As a species, humans are beset with vices. Some are completely harmless. Some can endanger your life. Overcoming these vices can be a constant struggle for some people, and I am no exception. In an attempt to change things up, I decided to attack one of my easiest to handle vices earlier this year.
When January rolled around, or more specifically, my return to Utah in January, I decided that I was going to abstain from alcohol. I didn’t really have a problem with it in my opinion. Sure, there were times that I drank to much and did stupid things, but mostly it was just something that I could easily do without. After a brief relapse while playing some Starcraft at a LAN party shortly after moving back, I have now gone a little over for months without a drink of alcohol.
I don’t claim that this is some great accomplishment. I now live in a place that is less alcohol-friendly than other places I have lived, but I figured it would be the easiest thing to stop doing before I started working on some of my other much harder to deal with vices. Some of the others I have tried to stop have been met with less success thus far, but I know that it is not an easy thing to do.
First up is my credit vice. I like to buy things, but I have had difficulty in the past of spending my own money to purchase them, relying on readily available credit to buy temporary gratification. A lot of these purchases are things that I can wait to buy, but it’s just a horrible vice that I have. Luckily for me (depending on how you look at it), with my Connecticut condo going to foreclosure in two weeks, it will probably be pretty hard for me to get any sort of credit for a little while, so I can actually focus on paying off the stuff I currently have and get back to a point where I can use credit more responsively.
Second on the agenda is what I call the “living healthy” vice. I know that I should eat better. And I know that I should get some exercise. But it sure is a lot easier to just not do those things. So I don’t, much to my own detriment. I tried to change my eating habits, and was doing pretty well with the whole thing, but once my brother stopped doing it with me, I lost the drive to do it. I recently watched a movie called “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” about a guy, who, well, is fat, sick and nearly dead. While only one of those three items applies to me currently, it is only a matter of time before one of the other two happen. If you consider the recent health scare in my family, it’s time for me to start taking better care of myself. I don’t know if I’ll go on a 60-day juice cleanse like the guy in the movie, but I really need to be more proactive about my health and my body. Or just find a super hot girl that likes fat guys and wants to make food for me all the time…
I have other minor vices that are things that I could probably do without, but for whatever reason I keep doing them. One is biting my nails, though I have been better at this recently than in the past. Another is staying up late and sleeping in, which is not a terrible thing some times but it really affects my work performance, or currently, the lack thereof. When I first returned to Utah, I was pretty good about getting up early enough to get some writing done. Now, if I wake up after 9, I feel that I don’t have enough time to get anything written in time for my noon deadline. Hopefully, going back to work somewhere will change this, and I will shift my writing to later in the day, but that remains to be seen.
The point of all this is that self-improvement begins one step at a time. I used my non-alcoholism as a step to prove that I could overcome something in my life. Now that I have nipped that squarely in the bud, it’s time to move onto something else. The credit thing might be taking care of itself, but the healthier living thing is my next priority. I am young enough to make a difference, but I am not getting any younger, and before long it might be too late.
Until next time…
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