Now that we’re halfway into the month, let’s talk New Year’s resolutions! I asked you all about yours a while back, and never really followed up on that.

I’ve always found the NYE resolution to be an interesting beast. On the one hand, there is something that seems very natural about a season of excess followed by a period of restraint and sacrifice: it’s a pattern you see in too many cultures and religions to ignore. On the other hand, the way so many people do NYE resolutions seems set up to guarantee failure: black-and-white absolutes, with no room for the inevitable backsliding. By the second week in February, you’ve already missed your goal of getting to the gym four times a week, so you just quit entirely.

I was pondering what my own 2010 resolutions and goals should be, and then more or less got handed a new set by my doctors: quit drinking, and change my entire eating pattern. Which was a little more ambitious than anything I was planning to carve out for myself, I tell you what. Here’s what’s helped:

1. Not having a choice. I’ve never been a fan of the classic AA notion that one must “hit bottom” (is that still a going concern in AA, or have they more or less dropped that idea?) before making a change. Still, there’s something to be said for having one’s doctor say “Yes, there is a real problem, and you can and must stop this problem now.” (Funny, on the other blog we are discussing why people write in to advice columns, and one thing that a number of folks mentioned, that hadn’t really occurred to me, was that the columnist not only provides a reality check, but also a sort of kick in the butt, just as my doctor did for me. Having someone say not only, “Yes, you’re right, there is a problem,” but say “And you need to do something about it now.”)

2. Quick feedback. I think this is something that scuttles a lot of NYE resolutions — people simply don’t see results fast enough, so they get discouraged and quit. I was lucky, because I felt markedly better after only a few days of getting on the right meds and knocking off the booze and spice. But let’s face it, a lot of good habits actually make you feel worse when you start. Sure, going to the gym will give you more energy and a better mood … after a few weeks. Before that, it will make you tired and cranky. So if the behavioral change itself won’t give you immediate, positive feedback, figure out a way to implement some little reward system, so you’ll know you’re getting somewhere.

3. Taking positive action. It’s always easier to do something than to not do something. (As you read the rest of this post, do not think of a white bear. See?) I’ve decided to look at my new diet as a chance to explore new cooking techniques and ingredients, rather than as simply giving up X, Y, and Z. WES alluded to a similar idea:

I think I have stumbled on an epiphany for my new year’s resolutions. In the past those pesky resolutions were things I knew I **should** do even if I didn’t want to do them. However this year I am making my goals shorter and more in tune with what I want to do. And if I finish them before the year is up great, I might do new ones in July!

So rather than my resolution to go on a diet my resolution is to crochet more and learn a new technique. It is a calming activity, allows me to be creative, and while still a sedentary activity it has the added bonus of you really cannot eat/munch while crocheting. And snacking is a big weakness of mine so really it should be a win win.

4. Communication and support. The research on the extent to which social networks affect behavior is impressive and grows more every day. We need our friends to support the kinds of things we do, the kind of person we want to be. It’s been immensely good for me to be able to write about my health issues here, and feel that by doing so, I’ve opened up a forum for other people to share their own experiences. It’s also been good to have a couple of weeks of minimal socializing, so I can get my new habits well under control before having to attend a cocktail party. And Mr. Improbable and I have had a number of conversations about how his life (since I do the cooking) will and won’t change.

Some further thoughts on your comments …

TJ wrote, “I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions (those always seem a little overwhelming), but I (along with my family) make resolutions with a more limited time frame.” I like that; I like that a lot. Make goals for a month or so, not for the entire year. I wonder if that isn’t what people do anyway, really … there’s the New Year’s Eve goals, and then spring cleaning and getting in shape for summer, and then back-to-school season.

Anne with an E wrote, “I resolve to stop waiting until the time is right/we have the dough to throw a huge shindig before inviting people over. Pizza and game night for six is just as fun as a BBQ for thirty (with a lot less cleanup.)” YES! I figured this out about four or five years ago and it was quite a revelation. And with six or eight people, everyone can really get to know each other. (Note for Bostonians — Redbones BBQ delivers, and they are very good. They also have enough good sides that any vegetarians will be taken care of. Highly recommended for informal parties.)

Military Mom wrote:

My first resolution is to stop agreeing to do or help with activities without REALLY stopping to assess if I have time or want to do it. Up until now I’ve volunteered when other people need help and have almost always regretted it afterwards. My second is to try to lower my stress level. This will require the rest of my family to step up and help, but I think they are recognizing my stress is affecting my health…and therefore their lives too…

Good luck with those two, obviously related, resolutions. I’m sure it’s something many, many of us can relate to.

How about the rest of you? How are your resolutions working out?

This will be a quickie, followed perhaps by a long leisurely, after I’ve heard some of your thoughts. Ellen Goodman, who will be retiring from the Globe shortly, wrote a recent op-ed about shame:

If, as anthropologists say, shame comes from a violation of cultural norms, it seems to have found its match in a newer cultural norm: fame. Notoriety isn’t so notorious anymore. If Hester Prynne were around, she wouldn’t be the subject of a novel, she’d be the author of a tell-all memoir with cellphone pictures of a buff Arthur Dimmesdale.

But enough about sex and shameless. How about money? While Dupre was making her debut, eyes were turned on Wall Street bankers. As President Obama said on “60 Minutes,’’ “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers.’’ The bankers who were too big to fail took the TARP money, ran, then paid much of it back so they could return to their boffo bonus ways. They are the latest incarnation of CEOs who get paid for nonperformance and masters of the universe convinced they deserve to be on the right side of the escalating pay gap.

When 12 bankers were invited to the White House woodshed Monday, three didn’t make it. Bad weather delayed their flights. Well, I have one word for those bankers: Amtrak.

The impetus for this article was that Ashley Dupre, the sex worker in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, has been given an advice column in the New York Post. To be honest, I have no problem with that. There are no professional certifications to be an advice columnist, and on her first couple of outings, Ms. Dupre doesn’t seem to be doing a half-bad job. I can’t imagine, aside from base prejudice, why anyone who gave it more than a moment’s thought would think a sex worker wouldn’t make a potentially excellent advice columnist.

But although I disagree with Ms. Goodman’s assertion that Ms. Dupre ought to be shamed (presumably by consigning her forever to the profession that she ought to be ashamed of belonging to in the first place?), I do think she’s on to something about those bankers.

But I think she only got half of it right. While bankers, fame pursuers of the likes of the balloon boys’ family and the White House gatecrashers, and Boston drivers, bikers, and pedestrians all seem remarkably immune to shame, contemporary culture does shame many of us.

How many of you feel ashamed because of your weight?
How many of you feel ashamed because you aren’t model-beautiful?
How many of you feel ashamed because you have lost a job?
How many of you feel ashamed because you are not rich?
How many of you feel ashamed because you haz a sick?
How many of you feel ashamed because you “aren’t doing anything” with your degree?
How many of you feel ashamed because you don’t have a degree, or don’t have one from the “right” school?

I’ve finally identified the emotion I feel when people ask me if I’m going to go on “Oprah.” It’s not disappointment. It’s shame. I didn’t make it. I wasn’t successful enough. I’m not Elizabeth Gilbert. How pathetic that I’ve even tried.

I think we do shame people in this culture — or at least, persistent advertising-driven media messages do. We don’t shame them about their morality or effort, but about their bodies, their money, their prestige or lack thereof. And when people actually try to improve their life through real effort as opposed to a gimmick, we tend to shame that, too. Ask a fat person sometime what kind of comments they get when they exercise. (No, exercise won’t necessarily make you thin, but it will improve your life and health.) Ask someone how they feel when they have to say no to TGIF drinks, or stick to water, because they are saving for a house.

It’s not only that we honor the unworthy. We actually shame those who try to better themselves.

Okay, that was a little longer than I thought. But the idea was STILL to hear your thoughts on the topic, not mine! So make with some insights, already, mmkay?

Blogger Sassy Curmudgeon has a nifty chronological advantage for a writer — born in a year ending in “0,” she can write a decade-in-review piece that is also a review of her own life. She’s done so, rather hilariously, in “Ten Years of Twenties,” which everyone who is or has been in their twenties should read:

Unless you have a particularly rough childhood, your twenties are your birth into the real world, by which I mean a world that doesn’t involve trading “points” for meals or having a third party pay for your cell phone. They are painful and joyful, exciting and despondent, infantile and terribly grown up-seeming, drunken and sobering.

The blogs that I like best, like Andrew Sullivan’s and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, bounce around to a bunch of different topics, more or less like I do. The fact is, though, it’s easier for a new blog to get attention if it’s specialized: fashion, politics, sports, science, Christian, literary, whatever.

But don’t worry. Although I’m pretty sure no one has covered this niche, the preponderance of posts having to do with dogs and/or springtime-green coats is not going to become the sole focus of this blog. But at the risk of beating the topic to death, I did want to share a couple more pictures that I found of Milo and me while perusing my hard drive.

I’d lived in Boston for a good 10 years before succumbing to the need for a puffy coat, but having a dog who requires a morning walk quickly made it obvious that fashion was going to have to take a back seat to necessity. So I chose — of course! — a nice springy green one from Land’s End L.L. Bean. It arrived in the mail, and I tried in on, and then came upstairs to model it for Mr. Improbable and Milo.

Milo, whom we’d only had for a few months, completely flipped a nutty when the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Woman came at him. The hood covered my face, and the strong plastic-y odor of the coat’s wrapping masked my own smell.

Once he realized it was me, of course, we made up.

Take a look, though, at his body language in that first picture. That is one scared dog. Look how far down his ears are tucked, how much eye-white you can see, how his hindquarters are bunched under him, ready to protect his vitals, or to spring. Everyone knows to beware of a dog that is snarling, hackles up, baring its teeth. But a dog who looks like Milo does here can be just as dangerous, if not more so. The vast majority of the time, a normal dog’s aggression is not driven by “dominance” issues, but by fear.

Kind of like people.

So maybe the next time you’re faced with an angry coworker, or in-law, or child, if you can, take a step back and ask yourself what’s really motivating them. Often, treating angry people as though they are afraid can be a remarkable way of defusing tension.

And here’s another post I meant to write up from last year! Dan Ariely also came with us to the 2008 festival. Dan, along with his co-authors, won the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. (And his book, Predictably Irrational, is a wonderful read.)

So we were at one of the parties that local folks throw for the visiting speakers and their own friends, and I mentioned to Dan, as I did here, that I tend to feel inferior to European women in terms of style. Dan suggested that this was merely the placebo effect in action: that because I knew they were European, I attributed greater panache to them than might be objectively determined. (Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize winner Brian Wansink has shown that people rate a “fine California wine” higher than a “fine Nebraska wine,” despite nothing changing but the label.) “What would you think of that woman’s dress if you saw it in America?” he asked.

Now this was a move of some rhetorical cleverness. It flattered or reassured the other person (i.e., me), invoked the awesome explanatory power of the speaker’s research, and gave the conversation somewhere to go afterward. Quite the hat trick. We can’t always speak as productively as Behavioral-Economist Dan, or listen as productively as Sword-Swallower Dan, but it’s something to aim for.

(Since it is the name of his book, I’m tempted to refer to Dan Ariely as “Predictably Irrational Dan,” but that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish him from Sword-Swallower Dan, as what could be more predictably irrational than a person who swallows a sword whenever someone asks them to? So “Behavioral-Economist Dan” it will have to be.)

When we got back from Italy last week, we returned to a surprise: a power outage. There was about an hour of daylight left, so we were able to dig out some tea lights and flash lights and get ourselves set up. And fortunately, we have a gas stove, and were able to get some tea going.

It was all very London-during-the-blitz, as we sat around drinking our tea by candlelight for a couple of hours before the power came on, and it wasn’t half bad. Normally, when we get home, we pounce right online and back into our normal work lives. It was rather nice not to have that as an option, to simply relax with tea and candles, however involuntarily, for a few hours before resuming everyday life. I wonder if we’d have the discipline to do that without a power outage. I suspect we wouldn’t.

Thinking more about my post on Genesis, I’m hoping that the atheists and unaffiliated among you can get over the religious language. (And that more conservative religious folk can get over my somewhat irreverent take on the scriptures.) Here’s what I’m wanting to hear from you: when have you created something that turned out to have a life of its own?

Over the weekend, three of my friends posted about creativity on Facebook, although they might not have defined it that way. One simply posted some pictures of beautiful pastries he and his wife had made — the kind of thing that might turn out well, and might not at all. They did turn out well, and he seemed proud of them in a way that almost appeared to give the pastries themselves credit. Another posted about an astonishing new vocabulary word his son had learned (one of the new words you are glad to see your children learn, I hasten to clarify). Another chronicled her struggles with a writing project that, at the end, turned out to be something very different from what she had originally intended.

The creation ultimately breaks away from the creator.

This is all I meant to say, for those of you who couldn’t make it through the God talk.

When has something you created — a pastry, a painting, a person — shown you that it has a life of its own?

Tell me your creation stories.

The answer to this question is not the title of the blog post below!

Rather, it’s the title of a talk I’ll be giving at a Boston University alumni luncheon this Friday. Shortly before I’d been asked to give the talk, I’d given another one in New Hampshire, at which someone asked me — as someone often does — what “makes [me] an expert”? As I mentioned to my Facebook friends afterward, I’m always tempted to answer “What makes you an expert?” with “The fact that people ask me questions,” but I fear that would sound sarcastic. I don’t mean it that way, though — I’m enough of a social constructionist to think there’s a good amount of truth in that reply.

It’s one thing to define expertise in a field that has boundaries. We know what karate is, so defining what it means to be an expert in the field of karate — or 17th century French drama, computer programming, veterinary medicine, architecture, even etiquette — is possible, if not necessarily simple. Of course, in all of these fields, levels of expertise can differ. More trickily, “expert” can either mean “having expert knowledge of,” as a critic would, or “being an expert practitioner of.”

I wrote about this question a couple of years ago on the other blog (back when that was a mishmash of whatever was preoccupying me, and wasn’t a straightforward question & response format as it is today). Check out the ideas I explored there. As applicable to the whole “Miss Conduct” venture, I wrote:

But if I am an expert, as Miss Conduct, what exactly am I an expert on? I’ve been writing the column nearly three years now and it moved beyond classic etiquette a long time ago. Social behavior, I suppose you could call it, but what isn’t? And in what way am I an expert? Whatever my column is about, there’s no degree in it, no professional organization, no standardized test to pass. I bring scholarly and work experience in theater, psychology, storytelling, comedy, project management, human resources, philosophy, and religion. And life experiences too odd and idiosyncratic to explain. But someone else could do just as good (well, almost as good …) a job as I do with a completely different skill set and experiences.

These are the ideas I want to explore Friday afternoon, I think, at the institution that granted me a PhD., which is where many people think my “expertise” comes from. I’m not so sure I agree with that. It’s an ingredient, sure, but if chili were only beef, we’d call it “steak.”

What am I an expert on?

What does it mean to be an “expert,” anyway?

What does it mean to be an authority? Does that differ from being an expert?

I would love to get your thoughts on this! And I will respond in comments, and share any insights that emerge from Friday’s lunch as well.

Apparently I’m not the only one. Many of you are also driven crazy by comments or questions that you know are wholly innocent and socially appropriate. And I dare say that any of us who have occasionally been in one of those “Just don’t ASK me how [my job hunt, the dissertation, trying to have a baby, selling that house we've had on the market since mid-2008, recovering from my hip surgery] is going!” moods sometimes feel a twinge of discomfort when we encounter friends or acquaintances who are in similarly delicate situations. Ought we ask? Are they tired of talking about it? Ought we not ask? And risk them thinking we are tired of listening? Oy. One wants to be sensitive … yet it is so difficult! With apologies to Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being asked personal questions is not being asked personal questions.

The fear of saying something hurtful-if-not-rude reminded me of this post from my Miss Conduct blog, on the pros and cons of friending one’s parents on Facebook. Many commenters rightly pointed out that nothing on Facebook is really private anyway, with one stating, “[M]y worst enemy will never see anything other than banal posts like ‘I took my dog for a walk’ or ‘I’m grilling hamburgers with the family.’” So that’s the reason so many Facebook posts are notoriously boring! Rather than risk giving offense, or giving ammunition to someone who may wish you ill, people cling to dull, anodyne status updates that no one can possibly object to.

And here’s where I’m going with all this. It’s terribly trendy these days to run around accusing the rest of the world of narcissism (I’ve written about this before). I wonder, though: if people are focusing more on themselves, and talking more about themselves, might there be at least some degree of pro-social motivation to this? “Why do you think the rest of the world cares what you have for breakfast?” the anti-narcissism crusader against Facebook thunders. Maybe the person who posted, “Greek yogurt and honey is yummy!” isn’t necessarily convinced that hundred of friends are breathlessly eager for this news. Maybe she simply wants to express herself, a sort of virtual wave hello, but doesn’t want to risk starting a debate about abortion, or having her mother nag her to explain the origin of some private joke, or her employer see that she was out until 3am last night. In short, perhaps all those “Time for bed!” and “Coffee, STAT!” updates are less the result of compulsive self-expression than they are of compulsive self-censorship.

In face-to-face conversation, too, I wonder if we sometimes come across as self-absorbed because we fear asking, or saying, the wrong thing. We hesitate to ask the graduate about his job plans, the mom-to-be about her pregnancy, the groom about his honeymoon, the academic about her grant application. And haven’t we all been taught that when fighting with loved ones, we are to use “I” statements (”I feel hurt when you do X”) rather than “you” statements (”You always do X, you big moron”)? Awareness of diversity, too–of the different ways that men and women, whites and people of color, straights and gays experience the world–can leave the sensitive soul feeling that she can only speak with real authority when she is speaking about herself. (Compare this to some fifty years ago or so, when men and white people felt quite capable of speaking for humanity as a whole.) Certainly, this sensitive soul feels that way. I use a huge number of first-person pronouns in my work–a measure sometimes used as a dependent variable to determine a writer’s level of narcissism! But it doesn’t stem from that at all. I mean, of course I’m in love with my own words, that’s why I’m a writer. But my compulsion to keep qualifying them as my words comes less from hubris than humility. This is my opinion of what your mother-in-law said at the last family picnic. Not God’s. Not Jane Austen’s. Not Oprah’s. Just mine, influenced by my own unique experiences and education. Don’t take it for more than that.

Some people are still self-absorbed jerks, I’m not saying they aren’t. But I wonder if there aren’t other motives at play as well. What do you think?