New Year, More Me

My day job as I like to call it is making promos for television shows and cable networks. I often pretend I watch TV for a living. And that truly is a large part of my job. The other part is convincing people to watch things they might not want to watch. It’s a lot easier for me to promote television than it is for me to promote myself. I have a better chance of getting you to watch an all-day Sandra Bullock movie marathon than, say, convincing you to buy all of my books at once and in all formats. But I digress.

I am freelance, though for a couple of years now I’ve been working steadily at a channel I really like with shows I actually do watch. And this is big because I don’t watch much. For a long time I worked at different women’s networks where we would ring in the new year with some variation on the following campaign – “New Year, New You.”  We did this every year at numerous channels again and again. It was a thing. Advertisers bought into it. With resolutions and gym memberships and a million and one ways to quit smoking, people and especially the fairer sex are always pressured or nudged to transform into someone else – someone newer, skinnier, better.

I was not immune to this. Last year my first week of January resolution to “work out more” led to overzealous squats and then a whole year of random hip pain the likes of which I didn’t expect to feel until I had grandchildren. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t successful. The new me felt like an old biddy.

I’m done with all that.

This year I don’t have resolutions. I am making intentions. I intend to not try to change myself into someone new. I intend to enhance what’s already here. Enhance is really the best word I can think of, even though it makes me think slightly of breasts. But breasts are awesome, so I’ll keep it.

I already have a lot of plans for the year, but who knows what 2012 will bring? No doubt this year will be full of some new and scary and hopefully wonderful stuff. If I try to be anyone but me, I don’t know that I will deal with any of it all that well. A new me just couldn’t hack it. The old one with stiff hips will have to do.

This year I intend to live like an improv comic, to accept and to heighten. I will say yes to more things and then try to go to one step further. Or is it farther? I never know. I intend to run more so maybe both.

But you can keep those squats, 2011. The same goes for lunges. It’s time for a nice gentle stretch.

Happy 2012!