I feel like my new year really began about a month ago, and I have to say I'm grateful for the head-start.  This old tortoise can certainly use one.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?

My 2011 is already half-blocked out as we speak.  My age of spontaneity is over.  Honestly, I've never really been the spontaneous type.  Not that I'd want a rigidly structured life.  It's like this: I haven't used an alarm clock for twenty years, but I'm always on time. 

Truth is, I've always appreciated the inspiration that comes from a structured existence.  My years of wanderlust gave me an appreciation of the limits of both spontaneity and structure.  I can admit I often felt I was living a life of free verse, longing for a sonnet. 

Yeah, I know.  Tallulah Bankhead once said "I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.”

I bet you didn't know: I am the exact opposite of Tallulah Bankhead. The only thing in my day more exciting than getting up in the morning?  Going to bed at night!  After you've sucked all the marrow out of the day, why sit around gnawing the bone and picking your teeth into the wee hours?  Dull as ditch water?  Sound asleep is more like it!

Speaking of.  I woke up bright and early this morning to the first First Day in years with no vague goals for the year ahead.  In years past they were always things like what kind of boys I wasn't going to hook up with anymore, How to get out of some tight spot I'd wedged myself into (I have always relied heavily on the old deus ex machina), or hasty plans to stock up on bottled water and canned beans for the coming Apocalypse.  And, of course, like everyone else: going to the gym, trying the latest penis-enlargement technology, and flossing, flossing, flossing!

Not this year.  Got all that covered.  Even the flossing.

This year's resolutions are actual agenda items.  On, like, actual agendas.  The kind you use for, um, actual meetings.  Like, meetings you actually have scheduled. 

Some of this is sort of exciting for me at the moment.  Some of it is just necessary.  But if there's anything I have learned it's that the necessary bits are, well, necessary.  A lot goes into a moment of excitement, you know.  You want to skip the prep work, like they do in the movies — give it the old montage treatment — and in memory that's what it will get.  But you do actually have to put in the time in the here and now.

Dull as ditch water?  Well, it is what it is.  Lucky for you, I won't be talking about a lot of these agenda items until they've come to pass, which will make their implementation in the end look effortless.  Only the thing itself will remain.

Which is precisely the point of the perfect sonnet, innit?