New Years Resolutions

Nora Ephron Resolves to Eat More Cheese:

1. I resolve to be a better human being this year, and that includes trying to remember the names of people I have just been introduced to. It also includes trying to remember the names of people I already know. Last year I bumped into someone I was certain I knew, in a mall in Las Vegas, and realized after about a minute that it was my sister.


2. I resolve to go to Madrid. I went to Madrid once, but I don't remember it. I'm pretty sure I saw a Goya in a museum there, but I may merely have seen a photograph of a Goya in the museum and confused it with an actual experience. At this point there's no way to know.


3. I resolve to go to the Tiffany show at the Met. I have definitely not been to the Tiffany show at the Met. One of my biggest regrets in life was not buying a Tiffany lamp in 1964 when they cost only $10,000, even though I didn't have $10,000 in 1964. Had I bought a Tiffany lamp back then, it would probably have been lost in the tragic moving-truck episode of 1979, along with a Saul Steinberg drawing that was the only valuable thing I owned at the time and which, naturally, I had failed to insure, thus causing me to make a New Year's resolution in 1980 to overinsure everything forever, something I always forget to do.


4. I resolve to write a blog about those incredibly irritating little stickers that are stuck to the fruit and tell the cash register at the grocery store whether you are buying Fuji apples for $1.29 a pound or Gala apples for $1.29 a pound. I meant to write about this last year but it slipped my mind.


5. I resolve to eat more waffles, even though this resolution is in direct conflict with my most important resolution of the New Year, which is to lose two pounds. Waffles are amazing. When I'm dying, I don't want to regret not having eaten more of them. Incidentally, one of my most successful New Year's resolutions, which I made in 1990, was to eat more cheese. I recommend it highly as a resolution and as a way of life, although, come to think of it, it's one of the reasons why I now have to lose two pounds.


6. I resolve to watch that movie by Jean Renoir I can never remember the name of but it's French and it's supposed to be the greatest movie ever made.


7. I resolve not to resolve to read Proust. Because you never do and then you just feel like a failure.


8. I resolve to get off America Online and find another internet service provider that doesn't shut down on you while you're in the middle of an email or fail to make a full connection when you log on. It's hard to leave America Online. But this year I am going to. And I am not going to forget.


9. I resolve to finish reading Fiasco.


10. I resolve to memorize once and for all the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia, although I knew the difference a few months ago and, to be perfectly honest, it didn't really seem to matter that much. I mean, let's just get out of there and let them sort it out.


11. I resolve to cook a timballo. I want to make one just like the one they made in the movie Big Night, which came out ten years ago. Why it's taken me so long to make a timballo, I don't know. I guess I just forgot.