::it seemed important at the time::

12.31.01
Time for New Year's resolutions. I know, I know, they probably won't happen, but if I don't make and try to follow them, they definitely won't happen.

Instead of a bunch of little resolutions, I've decided to make one big resolution. My one big resolution is to be more like Kenny. Kenny is one of the software engineers where I work. I've decided that being more like Kenny is a good New Year's resolution for the following reasons:

I don't know him very well. This means I get an overall feeling for his personality, without getting hung up on details that I might not like or that wouldn't fit me.
He is the right amount of quiet. The world needs more quiet people. Kenny is the type of person who picks up on little details of conversations and brings them up later, when you least suspect it, days or weeks or months after the fact, and it makes you happy that the world is not just everybody talking all at once and nobody listening, which is really what is seems like sometimes if you get on the metro or elevator and everybody is jabbering on their cell phones nonstop. But he's not so quiet that he's comatose or boring, which brings us to the next bullet.
Kenny is wicked funny. So funny that sometimes we all get dizzy from laughing at things he says. It works in tandem with the being quiet. Out of nowhere, it seems, he just says things that slay you. It's Kenny's secret weapon.
Kenny seems content with life. He does his work, and he goes to happy hours or lunch with people from work, and his mood just always seems to be even. It's kind of like there are little motor boats zipping all over the harbor, here and there, but Kenny is the barge that is just going down the middle, steady and unmoved.
He's really nice to people. I've heard him talking to all different kinds of people, and he's always polite to them.
"Kenny is country" is how our friend Jon described him. He said it as the highest honor you can bestow on anybody. Kenny has common sense and he is down-to-earth and unpretentious. I think he's actually from New Jersey or similar, but he has something country about him, like Andy Griffith. He just seems infinitely normal and sane.

I'm not really sure how to implement my "be more like Kenny" plan, but I have learned one important thing. If you are quiet, that covers a multitude of sins. Seriously. The more you talk, the more you mess up. There is a lot to be said, I think (and this is my journal, so what I think rules), for living a quiet life and listening to people and being normal and sane. Here's to being more like Kenny in 2002.