The World Doesn't Resolve Around Me

First things first, the message on the top of last week's post was supposed to say "Merry Christmas."  However, I messed things up a little, by not previewing it first.  I am truly sorry for how that didn't work out.  I will resolve to do better in the coming year.  This will pretty much be the only resolution I will make, as I don't really make New Year's resolutions.  Oh, I try to improve my life, but it is more of a year-round thing, and not something I try to force upon myself just because it is January first.  This is not just a random thing, either.  I pick up and discard improvements throughout the year.  I am always trying to eat better, exercise more, and quit bad habits while trying to start new good ones.  I understand the importance of starting new things at the start of a new year, but it just never seems to work out the best for me when I do.  For instance, I used to plan up to an entire month trying new food/recipes.  Sometimes, I would limit myself to just one week, if I couldn't find enough new foods ahead of time.  After a few years of this, I just kind of stopped.  Finding entirely new foods was almost impossible, and even just trying new products and recipes was becoming a challenge.  Now, I just try things when I see them.  Mostly, they are new varieties of things I already buy or get.  This gets tiring, especially when this means that products I do like are discontinued.  I have gone through over a dozen different flavors/brands of cereal and snack bars over the years, only to see the one I don't like still on the shelves while my favorites disappear.  Exercise is just the same.  I have lists of hundreds of different exercises, the majority of them I have never attempted.  I rely on a core (bad pun) group of a few dozen that I rotate through, with a little variation here and there, with the biggest changes coming in weight lifted and for how many times.  For example, this past weekend I did unilateral presses at 120 pounds for twenty total reps over three sets.  I wasn't even planning on so many, but I felt I could go all the way and I did.  My bad habits are trickier.  I try to change them as after as I can, to various levels of success.  After decades, I have all but stopped biting my nails, although I still have trouble with two fingers on my  left hand for some reason.  I even try to improve my good habits.  Typing is apparently not one of them, as I have made multiple mistakes just today.  I have corrected them, but I just seem to be hitting the wrong keys and I cannot blame the keyboard for most of them.  However,  this keyboard does have quite a few keys that are sticking.  Anyway, I will try to improve my life next year; I just won't announce how I will be doing it.

Top of the Charts

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I have always been fascinated by lists, particularly Billboard magazines' Hot 100 chart.  I have been following the Top 10 pretty much every week since I was in grade school.  Over the decades, I have become so familiar with their various charting techniques, that I have frequently been able to determine the top songs of the year.  I havn't always been exact, but I come close very often.  Sometimes, I have been able to guess upsets that many people wouldn't even see coming.  Take this year.  One would think that "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi with Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber would be the number one song of the year.  I mean, it spent sixteen weeks at number one.  However, through my own analysis of the weekly top ten lists, I discovered that "Shape of You" by Ed Sheeran had actually spent more total weeks in the top ten, even though it only spent twelve weeks at number one.  It would be a close call, but Ed wound up getting number one song of the year, just as I had predicted.  In fact, I correctly predicted the top three songs of the year in order, with "That's What I Like" by Bruno Mars coming in third.  Each of these songs had chart performances so dominating, that no other songs really came close.  In fact, any two of these songs spent more weeks in the top ten  then all songs by solo women combined.  I had felt that this was the case, but it took my research to conform it.  Anyway, it was an interesting year in the charts.  I hope you like my Christmas message at the top of the page.  It was going to include a snowman graphic, but I couldn't get things to work out just right.  Still, I think it came out pretty well.

 

Not Too Naughty, Not Quite Nice

I am naturally very inquisitive.  I just have to find things out.  It is one reason I was going to be a journalism major in college, if I had only gone to the right school.  This sneakiness really came to the front at Christmas.  Hardly a year went by without me finding out at least some of my presents before I unwrapped them.  I had all the tricks.  Not only would I shake my presents, I knew how to peek under the flaps without greatly disturbing them.  I would even moisten light-colored portions of the wrapping to make it transparent enough to try and see images underneath.  One year, a great aunt had given me a water game, and I later would get the exact same game from a cousin.  I had to feign enjoyment, since I already knew I was getting another one.  My "best" year was 1980.  That year, I could figure out almost every single gift I had under the tree.  I wasn't that careful in hiding the fact, and my mother hid everything until Christmas, even the one I didn't figure out.  How was I supposed to know she had gotten my a giant teddy bear that she got as a special offer with one of her fragrance purchases?  Our house wasn't that big, so there weren't too many places to hide gifts before they were wrapped.  I would sneak around, frequently finding them and sometimes claiming them early as prizes in a successful hunt.  Not always, but I did sometimes play with them.  For instance, I easily found my Super Nintendo game system.  When I was the only one in the house, I took it from its hiding place, got it out of the box, hooked it up to the television, and played the first few levels of  Super Mario World.  I then put everything back before I could be caught.  My mother suspected something, but she couldn't prove anything.  This secretiveness also helped me when I started to buy gifts for my mother, as well.  Once, in the late '90s, on one of my infrequent forays outside of the house, I was just wandering a store, when I found something my mother had been wanting for some time:  a bonnet style hair dryer.  I managed to get it, and a Michael Bolton tape, and hid it in the trunk of my car and put in it so it wouldn't move around to make noise so my mother wouldn't hear it when I went to pick her up.  I managed to slip it into the house and wrap it without anyone knowing.  My mother took awhile to even notice it under the tree.  She was very surprised when she opened it up.  Unfortunately, she rarely had the time to use it, and it was ultimately thrown out years later.  I had a knack for picking good gifts, but my mother doesn't.  When I was in high school, she once got me a sweater I liked, but I couldn't wear because it was the wrong size.  I had tried it on weeks before and had to get a different one instead.  She thought I had grown enough so it could fit.  I hadn't.  She was so certain, she had thrown away the receipt.  Although I would grow a little more (as well as develop some muscle tone), that sweater never did fit me right.  That is one of the reasons why I don't ask her for gifts any more.  She always thinks I would like or need something, but she turns out to be wrong.  Christmas isn't as much fun when you have to ask for an exact gift, and nothing else will do.

The Rabbits Is Coming

I admit it, I am a rabbit person.  For some strange reason, I just connect to the furry critters.  I don't know why.  I felt the connection long before I even saw a real one.  I just share so much in common with them. I consider myself cute, timid, and somewhat cuddly; but I can get a little ferocious if backed into a corner.  I am prone to going fast, even when it isn't necessary.  I have that mysterious, mystical side that many east Asian cultures see in rabbits, as well as their lagomorph cousins hares.  I even have that playful, trickster nature that rabbits can have in folklore.  As for the remarkable fertility, I am still waiting.  Strangely enough, I had an even stronger tie to rabbits that I only recently discovered.  My grandfather's name, Arlie, actually means something along the lines of "from the hare's field/meadow."  I never realized that.  If I am ever lucky enough to have a daughter, I had actually been thinking about naming her Harleigh, the feminine form of his name and probably spelled that way. [As for boy's names, my top five, in rough order are:  Toby Jr., Jacob (or whatever name starting with J is my father's), Matthew, Lawrence, and Donald (as in the duck, not the President) {As for why I have more boy's names than girls, for some reason I always picture having more boys, particularly multiple births; probably that rabbit thing again.}].  Back in 2002, a rabbit colony just seemed to pop up in the hill behind my home.  Pretty much every day that summer, I saw at least one rabbit.  Morning and evening, totally at random.  Sometimes, I would have to stand in the back yard for minutes, just trying to catch a glimpse of once hopping by, but I saw one every day.  The best time was the following year.  It was a Sunday evening, just after a shower.  The front door was open, and I took a quick glance at the yard.  I saw some movement.  It was a baby bunny hopping in the grass.  Then, I saw another one.  And another one.  And another one.  In total, there were six or seven bunnies, hopping about.  Then, I saw the mama rabbit.  How did I know it was their mother?  A few minutes later, I looked out again.  There was the mother, lying on her back, with all the baby bunnies trying to nurse.  It was one of the most beautiful and sublime things I have ever seen.  I would have taken a picture, but I was afraid the light and sound would scare them off, and I didn't want to ruin the perfect moment.  While I have had a number of unusual animal sightings, both in my yard and elsewhere, this was still the best one.  [About that title.  I know it is grammatically incorrect.  It is a reference to an episode of the '80's cartoon U.S. Acres.  It is probably an allusion to something else as well, but I can't place it.  The episode was about a doomsayer prophet warning about a rabbit invasion with a sign.  Many characters commented that is was incorrect, too.  At the end of the show, a rabbit stampede came by and took down a bad guy, saving the characters.]