Hi.

Well, Happy New Year. There, that’s out of the way. I’ll admit to deriding and derailing from the commonly discussed “resolutions” from time to time, but I’m not here to talk about those. I thought I’d share a minor epiphany I had instead. That alright with you?

Cool. I suppose if you didn’t care, you would have stopped reading already. Though if I had to pick a spot to mark as “casual reader most likely to stop,” it would have to be this following line:

It came to me in a song.

Still with me? Man, that’s a nasty cliché-sounding line. Alright, so it was an Ozzy song. That’s better, right? I know. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, here’s what I heard:

The time has come for you to make up your own mind/Stop looking for the answers that you’ll never find/Save all your tears for when you really need to cry/Don’t wish your life away just spread your wings and fly.

That’s from “Time” off the Scream album in case you were wondering. It’s like the first verse.

So maybe it’s meaningless to you, but it hit me kind of hard. I’ve had a lot of indecision and heel-digging in my life, mostly because now’s the time to stop playing around and be making all these adult choices. I hate to say it, but I feel like the previous generations were more mature at this age — i.e. “ready to be adults” — than my generation. I still feel like I’m just starting out of the nest when the truth is that, come April, I’ll be out of here with a B.A. in Writing. What then?

A long time ago, an older writer said to me, “No one is going to make your dreams come true for you.” Well, ok, she said “do it for you,” but she was talking about my dreams coming true doggone it! Sorry for another disgusting cliché-phrase. So that little tidbit stuck with me, and I think it ties in here. I wish I had time to learn to sing better, time to make drawing more than just a hobby, time to work out like crazy instead of just when it’s convenient.

But I don’t. We don’t. Time is something we think we’ve got squared away in watches and phones, but nothing stops it from going forward and leaving us behind if we’re not careful. If I’m not careful. So I’ve been moving forward lately with my driving force being “just do it.” Whatever “it” is.

If (and that’s a big “if”) I were to make an official resolution (which I’m not), it would have to involve better management of the time I’ve got. But I’m not going to pay that any lip-service. I’ve discovered something about myself: when I make my plans known to other people, the chance of those plans actually being accomplished goes way, way down. Isn’t that bass-ackwards?

In other news: here’s my first column for a publication. Yay me. I’ll be talking about whatever I think is worth talking about, in a generally light-hearted manner, so don’t expect politics and hot button issues and life-advice from me. Although, if you do actually “get something” out of a column of mine, well, I think we could both be pleasantly surprised. I know I would be.