Resolutions are sweet delusions
Resolutions? Nothing serious. I’d like to keep Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz. I’d like to read more political biographies. I’d like to lose 1.3 pounds.
I have suddenly found myself at the age at which I need to exercise more but doing so leaves me achy, as if my joints are separating. It becomes a Catch-22 of New Year’s resolutions. To feel better, you must work out, but you can’t because it hurts. January, huh? Our purgatory of self-improvement.
Adding to my predicament is that my Sunday touch football league, formerly made up of overweight litigators, TV types and scrawny scribes, now includes a crew member from the rapper band LMFAO. You should see our games, water-colored midwinter pastorals of kids, dogs, dads and rapper dudes.
Only in L.A., right?
You might’ve seen LMFAO on some of the New Year’s Eve telecasts. Two guys jump around as if their privates are on fire. Since the 1950s, this has been a shortcut to fame in America. I have started doing it myself, but when people see me, they don’t get excited and scream. They merely direct me to the nearest loo.
“Bathroom’s over there, pal,” they say, to which I scowl and act a little more twitchy than before. I refuse to sacrifice my art just to satisfy society’s idea of acceptable behavior.
Anyway, I now play football with a fleet-footed roadie from LMFAO. How rich is life?
Middle January, middle age. The older kids have fled, leaving the house relatively quiet. You can hear the furnace kicking on again and the belly noises of the dog. Those screechy Karcrashians are no longer on TV all the time, the way they were when the college girl was back.
Love her dearly. Were I to design a kid from scratch — hair, nose, teeth, kneecaps — she’s almost exactly the daughter I would design. Likes people, doesn’t sweat the small stuff — a joy on almost every level.
But she has terrible taste in television.
By the second week of the holiday break, I was ready to trade her to another family. But because of the new salary cap, and her addiction to expensive hair and nail care, I was unable to unload her.
So she spent much of her winter break watching “The Bachelor” or hours of the Karcrashians, a celebration of crass behavior. Basically, if a show involved organisms with pearly teeth and one-celled brains, she was there.
By the way, this is the sort of inside info that never shows up in those folksy Christmas letters — how would you phrase it?
”.... And our younger daughter finished the year watching lots of cheesy TV, wrapped up in a blanket like a burrito, barely speaking except to whine about the type of yogurt we buy. We’re so proud of her, we could burst.”
Yet, we are, of course — and you never know quite how proud until they leave again for college. The other morning, she filled her suitcases with Christmas sweaters and fled back to the heartland with her mother’s kiss still shimmering on her cheek.
Now what do we watch? News from the campaign trail? That buzzy show “Downton Abbey”? Stuff like that could actually make you smarter, so you need to be careful.
January might be the TVest month we have. “American Idol” returns — you probably spotted a commercial — and the NFL is in full flower. Nobody admits it, but January involves a lot of domestic hibernation. Short days. Long nights. Fleecy blankets on the couch. It’s what humans grow instead of fur.
In fact, the other night I’m watching a DVD of “White Fang” on the couch with the little guy and the world’s worst lap dog, a 300-pound beagle that has taken up yoga for the new year.
Immediately evident are the contrasts. Up there in the Yukon, dogs didn’t have couches. Wolves had it even worse. Prospectors even worse.
Up there in the Arctic, neither man nor beast did yoga. In L.A., beagles do yoga all the time. It’s a type of yoga that involves lots of self-licking, so it’s bound to become very popular. You hear the 300-pound beagle at 5 a.m., while you’re trying to sleep, slurping himself as he goes through all these yogatic contortions.
And then the guilt kicks in. In January, we are nothing more than silly assemblages of remorse and guilt and sticky, half-hearted resolutions.
We lie there in the pre-dawn manufacturing the first excuses of the day. How cold is the wind? Is it raining? How crowded is the gym?
Yep, I think that sounds like rain.
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