New Year Irresolution

I have a good imagination. It has allowed me to create completely unreasonable expectations for life.
I haven’t written a screenplay yet, but I do have my Oscar speech ready. Unfortunately, I’ll trip walking up the stairs to collect my statuette, suffer a concussion, and miss the entire thing due to coma. I haven’t published my book yet, but I know what I’ll call the series. I can already see the fan sites now and how they’ll use my cherished characters in their nasty little porn stories that have nothing to do with the integral storyline and have horrible grammar. I know where I’ll go shopping when I win the lottery. I also know which relatives and friends will turn ugly in their greed and plot my murder. I’ve planned the award-winning video, but I’m not sure if I’ve written song or someone else has. I think, this week, it’s going to be written by my future rock star husband who dedicates the song to our undying love. Once he dies in a terrible plane crash (the pilot will be woozy on allergy medications) I’ll refuse to ever listen to the song again and strike up a comic, yet still meaningful, friendship with Courtney Love. I’m assigned to a project at work and before I know it the CEO is shaking my hand due to its success. After he promotes me past everyone in my department, however, their bitterness and envy leads to the end of my friendship with them. One even commits suicide which I have to learn how to live with for the rest of my life. That is, if the apocalypse doesn’t take place this week. Though, if it does, it’ll probably be on some other planet. I start a karate class and am quickly beating potential rapists into apologetic pulp. Then I break my arm right before my test for the black belt (damn prairie dog holes) and never realize that dream. I see an interview with an everyday Joe who saved some endangered child and I’ve already figured out how I would have done it better by the end of the show. I never do get comfortable, however, with the sudden media attention and adoration of the masses. I meet a new guy and he is already doomed to never be as romantic as he is in my head. Within a week of knowing each other he’s already stood me up at the alter, helped me conceive three beautiful little boys, and been killed in Iraq. There is no suggestion I can’t blow out of proportion. There is no intimation I can’t turn into past tense. There is no ending I haven’t rewritten so many times, so many ways, that reality can’t help but taste a little bland at times.
This is to say nothing of the created population in my mind of people and creatures I torture day in and day out with love, hate, boredom, defiance, and the other plot devices of life imagined. Their stories twist and twine as quickly and colorfully as mine tends to in my vivid imagination.
A good imagination can take up a lot of time. It can waste a lot of time. I’m not sure I could stop my imagination if I wanted to (barring pre-Oscar acceptance speech comas). I enjoy aspects of it and it has done wonders for my writing, but I hate the times when it seems like it supersedes reality. Life, the real one, isn’t all beige details after all. Reality can explode unexpectedly in ways that my imagination hasn’t gotten around to conceiving yet. Though I don’t want to exorcise my imagination, I do need to control it enough so that I can live my life happily.
So I’m a good little yogi; I sit quietly and try to clear the clutter of my mind. I do my best to live in the now, not the now if we had laser guns. And, for the beginning of this New Year 2007, I have no resolutions. I’m trying to cut back on unreasonable expectations.