Moving house sucks, no question, but the silver lining to the whole agonizing, cuticle-ravaging process is that, every time you move, you get to start over. You get to launch a hundred grand organizational and interior-design plans — revamp your filing systems, get into good cleaning habits, bask in the smug glow of an orderly house. Powered by self-righteousness, home-décor catalogs, and the neatly penned notes you’ve left yourself in your day planner at three-month intervals re: defrosting the refrigerator, you vow to make a bunch of other changes as well. You’ll return phone calls more promptly! You’ll work on your posture! You’ll cook that timballo from Big Night!

And it sticks, for a while, but then…then something happens. The alignment gets thrown off. You go out of town for a week, or you get a cold, and one or two of these improvement projects gets thrown under the bus. Temporarily, of course, you tell yourself; you’ll get to it. But because you’ve taken a few days off from sitting up straight, or actually cleaning the coffeemaker instead of just rinsing it briskly, or whatever, now it’s a bigger job — harder, longer, blinking on your to-do list like a small-town stoplight at 2 AM. You keep skipping it. A work project cuts into your free time, and you stay on top of basics like dishes and laundry, but the whole “eat more fruit” undertaking is the next to go, wrestled to the mat by cookies yet again. For a stretch there, you swept up every night, because your friend told you that the Japanese do that as a good-night ritual — tidying up the messes of this day, mentally, to ready for the next. You’d liked the sound of that, and you’ll get back to that — sure. Absolutely. But tonight, you just want to go to bed, and besides, why bother with the sweeping when the bathtub looks like an antibiotic farm?

When a new year comes along, I remember the personal-development optimism I fairly burst with when I moved into my current abode. I arrived at the end of the year, exhausted but triumphant, and when everything had gotten unpacked and put away, I promised myself, out loud, solemnly, with the cats as witnesses, that Things Are Going To Change Around Here.

And they did.

And then they changed back. You know what they say: lint finds its level.

But every time I put up a new calendar, resolutions tempt me. I know they don’t work — or at least I’ve never been able to work with them — but they always seem like a good idea, a chance to start over, to become something else, a better hostess, a better cook, more knowledgeable about state capitals. Something.

But pragmatism ruled the day on the eve of 2007. Below, my resolutions.

1. Eat cheese in amounts equal to or greater than 2006.

2. Display horrible posture at desk. I have tried everything to make myself sit up straight in front of the computer so I don’t wake up in my late thirties with a hump, but it just can’t happen in the current apartment, which is crooked, and the slant does not run in only one direction, so the energy I would prefer to expend on yogi-esque spinal comportment is used instead in a vain effort just to keep my desk chair from rolling out into the living room, through the kitchen, down the hall, into the bedroom, out the window, onto Fourth Avenue, and down to Coney Island for dogs and rides. The less said about the various joint contortions involved, the better, or about the nineteen-thirties-musical choreography busted out when the chair starts rolling anyway for no reason while I’m in the middle of typing a sentence; suffice it to say that any sitting up straight I do gets done in restaurants, and homes not my own.

3. Take the timballo recipe, hopefully clipped from magazine in late 2005, down from fridge. This resolution is actually two resolutions: a) to understand that people don’t change, that neither will the geometry of my kitchen, and that I can cook and look fondly on cooking in theory but in practice have neither the motivation nor the physical plant required to make anything more complicated than a frittata; and b) to recognize that general-interest magazines assume a counter space, and a storage system for a wide range of kitchen tools, simply not available to me until my bank-robbery career gets off the ground.

4. Ignore portion of bathroom floor beside toilet. That patch of tile is a gunge magnet; even in more conscientious times, it didn’t stay clean (or clean-looking) for more than ten minutes. It is paranormally disgusting, and whatever else you think about me as a householder, let it never be said that I don’t respect the supernatural. Grody it is; grody it shall stay.

5. Pose toys in lewd positions, preferably where visitors to the apartment cannot help but notice them. Mr. Stupidhead got me Crockett and Tubbs action figures for Christmas, which upped the ante considerably…especially since the Crockett Pak™ includes Elvis, Crockett’s pet alligator. Said reptile is now engaging in a four-way with a Paul O’Neill bobblehead, a dashboard hula boy, and a wind-up kangaroo. Crockett himself is unattached at the moment, although he’s giving my set of Russian nesting dolls the eye, and Tubbs is gittin’ it on with John McClane. …Hey, at least I’ve kept the Monsters Inc. figurines out of it. So far.

6. Allow paranoia about spoiled food to flourish unchecked. My fridge doesn’t have a separate freezer, just a little section on top with a useless door, so it gets extremely cold; Diet Cokes come out as Slurpees all the time. And yet I will throw out milk that is nearly a week away from its sell-by date — even the special “in NYC” sell-by date — because it “smells off.” Milk always smells off to me, because I hate milk and probably can’t distinguish bad milk from, you know, milk — but hey, why not use my “powers” for good? “Um…did you say you were with the…dairy? Police?” “Look, lady: I know when a half gallon of two percent has turned, so you can let me in, or you can get the trots. Don’t make me come back with a warrant.”

7. Continue pretending Kuffs was “just misunderstood.” I paid for the ticket and I sat through the whole thing. This isn’t the most dignified way of working through the grief, but it’s all I’ve got.

8. Buy more teeny barrettes that do nothing but annoy me. Short hair really brings the limits of barrette technology into focus, unfortunately. Equally unfortunately, nothing ever changes — barrettes either clamp way too tightly or hardly clamp at all. Bitty little claw clips, same issue; swooning out of my bangs all Camille the second I remove my hand, or digging into my hairline like deer ticks.

9. Overuse the same cultural references I’ve beaten nigh unto death since the turn of the millennium. Camille; Venn diagrams; Busby Berkeley; “Homerian”; “he’s the Babe Ruth of [x]”; the “-bot” suffix; “Noun II: Electric Nounaloo.” I don’t know when I stopped retaining new references and/or information, but I’ve become the Sars-o-tron 3000 (…aaaaaand another one). It’s time to just admit it.

10. Eat only non-breakfast foods for breakfast. I fell off the wagon on this one this morning; yes, I consumed Hanukkah gelt, and yes, it was 8:30 AM, but I melted it in my coffee, which is clearly cheating. The Indian food I had for brunch the other day? Far more suitable.

11. Never have enough paper towels in the house. Done and done, my friends.

12. Bore people with rando dreams involving rando celebrities doing rando things with rando items. I can do it in ten words or fewer: “Penn Jillette is my dad; house made of Post-It flags.” See? …Um, actually, because “Post-It” is hyphenated, it’s considered one word. …Fine: “House made of Post-Its.” Happy now? Bored yet?

13. Read same baseball books over and over at bedtime instead of trying a new book. Easiest one on the list. I have tried the reverse; it’s just not me.

14. Show zero patience or planning ahead regarding polishing of nails. I guess I could frame it as a quality-control issue — if Revlon’s polish won’t hold up to the three months of filing I have to catch up on, what the hell good is it? — except for the part where I never get thirsty for a Diet Coke at any point in the process except when the critical second coat is still wet, and that thirst is inexorably followed by an almost feverish desire to do the dishes immediately, and to redouble my efforts to pick the remnants of a price tag off a glass that I’ve already washed a hundred times so now the tag is baked into the bottom.

15. Spread the rumor that Dolly Parton and Fran Lebowitz are a couple. I didn’t start the rumor, and my first reaction to it went something like, “I…whaaaat? Come on, no,” but then it started to grow on me, because it is so out there, it almost feels like it’s the most obviously true thing ever. …I know, I know, but think about it for a sec. …Yeah, it’s kind of starting to work for you, right? The two of them at home, watching old movies on TV under an afghan with Conway Twitty’s face knitted into it? Dolly, lovingly lint-rolling Fran’s tux before they go out for barbecue? …Come ahhhhhhhn, it’s awesome, right? The whole is greater than the sum of the parts? …You feel me. Go tell a friend. And if either Dolly or Fran is a friend of yours, tell her to call the other one up for Thai food, because it’s just a rumor, but I think it would improve our world if it became a fact, and when it does become a fact, then we can bandy it about that they’re running for president.

16. Let the cats play with dental floss. Life is short. They like to pounce. Sue me.

January 8, 2007

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