New Year’s Day always brings an unparalleled opportunity to start fresh and turn your life around. Especially if you feel, as I do, that your life has recently gotten turned upside down and backwards, this might be a great time to quit moping and hiding in bed with a dog-eared copy of Project 2025 and make some mood-changing New Year’s resolutions. Here are mine:
• I will not be goaded into obsessing over Donald Trump. I will ignore all the headlines in the news about how he’s done something so blatantly illegal, immoral or unprecedented that I feel it is my duty as a citizen, and voyeur of train wrecks and car crashes, to find out more about it. I will continue to ignore all these headlines unless he starts WWIII or until newspapers cease to exist, whichever comes first.
• If I’m ever going to actually lose weight, I won’t start thinking about taking a second helping of lasagna or devil’s food cake until I’ve completely eaten the first helping, and have sat still, without chewing, swallowing, or licking my lips for at least one minute. Okay, maybe only five seconds if I see it’s the last piece of cake and my cousin Big Rudy is already trying to maneuver his enormous paw to have at it.
• Walk 10,000 steps every day. Yes, even if it’s only walking 10 steps to the kitchen 1000 times to see what’s in the refrigerator.
• Call my relatives regularly while I still have the chance. For example, now that he’s gone to the great beyond, one of my great regrets in life is the year that I got so mad at my brother that I stopped seeing him entirely, instead of calling him four or five times a day to remind him of what a butthead I thought he really was.
• Make a budget and stick to it. Unless that Martin guitar I saw at the music shop goes on sale because the owner needs to raise quick cash to bail out the bass player in his band again.
• This is the year that I will finally get organized. I’ve hired an organizer that lost her regular gig due to her successful Ohio campaign to legalize having unsecured dogs in the backseat of your car. (Although my dog still prefers to wear her seatbelt.) My organizer has already started working on me but so far my desk is still a mess, my drawers and closets are an impossible tangle of misplaced items, and my freezer is still full of mislabeled food that I’ll probably never risk eating. However, she has gotten me started on a regular schedule of marching, picketing, making protest signs, boycotting against fossil fuels and non-union underwear, and gathering signatures for an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would require the Pentagon to investigate whether ticks have been weaponized against U.S. citizens (and dogs.)
• I will travel more, preferably to countries outside the U.S. who look favorably on people fleeing orange megalomaniac wanna-be dictators. But first I need to renew my passport. But first I need to find my passport. Which I will try to do after I’m done marching, making protest signs, etc. etc.
• I will work harder to make sure to get a good night’s sleep. I will do this by meditating for fifteen minutes before bedtime, instead of doomscrolling all the social media and news sites for updates on the latest 100 year flood, toxic waste spill or White House dumpster fire and rat infestation.
• I will try to move outside my comfort zone by learning a new skill like working with my grandsons to take every single pillow, couch cushion, folding chair and sheet in the house to build a maze and then navigating to the center where the holy grail is hidden: Four apple juice boxes and an unopened (or at least not entirely eaten) bag of potato chips.
• In 2025 I vow to save more. OK, maybe not money, because I know how hard that is. But I could save more other things. I will save more plastic bags, because why put them in the landfill when we still have several only half-filled drawers that I could stuff more bags into. Also, I will save more rubber bands, because no matter how many I save I never seem to be able to find one when I need one. (Maybe my organizer can help me on this one, after we finish petitioning).
• Despite all the crazy things that have been happening and will no doubt continue to happen I will stay positive. Focusing on the negative will only lead to discouragement, sadness, and probably an overindulgence in depressing, whiny country music singers. So, yes, I will be positive! I’m positive he’s nuts. I’m positive he will eventually be wearing an orange jumpsuit, (or maybe an orange straitjacket) to go with his orange makeup. I’m positive that whatever it is he tries to do he will inevitably screw up. And I’m absolutely positive that every one of his current flunkies will eventually be sorry they ever met him when he ultimately throws them under the figurative (or in some cases literal) orange bus.
Best wishes to all our readers for a very Happy (and increasingly funny) New Year!
Read the January / February 2025 Issue Online
