A New Year

     It's a new year.  A time for new beginnings, for resolutions.  If ever there were a time to try new things, to make changes, to turn over new leaves, now would be it.  Somehow that magical ball dropping and that magical flip of the calendar allows us to completely transform.  This will be our year!  Last year might not have worked out like we planned, but look, a whole new year ahead of us.  A clean slate.  How wonderful. 
     It's been a full week into this new year, and all I have to show for it is used tissues all over my bed and a dying tree in my living room.  I'd like to blame my sickness for my lack of resolute, but I don't usually make resolutions.  Or if I do, they're funny things like "don't wake up in my own vomit."  Kudos to me for holding on to that for one whole year.  But I tend to not make resolutions, mostly because I think they're cliche, and also because I usually forget about them.
     I joined a gym last month- just before the new year to beat the rush.  I haven't gone for the last two weeks because of vacation and being sick.  And it would be really easy for me to forget to go all together.  To go requires a modification of my behavior.  It goes beyond sheer willpower for me.  I really just do plain forget that the modified behavior was something I wanted to do.  Tying it to a "New Year's Resolution" doesn't help me remember. 
     Moving past the taint of resolutions, however, a new year can be a fresh start.  It's also a new decade, and for those of us with five year plans, the prospect of a fresh decade to conquer can be both exhilarating and daunting.  (Wait, it's not a new decade, is it?  Someone told me it was, but I was drunk at the time.  Did 2010 end the aughts, or did it begin the teens?  If there was no year zero, then the decade starts with 2011.  Oh god.   Not this again.)  Anyway, a new year can give us fresh perspective.  A new year, a new beginning, new leaves, and all that.  Although, the new year looks a lot like the old year.  Except in the old year that tree in my living room was still alive.