The End of New Year's Resolutions
by Mad Dog

I don't see why I should wake up on January 1st with any further resolve than to brush my teeth, eat a decent breakfast, and call my mother to make her proud by telling her that I brushed my teeth and ate a decent breakfast.

   Call me un-American (there, aren't you glad you got that out of your system?), but I don't see why I should wake up on January 1st with any further resolve than to brush my teeth, eat a decent breakfast, and call my mother to make her proud by telling her that I brushed my teeth and ate a decent breakfast, two things she spent the best seventeen years of her life trying to get me to do. Oh yeah, and to wish her a Happy New Year.

   While it's true people may be asking about New Year's resolutions innocently enough, I suspect they really do it so they can go home, write it in their diary, and confront me the next year by saying, "Ah ha! That's what you said last year, yet you're still collecting dryer lint in the hopes of making the Guinness Book of World Records by sculpting it into a tabletop replica of the Corn Palace." So? What's wrong with having long-term goals in life?

   What's so fascinating about rehashing the year we've just escaped is a mystery to me, much like why every female in California above the age of fourteen has had a nose job yet the Sphinx—one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World—still looks like an inbred Pekinese after a car wreck. In the last two weeks I've seen annual reviews of 2002’s music, TV, art, movies, top news stories, books, celebrity tattoos, and dryer lint sculptures. I've scanned Top Ten lists of the highest paid actors, funniest TV commercials, most lurid court cases, and the best Top Ten lists.

   Since most of us lived through the previous year and hardly need, or want, to be reminded of it, who are these year end wrap-ups aimed at? The primary targets are those under the age of one who didn't have a chance to experience it first hand, those living in abandoned fallout shelters in our national forests, and anyone who doesn't own a radio, television, or subscribe to any of the newspapers and magazines that are regurgitating their own contents at the end of the year. It’s like writing a cookbook for anorexics.

   Printing the results would be a great public service. After all, a survey for U.S. News and World Report revealed that nearly six in ten Americans believe the world will come to an end or be destroyed within a few years. And they were the optimists. Imagine the much needed boost we'd see in the economy when those people read the newspaper and realize that the washing machines, cars, and Ronco Microwave Fondue Pots that were on their last leg will have to make it through another full year. Why the stores would be jammed!

   But there would be an even bigger bonus to getting these predictions, because as long as the editors had the psychics on the line they could find out the answers to some of the 21st century's most baffling mysteries. Like why Miss Cleo’s oracles don't call you by name when they answer the phone, how come they can't tell Ed McMahon and Dick Clark the correct spelling of your last name, and why people who make New Year's resolutions they know they'll never keep think they're better off than those of us who don't even bother.

   Oh well, maybe next year. 

©1995, 2002 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. The Top 10 Newspapers of the Year as a matter of fact.