To Be Improved or to Be Enriched?

How my New Years Resolution-making has evolved over the years

Dear Friends,

In my twenties, when I lived in the cramped tenement buildings of New York, smoking cigarettes out of fire escapes and drinking cheap red wine, I made elaborate resolutions for each New Year. These were often multi-categorical, multi-paged documents, sometimes with tabs. They were extensive blueprints for a nebulous future self who weighed less, published in magazines, and had a Roth IRA. By the time the year began to unfold, however, I had completely lost interest in this towering, non-sensical list of tasks I had assigned myself: “Attend a Young Lions Event” (a social club at the New York Public Library for literate people under 40), for example, made the list almost every year. I never got around to going and I have no regrets about that. “Do the Fat Smash cleanse perfectly to a T” never got crossed off either, probably because it was more punitive than I imagine than being sent away to a convent and put into the care of mean nuns in any century.