Happy New Year, Ya Filthy Animals

Well, hello there, friends. Happy New Year!

Now, I’m going to choose my next words carefully. I don’t want to make any grand statements I’ll regret due to my superstitious upbringing and core beliefs that any positive or optimistic observations will result in swift and poignantly cruel cosmic retaliation. But, ah, what the hell. It feels like 2023 could be a . . . year! Twelve months, 52 weeks, four seasons — the whole Megillah! Phew, that felt good. I mean, who knows? It might even be kind of maybe a little bit arguably less horrible in some (but not all) ways than other recent years that shall remain nameless.

Shit. Now I’ve done it. Kinehora ptoo ptoo ptoo. Now you have to spit three times and apologize and say something cynical or your whole year will be ruined. Pass it on.

The first week of each year always invites quite the celebrity red carpet of emotions for me. Shame naturally leads the procession, with all the regrets of the previous year and all the failings I will surely realize in the coming months. Why did I drink so much? When will I learn to grow up and order the goddamn branzino? Why didn’t I do more (any) journaling last year or any other year of my life? Where the hell do I put all these unopened jars of novelty sprinkles I keep buying for seasonal cookies that we never have the time to bake? Why don’t we have any time to bake?! But wait! Here comes Hopefulness sashaying in, and perhaps even a glimpse of — could it be her? Yes! It’s Resolve, looking handsome as ever. I will write more! I will eat healthy and exercise regularly and hydrate properly and take probiotics and fit into my jeans again! I will stop buying chicken breasts and defrost the ones I already have! I will drink slightly less on certain weekdays! I will throw out the sprinkles! Then of course, in short order, those feelings are followed by an encore from Shame, this time accompanied by her escort, Guilt, on whose heels comes Indignation and, finally, my old pal Complacency. She’s a bit of a pill, sure. What can I say? She gets me.

But now it’s January 3rd 4th 5th, which means Shame has already made her first cameo (what else is New Year’s Day good for?) and it’s time to focus on the middle guys. New year, new me. Or to be more accurate, the exact same aspirational version of the new me whom I’ve been envisioning for the past dozen or so years, but a brand spanking new opportunity to realize her. One of these Januaries it might actually happen, right? Shut up.

Except that January is the worst. It’s like winter isn’t bad enough without having to feel dumb and fat and lazy in addition to cold and seasonally affected. We should call it what it is:

• Why are you lying you lying liar-ary
• Do you think I’m stupid-ary
• Do you think you’re better than me-ary
• Frozen Expanse of Broken Promises
• Fake Vegan Awareness Month

Do you want to know something? I have written and re-written the first three sentences of this very post every year since I began blogging (which is a lot longer than you may think). I make a resolution to write more regularly and then I muse, “what better way to begin this journey of self-improvement than with an essay on how New Year’s resolutions are actually so much bullshit?” And then because they are precisely bullshit, I never do it and the sentences live as a note in my phone which I will delete and rewrite in approximately 12 months. And here we are again. But wait, what’s happening? Am I doing it? Are you reading this? Have I . . . written it? Well, I’ll be.

Unfortunately, we all know well that New Year’s resolutions are basically nothing more than another retail season (Fix Your Terrible Self with Our Help!) followed by a subsequent retail season (Love Your Terrible Self with Our Sweatpants!). Why can’t we resist the call to set ourselves up for crushing defeat? I’ve always thought it made more sense to make personal resolutions on one’s birthday, which is a thing I’ve also never done. It’s not that people can’t change or improve, it’s just that we prefer not to. Opening a new desk calendar can feel like a fresh beginning, but like most things in my kitchen it all-too-quickly gets a little stale.

So what am I proposing? I don’t know, quit pressuring me. Isn’t it enough that I’ve made it to 700 words when I normally max out at a voice text to myself while I’m sitting on the toilet? Okay, okay, I’ve got it. I’ve got it! Thoughts are forming, and here they are: let’s half-ass it. On purpose. A whole, two-cheeked half-assing.

Stay with me. We ease into the piping hot cauldron of self-improvement goals. We dip a toe, then another, then we go in up to our ankles. Order one branzino, but know that next time you can get that pasta, honey. Take a walk, then take a nap. Write/paint/make/cook/organize a thing, then celebrate with a glass of wine or two. All this inspirational guilt-provocation about it taking however long to form a new habit is helpful context, I suppose, but it bypasses the hard part. We’re supposed to just tough it out with little more than our dubious internal resources and the promise that at the end of a month we’ll be new, better, higher functioning people finally. For real this time. Pssht. As my mother pointedly said a hundred million times over the course of my childhood, “don’t be so naive.”

Let’s aim higher by aiming low. I didn’t grow out of those jeans in a month, ya know what I mean? I’m not a particularly patient person, but maybe it won’t feel so painstaking if the new is mixed in more seamlessly with the old. It’s like how you wean babies off of breastfeeding and bottles so they hardly notice what’s happening. Or how you take teeny tiny steps into the ocean before you can get in and swim and enjoy it and forget about the fact that you’re likely about to get eaten by a sea monster.

Or to use a more viscerally descriptive metaphor, it’s like tempering an egg before you add it to a warm sauce. First, you must get the egg to room temperature, and then you have to mix a little of the heated sauce into the egg before gradually stirring the newly warmed egg back into the hot pan. And if you go too fast and just throw everything together, the egg will seize up in the heat and scramble and curdle and you wind up with a lumpy hot garbage mess instead of carbonara and you need to throw it out and start over or just give up and order in again, which is another thing I’ve promised myself I’ll do less often. You feel me?

So my new and only resolution is to avoid being a scrambled, lumpy, hot garbage mess this month in the hopes of being carbonara this year. (Also, eating some carbonara). Join me in my half-assed resolution revolution! Together we can be sort of medium-okay, and that’s just fine, probably.