Seriously, How Did It Get to be 2009?!

OK, Not only is it 2009, but it's damn near February 2009. And I haven't written in here since July. What happened?!

The answer, of course, is MEDICAL SCHOOL. But what are you going to do?

So it's January, time for my annual entry thinking about how I am going to read this year. And my annual promise to write more in the book blog. We all know how well those have turned out. Perhaps this one will be better. Either way, here's what I am thinking:

I gave up TV. The official reason being that this block of classes is important and I want to do well so that I can get good grades and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The actual reasons are a little more complicated. Certainly, I do want better grades, and spending more time studying is a good way to work towards that goal, but there's more to it than that. And if you asked me whether I would rather spend my Thursday evenings with Gross Anatomy or Gray's Anatomy the answer is easy and not the one that Dr. Giffin would like to hear, but there will be no more Dr. McDreamy in my life. Seriously.

Part of this comes from the fact that I am engaged now, and Andrew The Wonderful will be moving here in the spring/early summer. This means that I have to do some thinking about the way I spend my time, especially my "alone time," since there will be less of it. Now, I am not complaining about that. In fact, I couldn't be more excited to be trading my alone time for more Andrew time, but it does mean that I'm thinking about the way that I spend my evenings. Mostly what I've come up with is that I know that I will want to be spending time with him, and that he will not want to be spending that time watching One Tree Hill. The way that I live my day to day at the moment (odd hours, etc) is not overly conducive to sharing living space with another person, and probably also not overly conducive to my own health. It needs to be, at least, thought good and hard about, and nixing the TV seemed a good way to add some thinking time (and maybe some sleeping time as well). And of course, the good grades I want, not just for their own sake, or for the sake of the good feelings and pride that comes with them, but also because with being engaged comes the reality that all future life choices will be made as a pair, and I sure as hell am not going to be the one that limits our choices of future locations by having grades that prevent me from matching wherever I damn well choose. So there.

But there's more to it than those things too. I was sort of thinking about the kind of person that I want to be, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the way that an author would describe me were he to be introducing my character in a novel. This is not new patten, but I turned the lens toward the TV watching. Now, which would you rather: Maggie is a voracious and thoughtful reader OR Maggie is the type of person who can tell you, exactly, what happened on Desperate Housewives last night?

One of those things is better than the other, or at least, closer to the way that I see myself, closer to the way that I want to be.

So I'm reading as my study breaks, which makes them more flexible and more enjoyable and better for my brain and my ability to hold interesting conversations. And is certainly better for this blog. We'll see how it goes. I suppose that I could promise to write in here once a week, or something like that, but I am trying to make more reasonable resolutions this year. Ones that take into account all the little things in life that you can't predict. So no number based promises, just some thinking, and a promise that, at the very least, there will be more thinking.