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(Yes, my new computer allowed me to re-use an old joke. On with the show!)

My resolutions for 2009 were simple - expand my horizons and stop being so cynical. How did I do?

At first glance, I thought I did pretty poorly. Story time:

Last March, I had some Chinese food. At 5 AM the next morning, I ran out of bed and threw up before I reached the bathroom. Food poisoning!

Well, it wasn't quite that simple. After giving it more thought, the culprit was not the Chinese food, but rather whatever I had the night before. Or possibly what I had for breakfast (but not lunch) that day. Or possibly it was actually Norwalk virus and not food poisoning at all.

Regardless of the actual culprit, my mind blamed it on the Chinese food - after all, that was what came back up that night, completely undigested. For a good while, I couldn't look at Chinese food without feeling queasy - forget about trying anything new.

But aside from the culinary misadventures, 2009 was actually fairly good to me on the horizon-expanding front.

Movies? 500 Days of Summer was more or less a romantic comedy with less romance and less comedy, Avatar was far more than a glorified kids' movie, and that's to say nothing of indie rentals like Everything's Gone Green or The Squid And The Whale. I liked all of them.

TV shows? A little less, but I tried out several new options, I'm still watching V and Flash Forward (or I will when they come back), and I'm even occasionally catching reruns of ignored sitcoms like Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond. So that's a check.

And music, of course, has come along nicely. I'm not going to link to any of the dozen or so posts I made in 2009 about music, but I finally broke out of my classic-rock-and-the-New-Pornographers bubble and discovered new bands ranging from Animal Collective to Slow Cub to Norfolk & Western. It's been fun, even if I'm still mostly in a pop-rock vein.

I also mentioned - and then completely forgot about - taking courses in new subjects. Due to degree requirements, that couldn't have happened much anyhow, but 'Conservative Christian Subculture' is a small step outside my comfort zone (only small, because I know the prof).

I also resolved to stop being so cynical, and I think I did a decent job on that front. I've read popular books, watched popular TV shows - Friends as mentioned above - and even a lot of the music I've gotten into is popular amongst indie hipsters.

Even my outlook on life is less cynical, as hopefully evidenced by the political experiment I conducted here in the fall.

Oh, and I *did* get a new job. So for once, I more or less accomplished all my resolutions.

So what's on my plate for 2010? The same things, really. Keep discovering new things. Don't get stuck in my ways or stubborn in my thinking. Explore.

And do something journalism-related. If I don't get a job or internship, do some things online.

We'll see how this plays out.

I can only imagine flawlessly.

--Ryan