New Year’s Resolutions

Exercise more – It’s little things that provide us with more muscle tone and aerobic exercise; for example, buy heavier snacks, listen to music with faster tempos… or, an easy one, try TYPING MORE IN UPPER CASE.

▼

Lose weight – We all gain weight over the holidays and folks like me don’t even wait for the holidays. This is called “being proactive”. The best way to lose weight is to DIET… one fad diet after another, until your body gets so confused that it rejects ALL incoming calories. Tip: If, at the end of the day, you can still remember eating it, it probably wasn’t on your diet.

▼

Get More Organized – If we operated at peak efficiency, imagine what we could do. Ironically, while you are imaging all the things that you could do, you are not operating at peak efficiency. The trick is making lists and prioritizing those lists and then listing those priorities. If you have 3 x 5 cards, use lots of those because it is 1948.

▼

Learn a language – Well, you’ve alienated everyone that speaks English. Learn another language and work towards boring the rest of the world. Make a list of the languages you have learned and prioritize that list. Tip: Spanish and Italian are called “romance languages” but I’ve never seen speaking either lead to anything resembling romance.

▼

Carpe Diem – Which is, of course, Latin for “seize the carp”. Which carp? Why the carp of life experience of course! We all have things we want to do and never have done. And, many of those things don’t involve blonde twins or smoking crack on a double-decker bus. We must live a life with no regrets or else, on our death beds, we will be prioritizing lists of those regrets.

▼

Get finances under control – This one is easy. Simply take in more money. Often this is no more difficult than finding a better job that pays more money. Scan Craigslist for openings in the field of being a billionaire… or, if you want to work your way up from the bottom, a millionaire.

▼

Quit smoking/drinking – If you wanted a resolution that you’d break before the end of the week, this is the one for you. Quitting any vice that is on the shelf at your local grocery store is virtually impossible. Yeah, I know you think that you’ve got “will power”; but, if you did, you wouldn’t be seizing carp, smoking crack on double-decker buses or looking for millionaire jobs on Craigslist…

▼

Spend more time with family – Inexplicably, your children want to hang out with you; even your wife would like to spend more time with you, despite the fact that your hands smell like carp. You’ve been working hard and spending a lot of time “getting into yourself”… now spend it with your loved ones. Tip: If you’ve forgotten any of your children’s names, they WILL know… although, it is often the case that the oldest is named after one of the parents, so it is a pretty good guess.

▼

Travel – Go to other places, get to know the people there and suddenly remember WHY you don’t live there. Where you live now sucks, just not as much as every other place in the world.

▼

Read more – Start by working your way through Tolstoy, Proust and Camus; then, work through the subtleties of Steinbeck, Ishiguro and Umberto Eco. Reading a classic piece of literature is akin to—I’M KIDDING, OF COURSE. We’ll never get around to reading important literary works because we have too many other important things going on in our—HEY LOOK, IT’S AN EPISODE OF BIG BANG THEORY THAT I SAW LAST WEEK… goodbye, Cannery Row!