Resolutions

I’m a big believer in New Year’s resolutions. Like practically everybody else, I’ve made zillions of them that I didn’t keep past the first week, but occasionally the feeling of hitting the reset button at the start of a new year can have powerful results. I think it was 7 years ago that I made this New Year’s resolution: “I will start the process of applying to graduate school and change my career.” That was a biggie, and I took it seriously, and in a few months, lord willing, I’ll be graduating with my Ph.D.

That same year I started a practice which I continued for several years afterward, but haven’t done recently. I took a 6-week break from all my vices, which at the time were: booze, coffee, cigars, TV, and junk food. The point was not that I had a real problem with any of these, but cutting them all out was a lesson in the place they took in my life. How much time, for instance, did I take making coffee everday, and when was it that I had an urge to drink it? I’ve never watched much TV since then, my interest in cigars is on a slow wane – they’re really nice to be sure, but I just never have time – I’ve never drunk nearly as much coffee as I did then (2 pots a day) although the coffee-making ritual has certainly been a handy avoidance behavior at work sometimes. I have continued, occasionally, to indulge in drink more than is good for me, but my pleasure in doing so declines as my interest in my work increases: you need brains to study brains.

Since I’ve been in grad school, this ritual’s been complicated by two things. One is that my vices are considerably more dear comforts in this environment. Without them, I’ve got precious little goodness going on until I get out of here. The other is that they’re not really vices anymore. The lesson I learned the first few times stuck, basically, and so now my six weeks of abstinence seem like a pointless gesture. The last couple of times I’ve tried it, I reach a point a few weeks in where I’m saying, “Why am I doing this, again? I really want a god damn cup of coffee.” But I’ve really been feeling like I’d like that sense of rebooting again, though, so I’ve given a lot of thought to a big, bad new list of resolutions for 2004. Enough thought that I’m just now ready to get started with ‘em.



And after all that, I’m not going to tell you what they are. C’mon, that stuff is personal. But if you’re wondering, yes, one of them involves this blog.