Top 10 Shit-Brained News Years Resolutions
It's the New Year. So, like a shabby, sanctimonious, bum-fluff-bearded Moses pontificating on the highest floor of the Whitgift Centre, here are the ten most flabby, over-used and shit-brained New Year's Resolutions.
1. No more booze
What a noble idea, ignoring the fact that it’s exercise and healthy eating that actually makes you fit; alcohol abstinence is just an empty placebo, like an angry father shouting to his miscreant children: "I swear, I will turn this car around and we'll go straight back home!" halfway through a journey to Disneyland Paris.
Getting on the wagon sets off extreme Twilight-style reactions in some: Goth-type skin pallour, excessive frothing and spewing all kinds of shit from their hateful mouths (jaysus, see Shane McGowan). Ineviteably, the ‘no alcohol’ resolution gets broken after three weeks - well, gotta celebrate Burns Night somehow - undoing any good work in one fell binge of Frank-from-Shameless proportions, attractiveness and coherentness.
2. Help someone in need
It’s naïve, but I still hold strong in the belief that most people, through common courtesy or simple kneejerk moments, do end up helping someone in need, even without realising it, over the course of a year. So there’s no need to suddenly go all Mother Teresa come 2011, chopping your kidneys out and hurling them at sickly children on hospital drips. Or sailing to Louisiana and sucking petroleum out of lifeless baby otters.
3. See friends and relatives more
January. You had a few beers too many and really caught up with a long-lost amigo. Great. But of course it doesn’t last. May rolls round, you’ve been on the road three weekends in a row talking about mainly the same generic things and a deathly boring ‘friend-quaintance’ is wittering on about grit shortages. Or your mother is chastising your personal hygiene and life choices.
Sensible people love friends and family – so they stay out of their way, making occasional darting forays to see them before retreating back to safety, much like a stealth squadron in Helmand Province.
4. Be happier
Aside from being a vague and all-encompassing resolution, it’s the kind of moany, melodramatic thing said that’s sure to gain back-handed pity and sympathy. People will pat you on the shoulder and convincingly say ‘Life isn’t that bad, buddy’ before later telling fellow friends behind your back: “Didn't realise he was depressive” or “I’ll give it six months till he has that big gay epiphany”.
5. Go travelling
Lost? In need of inspiration? Don’t go travelling. You don’t get a life-changing realisation from partying to Pendulum with a bunch of drug-addled European backpackers in Bali. Just two holes simultaneously smashed into the wallet and memory bank. And a stubborn STD.
6. Take a photo of yourself every day for a year
It’s lose-lose with this one. Either you stop doing it after ten days because it’s easily forgettable/completely pointless, or you end up having 365 photos of you looking gradually less attractive, more saggy and closer to death than before. All it’s good for is a Youtube photo montage set to Snow Patrol, allowing shitbag teenagers to make comments like “ROFL, you got smacked wid the ugly tree” in between screaming racial slurs at each other over Call of Duty headpieces.
7. I shall get new straighteners / I will buy a new wardrobe / something else utterly shit-brained
Ask the New Year's resolutions question, and there’s always someone who pipes up with absolute drivel. Yeah, it would really have been smarter to say nothing at all and continue that staring contest you had going on with the mirror.
Shit, it’s the Age of Austerity! Drain that last drop of champagne by 1159 on December 31, and spend the next twelve months barricading yourself into a self-sufficient commune on the Isle of Skye. Live off the land. Wear hand-knitted sweaters. Finally understand what Scottish people are saying. It’s a lonely and windswept existence, but you can save £6,000 for that class-A drug habit or some such similar endeavour. Worth it.
9. Get organised
New Year's Day is the best time to start getting organised: waking up surrounded by confetti and beer bottles, with a tramp's todger in your ear. Disorganised people are perennially disorganised, no amount of willpower will change that. I would know. There are little steps you can make - buy a diary, make knots in handkerchiefs, employ a nubile, attractive secretary - but essentially realise that your bedroom/desk will always be covered in paperwork, past receipts and fortnight-old pizza.
10. Learn a musical instrument
Musical instruments are for secondary children or youngsters being lived vicariously through by their flashback-and-money-motivated parents. For anyone over 18, it’s an always expensive, almost-always unsuccessful pursuit, ending up as a one-time anecdote or “that Fender in the corner”. And anyway, musical instruments? Make like a normal person and enter the X Factor.
