It’s the middle of January, the weather is cold, the bus into the city is crowded and slow, it seems like Spring will never arrive. Our 2010 office holiday calendar came out and our next holiday is Memorial Day – five months away. So I’m not letting myself feel guilty about guilty pleasures, no matter what their name implies. One of mine includes the return of network television after its “winter hiatus” and the return of my no-longer-secret guilty pleasure, American Idol. It’s the only reality show I follow from the auditions to Hollywood Week to the live performances. I have even started voting since AT&T customers can text their votes. I was sorry to have Adam Lambert lose last year, but was happy to receive his debut CD for Christmas. I read the funny reviews on VoteForThe Worst.com. I debate whether Ellen de Generis will be a good addition and whether the show will survive without Simon Cowell next year. The ninth season started last night and I have my DVR(s) set to record for the nights I have to work late during tax season.  I even own the Disney plush figures from the Walt Disney World American Idol Experience:   Donald as Simon, Minnie as Paula, and Goofy as Randy.

I used to think that Drake Ring Dings® were my guilty pleasure but that is just silly – they are one of nature’s perfect foods.

Yesterday I made my resolutions for 2010. I even came up with a theme for the year: “Start over again in 2010.” As I looked at the daunting list it occurred to me that these are resolutions for the entire year, not just January. If I start them all at once, I am apt to fail. It’s hard to make changes; old habits are hard to break; new habits take time to form. I took my list of resolutions and wrote a different month next to each one. Now I have only one to concentrate on in January, and a good hope of success. In February I will tackle the next one, once I have had a month to form the new patterns of the first, and so on. Of course, having written them all down they are all in my mind and if I start some early, as I am bound to do, I’m not going to stop just because their month has not arrived. But if I find that I am trying to do too many at once, I’ll look back at my list with assigned months and go back to working on the most important one at that time.

This has given me new hope that this year I will succeed in the making the changes I have resolved to make. Now I have to decide if this year is “Twenty Ten” or “Two Thousand Ten.”