New Year, New B

I blogged last year about my love for New Year’s; the starting over of it all.  I made my resolution; I sort of kept it.  I say sort of, because how do you really measure “be aware of the time I’m spending?”  I have some great memories from this year, and I think I made more active decisions this year, regarding life choices.  Sooo okay I’m going to give that one to me, what the heck. It’s a new year.

I am 55% excited and 45% terrified about my resolution for this year.  It’s simple, concise, easily measured, but it’s also one of those mythical BIG STEPS INTO ADULTHOOD that could make or break my spirit if I don’t succeed. 

I am going to finish all my started projects this year.

Okay looking at it on paper (screen?) kind of takes away from the drama, but this is a Big Deal.  It came to me, as if in a dream, a few weeks ago when the realization basically punched me in the face:  I have never finished anything that did not have a specific deadline. In my entire life.  

I have sewing projects from the 6^th grade, originally meant for friends that I moved away from but to whom I now hardly speak.  I have two novels (short stories? er, free form poems?)  that I have not touched in over three years.  I have scrapbooks, frames, a Rosetta Stone, pictures, and sewing alteration projects galore collecting dust in the closet in our second bedroom. I hardly finish my meals; I always seem to have something terrible rotting in the fridge that I was totally going to reheat/bake/chef my little heart out, but never got around to it.  I currently have five black bananas in my freezer, just waiting to one day be reincarnated into banana bread.  If I can ever wrench them from the shelf, that is.

I’ve been told that I am this way because I am an artist; I have too many huge ideas and a too short an attention span before the next big creative wave.  And I totally bought into it, for years, bought into the whole “messy artist” persona: the absentmindedness, the clutter. But that kind of thinking does me (and the neat freak* who somehow persists to love/live with me) a great disservice.

My little apartment holds twenty-four years of big ideas, projects, and life-changes gone unfinished.  Where does that put me, in the grand scheme of things, when the only artist I know of who truly gets away with unfinished work is Tupac?  And I mean, I feel pretty good about the quality of work that I do, but I am not Tupac.  This is something that I know.

So this year I am finishing projects. All the ones I started long ago, and all the ones I will start in the future.  Maybe along the way I'll learn how to manage my time, or how awesome it is to actually finish stuff.  Though I have to admit, those two foreign concepts sound a little crazy to me. But I am excited. And I am about to get real crafty. 

Finished products from B.Graham? I hope the world is ready.



*I feel I should mention that he read this and insisted that the "freak" bit is an untruth.