I am especially bad at gifts.

Well, I'm bad at giving gifts on the days that you're supposed to give gifts. I tried to be marginally less bad this year, and I mostly succeeded, or at any rate I actually bought gifts for most of the people I was supposed to. I used to ride the bus with a girl named Hannah in the second grade, she was a Jehovah's Witness, and I was trying to wrap my head around not having a birthday or not having Christmas. I said, when do you get presents? And she said that whenever someone gives you something, anything, that's a present. And maybe I didn't really get it then, but I do now.

That isn't why I'm bad at presents! I'm not saying I internalized this philosophy as a young man and that's why you need to cut me some slack. I'm bad at presents because I have a rocky relationship with linear time, and I can't handle the pressure. I can't do it on a specific day, in the way some can't "do it" when others are "watching."

Likewise, resolving to accomplish certain life-changing feats at specific chronojunctures is something I have historically been less than adept at, even without an evil force endeavoring to skulk and thwart, but I am comforted somewhat to know that this may be a human deficiency. I hope you exist in that range of experience which allows you to succeed where I myself have failed, specifically charted against numerically daunting graphs with titles like "Recidivism" and "Cheesecakes Per Day (CPD)."

I have avoided talking about the Iron Church - a name given to the gym ironically at first, and now used in a manner approaching, if not directly adjacent to reverence - but if I can find a way to discuss the matter at some point without sounding like a preacher at an old-timey Tent Revival Meetin' I will try. In any case, I started that shit in late September, which I think of as an especially inauspicious time to molt into some new creature. I guarantee that if I'd tried to start yesterday, in the service of some scheduled campaign of improvement, I would already have quit.

(CW)TB out.