New Year Notes to Self

It’s popular this time of year to make profound personal pledges – more commonly known as resolutions – to self and significant others as a way to set a corrective course for the upcoming 12 months. Whatever. I’ve learned through first-hand experience that the sad majority of these resolutions are all too often ignored, diluted, broken or otherwise abandoned by the time the Martin Luther King holiday rolls around in mid-January, if not sooner.

While I wouldn’t call what follows resolutions, per se, it still seemed like a good idea to start out the New Year with a few – well, let’s just call them “notes” to myself. For example:

Next year, I’ll take official power outage notices from Edison with a grain of salt. In the two weeks before Christmas, we were notified on at least four separate occasions (via robocalls, through the mail or with notices left on our door) that we would be without power on a specific upcoming day any time between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. As someone who works from a home office bristling with computers, fax machines, scanners, printers, wireless routers and other technology, it takes a whole lot of planning and inconvenience to prepare to continue working without power or an Internet connection. And so on four different days I made the many necessary, time-consuming arrangements, notified clients that I may be difficult to reach and have limited access to emails, etc. – only to have the entire day pass without even a flicker of our lights. Frustrating.

Speaking of lights, next year I need to remind myself to shop for new Christmas lights and decorations in September. If I haven’t done it by Halloween, it’ll be too late.

Also, I really should play my guitars more. A lot more. And write songs. And sing. That said, this New Year I want the gift of music to play a much, much bigger role in my everyday life. Hold me to that one, okay?

On the subject of music, singing and songwriting, next year I really need to write a song that becomes the soundtrack for every other TV commercial like “Home” by Phillip Phillips has been this year. So, yeah … let’s make that happen.

Then again – I’d have more time for music if I didn’t watch the first hour of NBC’s “Today” show on weekday mornings. The morning yak-fest is worse for my blood pressure than an entire 12-cup pot of dark roast. I’d love to have a word with the NBC execs who think it’s hip to have a minimum of five or more people on camera at once with each one clamoring to talk louder than the other until no story can be enjoyed, much less understood. And can we please put an end to this silly fad of having the show’s talent stand next to a big touch screen monitor and swiping images during a story?

Looking ahead to next December, I’m going to try not to walk around singing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” I recently paid attention to the actual lyrics and it seriously creeped me out. The writer, Frank Loesser, didn’t include a reference to roofies in any of the lyrics, but he could have. He did, in fact, list the male singer as “wolf” and the female part as “mouse” on the original sheet music for this 1944 ditty, thus raising the creep-factor even higher.

Over the next 12 months I will try my best to Tweet on at least a somewhat regular basis. Because Lord knows I need to spend more of every day staring down at a glowing screen.

He also knows I need to get back to memorizing Scripture – one verse a week – something I did religiously (sorry, just too easy) the first half of last year but somehow stopped as life got busier.

And finally, I hope that – this year more than ever – I’ll see you ’round town.

  Jim Chase