Funfare for the Common Man

Wait, in my last post, and first of this year, did I really claim that I was going to post 52 times this year? Seriously? What the hell was I thinking? I referenced the financial writer and investing guru Jason Zweig in my last post, and this is what he said at the start of his article on resolutions: ‘Don’t resolve to do something so easy it doesn’t require a resolution, nor something so hard no resolution could make it achievable. Resolutions are for raising the bar, not for laying the bar on the ground and hopping over it or for putting the bar too high for anyone to reach. Make all your resolutions in public. The fear of social pressure, whether it materializes or not, will help you keep your word, since you are pledging not just to yourself but to others…’ (emphasis mine) [Gulp.] Talk about pressure: I’m already being asked about this! Way, way back in my undergraduate days, I took a history course on the Holocaust, and I had exactly one assignment, wh...

Many years ago, before my teaching days (and before I had even planned on becoming a teacher), I worked at Waterstone’s bookshop in Belfast in the run-up to the Christmas period (and I was sorely tempted to stay on permanently – that might have been the best job I’ve ever had and my not-so-secret dream is still to run my own bookshop one day, but alas…). After the Christmas holidays I remember having to put out books for the section entitled ‘New Year, New You!’ These books were downright appalling in terms of cringeworthiness: your usual mélange of self-help gurus proffering up advice about positive thinking, happiness, getting into shape, eating more healthily, acupuncture, meditation, the Kama Sutra, being a calmer person, not kicking puppies, etc, etc. In some ways I’ve mellowed out over the years and in others I’m just as much of a grouch as I always have been. But I’ve never really liked the idea of your more standard run-of-the-mill resolutions, the kind that everyone says ...