New Year's Resolutions

1) Pay More Attention. To everything. All the time. I consider this to be the golden panacea of new year's resolutions, because it will manifest a number of important desires in my life: everything from keeping small and important pieces of paper in my hand to smoothing the rougher edges from my relationships with other people. Not to spoil the ending of the "Crash Course in Women" series, but it is not so much about women as it is about the value of careful observation.

2) Learn To Draw. There used to be a time in my life when I was constantly learning new things. This was not so much a factor of my inquisitive nature, but of the fact that I literally used to KNOW NOTHING AT ALL; there was a moment when using the toilet by myself constituted a huge advance in knowledge. But as I grew older, the number of truly new things I learned steadily decreased.

Ask yourself: what was the last truly new thing you learned to do? For me, it's yoga, and that turned out pretty well. But digging back further, it gets more difficult. Would I consider the Lua programming language to be something new? Hmm.

Proponents of neuroplasticity claim that there is a huge cognitive benefit to learning new things, and I believe them. I'm picking drawing because it's a skill that doesn't overlap with any I currently possess; not to mention that it's a skill that I often find myself wishing for in my work. (Being able to draw my own storyboards would be oh so very helpful.)

3) Take More Photos. I kind of regret not having more photographic documentation of my life. I'm not one of those people who can whip out gigantic photo albums of me and my friends holding the alcoholic beverages of our choice, and I kind of regret it, actually. Plus, I really need to really work on my photography techniques. Even when I encounter something I know will make a good photo, I don't necessarily have the technical ability to capture it. And that's frustrating.

4) Listen To More Music. As we get older, our preferences tend to ossify. It becomes all too easy to eat the same foods, to listen to the same music. I try to make a deliberate effort to resist this tendency. It's difficult, but necessary. Music, in particular, is heavily tied to my writing process. An appropriately powerful piece can carry me through an entire scene - it's the nitrous oxide of screenwriting. But the effect is inversely proportional to the number of times I've heard a piece of music - which is to say, songs get old. So if I don't expand my musical tastes, an important well of inspiration will go bone dry.

5) Read More Books. I read more books in the past year than I've read in a long time, and it still doesn't feel like I read enough. I happen to think that books represent something undervalued in our culture: slow-cooked, well-cultivated knowledge. Which leads me to my next resolution.

6) Cut Down On The Internet. The repository of heavily processed, high-calorie, nutrient deficient knowledge. There was a time when spending time on the Internet represented a competitive advantage; you could acquire rarer information more quickly than those around you. But since the internet has become ubiquitous, that advantage has steadily eroded; that nifty new idea you learned? That Flash animation technique? That obscure remix? One hundred million other people have seen the same exact thing. So if you happen to be an artist looking for creative inspiration (i.e. ideas to steal), the internet is not necessarily the best place to be. In fact, the internet now represents a competitive disadvantage, mainly because it devours so much free time.