01.03.2008
Resolutions schmesolutions
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If it hasn’t been said a thousand times already, New Year’s resolutions are absurd.
If you think about it, New Year’s is absurd. If it weren’t for some old dude a few lifetimes ago, New Year’s Day would be just another day.
And if you really think about it, if there were aliens keeping Earth under surveillance, they probably get freaked out that millions of people all seem to make life-changing promises on a day somewhat randomly designated to be the start of the rest of eternity.
Quit smoking, quit drinking, quit being fat — why do people wait until Jan. 1. to quit sucking at life?
It’s sort of like giving up something during the 40 days of Lent to reflect Christ’s sacrifice — I’m not sure giving up chocolate reflects basically being tortured to death, and if you’re really trying to be Christ-like, why reserve it to those 40 days?
Look, folks, if Jesus only acted Jesus-like for 40 days, I highly doubt he’d have the following he does.
The point isn’t to say that New Year’s resolutions are linked to the crucifixion, but if you want to get technical, the calendar we operate on today is based on the birth of Christ.
Whoever made said calendar was apparently way off on Jesus’ birthday, and for the sake of my argument that people are ridiculous, it’s important that you understand that.
We won’t go into history lessons or theories of theology, but to get down to the meat and potatoes of it all, millions of New Year’s resolutions are made each year because someone somewhere in a far, far away land said Jesus was born then, so that makes now today, and today is part of a 365-day year that adds a day every four years. It may have been tweaked since, but you get the idea.
The human mind needs some sort of explanation, some sort of structure, so we’ve developed time. Seconds, minutes, decades, centuries. It’s all the same.
Each day is really like the next, and humans just complicate it with their technology and pollution and global warming.
So here we are, on this day marked Jan. 1 — which, according to the Chinese calendar, means squat — making all these promises about who we want to be for the next 364 sun-ups and sun-downs.
But Jan. 1 just marks another year. It’s not the beginning or the end of anything significant. Most fiscal years ignore Jan. 1, the school year ignores it and football season blows right by it.
New Year’s Day is just another day off work, and for those of us in newspapers and other jobs that ignore holidays, it’s just another day other people have off and we don’t.
It would make more sense to make resolutions on your birthday. That seems to be a logical time to evaluate your life on some socio-politico-exercise-i-o scale and determine if you are happy with yourself (and odds are you aren’t).
And if you are happy with yourself, it’s probably because you don’t restrict your resolutions to one day of the year, but resolve to quit sucking at life on a year-round basis.
So maybe everyone’s resolution should be to never make a resolution again.
If I made resolutions, mine would be to step down from my soapbox.
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