New year's resolution: write in my effing DIARY.

As to anything else... I don't do that anymore. Am a completely reformed resolution junkie. In their place, I have 43 things.

I think it's interesting that Lani's things are more philosophical and abstract, and less easy to cross off a list and say, 'yes, I've done this.' Some of mine are silly, some rather unimportant in the grand scheme, and some seem vitally necessary, but all are very much NOW goals: things I want now, things I could take definite steps toward any time I choose to and say I've absolutely accomplished them.

I love her things, by the way, and perhaps more than my own because they are things to really strive for. My point is, I could certainly name 43 things to do with personal evolution like hers, and she could certainly name 43 things to do with present fancies like mine. Why then the difference?

My dearest Lani is a dreamer. She wants things and believes (correctly, I am positive) she can have them. Not a sense of entitlement, but an inner knowledge that if she works long enough at something she can earn it. She can grow into it. She can own it.

Me? I have a singular lack of ambition. You must know this. It's also why I talk about the coffee shop less than she does. It is my ideal in every way, but I have never really dreamed about the future. If things don't come off, I'm not one to say, well, the old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.

(Yes, I just plagiarized The Bridges of Madison County, and if it was anything close to the original text, yes, I did it from memory. Oh dear.)

I was surprised to read last year's now-obligatory (it got me back here, didn't it?) new year's entry and find I had actually resolved to become a fully realized nomadic subject. And that's what I have accomplished... I have shrugged off every label I once wore as both crown and shield, every blind affiliation, every unfounded identification. I am only me, stripped bare, all the essential unconnected raw materials of a person. At another time I would have said this is the year to connect those dots. But to plagiarize another, greater film, it's very comfortable just to drift here.

I am actually myself — I am actually myself (this is no profound statement, but I've thought it so many ways) — I am not going in any certain direction, toward any perfectable evolving end, and mundane as my life is right now, that makes me feel free.

I have been kinder since casting off my beliefs: I don't judge people as I used. I have been less angry: I just don't care what Bush said this week or what Congress is riled up about. And most importantly, as I've said, I won't align myself with anything external except the people I actually love, the places in which I feel at home, the books I read, the films I see. Anything else can BLOW ME, and if you could hear me, I would shout that with such indignant, laughably earnest rage. It can blow me.

I talk about nomadic subjectivity as if it were the source of all internal evil, but believe me, I was evil when I was a 'liberal vegetarian feminist asexual elitist atheist-leaning agnostic existentialist/humanist/deist/-ist of the week, oh god! give me an -ist!!' You might still legitimately call me any of those things, but I swear to you I am none.

And I firmly deny one can have a better or worse perspective, but this one suits me. So it's what I'll 'be' for now.

(PS as you can imagine I now loathe my diary name, but I have nearly 500 entries and people reading me here, so what to do?)

(PPS I took a class from Rosi Braidotti; I can pervert her philosophy all I want. :p Not really, though. I am contrite.)