I have noticed that we, as human people, have a hard time learning from the past.  One could easily point to things like holy wars or women’s overalls, but never is this fact more evident than during the month of January as each year – inspired by the metaphorical fresh start that the new calendar brings – millions of people take to setting goals and making resolutions that will be forgotten by the time the first Valentine’s day chocolate hits grocery store shelves, which anymore is approximately Nov 15^th, so these resolutions are really short-lived.  And yet it happens every year!  The entire personal fitness industry depends on it!  This month, tens of thousands of people across the nation will toss out their leftover cookies and rush to the mall to purchase hundreds of dollars worth of fancy “exercise” clothing, which will soon become fancy “lounge” clothing, and eventually, fancy “dust rags” as the collective flab of the defeated masses blows out even the stretchiest of seams.  These people will join gyms that they’ll visit a total of three times – seemingly just to irritate those of us who go year round – and then continue paying for the entire year, maintaining the false hope that they might visit again “around May, once the weather gets nice”.  Snaring these people seems to be a pretty lucrative business plan for the fitness centers, judging by all the HUGE new facilities springing up around the area.  There’s really not much overhead, because they don’t even have to buy any actual fitness equipment at this point – if you were ever to get close enough to see inside you’d notice that there’s just a card table and a revolving group of fit, attractive 20-somethings skating around on their “heely” shoes and ingesting controlled substances while waiting for the pizza guy.  The majority of your fitness center checks are actually signed directly over to Dominos. And yet, this certain eventuality doesn’t deter us.  Even corporations hop on the goal train this time of year, forcing employees to develop metrics by which they can be measured and denied raises the following year, when in fact the only goal most employees have is to continue collecting a paycheck by any means possible, up to and including insurance fraud.

Seeing the writing on the wall, my standard go-to resolution is to “never change”.  This has been working out pretty well for me for the last decade or so – though it probably doesn’t thrill my wife – and I plan to stick with it for the foreseeable future.  However, the blog is still fairly new, and I thought hey, why not take a look into the lucrative future of posting my opinions openly on the internet?!  Surely I could put together a five-year plan for Reluctantly Aging – though ideally the final four years of that plan would mostly consist of which jetski I plan to take from my yacht into shore for my daily champagne brunch served by supermodels.  As you may have guessed, the eventual – by which I mean ‘pretty much immediate’ – goal for ReluctantlyAging.com is to amass several million loyal followers and retire on ad revenue at 40 to either a Tahitian beach, or a mountain valley in Switzerland.  This is where the plan gets cloudy – it’s hard to choose an exotic foreign location, because I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to leave the US and scout potential retirement locales in my life, with the exception of a couple trips to Canada, which is beautiful but doesn’t really count as ‘foreign’, per se, as it’s more like “Really North Dakota.” I have been to Switzerland, which is why it makes the list, though prior to visiting I had pictured the Swiss people as little clock-making elves that lived in hollowed out trees like the Gummi Bears or the Keeblers, so you can imagine my disappointment when they turned out to be normal, non-magical people – though the mountains were beautiful, and they did make some pretty spectacular chocolate.

Location aside, as you may notice from the complete lack of advertising on this page, the plan has been slow to take off.  That frustrates me, because I had what I thought was a pretty solid business model:

Sadly, even the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes end with George shooting Lennie after he accidentally kills some trollop in the barn, even though all he wanted to do was tend to the rabbits…

But I refuse to give up, because by God, I don’t care for real work!  I do believe, though, that I would be willing to hunker down and really dedicate myself to writing full time – by which I mean, ‘between naps and video games, but not when there were Big Bang Theory reruns on’ – if it meant that I could follow my passion of being filthy stinking rich and traveling to all sorts of exotic locations without a care in the world.

While the blog hasn’t necessarily taken off yet, it still seems like a better plan than the original method for funding my wanderlust, which was to accumulate enough airline and Hilton points via work travel to vacation in fancy places at the more reasonable rate of ‘free”.  After 12 years, I’ve managed to rack up somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million Hilton points (It would be significantly more if Hilton would force all their properties to honor double and triple point promotions!) which amounts to less than 1.5 nights in the Presidential Overwater Villa at the Hilton Bora Bora Nui Resort and Spa that I’ve had my eye on.  I know this seems like an impossible dream, being that – price aside – these sorts of places likely have some sort of standards for their clientele, but I’ve looked into it and the folks at Hilton don’t require that you be an *actual* president to stay in this suite.  They will also accept Sheiks, Princes, Emperors, militant warlords, and the occasional Prime Minister – so there’s still a chance.  Unfortunately, by the time I have enough points for a week, ocean levels will have risen to the point of completely swallowing my island paradise, so I need to get moving on this whole blog plan.  I think it’s still possible, but I’ll need your help!  The good people at WordPress require certain readership levels before they’ll let me advertise, which they define as “several orders of magnitude more than you currently have”, so tell your friends about me!  Follow and share!  Come back over and over!  I promise to send lovely fruit baskets to my top visitors, presuming they send a preaddressed, postage paid box to my local address for shipping of said baskets!  Together, we can achieve my dreams!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to slip into some fancy lounging clothes, because The Big Bang Theory is about to start.  And remember to vote for me in the next election – I’d hate to have to go the warlord route.