Calm Change Right Before Your Eyes

After all that hype, I didn’t make it to the Santa Monica Pier for my annual Amy’s Yearly Plan Of World Domination That God Promptly Laughs At. My time this weekend was spent trying to find a screening of Up In The Air that wasn’t sold out, it took me three tries before I could finally do it. Plus I was gifted a very large bottle of Don Julio tequila for Christmas, and when you have that much good quality tequila, it seems kinda dumb to go pay for it elsewhere. The weather’s been nice at night, so maybe I can craft my plan at the house looking at the city views this week sometime. We shall see.

Normally, I spend my New Year’s at Native Chick’s place, as she does a time capsule thing that’s kinda nifty. But she didn’t have it this year, and just as I was thinking it was too bad, because I would’ve liked to have what my time capsule sheet was for 2009, I run across it in one of the boxes I still haven’t unpacked. I took it with me last New Year’s and didn’t even remember it. Funny how that works.

Native Chick usually had all sorts of stickers of fun things that you could decorate your sheet with, but for some reason last year, all that was left were word stickers like the word art scramble that you sometimes see on people’s refrigerators. Which made my 2009 sheet look a bit like a ransom note. Heh.

It’s called “Promises for 2009” and divided into categories of Promise: Career ; Promise: Romance ; Promise: Spirit ; Promise: Art.

I had written down in the Spirit category that “I will do my best to get to know God to know God, not to know me.” And while it’s grammatically suspect (it was written after several New Year’s Eve drinks) the intent was admirable, which is that I wanted to know God for who He was, not for what He could do for me.

I don’t think I achieved that in 2009 (though I did make it through the Old Testament for the second time, yay me), so it’ll just carry over for 2010.

In the Art category, I wrote “Everything I write will be entertaining and accessible to the widest amount of people possible. And if it sparks conversation afterwards, the more the better.” I neglected to mention that it would be QUALITY stuff I was writing. Because you could look at that promise and say, wow, you wrote Transformers 2. Heh.

But in the Romance category, the ransom note stickers I put up there were “Calm” , “Change” , “Right Before Your Eyes.” And I wrote down, “I will not force it. I will not invent it. I will not ignore it.”

And while I’m not about to get into my personal life here (nor do I think I ever will. It’s a lose lose situation.) I like that as my motto:

I will not force it. I will not invent it. I will not ignore it.

I am absurdly optimistic about 2010. I have gotten myself out of commitments and entanglements that were distracting me from my true focus. I’ve spent most of the holidays rewriting the Christmas monologues with the hopes of finding a publisher. I know it’s not going to be easy. There may even be a few of you reading who are smiling at your computer screen going just you wait, chickie. It aint that easy. There’s a few blogs out there from wannabe screenwriters that I do the exact same thing to, so it’s all fair at the end of the “publish post” button.

I think I was hopeful at the beginning of 2009, as it looked like some things were going to blow up that didn’t take off as far as we hoped. So I have every reason to be bitter, angry, despondent.

And yet I’m not. It’s the weirdest thing. It could be that I’m getting too old to really let bitterness take over my life (and I know that sentence doesn’t make sense either.)

But to be bitter strikes me as one of those, been there, done that things. It doesn’t improve your situation. I’ve improved my situation by divesting myself of distractions. All systems are go to make 2010 The Year Amy Wrote Her Ass Off.

So I think I’m gonna add on to the 2009 Promise:

I will not force it. I will not invent it. I will not ignore it.

I will go for it.

Let’s see what happens.