Get Ready For Form 2008R

I don’t get the whole New Year’s resolution thing. Yeah, OK, I get the intention. I used to do it, too. I made lists and I cut pictures out of magazines of how thin I wanted to look and stuck them on the refrigerator, went to aerobics classes and made plans to put away ten percent of my salary. But I don’t think I ever made one New Year’s Resolution that I didn’t break by March.

And over the last few years, it came to me: who needs the pressure? What’s the point of setting myself up for failure based on a myth that THIS is the time where I must take stock and note where I could make improvement? Why January 1? Why not the Spring Solstice or my birthday or the beginning of the school year or friggin’ Groundhog’s Day to create my list of resolutions?

Or, hey. What about this? Why not wait until you are READY to make a change? When you feel strong enough to quit smoking, lose twenty pounds, join a gym or stop running up your credit card, do it!

Because on New Year’s Eve, many of us are either drunk or besotted with carbohydrates or at least the spirit of the season, so this is not exactly the best time to make commitments of any sort.

Anyone who either got a bad haircut or a tattoo following a breakup knows what I’m talking about.

It’s all a conspiracy, anyway. Weight Watchers and Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the major health clubs and the FDA and the people who make nicotine patches and gum hired a publicist and campaigned to declare January 1 the day YOU MUST IMPROVE YOUR LIFE.

“Mghffgh?” we mumble, waking up on New Year’s Day still in your party makeup and maybe wearing someone else’s clothes, in someone else’s house, your head pounding as if someone were jackhammering just outside your cerebellum. “Last night I said I was gonna do what?”

The little angel of conscience pulls the pencil from behind his ear. “I believe that was to stop drinking and slutting around.”

You swat at it and pull the covers back over your head.

And somehow this improvement never seems to happen.

Anyway.

You don’t know it yet, but my secret sources tell me that this cabal of good conscience (known on the sly as the CGC) have a new plan in the works. Since you have to register your dog, your marriage, your children, your car, your boat and need licenses or other governmental approvals for so many other impositions of private life, you will soon have to register your New Year’s Resolutions. Representatives from the CGC met with Bush’s finance gurus and it was determined that if people made and kept their resolutions, it would save millions and millions in health care and Medicaid costs that could be used for really, really important things like new office furnishings for incoming members of congress or the stupendously lavish rehab of Kofi Annan’s successor’s living quarters.

So this is how it’s going go down: every household will get a form by November 1, and each adult member of the household must choose a minimum of two and a maximum of five resolutions. A nominal tax will be requested (read: required) for each resolution, to be determined by a five-page worksheet based on household income, latest credit card statements, cholesterol levels, weight, BMI and peak oxygen flow of each adult in the household. If, based on submitted evidence (signed affidavits from doctors, creditors, etc.), the resolutions in question have been adequately kept by the next resolution period, a refund will be issued commensurate with the level by which the resolution in question has been successful. If the resolution commitment level was not kept, you will be fined.

You have eleven months to think about what you want to change.

Happy New Year.