a while in my closet when I was a little kid. I covered the floor with blankets and stuffed animals and pillows and slept there. My room was really huge and kind of scary in its bigness. So I've always been fascinated by tiny living spaces. I loved the interiors of camper vans and boats, the tiny stove, the little fridge, the miniscule sink, the diminutive toilet. And now this love for tiny spaces manifests itself in an appreciation for the work of Andrea Zittel and the book Tokyo: a certain style which has photographs of the tiny apartments of dozens of Tokyo residents. These microflats in the New York Times look pretty groovy: they're only 344 square feet, but they have a king-size bed, a sofa, a desk and a table that seats six. Right now (or at least recently) they set up a Microflat in a store window and hired a couple people to live in it for a week or so.

Blork provides a better article about the Londond Microflats, with illustrations.
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I wish I had seen this earlier in the season:How to Knit a Chihuahua Sweater. Wow! those are some slim dogs. They're supermodel skinny. No way Dos Pesos could fit into it! [via mydogmeg.net]
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I updated the books page again, and archived the list from 2000-2001.
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Mitsu once again has some good information regarding mood disorders and creativity, particularly manic-depression.
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I'm feeling quite out of the loop as far as recent music is concerned and I need some recommendations. I haven't bought music for two or three years and back then I was buying Sigur Ros and Palace and Belle and Sebastian and Kid Loco and Neutral Milk Hotel and delta blues and had just gotten that Harry Smith compilation of American folk music from the 20s, which I loved. Of the old stuff I like Syd Barrett and and X and Roxy Music and Kool Moe Dee and De La Soul and PJ Harvey and lots of other stuff. Someone sent me an email not too long ago offering to burn me some of the old twangy stuff, but I lost the email switching to OSX and so if you're out there, please send it again.

So, what should I be listening to?
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In Europe, post-fascism is on the rise: A Jumpy, Anti-Immigrant Europe Is Creeping Rightward. I find this trend quite frightening. My friend Christian in Denmark recently came up against the new anti-immigrant policies in trying to get his wife, Adriana, the equivalent of a social security number there. In Denmark you can't go to the doctor, or drive, or even get a library card without this number, and they had a new policy, as I understand it, of no longer permitting spouses to be recognized as immigrants. They battled the government for several years and finally won their case, a couple months ago. There was an article about the case in the national paper.
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I am reading a couple of books lent to me by Martha: The American Experience: A Radical Reader and the earnest Civil Rights and Civil Liberties which has a great picture on the cover of a guy who just stepped off the set of The Planet of the Apes and is apparently participating in some kind of protest/riot. In my novel the parents of one of my characters are 60s radicals of the Black Panther, Weatherman, SLA variety. If anyone has any recommendations of good books on any of these groups, I'd appreciate them. I'm also researching WWII Filipino history.

In addition, I'm reading a trashy novel by George R. R. Martin The Armageddon Rag since it's about the music scene in the 60s, as well as reminisences of protests and communes and psychedelia.

UPDATE: OK, I feel bad for dispensing with George R.R. Martin so blithely; he was, after all the author of one of my favorite stories as a teenager A Song for Lya. So maybe it's pulp and not trash if we may make that distinction.
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They're going to revoke my HAPA and/or Pinoy status if I don't stop burning the rice. I *always* burn the rice. I just did it again, making rice to accompany the adobo. It's because I grew up in a house with a rice cooker, and was unsuccessful in my attempts to steal my sister's.
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I've been remembering a great deal lately, remembering things that I'd nearly forgotten, or that were at risk of being forgotten if I didn't call them to mind. Because I read an article once that left me convinced that you don't actually have memories. I mean you do, but you're not bringing up, as on a computer screen, the data you stored one day back in 1992 when you went fishing. You're bringing up the memory of the last time you remembered fishing in 1992, as well as all the associated emotions and opinions and embellishments that have given the memory its form over the years, and that one of the tricks to remembering things is to think about them often.

In any event, yesterday I remembered a previously forgotten trip I took with my fifth grade class (as well as all the other fifth grade classes in my school district) to some camp somewhere, called Quiet Valley. I have very little recollection of what we did there, but I remember that it was a very big deal, and that we had been talking about it all year, because some time in the the schedule of activities was going to be a dance and for this dance we had to choose a partner. We were both attracted to and repelled by this idea, and discussed it endlessly. The kids were all highly anxious about the situation, frightened that they wouldn't have anyone to dance with and terrified that if they didn't choose they might get assigned someone, which would be another kind of humiliation, but not as bad as possibly asking someone and getting rejected. I was going to go with Mark Beardslee, my "boyfriend" at the time, who I remember little about except that he had really large freckles and wore ironed jeans and moved to Minnesota the following year. All year long we worried about it. All you had to do to introduce discomfort into any interaction with any other kids was to say "Quiet Valley" and terror would glaze their features. At one point our fifth grade teacher Miss Oxley said, "Listen you guys. The dance is about 1% of what we do there, it's really not important." But it was. It was about the transition from "Ew, girls! Gross!" to thinking that maybe it would be ok -- if your friends were doing it too and didn't make too much fun of you -- to hold their hands.

So the big day arrived and we went to Quiet Valley. Yellow school buses, parental chaperones and the novelty of seeing Miss Oxley in shorts. The funny thing is, I don't remember the actual dance. I remember being bunked with some kids I wasn't crazy about and I remember doing some "team building" exercises and I remember walking toward the dining hall when the sun was going down, but the dance itself, most likely the greatest anticlimax of my tenth year, remains a complete cipher.
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Mope mope mope. No one playing with me. Sick, everyone is sick and no one has a moment to spare for old Dos Pesos. Growrrrr. And they only let me go out and sniff for like, one minute, before it's, "Come on back inside Dos, it's cold out here!" just when I got a good sniff of a nice lady dog. RrrrWOWrrrr! Caterina promises I'll get to go out to the vet next week for a 'vak-sin-ay-shun' whatever that is, and then to get 'fixed'. I can't wait!

I'm so bored, growr. Stupid old nylabone. Stupid old frisbee. I've chewed everything I can think of. Growr. Here's a pink chubby toe poking out from under the covers! *Chomp*

Oh crap. I shouldn't'a done that. Sheesh! What's up with these people today?! That is so not on! Grumble growr. Wish I had Oliver's number so we could commiserate. Old Francy-pants.
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What? You haven't seen the Online Pre-Date Confidence Builder yet? [via harrumph]
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How lame is this "hidden" Hirschfeld Nina?
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*Cough*. In other exciting news, in between dizzy spells I've been working my way through my list and looking up all the words I didn't know in Suttree, which were quite a few. Writing the novel again, back-burnered in November for short-story clipping and pruning and holidaying, because lying on my back in a semi-hallucinatory state unable to do anything at all forced me to have ideas.
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Nothing new to report. Just more snot, booger, mucus, phlegm. Snot, booger, mucus, phlegm. It's a mantra that slips trippingly off the tongue, or trips slippingly off the tongue, iambically. However, I'm so clogged up it sounds more like thnot, booger, mucuth, phlegm.

Making tea.
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Snot, booger, mucus and phlegm are the *perfect* words for what they represent.
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If you hold with the idea that when you enter into a new germ pool you're more likely to get sick, then the reason I've been sick with three separate bugs this season -- having not been sick for years -- is because I've entered a new germ pool up here that I have to get used to.

I dreamt that I lost Dos Pesos, in New York City. I was on Spring Street, west of Varick, and there was a chandelier store with all the chandeliers hanging outside and a clothing store full of soft silk drapey clothes which this motherly woman I was accompanying there was trying on. I somehow ended up with a bulldog, which is the kind of dog I had originally wanted, and I suddenly felt like I'd never find Dos P. again, when he appeared with this motherly woman's peculiar son. "He's so arty and strange," she said, and indeed he was weird in that sixteen-year-old trying to be weird but not being weird in the way he'd intended, if you know what I mean.

I can't breathe and my head is full of snot. Maybe I won't go to the studio today, but stay here and write; this head cold might be exacerbated by the dust there.
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Wow! It's been a looong loong time since I've spent an entire day pushel pixing. And I'm very happy with the results. It's a site created entirely in two colors, black and white, coming soon to a browser near you.
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Mitsu asks, "Is being cynical or negative inherent to being smart?"

I also read a study once of a conjectural connection between intelligence, depression and a "sense of reality": they tested people who identified themselves as "happy, content" and people who identified themselves as "unhappy, depressed" and gave them a test to assess their knowledge of history and current events. The "happy" people had no idea what went on or what was going on, whereas the "unhappy" people did. Whether they knew these things because they were depressed type people or were depressed because they knew these things is hard to guess.

I read another study where it was determined that the most successful people are optimists -- and that their sense of themselves and their talents and what was possible was completely unreasonable, even given their own personal history of success vs. failure. Successful people just had faith that they'd eventually win. Which makes sense, right? Fall seven times, get up eight, etc.
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Friday night, dinner with Ann Marie and Bruce and Saturday night, Dinka's birthday dinner at Martha's house where there was delicious fish for dinner which made Rennie remember a kind of fish that lives in all female schools with only one male, and one large "queen" female. When the sole male dies, the "next largest" female fish becomes male. Peculiar. Which led to a discussion of parthenogenesis and feminist science fiction and on to an argument between Martha and I as to whether or not Lynda McCartney or Yoko Ono were "better", a highly amusing subject to endeavor to defend. We finally concluded neither of us had a better or worse position than the other, and that for Reason X we held the view that we did. We watched Pierre-Andre's video involving tiles and a mall and extreme closeups of feet and Dinka's belly button and legs. Afterwards we went to Derek and Dinka's for coffee and on the way over it started snowing. By the time we left at half past one, the ground was completely covered, but by this morning it had vanished, rained away.

I spent much of today reading The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, which was quite good. Judith and I have started a very small reading group comprising just the two of us. The Sebald was our first undertaking and next we're moving on to Underworld.
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Readers of synthetic zero: Mitsu now has a picture of himself up. Does he look like you think he'd look? Email him and tell him! It's an interesting thing, how you think someone will look from what they write.
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Great Spanish novelist Cela dies. I hate it when famous writers die before I've had a chance to read their books. Or win the Nobel Prize for that matter. How can you not admire a guy who founded an ism called "tremendismo"?
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Though I'm fully conversant in The Simpsons there are a lot of TV shows that I've never seen, such as:

• Ally McBeal
• Gilligan's Island
• McGuyver (sp?)
• Friends
• NYPD Blue
• Law & Order
• Survivor
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• etc.

The reason this came up is because Stewart said, "Doesn't Alissa's partner Jen look a lot like TV's Ally McBeal's Calista Flockhart?" and I knew exactly who he was talking about, which I shouldn't, since I've never seen the show. I canname all 6 main actors in Friends. How this information has seeped into my consciousness, I don't know. From looking at the cover of the supermarket tabloids at the checkout? From hearing other people talking about it? These are things I don't necessarily want clogging up my brainspace, but the Bigbrotherly mass media continues to transgress the boundries of my carefully constructed cultural envelope. I am willfully peculiar in this way, I suppose. In college, my roommate Rowena (now an agent in LA) told me I should really watch more TV. So I sat down one night and watched and wrote down pages of notes on the weird and fascinating things I saw there -- a story about a woman who'd abandoned her two children, an episode of The Planet of the Apes, the show with the guy who insured his legs for $1 million, you know....I watched three shows in as many half-hours. "No, no!" Rowena said, "You're not getting this at all! You don't stay on one channel..." and she took the pen and paper out of my hand and gave me the remote. I flipped idly around, passing an infomercial, a reality cop show, until I settled on a talk show on which Phyllis Diller was appearing. "Omigod, is she still alive?! She must be older than Bob Hope!" I said. "You're getting the hang of it," Rowena said. I flipped to Jeopardy "Is that a rug or is that his real hair?" I asked. "We've got you now!" she said, and settled back into the couch.

The whole Jonathan Franzen flap put this whole cultural divide into stark relief: books are the domain of the elite, TV the medium of the people, and seepage from the TV world into the book world make a lot of the book worlders uncomfortable, because TV is what the book people are standing against. It's certainly what my parents were standing against when they enforced the strict No-TV-Save-Walter-Cronkite regime of my childhood, a regime I've reduced to a simple No-TV. It made me peculiar in ways unanticipated by my parents, however. Instead of William F. Buckley I got into William Burroughs, swapped Churchill for Che Guevara and became the kind of smartass that countered pat Sunday sermonizings with the atheisms of Nietzsche and refused to go to confirmation class. My parents latterly lamented their TV ban. The Ayn Rand didn't take. They had inadvertently created a monster.

But I digress. Is it snobbery that keeps me reading instead of watching TV? Is reading an elitist act? And can we readers ever stop congratulating ourselves on our total ignorance of television? Last night at dinner, Bruce and Ann Marie mentioned that they could keep up with their subscriptions to The Economist and The New Yorker because they *no longer had a TV*. "We don't either!" we proclaimed, and it was a shibboleth, a secret handshake, an entree into the secret cabal where we all sit around dissing Baywatch.

All this cultural relativism is confusing to me. Why is it that "we" think Madonna is OK and Britney Spears is not? And aren't we also "the people"? Isn't diversity and self-determination a part of the Democratic pact? I have felt peculiar ever since grade school when I was mercilessly teased for asking who "Mork" was and made ashamed for knowing who Fortinbras was. Does pride of fringe necessarily = elitism if one has never wanted for opportunity? Does watching every episode Twin Peaks "count"? If TV is not the default Master Narrative, why the hell do I know who Mr. T is?
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I guess you know how Dos Pesos and I feel about eating dogs. On Slate: Wok the Dog - What's wrong with eating man's best friend? The argument goes something like this:

I thought the argument against eating dogs is that dogs are carnivores, unlike pigs, cows and sheep (at least before it was revealed during the Mad Cow epidemic that these cows were being fed, well, minced cow) and that somehow eating another animal that high on the food chain was in some way unhealthy or unsanitary. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
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I wish I knew Perl so I could write a local commenting system for caterina.net. The thread about the parks below, and who has a right to do what in them was more than BlogBack could handle, alas. Stewart and I were talking about the general impossibility of supporting comments, by just doing the math. 250,000 weblogs x 2 posts a day x 3 comments a post -- you'd need a few racks at a server farm to handle it. I'm not surprised that BlogBack stopped taking new subscribers after only a couple weeks.
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ANNOUNCING: The Shipyard Power Tool Drag Races- Sunday, March 31st. This is the kind of thing that would happen all the time in San Francisco that doesn't happen here in Vancouver. Here you see a lot of people dancing with fire, which is fun, but not the kind of hair-raising event likely to put 20 people into an emergency room.

The "Tragedy of the Commons" was exemplified the other night when, leaving my studio I was looking for a little grassy area where Dos Pesos could pee, and so headed up to Cathedral Square, a small park on Richards and, I think, West Pender. It was just after dark, say 5:30 or 6:00, and it was full of drug dealers standing hunched in their hooded sweatshirts and crack users, their pipes flaring with each inhalation. There was no grassy area where Dos Pesos could pee that was not, apparently, someone's turf. "Baby, you belong in the British Properties," one of the drug dealers said to me, as I headed off towards the paved world, which I guess is the local vernacular for "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" The British Properties are where the rich people live.

This is a common thing in the cities where I've lived -- New York, San Francisco, Buenos Aires -- you stay away from parks after dark. It is tacitly understood that they become dangerous places after the sun has gone down. When a jogger got raped in Central Park by a gang of wilding teenagers, I distinctly remember everyone asking, "What was she doing in the park after 10 p.m.?"
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I never knew the origin of the phrase "The Tragedy of the Commons". According to someone posting to the nettime mailing list, "The Tragedy of the Commons" was the title of an article written by Garrett Hardin, published in Science, 162(1968):

More cool stuff you can buy for your home: Glass Bell Jars, Ferrofluid Display Cells, Demonstration Pig Hearts
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A few things I know

1. People with the name of Wolfgang: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Wolfgang Van Halen, son of Eddie Van Halen.
2. You should always look further back in the milk fridge for milk with a later Use By date.
3. Mochi is some kind of sweet rice thing, Japanese.
4. Gary Gilmore, while he was on death row, was pen pals with a 10-year-old-girl boxer named Amber Jim. I was obsessed with Amber Jim after reading an article about her in Time magazine.
5. Cy Twombly lives in Rome.
6. John Cheever lived in Briarcliff Manor, NY and used to play cards with a bunch of other men on Fridays. They called this "Friday Club."
7. Healthy dogs usually have cold wet noses.

Allergies. I look like I've spent a round in the ring with Mike Tyson. My eyes are completely swollen and red, and itch like hell. I'm allergic to something, and I don't know what. They've been like this for two days. The house is relatively clean, and my air filter is on. I think I look worse than I feel.
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Now that Mignon has also become a quilting fool, she's been surfing around looking for quilting sites online and came across the Ugly Quilt web site. Interesting story on the history page.
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Binge Reader Polished off Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson last night, a book that was rejected by 54 publishers and that when finally published (by the Dalkey Archive) received excellent reviews and became a staple in college courses on the experimental novel. Ann Beattie, David Foster Wallace, Walter Abish and The Washington Post gush about it all over the cover, and all of this praise is well-deserved. It was erudite, it was funny, it was sad, it was profound, it was as novel a novel as I've read this year, about an artist, Kate, who is that last person left in the entire world, and mad.

2001 was the year was the year for discovering Thomas Bernhard, Cormac McCarthy and Anne Carson. And for rereading and finally appreciating the formerly loathed Faulkner. My loathing was based on the first 100 pages of one of his books, As I Lay Dying, assigned to me in high school. The first 100 pages were still bracingly dull, bleak and disgusting the second time around, but the difference this time was that I didn't quit when I most wanted to and forced myself to follow it to the end, which is where it demonstrates why Faulkner is Faulkner and I was so happy.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library, said Borges.
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Sucks to your ass-mar! I finished The Lord of the Flies last night, which was dark, horrible and fantastic. When I go back and read books that are typically assigned in high school they seem to have very clear "messages" -- I'm thinking of The Heart of Darkness and The Stranger -- and are very satisfying that way.

I also think that I might've succumbed to all the Lord of the Rings fanfare, but given a pretty strong resistance to marketing, unconsciously subverted it by picking up The Lord of the Flies instead.
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Nancy recommends drinking salt water for my sore throat, but the taste of it reminds me of the time I almost drowned in Puerto Escondido. Floating lazily in an innertube, I was suddenly sucked out by a rogue riptide and slammed against a rock. I went unconscious and started sinking and would have drowned but a local surfer named Nacho Barrera, friend of my friends from Cuernavaca, paddled out on his board and pulled me back in. Spat up salt water for hours, it was coming out of my ears, my nose. And I haven't gone more than knee deep in the ocean since. I'm deathly afraid of it now.
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I'm getting a parsing error on the comments. Since I haven't done anything to the code, I'm figuring it must be something on the BlogBack side of things. I'm looking into it.
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Barter, Baby! Good idea. You build a page with a list of all your barterable items and your name and location, and you barter them for other things. [via formica.ca]
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A really excellent article in which Wes Anderson, director of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums talks about one of his favorite movies (and one of mine) Small Change: From Truffaut's Centimes, a Wealth of Inspiration

Yesterday, moving into my studio, I found the four DVDs that I own, which are:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
• Stolen Kisses (Truffaut)
• 400 Blows (Truffaut)
• The Player (Altman)

You hardly ever hear a good rant anymore (as I've said before). Politeness, nicety and political correctness seem to have bled everyone of their more acid responses to things and made us all into pantywaist Pollyannas (pantywaist?). It is thus a special occasion when you get to hear what people really think. A friend of mine now living in London -- not English though he went to graduate school there -- sent me the following response to my asking how he liked it over there.

I laughed aloud. They come off pretty well in this screed, but you should hear him talk about Americans. Ha!
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I'm feeling sort of not great and have been feeling that way all day. Not sure what it is, but all my energy seems to have been leached out of me. Last night I was feeling so great that I wanted to stay up and do a million things. So enthusiastic was I that I wrote down 12 things that I wanted to do today. But I've only done one of them...
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I missed this one on New Year's Day at Alamut:

(Wrote 500 words and am taking a break...uh, could you cue the Rocky theme song again?)
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I have been back on my 1000 words a day schedule again. Woohoo! So far so good. Except that I haven't done it yet today, and it's after 8:30 and I suddenly feel really tired. Like I-want-to-go-to-bed-immediately tired. And how often does that happen? Not very often. But I have to do it. I said I would and, you know, new years resolu mumble mumble.

O.K. Cue the Rocky theme song. Here I go.
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Stewart took some nifty night photos when Justin was visiting this weekend, cruising around industrial ruins looking for good shots during the brief interval of no rain.
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How cool is that?After Dave Hickey received a MacArthur, I posted something about being unable to find a copy of his book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, try as I might. Though it seemed to be in print, I could find a copy neither here nor there, not on abebooks, alibris, amazon or anywhere. Tim wrote that he had the book and since it was apparently out of print, he'd send me a copy. I received it yesterday. Yay! The epigraph from the first essay is this:

I notice that Daegan uses the word "pee" as a transitive verb, i.e. while I was peeing my dog. We use "poop" the same way, as in "Have you pooped Dos Pesos this morning?"
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Someone wrote in one of the comment sections here that everyday life is underrated, and today, though nothing remarkable happened, and I left the house a total of five times (after going back 4 times to get things I'd forgotten, and then back again to get the things I left after I'd gone back to get something else) today was a really good day.
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I found this Index of Culture-Bound Syndromes by Culture interesting, especially this one:

When I went to a Chinese acupuncturist about my muscle aches, she asked me if there was a lot of wind when I first started feeling the aches. I said there wasn't. She asked again, and I said no again. She kept on asking, shaking her head, incredulous that there was no wind. "Was it, maybe, cold?" she asked, finally. "In Brazil? in summertime?" I said. "It was 100 degrees and humid and the air never moved! Stifling!" She seemed angry that there wasn't any wind, so I didn't say anything else. [via mefi]
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Saw The Man Who Wasn't There last night, the Coen Brothers latest, and while it wasn't the most uplifting of movies, and not one of the Coen Brothers funnier ones, the production design was to die for, and the acting by Billy Bob was excellent, and I love inky black and white movies, noir voiceover and perfectly rendered period pieces.

I feel bad whenever I go to Tinseltown. It's a brand new mall built in a really depressed part of town where there are nothing but junkies, dealers, crack houses and flophouses. There are hardly any stores in the mall, which has been open for a year and a half, the available stores are all boarded up, and I've only ever seen people going to the movies there, never buying anything. Plus it's difficult for anyone with even a modicum of aesthetic feeling to countenance the depressing 80s-style neon lights on the outside. Not that I am a big supporter of malls, I'm not, I hate them. But it is depressing to see so much money wasted that could have been better spent otherwise. It makes you wonder what went wrong, and how it went wrong and whether it could be made better.
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I'm happy to say I remembered to say rabbit rabbit at midnight on New Year's! Hooray!
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This morning I found Dos Pesos gnawing on a pin cushion -- and none of the pins were anywhere to be found. He was very bouncy and playful, and didn't seem to be suffering from swallowed pins, but I'm keeping a close eye on him. Egads!

UPDATE: All day, fully expecting to see pins poking through the fur of my dog -- part pooch, part porcupine -- all I saw was a jaunty, happy dog. Then when I finally decided to make the bed long after noon there were all the pins, on my pillow. Glad I found them before diving face first into bed tonight or we'd be Cyclops and her porcupine pet.

One needle still missing.
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In the beginning of his diary, Brian Eno wrote about a Dan Flavin exhibit that he had seen. He wrote something like, "Flavin plowed the same field over and over and over and it kept bearing fruit" (I can't find the book). Dan Flavin only worked with fluorescent tubes in the commercially available colors which were daylight, cool white, warm white, yellow, pink, blue, green, red and soft white, according to the Stockebrand essay on the Chinati site. She writes:

This takes incredible discipline. Reminds me of a Talk of the Town article about when Alex Melamid of Komar and Melamid offered to give lessons on "how to be an artist" -- these are the guys who hired a market research firm to survey people different countries of what kind of art they liked, producing the most wanted and least wanted paintings for each country.

A student arrived to learn "how to be an artist" and Melamid said, "your medium will be" and looked around his studio "coffee cups! from now on and for the rest of your life you will work only with coffee cups!" And that was the end of the lesson. But ah! The beauties of limitation and the freedom of discipline! Pick well, though. Fluorescent light has The Something. Coffee cups?

There is also a Dan Flavin book out that I didn't know about. Damn those book publishers! I can't keep up.
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I am now an installation artist. My medium? Thread.
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Bing and Ty and Judith in the comments to the New Year's Resolution post below said that doing things every day is what's important, not the announcing that you're going to do things on January first, and they're completely right about that. But the thing that I think is important to me about the New Year's Resolution tradition is that it's a ritual, and rituals are sort of organizing principles for the inner life where the inner life is put out into the world, like graduations and weddings and bar mitzvahs and gang intitiations and the erstwhile annual Grateful Dead New Year's Show in San Francisco. They relate what goes on inside you to the rest of the world, and get other people to participate in it. They're a marker of the sacred within the profane. When you make vows you talk not only to your people but you talk to God, or the Great Is, or some ideal of honesty or whatever your particular deity-substitute or thing-for-which-it-is-worth-bettering-yourself. Do, yes, always do. But to say is also to do if words, in their perfect state of integrity, equal actions. Because that is what a spoken commitment is. Most likely you will fail to achieve your your New Year's Resolution without slipup or error. But you will probably fail less than if you had never committed to it. And this is why I like New Year's Resolutions.

I'm sure Mircea Eliade said this better somewhere in one of his books, and Stewart had an incomplete post about words as acts way back when.
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