t blog. I guess we’ll see if I hit the goal this year!

So that’s about it — 2009 New Year’s Revolutions. Any suggestions for how I can get there?