Proust Quote:
“People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.”

Confessions Question:
Your favourite occupation.

Confidences Question:
My favorite occupation.

Proust’s Answer:
Loving.

Proust does give a pretty darn good answer to this question. But if you were to define occupation as a job, I doubt loving is a paid occupation.

It has long been my dream job to be me. Not to be unemployed necessarily. On the contrary to be paid to be me. To get a healthy paycheck in the mail for simply being me. Once a year I would get a performance review in the mail. It would indicate how well I had done that year at being me and I would be given a healthy raise if I had been true to myself that year or a dismal raise if that year I hadn’t been very much me. Either way, the job would come with health insurance and a cost of living wage increase.

I don’t think I would need a retirement plan. I couldn’t retire from being me. At least not in a way where I would need to continue getting paychecks in the mail.

However, if you define occupation as “any activity in which a person is engaged”, then you would have to be a fool not to figure out my favorite occupation. It isn’t board games.

This following number has a certain degree of uncertainty in it, but it is in the ball park. At least I doubt it deviates from the truth by more than a few percentage points. Thus far in 2009 I have taken 7,796 photos.

That is a healthy number, but as I reflect upon it, I can only think of a small handful of personal projects that I have made significant progress on this year.

I do not believe in New Year’s resolutions. It is folly to wait for an arbitrary point in the Earth’s revolution around the sun to decide to make improvements in one’s life. Today is the day to make improvements in your life. Nobody is promised tomorrow.

That being written, I do have a handful of goals for 2010. I have started working on these goals already, including lining up a potentially pregnant chick to do some chainsaw work in my yard. One of the goals that does not involve chainsaws is to complete a personal photo project every week. I have completed some personal photo projects in the last couple of weeks and I look forward to sharing some of those in January, when this self-indulgent exercise has ran its regrettable course.