Last year, my new year’s resolution (revolution if you ask my little sister) was to learn to cook a new meal every 2 weeks. This went very well and I’m proud to say I kept it, and my favourite thing to make is jerk chicken with pineapple chutney.

This year will be a big change-filled year, so I decided to make a resolution that I could adapt to wherever I live, no matter what legal binding I have to whatever fiancé, one that would carry through regardless of circumstance.

The latter bit of 2006 had me experiencing an accumulated amount of drama. There has always been a part of me that wants to have the last word, to say what I mean, and to speak my mind. I have since learned that sometimes you have to just zip it. I think that when you grow up, you lose the license to act rashly, and fight to the “being right” death. At least, that’s what I’m learning. Sometimes it’s better, truly, to say nothing at all. For an extrovert oldest child and former theatre actor, this is difficult! In a group dynamic too, it is too easy to get caught up in the he said she said, the analyzation, the assumptions, the drama. So this year, it’s out with the drama.

The year that I am to plan a wedding and move and graduate may be a recipe for drama, but the good, exciting kind. I am banning the bad kind. I am banning myself from getting caught up in it. You want to be a silly girl? That’s your prerogative, and I’ll have no part in it. I may still go to sleep with thoughts of what I could have said, finding holes in people’s silly arguments, but when I wake up in the morning, I want to hold my head high, and not have it bogged down with ego, any superiority complex or otherwise.

Twentysomething is kind of a zigzag growing period. We aren’t like infants and toddlers who follow a prescribed growth chart, all finding their toes and learning to crawl at approximately the same time. At twentysomething, we are all finding our way at different paces. Some are bogged down by their own family dramas, some have self esteem that is still catching up with them after tumultuous teen years. Some have been socialized in a way that does not agree with the world around them. Variety, they say, is the spice of life. But the spice that gives you the runs and leaves you feeling crappy-- well, I say thank you very much but no thanks.

I have great friends- girls that have been buddies since the spandex days of third grade, and others who have woven themselves into my fabric along the way. I do not need to keep friends for the sake of numbers. Those who take more than they can give, or who may expect me to be a doormat to their bullying will find that I am no longer into the drama. I have a great family, great friends, and a great fiancé. I have great health, great prospects and a yellow brick road ahead of me that looks to take me to great places. I don’t need your drama weighing me down. I will always be a shoulder to cry on, and I will gladly help out where I can. (Karma, baby). But in no way can you expect to run me down with you.

So with 2007, I signed up for some yoga classes, made some quiet decisions in my head about what I will put into my body in all varieties of nourishment, and realigned some priorities. “You can always make more money,” says a friend of mine. So I will go into 2007 with great people around me and take the other stuff as it comes.