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This week: Resolutions Edited by: Waltz Invictus  
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Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
-Mel Brooks |
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Resolutions
Make any New Year's Resolutions this year?
It's now mid-January. Kept any New Year's Resolutions this year?
If you're like most people, you made a few and are still keeping one or two, sort of. Just wait until next month. when chances are you've forgotten all about all of them.
I'm sure there are many reasons for that. Each year, after the obligatory holiday feel-good news stories, there comes a rash of how-to-keep-resolutions stories. Don't make too many, keep the goals reasonable, make yourself accountable to someone, yadda, yadda, whatever.
I'm not a self-help guru; I'm a comedy writer. And as a comedy writer, I have a remarkable, unthinkable, novel idea for keeping your resolutions:
Don't make any.
Look, I admit there's a good bit of self-indulgence in this suggestion. Fact is, I don't want to hear about your resolutions. Because I don't care. No, really, I don't. Someone came up to me the other day and said, "I'm making a resolution to lose weight. So if you see me eating a bacon cheeseburger, stop me." You know, the old enlist-your-friends trick. So we went out and she ordered a bacon cheeseburger. Afterwards, she said, "(burp) You were supposed to stop me."
"I don't get between people and their bacon," I said. "Basic rule of self-preservation." Also, she learned a valuable lesson: if your friend is a comedy writer, he will eventually use you as material.
Another common resolution is some variant of "I'll go to the gym more." Think, people. Think. You make a resolution like that, along with hundreds of other people in your neighborhood, and you know what happens? The gym fills up. At all hours, not just the five-to-seven rush, which becomes like Saturday Night in a dark place with strobe lights and thumping music, only a lot less fun. Not only does that make you and your thousand buddies less likely to go because all the treadmills are taken by guys who haven't exercised since middle school, but it crowds out the regulars.
So those of us who go to the gym regularly (okay, ocassionally (okay, sporadically, but not tied to arbitrary year-starting dates)) are thoroughly annoyed. It's gotten so MY resolution is to avoid the gym entirely until my birthday, which is in mid-February; by that time, everyone's realized that they don't really WANT to go to the gym every day, and so go not at all.
And that's the real problem, isn't it? Want. You only think you want to lose weight; what you really want is a creme brulée. You don't really want to eat salad for three meals a day; you want a bacon cheeseburger and chocolate, preferably both at the same time. You don't actually want to quit smoking; you want your smoking to have no adverse consequences, and for people to quit saying "You know, those things will kill you" every freaking time you light up.
So don't. Just don't. There's nothing magical about New Year's; honest. It's just an arbitrary point along the earth's orbital path. The Romans used the Spring equinox. The Celts went with the other side of the calendar. Other cultures don't even care about solar years, and just use a lunar calendar. Yes, you miss the epic joy of being part of the "in" crowd by doing what everyone else is- oh, wait, that's not joy. So make a resolution right now not to make a New Year's resolution next year. Pick an arbitrary day, like your best friend's birthday, or the first new moon after the spring equinox, or whatever, and choose that as your starting day for only one life change.
You'll still fail at it, of course. But at least you won't be in my way at the gym, and you won't be comedy material. |
Just a few wintry items for January:
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Comedy: January 11, 2012 Issue [#4818]
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