It's only the 9th...

New Year's resolutions are restrictive and harmful to my creativity. Let me explain:

Resolutions are so cumbersome to me. They ruin my life and I never accomplish them. For instance, I am not one of those magical people who always fits into their jeans or who never thinks their face is fat. But if I ever promise to go on a diet, I wake up thinking, What can I eat? When can I eat? When and what can I eat after that? It works better just to think, okay, I'll just eat a tiny bit less of everything and that does the trick for me. Well, the same thing happens with resolutions. I wake up thinking, I know I said I would, but I'll do it tomorrow, or How long can I go without doing it? and then live the rest of the year with the discouraging knowledge that I didn't do it.

So, since there are things I would like to change about myself and the way I live, and since New Year's is sort of a good time for new beginnings, I decided that I will just do whatever I want all the time without over-thinking it and making it a big deal. I did not select anything specific to change, but only made that one decision. How is it going?

So far, I have...

~kept a cleaner house

~read a lot more than usual

~put things away when I didn't feel like it but wanted them put away

~eaten more chocolate (I am eating a Cadbury Cream Egg this minute! Yes, they are already out on the check-out stands at our Kroger)

~completely stopped stressing about when to dye my roots again

~been more organized with my time

~eaten more pasta

~never missed a day of Bible study (it's only the 9th, I know.)

~felt excessively grateful at my current ability (and it's been a long time!) to see my collar bones in the mirror (under the skin, of course)

~bought a year's worth of awesome skincare (for way cheaper on ebay) and the first matching set of bra and panties I've had since I was 14

~given in and corrected peoples' spelling errors on facebook (I've said before, grammar I don't care about--facebook itself is nothing but a blight on the world of grammar it seems, and typos are understandable, but out-and-out misspellings are not. If people don't like it, they shouldn't misspell things.)

~probably pleased my general acquaintance far less than usual by not fretfully considering their opinions in anything I've done.

It's been great!!!