Be It Herewith Resolved…

I don’t “do” Resolutions. Just paint me red and call me a rebel, but I just can’t get into the whole Resolution thing, even casually.

I think it stems from my having a somewhat casual attitude toward the “calendar year”. While I can hardly just disregard it altogether (thank you, Mr. IRS, for forcing me to make a long series of nonsensical numbers, such as “by 4/15/2006 I must account for all dollars earned from 1/1/2005 through 12/31/2005”, a major part of my life), in terms of my overall life direction…I just can’t really get all that charged up about January 1 as a Catalyst for Change, personally.

I have even developed a kind of disdain for the Resolution thing. Year after year, the same people make the same promises – they’re going to lose weight, search for love, move up, move out, change their hair, stop smoking, blah blah blah.

And by February…what Resolution? Oh, yeah, that, ha ha, well, um, I’m just having this one Texas-sized Coldstone sundae and a cigarette, and then I swear…

Uh-huh.

There’s just something about those New Year Resolutions. They’re throw-away promises, which perturbs me.

And yet, every year, people start asking me around Thanksgiving if I’ve got any “good” resolutions for this coming year. I then get away with making vague muttering noises until this very week, this week right here, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It is now that people begin to start pestering about it with the zeal of the recently converted.

“I’m resolving that this year, I’m giving up having wild sex with strangers while my husband is at work! How about you, you got any good ones this year?”

And then they wait, with breathless anticipation, for me to declare my intention of giving up my international lottery scams, my meth cooking, my beating of the children or my four-skein-a-week yarn habit (never! NEVER!!!!)

In years past, I’ve trotted out either something utterly banal or something intensely disgusting, depending on the persistence of the asker.

Which those of you who meet up with me in person during this whole New Year week might want to bear in mind: if you keep pestering me about NO REALLY what resolutions I intend to press to my bosom this year, I’m seriously going to tell you all about how I intend to resist becoming an Olympic-class nose picker this allergy season, because I tell you what, last spring (and some of the early summer, too!) I spent three or more hours per day with my index finger, this index finger right here, recently used to arrange the crudités on the platter, shoved about two inches up my sinus cavity trying to dig out the gravel I was pretty sure had gotten stuck in there.

You have been warned.

The awful truth is, I don’t have any ‘real’ resolutions. I didn’t have any last year, and I don’t have any resolutions this year, either.

I have goals. I have dreams and wishes and good things I want to do more of and bad habits that need breaking.

But they have nothing to do with January 1, 2006.

So, this year, I resolve to have no ‘real’ resolutions.

Wait.

Did I just make a Resolution…?