BrockLi Soup

To begin with: yes, I’m sitting at home at midnight on New Year’s Eve. I’ve had an upset stomach all evening and really didn’t feel like going out, so I didn’t. I’ve been dicking around with MySQL and writing this post for the past two hours, so I didn’t even realize it was 2007 until I heard fireworks in DC. For the record, they can’t be seen from my balcony. I DID see the last 30 seconds of the ball drop; those people in Times Square always seem to have a much better New Year’s Eve than I do.

Anyway.

It’s been a banner year for movie-watchin, folks! I’m not going to give all the analysis I did last year. In all honesty, I DID run the same queries for this year, but they aren’t interesting enough to include (I don’t know why I bothered last year).

In the way of quick summary: since the beginning of 2004, I’ve been noting every movie I see all the way through, an idea I stole from Grahams. It’s likely that I’ve forgotten one or two, but I consider it to be a complete list. Here are the basic stats for the past three years:

I started watching more movies around the time I started keeping track of them, so I’m more than certain that this year has had my highest volume of movie-viewings yet. 144 movies this year means 12 a month, or one every two and a half days. There were nine movies that I watched twice this year; there are others that I’ve seen in previous years and again this year (ie, Boondock Saints, which I’ve seen five times in the past three years), but I don’t feel like coming up with the SQL query to determine that number.

I’ve definitely become a little more critical in my ratings, something I wanted to improve on from last year. I noted last year that I generally only watch movies I expect to like, so the numbers are skewed toward the positive. It’s hard to say if I’ve actually gotten more critical, or just started taking more chances on movies that I may not like (thus causing more low ratings).

I subscribed to Netflix just before moving to Arlington at the end of last November, and then upgraded from three to four movies at a time sometime early this year. In 2006, I watched 88 movies from Netflix. According to their website, I returned 111 discs this year. Eight of those were movies I got but didn’t watch, and the remaining 15 were TV shows. I’d say I’m getting my money’s worth: at $24/month, I paid about $2.60 per disc (including TV shows and unwatched movies). That’s certainly better than $10 at Regal.

I’ve put a serious dent in the list of movies I need to see, but I’ve still got over 340 discs in my Netflix queue. I approach it sort of like I approach books: if it sounds interesting, I’ll try it. When I glance over the list, I don’t even recognize half the titles. I go through it every month or two and remove a bunch that were added on a whim, but obviously I haven’t done so in a while. I should probably spend some time getting rid of all the crap that will never make it to the top: I’m constantly shuffling my queue, and the stuff I don’t recognize never makes it to the top.

Now, I need some suggestions. I’ve caught up on a bunch of older stuff I hadn’t seen, but I want to spend the first month or two of the new year watching new movies that I’ve been missing. What movies would you recommend from the past year or two? The second season of The Office is coming first no matter what you say, but drop me an e-mail or leave a comment here if you’ve seen something good lately.

Addendum: I’ve just trimmed the queue from 348 to 213. That should help.

This year has been a disappointment, and I’m not the first to say so publicly. It was going to be good, but I suppose that 2005 was a tough act to follow. I had planned to do a monthly review of the past year (just like everyone else), but ya know what, I really don’t feel like it anymore. Here’s a quick and dirty, in no particular order:

Visited Rochester a couple times. Visited Buffalo a couple times. Visited Pennsylvania a couple times. Visited Chapel Hill not too long ago. BP visited us a bunch of times. Family visited, and we touristed. A bunch of other people came to visit. Moved in with Fotios and Jym, then Matt moved in. Got rid of the car, then it got hit by a deer. Grew a long goatee. Drove to Nashville and back (with a week in between) for work. Started smoking again, then quit again last month. Read a bunch of books, watched a bunch of movies. Saw Flogging Molly a couple of times and Against Me once. Got a root canal. Decided to write more, then didn’t. Decided to win the lottery, then didn’t. Decided to go to the gym on a regular basis, then did, for a little bit. Went to Flugtag.

That pretty much sums it up. There were quite a few really good weekends in there, but overall, it wasn’t that great.

Of course, making next year better hinges on identifying the things that can be improved. I think that changing things up more often and rejuvenating my social life will help things considerably. This is the first full year I’ve been out of school and I sort of fell into the “go to work, make dinner, watch a movie, sleep, repeat” routine. While I was at RIT, everything changed every three months - different classes, which meant seeing different people every day, and a different schedule for class and work. Additionally, there were always a ton of people around. I worked, studied, and partied with my peers, and I loved it. I met new people almost daily. I always had some project that needed to be done, to keep me occupied, and at the end of each quarter, I had something to show for the past three months.

I know people are tired of me whining about how much I miss college, but tough shit - it worked for me, better than anything else I’ve known before or since. I’ve been entertaining the idea of grad school; now would be the best time to do it, but I’ve got enough student loans to deal with as it is. That might be something to look into more next year, though.

Anyway, the burden to make next year better is on me, and to that end, I’ve come up with a bunch of resolutions that should help:

1. Go to the gym at least twice a week, preferably more.
2. Spend less time just hanging out in the apartment.
3. Get a handle on my finances.
4. Be more positive about life in general.
5. Try brewing beer.
6. Do more personal projects.

There were others on the first draft of the list that I’ve since decided to put off. For example, I added “Move into DC” last month when I decided I wanted to live in Dupont, but have since determined that it would be in my best interest to stay here in Arlington for another year. I also wanted to build or buy a kegerator, so we can have good beer on tap all the time, but that needs to wait until I can afford it and have somewhere to put it.

Actually writing all of this has been more therapeutic than I expected. I’m trying not to make it sound like the past year was awful, because really, it wasn’t. However, this is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I can really say I haven’t been happy with the previous year. Maybe 2007 will be great, maybe I’m just overthinking things. Maybe the start of the new year will be just as anticlimatic as it always is: no different from the day before. At least this time around, I’ll have a reason to make it more than that.