As you direct the heaping red plastic spoon toward your watering mouth you are thinking only happy thoughts toward the geniuses at Dairy Queen and their trailblazing Brownie Batter Blizzard. Frozen pseudo-dairy hits the tongue and something odd happens. Rather than melting in a chocolate pool of wonder and delight, the ice cream whips out miniature dirty bombs and detonates them in your sinuses and down through your neck. Your brain screeches to a grinding halt, hardens into lead, your eyes cross, you yowl.

Thankfully, the freeze isn’t lasting and most people go on to finish their Blizzard with no lasting damage. Death by ice cream would have rendered the treat extinct and illegal long ago. Ice cream parlors would have gone the way of opium dens and Furr’s Cafeterias.

I am having the writing equivalent of brain freeze. Big scoops of life have hit my tongue. I have tasted and my brain has reacted by sealing itself in an armor-plated cocoon. I wish that life has tasted like chocolate or pot roast. This week it has tasted like Furr’s Cafeteria “green” beans, black licorice, and prune juice—whipped together in a Blizzard of devil’s design for the purposes of making me silent, for once.

Maybe that isn’t a bad thing—to simply be still. When bad things happen attention turns to what is important and what is good. The green beans make the chocolate more chocolatey and the pot roast more roasty.

Yesterday’s newspaper came with the usual coupon insert. I always have good intentions regarding coupons. I clip them, stash them in a little magnetic holder on the refrigerator, and store them there well beyond their expiration dates.

As I looked through the myriad of ways I could save 35 cents, I began to notice a pattern. All of the food items were “lo-carb”, made with Splenda, or otherwise promised to be utterly healthy but not taste too badly.

This phenomenon makes January the most boring, eye-rollingly deprived of all pleasure month of the entire year. The frenzy to lose weight fizzles out by March and then it is back to McDonalds. I am a lifetime member at Weight Watchers and I remember that there were literally hundreds of people at the January meetings last year, but the numbers sharply dropped once springtime approached.

I think the wisest resolution to make is “I will not make a New Year’s Resolution!”

IF I were to make resolutions this year, they would be:

1. Sew Aidan’s Brownie patches on her vest, finally. I have been avoiding this task ever since I discovered that I couldn’t iron the patches onto the vest. Needle and thread: required.

2. Actually print some of the 4,829 digital pictures we have stored on the computer and on disc. I do not remember what it feels like to hold a photograph in my hands…they are imprisoned on the computer screen.

3. The picture issue reminds be that I need to redecorate the front of the refrigerator. It is currently sporting photos that are four or five years old, an ultrasound picture of Joel taken nearly two years ago, Aidan’s old spelling lists, expired coupons, and ugly magnets that come free on the front of the phone books offering Roto Rooter services.

4. I need to find a hairstyle that transcends the ponytail. Something so fabulous that it makes the ponytail unnecessary. I need a hairstyle that doesn’t compel me to just sweep it up into a ponytail. I need to learn to say “no” to ponytails. Ponytail, ponytail, ponytail. It is surprising that my hair hasn’t been whipped into the discipline of simply growing itself into a point on the back of my head, then free-falling.

5. Finally, I resolve that by next Christmas I will have Tommy and Joel’s stockings done. I have given myself the breathing room that only 358 days can provide. What will I do with those days and nights?

We shall see.