Not everything needs to be wrapped in a 500-word post, but they're still worth a comment or two....
                    

1. I don't need to recycle my old jeans anymore, now that they sell new jeans that have tears and holes in the legs when you buy them. What I really need, though, is for pre-stained shirts to become a thing.            
2. When I went to Venice and saw all the buildings standing on stilts in the water, all I could think was, “Who was second guy to conclude that this was a good idea?”          
3. My bottle of beer has a note on it that says, “Drink responsibly,”  but doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of drinking?          
4. You get the worst service when the restaurant is empty.          
5. It’s just a trifle depressing to come across a 2015 to-do list and realize you still haven’t done any of it.          
6. The problem with most bus routes is that they’re designed by people who never ride the bus.
7. You can tell how comfortable someone is with public speaking, or how prepared they are, by the number of times they say awesome or amazing.
8. Why is it that when someone says something nice about a person and I question their motivation, I am being cynical, but when someone says something critical and I suggest there might be another motivation, I am being naive?

                                                                                                                                                                                          
Being a writer, I’ve always wanted to add a word to the English language. Wouldn’t it be great if everybody was talking about sparjavu and they knew I had coined the term?
                                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
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“Oh, yes, the aromatic reminder of having had asparagus at dinner, or as Michael Rosenbaum calls it, the sparjavu”. (I was going to call it the echospear, but that word already exists. You have to move quickly on this stuff.)

Pat Riley invented the word Threepeat, and was smart enough to copyright it, so I probably owe him a dollar for mentioning his achievement. J.K. Rowling invented Muggles, Stephen Colbert (or one of his writers) came up with Truthiness, and Donald Trump invented Covfefe, as far as we know. Billy Shakespeare did it more than a dozen times, and he didn’t even know about indoor plumbing.

Somebody was the first to describe something as groovy, although she was probably too stoned to remember it. Likewise for party animal, word vomit, and brain fart. Heck, somebody had to be the first to use the word word. Imagine the long-term royalties from copyrighting that one.

I’ve made a few attempts at verbination (See what I did there? Huh?) over the years. In the corporate governance book I wrote with Marilyn Seymann in 2003, I came up with contrasynergy as the counterproductive result of mergers and strategies. As you know, contrasynergy is a household word today and everyone knows I am its father. Right.

(FWIW: Apparently, I blew my opportunity when someone was looking for just this word on Google Answers two years later and none of the respondents referenced contrasynergy. Clearly, that was my moment to grab fame and I lost out to “antergy,” which still gets less than 5,000 hits on Google.)

Later, I tried to come up with words meaning “he or she, (hesh)” “him or her (hirm),” and “his or hers (hirs),” but I didn’t get past Go. Every time I wrote one of these words, the explanation took longer than its sentence. As is the case with humor, if you have to explain it to people, it isn’t very good.
New words get invented all the time, so this shouldn’t be very difficult. The twisted charging cables in your drawer are a cabletti, the pizza delivery guy who can’t find your house is gipsless. Your longtime friend who is incredibly racist is a philorant. Man, I could do this all day.

But it’s not enough to make up a word. Somebody else has to repeat it. So far, no takers. Despite my generous and supremely creative efforts, the whole world isn’t watching.

My day will come, of course, but it won’t be when I want it or intend it. I’ll be walking down the street, trip and make some sort of a splerffing noise when I hit the ground and that will be the sound that defines my existence. Anytime someone falls with a splerff, bystanders will be reminded of me.

It’s not much consolation, of course. But if Murphy can live with his law and Ponzi’s okay with his scheming and Hobson's accepted his choice, I guess I can make it do.

Jill and I turn 65 this year, and we always make plans for a special trip when our anniversary or birthday year is divisible by five. We’ve visited four continents together and I have been lucky enough to get to another two, but there’s still more to see than can ever be seen, as the song goes.

While the list of faraway treasures is seemingly endless, I’m considering someplace much closer to home this year. I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower—both in Pisa and in Niles!!—and Coit Tower and Willis Tower and the tower of cars that used to stand at Harlem and Cermak.

In 2018, though, I want to see something even more exotic and legendary: my abs. Like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster and UFOs, my abs are rumored to exist. Thus far, however, no sightings have ever been reported. Once, while standing in the bathroom and inhaling very, very, very deeply, I thought I saw a glimpse of one, but it turned out to be a streak on the mirror.

Hope springs eternal, much like delusion, and I am convinced this is the year it will happen. Like Edmund Hillary and Stanley Livingstone, I will see what no man or woman has ever seen before. (Well, with Hillary and Livingstone, it was no white European men, but the concept is the same.)

Yes, I have attempted this journey before, only to fail again and again. This time will be different, though. I have been exercising pretty regularly for almost two years now and my calves are now almost visible. Then, on to the biceps, triceps, foreceps, and finally the holy grail, my abdicators, or abominables, or whatever abs is short for. (Probably absentia in my case.)

I know they exist, because they hurt like hell after I’ve done a set of planks or Russian twists or Albanian gerbils. The pain is a lot like a heart attack, although you don’t get the relief that comes from losing consciousness.

I’ve done the math and this is doable. The flab on my gut is my most loyal of friends, guaranteed to stick with me to the bitterest of ends, so I’ll need to lose about 30 pounds before the hidden gems begin to show themselves. At 3,500 calories per pound, that’s a mere 105,000 calories. If I want to do this over three months, all I need to do is consume roughly 1.200 fewer calories per day. So, I’ll be taking in about 1,000 calories per day, every day, for the next 90 days, including weekends and benders.

Piece of cake, or maybe two pieces of cake, depending on how you slice it. No problem giving up the cake, which I almost never eat anyway. No problem giving up kale, either, or Brussels sprouts or quinoa or ramp. These aren’t really food, anyway, just repackaged tree bark they sell at Whole Foods.

But what about jalapeno poppers? How can I jeopardize the security of already impoverished popper farmers in southern Costa Rica? Can I really give up Cheetos if it means that Chester Cheetah will lose his job and starve in an urban jungle? How can I force thousands of tiny pretzel twisters onto the street, just because I want a six pack. And what about the people who make six packs? Don’t they have dreams, too?

Suddenly, I realize how many people are depending on me for their careers and happiness. In truth, I am like Atlas, holding the entire world of food industry workers on my incredibly ripped shoulders. I dare not falter, or even shrug.

All I need to do is consume 5,200 calories per day and I can be the savior of pretzel twisters and popper pickers everywhere. It’s a major sacrifice as my abs remain enshrouded in mystery, and fat, but that’s the price of making others’ lives more fulfilling.

I know my incredible buffness is in there, somewhere, buried deeply and safe, and that will have to suffice.

Anyway, I hear Willis Tower is lovely this time of year.