Why I don't make resolutions

After a lifetime of refusing to make New Years Resolutions (because I hardly ever kept them and, as a Mets fan, who needs additional disappointment?), I made a few private ones to myself last year. They were:

1. Let my hair grow out (yeah, you say, what effort is involved here, just don’t cut it, for God’s sake, but those of you who’ve tried to go from short hair to long know there’s much more work and discipline required than simply NOT CUTTING IT when every day when you look in the mirror you want to hack off the strays with nail scissors and cover your head with styling products until the ends of your hair could pop balloons)

2. Take some time off from work.

3. Strengthen my core muscles, as my chiropractor had been nagging me to do for months.

Well, I was riding out #1 fairly well, but I blew off #2 and #3. I was working on a major project with a ridiculous deadline at work, so I couldn’t take time off. And even when I had as much as an evening free, who could get into the parking lot at the gym, because everybody else’s New Year’s resolutions involved joining a gym. (Yeah, but did it have to be MY gym? Surely there are several other fine athletic establishments in the area that would have welcomed them with clean towels and bottled water. Except that mine isn’t a clean towel and bottled water sort of establishment, which is why I like it. Half the equipment doesn’t work, the guys don’t wear cologne, women don’t show up in thongs and make me feel bad about myself. It’s fairly inexpensive, which is another reason why I like it (and probably why all those other people seem to like it) except that now all these new people join and demand things like clean floors and hot water and elliptical trainers that work, so they have to raise the membership fees so I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to go either. So while I was dragging my butt on #2 and #3, whining about overtime and no parking spaces and membership fees, a higher power intervened. As everyone in the world probably knows by now, that’s when I hurt my back.

1. My hair grew in all by itself because I could give a hang about looking in mirrors. Instead, if leaving the house, I'd pop on a baseball cap. And a baseball cap on a woman walking with a cane has much more panache than the cap alone.
2. I got time off with pay (granted, disability pays enough to basically cover the phone and cable bills, but it’s better than nothing) and then without pay (which basically sucks)
3. Thanks to my physical therapist, you can now bounce quarters off my abdomen.

So this is why no resolutions this year.

Well, maybe one.

Which is to be very careful what I wish for.