ManicDDaily

Snow Drops and Red Wine

This morning I saw snowdrops (honest-to-goodness clumps of little white flowers) blooming behind the iron fence that runs along the esplanade in Battery Park City.  (Flowers in public spaces seem to be kept behind bars in New York City, I guess, to keep them from becoming flowers in private spaces.)   The snowdrops, combined with what was really a glorious morning, made me worry that I was too harsh about the month of March in yesterday’s post.  I called it the cruelest month.

March really isn’t cruel; it’s just, you know, brusque, brutal (think Ides).

It’s all a matter of timing.  Even to the jaded, January feels like a new start; the year is fresh;  change seems genuinely possible.  (Sort of like Obama’s inauguration.)  But, hey, it’s just January.  You’re a little tired from Christmas (the election); you want to be kind to yourself (bipartisan),   and besides, you’re still working on getting the digits on your checks right (i.e. the collapsing banking system).  You feel like you can take a little time for the life changes.

Then February hits.  But, hey, it’s February.   Cold, grey, stormy (the continuing worrisome instability of the economy), and above all, short.  Nobody really expects you to make life changes in February.

And then, suddenly… it’s March.  Not just March, mid-March.  And suddenly, the year doesn’t feel so new any more.  The stores don’t even have half-priced calendars.   (The banks are doing okay, but now everyone worries about budget deficits, or uses them as political cover.)

In March, change feels very hard.   Obligation looms (i.e. taxes) (i.e.  budget deficits) and the scent of Spring in the air seem to bring up the repeating cycle of the season as much as “newness”.   That sense of cycle (another winter over, another year already mid-swing) feels more relentless than reviving.  (Can one have schadenfreude towards a season?  Can politicians let go of their schadenfreude for other politicians?)

For all of you feeling left behind by Spring, and by time itself, I have good news: first, a new and fairly extensive study conducted by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston shows that women who drink alcohol regularly, particularly red wine, are significantly less likely to gain weight and become obese than non-drinkers. Secondly, spending on cosmetic plastic surgery, such as breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and liposuction, dropped significantly last year.

One would like to think that the drop in spending on such cosmetic procedures was a result of people coming to their senses—hard economic times making them realize what was important in life—but the drop may simply mean that hard economic times gave people less money to spend.  This later view is unfortunately born out by the fact that spending on less expensive treatments, such as Botox injections, actually rose in 2009.

Nonetheless, nonetheless, both studies offer hope, at least to me.  At last, there are some health resolutions and fashions I should be able to adopt in the coming year (even beginning as late as mid-March)—(i) drinking more red wine, and (ii) not getting expensive cosmetic surgery.     Definitely doable.

I wish it were as easy for the President.