It’s a new year, which means it’s time to crack your knuckles, put on your gym shoes, and go back to bed.
I know I ought to be outside, breathing the bracing air and getting my heart rate up. But I worry. Even if a little exercise won’t kill you, why take the chance?
And if I’m going to quit my resolutions in two weeks, I might as well save some time and get the quitting done early.
I’m a paper resolutions kind of person. I write everything down so that when I forget things, I can find my notes and remember my resolutions.
Or I forget where I put my notes. But that’s no worse than forgetting the resolutions to start with.
In between writing this column and coding, I hardly have time left for my other interests, like tap dancing, juggling and constitutional law.
I’m only kidding about the juggling.
One year I wrote a treaty for New Year’s. One article banned the importation of sugar into the Paskhaver household.
I was a kid back then — well, more of a kid than I am now — and the treaty was meant for my parents.
They signed it, so as far as I was concerned, it was a legally binding document.
I figured it was even more legal because it was in cursive.
But Dad, who is wiser than I am regarding international relations, started a sugar-smuggling operation.
Four days after the New Year, the home’s version of law enforcement (my dog) stumbled upon package after package of cookies, hidden in the bottom shelf of the pantry.
That was the year I learned about the failure of Prohibition. Even my dog ate the cookies.
If my treaty worked like a real treaty, I would have declared war.
But being a kid, I couldn’t break out the missile launchers.
All I could do was consider how I might hold myself to my own resolutions, and whether it was ethical to hold other people to them.
Fortunately, my sister took a class on ethics.
So I asked her, and like a real philosopher, she told me and my brother about another problem completely unrelated to my own.
Here’s the gist of the Train Problem. A train is set on a track. If it keeps going, it’ll run over five people.
You have the option of pulling a lever to turn the train onto a new track, where it will run over only one person.
My sister explained that people have varying opinions on whether it’s ethical to pull the lever so that the train runs over fewer people.
And my brother asked, “Why can’t you run over all of them?”
This is why he does not design self-driving cars.
But the problem has a point. No matter what you do, you can’t save everyone.
So this new year, I’m resolved to change what I can: Me.
Who knows? If I’m inspirational enough, maybe my family members will follow suit.
The moment I finish this column, I’ll commute to the gym. Maybe I’ll take the train.
Alexandra Paskhaver’s humor column appears every other week.
