I'm not a big fan of New Years resolutions. Those ideas that seem so achievable about half an hour before the big event rapidly sour as reality (and the next morning hangover) sets in. It's almost fashionable (or certainly very excusable) to fail, and it's almost funny to fail them before the hangover has even set in. Of course, lots of things seem funny when one is drunk, which may go some way to explaining that video of me dancing to Shania Twain, or the popularity of Tits on a keyboard.

The concept of picking a time to set goals, and following through with them, has always fascinated me somewhat, not least because I usually fail more or less spectacularly at the planning stage. The everyday hassles of daily life mire me down, and I find myself, usually less than a week later, trying to answer the police when they ask me exactly what the hell I was thinking when I spray-painted a statue of Ghandi day-glo pink. In broad daylight.

Considering the whole process some time around Christmas, I realised that perhaps my goals were not inaccessible, but that they were poorly conceived, and were unaccompanied by much motivation. It's all very well to say that one wants to club baby seals for a living, but unless one breaks that lofty goal into smaller components, it will remain as elusive as petrol in Zimbabwe. One would have to find companies that practise seal-clubbing, or at least groups of people who do it as a hobby (possibly though Greenpeace), and get in touch with them, find out what skills they would be looking for, where they operate from, and make enquiries as to job openings. It may be necessary to buy your own club. Then travel arrangements would need to be made, accomodation found, and several other factors taken into consideration. Each step is not only possible, but actually pretty simple, until one day one steps out onto the tundra, club in hand, and prepares to make to make baby seal paté.

Hence, the concept of February resolutions. They're made at a point in time when things are usually fairly quiet, can be planned for more easily, and if you only want to keep them up for a month, well, it's a short month. My own goals are not quite so lofty - all I wish is to move about half a planet away, break an addiction more severe than heroin, and reach the nigh-mythical level four on some internet website.

I can hear you now: "Why should we care? These goals are paltry, pitiful aspirations! Aim for something truly great, like spray-painting the Queen Victoria statue!" I would, but there are... complications involved. On an unrelated note, I'm the only person to ever receive a restraining order from a statue. Besides, to reach that third goal, I'm going to need to post here fairly often, so you'll be hearing a lot more from me. Learn to deal with it.

My goals, then:

1. Move half a planet away - While some might argue that since the Earth orbits the sun at about 29.8Km/s, and the diameter of the Earth is 12 756km, I accomplish this feat, along with everybody else, roughly every 3 and a half minutes, but this is not quite what I mean. I've found myself caught up by wanderlust, a desire to experience a new way of life, and the best way for me to do this is to find employment elsewhere on the planet. My eyes are on the UK, mostly due to my British passport, but I'm open to suggestions. The job does need to be IT related, as it's what I know - particularly networking and general systems administration. To do this, I'll need to:
   • Dust off and update my CV
   • Find out what offers are available overseas
   • Apply, and actually get something
   • Make arrangements so that my current clients are left stranded
   • Make appropriate plans to move there
2. Quit smoking - This one scares me a little. I've made the plunge before, and succeeded for more than six months, but smoking is an integral part of my life, and has been for about ten years now. I've heard good things about Varenicline though, so it may be time to try again. To do this, I'll need to:
   • Talk to my doctor
   • Use whatever methods are available to quit smoking
   • Not start again
3. Reach level four on E2 - I'm not actually into reaching level four just for the sake of reaching it; rather I feel I need to give more back to a site that's given me so much over the last few years. I need to node more, and to get into the swing of that, I'm going to node at the least a daylog every two days, more if I can. Since my access to computers outside of work is spotty since my hard drive keeled over, this may be a difficult one to follow, but I'm certainly going to try. To do this I'll need to:
   • Write at least 14 nodes this month
   • Try not to make them all daylogs

Looking at what I've written, I'm left feeling slightly awed by the amount of work I've set myself - but the key thing is that it is set, and all that is left is to start. The first step is the hardest. Wish me luck.

I have ceased wavering! This essay of mine on the possibility of doing political philosophy will go forth! It must go forth. But maybe with a few modifications.

I have a sort of standard, moderately formal tone in which I write the standard exegetical philosophy essays that, as a philosophy student, I'm expected to write. It's a side-effect of learning philosophy in an academic background, you know, and I really would love to divest myself of it. But there is a lure to writing philosophy in this style: it is easy, uncontroversial, and moreover quick.

Essentially, one takes the text to be killed and divides it into relevant movements. For each movement one finds a characteristic quotation, for each quotation one builds a paragraph, and by stitching a sufficient number of paragraphs together one forms an essay. Like I said, perfectly acceptable, academically convenient, safe.

Except that I'm finding my own writing to be perfectly unacceptable, dull, boring, and longwinded. So I'm forever ditching this old scholastic method and searching out my own; a better writing style that actually engages the reader instead of dully plodding along through the text like a snail with a one-track mind. Of that stuff are made analytic philosophers — no, bad analytic philsophers. What I need is energy, a love for playing with words. I need to relearn what it means to write.

And damn, what poor timing, what with finals week only two weeks away. Well, wish me luck, I guess.

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