Hasslington's General Mindset Guidelines For 2009

Hasslington resolves to do the following during 2009...

1.) The first order of business is, as always, to keep on keepin' on. Or, as Sir Winston Churchill put it, "K.B.O." ("Keep buggering on." It's best not to take that in an overly-literal manner, but rather as a general mindset....)

2.) Oddly, I've got a hankering to read Stephen King novels (!?!). I don't know why I want to read his books, though it may have something to do with the fact that he came to fame around the time I was born, and has therefore chronicled the "American spirit" during my lifetime. So, as Paul Simon would have it, "...who am I to blow against the wind..."?

3.) Despite what I just wrote, I resolve to keep blowing against the culturally-motivated wind when it's the right thing to do. (As Walt Whitman would have it, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.")

4.) I will do my very best to remain generally and genuinely optimistic throughout (at least most of) 2009, but hopefully not at the expense of my penchant for analytical readings as applied to a number of things, including myself.

5.) A person needs a sense of humor. Put another way, a genuine sense of humor is an absolutely essential component of a relatively successful life; that's all there is to it. I therefore hope to retain (and expand upon?) whatever semblance of a sense of humor I at present possess.

6.) I promise to try to write about more diverse topics than I did during the 2008 U.S. presidential election year, though I might annoy a few readers with my baseball obsession. I'll try to keep such posts to a minimum, whatever the word "minimum" might mean insofar as that glorious sport is concerned. Oops, there I go already....

I'm not a grand-gesture, sweeping-resolution sort of guy, so let's just call these my "General Mindset Guidelines For 2009," shall we? So, 2009, here we go....