My Impossibly Low Standards

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This anxious year is drawing to a close, a parade of gray winter afternoons marching by like weary soldiers trying to keep their chins in the air. Most of my friends are attempting to fortify themselves in one way or another against the turmoil of recent months with wine, movies, chocolate or just plain hunkering down at home until gas prices come down.

Colored lights wink up as usual from the branches of the trees downtown, and the merchants are bent on dazzling us, just like always, promising that the coming holidays offer a respite from all the worrying. But everyone I know is still kind of shaky. It’s as if we’ve been on an extended roller coaster ride and wish that at least we’d eaten a lighter lunch. Out come the felt tip pens and the New Year’s lists; we console ourselves with the thought that if we can’t fix the old out-of-control year, it might be possible to shore up the incoming one.

My friend Heidi’s proclamations are firm, though suspiciously similar to last year’s items: lose 10 pounds, transform the cottage into an art studio, sign up for kickboxing and end the romance with Melvin if he won’t move in. This time she means it. Phyllis is adding to an ever mushrooming list of “I Quits”: martinis, soap operas, parking tickets, tiramisu, lending her garden tools to the nasty neighbors. Bryan swears he’ll stop smoking cigars, ride his bike to work (not as impressive as it sounds, since he runs his company from an office in the back of his house) and hit on Heidi the moment Melvin is safely out of the way. I’m surrounded by people of steely resolve. I envy their determined brows, their new 18-month gym memberships and most of all, the discipline oozing from under their freshly-laundered sweatbands.

I don’t dare let on that my own list is, thus far, astonishingly blank. I’ve learned, slowly, that this past year I’ve been overestimating pretty much everything—the stability of the housing market, the common sense of our elected Commander-in-Chief, the willingness of my dentist to cut me a special deal and most painfully, my brother’s ability to remember my birthday and show up with one or two tastefully expensive presents in hand. Why begin 2009 by overestimating myself as well? I can’t bear the feeling of failure which always descends by January 14, when I realize I’ve kept not a single one of my resolutions, usually because, in a fog of eggnog-induced good spirits, I again overshot the mark.