Resolved
Resolutions often fail, but that doesn’t make the New Year a bad time to say what you want from your life.
It was either 2004 or 2005 when I got Death Cab for Cutie’s album Transatlanticism for Christmas. That would have made me 14 or 15. I was a fan of The O.C., on which my favorite character liked Death Cab and had a Transatlanticism poster on his bedroom wall. And I was a fan of my friends, who also liked Death Cab, and was eager to adopt their preferred cultural artifacts as my own.
I spent much of that Christmas sitting on the nubbly couch at my Grandma’s house, wearing headphones, listening to that album over and over. Midway through the first song, “ Ben Gibbard sings: “So this is the New Year / And I have no resolutions / No
