I was late going to my birthday brunch on Jan. 8 last year because my youngest daughter wanted to play me some songs on her guitar. Because of that, I hopped in my car about 30 minutes late to meet friends at the just-opened Beyond Bread at the corner of Ina and Oracle roads. I picked up one of my friends along the way, explaining my tardiness and telling her about my two resolutions for 2011: Make more time for girlfriends and accept that my life as a newspaper reporter was over. The birthday brunch was a celebration of new beginnings.

Driving toward the sandwich shop, we discussed how only cool people are born on Jan. 8 (The King, for instance), and the great weather. I was explaining my new teaching assignment when my phone rang. It was about 10:45 a.m. and the other friend we were meeting explained that she was detoured away from Beyond Bread by police surrounding the intersection.

“They’re saying someone was shot,” she said. To which I replied, “A few weeks ago they said there was a bomb threat or something and it turned out to be nothing.” We moved the birthday celebration to another restaurant.

Fewer than 5 minutes later, sitting at the stoplight across the street from the newly chosen venue, my phone buzzed. I flipped it open to see a message from a local priest: “There are reports that Gabrielle Giffords has been shot up where you live. Do you know anything?” I handed the phone to my friend, a volunteer with the local Democratic Party. “Oh my God,” she said, “this can’t be right.”

We pulled into a parking lot and started calling people who might confirm what we were hearing – I dialed old colleagues from the former Tucson Citizen newspaper and she called Democratic Party contacts. It wasn’t long before the information was confirmed. Yet, when news organizations began reporting that Giffords had died, my friend and I said the same thing simultaneously: “They don’t know Gabby.”

Let me be clear: I am not friends with Congresswoman Giffords, although as anyone who has met her will attest, she’s one of those people who makes everyone feel like a friend. I interviewed her a few times about educational issues in my job as a higher education reporter for the former afternoon daily. I reported on her wedding. I occasionally sat at the same table with her at The Shanty when she met up with friends of hers there who were my Citizen colleagues, people with whom I sometimes shared a Friday night beer. During one of those times, Giffords and I had a conversation about teenage girls since I had survived raising a couple of them and she was a new step-mom to daughters, but if I’d walked into a room, I doubt she would have remembered my name. I was not – I am not – all that remarkable.

Giffords, on the other hand, is and always has been remarkable, which is why my friend and I responded to the erroneous pronouncement  with an I-don’t-think-so attitude. We had met Gabby and meeting her even once was all it took to realize this was a woman who could survive just about anything with a positive attitude, class, a work-horse work ethic, stellar intelligence and that great smile of hers. It seemed to us that there was no way she would be stopped just by a bullet. Luckily, she wasn’t.

I spent most of my birthday weekend in 2011 helping report on the shooting for the New York Times, pulling together local sources for the reporters flying into town and talking with Giffords’ staff members who had been at the shooting. (I also fielded a few frantic phone calls from Dallas family members who had Google mapped the shooting site and knew it was only about five miles from my house.) Late on Jan. 9, as I was writing a lesson for my Monday class, my Times contact called me, beginning the conversation with, “Monday we’d like you to try to find out more about the shooter ….”

I stopped her mid-sentence and told her on Monday I had to go back to my real job at the high school where, ironically, gunman Jared L. Loughner once went to school. I’d be a teacher again, not a reporter, and my job was to help my ninth graders understand not only the use of semicolons but, I imagined, that the world was still a safe place.

As it turned out, we never got to semicolons that day. The students had questions about mental illness and guns and what Congress does. Mostly, they wanted to talk about Giffords and if she was going to live.

“Do you know her?” one student asked.

“Yes,” I said, explaining that I’d met Giffords and interviewed her.

They wanted to know what she was like. Strong, I said. Intelligent – and street-smart, too. Kind. Polite with reporters. Well-spoken. Ridiculous amount of energy. Extremely well read. Determined.

“Well then,” piped up one of the class troublemakers, “if she’s got all that goin’ on, she’s gonna be OK.”

And indeed, Giffords has proven that she is going to be OK. The fact that she’s coming to town to mark the anniversary of the shooting this weekend demonstrates her strength, tenacity and graciousness more than ever – not to mention her faith and ability to forgive. She’s an example for all of us, and Arizona is lucky to claim her as a native daughter. Welcome home, Gabby.

For the past few years I’ve made a list of four things I’d like to attempt in the New Year and in each of those three years I’ve only made it to incorporating two of those things. That’s a 50-percent batting average (or whatever the appropriate sports metaphor and/or statistic would be), but I suppose it’s better than zero. This year, however, I want to shoot the moon, and my advice to you is to do the same. Life is short, people! Might as well grab all the gusto you can. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of 12 (2012, get it?) New Year’s resolutions we can all consider. Maybe you can’t tackle all 12, but I bet you can do at least three. A handful make the popular New Year’s resolutions list, but most don’t. Here we go:

1. No more mocking. While such a funny concept on late-night television, it really is hurtful (and immature) to get your jollies from making fun of others. We can be better than that. I think this quote sums it up well:

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life you will have been all of these. – Robert Goddard

2. Stop eating yourself to death and disease – or, if you won’t, accept the consequences of being overweight (including the “first-impression” factor when applying for jobs in this tough economy) without making lame excuses. While there is some research that points to a “fat gene”, even the tiny percentage of folks who have that gene can still improve their health and lose weight by eating right and moving more. It’s past time as a nation that we take responsibility for our overweight “issue” and do something about it. Yes, eating right and exercising takes discipline. But discipline is actually a good thing! Exercise takes time and commitment, but if you have an hour to watch television each day (and stats show you watch way more than that), you have an hour to walk (quickly, quickly) each day. And that hour, as long as you don’t undo it all by rewarding yourself with food or non-H2O drink afterwards, is all it takes.

3. Read this book. Doing so will help you with #2 above.

4. Make downward comparisons (aka cage the jealousy monster). There will always be people who have more than you do, and you’ll live with a feeling of scarcity as long as you compare what you don’t have with what the Jones’ do. On the other hand, if you compare your situation to that of those less well-off than you (and you can always find someone less well-off than you), you’ll see how blessed you really are.

5. Along those lines, commit to a gratitude list. Each day for the next year write down one thing daily for which you are thankful. You can go old school and write it in a journal, make a really cool wall display of Post-it gratitude notes or keep the list on Facebook. I’ve been doing this since Thanksgiving and it is amazing what happens when you pay attention to the little things. The main result is a reduction in our cultural tendency to whine.

6. Be kind. This one is similar to #1, but it bears repeating. Every life, no matter how amazing it looks from the outside, has some amount of pain in it and that pain can be eased by a little kindness. Besides, if you’re nice to someone, it tends to create a cycle of niceness. Ditto if you’re a jerk to someone… it creates a cycle of jerkiness.

7. Give the benefit of the doubt. Yes, there are real weenies out there. The President of Iran comes to mind. As do the teenagers who live under the false impression that they own the parts of Tucson they vandalize with spray paint and drug cartel leaders and their minions. But besides that, most people are trying the best they can to get by in this complicated world. Give each other a break.

8. Expand your mind. Take a class, take up the bagpipes (or something more tame), take yourself to the library.

9. Have coffee with someone you consider an “enemy.” Maybe it is someone of a different political persuasion. Maybe it would be someone of a different race, gender or sexual orientation. Maybe it’s your mother-in-law. Who knows! The possibilities are endless in our current polarized atmosphere. Lunch is too long, dinner is too serious, but coffee is just about right.

10. Listen. I’m a world-class interrupter. It is my Achilles heel; someone will be telling me a story and questions start popping up in my head like the whack-a-mole game and I blurt them out. I’ve gotten slightly better at listening over the past few years, but still have a way to go. As I’ve tried to develop better listening skills, I’ve noticed that very few people really are good listeners. (Keep in mind that just because you’re being quiet and looking at someone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re listening.) Ergo, it seems like something we could all work on.

11. Do the right thing. Someone is telling a racist joke and we let it slide. Someone is threatening another person and we don’t intervene. Someone is lonely and we avoid calling because it will be a drag. Doing the right thing is rarely easy, but you know you should. Someone needs to so it might as well be you. (And me.)

12. Forgive – yourself, your parents, your boss, your children, your neighbor, your enemy, your in-laws, your 4th grade teacher, the publisher who rejected your work, Wall Street weirdos, etc. As the Eagles once pointedly sang, “Get over it.”

A couple of lines in the contract of the new University of Arizona football coach demonstrates what many in higher education have said for years – and what came out more recently in analysis of the Penn State scandal: College athletics, in particular football, are abusive and dishonest in their very nature. There can be no better evidence of this dishonesty than in the term “scholar-athletes.” If the emphasis was truly on the former, Rich Rodriquez’s contract would not offer a $150,000 bonus for winning a BCS national title game while only offering a mere $5,000 for a team average – not individual, mind you, just average -  GPA of 2.6. (See bottom of this article for contract breakdown.)

If the University of Arizona and the Arizona Board of Regents REALLY thought the most important thing for these young men was a college education instead of being pimped out by the university and the board for fan entertainment value, they would offer RichRod $150,000 for a team average GPA of 2.6 and (wait for it) no bonus for winning. Why should he get a bonus for winning? That’s his job and at a base salary of $1.45 million, I’m thinking he’s well-enough paid. The thing that is difficult to do – and the thing that matters in the long run for the vast majority of those football players – is helping them get an education with a GPA that is good enough to help them get a job in the current economic marketplace.

But no, that’s not what the University or the Regents value – at least not by the looks of the contract. Fine by me, but the least they could do is be honest with the public, the professors at the university, and, most of all the players and their parents. Then again, I’m guessing a recruiting pitch that went like this wouldn’t go over too well: “Yes, Mrs. Smith, Johnny will be studying at one of the highest-ranked research universities in the nation. Of course, practice will come first and so he’ll have to pick a major that is flexible as far as when classes are offered and one that isn’t too demanding because he simply won’t have time to study. We know the vast majority of our student-athletes won’t make the pros so we do try to give them a backup plan, but we just have to limit their choices due to their football schedule. Our primary goal, as you can tell by my contract, is using your son to help us win a BSC national title because if we win, I get a bonus of $150,000!!  But we really DO care about him so we’ll give him a tuition waiver to attend the classes that he can in his major and a Dean’s Excuse to miss classes on the days we’re traveling for games. It’s a great deal!”

If RichRod was so fabulous – and if the UA administration and Regents really cared about these athletes as students – the coach and regents would flip Rodriguez’s contract around to have the bonuses aimed at academic success not athletic prowess. And for that matter, R-squared would say, “Hey, I don’t need $1.45 million (who needs that much money???). I’ll get by on a pawltry $200,000 plus bonuses and the university – being an academic institution and all – can spend the rest of that money on (shock!) academics.” If neither the university, the coach or the Regents are willing to do any such thing, they need to drop the pretense of “scholar-athletes” and come clean with everyone involved.