New Year's Resolutions

For a long time, I was adamantly against New Year’s resolutions. Why suddenly start trying to be a better person on an arbitrary date? But in recent years, I’ve seen that there is some validity to it. It may be a random start date, but if it makes you feel like you’re starting with a clean slate, why the heck not. But the hard part is keeping up with them. People tend to make goals that require sweeping change, and then feel bad when they inevitably fail at them.

88% of New Year's resolutions fail!! Here are 12 tactics to help you meet and keep yours.

I really like this article on how to reframe your resolutions into more realistic goals with specific steps to take. I actually put together an Excel chart with my goals and steps.

I love the idea of associating your routines with rewards so that you're more likely to follow through with them. I need to figure out some rewards and add them to my chart!!

My resolutions are to work out regularly, continue to eat healthy, finish my screenplay, and work on more creative projects. But these sound pretty good too:

Christmas Time at Disneyland

My boyfriend and I recently went to Disneyland for a couple days. Disneyland in the winter is the best ever. The castle is covered in snow, there are huge Christmas trees, all the characters are in holiday themed outfits. It’s just super cute and festive and wonderful.

The first evening we were there, there was an Annual Passholder event for Limited Time Magic, a screening of The Santa Clause. They held it at the Opera House on Main Street, which is where the Abraham Lincoln thing normally is. It was a really great idea for a special event, and probably super easy to pull off, while still being festive and awesome for the passholder attendees!

We stayed at the Grand Californian Hotel, the beautiful hotel that’s connected to California Adventure. It is, in fact, quite grand. The lobby is huge, with lots of cushy chairs and a huuuge Christmas tree. Because we stayed there, we got early entry into the park! The line to get in from the hotel was actually quite long, but we still got in early, and immediately headed to Cars Land. The line was already long, but the single rider line was so non-existent that we literally walked right on - and we got to sit together! We got right back in line after we got off, and walked right on again!! We rode the most popular ride in the park twice in like ten minutes, it was amazing.

One of my favorite rides at Disneyland is Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters. In it, you are on a moving track going through different rooms where you have to shoot at various targets. Not a lot of people know this, but the shape of the targets determine the amount of points. Circles are the most common ones, but they’re only worth 100 points. I only go for the diamonds and triangles, which are worth 5,000 and 10,000 points. At one point, the ride stopped (probably to let on a handicapped person), and I was right in front of a triangle target. I aimed my gun for it and didn’t stop pulling the trigger until we moved again. I accumulated a TON of points. At the end, I ALMOST broke 1 million points, which is by far the most I’ve ever gotten!!

Just entirely too much Home Alone stuff

I’m planning on having a bunch of free time this weekend, so I’m probably going to catch up on some holiday movies, since ‘tis the season! One of my faves is of course Home Alone. Here's a bunch of stuff about it you might not have know but desperately need to:

• What if Kevin McAllister had Instagram?

• The Home Alone drinking game

• 12 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Home Alone

• Uncle Frank Was Behind Everything in Home Alone

• The Injuries From Home Alone Analyzed

• Home Alone vs. Die Hard

A Very Merry Mix-Up

The other day I got sucked into a Christmas movie on the Hallmark Channel, called A Very Merry Mix-Up. Don’t judge me, sappy sentimental Christmas movies can be really entertaining!

I missed the first ten minutes or so, but I inferred that Alice, our redheaded protagonist, flew in to spend Christmas with her new fiance’s family, and got picked up from the airport by the fiance’s brother. She has never met her fiance’s family before, but they are really sweet and welcome her with open arms to their home while they wait for the fiance to arrive a few days later. She proves herself to be adorable and perfect, as all Hallmark Channel movie protags are, and fiance’s brother quickly falls in love with her. Uh-oh conflict!

So the fiance eventually comes home and Alice is all “Uh, you’re not my fiance.” And the fiance’s brother is all like, “But that’s my brother.” And the not-fiance is all “Who the heck are you?” Alice went home with the wrong family from the airport! Oops! So the real fiance comes and picks her up and takes her to his cold and jail-ish mansion with his typical-rich-people mother and father. Everything is in sharp contrast to the other family’s - cold and impersonal compared to the warm and cozy of the first family. The fiance isn’t really a two-dimensional bad guy, he’s just a driven-business-type who doesn’t understand human emotions. Alice owns an antique shop that she inherited from her father after he died; the fiance manages a deal for a strip mall to be built right where her shop, and they’ll pay her millions for the land. He thinks she will be ecstatic because now she’s rich, yay. But she doesn’t want to be rich, she just wants to have her cute little shop that her father left her. This is the breaking point in the relationship, I guess, and she quickly realizes that her true love is the first guy, who she loves even though she only met him 2 days ago. But it totally works, and they live happily ever after, and I don’t actually really feel like I wasted 2 hours of my life.

It reminded me a bit of one of my favorite Sandra Bullock movies, While You Were Sleeping. There’s a merry mix-up in that one too, where Sandy’s character accidentally tells her crush’s family that they’re engaged, after he is in a coma following an accident (that she rescued him from!), and then falls in love with his brother while she spends Christmas with his family.

If I had to choose between the two movies, no contest it’s WYWS. But sappy Christmas movies only come around once a year, so... I’ve gotta go check out their line-up and see what other cheesy awesomeness I should check out.

MAPS

'Maps' by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is one of my (many) favorite songs. Recently I discovered another version that's acoustic. I think this version is as beautiful, if not more so, than the original.

Original version:

Acoustic:

Did you know the title is actually an acronym for My Angus Please Stay? Karen O wrote the song for her boyfriend who was leaving town.

My Thanksgiving Break, In A Nutshell

I went to Houston to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. Here are a few highlights:

*On my flight from LA, when the man sitting in the aisle seat in my row remarked to me that it’s nice our middle seat is open, my response was YEAH-YUH! He looked at me weird and then didn't talk to me the rest of the flight.

*We ended up renting a few movies to watch while I was there and my dad was absolutely enchanted by the Redbox box.

*Trying to explain what the Tesseract in The Avengers is to my dad is hard. Seriously, you try explaining what the Tesseract is.

*We went to see Catching Fire on Thanksgiving morning, and so did about 10 other people. Two of whom were full grown men, sitting by themselves. No judgement! Good for them. Katniss can be a hero to all ages and genders.

*Thanksgiving buffet at Golden Corral is not as glamorous as it sounds. I know it doesn't sound glamorous, but it’s even less than what you’d think. BUT there’s a lot of food, turkey and ham and pizza and mac & cheese and fried fish and clam chowder. Not to mention, the 3 kinds of fountains - chocolate, white chocolate, and caramel. Did YOU have chocolate fountains at YOUR Thanksgiving? I didn't think so.

*Duck Dynasty is basically the exact same show as Keeping Up With the Kardashians in that they both feature rich families doing really unimportant things. Also, way too many product lines.

*My BFF who lives in Houston and I went to a restaurant that we went to last time I was in town and it was worse. Guess who’s getting an updated Yelp review with fewer stars?

*It was SO AWESOME to be able to use electronic devices during take-off and landing. Finally, amirite? Like my Kindle Fire being on was going to bring the whole plane down.