Strangely Naked

Did you do it? Did you accomplish everything you set out to do in 2015? Lose that 10 pounds? Hunt an endangered lion (wut up, my dentist readers!)? Hot box a Klan member’s hood? Evade prosecution for mudering a child and justify it on national television as a “whoopsie”? Invade a neighboring country without repercussions? Paint yourself orange and chew on a lemon while spouting unsupportable nonsense on a national stage leaving a lazy and sensationalistic media insatiable for more? Maybe you just learned how to knit?

If you didn’t get to everything you hoped to do in 2015, don’t be so hard on yourself. No one manages to perfectly construct the utopian dreamscape conjured by our hyperbolic new year optimism. Think of and aggrandize your most meagre of exploits. Reading this? Consider 2015 dominated because you “read more and engaged with more diverse opinions this past year.” Good job!

If you’re not feeling great about your progression as a person or contributions as a citizen of the world, you may just need a better mental spin doctor (and not the weird post-hippies who sang “Two Princes” and who now presumably give hacky sack lessons somewhere outside of Portland). That’s where I come in to help.

Wanted to lose weight but actually gained a couple of lbs instead? You spent doublet-aught-15 “bulking up” for when you inevitably power lift in twomp-16. (You have to put a dumb spin on the year to sound more confident in credible in your defiance of resolution shortcomings.)

Determined to have written a book by this point? Maybe instead, in the course of writing said book you realized a greater truth: adding to the echo chamber, the tsunami of literary choices, would only detract and distract from the literary classics that do so much toward explaining the human experience. Who are we to presume to have insight above those of Emerson, Morrison, Thoreau, Bronte, Smith (the Smith of your choice), Toole, Du Bois, etc.? Instead, you/I chose to bask in the genius of those who came before. Call it research, call it consideration (no one wants to be pestered to read a friend’s ebook about psychic space vampires), call it a prolapsed editing process, but surely do not call it a failure of determination! At the very least, you have written more than a novel’s worth of brilliant word stew in email form and all you’re waiting to do is compile and edit your bon mots into the next cascade of decadence that belies the participation in the arrogantly named First World society.

Perchance you declared you would volunteer more but instead dedicated your free time to watching terrible movies for fun or writing fart jokes on the internet. I can’t help you there, you’re a terrible person. Which just means you’re setting yourself up for a great redemption story in 2016!

Regardless–Sorry, irregardless (my resolution was to make grammarians feel more needed and contribute to their ego by giving them the exhilarating rush of moral superiority that comes from correcting others) of how your 2015 went, don’t worry, a new arbitrary starting point is coming up. In just a few days, you’ll get to make yourself a whole new list of unrealistic goals to fail! And I’ll be right here to aid in your righteous self-justification for not advancing your personal narrative.

Happy New Year!