Wow.... I suck at this blog thing!

One of my New Year's Resolutions (yes, one of them... I had one main theme, which was then broken down into 5 parts) was to blog every day of the new year so I could eventually write a book. Well... I'm not much further on either of my short stories for a book, and you can clearly see when my last blog was. That's ok... No time like the present to start something back up!

So my NYR was 5-fold, all falling under the theme: The year to WIN is 2010! (Getting fine in 2009 was a bust, so I figured something a bit more ambiguous was in order!) The 5 parts of my resolution were as follows, including their status 6-months in:

1) Blog regularly (FAIL!)
2) Lose a substantial amount of weight (SUCCESS!)
3) Pay off all my credit cards (SUCCESS- well, in 9/10 total success!
4) Travel to SF and NYC (in the works... have plans to do so, at any rate)
5) Start a book club. Eat, Pray, Love has been our first book, (which we will eventually finish!) and then see the movie (Quasi-SUCCESS!)

So over-all I've done pretty well! (I'm counting last week's trip to Yellowstone as a half success for traveling, and we did have 1 book club meeting, and the other will happen, I'm just sure of it!)

So today I'm starting my 2nd half of the year resolution. To seriously consider doing something adventuresome. The more I think about my life, the more I get frustrated. Yes I have put a lot of pressure on myself to do something great, but here I am, 26 years old, in a job that's not going places as quickly as I'd like, living with Spaggy (which has been the most inspiring year of my life, but let's be honest... I'm too old to rely on someone else as much as I do), and about to overcome the peak of my personal mountain. I can feel that something exciting is just around the bend, and I just need to convince myself that the time is right!

My thoughts of adventure entail legitimately writing a book of short stories about my favorite topic... me! Also, I think I might travel to Thailand in the spring of 2011. Thailand in '11, it's gonna be heaven! Sound like a new theme to anyone else?

The main point of this rambley post is to share what has kick-started my adventuresomeness tonight(it's a word.. I just used it!) and it's a person. Anais Nin. I feel like I've been familiar with that name from random song lyrics or HS lit classes or something, for quite a while, but had no clue who she is. (Or even that she's a she!) So I did a bit of research, and have found a new muse. At least new to me, and a muse for the time being. Read the following and I dare you to not be inspired! (Don't just stop reading here... the best 2 are at the bottom!)

* "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
* "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
* "For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."
* "Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness."
* "Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
* "The only abnormality is the inability to love."
* "I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
* "Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
* "Dreams are necessary to life."
* "The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment with it, that was the miracle."

And my two favorite truths (well, truths to me):

* "It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

* "I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

Hoping to remember this as I enter the last half of 2010, the year to win! I can feel an excitement stirring (or maybe I'm still suffering from butterflies from seeing Eclipse, but doubtful!) and hope I make some exciting decisions in the nearish future! After all, it's just life... no one get's out alive and we can sleep when we're dead!