Keeping it 100....

This is the 100th blog of the year. I thought about posting a banked fiction piece but since I got something worked out for my Dana exchange early I decided to write a new piece. 

I like milestones. I mean, milestones are basically just gold stars right? But I'm not the only one who likes them. Everyone talks about milestones. Heck, we celebrate the calendar turning over every year. EVERY YEAR. And when it's a big one, like the 1999 to 2000 switch we really go crazy. 

I mean literally crazy on that one with the Y2K hullabaloo. 

But milestones, road markers, check points. We all like them.

It's part of what made Weight Watchers such a terrible idea for me. You got a new reward at every 5 pounds lost and at certain percentages of your body weight lost and a different goals. It was like a continual milestone/gold star machine. I would have kept going for a lot longer than I did if people hadn't started to say, "Umm...you are supposed to stop when you reach your goal weight..."

But I love a good milestone. I love a good gold star. 

And then at the same time I think we put too much pressure on them. We expect there to be some sort of magic to them that there just isn't. Like New Year's Eve. We celebrate that change and then we make all sorts of resolutions to do things differently. Like we are going to wake up on January 1st somehow fundamentally changed from who we woke up as on December 31st. 

We expect Valentine's Day to be the most romantic and special day of the year. 

We expect to wake up feeling more grown-up and mature on our 18th birthday.

We think that there is going to be some sort of fundamental change in our relationships after we say I do. 

But that's not how it works. 

The change for New Year's Resolutions starts long before January 1st. Or at least it should if you have any hope of making them stick. If you want to work out more, you need to have the plan in place on how that's going to happen. When are you going to do it? How are you going to make it happen? Do you really want to do it in the first place? Because if you don't, you won't stick with it. Because, and here is the secret from someone who has worked out consistently for decades. It often just sucks. It can be boring. It can be tiring. There are 100 other things you'd rather do right then, and a lot of them including sleeping or sitting on the couch. You have to have a plan that started long before that milestone date. 

Most of you know I don't celebrate Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. I think they are days that set people up to be disappointed. Katie calls me almost every week. I would hate to trade that for her taking me out to breakfast or sending me a card once a year. My idea of romantic is when Brent sends me a meme of a skeleton saying something funny, because it shows that he knows who I am. I would not appreciate a dozen roses and a fancy dinner once a year instead. When Valentine's Day rolls around and people ask him what he's doing for me he says, "We don't celebrate, she expects me to tell her I love her every day."

And look at this blog. It's the 100th blog of the year so I feel like it should be something big and different but really it's just the same thing as always. Me telling you what I think about the world. 

And what I think is that I love a good gold star and milestone marker and I also think that a lot of the markers we choose do more harm than good. Don't wait for a special day to tell someone how much you love them. Don't think you are going to feel like a grown-up just because you turned 18, or 21, or 35 or 55 (I'll let you know what 56 brings). Don't think you are going to turn into a brand new person just because you are writing a new year on your checks, or whatever the equivalent is now that we don't use checks! 

And don't think that a wedding day is what makes a marriage. Everyone knows what makes a marriage is skeleton memes.