Promise Made Are Promises Broken

I don't like to roll out my resolutions all at once. They all start vying for brain time and I end up doing none of them. I like to stagger them, and so far, I've started two new ones.

1) To not be busy this year.

I've already started this -- ask me to do something with you, and I guarantee you, the answer will not be "I'm busy." It may be something else like "Would Thursday be OK," or "I'm sleeping," or "Actually, that doesn't sound like my kind of rally," but I won't be busy.

The second one, I haven't quite nailed down, but I did talk about it extensively with my friend Heather at Rita Flora restaurant today -- incidentally, a nice place to eat because it's located in a flower shop and therefore all the food smells really nice.

The resolution is something like "I resolve to put people more at ease around me, perhaps by being more at ease with other people myself or by slowing down my speech or by bringing the conversation around to their interests, or perhaps by spraying them with some sort of muscle relaxant." I've got the gist of it, but it doesn't sing yet.

I just feel like sometimes, maybe, I'm a bit of a dork in conversations, and that might put people off.

Well, today for example, I was telling Phil, the music editor, that I might like to do a review of Loudon Wainwright III, a folk musician I recently discovered who will be playing in L.A. in mid-January. Except I made a series of gangly errors. First, I called the fellow LOO-din, instead of LAO-din (rhymes with COW-din). And, you know, when you're asking to review someone, it's important to know what the hell the name is of the person you're reviewing. Then, I said, with my trademark knack from understatement that I guessed that even though I'd just discovered this guy's music, I expected it probably wasn't that new of an act. Um, no, he's been around more than 30 years, I was told. Ah. I didn't correct my understatement because I would have seemed even more dork-full. Last, Phil informed me that we'd done a review of LWIII on Nov. 6, when he performed at the Getty. So, journal reader, if I had in fact read the newspaper for which I worked a little more closely, I could have avoided the whole situation.

Yech. Small wonder I have the nickname at work that I do.

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