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A Cynical Idealist’s Quest: One New Year’s Resolution a month for twelve months.

New Year’s Eve, 2007: My New Year’s Resolution – create a blog that isn’t just for link sharing or aimless personal journaling.

Unlike all my other New Year’s Resolutions, the year after year dramatic promises of lifestyle alteration, I set my sights low last year. Of course I can start a blog. I just get a Wordpress account, and an idea, and I’m golden. I’d have to be incredibly lazy not to accomplish this within at least a month of the New Year.

New Year’s Eve Eve, 2008: I start the blog. Alright, I actually did it! One New Year’s Resolution Accomplished!

If you’re what my friend Di would call a “cynical idealist” and an undercured perfectionist, you understand that accomplishing a goal can be a very depressing thing. Before the afterglow has worn off you are already regretting the imperfections and the missed opportunities, the minor spelling and punctuation errors, the lack of clarity and grace, and all of the days of procrastination that got in the way. With my previous Resolution so close to accomplishment (pending the publishing of this post) I can’t help but reflect on all the Resolutions that lay wasted in the detritus of years’ past.

The cynical idealist is still half idealist, so that means there must be a silver lining. Which inspired the topic of this blog.

Why?

I’ve always been interested in minor-extreme lifestyle changes. Adopting dramatic modifications and observing the effects. If you want to be cyclist, go hardcore and bike across from Boston to New York. If you want to be an environmentalist, haul your recyclables to Jersey when NYC bans it. I’m a cold turkey kind of guy. Getting thrown into the deep end always seems the best way to learn. And it makes for great entertainment obviously. The extremes of Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Day experiments on the more dramatic end; No Impact Man and One Dollar Diet, perhaps more within reach.

With that, I embark on the quest of this blog: 12 months of my forgotten resolutions, one month at a time. Resolutions that have a purpose, documented here in all of their extremes and well-intentioned glory. They say it takes about three weeks for a practice to become a habit. So I’ll see what I can learn from four weeks of practice on each.

Who Am I?

  • Overeducated media professional, with Midwestern roots, based in the Northeast.
  • Gourmand, music fan, comedy connousieur, film buff.
  • World traveler, lazy environmentalist, politics junkie, post-ironic anti-hipster.
  • Cynical idealist, fundamentalist agnostic, ambivalent philosopher.
  • Boyfriend to a PhD student who is very skeptical patient about this experiment.
  • Owner to two oddly named cats who couldn’t care less.
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