New column and this year's Theme

So we have yet another new year.

Again - and I keep telling this to people every new year - I don't have resolutions. What I have are themes. There are no absolute objectives; all I have to do is be aware of my actions throughout the year so as to conform to the theme that I have chosen myself earlier in the year.

Last year's theme was punctuality. Reeeally difficult, I tell you. There were hits and misses but overall, I think there were more hits than misses. So that's good. Plus, I ended the year on the right note: New Year's Eve, I had a meeting with Cedric about our cartoon book project and I'm happy to report that I managed to be on time, even though I had only 15 minutes to get from NST to Taman Bahagia LRT.

This year, I haven't decided on a theme yet but I think it's gonna be 'relax'. As in I want to be less uptight about things. For example, I'm a perfectionist and it has cost me countless minutes which in turn contributed to my being late for appointments or meeting deadlines.

I also tend to worry unnecessarily about things that might happen in the future. For example, tomorrow I'm going to Las Vegas for a week and already I'm worried about some kind of sin that I'll be committing next week (despite the fact that I'm such a damn nice guy). If life were 'Minority Report', the authorities in Malaysia can arrest me right now. Now I say relax. You know, they say 95 percent of the things we worry about are not gonna happen. The other 5 percent, like death and income tax, are going to happen anyway. So why worry?


I have also just started writing a weekly column in NST called 'Living Outside The Idiot Box'. It's about living without TV. Basically I'm subjecting myself to three whole months of not watching TV and I'm supposed to relate my experience. It's pretty controversial. When I told my friends about the experiment, opinions were divided. Some said, "Dude, I haven't been watching much TV for quite some time now so it's nothing new to me" while others went, "OMG! How am I gonna watch my EPL??".

Quite a few have also pointed out that there are so many ways for me to cheat: DVDs, YouTube, online TV shows. I hope after a month or so, they'll be able to see the column for what it is: a front for me to practice humour writing and stripping (the column comes with a related comic strip). Besides, I'm really not that big into watching TV. I'm not like the guy in the Astro ad. I've got no time!

Alhan Farhanah Mohd Ridzwan

at age one year-plus.