This is the last of my posts about my 2010 goals. I’m hoping my friends will help encourage me and hold me accountable.

Area Three: Music
I what now seems like another life, I was a professional musician. It was without question the hardest, most time-consuming, and lowest-paying job I ever had, and I had a love-hate relationship with it. I loved the music, and hated the profession. I don’t care it I never working in that business again, but over the past few years, I have not been spending much time on my music, and thats not good.

In fact, that gap between my abilities then and now is so large it can get really frustrating when I start up again. So some simple, modest goals that I’ll enjoy.

By the End of 2010 I will:

• Learn at least 60 popular songs
• Sing on stage at least twice
• Agree to go to karaoke when my friends ask
• Practice until I can recognize all chords and intervals again

This probably won’t be that big of an issue in the news because the networks won’t be able to put a red-blue spin on it. It’s bad for American democracy as a whole.

The legal fiction of corporate personhood keeps getting stretched farther and farther. Yesterday the Supreme Court overturned several precedents and ruled part of the 2002 campaign finance reform law to be unconstitutional saying that corporations have the same free speech rights as actual people, and as such the government can not place any restrictions on corporations and labor unions spending money from of their general funds to support of specific candidates.

Companies are not people. They can’t be found guilty of a crime, have no emotions or social connections and don’t fear punishment or ostracism. That’s not criticism of companies. It’s just a fact. They are not people and should not be treated as such.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like.
— Edward Thurlow

I’m continuing to post about my 2010 goals hoping my friends will help encourage and hold me accountable.

Area Two: Japanese
I’ve been living in Japan for over 20 years. Twenty long, stinking, painful years. No, seriously only about three of those years were long stinking and painful. The rest ranged from “same as the old year” to unbelievably challenging and fun. I’ve married into a Japanese family, served on the board of a public Japanese firm, negotiated the sale of a company, given countless of business presentations, three hiroen speeches and not a few public presentations; all in Japanese. But you know what? As far as I’m concerned my Japanese stinks. I must be getting my point across using some combination of facial expressions, hand gestures and telepathy, because I lot of the time even I don’t know what I just said. That changes starting now.

There are three areas of my life that I plan on improving in 2010. My goals are modest when I look at them individually, but achieving all of them would make life at the end of 2010 a bit better than it is at the start of it. I’m putting my goals up here on my blog in the hope that my friends will hold me accountable vie encouragement, gentle prodding, shame, mental abuse or swift and blinding violence as they deem appropriate.

Area One: Health
I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the trauma of my seventh grade gym class. You see, I was a fat kid (not chubby mind you, but 30-inch-inseam and a very tight 36-inch-waist rotund) and had a crew-cut sporting gym teacher with a who liked to call us fat kids “jellybeans” and make snarky remarks when it was our turn at the chin-up bar. Even though I eventually dropped the weight and got pretty good at baseball and the martial arts, I (shamefully) never managed to do more than three chin-ups.

Truth be told, last year was supposed to be my get in shape year, but things didn’t work out. A nasty back injury led to a knee injury, which shut down all exercise for much of the year. Thankfully, yoga and stretching averted the surgery my doctor suggested, but 2009 was a step backwards in health. This year is going to be different.

By the end of 2010 I will:

• be able to do 10 perfect pull-ups
• run 5k in under 30 minutes
• have a 90 cm waist as measured across the belly-button
• do a downward dog with my heels on the floor

It’s wonderful to watch a nation try to create an ideal government. Bhutan is in the process of creating one in which the government is held accountable based on the happiness of its people.

To make this work the Bhutanese came up with a way to mathematically quantify happiness both on the individual and national level, and to have an objective measure of to what degree specific government policies increase or decrease the happiness of the people.

Part of this involves a 300 question questionnaire, which most people were quite happy to fill out. Questions about the degree to which people feel safe from spirit and ghost attacks struck me as silly at first, but the fact is that people do feel less happy when they are worried about being attacked by a ghost.

Amazing and inspiring stuff.