by Shai Nir
This weekend, we kick off the hilarity season with the introduction of a new columnist, Shai Nir!
2008 slowly approaches, rife with fresh starts and new opportunities. And what would a new year be without empty promises to yourself that you’ll forget before the end of the first week? Yes, the New Year’s resolution is a tradition among traditions1, and in honor of the coming New Year I have decided to share some of my old New Year’s Resolutions2. So here they are, along with whether or not I succeeded in achieving them:
2006: Start flossing regularly (Result: Failure).
2005: Throughout the year for better or for worse, / Speak every line in poetry or verse (Result: Success!3).
2004: Quit drinking (Result: Failure4).
2002: Start flossing regularly (Result: Failure).
2000: Stop automatically writing “1997” for the year whenever I write the date (Result: Success!).
1997: Prepare myself for the upcoming Y2K (Result: Success!).
1997: Get Princess Diana’s autograph (Result: Success!).
1996: Construct the world’s tallest unsupported sock tower (Result: Failure).
1993: Invest in the emerging technology known as the “Internet” (Result: Failure).
1991: Booboopabagoopapoopoo (Result: Goo!)
1990: Start teething, floss regularly (Result: Success! and Failure).
1982: Single-handedly win the Cold War in the name of the People’s Republic of My Bedroom (Result: Failure).
1964: Develop a viable nuclear arsenal for the State of Israel (Result: Classified).
1895: Build a time machine (Result: Success!5).
84,430,015 BCE: Give up on fixing the time machine and find some other way to get back to the 1890s (Result: Success!).
1895: Never ever EVER build a time machine (Result: Success!).
1684: Vex generations of high school and college students by creating an entirely new form of mathematics that shall be known as Calculus6 (Result: Success!).
1067: Bring the shower cap to a previously untapped market of Vikings (Result: Failure).
1 BC: Find out what the heck it is we’ve been counting down to all along (Result: Failure).
52 BCE: Conquer Gaul in the name of the Roman Empire (Result: Success!7).
780 BCE: Win a medal at the second Olympic games (Result: Failure8).
1590 BCE: Stop taking God’s name in vain, coveting my neighbor’s things, making graven images, stealing, murdering, committing adultery, bearing false witness, having other Gods before the Lord. Start honoring mother and father, keeping Sabbath day holy (Result: 6/10 Success!).
4002 BCE: Finally finish that big dinosaur bone burial prank (Result: Success!).
5232 BCE: Develop a method of recording ideas visually that will enable others to understand them without having to speak to the one who originally recorded them (Result: Success!).
And I would love to show you more but for some reason I didn’t write any of them down before then.
1 Whatever that means
2 But not this year’s, because I forgot it.
3 Though only if you count free verse.
4 Perhaps I should have specified which liquids to stop drinking.
5 Due to a shoddier understanding of physics at the time, I was not, in fact, breaking any laws.
6 Curse you, Newton and Leibniz, for taking all the credit!
7 Well, OK, this was actually Julius Caesar, but it got done anyway, so I’m counting it as a success for me.
8 Those Greeks turned out to be extremely intolerant of performance enhancers. But boy, they could party like it’s 1997! I mean 99, damn it.