2010

Resolutions? I actually knew someone who would not just make New Year's resolutions but actually make a five-year plan and revise it each year as necessary. How about a five week plan? Or maybe just five day? And I could revise it each day as necessary! Which of course it would be necessary since I'd probably forget by day 2 what I had resolved to do or not do the day before. Hmm? Is it better to be positive and say what I would do rather than not do? I used to actually believe in positive thinking and can remember practicing it.
1. I will think positively
2. I've already broken, I was going to limit myself to 2 or at most 3 chocolate rice cakes but while watching Chocolat on DVD I ate all 7 that were left!
3. I'll think about that tomorrow (not rice cakes, # 3).
Now I will have a cup of Sleepy Time tea and hope Eliot will feel as good tomorrow as he did today. He says his shoulder feels better than it has the past two weeks. He is more cheerful when he feels better.
I just thought of a # 3 - I will forgive myself for bad thoughts especially the ones I have when Eliot is not cheerful. Also the bad thoughts I have about myself especially after I eat too much.
But at least it was only rice cakes!
I just finished reading Kati Marton's "The Great Escape" subtitled Nine Jews who Fled Hitler and Changed the World. They were all Hungarian Jews who were born in the brief "Golden Age of Budapest" I understand that in Hungary it was subtitled Nine Hungarians... since no one would buy it with the other subtitle. What troubles me the most is the quote from "The Third Man": "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy, and they produced the cuckoo clock." I have heard this in various forms many times over my lifetime. Ah, #4 Stop dwelling on what a mess homo sapiens have made of the natural order of this planet as well as forgiving myself for being part of the problem.
What happened to #1: positive thinking. Boy is that going to go down the tubes because the next 5 books I'm going to read are all by Kurt Vonnegut,
And so it goes.