Zimmerman

When we were in high school, Mrs. Zimmerman, who held some position I never quite understood, spoke to everyone at morning meeting one day. Her talk was about honoring the commitments we've made.

"Nobody likes a woman they can't depend on," she said repeatedly. Or something like that -- in the rewriting of it some 20 years later, that phrasing strikes me as odd.

Anyway, Tara and I got a lot of mileage out of that -- repeating it to one another admonishingly to this day.

She had a point, Mrs. Zimmerman, and I think the specifics she discussed were students' signing up for community service or clubs and then not following through. We were all women at the time -- the school has since turned co-ed -- and there was a heavy emphasis on the extra-curricular.

I have since become a woman upon whom one has not always been able to depend. A lot of people like me; I'm nice. But I have broken, postponed, and slept through many a plan in my day. And I've been given an abundance of second, third, fourth and fifth chances. Though I may have found loopholes in her phrasing, I can not argue with her sentiment: Thou shalt do thy best to honor thy commitments. Those I've broken with friends and family members I've had subsequent chances to redeem. Those I've broken with myself ... I've largely given up on, substituted other projects for the abandoned ones.

And so it is, the first of my new year's resolutions, admitted to with trepidation and hope: I will do my best to write something in this blog (blech -- that word embarrasses me) every day ... until I get to the point where I can skip a day or two or three -- even longer -- without fear that my momentum has forever faded.

And if I don't post every day, I will not abandon this project.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

I believe the above warm-fuzzy is the translation of a phrase etched in stone toward the beginning of the Catacombs, in Paris, at the Denfert-Roche-something metro.

I know a little bit about a lot of things. And that's fine.