This new year came in quietly but wonderfully, as I stayed home, huddled away from the cold, opting to curl up on the couch with some movies and a cute boy who knows how to kiss rather than give in to the pressure to go out and par-tay with the drunken revellers in the cold. It was a good note to start things off with. It was also nice to have a totally pleasant and relaxing night in the wake of the last horrible month.
I feel some sort of nebulous obligation to do a year-end wrap-up, but frankly that would be dull and redundant considering how thoroughly I’ve documented the year here. All in all, it was OK, with the usual amount of ups, downs, and change that I’ve come to expect in my life. If nothing else, I don’t sit still or settle into routine for very long.
Rather than dwell on the last year — there’s no point, seeing as I still don’t have a rocket car or a sleek pod-home on the moon — let’s think about the next. I don’t like the idea of resolutions, since they’re so easily broken. I like Andy’s idea of using a slogan as a guiding principle for the year, but it’s his schtick, and he already used the best one for this last year: “Less talk, more rock.” I guess the best thing for me, eternally bogged down by an endless list of projects to think about, would be to make an effort to reorder my long-term to-do list. so here, as of Janury 1, 2001, are the things that I would like to make higher priorities on the list:
- Draw more. And draw to work out ideas rather than just doodle. I hate that I’ve all but stopped drawing. I’ve given up on the one activity that made my entire educational career tolerable. The new UltraSparky backgrounds will hopefully be a good reminder that I should work on more material.
- Read more comic books. Related to the desire to draw more. Comic books have always been profoundly important to me, but I gave up following them years ago when I was a poor student. Their place in my life became primarily one of nostalgia. Dave and Andy and others have helped me keep up, though, and I’ve discovered another generation of books that really get me excited, and speak to a lot of ideas that I’ve pondered on my own over the years. The superhero genre is still pretty dear to me, and it’s exciting to see the kind of excitement, big ideas, and maturity shown in books like The Invisibles or The Authority.
- Learn more programming and scripting. I like the stuff, but I’ve been dicking around without actually just learning to write usefull things like PERL or PHP. What kind of nerd am I without that stuff? A poseur nerd, that’s what.
- Work more, and more efficiently. Who knows, maybe I’ll even look for a regular job that would be a good fit for me. As busy as I usually am, I wind up wasting a fuck of a lot of time, and squandering hours that could be better spent making myself more solvent. (Or drawing more.) I need to get my act together.
- Stop sleeping around so much. The opposite of one of last year’s goals. Guess how I’ve squandered a lot of that time I mentioned? I got a lot out of my system, and I had an awful lot of fun, but I’ve been really feeling the need to focus again and shoot for quality instead of quantity. (I suppose this is more of a resolution than a reprioritization, but it’s been on my mind lately.)
Wish me luck, kids, and stay on my case if you catch me slacking off.
On a totally different pop-culture note, I’ve found myself talking with lots of guys recently about how they also always thought that Aquaman was totally hot. So it’s not just me. It’s almost weird how often this has been happening, like some great pent-up surge of homosexual zeitgeist blowing a gasket. A friend spontaneously got me a totally hot Aquaman poster by Alex Ross for my birthday. Another announced he’s planning on fulfilling a lifelong dream and getting an Aquaman tattoo. Various other guys, when I’ve started to mention who the hottest superfriend was, beat me to the punch by screaming out, “Aquaman!” This has been even more startling than the realization a few years back that the homos all seemed to have a thing for Boba Fett.