Insert New Year's Cliche Here.

I don't really have much to write about, but I figure that a new year deserves a new post. I hope you're not expecting to read about my New Year's resolutions because I didn't make any. I'm also not going to eat black-eyed peas today. Someone told me that eating black-eyed peas would be good luck, but I think that's a load of horse shit. I didn't eat ANY black-eyed peas at all in 2007, much less on New Year's Day, and I had a stellar year! I didn't kiss anyone at midnight and I didn't sing Auld Lang Syne while toasting with champagne. You could say I'm an unceremonious bitch.

I will mention a quick follow up to my last post, though. My little sister was deeply touched by the moving letter that I painstakingly crafted for her on her birthday. She was so touched, in fact, that for Christmas, she bought me some yarn and glitter glue so I could finally have the ornament-making experience that she so unwittingly robbed from me 19 years ago.

So anyway, I guess I should end this with something ... inspirational to ring in the new year. Instead of going out tonight, I stayed home. Long story short, I was a bit ill and I have to leave for Wisco early in the morning. So I was cleaning my room instead of drinking a lot and repeatedly exclaiming how awesome 2007 was. In a pile of business cards and old receipts I found a worn out folded up piece of paper with my handwriting on it. I wrote this quote on this scrap of paper about a year and a half ago. I was "between jobs" and was pretty anxious about where to go from there. I had a hell of a lot of time on my hands back then, being unemployed and all, so I read a lot. I remember reading this one paragraph. Then I read it again. And again. Then I thought about it all the time, but it was long, so I could never remember exactly what it said. So I copied that paragraph onto some scrap paper and I carried that paper around in my pocket for over six months. This is what it said:

You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it and do not hate anything." - Rainer Maria Rilke

I stopped carrying it around when I moved back to Arkansas almost exactly a year ago. I guess I thought I didn't need it anymore. I thought I'd found my answers, but now I'm realizing that the questions have changed and that it's still pretty useful advice.

Great. Just great. Now I've managed to write something reflective on New Year's Day. I guess I'm not a completely unceremonious bitch.