OFF THE PAGE WITH RAYMOND ATKINS - New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s New Year’s Resolution time again, and I guess I need to begin this by admitting to you that I have a love/hate relationship with resolutions: I love to make them, but I hate to carry through with them. I mean, they are so easy to make but so hard to keep, and what is up with that? Luckily, I am also a tree-hugging wide-eyed liberal who believes in recycling among all manner of other things such as feeding the poor and guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose, so what I usually do on New Year’s Eve is just change the date on the previous year’s list, drink a cup of holiday cheer, and then scoot off to bed well before the fireworks begin. This is a method that has worked extremely well for me for a long time, and why mess with success?

Still, I hate to get into a rut (one of the eternal resolutions on the master list is to not get into a rut, by the way), so this year I think I’ll try something different. In the interest of making a fresh start, I am going to at least review some of the longer-standing vows of improvement with the intent of perhaps updating them, or maybe even removing one or two if I have accidentally achieved them. This last is not likely, I’ll admit, but stranger things have happened down the long corridors of time.

Read James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is my oldest resolution by far, and it has been on my list since I was sixteen. At that time it was the hot new release by that slim, myopic Irish boy, and anyone who wished to be considered literary was making a run at it no matter how much it hurt. I gave it a good try then, and I still do every year, but invariably by about page forty it begins to sound like Charlie Brown’s mama wrote it, and wah wah…wahwah Wah wah wah. One year I even had my wife stand over me with the twelve-gauge, and with that extra incentive I made it to page sixty-three, but then Mrs. Brown made her yearly appearance, and that was that. It was a good thing for me that that was the year that my wife had resolved not to shoot anyone with the twelve-gauge, or who knows what might have happened?

Buy a laptop. As you all know, technology and I have a strained relationship, but even so I have been feeling for some time like I have missed the laptop boat. Most of my writerly peers have them, and here I am with my circa 1995 Hewlitt Packard desktop—Y2K Certified, mind you—that I bought at a school auction for $15. Yes, I know I paid too much, but the thing works well enough for my purposes, especially since I installed that new Microsoft Office Suite which I may or may not have actually paid for. But it would be nice to take my computer to a coffee shop and rub elbows with other writers. The one time I tried to, though, a random, clumsy customer tripped over the cord I had fished across the store to the nearest receptacle, and I am still dealing with the lingering legalities from that episode. Plus, if what I see on the internet is true, and why would they lie, if you have a laptop you run the risk of FBI raids and Congressional hearings and all sorts of other unwanted attention, and frankly I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life, and neither does my sketchy Microsoft Office Suite.

Stop cussing. Aw hell no.

Stop drinking so much coffee. Nope.

Replace my flip phone. Uh uh.

Walk the Appalachian Trail. See “stop cussing.”

Several of my permanent resolutions have to do with making healthier food choices, even if it kills me. Every year I go in for a physical, and every year this life-affirming choice of eating better is suggested to me by one doctor or another (I have outlived four, thus far). The problem with healthy food is that it usually tastes pretty bad. Okay, before all you cruelty-free, locally grown, organic, free-range, tree-hugging, granola-eating types out there get your Birkenstocks into a twist and slam your hand-thrown pottery bowls down on the table, remember that eating healthy is on the list. It’s way down the list, but it’s there.

Eat Kale. The gold standard of healthy foods is kale. An easy way to remember the name is by using this little rhyme I made up: “Kale? Oh, hale!” If the literature is to be believed—and I don’t think that the Associated Kale Farmers of America would lie about something like this—kale is a wonder food that is packed so full of nutrition and goodness that it will do everything from reversing hair loss to putting twinkles in eyes and dimples in smooth chins. Unfortunately for me, because I could use all of that, kale is some nasty stuff. When I was a kid, a bully by the name of Marty Tingley once made me eat some grass, and that handful of grass tasted better than kale does. Since kale made the switch from fodder to cuisine, many recipes for preparing it have sprung up, and all these recipes have one thing in common. They all attempt to make the kale taste like it is not even in the dish. That truly is the best way to eat it.

Eat Brussels sprouts. Kale is from the same food group that contains cabbage as well as our next healthy choice, Brussels sprouts. If you took some kale and rolled it up into a little ball, then you would have Brussels sprouts. I once sat at the dinner table for seven months due to a meal of liver and Brussels sprouts. My sainted mother was one of those clean-your-plate-if-you-want-to-leave-the table people, and by about the middle of the fourth month, I really wanted to leave the table, but I just couldn’t make myself eat the stuff. Liver and Brussels sprouts do not improve with age. No, I wasn’t a stupid kid, but we happened to be between dogs at that particular moment in time (Scruffy had choked to death on a Brussels sprout about six months prior), and when I tried to slip some to the cat, she scratched me and ran away. If it hadn’t been for that earthquake and subsequent fire, I guess I’d still be sitting there.

Eat quinoa. Quinoa has been called “the mother of grain.” You know those Styrofoam bubbles that are used to pack fragile items for mailing? If those were way smaller and you boiled them, they would taste just like quinoa. By the way, quinoa is not pronounced like it is spelled. It is pronounced “keen-wah,” and I don’t know what to even say about that. Maybe the name was coined by Charlie Brown’s mom.

Eat chocolate. You’re probably thinking that it is time for a little good news on the health food front, and I have some of a sort. Chocolate is on the list of healthy foods. But before you run out to pick up a couple of bags of Hershey’s Miniatures, you had better let me explain. The chocolate that is good for you is the stuff that contains more than 70 percent cacao, and it has no sugar, almonds, peanut butter, or raisins in it. Remember when you were a kid and you found that bar of semi-sweet baker’s chocolate in your mama’s kitchen cabinet, and you snuck it outside behind the house and took a bite? Well, this stuff is that stuff. So, while it is better than, say, kale, it’s nothing to write home about.

Sigh. After my thorough review I have come to the realization that there is no way I’m going to eat any of this stuff. Again. I could do it, and I ought to do it, but you and I both know I’m not going to do it. I guess I’ll just recycle last year’s resolutions, after all. This will be the fifth year in a row that I will not under any circumstances go skydiving. Now there’s a resolution I can live with.