New Year's Resolutions

1) Vitamins

About three months ago I started taking vitamins religiously and I have to admit that I feel healthier. Whether or not I am feeling an actual healthier state or merely feeling as if I am healthier would be fun to debate at some point in the future. Regardless. If you do the math it is almost impossible to consume all the vitamins and minerals you need on a daily basis without turning into a neurotic food obsessive. Given half a chance I'm sure I could work myself up into quite a tizzy over this and since I have far more interesting things to obsess about than the state of my electrolytes it seems prudent to dose myself with supplements if only to free up those extra brain cells from needless worry.

2) Scientific American

For whatever good it's worth I think I should try to keep up with science. And reading mainstream science magazines seems like a safe enough place to start. Not that I'm capable of remembering any of the absurd terms and nonintuitive discoveries with any persuasive coherency. But still. Science is at least as important as politics. One wonders if in fact the two fields are meaningfully distinct in this day and age. Between big business interests and international chemical cartels and US right wing fanatics and war, war, war. Stolen patents and intellectual property rights vagaries and abandoned philosophical schools of ethics and epistemology. Questionable uses of resources, questionable estimates of remaining resources, questionable wants and more questionable needs. And everything coming down to particles so small they can't be seen except by employing tools whose sight is itself based on a physics that certainly wasn't taught in high school Who is there keeping tabs on all of this? And why not me?

3) Crochet

I need to do something with my hands besides typing. And using the mouse doesn't count. I would also like, for once, to produce a visible, tangible object instead of merely crafting unseen bits of polarized matter. Beading seemed at good candidate for this job, what with beaded handbags all the rage. But the beads have a tendency to fall out of their little jars and run amok. All on their own, independently, like magic. But yarn is more restrained, more organized, more flexible. I used to crochet as a child so I imagine it will all come back to me. Hands seem to remember things that the mind can't hold onto.

January 2, 1999

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