Wednesday, June 27, 2007 | by nathan

Page Management

As the year is now half over, I am taking stock of the things I told myself I’d try to do this year. Some of them, of course, are every day things that cannot simply be marked off, though I can tell you right now that almost every single one of those things will come up a "Not So Much" when all is said and done, and 2008 is born anew.

Other things I’ve let fall by the wayside. I decided that keeping a 10-year journal might be too much work for someone juggling a blog, a regular journal, an online column, a novel, a screenplay, and a nonfiction memoir plus the public relations duties of a medium-sized private university law school. So now that the novel, screenplay, memoir and grad school are over, I’m thinking of taking it back up, but obviously not until next year begins. Because I’m anal. But I’m still not sure, and if I don’t do it, it’s no big deal, really.

The other thing I really wanted to try was reading 52 books this year. I’m way, way behind, as, like everything else in my life, it fell by the wayside when I was struggling to finish my degree. Now that’s over, and I’d like to get caught up, and in that vein I’ve revamped the Book Project page a little bit, and I’m going to try to reread the whole Harry Potter series before Deathly Hallows comes out, but that means I’ve got to start, like, tonight. Which is fine. I have a theory I’m working on that I may post here, or that I may send to Mugglenet, just to see if they like it.

At any rate, I have to say that so far 2007 has been a pretty great year, though a few of my resolutions are already bust, like, "Watch less television" (though I have promised myself not to find a replacement show for Veronica Mars, which means - hey! - less television). I made myself a kind of mini-list for things to do this summer, and I haven’t checked it in awhile, but I think I’m good. I have to tell myself that these lists are just suggestions, things I’d like to do, and not things that once I commit them to paper, Jesus is up there on his Blackberry, irritably tapping the screen, looking over his glasses at me suggesting I probably should get to work.

Today I was writing my entry for the x365 project, and I looked at the next name on the list and got excited and went ahead and wrote the entry. Then I got excited about the name after that, and ended up writing over a week’s worth of entries. I don’t feel bad about this, as I stopped once I ran out of things to say, and it occurred to me that I’ve just freed up a bit of time every morning for the next week. I’ve been wanting to do a site redesign for awhile - it’s on my summer mini-list - and so if I get busy with that, at least there will be daily updates coming down the chute, even if my random ramblings like this have completely dried up.

But really, you should only be so lucky.