I was idly surfing the Internet one morning, not really looking for anything, just killing time until the coffee finished brewing.

I decided to search for recipes. After spaghetti carbonara, for which we already have a great recipe, my favorite Italian dish is eggplant parmigiana, for which we don't have a good recipe at all. So I tapped around, reading ingredient lists, imagining the taste of the finished dish like some people read musical scores, imagining the sound of the horns and violins.

It occurred to me, after a dozen or so recipes, that almost every meal now is finished by dribbling some extra virgin olive oil over the dish.

It's the latest food fad.

You see it all the time on TV.

No matter what they're cooking, the host always ends by putting his or her thumb over the opened top of a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, tilting the bottle upside down, dribbling some fat drops onto the dish.

Extra virgin olive oil has become the new ketchup.

Anyway, I drifted around the Internet some more, wound up on one of those Ask the Doctor sites.

I'm sure you've seen them. "My arm hurts every time I lift it over my head. What should I do?"

On this particular site, someone wrote in and said, "I've heard that if you're having a heart attack, after you dial 911 you should chew an aspirin, because chewing it gets it into your bloodstream much faster, and the blood-thinning aspects of aspirin will help dissolve the clot causing the heart attack. The problem is, I really hate the taste of aspirin. Could I just swallow it instead of chewing it?"

Dude! You're lying on your back, dying, limbs flopping around, your miserable life flashing in front of you, you know you can save your life by chewing an aspirin, and you're hesitating to save your life because aspirin tastes bad?

So that's my New Year's resolution, and I hope it will be yours too.

I will accept that life sometimes leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.