Thirty-Eight Resolutions From the Past

When I was trying to finish my doctorate, I often found I couldn’t.

Thus, since resolutions are useless, I decided to come up with some because useless things are my specialty, and as usual I couldn’t write about the things I was supposed to be writing about. But I could of course write to complain about it.

Therefore, in order to channel all my negative thinking, I created a positive list of goals! What could I become – what actions could I take – to improve myself starting today?

(!!!)

1. Be optimistic! Try it out! Maybe it doesn’t hurt!
2. Beat epilepsy! so I can donate blood to the Red Cross. I tried making the British Red Cross accept my blood again the year after they initially forbade my participation because I’m an epileptic or, as they refer to me in the UK, a “spastic”… that’s real nice, Brits… and found that the British Red Cross had officially blackballed me. It’s the one time someone at an organization in Scotland had actually entered information into a general computer system, and didn’t just hand-write it on a Post-It to stick to their cubicle wall. I was impressed. The Red Cross should have held a training seminar for British Gas who continued to think my husband lived in a different apartment in our building and thus argued he owed them money for the gas used in this separate apartment… and they are probably still seeking that money. However, back to blood, I have track marks from selling bodily fluid at Badger Plasma Center in college, and I was completely okay with lying to them about my epilepsy on a weekly basis. But since I felt compelled to speak truth to the Red Cross, and since they were one of the few businesses or organizations there who amazingly kept “computer records”, I was banned. I rant about this because a kid had come to our door one night around that time, asking for money to donate to the Red Cross for the swine flu epidemic, and I wanted to scream, “You continue to refuse my blood. Fuck off. I want to help with blood.”
3. Find the boy I hyper-briefly dated from Badger Plasma and ask him about the root cause of his psychosis.
4. Get some answers.
5. Learn Braille and sign language. My French isn’t coming back as easily as I’d hoped, and spoken language has let me down once too often.
6. Hang out with nine-year-old humans more often. They are better.
7. Learn to be a proper girl and “manage” my eyebrows and other things like that. When I was younger, some of my friends were always so horrified with my eyebrow care system and I responded by saying I was working on managing other things, like “temper,” “drinking,” “will to live” and “ability to give a shit”. My eye hairline seemed insignificant. But I gave a go at brushing, tweezing and shaping them the week before and they don’t really match, but I can’t figure out how exactly they don’t match, and so I just looked interested all the time.
8. Figure out why swimming used to be the best thing ever invented and where that kind of cognitive reasoning went.
9. Eliminate adult fears and stick to the old ones.
10. Lead some sort of vigilante group against dumb evil. Evil should never be annoying and so they must be told that they’re doing it wrong. We would start in rural areas. Perhaps hold a few social understanding courses to begin with because education is, in fact, our greatest weapon.
11. Bring back White Snake. It’s ridiculous White Snake are confined to county fairs and sympathy tours. I want to create a digital photo album entitled “My Day with White Snake.” Bring back Vivian Campbell.
12. Remember what people talk about more often.
13. Make good music. Make any music.
14. Find my 1983 Toyota Camry.
15. Be less imaginative.
16. Bring back clever.
17. Communicate with bigger animals.
18. Rescue children the old-fashioned way. I watched too many Disney movies growing up and feel true liberation is more possible through physical escape than with the current state system. You’d just play some old Arcade Fire album as the soundtrack and then execute some elaborately covert sneaking-out plan and then… go live in rural Manitoba somehow. Also, you’d purchase some kind of outdoor skills book because the reason I think Manitoba would be a good place to hide is also why we would need to utilize some kind of nature survival skills which many of us surely do not already possess.
19. Implement my Brinks truck robbery plan, which I came up with while sitting at the old Baraboo Dairy Queen outdoors seating area when I was ten years old. I watched it stop and unload every day that summer, waiting for my chance.
20. Finish my fucking thesis and do something with my life.
21. Actually write something academic today and make the day slightly remarkable.
22. Work less.
23. Change social classes formally and see how it really feels.
24. Stop wondering how popcorn kernels feel in the microwave and just enjoy the goddamn popcorn.
25. Lead the humans in the war against the machines, and design our outfits, which will look stunning next to the machines, who will look so plain and blink-y. We’ll get style points at least, since we’d have no hope of beating them in any other area. They have metal claws and we have fleshy hands. We have baseball and they have Tetris. We have emotions and they have data processing. No chance.
26. Keep my mind and body more distinct like before. Both seemed to run much better when they weren’t communicating with one another so often. Things felt more possible.
27. Gamble more.
28. Utilize oxymorons more regularly. Oh wow. YES, “slightly delighted” makes sense. I can’t believe I had to defend that to my research supervisor. If that is an unbelievable oxymoron, I am out of practice. Painful relief, miserable comfort, candid secrets, pliable certainty, desperate ease, useless function, practical love, big smalls… if oxymorons don’t make sense, then your life isn’t complicated enough, I said, shaking my head. Academics.
29. Have kids and make them be more competitive in high school sports than I was. Scholarships, scholarships, scholarships. I planned to train them to play pro golf, too. I have no idea why I didn’t continue playing golf. It’s like a small town’s version of the way out, and way less physically demanding than basketball.
30. Work out why computers hate me. They blink and giggle cruelly while I sit here in my little chair, demoralized.
31. Train bees to think for me. They seem to be much more driven and productive. They’d have created honey combs and other bee things by the end of the day, while I, on the other hand, will have created this list and thoroughly researched ways of getting tickets for T in the Park this weekend, and each method could be categorized under the subheading of Criminal Acts.
32. Define boundaries differently.
33. Defy the odds more sadistically.
34. Learn how to channel my brain electricity. Become an X-Men. EPILEPTIC EVEDRA! with a purple spandex pant suit thing, a lightning bolt and a cape. Oh, I wish my name was Evedra. For some reason, legally changing my name seems more intimidating than leading the human race in robot wars. Bureaucracy, you bastard.
35. Re-learn clarinet and move on to oboe like I was fucking supposed to.
36. Eat less fake sugar and ask friends for their exciting stories about real drugs again.
37. Uncover more talents. I can only do so much with the ones I’ve got, and they’re officially spent.
38. Overcome school for the last time. NO! MORE! SCHOOL! If I can’t get a “real job” with my over-education I’m going to stop trying so hard to appear sane and just let it all hang out.