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I've never been good at the traditional New Years Resolution thing. Every year I sit down and break myself down into categories like physical fitness, spiritual fitness, financial savvy, mental strength, social and family interactions and then I set-up very specific self-help goals within each one...However by January 13th (if I'm lucky) I've already in some way broken, altered or weaseled my way out of caring to accomplish my very own self-improvement goals.

It's not that I don't care. I want to be skinnier, to have a rainy day fund, and to honestly be able to tell you the difference between the judicial and legislative branches of the Government without Googling it first. I think we all want to be better than we currently are. But traditional resolution making isn't the best way for me to do that. I get too caught up in the numbers of it all, and then too disappointed when I don't meet up with them. I know what it means to eat 200 fewer calories in a day, but I don't understand what it means to me on a day-to-day basis. I don't see how it is making me a better person. I'm sure 200 less calories a year could add up to 5 pounds or something, and sure weighing 5 pounds less could also mean I am 5 pounds healthier, even 5 pounds better perhaps. But what if the meantime my personality becomes 5 pounds bitchier because I really wanted those snickers bars more than I wanted to be 5 pounds lighter? Does that really make many any better overall or did I just shift my problem baggage somewhere else?

I really do want to be a better person. I want to literally and metaphorically stop shifting the weight of my imperfections from my thighs to my physce and back again. I want to fix them, improve them and give them the boot and I think cookies are just the way to do that.

Now bear with me this might take some explaining. A few years ago a friends New Years Resolution was to tell everyone she dreamed about in that year that she had dreamed about them. Part-way through the year I got an e-mail from her that chronicled my visit through her subconscious. It was a ridiculous dream that if I remember right involved me telling her to dance around a "love noodle." But I loved it. And it wasn't the dream, the dream could have been anything. Because it was less about the dream and more about the e-mail, it was just fun to hear from someone that I don't normally hear from. Vowing to tell everyone you dream about probably doesn't fit into almost any traditional category that is normally associated with self-mastery. But I would argue that it could be just as, if not more, powerful.  Even if the content was meaningless the connection was still made, and that's what really matters. How often do we resolve to do things like "reconnect with old friends" yet how often do we really do them?

Maybe giving ourselves an excuse (like dream-telling, or cookie baking) will allow us the freedom and wiggle-room to grow in a way that more structured self-mastery never could. I feel like cookies will actually make me a better person, because it's more than just the cookies. It's about learning to better manage my time in order to make room for hand-baked goods. It's about eating less other junk, in order to eat more cookies. It's about being more patient as my daughters learn to crack an egg. It's about remembering to make a friend a batch of Birthday cookies and collecting heirloom recipes from oft-overlooked sources. It's about learning the exact formula for alcohol burn off so that I don't get a cookie-induced hangover. It's about budgeting my pennies to buy that fancy vanilla. In short it's about learning everything I possibly can from a cookie. I'm hoping fifty batches will be enough.