Better Late

It's been a month, but I think I've finally got them down. After all, New Year's Resolutions aren't something to screw around with.

Every year I make the same tired old resolutions about losing weight and gaining money, so this year in the spirit of Tabula Rasa, I thought I'd try something different.

Something actually achievable as opposed to the regular, idealistic bullshit I usually list. So here goes, and here's to keeping them this time.

1) Take my recommended daily intake of calcium every day.

I hate drinking milk but the knowledge that Asian women in particularly are susceptible to osteoporosis frightens my balls off. If it means more ice-cream, chocolate, cheese and lattes, who am I to argue with the laws of nature?

2) Moisturise at least twice a day.

Because the doctor says so.

3) Be more careful.

Think before I talk. Make my decisions with more information and consideration. Stop buying clothes and shoes that are too tight. Hang around good people. Try to see things from a point of view other than my own. Eat less sugar and more vegetables. Exercise more.

You know, all that zen jazz.

4) Decide what course of education I would like to pursue before the year is out.

What I need more than anything is to go back to being able to skip classes, sleep in and feel like all the pressure is on me letting myself, and only myself down. Enough of this responsibility shit for awhile.

As my brother frequently jokes: "I don't know what you're so worried about, jie, it's not like what you write is printed and read the next day by thousands of people. Chill."

5) Do the things that make me happy.

This is the most important one (apart from the one I'm not listing about buying a cute new handbag). I am DONE spending my time trying to please other people and doing things because it will make them feel glad or secure or satisfied. Beck (and my mother) tells me that I have to be liked by everybody and it makes me do all kinds of things because I don't want people to be mad at me, to hate me, to feel sad because of me, to be hurt by my decisions.

Two decades of living in North Korea-like conditions will make you really really pissed off. Keeping all that anger inside will make you still madder.

So I'm done. For once, I'm going to go out when I want to go out, see who I want to see, write what I want to write, say what I want to say and if you have a problem with it, to quote Dick Cavett, fold it five ways and stick it where the sun don't shine. (Unless you're my illustrious boss, in which case, please don't stop paying me and did I mention how illustrious you were?)

I would like to have me a little fun my way and if this means running away to Tibet and opening a Llama farm with an 80-year-old rentboy I met while backpacking in Pondicherry (um... just an example, y'know), Imma do it. I feel like I've deprived myself of many things I've wanted and needed to do for too long, and I keep telling people life is too short to live like that, but I never do anything about it.

So let's try it for once: I am going to decide when I do what.

Judge me, and you are dead to me. Try to beg me to do otherwise and you are sleeping with the fishes. Fuck you and your dog for trying to make me feel bad about it. I am done feeling guilty and sad and scared shitless. DONE, DONE, DONE.


So stop me if you see me doing otherwise, aight beyotches?

I'm off to a fine one-month-old New Year.

So far, so good.