It's February, have you given up yet?
“This year I resolve to lose 25 pounds and get back into shape so when I look into a mirror I don’t want to cry myself to sleep after eating a tub of Cherry Garcia ice cream.”
How many times have you heard that following a Jan. 1 all-nighter? My New Year’s resolution is to get a 4.0 this semester... This year I’m going to find a steady girlfriend... My resolution is to learn a new language… yada yada yada whatever. The classic idea of a New Year’s resolution is the biggest load of garbage I’ve ever heard of since the Hanson song "MMMBop."
For full effect, do not download MMMBop by Hanson, that will in fact damage you in ways much worse than Insane Clown Posse ever would.
The reason that resolutions are such a joke is simple: Nobody follows through with them. Ever. Whether it be a new diet, an attempt at a new language, or going jogging with your dog at 5 a.m. every morning it doesn’t matter. Nobody ever actually completes his or her New Year’s resolution. It is said that to form a habit it takes 21 consecutive days of continually repeated actions of that routine for it to become ingrained in you. Well, that doesn’t matter one bit because the habit is up and forgotten by Jan. 3 anyway.
Last year I tried to break the mold and actually complete the whole New Year’s resolution idea. I made a goal to become fluent in Spanish. Yep, and I was determined, I was set, I was going to be the best non-native Spanish speaker this campus had ever seen. And so it began: I was checking out Spanish books, reading online courses, I even had a buddy of mine only talk to me in Spanish just so I could get a feel for what the language was like. Oh, I was on a roll. I was going to be fluent in no time.
But that all changed around Jan. 4 or so. Homework began piling up, my friends wanted to hang out, I realized that I actually had a full-time job, my actual life returned, things got in the way, and my attempt at becoming a Spaniard was left back in the dust. I tried to resurrect it a few weeks later, but it was to no avail. My Spanish lessons were over, and I was back to the same mono-linguistic individual I started as.
Now why is that? It is a mystery that is beyond me, but it is one of the most expected and typical behaviors that we all as individuals don’t do. Let’s just admit it. We all as human beings are one of the laziest, relinquishing, non-New-Year’s-resolution-finishing creatures ever.
One thing that has always puzzled me is why we wait until Jan. 1 to start the goal. I understand that it is the beginning of a New Year and there is a feeling of freshness in the air that makes us all want to start over, but why wait until Jan. 1 to make the goal? For instance, why would I come up with the resolution to lose weight in mid-November and then pile on the pounds created by bad dieting and not working out for the next month and a half, only to make the resolution more compound and difficult to accomplish? Who knows?
Am I wrong for thinking that the idea of a New Year’s resolution is an absolute and complete total waste of time? Do people actually accomplish things by starting a diet on New Year’s Day after gorging down an entire previous month full of holiday treats and candy-coated gingerbread houses? I don’t know. In my book, New Year’s resolutions make about as much sense as a group of guys watching “The Notebook” for Guys Night Out. There’s nothing I can do about it though, I guess. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to hit the streets for a couple of miles of jogging. It’s part of this New Year’s resolution that I made…
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