New Year Resolutions that have been broken and abandoned litter my memories of New Year’s past. Like the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of my life, they’re locked in stinky dark, little corners with flags like “Diet” and “Eat Healthy” and “Call Home More Often,” drooping and listless. I used to make resolutions – as many as nine or ten when I was younger – but by the end of the first week of January it was abundantly clear that they were all forgotten and ignored.

So then I came up with a bright idea. I wouldn’t call them New Year’s Resolutions at all. Instead I called them “Bad Habits” that had to be broken. Habits like wearing a bathrobe round the house over my sleep T-shirt so that the neighbors or golfers couldn’t see me through the hedge and from the path at the end of the yard. Why they would want to was always a mystery to me but I was told year in year out by my husband that it’s much easier to see into a house than I would think. Especially at dusk or in the evening when the windows made my performance better lit than the last Broadway show we’d seen.

I still maintain that people have to want to stare in. And what possible jollies could they get from watching an over-middle-aged, over-weight, grey-haired woman sitting at a table with a laptop open in front of her, in a T-shirt that says I/O in big letters across the sadly sagging boobs. None of them could see through the screen of the laptop, nor would they know that I/O was a highly prized T-shirt from the last Google Developers Conference in 2014. 

But today as I sit tapping this into some new software I’m testing for my radio show, the curtain to the window is partially drawn to shield me from prying eyes even though I/O is accompanied by jeans and flip-flops. 

The bathrobe habit went the way of all New Year’s Resolutions. In two ways. One I didn’t wear it again after about 2 days and Two, I remembered to hang it up and not leave it gracefully adorning my bed/bookcase/sofa/ delete as applicable. So maybe the other Bad Habit – “Dealing with my Clutter” – was broken?

Nope.

That “Clutter” habit – that’s the Smaug of all my good intentions and bad habits. I personally believe that everything I own has secret velcro attached to it, so that as soon as it comes into contact with anything else I own, it sticks to it, expanding the surface area it covers by a factor of 3. Within hours I’m buried under clutter – and so this year – 2015 – is the year that Bad Habit – will be tamed. 

At least that’s this year’s resolution.

Which will no doubt go the way of all the others.

Rinse and repeat.