Happy New Year

My resolution for the New Year is to get myself a crew. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and it really started to hit home last week as I reminisced about my mother and her obsession with spending the week after Christmas scrubbing and cleaning the house to get it ready for the New Year. I don't know if it was a Japanese thing or just my mother's own personal thing, but she considered it bad luck to start the New Year off with a dirty house, and unfortunately for me and my brothers, little boys who would have much rather spent their Christmas vacations playing with their new Christmas toys than doing chores, she had no compunctions about dragging us away from pleasanter pursuits and setting us to the dreary task of cleaning out the garage or washing the windows.

So I was thinking about the old days and it came to me that life would be so much better if I had a crew. You know, a bunch of people that would do my washing and do my cleaning and cook my meals and go down to the store and get my groceries and take care of all those day-to-day things that are just such a bother for a man of refinement and leisure like myself. When there was work to be done around the house or out in the yard they could take care of it, when there were things that needed fixing or errands to be run they could take care of it, and when there were social obligations to be dodged they could make the phone calls and offer my sincere apologies as well. Ah yes, wouldn't that be nice, and just maybe if it was a good crew they could proofread my blogs for me and even get them into a form more closely resembling the english language.

But, I have no crew nor the wherewithal to get one, so I guess I'm stuck. Of course it used to be that a man (and by that I mean a male) could find himself a good wife who would look after all his needs, but those days are gone. True, there are still some guys who can get away with it, but for the most part husbands who sit in front of the TV and snap open a beer while their wives do all the cooking and cleaning and washing are a vanishing breed. In fact I think there's even a word for those type of men in the modern lexicon - they call them "ex-husbands".

No, if you're gonna make it in today's world you've gotta get a crew.

Other than that I don't have any real resolutions going into 2005, although I was thinking it would be nice to learn a new language. In fact I was considering getting some language software and trying to learn Italian. It seems with all the operas I watch it would be a good thing to learn, but I don't know. French was the last foreign language I tried to learn and I didn't do too well with that one. I mean I could learn the words - a chien was a dog and a chat was a cat, for example - but it was all those tenses and genders and things that used to trip me up. Hmmm, is it past imperfect or future conditional, masculine or feminine, active or passive - geez, who can keep all this stuff straight in their heads.

"La crayon, s'il vous plait."

"Oh, ho, ho, monsieur. Ce n'est pas 'la crayon', c'est 'le crayon'. "

"Le crayon?"

"Oui, monsieur. Je pense que votre francais n'est pas trop bon"

"N'est trop bon, huh. Well look Pierre, Je suis l'Americaine, ok? Nous disons 'the crayon' so donnez-moi une break, will 'ya? How about you skip the commentary and just let me have 'the' crayon por favor. "

"Oh, je vois. Vous etes un americain...(mais naturellement). Je comprends, monsieur. Pardonnez-mois, monsieur. Voici le crayon."

"Danka, Pierre. La papier, s'il vous plait."

"Oh, ho, ho, monsieur. Ce n'est pas 'la' papier, c'est ..."

"C'est what? Le papier? Is that what you were going to say? Were you going to tell me I screwed up again? Is that what you're going to tell me, Pierre?"

"Uh, ce n'est pas important, monsieur. (Les Americains sont des idiots)"

"(Les Francais sont des idiots.)"

So, instead of French I thought I'd try Italian, but then I was looking through an Italian phrasebook at the bookstore and it looks like they've got masculine and feminine words too. Man, I don't think I'm up for this.

Of course there's always Chinese.