Progress Report

It’s about a month and a half into 2015 now, and fulfillment of my new year’s resolutions is at a standstill after having gotten off to a heady start.

“Welcome to the world,” you say. “Everybody resolves to lose weight, eat better, read all the great novels, etc, but nobody ends up doing it.”

Except, I long ago stopped setting my sights that high.

Well, I don’t really need to lose pounds in the first place, because I’ve been obsessive-compulsive about maintaining my weight since I was in my 20s. But, as much as Lynn would love for me to stop competing for the superlative of Worst Vegetarian Diet Ever, I have every intention of continuing to guzzle Diet Mountain Dew and cap every workday lunch with an extra-large chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop from 7-Eleven (No fat, less than 100 calories, and  a week’s supply of sugar!). Read the great novels? I made the mistake of posting on this blog a few years ago a book-reading goal that I came nowhere near meeting, and War and Peace wasn’t even on it. (This was one of those instances in which having an infinitesimal readership proved to be a very good thing. Only one person called me out with a “How’s that workin’ out?” email.)

This year I decided to limit my resolutions—with a few notable exceptions—to completing niggling tasks that I just never get around to doing, or that I irrationally put off. It was a new and viable approach that kicked off like gangbusters during the first week in January, when I rode a Montgomery County Ride-On Bus to the Friendship Heights Metro station and added an app to my iPhone. (Those are two different things.)

I’d gotten out of the habit of riding the county bus a few years ago, and then, over the course of time, I’d managed to convince myself that everything had probably gotten too complicated, in my absence, for me ever to figure it out. Because this is how I think—this is how I am. Did the buses really take SmartTrip cards now?  Had our local bus route changed? Was the terminus by the Metro station in the same place where it used to be? Etc, etc. I’d even gotten parking tickets a couple of times in DC for lingering past two hours on neighborhoods streets while watching movies in nearby theaters—just because I wouldn’t go online to update myself on Ride-On’s current procedures.

Well, what do you know? I used my SmartTrip card that day last month to pay my fare, leaving from the same stop as always near my house and arriving at the same old terminus near Metro. And it seems that all of the bus schedules are helpfully posted online! I didn’t even need one of those printed-out route schedules from Ride-On’s display at the Metro station. (I’m not even sure those displays still exist. I haven’t looked.)

So, next, the app. I hadn’t added a new app to my phone in probably a year because I’d forgotten how one does that. While I was drafting my new year’s resolutions, this struck me as frankly asinine. I asked Lynn what our “Apps Store” password was, found what I was looking for, and soon had a shiny new app on my smartphone. Voila! Another resolution met.

But that’s where my new year’s progress stalled. Next on my list was one word: “Coins.” My dressing area downstairs in our house is littered with overflowing containers of various shapes and sizes that all are packed with loose change. The big one, which I filled first, primarily holds pennies, but there’s a lot of silver in most of the other ones. There’s no telling what the cumulative amount of cash is—much less than a fortune but considerably more than the cost of a few movie tickets. It's kind of a moot point, though, because the money is not being used. It, rather, is a sprawling eyesore that irritates me every time I look at it.

Back in the old days, I actually enjoyed rolling pennies into wrappers, writing my account number on the outside, and bringing the rolls of 50 to my bank in a shoe box. It was fun, walking in with a tidied mountain of near-worthless zinc or copper (or whatever pennies are made of these days) and walking out with 20 or 30 dollars of real greenback currency. But my coin tsunami now far exceeds a shoe box’s capacity. For all I know, too, banks now refuse to accept penny rolls for obscure reasons that may be linked to Homeland Security.

The thing is, though, that my bank doesn’t offer those coin machines that helpfully convert customers’ loose change into paper money without the financial institution demanding a cut of the total. While I’m not averse to using a CoinStar machine in a grocery store—sure, they take a percentage, but what good are the coins doing me now?—I worry obsessively about the whole thing. Kind of the way I’d worried about the Ride-On bus.  I haven’t yet been able to force myself even to read the instructions on the machine, for fear I’ll find them too complicated. I also envision having someone standing directly behind me, waiting impatiently for me to finish. I worry to distraction about all the noise I’ll make, and the undue attention I’ll draw to myself. I wonder how many coins I should bring with me on that first trip, and how long feeding X number of them into the machine will take while I’m making all that racket.

Lynn tries to calm me, in the manner that one would a 5-year-old. She says, reassuringly,“We’ll go over to Harris Teeter one day and check it all out.” Which is sweet, and nice. And I know that she’s right. We would figure it out—and then, slowly but surely, my mounds of coins would disappear, and I’d have more “real” money in my pocket or bank account, or wherever I choose to place it.

But that hasn’t happened yet, somehow. I still dread the noise and the instructions. Does the machine give you cash, or a receipt that you then must bring to a cashier at the grocery store? How does it all work? Aaahhh! In the meantime, every morning, when I come downstairs to dress, I encounter an unruly army of Abes, Toms, FDRs and Georges, all sitting there in their containers, vexing me.

So, the baseball season’s coming up. Pitchers and catchers report to spring training in, like, a week. Which brings to mind two other seemingly simple check-off items on my resolution list: Nats Rewards and StubHub.

Because I’m a longtime Washington Nationals partial season ticket holder, I'm entitled to various “rewards” on the computerized card that I barely understand well enough to annually load my 20 game tickets onto. If I were to take full advantage of these additional rewards, I’d at the very least earn an excellent seat at one additional game per season. I know this because friends of mine have done it. It can’t be that hard to figure out. But I’ve just sort of psyched myself out about it, as I tend to do. I’ve convinced myself that it’s too difficult to so much as attempt. I really need get over this.

StubHub is a similar thing. Millions of people every day use this “fan exchange” site to buy and sell tickets to baseball games and other events at good prices. But I don’t really know much about it, and I worry that I’ll be stymied by an account that someone set up for me once, that may somehow prevent me from entering new information. Or something like that. (My fears often are less than fully baked.) Anyway, I really should check out StubHub before I next go to an Orioles game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Why, perhaps, armed with my reasonably priced StubHub ticket, I could sit nearer the field and the Bird mascot! Wouldn’t that be awesome? Sure it would.

There are a few things on my resolution list that aren’t as easily actionable. For instance, I need to add a state, if not two, to my running list this year. (Actually, first I need to check the list on my office computer to see how many states I have to go. I’m sure it’s under 20, but how many  under? I am 56 years old, soon to be 57! Time’s a-wastin’.) I’m thinking that I can fly to a corner of one state I need that’s near another state I need, so that I can kill two running states on one trip. But this will take some planning.

One item on my resolution list that’s fairly easily actionable but is more at the traditional procrastinator’s level of onerous is clearing out this drawer into which I’ve thrown, over the past several years, pretty much anything of a size that could fit in a drawer. For example, I know—although they’re certainly no longer visible—that there are “valuable” newspapers in there commemorating Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 as America's first African American president. I put the word valuable in quotes because, of course, these utterly unprotected materials are dry and yellowed by now—about as fresh and vital as our beleaguered president himself looks, well into his second and final term as chief executive.

The problem with cleaning out drawers that evoke a compact episode of the reality series Hoarders is that if you do, you’ve then got to figure out what do with all that crap. Not everything merits tossing or donating, but if you keep stuff, it’s got to be stowed somewhere. We live in a small house that already has available no attic space and a packed garage that never could house a car.

So, I guess there’s a backhanded argument to be made for further putting off the drawer-clearing. Perhaps that’ll reappear on the 2016 resolutions list. Ideally not to be joined there by “Coins,” “Nats Rewards” and “StubHub.”

If I’d just set aside my fears and dive in, I conceivably could meet all three of those goals in a single day. But the day may have been back in January.