Village life: My crabby alter ego has surfaced

Since the world is going to end in 2012 anyway, it's settled — I'm giving up on improving myself.

To seal the deal, I just ate the last sticky bun. I didn't even ask anybody else if they wanted it. Before that, I gobbled up my husband's leftovers that he probably was saving for lunch. Like William Carlos Williams' notorious plums, they were delicious.

I'm a walking inventory of sins of both omission and commission and I don't care.

I was tired of the new year's folderol before it even started. By the time you read this, I probably will have quaffed champagne, immoderately flaunting that paean to grown-up balance I dished out last month. My crabby alter ego has surfaced.

Incessant sappy calls for "starting over" unleashed my worldly old jaded hussy. She casts a dim eye not just on my own questionable prospects for rehabilitation, but on the whole cockeyed idea of progress.

New Year's a celebration? What are we celebrating? That we're fatter than we were last year, older, more worn out? That the world is ever hotter? That the rich are richer and the poor are stuck? That a whole slew of people we loved and lost have died? That we've faced down cancer and suicide — the big stuff — and also the little stuff, that really gets us, like when I ran my Honda into my garage door designed for a Model T and scraped a rude strip down the side?

New Year's is boring — a bully holiday, the handmaiden of gleeful Goodie Two Shoes who want all the rest of us to be sorry, to be sorry about our sorry selves.

Ptooey, as R. Crumm's characters used to say.

When is it just okay to be okay? When is it just okay to be the way I am right now?

Now, starting now.

Oooh, are that the grannies rustling in their dour mausoleums?

Pipe down, all you fatuous Norman Vincent Peales. I know what I'm saying.

I'm bucking several centuries of tradition. I'm a Protestant, an American, a teacher, a writer, and a Worth. That's five strikes against willful sloth, five puffed-up lines of conscience yelling, "get right with God, we gotta beat the Arabs, anyone can learn, revise-revise-revise and you will never be good enough." In that order.

I'm tired.

My history with self-loathing and self-improvement is deep and ancestral. When my Protestant forbears sang Amazing Grace, they didn't just warble, "that saved a wretch like me." They had to go further. Those sanctified masochists sang, "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a WORM like me." I joined in jubilantly, cataloguing dread-filled words like "self-abnegation" and "original sin." I studied catechism from a forbidding black book called The Discipline.

My maternal grandmother, who died before I was born, was an impassioned adherent of relentless individual progress.

Before she lost her wits (was there a cause and effect?) she was a fan of Emile Coue, a French psychologist and pharmacist. According to Wikipedia, Coue "introduced a method of self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion." His mantra, which I heard repeatedly from my mother, was, "Every day and in every way, I am getting better and better."

Unfortunately, in addition to my grandmother's Coue fanaticism, one of the few other things I know about her is a very lurid episode. On one of her last visits, she came across a pile of turds on the living room floor. She bellowed at my mother: "Who let a dog in here? How could you!?"

But they were actually hers. Her turds. Try to get that story out of your mind.

Many years later, I roared with recognition in The Pink Panther Strikes Again when Chief Inspector Dreyfus, gone totally cuckoo, spits out the phrase over and over again as his psychiatrist urges him on — "Every day, in every way."

OMG! It wasn't just me who thought the phrase was exhaustingly ridiculous.

And I can't disentangle my grandmother's dark lumps from Emile Coue. I'm ruined by an accidental pairing of excrement with optimistic autosuggestion. We can only get so much better, and then, well, we get worse. So it goes.

Will the sky fall, really, if I stretch right out on the couch for an extra hour and yell back at Republicans? What if I watch Wheel of Fortune instead of writing a poem? Will the world end, as one of my Facebook friends suggested, if I eat chocolate for breakfast?

I say, no. The world's going to end this year anyway. And even if it doesn't, well (goes into a whisper) there's only so much you can do about neck wrinkles.

Every day and in every way, I am shaking all that off.

Hey wait, that sounds like a resolution.

NO! NO! I won't get better and better. I'll just be me, stumbling and fumbling through my one life. I'm just going to let it be. I don't even care that the last sentence insipidly rhymed. Maybe I'll even write "gonna" instead of "going to." If I start to feel the rude poke of ambition, I'm gonna lie down until the little nag shuts up.

This is it. That's No. 1 on Sheldon Kopp's always-bracing Eschatalogical Laundry List. This is it, and for today, at least, I'm good enough.

Happy New Year.

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.