I know resolutions are usually made only to be broke relatively soon in the year - but I’m going to make some anyway… reasonable ones, so that maybe - just maybe - I can actually keep one or two, if not all of them.

1. Read all of the books I own… err, well… most of them anyway. At least 10 of them. I own a lot of books, and there are a lot of books floating around my house. I’ve read very few of them. It’s a case of the “I own it, I can read it when ever I want!”… But then it just never gets read. Next to shoes, I spend most of my money on books - so I should at least read what I buy.

2. Buy fewer shoes. This year I bought 18 pairs of shoes, that I remember/still have. I’ve decided that that’s excessive. In 2008 I can buy a max of 3 pairs of shoes, and that’s not including the 1 pair of burks that I will probably buy to replace my current ones… so 4 pairs of shoes.

3.  Go to University and get at least 5 A’s… I tend to slack off, and end up getting B’s. I’m always really excited because I always think I’m doing so well because I get A’s on essays and exams - but then they remind you that class attendance and small in class discussions account for 20% of your mark or something like that, and then I hit the floor. D’oh. So really… I should start going to class.

4. Get my passport. … Seriously. I’ve been meaning to get it for over 2 years.

5.  Write more. Whether it’s for Lib-Deb, Eco-Chick or just creative writing on my own time, I really need to start writing more. I find that it takes me forever just to write essays or small blog posts, and I blame it on my lack of writing in the past 6 months. And I feel REALLY bad for telling Starre I’d write more for her, and then never do it.

6. Pay off my credit card debt. All of it. I want that done by March at the latest.

7. Decide the “big picture” things…

8. Eat better, I guess. I just feel like that *should* be one. It’s not that I want to eat better, or that I have any urge to eat better. I just think I should. My mom keeps telling me I should, and mothers know best, so she’s probably right to some degree or another.

Admittedly, I haven’t been reading very much as of late. I spend a lot of time playing guitar hero, watching movies and sleeping. But for christmas my mom got me the book A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. …I started to read it and didn’t put it down for hours at a time. My eyes would get heavy, but I wouldn’t let myself sleep.

Ishmael, now 26 and living in New York City, was a child soldier at the age of 13. The book is his memoir following him from his first year in the war running across Sierra Leone up to his rehabilitation in Free Town. It’s heart breaking to see his transformation from a small innocent child into someone that can’t show or take any affection. Even after his time in rehab his reluctance for love and caring is apparent.

I highly recommend reading the book, it really puts things into perspective. I recently quit Future Shop and had been really queasy about the whole situation and uneasy until I read the book and saw how little these problems are, and how worse it really could be. I am thankful that the biggest problem in my life right now is debt.

Ishmael not only lost every member of his family, but also committed multiple acts of violence that are completely unimaginable and will haunt him for the rest of his life. It’s scary to think there are over 300 000 boys in his situation, not just him. The war through the eyes of a child is so unexplained and terrifying.

Check out George’s interview with Ishmael, it’s moving.

It’s nearly 2008. I think my favorite part about the last couple weeks in December is looking back at the past year, and seeing what came out of it that was definitely worth the time and effort put into it. So here it is - the my tops lists:

Top 10 albums:

1. LCD Soundsystem - 45:33
2. Rascal Flatts - Still Feels Good
3. Craig David - Trust Me
4. Pinback - Autumn of Seraphs
5. Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity
6. RJD2 - The Third Hand
7. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
8. The Six Parts Seven - Casually Smashed to Pieces
9. Elliot Smith - New Moon
10. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Runners up definitely - Feist, Radiohead, M.I.A and Of Montreal
Actually, i think this list of top albums might actually destroy mine… Not only is it a good list, but it’s also 100% Canadian. Woo! Feist!

Top 10 songs:

1. Apologize - Timbaland ft One Republic
2. Hot Stuff - Craig David
3. Toy Solider - Britney Spears
4. Alaska - Camera Obscura
5. The Way I am - Ingrid Michaelson
6. Bartender - T-Pain ft Akon
7. +81 - Deerhoof
8. Blueberry Tree Part II - Husky Rescue
9. My Moon My Man - Feist
10. The Past Is a Grotesque Animal - Of Montreal

Top 5 movies:

1. The Lives of Others
2. Little Miss Sunshine
3. Sweeny Todd
4. Amazing Grace
5. Surfs Up… fo reelz

Top 5 personal moments:

1. Moving home from BC… I miss BC a lot, but it is good to be home. And it looks like I’ll be here for a while, and that’s okay.
2. Getting alcohol poisoning. …I know, it doesn’t really sound all that good, but honestly - it made a good story and has terrified me into drinking less and less each time I go out.
3. The CFI leadership conference. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, introduced me to a lot of people and gave me an opportunity to converse with a lot of open minded, like minded people my age for a few days.
4. My first night out with Future Shop folks. Shit. Show. I established quite the name for myself that night. Gah.
5. Getting to meet Baby AJ! The birth of Baby Ella!

Top 3 games:

1. Oblivion!
2. Guitar Hero 2 - seriously, 3 isn’t really that much better. There are some good songs, but… meh.
3. Bioshock!

I hate halo 3 and the orange box. …so i dont even want to hear it. call of duty 4… it’s more than decent though. As is Assassins Creed, but I haven’t played it enough to put it in a top list.

Top 5 TV shows:

1. Heroes!
2. Flight of the Conchords
3. Planet Earth
4. Yo Gabba Gabba
5. The Office

Top 4 under-reported news stories:

1. Somalia … for some reason, few people knew about the + 1 million Somalians fleeing from their homes - while the UN sits back and watches.
2. Mansions in Luanda … Post-Civil war Angola had an economic growth rate 12.5% higher than China’s 11.5% rate. Thank you oil reserves!
3. 100 000 troops … Lined up along the Ethiopian and Eritrea border, just waiting to have at it, much like the crisis that happened there in 2002.
4. More reasons why teachers need to have background checks, character tests and need to be watched closely. Seriously.

Top 5 books:

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2. Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
3. The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
4. Dirt - The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery
5. Busting the Limits of Time by Martin Rudwick

Top 5 environmental stories:

1. Walmarts green appeal. …They’re still not perfect. They still encourage suburban sprawl. They still suck money out of people. They still pay employees shitty wages. But they are doing great initiatives for the environment. That is all.
2. Moving from “environmentalists kill the economy” to creating green jobs to increase economic growth. Creating new economic sectors that cater directly to the hippies. Solar panel companies, organic farms… the new green economy should create over 6 million jobs by 2015.
3. The world’s 15 greenest cities
4. The Great Biofuel Hoax
5. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its 4th Assessment Report in which it declared that global warming is “unequivocal” and that it was “very likely” that most of the observed warming was caused by man. More than 2500 scientists worked on the report. The panel’s work was recognized with a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which it shared with Al Gore.

Top 5 natural disasters:

1. Bangladesh Cyclones

2. Mexico Floods

3. Hurrican Felix

4. Greece Forest Fires

5. Peru Earthquake

When I was 17 I got my first credit card. There are fewer plastic things I have been that excited about in my entire life. E-bay and I became good friends. I ordered a super nintendo, camera, all kinds of shit. Then I turned to online shopping in general… Think Geek, NHL store, American Eagle online… etc. Then it turned into an “everyday” card, and to make matters worse somewhere in that time I got two more of them.

I would buy a pop with it, pay for my taxi rides with it, just throw 20 dollars here and there onto it, buy rounds at the bar… and for some reason I thought my random $200 payments here and there were keeping the balance on it relatively low.

Well…Last night, I checked my balance for the first time in a long time…

I cut up my cards. Every single one of them.

Today was the first day in three years that I’ve gone without a credit card. It was actually kind of scary. What if the bus didn’t come? What if I got hungry? What if some really cute guy asked me out for dinner, but then didn’t offer to pay? What if a once in a lifetime opportunity to go to Greece for a month for only $100 popped up? So many what if’s, and not a single ounce of credit to ease my worried soul.

Thus it was today that I realized that I need to grow up. Stop spending all that money. Stop going out on Friday nights with no money but spending $90 on booze anyway. Stop buying mounds upon mounds of clothing. (Seriously… the amount of clothing and shoes I have is disgusting. I could cloth an entire relatively small country.) Stop offering to just throw the pizza order on my credit card and take the cash which just goes toward buying the beer later. No more new xbox 360s, or games, or computer accessories, or speakers, or CD, or DVDs, or iPods, or phones, or whatevers.

Instead. I’ve decided that I can buy only one xbox game every other month. I don’t need to spend any more on my computer. I am not allowed to buy any more shoes, for a good. long. time. No more CDs or DVDs, especially since I know how to use torrents. No more nights out with drunken cab rides home. I am taking all the extra features off my blackberry and using it as a regular phone (possibly selling it, and using the money to get a regular phone… it’s a possibility. But I love my curve..) No more crazy ideas about where I’ll be living next year… I’ll be living here. In Guelph. Working at the same place. The only difference will be I’ll be one year further in my schooling than I am now.

These are the plans. All of the saved money will be going on to my student line of credit. (I applied for just enough to pay off my credit cards… interest rate on visa - 18%… on a line of credit - 7%.)

I. Hate. Credit Cards.

I’m 20 and I live on the far end of town… so I take a taxi quite often. Sometimes I just don’t feel like waiting for the bus after work, but more often I’m out too late and the buses have already stopped running. I recently realized that some of the most interesting things have happened to me in cabs. Whether is be cute life lessons, or really strange happenings… I just love taxi drives. I just thought I’d quickly share some of the interesting taxi stories that I have built up in my little head:

Tonight I hopped into a cab to go downtown to meet some of the guys from work for a beer or three. I get in and tell him that I would like to go to the Jimmy Jazz and he says alright. After a few seconds of silence he goes “Strawberries?” … confused I say “Excuse me?” … “You smell like strawberries…” … “Oh, well its not actually strawberry perfume” … “You’re right, it’s more like Pez.” he says to me, as if that makes anything less weird. On the not of Pez he continues… “have you ever watched people on the bus? They look like pez dispensers. When the bus driver hits the breaks, they all tilt their heads back at the same time, and no one even realizes that they look like a child’s candy dispenser. Next time you’re on the bus, you should look”… “……….uh, yeah. I’ll do that.”

After the Jimmy Jazz I call another cab. This driver seems to be pretty normal. I get in and we drive for a bit… but then, OH but then… I Hate That I Love You by Ne-Yo and Rhianna came on the radio. And apparently this 50 year old East Indian man likes the song, because he cranked that shit and sang every single word. Even the parts where Rhianna goes super high and does the wavy voice thing. He totally belted it out. Weirder than that was after the song had finished… he just turned the radio off and kept driving without saying a single word. …We both just sat there. In total silence.

I was at my friend Ellen’s house after a wicked night of downtowning… (her house is like a 6 minute walk from downtown, so when bars close, we go there…) and it was getting late so I called my cab. It was going alright, but then when we were about to go past the main roads he locked all the doors… “I just wanted to lock you in.” … “uh, why?” … “well because drunk people are going to try and jump at you and get into the door. And if they get it open they are going to pull you out and probably punch you in the face.” … “oh. okay.” Then he told me about 8 stories from when that actually happened.

Often i get into the car and they ask me where I work. This has led to many conversations - one time I ended up selling a guy a Rebel XTi, he came into Future Shop the next day and got it. Another time I got a lesson on managers and how to use human resources to our advantage, and how we absolutely should be going to HR with our issues. Another lady told me to appreciate people at work who looked out for me, and gave me a big long lecture on “team work”… it was cute. But annoying.

I think this one is my absolute favorite… The nicest old woman ever gave me a drive from work to home. We talked about how important loving our jobs is and if we don’t that we should quit… and a little other small chit chat sort of things. When she pulled on to my road she said “You know, when I moved to Guelph, I used to live on this road. I lived in that house there.” She pointed to a house on a corner surrounded by huge pine trees, an apartment building and another house and sporting a relatively small back yard. “But back then, those trees were about 3 feet tall and my back yard was an apple orchard.”