I think I am going to take this illusory opportunity afforded to me by an insignificant quirk of base ten mathematics and give the etch-a-sketch of my soul a pretty hard shake.

I’m taking existence as a fresh screen, without squiggly assumptions and straight line boundaries. The screen is blank and I have all this room to twiddle the knobs of 2010!

It turns out that despite burn marks, my laptop is still working. I had a terribly helpful and nice chap at KRCS take a look at it for me and bought a replacement power supply, throwing the old one in the bin. So my laptop has brand new power for 2010, I feel that I do as well.

I went out earlier with all this in mind, apart from the saved laptop – which happened while I was out. The difference to life when I go out happy and open minded with love for the world rather than closed off, insular and negative is immense. If you go into the world with love in your heart you will find more love and happiness, if you go out with hate you will find more hate and misery.

People see this, it makes you approachable – little sparks of connection and human cosmic love fly around, invisible to those without open hearts full of love. I’ve been a bit down lately, and when I’ve been out it has been hollow and lonely because it closed my heart to the universe.

Now I need to learn to use this, when I feel down I need to be able to go out there and be open, remind myself that despite humanity being rats, scurrying around in filth we are also cosmic angels who want something better but just cannot reach it yet. Filthy cosmic rat angels!

I started the year feeling rather unwell, I’ve had a cold moving through body parts at random, picking one or two at a time to play with. I started off with a really sore throat, this went away as it moved into my sinuses, making my head feel like it was overstuffed with cotton wool and nails and currently it has gone to my chest and throat, giving me a wheezy tickly cough that is a little annoying. I just kept on moving, carried on. I can’t stand being incapacitated so I don’t let it happen, even when I pulled a neck muscle in 2008 I was out there bent and shuffling about like a nonagenarian, buying wine and bagels in the supermarket.

I’ll stop moving when I am dead, and even then I’ll probably need convincing.

I’ve extended this bloody mindedness to the rest of my life, in a positive way. I’m going to be a big rock and the universe can just wash over me with waves of any size it wants. I’m not going to be slammed about by waves like I used to be, I’m not going to rail against the universe, get angry about things I have no control over or be carried into places I do not want to be by these things. I’m not going to be a barrier and try to stop it either.

I’ll stand here, while the universe does as it will.

I was not in the mood for going out on New Year’s Eve, I’m not digging the loud drunken celebration scene these days, so I didn’t let the waves take me there. I watched Jools Holland on television and enjoyed a bottle of Champagne-type-stuff from New Zealand on my own, acknowledging the synthetic point in time inside my head as I sat.

Throughout the night, there was a party going in the flat next door. Very loud, same as his regular parties always are with poor quality hip hop blaring through the walls, making things in my flat vibrate. The glasses in my cupboard tinkle with the bass like dancing glass faeries. A couple of times I’ve sat here in impotent fury, seething, being angry and annoyed but that night I just let the wave wash over me, like a rock.

It was still going on when I went to bed, I read for a couple of hours, sipping at a hot drink made with flu powder by a company who I should never really buy things from if I was being true to what I believe. Beechams, Nike, Coca-Cola, Wal*Mart, Nestlé – I buy from them all and think “never again, this has to stop” every time. Maybe this should be one of my new year things, ethical consumption. By letting this just happen and not touch me, I tuned it out. It was still thudding noisily, with muffled rapping when I turned the light off and went to sleep, with people smoking, laughing and shouting under my bedroom window. I was going to sleep in a universe where people were having great fun. It made me smile.

How to live in the twenty-first century? Just stop struggling against it, you’ll realise no one is pulling at you – you’re just throwing yourself around and bouncing off the walls on your own.

How great would everything be if everyone just said to themselves, “This is the world and I live in it”, and smiled?

New Year’s Day, I didn’t do much. I used the last remaining battery charge in my laptop, studied, read some more and watched some television. Being without a laptop makes me so much more productive, I need to learn to be tougher with myself, to put it away more often.

Today I’m making some cuts on Twitter and RSS feeds. I need to reduce my constant internet consumption by quite a bit, I have a very busy year coming up with both work and doing the final course in my Art History degree. This time next year, I’ll have graduated with a new degree.

I get the feeling that 2010 is going to be about new things, the last few years of effort seem to be paying off. Onwards to 2020!