It occurred to me that I’ve never had a real New Year’s resolution, so I decided to come up with some now. After some thought, I realized that resolutions always seem to fit into three categories:
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A change in diet
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Quitting a bad habit (usually relating to some sort of addiction)
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Beginning some personal project
With these categories in mind, I’ve come up with the following resolutions:
- Stop eating restaurant food, cold turkey. It’s easy to give in to the restaurant temptation. You think "You know, I ate well today. I had a serving of ‘vegetables’ (the lettuce on that burger you had for lunch), and I ate a healthy breakfast of Lucky Charms (it’s part of a complete breakfast, you know). So you decide to take a trip to a nearby restaurant for dinner as a treat. Little do you realize, even the healthiest items on the menu are the dietary equivalent of wrapping your car around a telephone pole. How do they even manage to pack 7,000 calories into a glass of water? Not that it matters much because, since it’s a ‘special occasion,’ you’ll just go ahead and get a full order of buttered bacon, dipped in chocolate and wrapped around a live cow.
Soon, you’ve crammed an entire petting zoo’s worth of livestock down your throat, effectively transforming yourself into a Jaba the Hut-style mass of flesh who needs a forklift to pry itself out of the booth. Well, now that I have a somewhat arbitrary excuse to improve myself, I’m going to break the vicious cycle of restaurant gorging.
Not that I plan on being overly rigid about this. If someone has leftovers they don’t want, I wouldn’t want the food to go to waste. Or if it’s a real special occasion, like a birthday, or a Wednesday.
- End my Wikipedia addiction. I know I’m not alone on this one. Sure, it always starts out innocently enough: you start to wonder when The Simpsons debuted. Soon, however, you see something like “the Peabody Award” in there, something you’ve heard before but, now that you think about it, you’re not quite sure what it is.
Then you see a link like “World Wide Web,” and you say to yourself, “how could they possibly do justice to the World Wide Web in a single article?” Soon the privacy section catches your eye, and you get sucked into “social network service,” followed by troll, and then you find some bizarre, inappropriate term like “sock puppet,” which turns out to be a political strategy.
In no time, you’ve delved into a world of political and economic theories, lost in a field you know nothing about. Your browser is filled with tabs, you haven’t finished a single article, but you just can’t help yourself. Every sentence is filled with terms you don’t understand. Six hours later, you wake to the sunrise, dazed and confused, dried drool encrusted on your face, your PC frozen from opening too many articles at the same time. You gaze into the mirror, disgusted with yourself, swearing “never again” under your breath, but deep down you know you just can’t help yourself.
- I will begin a campaign to destroy the word “blog.” I do not yet know what it will be replaced with, but it will be something completely different. I hate that word. It sounds like a noise you would make while throwing up.
Now, I know that much more common personal projects include some sort of exercise regime or trying to get your finances in order, but frankly, my finances and exercise program are already sorted out, so unless I decide I’d like to be able to buy and then lift a brand new Corvette, I’m pretty sure it’d be pointless to pursue the more popular route on this one.
In keeping with tradition, I will need to abandon at least two resolutions by January 16th. There will then be eleven and a half months left for the final resolution, so I will be starting a pool on when I will crack on number three. Bets will be placed via e-mail.