past future sense

We're now 20 days out from the end of the Mayan calendar. Personally, I'm convinced that Walmart and Apple are the key players at the center of that apocalyptic conspiracy theory. Regardless, if things do get hairy, our digital documents will be the most likely survivors and I'll be terribly embarrassed that my last blog post is from July. Unacceptable, even if I am dead/zombie'd/living in a cave.

• Eat breakfast, girl! 
• Enjoy making silly things for dear friends.
• Write letters. Can I send you one? 
• Listen to music. Gave up on music for far too long. Let's reconnect. 
• Nevermind the idea that professional contacts will stumble across this silly blog. Grown ups can blog too. 
• Reconnect with your best friends. 
• Let it out. 
• Be embarassed. 

I've now been in this town more or less for 10 years with a few interruptions. I've watched fans and foes of the Burg come and go. I've heard a million complaints, and made several myself. Yet I'm still here, after all.
Maybe the reasons to love the Hub City deserve a little fanfare.

Very few of my acquaintances would ever guess that I even know how to be still and quiet. But my oldest and  closest friends know that from time to time I prefer to drop off the grid entirely. I don't necessarily want to lay in a dark room by myself for hours. I need to create!
To make something so horribly embarrassing that it can only be left to utter alone time.
In the public, waking life, I know my skill set. I'm a communicator, a connector, a planner, a writer, a dreamer and a get in there and get your hands dirty kinda girl.

I also know what I cannot do. Unfortunately it's a much longer list.

[Have you read this book yet? If not, why not? I'm only on p. 100 but wanted to share this part that made me cry..]

An ambulance drove down the street between us, and I imagined who it was carrying and what had happened to him. Did he break an ankle attempting a hard trick on his skateboard? Or maybe he was dying from third-degree burns on 90% of his body? Was there any chance I knew him? Did anyone see the ambulance and wonder if it was me inside?

What about a device that knew everyone you knew? So when an ambulance went down the street, a big sign on the roof could flash

DON'T WORRY! DON'T WORRY!

if the sick person's device didn't detect the device of someone he knew nearby. And if the device did detect the device of seomone he knew, the ambulance could flash the name of the person in the ambulance and either

IT'S NOTHING MAJOR! IT'S NOTHING MAJOR

or, if it was something major,

IT'S MAJOR! IT'S MAJOR!

And maybe you could rate the people you knew by how much you loved them, so if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash

GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

One thing that's nice to think about is someone who was the first person on lots of people's lists so that when he was dying, and his ambulance went down the streets to the hospital, the whole time it would flasy

GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!

- From Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, p. 73
Jonathan Safran Foer, who also wrote Everything is Illuminated

Good grief, I love to nerd out over some New Year's resolutions. Let's get started...

Zach and I before going out for NYE12

1) Be on time. 
My sweet boyfriend came up with this one for me. Touché, love.
I'm a big fan of things that are measurable, and going the extra mile so I'm going to revise this one to "Be 5 minutes early."
Alongside that, I'm a realist. I can't be 5 minutes early to everything, like say, happy hour. But the following are mandatory: work, client & organizational meetings, dates, family gatherings. I'm not going to put a timeline on purely social meet ups, unless of course I'm hosting them.

2) Stop procrastinating. 

• Don't just abandon a current task to hop to another one that seems more interesting. Write down tasks as they come up in a consistent place, such as Reminders app on my iPhone. Need to have a paper back up as well for affirmation. Return focus to the task at hand. 
• Shut off the talk box. For tasks that require a concentrated amount of focus, turn off the phone. Because I'm a realtor, turning off my phone for any length of time seems counter-intuitive. But if 20 minutes here or there will gain me some real productivity, the cost is worth the reward. That's what voicemail is for. (As I write this entry, I've received probably a dozen dings and notices from my little talk box. Off it goes.)
• Mark it off the list. If it wasn't on the list, and I've finished it, I'll write it down anyway, just to cross it off. Feels good huh?
• Say no to something every day. I enjoy saying yes. To a certain extent, I enjoy juggling tasks. But reality is, when I say yes to something at random, I'm saying no to several other, probably much more important opportunities. For big decisions, I should probably sleep on it before haphazardly agreeing to anything new. 

There, see that was like 5 resolutions in one. So we'll wrap it up with one more.

3) Read voraciously.
In fifth grade, I was my elementary school's top reader, neck and neck with our eventual valedictorian. Not sure exactly how that worked out for me. But I hope to be in the public library at least once a week, whether reading some of my favorite magazines or finishing a best seller. If it wasn't closed for holiday, I would be there right now.

Here are some others that didn't make the Top Three Goals for 2012:

• Record all expenses for January and make a legitimate, usable budget for the year. 
• Use no debt for one year. 
• Lose 5 lbs permanently or stay same body weight but reduce body fat by 3%.
• Go to NYC.
• Treat my desk like a desk.*
• Double our clients for Freedom Cleaning in Q1.
• Double real estate sales for 2011 by Q3.
• Journal every week. 
• Blog every week. (I always blow this one.)
• Use digital rather than paper records for work, whenever possible. (See * above.)

So, file this away till Dec. 31, 2011, assuming the planet makes it there, and I'll give myself a report card then. In the meantime, what are your resolutions?