Talking About a Resolution

It's New Year's Eve, and though I am usually scrambling to think of resolutions I need to make, I ought to make for the new year, this year I will have only one, and it is one that I have put a lot of thought into for once: to lose the habit of casting pearls before swine. Everything else will proceed from that. I will not offer my help, and instead will wait to be asked. This will be the hardest resolution for me to keep because I like to help others. The gifts I have I will use for my own gain and where they will be most appreciated. I will make a list of my 'marketable' skills and match them up first with my family's needs, my own, and then those of deserving persons and organizations who have asked for them. As for friendships, well, I have always had the most luck with waiting for them to happen rather than trying to make friends, though more often than not, offers of friendship from others have turned out to be thinly veiled demands for incorporation: attend a shower, buy a gift, help with childcare, shop for someone, provide free writing instruction and language practice. I think that being so generous is a character flaw, as is being too forgiving. I have always thought the question, "what's in it for me?" a selfish one, and it is one which it goes against my nature to ask, but now I am thinking that maybe I would be happier if I asked it more often. I am too often disappointed to find that I was being used, and I am too old to care to deal with that disappointment. And honestly, I'm weary of, well, casting my pearls before swine, then picking them, cleaning them off and apologizing to the pigs for troubling them.