Is This the Year?

Monday, January 3, 2005

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Is This the Year?

By J’AMY PACHECO

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from a friend who mentioned she was off to another state to perform a New Years Eve show. A stand-up comic, she travels the country making people laugh.

Although she’s had her name in lights on the Las Vegas Strip, she’s not famous. In my response, I asked if this was the year I would finally get to see her on The Tonight Show. Her response was immediate, and reflected an unexpected level of frustration.

“Yes,” she wrote. “This is the year I get on some show, somewhere, [expletive].”

While my friend’s is not exactly a household name, she does work regularly. Her comic services are in demand in the business world, and she is able to make a living with her sense of humor.

But to some extent, I can understand her frustration. Most of us have, I think, some unrealized dream. Perhaps we’re part way there; or maybe we’ve settled for a lowered-expectation form of that dream. Some of us have probably given our dreams up entirely.

(I, for example, have abandoned all hope of ever getting to be a Disney princess or drive Oscar Mayer’s Weiner wagon.)

At this time of year, with a fresh new sheet on the calendar, it’s common to reflect upon what we hope to accomplish in the coming year — as well as what we’ve failed to achieve. I don’t mean just our long term, large-scale dreams and aspirations; our day-to-day routines are equally subject to derailment.

For example: as a Christmas gift, my husband last year gave me a membership to an exercise facility I had expressed interest in joining. I went regularly and enthusiastically for about two months before my unpredictable daily schedule started making it difficult to set a time to exercise.

My trips to the gym became less and less frequent and eventually, I stopped going. But I think about it almost daily.

I’ll admit it annoys me that I haven’t made going to the gym a priority. It’s not a question of losing weight or size; I just liked the way I felt when I was exercising regularly and want to feel that way every day.

Faced with a new year (and an optional extension of my membership), I set a goal: I’ll go three times each week in January, or I’ll cancel the membership.

Occasionally, failing to accomplish some task can have a positive result. I moved to a new home in June, and ended up storing a lot of household stuff in the garage while I figured out where it would go.

It was a busy time of year for me, and the boxes lingered in the garage longer than I expected. After a few months, it occurred to me that if I hadn’t needed the contents of the boxes by that time, I probably didn’t need the stuff. It’s been more than six months, and so far, it’s been a good decision.

But there are other things I’d hoped to accomplish that haven’t come to fruition.

My little girl recently finished reading an enormous, 79-chapter book called, “Peter and the Starcatchers.” Written by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, it answers a question posed by Pearson’s little girl after a bedtime story: how did Peter Pan and Captain Hook become acquainted?

The book is almost as big as my petite third grader. As an admirer of Peter Pan, she couldn’t help but love the Barry/Ridley story. When she learned of the question that launched the story, she was inspired.

“Mom,” she started, “if I ask you a really good question, will your write a book to answer it?”

To tell the truth, I always thought I would have written a book — or something longer than 800 words — by this point in my life, but that hasn’t been the case. I suppose if you put all of my weekly columns together you’d end up with enough pages to fill a book, but it’s not quite the same.

It’s easy to dream big and make plans. Carrying out those plans is the hard part. But it’s not impossible, and I sincerely believe my friend will be cracking people up on television this year.

So what have you been putting off? What’s your dream? Is this the year you make it happen?

It’s a new year, and time for a new plan. Somebody more perceptive than I once said, “If you do what you did, you’ll get what you got.” Perhaps it’s time to do something other than what we’ve been doing.

I think I’ll go polish my tiara…just in case.

Happy New Year!