2007 New Year's Resolutions

In order to properly make 2007 New Year's resolutions, I thought I'd go back to my 2006 resolutions to see how well I did.

My 2006 resolutions were:

1.) Read 52 books. Status: Failed. I read a good number of books, but no where close to 52. I say I read between 13-20...and only a handful worth remembering. The rest were what I picked up in the airport to keep myself occupied.

2.) Learn Italian. Status: Failed. The DVD set my sister got me remains unopened on my book shelf. Que pena. Too bad that's spanish.

3.) Write for 15 minutes every day. Status: Questionable at best. Maybe if you averaged all that I wrote it would net out somewhere near 15 minutes every two or three days. But not every day.

4.) Call friends and family more often. Status: Pretty okay. Sadly, MySpace and e-mail may have allowed me to slack on this a bit, but if the object is too keep in touch than I did just fine.

5.) Don't Worry About Things Beyond Your Control. Status: Great success (said in Borat voice). I actually think I did really well with this one, letting go of things that keep me down and keep focused on the positive. I guess if I had to stick with any resolution, this would have been the best one.

So, with my 20% success rate in keeping my 2006 resolutions, maybe I should set slightly more manageable goals for 2007. Those are:

1.) Learn Italian. I fully plan on going to Italy by year's end. My sister got me the travel guide to go with the language DVDS, so if this does not get done I'm going to trade in my last name and heritage. Because I don't deserve them.

2.) Read 26 Books. That's one book every two weeks. And if I just stop f*ing around on the computer, reading pointless celeb gossip throughout the day, this should not be a problem.

3.) Write for 10 minutes every day. Just writing this post is taking care of today. I feel more accomplished already. Plus, I'm on Page 9 of my book. If I can write for just 10 minutes every day, that's 3,650 minutes of writing. That's about 61 hours of writing, which should get me well past page 100. One would hope.

4.) Travel. Alot. With two planned trips to Europe already on the table, I hope this is not too hard. Plus, I want to buy a giant world map and start sticking in pins of every place I've been to- both in the US and abroad. I think that will be good motivation too.

And I think that's about good enough to set myself up for failure. Just like I did last year, sometime around June I'll check in with myself and see how well I'm not doing.