Mundane thoughts on New Year's Eve

1. Many of us out of habit will write "2007" when January rolls around instead of "2008". One trick I developed several years ago was to focus less on remembering the year itself than devising a rule that was good for all time: "'January' and 'February' mean 'danger!', 'caution!', 'careful!'".

2. When walking and you are not sure whether the ground is slick or not, you can rotate the ball of your foot slightly with each step, which shows the slipperiness without needing to move your foot back and forth and thus change weight distribution and risk falling.

3. Sometimes when eating a cracker or other item whose consumption is likely to create small crumbs, you can reduce or eliminate the number of crumbs by inhaling slightly as you bite. You have to inhale very slightly, of course, so you don't get crumbs in your lungs. If you do this and succeed, you might feel a tiny increment of esteem at your skill in managing to avoid both crumbs and danger. No one with any sense would write this, because someone will try it, inhale crumbs and sue me.

4. You will receive solicitations to contribute to worthy causes in rough proportion to the number of organizations you have given money to in the past. Instead of considering each request as it comes, you can place all the requests in a pile, and go through it only once a year. You can decide at that point how much you would like to give in total, how much to various categories, and how much to different organizations. Exceptions suggested for friends, children, and national emergencies.

5. There are unintended consequences. When I was reviewing the draft announcement to the FUSN list of my mother's death, I suggested email as an alternative to a physical condolence card, hoping to make people's lives easier. But I hadn't considered at the time that the very fact that the email condolence was easy would make people reply by that means who would not have sent a card. In greater detail: People range from those who feel a close connection with me to those who feel no connection. Up to some point along that line, people would feel the effort of sending a physical card was justified by the closeness they felt. Since sending an email is so much easier, there is a class of people who would not send a card but would feel that their closeness justified an email. The email is easier, to be sure, but still requires composing a message of the right length and content. For those people I made their lives harder, not easier. Thank you, one and all, for your expressions of condolence. For those of you who were further down the scale of closeness, who thought a condolence-like thought but didn't feel enough closeness to cross the email threshold, thank you too! Any condolences I might receive by either method as a result of this message will be other unintended consequences. I'm not going to lose sleep over it.