I’ve got goals, but I don’t think they make for good resolutions. I may want to lose 35 pounds, but that’s vague. The thing to do is decide how I think I can achieve that, and resolve to take those steps. I may have been unduly influenced by my job in corporate America, but I think this is the way to go. So:

Exercise

I’m going to continue to use the Assisted Pull-Up Machine at work. When I started, I could do eight pull-ups with 100 pounds of assistance. Now I’m doing about that many with only 55 pounds of resistance. My long-term goal is to be doing regular pull-ups. And, in fact, I’m able to do bout two and a half, but I’m not yet happy with the height I’m getting. So I’m going to keep pushing through the assisted pull-ups until I can do at least five or six real pull-ups.

I’m also going to get more walking and running in. I can walk for hours, but I’m not good at running. I run out of breath quickly. So I’m going to work on a combination of an elliptical machine (at home), treadmill (at work), and the outdoors (everywhere!) until I can run five kilometers. And then I’m going to run a 5K, which will make me feel like I’m in shape.

I’d also like to be able to do a handstand, but I don’t have a specific plan for that. Maybe just do a bunch of pushups until I have strong enough shoulders? I don’t know.

Education

Education, as you may already be aware, is never a waste. Consequently, I like to continually be learning things. By the end of 2013, I will speak another language, and I will play a musical instrument. I can already sort of play the guitar and I’m not terrible on piano, so I really just need to put in some effort on one or the other and I’ll be passable.

For the language, my choices are Latin (because I remember some of what I took in high school), French, or Japanese. The last two would come in handy with my job, and I have a smattering of vocabulary already. I’d rather be able to speak Japanese, but the written language is sufficiently different from English that I might take the easy way out.

Oh, One More Thing

I’m going to improve my handwriting.

Every year, people make New Year’s Resolutions. And every year, there are people sneering about the very idea, saying that there’s nothing special about January 1, and if you really wanted to do something, you’d just do it instead of waiting for the calendar to change.

These people are jerks. And the only reason they’re saying these things is to stop you from changing your life the way you want to.

Because the truth is that the change of the calendar is a pretty big psychological moment. Sweeping away the old year and starting fresh for the new one is a lot easier than suddenly dropping a bad habit in the middle of a random week. Most people need some sort of impetus for change. And there are no bad ones. Some people seem to think it’s okay for people to take a moment to consider their lives and how they could be more awesome, except on January 1.

When someone tells you that they’re planning on losing thirty pounds or learning French or whatever, you should be supportive. Telling them they’re going to fail is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it lets the doomsayer feel smug. Sure, they didn’t achieve anything either, but at least they ruined the dreams of someone who did want to achieve something.

Sure, it’s an arbitrary date, but so is any other one. And the middle of winter is a good time for self-reflection and reinvention. If you want to do this sort of thing on the Spring Equinox instead, I’m not going to argue. Heck, do it on your birthday. Or when you see the first robin of Spring. I’m in favor of people trying to make changes in their lives. It’s sound philosophy.

And another thing! I never see anyone yammering about how the fourth Thursday in November is just an arbitrary day for giving thanks for stuff. Or how December 25 is an arbitrary day for giving each other presents. All of this stuff is arbitrary, but rituals are important. They give life a rhythm, and they help us connect to the rest of the community that’s doing the same things on the same day.

As you may have heard, we recently had a presidential election in the United States. It was in all the papers. According to the New York Times, Barack Obama spent 852.9 million dollars and Mitt Romney spent 752.3 million.

Now, here’s the thing. That money didn’t just vanish. They exchanged it for goods and services. That’s $1,605,200,000 that was floating around. And in four years, there’s going to be even more. You don’t think you could peel off a tenth of a percent of that if you tried? Come on.

A lot of that money was being spent on advertising. But even more was spent on things like “polling” and “getting out the vote.” And those are two areas where, with a bit of preparation, it would be easy to be useful.

POLLING

It’s tempting to think that polling has been solved, what with there being a dozen high-powered national polling firms and Nate Silver being there to sort them out. But there’s always a market for polling data, because people always need to push different agendas. Even if every poll agrees that Candidate A is up by twenty points, a poll showing a margin of only ten points will get coverage by people trying to show that it’s a closer race than everyone thought. And a poll showing a thirty-point margin will get coverage the next day.

Basically, I propose running a fake polling operation and selling data to interested parties. You’ll need some stationery.

GET OUT THE VOTE

Okay. This is key. Because voter turnout isn’t 100%, it’s actually more efficient for campaigns not to even bother trying to change anyone’s mind. Instead, they just try to get a bigger proportion of “their guys” to vote than “the other guy’s guys.” Look at Ohio: Obama won, 2,697,260-2,593,779. That’s a margin of just over 100,000 people. There are over 11,000,000 people in Ohio. The US Census says 23.7% of those are below 18, but that’s still eight million potential voters. More to the point, it’s around three million people who could have voted but didn’t.

Now. Remember how much each campaign spent. If you’re even remotely plausible as someone who can get people to the polls in a swing state, you’re hired. As it gets close to the election, I imagine the level of required plausibility goes way down.

So here’s what you do. Take a look at the list of swing states and decide where you’d like to live. Florida sounds nice to me, although there’s probably something to be said for Nevada. If you’re the kind of person who wants to put this plan into effect, you might like Las Vegas.

Next, you need to spend a couple years establishing yourself. Sorry! If you want the completely bogus plan, go back up to the fake-polling-company thing. For this angle, you need to do a little work. So maybe Las Vegas is the wrong place to set up shop, because you might have to hit the streets. But I’m not sure it matters if you have any success. The important part is that when 2016 comes around, you have a company that’s spent a few years in the “getting out the vote” business.

Then when the presidential campaigns come around, they’ll need someone with an organization. And that could be you! But even if you haven’t built a real get-out-the-vote organization, I’m guessing you could contact one of the sides in late October and say “Gimme a million dollars and I’ll put my imaginary talents to work for you. I have two years in this territory.” They’ll look at you and figure you’re a liar. And then they’ll run the odds and realize they’ve already spent like seven hundred million dollars, and maybe youcan help. Even if the odds are tiny, what’s another million dollars?

Actually, this is kind of a long plan. As long as you’re at it, you might as well figure out how to actually get out the vote. Rent a school bus or two. It can’t hurt to actually accomplish something while you’re out there.

Today is the first day of school! I don’t have a child, but I know when school starts because I live right next to an elementary school, and we have to keep track of these things so we know when parking is going to become impossible.

So I was thinking this would be a great day to adopt a new learning goal. Just because I am not technically in school doesn’t mean I can’t take up “First Day of School” as an instruction, right? Sure!

So I think I’m going to work on learning French.  I can already read some French as a result of having taken Latin in high school, but I can’t speak it at all and I can’t understand it when it’s spoken to me. That’s because most French speakers dispense with at least half of each word, which makes it difficult for the neophyte.

So there you go: First Day of School: I’m taking French!

From page 67:

The idea is to make PLAY into a paying profession or Life Scam. Of course it isn’t easy to break that corporate umbilical cord, but even if it pays Minimum it’s better than a high paycheck full of heart attacks. This is a shallow, fickle mudculture of vinyl. BUT DO NOT FEEL GUILTY IF YOU FIND YOURSELF HAVING FUN EVEN ON THE JOB.

If you work at, say, a printshop, you can develop the Zen of Stapling. Or, in a pretzel factory, the Zen of Flipping Dough — this too can be Slack.

The key is to work by instinct, NOT EFFORT: don’t “do the job,” but float on the lake of work . . . let the job “DO YOU”. This involves the same techniques that you’re already using when you play a video game or a musical instrument, or drive a car. You get ‘in sync’ with the machine, you become the machine, you surrender to the machine. You put your brain on ‘auto-pilot.’ You “GIVE UP”.

It is surprising to me to read that some twenty-five years after I first saw those words and to realize the degree to which I have adopted that philosophy. Sometimes my work gets me stressed out, and that’s when I take a moment to get my Zen on and remember to let the job do me.

Most of the Church of the SubGenius is deliberately silly, but there are secret truths sprinkled in there.

I’m not fat, exactly. But I’m a bit overweight. And there’s a part of me that wants to say the hell with it. I’m over forty; I’m allowed to be less trim and lean than I was in the glory of my youth. But there’s another part of me that is aware that even in the glory of my youth, I wasn’t fantastic. So I’ve decided that I need to lose some fat. And maybe add some muscle on account of how I’m pretty weak. But I’m going to start by dropping about twenty pounds of fat.

Here is my entire plan.

STEP ONE: Stop drinking Coke.

This will cut around a thousand calories a day from my diet. That right there ought to help a good deal, right? Plus, I’m going to replace it with drinking water, which is great for me. And without so much sugar and caffeine swirling around my system, I’m bound to sleep better. Frankly, this step alone could probably clean me up pretty well. But I’m going to combine it with:

STEP TWO: Work out for thirty minutes a day.

And I don’t mean “strenuously work out.” This is going to be more along the lines of thirty minutes on an elliptical machine. Or, if the sun ever comes out again, a vigorous stroll through the neighborhood. The Coke thing is going to be doing most of the weight-loss work. This is more to establish the habit of exercise so that I can build upon it for the future.

…and that’s it! That’s literally all I’m doing. I’m aware that there a million other things I could be doing (and arguably should be doing), but I’m not confident in my ability to complete change my lifestyle in the blink of an eye. This is enough to get me started. And like I say, I think it’s enough to make a noticeable change in the contents of my abdomen. I’ll worry about becoming a mighty Adonis later, when I’ve proved to myself I can do this.

A “slant rhyme” is something that’s almost, but not quite, a perfect rhyme. Like “splat” is a rhyme for “flat” and a slant rhyme for “clap.”

The trick to a slant rhyme is that the vowel sounds normally stay the same, while consonants can be replaced with similar noises. An unvoiced lingual stop at the end of a rod (like “T”) can be replaced with, say, a labial stop (“P”) and the actual sound is going to be a lot like a rhyme, even if it doesn’t meet all the requirements. There’s even a Slant Rhyme Dictionary!

Slant rhymes are often used in rhymes that are intended for performance, both because they make it easier to find rhymes and because they combine the “words sound alike” aspect of rhymes with the “every word doesn’t sound exactly the same” aspect of things that aren’t totally boring.

Now I shall provide something that may appear to be irrelevant. I shall ask you to be patient while I introduce this seeming non sequitur, because I promise that I shall concluding with a thrilling synthesis of my two themes.

I was recently alerted via Facebook to Eminem’s claim that he can rhyme “orange.” Here’s what Mr. Inem has to say:

“People say that the word ‘orange’ doesn’t rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange [...] If you enunciate it and make it more than one syllable — or-ange — you could say, like, ‘I put my or-ange four-inch door hinge in stor-age and ate por-ridge with Ge-orge.’”

At this point, you might think that I’m going to defend those as being slant-rhymes. I am not; I’m actually going to explain why those are actual, legitimate rhymes.

See, the concept of “rhyming” is based on what words actually sound like, not what they’re supposed to sound like. Depending on one’s accent, “pen” and “tin” might rhyme, or might not. Consider this couplet from the “Fat Albert” theme song:

You’ll have some fun now with me and all the gang,
Learnin’ from each other while we do our thing

That doesn’t rhyme. Clearly. However, what if “thing” were pronounced “thang”? And don’t say “But that’s not how that word’s pronounced,” because the fact is that lots of people do pronounce it like that. Then it’s a perfect rhyme! I have to admit that the actual theme song does not use that pronunciation, but I’m pretty sure it was supposed to.

Now, here’s the thing. Eminem is not a poet; he’s a performer. His speech up there was written to be said out loud. And he’s perfectly capable of putting a little extra enunciating into “OR-inj” and then putting more voicing into the end of “Four-inch” so that the sounds line up perfectly. And that means they do rhyme.

I have long wanted to be famous. Not paparazzi-famous, but famous enough that I can go specific places and there will be people who know who I am. And it’s occurred to me that Wikipedia provides a relatively accurate measurement of the level of fame I want. So that’s my new goal: I want a Wikipedia page.

Now, I don’t want to cheat the system. I don’t want one of those pages that gets deleted as soon as someone notices that it exists. I don’t even want a page that consists of a one-paragraph boilerplate and occasionally has to survive discussions about deletion. I want an actual, legitimate page.

Now, my name already appears in Wikipedia in a couple of spots. The page on The Sideboard (the tournament-Magic magazine I edited for a few years) lists me. And the Television Without Pity page lists me under the recappers (as “Montykins”). Although they don’t mention that I’m recapping The Event.

I could also arguably be listed in the entry for The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, in which I played an office worker. I had a name and a line of dialogue, so I think I could just barely count as “cast.” And there’s a case for listing me somewhere in the Magicthegathering.com entry, especially the part about Arcana, now that I have an actual byline on it.

Luckily, Wikipedia has a page specifically about the criteria for determining notability. So I’m going to look at a couple of them!

Biography: The person has received a well-known and significant award or honor, or has been nominated for one several times.

Well, I was nominated for a couple of Diarist.Net awards back when there were hardly any online journals. That probably doesn’t count, though. I’ll make a note that if I see an opportunity to win an Oscar, I should take it.

Biography: The person has created, or played a major role in co-creating, a significant or well-known work, or collective body of work, that has been the subject of an independent book or feature-length film, or of multiple independent periodical articles or reviews.

Not quite. I’ve made a minor contribution to Magic: The Gathering (mostly flavor text and some playtesting). I’ve made a huge contribution to magicthegathering.com, but I suspect the website isn’t significant enough.

So I think the easiest angle for me is to win a well-known and significant award or honor. If anyone knows what the easiest one to win is, please let me know.

I’ve decided that in order to get more done, I need to stop multitasking.

It feels like I’m working at hyperspeed when I multitask. I’ll write a paragraph in Word, then alt-tab to a browser window and read some of a web page, then do some paperwork, and let me put it this way: I started this sentence ten minutes ago. Then I got distracted and did a bunch of other stuff. And I’m confident that this paragraph would flow a lot better if I just focused on it. And I’d be done by now. My point is that multitasking, no matter how much it makes me feel like a whirling dynamo of productivity, is probably just not as efficient as concentrating on one thing until it’s done.

The other thing I think I need to do is to work slower. I have a tendency to rush through something and then declare the first draft “good enough.” That’s because it probably is, because I’ve got decades of practice at this sort of thing. But if I take the time to do a first draft, then do a polish? Hey, then things get good. It turns out that when you take the time to actually make decisions about things, you can often do a better job than just running off instinct.

So that’s my plan, I guess: work on one thing at a time and work slower. Come to think of it, I also need to get more sleep. My productivity apparently goes through the roof when I do things that sound lazy.