Occupy January: Last One in Gets the Rotten Shallots

Last night, I had to park on the other side of the gym, and my usually bare Spinning class was full save for one empty bike. As if that weren’t bad enough, when I went to the grocery store to shop for my usual vegetable bounty, there were no shredded carrots to be found, and I ended up getting the veggies at the bottom of the barrel including some questionable looking shallots. That’s when it hit me- the Resolutionists are out in full force this year, and they’re coming for blood.

Resolutionists are what I call people who jump on the diet and exercise bandwagon on January 1st hoping to hit the ground running to achieve their absurdly ridiculous and unrealistic goals by December 31st only to fail by February 1st, leaving the regular gym-goers like me frustrated and inconvenienced for one month.

Every year, Resolutionists join gyms in droves on January 1st (perhaps because they don’t know that it’s typically cheaper to join in the summer time- when no one is using the gym because they’re showing off the bodies they perfected at the gym in the winter so to lure members, gyms slash prices). They occupy my favorite spot in yoga, or use my favorite elliptical, or take my favorite bag in kickboxing. They even took my favorite bike in Spinning class. Regular gym-goers know the rules. We know not to take a particular bike if we know a certain person always uses it.

And Resolutionists stick out like tourists in New York City (you know, the people looking up at the buildings and taking pictures of the beautiful crap that veteran New Yorkers take for granted). They show up all shiny and new with their squeaky clean Nikes and their non-faded black yoga pants, and their state-of-the-art Brita water bottle filled with their hopes and dreams of sticking to their goals this year.

While Resolutionists view this as a good-faith effort to get healthy, we regular gym-goers think of it as tourist season. And we just secretly loathe going to the gym in January. We fully support those that are determined to join the club (bad pun intended) and become a regular gym-goer like us. I guess it’s just another case of one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch- enough people quit by February that we just don’t take any Resolutionists seriously. Their resolutions are fleeting.

On the plus side, at least the Kardashian-Humphries marriage will have lasted longer than something.

Ghosts of Years Past

Remember that episode of Sex and the City when Carrie freaks out about seeing Aiden at the opening of Steve’s bar because she’s not sure how Aiden feels about her since they broke up because she cheated on Mr. Big; and in writing her article she asks “…are we haunted by relationships past?” I find myself asking the same question, sort of. So many people are able to adopt a forgive and forget attitude in life. They are so focused on the future, they don’t care what happened five minutes ago. When a new month comes along, they put the previous month behind them and they don’t look back. If we lived in biblical times, I’d be Lot’s wife- I’d look back and turn into a pillar of salt.

I envy those people that are able to turn the page and keep going forward. I envy those able to forgive and FORGET. I used to hold grudges, until I realized that until you learn to forgive, you’re killing your soul. I feel I’ve mastered the art of forgiveness, but it’s the forgetting that I can’t fully grasp.

Sarcastic pictures aside, 2011 is a year that I want to forget for too many reasons to list here. And in 2008, I was forced, for the first time, to deal with the death of a family member. Those were the toughest years of my life. And I want nothing more than to move on from those difficult times in my life. I went through a lot and I am stronger for it. But I feel like ghosts of those years are still haunting me because I haven’t forgotten what I went through. I used to love the fact that my memory is so great. It’s helped me ace tests without studying, and I vividly remember things from my childhood. I sometimes tease my boyfriend because he seems to forget a lot of things. However, he remembers the important stuff- like my birthday, our anniversary, or that I’m allergic to seafood. But he seems to forget the bad stuff that’s happened to him, so as not to remind himself of how he felt. I certainly don’t want to be reminded of what horrible years those were for me, especially since I have so many positive things to look forward to this year; and I’m not in a bad place like I was in 2008 and 2011. But, there are songs I still won’t listen to because they were playing when I found out my cousin was murdered, or they remind me of another bad memory. But can you ever completely forget? Can you ever look ahead and never look back? How do you give up the ghosts?