Is it too late to talk about New Year’s resolutions? The kind I’m not going to stick to? I forgot to make any this year, and felt very empty and lost without them as I navigate 2017. So I’m making up for lost time and putting down a few I hope to fail at within the next, say, 10 minutes:
• Stop being shocked when college students tell me the year they were born. Like the other day in class when I mentioned I graduated from Flagler College in 1995. “I wasn’t even born yet!” someone from the group blurted out. They then commenced pointing and laughing at me, or at least that’s how I remember it right before I blacked out and someone was dispatched for the defibrillator. Maybe it hit me so hard because that final year of college is the last that we consider ourselves “young.” It’s right before moving out into the adult workforce and the real world. And now that move for me took place before any of these kids were even born. Yowza!
• Stop throwing the kid out of class who tells me he or she was born before I graduated. They’re just going to Snapchat it and share with all their friends on social media how old I am.
• TALK about running consistently. That way I don’t have to actually RUN more consistently. I should have done this while training for my marathon last year. But, nooooo! I had to go and do the running. I had to put in the grueling miles. My life would have been so much easier if I had just sat on the sofa with a bag of potato chips berating myself for not going out and hitting the roads. I’m getting that one right this year.
• Smile more. I mean one of those super-pearly-white smiles like you’re mugging for a grade school photograph. I read something that said you can improve your mood, your outlook on life or maybe your ability to win the lottery simply by smiling … especially if it’s right after a college student tells you his birth year and you feel faint.
• Explain to people that I’m trying to smile more for a reason, and that I’m not just creepy when I break into very forced, ridiculous and random grins that make me appear rabid or criminally insane.
• Try to figure out why my desk at home is littered with to-do lists that I will never do. I mean, come on: “Cut up wood on the side of the house?” “Review house insurance in case another hurricane comes?” Does any of that sound slightly fun or necessary? I must have three different lists that include these very same things. What was I trying to tell myself?!?
• Put this list of New Year’s resolutions in a folder so I can pull it out again next year and skip the whole ordeal of coming up with new ones.
Welcome 2017! I have a whole lot of stuff I’m ready not to do.