New Year's Resolutions from Steve the LLamabutcher

I just trolled through the archives to see if I had posted anything remotely droll on earlier New Year's Eves, in the vain attempt to do a post hoc web regurge of the meaning of the big picture.

So let me start a new tradition and post my New Year's Resolutions and Predictions, and we'll all check back in a year to see how I did.

First, my resolutions for O-Six:

1. Eat more guacamole

When I was in college, I suffered from horrible allergies. Basically, I went all four years with an extremely clogged sinus. The downside of this was that certain "friends" were known to cue into the power chord from "Aqualung" upon sight of me~the musical cue for "snot is dripping down his nose DEEEAH dum DAHH!" In vain, my Saintly Mother (TM) took me to an allergist who proceeded to run some rather painful tests, the net result was that I was supposedly allergic to "dust," "grass" etc. Gee, thanks, Doc. But what was impressed on my teenage mind by this hack was that I was also lethally allergic to avacados, and that if I were ever to have the evil green fruit, I was sure to shrivel up and die. Now, living as I did among a proud Hugenot American family amid the culinary wilds of New England, this did not pose much of a challenge, as the closest one would get to the actual avacado was by touching someone's horriblely tinted Sears Kenmore refrigerator. Somehow this appealed to my nascent and latent Calvinism, the idea of death lurking in nachos, and not the slow death of heart disease but sudden, instantaneous death swooping down like a bad strip club bouncer on a slightly too enthusiastic tipper.

Turns out, the good doctor was wrong on two counts: what I was actually allergic to was my shampoo (which I discovered soon after I left college), and was such an obvious call I should have sued the weasel for malpractice (pain and suffering from lost nookie due to excessive avoidable snot). Now, this should have alerted me to the fact that this guy was A) an idiot , and B) did I mention he was an idiot? No? He was an idiot. Yet, somehow, the ancient taboo ingrained upon my teenage brain (AVACADO = DEATH) remained, lingering like some Calvinistic notion of predestination and eternal damnation. But when I was in Dallas in October, I relented, and, as the great Joe Buck would say, "Oh. My. Goodness."

So 2006 will be the Year of the Guacamole at Rancho Non-Sequitor.

2. Be more of a dick at work

Yeah, I know, New Year's Resolutions are supposed to be about "spending more time with the family" and "be nicer to people and fluffy puppies" and "become more cultured." But I spend enough time with the family as it is, my idea of high culture is a Kurt Russell double feature and some Pabst Blue Ribbon (hey, hon, Big Trouble in Little China AND Dark Blue back to back! Hon? Must not have heard me) and, frankly, fluffy puppies annoy the crap out of me.

Chai-rista can back me up on this one: things really suck at work right now. The powers that be are in lying weasel mode 24/7. Believe it or not, I have tried the "high road" crap---I have really, really tried. And it's produced nothing but, errr, a whole lot of nothing. So it's pushback time, folks, time to call a spade a spade. Tenure doesn't protect academic freedom---that's a cruel lie. But it does mean you never have to say you're sorry.

I feel liberated already. Call it getting in touch with my proud Hugenot-American heritage. My people were kicked out of all the decent countries in Europe because, quite frankly, they were annoying as crap: self-righteous, narrow-minded, severely pious about the not really important things in life, difficult, obstinate, cheap, and not very snappy dressers. Heck, even the Pilgrims didn't like having them around and they weren't exactly a bunch of loosey-goosey, Blue state polyamorous brie-eaters. They would, however, fit in wonderfully to American higher ed today, fitting the model of a post-modern humanities professor to a "T", as long as you drain all that Christ-crap out of it.

Not quite in a bring a horse into the Dean's Office and kill it sort of way, but much more in the Deathmobile crashing into the stands genre.

3. Watch more bad movies

My resolution last year to "Just ignore the crap out of Jimmy Fallon" paid off handsomely, and ignoring the whole SNL franchise's efforts saved a lot of heartache (you could do a whole "Bye, bye, Mister Rob Schneider" to the tune of Don McLean's opus). Tina Fey just isn't doing it for me anymore.

That said, there are whole genres that have passed me by. The eldest turned 9 today, the youngest is 11 months. I'll confess it loudly: I've never seen Pulp Fiction, any of the American Pie franchise (except for about 1/3 of the third one on HBO), only the first season of the Sopranos (and the first episode of the last season), not to mention large chunks of the early Wilson brothers oevre. Yes, yes, I realize this lowers me in the eyes of many of you (I can hear Sadie screaming "I KNEW he was an orgling fraud!"), but it's confessional time. That said, I have seen the whole Ben Stiller genre (including, sadly, the Polly movie with Jennifer Aniston, on a plane......the only movie that actually made me feel sympathetic to Ross Geller). But still, vast, gaping holes remain to be filled that should take years to fill the breach.

In Oh-six I resolve not to let my ignorance grow any larger than it already is.

4. Stop mooching off my neighbor's wireless router

Yes, I'm an (occasional) wireless thief. Like right now, for instance. Bad. Bad LLama. Bad stinkin' LLama.

This year I promise to actually get the wireless and the broadband-thingee, if only to whup Robbo's perfumed heinie in Age of Empires II.

5. Be meaner to people at work

I already mentioned this one, but wanted to clarify: not to the students, except those who deserve it, and not to the staff---just my lying, stinking, faux-intellectual Marx-citing yet discriminatory in hiring colleagues.

6. Blog more

This was a good year at LLama Manor, exceeding all our goals for traffic, ads, etc. But the coolest thing is starting to spring out blogs from our friends. I feel we've suceeded when we have our whole ring of friends from college with blogs of their own. Keith----you're next.

It continues to be a great honor and privilege, not to mention a daily kick, to co-blog with Robbo: he's easily the best co-author a blogger could ever ask for. He's the real deal: steady, consistent, professional, polished, erudite, witty, and insightful, while I'm staggering incoherently across the stage, mumbling something quasi-obscene into the microphone before collapsing off the stage into
a pool of my own vomit. So, it's basically the long-awaited pairing of Yo Yo Ma with Ozzy Osbourne, and let's face it, I'm the one who is the better for it.

I've noted before that one of the unexpected things about blogging now into our third year, and going onto our 7000th posting (!?!?), the style has changed not just of writing but of reading: the more I blog, the more I come to appreciate "the blogger's blog" that's not the most popular (or even in the top 100) of popularity, but that has developed a solid style and distinct voice that makes it like a great small vineyard amidst a great sea of Huffington Shar-D'OH-neigh.

The new standard I've tried to develop is to become the blogger whose blog I would want to read. In other words, who are the bloggers that are my target audience, those who, when their tracks show up in the referal logs, make me smile? (This doesn't include of course My Pet Jawa or INDC Journal: we go way back with Rusty and Bill, and in each of their own ways they are blogs that we are inately tied to).

Blogs that I aspire to be read by in 2006:

Ambient Irony
X-Donk
Curmudgeonry
Phinneas
Sheila O'Malley
Professor Chaos
Colossus
Cake Eater
Truly Bad Films
Jen Speaks

Blogs that are the gold-standard that I aspire to be more like:

The HMQ
Ace
Beautiful Atrocities
Sobek Pundit
Wuzzadem
Six Meat Buffet

The last thing I resolve to do, blog wise, is to work with Phin so we can have a multiple skin format: classic mafia, as well as some others.

And I do hereby resolve to take down the garish Yuletide template.

UPDATE: The robitussen shots I was doing were obviously getting to me, as I missed the most obvious resolution of all: to turn this blog into a 24/7 virtual shrine to everything that is French Nooz Babe Melissa Theuriau.

And I can hear Robbo's Mom shrieking, "And now it is........?"

Seriously: if Reynolds can have his goodie-goodie "PorkBusters" dedicated to trimming congressional fiscal excess, why can't we have our nookie-nookie "TheuriauLusters" dedicated to, ummm, trimming congressional fiscal excess? (How's that for the new euphamism.)

So my resolution to you is less Dennis Hastert

and more Melissa Theuriau.