You know what Ammoo Grrrll is talking about: WE LOVE NEW BEGINNINGS! She writes:
Almost everybody loves do-overs, second chances, and planning how much better we are going to do THIS time. No, really. THIS time we really mean it! Hahaha. You know those little warnings at the end of ads for financial instruments: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results”? Yeah, well, actually, past performance turns out to be a frightfully good predictor of future results in an astonishing array of behaviors!
Think a career criminal temporarily arrested and released within minutes with no bail will change his ways out of gratitude for society’s kindness? No, he will be re-arrested within hours, sometimes three times in the same day…but not before causing someone ELSE great misery. As Max frequently paraphrases the Talmud, “To be kind to the cruel is to be cruel to the kind.”
And, even though probably no more than three or four people reading this are career criminals, chronic recidivism explains much of our personal behavior, too. As someone – maybe Bennett Cerf? Maybe Oscar Wilde? for sure, not me — quoted in a Reader’s Digest I read probably 65 years ago said: “Nothing feels as optimistic as the first day of a diet.”
Statistics prove that most of us dieters punk out by the end of Week Three. Unless we are realizing that “lose 20 lbs by Friday!” promise on the cover of every woman’s magazine. In the article right next to the Triple Fudge Cake recipe.
Ever since I was a child, I have loved new beginnings. The start of a new school year with my spankin’ new Big Chief Tablet and a box of 64-count Crayolas with sharp points that hadn’t been dulled or broken yet! Heaven! I just loved to LOOK at them, all pretty standing tall in rows! It seemed almost a shame to use one.
As we have discussed in a previous column, poor Joe’s mother was extremely thrifty and he claims that he never got more than the box of 8 Crayolas, except maybe once he thinks she may have splurged on the 16, possibly because they were sold out of the box of eight. That must have been an exciting day, indeed!
Consequentially, he never owned a weird beige-ish pink Crayon that was called “Flesh.” I was bewildered even as a child when I used to put the Crayon next to my skin and no way was it even close. Nor does Joe know the names of very many colors. He could not identify puce or ecru, periwinkle (one of my favorite colors!) or even tell “salmon” from “rose.” He tends to wear a lot of white, black, and navy. Eventually, “Flesh” color just disappeared from the pack, and I’m going to hazard a guess that the beloved Big Chief Tablet is gone, too.
I was still addicted to the optimism of new beginnings as late as college. I attended several colleges in my storied academic career, but I much preferred the Quarter system to the Semester system. With the Quarter system, one had THREE chances to start over every year instead of just two. Lately there’s been a minor kerfuffle about how to get female students into STEM. I’m proud to say that I was kind of a pioneer in STEM for girls. (Students Taking Easy Majors.) There were no “Studies” yet, and Basket-Weaving and Interpretive Dance were full, so I majored in Sociology. Which I called “a painful elaboration of the obvious.”
Each new Quarter was a fresh opportunity to pretend I wasn’t going to squander my time utterly. That I was going to get the reading list during Christmas break and do a whole lot of reading and even write a few essays and term papers on spec so that I wouldn’t be stressed when called upon to do so. Yeah, that happened. And pigs flew by my dorm room, where I was sleeping in so as to miss my 8:00 o’clock, 9:00 o’clock, and 10:00 o’clock classes.
What can you do with a “student” who Freshman Year planned her entire course schedule around Gym? I’m not making that up. I took Archery & Badminton, Ballroom Dancing, and Volleyball the first three quarters. And I sometimes had to move around some required courses to get my Gym classes in. Can you believe that in 1964 the University still believed that its students should MOVE PERIODICALLY?
We didn’t have cellphones or even personal old rotary dial phones in our rooms. Here’s what happened, kids, when somebody called us – the desk would buzz our dorm room with one buzz for a gentleman caller and two buzzes for a phone call, and then you would run to the phonebooth on your floor, throw out whoever was already monopolizing the phone, and take your call! Primitive, huh? It’s a mystery how any of us ever survived. There were some 6500 students at Northwestern University in 1964 when I arrived. And, although people came in a variety of acceptable sizes and shapes, I cannot recall seeing even ONE person who was morbidly obese. All that movement turned out to be important.
Funny how one of the great benefits of the infernal cellphones was always supposed to be “safety.” I’m sure people can point to several instances – car breakdowns, menacing strangers, and the like – in which a phone came in very handy. But you’d have to subtract the many deaths from teenage drivers messing with their texts and emails, and the death of human contact as millions of people spend all day every day – even on dates! – hunkered over their cellphones.
One of my favorite bumper stickers which I saw in a convenience store in Oklahoma and have mentioned in this column at least three times is: “Honk if you love Jesus. Text if you want to meet Him.” It’s not only teenagers – a prominent member of our St. Paul synagogue ran off the road in his sports car while talking on his cellphone. A thousand people came to his funeral. It was awful, but thank God at least it was a one-car accident with nobody else involved.
Not all new beginnings are good. I’m old enough to remember the late ’70s to the late ’80s when suddenly every couple you knew was getting a divorce. It was as if the whole culture collectively – except for a few geezers like our parents and grandparents who seemed fond of one another and clearly never had sex anyway – said, “I’d like a do-over on this marriage deal.” Some worked out well, even amicably, and everybody moved one place on in Marriage Musical Chairs.
There’s a Yiddish saying that if all our troubles were put in a sack, most of us would pick out the same ones again. I knew one woman who married three alcoholics in a row. Joe worked with a perfectly lovely woman whose husband left her and two beautiful little girls only to marry another woman with the same name as his ex, who could have played her in a movie.
But I guess there are also many success stories of new marital beginnings. And sometimes, apparently, just getting OUT with some measure of sanity is a success. Back in the primitive days of VHS rental stores (before Blockbuster drove most of the indies out of business), a guy named Dino had a sketchy store on a corner about a mile from our house. I think at least half of his business was porn, which he kept tastefully behind a curtain, separated from Bambi and Swiss Family Robinson. Anyway, once I tried to rent Ishtar, which many people told me was THE worst movie ever made. With Dustin Hoffman AND Warren Beatty, really?
I wanted to see for myself if it was THAT bad, and begged him to let me take it, but he said, “Susan, the only person I would rent that movie to is my ex-wife.”
As several people who know me have realized, I can be pretty persuasive. And eventually, Dino just let me take it for free. THAT’S how ethical Dino was – he could rent Kamala Does Cleveland to the icky furtive guy coming out from behind the curtained area, but he could not morally justify charging me for a bad movie!
Boy, his ex must have been a DOOZY! Because Ishtar was really and truly terrible. I abandoned it after about 15 minutes and didn’t even bother to rewind.