New Year Resolutions

Here is a list of my New Year resolutions. I know that many people make them in the beginning of a New Year and I never made one before. That’s why I thought that I should try to do one this year. Maybe it will help me to improve my life in many ways and get me much closer to my goals and dreams. At the same time it will keep me accountable on my commitments since I’ll be giving all of you updates on my progress.

1. Get closer to God: All of my life I knew little about God and was not very close to Him. This year I plan to change that by finally reading the entire Bible. I’m already in the middle of Genesis and will finish it
soon.

2. Speech Therapy: For some time now I’ve forgotten about the importance of speech therapy and didn’t work on my speech very seriously. I realize that I need to change that. That’s why my goal is to work on my speech almost everyday for at least 2 hours.

3. Get a job: Right now I’m in a place where I must get a job and be financially successful. There are already some important developments on this front that I plan to share with all of you soon.

4. Make this blog a lot more popular: One way to make this blog more popular is to build steady traffic. I already have some ideas on how to do that and will reveal them soon.

What are your New Year resolutions for this year?

Fall semester was great

Yup. It went pretty well even though it was one of the most challenging semesters I had in Brooklyn College. That's because in this semester I took advanced accounting classes that focused on difficult to understand topics. In addition to this, my goal was to get excellent grades in all of my classes and not just to pass them. All of this meant that I had to work very hard this semester. As a result of this hard work and a lot of studying, I had a lot less time for other things like this blog. That's part of the reason why I didn't post often the last few months. Now that the semester is finally over, I'm very happy to say that my hard work paid off big time because I managed to get good grades that I can be proud of. This is just one more of countless examples that proves that strong determination and hard work always pays off.

Happy new year to all of you!

I wish all of you a very happy and successful 2010. I hope all of you had a very good decade and may the next decade be as good if not better than the last one.

A lot of things happened in my life over the last months and I'll be giving you updates over the next days and weeks. Again have a wonderful and exciting new year all of you!

I had a test today in one of my Accounting classes

That’s right. It’s that time of the year again for those of us who still go to school. Over all I’m very happy how it went. It’s mainly because for the past week or so I studied really hard in hopes of getting a good grade like an A or a B. I usually don’t do this since I don’t like studying but with the support and encouragement from my family I did it and I believe it brought good results. I’ll find out for sure at the end of this week or early next week.

Not only I had a test today but my college also had a fire drill. Some people might like them and some people might hate them since they take away time from classes. But today at least for my class it was very different because this particular fire drill couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient moment. Like in the middle of our test. You read it right! I’m sure everyone hates it when it happens to them. Luckily it didn’t have any impact on me since I get extra time on exams. I just took that time to relax and to focus on getting a good grade on my test. I hope it didn’t have any negative impact on my classmate’s performance on the same test though…

Did anything similar happen to you?

There is no such thing as normal

That’s right. There is no such thing as normal in our world. That’s because the standards for normalcy shift or evolve as time passes. For example, not too long ago American society was a lot more conservative and moral than it is today. Immoral acts like premarital sex and adultery weren’t accepted by the mainstream society. This was normal in those days. But now the standard has changed and American society is much more liberal and accepting. As a result, average people are no longer shocked when they hear about other people cheating on their partners or having sex before marriage. In fact premarital sex is accepted so much right now that more than 90% of Americans engage or are going to engage in sexual relations before marriage. As you can see this is the new normal today unlike in the old days.

Another reason why there is no such thing as normal is because the standards for normalcy differ from one culture to the next. For example, most Americans frown upon an idea of eating insects and find it disgusting even though insects are an excellent source of protein and eating them has many advantages over eating other kinds of food. On the other hand this practice is widely accepted in other cultures and many people love eating insects outside America. Because of all this, eating insects is not normal in America but perfectly normal in many other cultures.

There are plenty of other reasons I can think of to prove that there is no such thing as normal. I think you probably can too if you think long enough. That’s why try not to judge other things or people that are different from you and seem “not normal”.

Speaking to new people is still hard for me…

Like for most people who stutter, it was always almost impossible for me to speak with new people. In fact it was so difficult when I was a lot younger that whenever I would talk to a new person my mind would literally go blank and freeze. Because of this the only way I would talk to a new person is if I absolutely had to and couldn’t really avoid it. That’s why for majority of my life I have done everything in my power to avoid talking to new people for as long as possible.

I did it and continue to do that to a large degree for many reasons. One major reason why I presently tend to avoid contact with new people is because I feel completely out of control in speaking situations most of the time. Because of this, I feel that in some way a wall exists between me and the whole world that needs to be broken down if I ever going to be free from my stuttering. Now that I’m older I’m beginning to try to change my life for the better by breaking this imaginary wall that only exists in my mind.

The most recent example of me trying to change my behavior is when I went to the financial aid office at my college. Of course I was feeling very nervous, anxious and not being in control as usual. But this time I actually tried to modify my thought pattern inside my head by telling myself that that an average person doesn’t really care that I stutter because I know that surveys consistently show that most people don’t care whether a person stutters or not. At the end this new self talk seemed to help and afterwards even though speaking to a new person was still hard I felt very good about myself. I guess it’s because I was able to do it and didn’t avoid it like I usually do. It also helped that a person I talked to was friendly. This small progress gave me hope that with enough time it would get a lot easier speaking with new people and making new friends.

To my fellow Jewish readers: Happy Yom Kippur! :)

All of us know that the Day of Atonement is the holiest day of the year for all of us. It is a day of atonement, repentance and forgiveness. I hope all of you will spend it asking for forgiveness from those people who you wronged, asking for forgiveness from G-d and attend a synagogue. That is what I'll be doing. May all of you be written in the book of life!

For people who are curious to learn more about Yom Kippur, you can go here. ;)