Every Day is New Year's

OK, so it's not working—the resolutions, the promise to be good to myself, and to avoid all troubled souls with friendships, dating, and work. I feel like saying that nothing ever does, but that would be wrong, too.

New year's is about new beginnings and working toward resolutions—only here, everything slides backwards. Get up at 7 a.m.; got up at 8 a.m. Sleep at 11 p.m.; slept at 1 a.m. No snacking after 9 p.m.; a pint of Ben and Jerry's and two little candy bars at 11 p.m. No impulse shopping; this morning, the going-out-of-business sale lured me in and once again the credit card became the culprit. It's easy to beat up on yourself. Yes, I'd say so.

Since the roommate left, there's been bad omens. Broken glass dishes, disappearing things, and I can't help but think that I'm reverting to the old self again. A search for outside pleasures and things, the impulse to please, the desire for what others have. How can someone smart be so dumb? Why don't we learn from getting burned?

I've been telling the mystery man (who is on his way out) that I seek alone time to think, solitude time to decide what i want and what would work. OK, bottom line: I think I need to look beyond free ski trips, romantic cabins, and expensive dinners, and say, "Enough of that, what can the person offer me?" I'm smart enough to see the train wreck if I don't focus. I'll revert to old ways, a stressful circle, a magnet for negative people and men, half-drunk glasses, half-eaten meals, and being bogged down by too many bags.

I told the Buddha man the other day that I love making lists. I have this addiction to buying paper and making all sorts of lists, but is it all a dream in the end? The thrill is in the thought, because there is no execution.

A fellow ADDer said to me that every day is New Year's Day for the ADD person. It's funny but I need to agree. Another failed resolution: Wash all dishes after eating? Well, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it takes a cockroach or two as a warning. "Why start something when you know it won't be executed?" the Buddha man asks. Good question, I think, maybe it's time to stop that vicious cycle.

Then I looked straight back and joked, I could stop washing the dishes by a, not eating, and b, reverting to plastic utensils... but then friends would look at me oddly anyway, and wonder why every day was a picnic.

Stranger things have happened in ADD land.