Unresolved: A Geek Dad's Argument For New Year's Aspirations Over Resolutions

You wouldn't think that the end of the year could sneak up on you, but it pretty much always sneaks up on me--even during the best of times. Life is so hectic in general--a continuous churn of family and work activities--that it warps my perception of the passage of time. And then one day I stop to take a breath and I see that New Year's Eve is just a few days off. In those moments, I feel like Ralphie from A Christmas Story in that scene where he's being pushed down the slide after failing to ask Santa for a Red Rider carbine-action BB gun. A voice--though not Jean Shepherd's--starts screaming "WAKE UP STUPID! YOU'RE BLOWING IT! YOU'RE BLOWING IT!"

In many past years, I've reacted by bargaining with myself. I start to list all of the things that I'm going to do differently in the next year. My list of resolutions has probably been fairly average in length and it's typically touched on the types of issues that most of us care about--spending more time with family, living healthier, carving out some time for myself, etc. That the list has remained relatively static isn't a great reflection on my success.

So this year, I've decided not to make any deals with myself save one--to enter the year with an open mind and an overarching aspiration to get more out of life in general. Rather than committing myself to make major changes that work and circumstance are going to actively undermine, I'm going to slow roll it by picking liberally from an eclectic list of small, achievable goals that will enrich my life one nerdy experience at a time:

• Getting Out to Game: Several years ago, my family and I joined a gaming club now attached to our local library. We met a lot of new people in the process, and many of those people make up the core of our friend group today. One of my fondest recollections of those earliest days of the club was going out to a nearby Panera Bread to grab sandwiches and play Resistance right there in the restaurant--allowing us to simultaneously both enjoy and advertise our hobby. With the founder of the club having moved away in the last year, I'd like to step up and initiate more events like this. Maybe a winter week night at one of our many fine pizzerias in some corner booth? Seems doable.

• Nerding It Forward: If you've been reading my blog from the beginning, you know that I've been buying graphic novels on the cheap--usually at comics conventions--to subsequently donate them to our local library. I plan to continue doing so, and have also considered expanding to comics-themed novels. (Shortly after my wife and I married, I read Diane Duane's trio of Spider-Man novels featuring the then-relatively-new character Venom and I'm thinking they would probably still hold up pretty well. While the story is set during a time when Peter Parker is married to Mary Jane Watson, I think it can still be timely given the plot of the enormously successful Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse now in theaters.) But beyond helping to populate our library with the comic arts, I'd also like to expand my efforts through the promotion of other nerdy activities--including bringing classic sci-fi movies to our local community theater. I've already proposed that they screen Forbidden Planet, and I hope to initiate a crowd-funding campaign sometime in 2019 to bank roll the endeavor--ideally as the start of a continuing summer movie series if I can swing it.

• Being More of a Maker: I love the feeling of achievement I get when I make something. It doesn't really matter whether it's something I make with my hands--like sketches--or something I make on the computer--like some of the T-shirt and cellphone case designs I've been marketing on CafePress.com. But everything I tend to do in that arena is something of a one-off--not part of a larger whole or strategy. So in keeping with the sentiments mentioned in the bullet below, I'd like to be more methodical and effective in how I use my limited opportunities to express myself creatively.

• Being More Organized About My Social Media: I've been giving it a lot of thought, and I'd like to be more thoughtful about how I schedule and drop posts across the several platforms I traffic--with emphasis on this blog and my Instagram account. I don't have the specifics worked out--again, I'm trying to focus on small steps rather than committing myself to large deliverables--but I do plan to publish a schedule of specific post types that I want to attach to particular days of the week and weeks of the month going forward. I hope that will help to keep me both accountable to myself and also to those of you kind enough to take the time to look at what I have to share.

So how about you? What kinds of things are you hoping to do in the coming year? And how confident are you that those goals are achievable?

Tell me/us about them in the comments section below, and have a great start to 2019!

And to All a Good Night: Some Random Geeky Reflections on the Night Before Christmas

I'd hoped to continue my experiment with using random encounter tables to plan free time this month, but it's December and--like many people--I find that free time isn't something I need to worry about much during the holidays. Rather, it tends to be a blur of planned engagements and commitments--and that's true even in a normal year, which this isn't. While I won't right now dive into all of the reasons why this year has been more difficult and trying than others that come to mind, I feel strongly about not losing my momentum where it involves this blog; so I'm going to keep things going with some quick thoughts and reflections here as the season almost literally flashes in front of my eyes.

Cookies! As I've noted before, I enjoy baking cookies as often as I can find the opportunity. Since Christmas offers not only the opportunity but the outright expectation of cookies, I invariably squeeze the task in--though I did cut it pretty close this time around, having only just delivered on the promise before lunch this morning. Doing so in volume, I usually don't have time to customize every individual cookie. But I typically hand-slice or hand-mold the designs for the last tray. This year, I was inspired to create the lightning bolt, dragon eggs, and Death Star shown here.

Games! When family gets together, we enjoy playing a variety of games--with favorites including titles such as Ticket to Ride, Dixit, Catan, and Quirkle. I'm not always a fan of card games--but I also particularly enjoy playing Twelve Days around the holidays and have for the last couple of years. Noting that, I noticed something for the first time in picking through the deck just the other day. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that Mrs. Claus looks fierce? I mean, Santa looks like Santa but Mrs. Claus--an hour of Sweet Grenadine hair color and she's out clubbing, right? Mr. Kringle, I think you need to stay on top of your game--that's all I'm saying.

Robots! Yes, robots. I couldn't bring myself to put them into storage after Halloween, as I really liked
how that project turned out. But I've also always just made an association between Christmas and robots dating back to around when I was seven. For some reason, all through my childhood, robots were really prominent on all my gift lists. There was the Transformers phase, which I suppose was fairly common. But another really deep cut--one that I will write about more comprehensively in a later post--was when I desperately wanted Raydeen from the Shogun Warriors.

The Shogun Warriors was a short-lived comic book series and toy collaboration between Mattel and Marvel back in the late 70s. But what was weird from my perspective was that the crossover between the toys and the comics seemed to be only partial. While I'd have been happy to own any of the two-foot tall figures based on the giant robots from the comic, there was only one crossover character--Raydeen. Unfortunately, it was also the most scarce of the figures in my area--presumably for the same reason.

It's only been in recent years that I learned that these robots were actually separately featured in Japanese animation in their own respective titles; the Marvel comic simply reinvented and repackaged them for an American audience. So the Great Mazinger that my parents eventually got for me--the one I ungratefully treated as a consolation prize--would have been warmly welcomed in thousands of other houses. While not featured in the Marvel comic, Mazinger was the subject of multiple anime series and even a recent animated movie. A cultural juggernaut several thousand miles away, he was greeted by an upturned nose and a sniffle at my house where I was a little boy who didn't know what he had.

Is there a Christmas message in there? Something to ponder as we bob and weave our way through various holiday traditions and obligations? Perhaps. In the meantime, I will simply wish you and yours happiness both in the midst of and in the aftermath of your celebrations.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a geek life. :)