Office was quiet the day after New Year’s Day. Just to make the new year more memorable, the powers that be decided to make the Beijing weather just a little worse than normal, sending a biting wind storm through the city in the late afternoon. People were walking with their backs to the wind to spare their faces from the slicing gusts. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world….”

I read Andrew Sullivan and InstaPundit and Gweilo Diaries and China Hand and various other blogs regularly, and I sometimes feel an urge to get back into my journalist mode, to be the muckracker I once was in Maryland and even in New York, when I had my few seconds of notoriety appearing on what was then MacNeil-Lehrer Report. And then there were all the letters I got into the Arizona Republic. But as I grow old approach middle age, I find it more of an effort to raise hell and to question the established paradigms. Well, I keep questioning, but I don’t do it on paper, cyber or otherwise, anymore. Maybe turning this into a pundit site instead of a cathartic but self-absorbed mirror would be healthier. Can I manage to co-mingle the two? Would that be “diluting the brand” as we marketers say?

So my perennial New Year’s Resolution — to go to the gym once a week — was lived up to yesterday, when after work I went straight to the gym. Of course, I pulled my back within just a few minutes and the pain 14 hours later is atrocious. I may go to a Chinese doctor today if the misery doesn’t recede. I also kept my second resolution, to write in this thing daily. So be forewarned.