January 2004 | Take back the New Year's resolution

This year, I invite you to join tiny dog in saving this ancient, joyless ritual of self-flaggelation from itself. How? You ask. By taking on a resolution that won't require you to hate yourself in the process-- you know the resolutions I mean, the kind that brisk women's magazines with their pastel-colored sexism and their condescending tight smiles unimaginatively propose that we undertake every f* year.

Mighty readers of tiny dog, join me in a pledge to reach your one neglected goal that would actually, if realized, give you a second chance at a long-ditched ambition, without having to think for a single second about any subject that's part of the traditional, soul-sucking canon of new year's self-abuse, like:

• Your status or position in the corporate world, e.g. "spruce up my resume with action verbs" or "increase industry networking to enhance personal salability." I am so sick of this shit, this hysteria about offshoring and employers holding all the cards, and your whole f***ing life revolving around the mandatory, mortality-sucking enterprise of working for cash, that I don't want any of us to do a damned thing about it this whole god-forsaken year, and just let the stock prices tumble and the paychecks implode, and the cell phones ring into the din of cold, black space.
• Your weight, exercise, or dietary habits, e.g., "I'll just lose X pounds, run screaming like a little girl from white carbs, or spend hours a day in an expensive gymnasium on the stairmaster, watching talking heads on the news without the sound." Despite popular political vehemence about the omnipresence of Jesus, our own celestial Dr. Phil of the soul, in all of our daily affairs, weight and eating habits became our fundamentalist national religion somewhere during the prior decade, or possibly before. Witness the irrational, satanic exorcism of white carbs from the diets of most weight-hysterical Americans, and the born-again implications of gastric bypass surgery ("I literally got a second chance at life") and you will know instantly what I mean. Let's all agree in 2K4 to eat well and exercise, and otherwise shut the f*** up about it, and this means you, shameless diet industry, braying women's magazines, and every other cog in the conspiracy.
• The degree to which your home, finances, and personal effects are organized and optimized, e.g., "I'll undertake celebrity spinmeister X's advice to pour hours of time and cash into bone crushingly boring pursuits in hope of having a more efficient life" as if you were some tense and greedy CEO of your own personal corporation, offshoring your free time and downsizing your interpretation of a fulfilling life to focus on a six sigma'd checkbook, or ISO-900 certified closet shelving solutions.

...or any of that other hyperefficient busybody shit most Americans overstuff their personal self-hatred hamper with at the close of every holiday season. So you ate too many macadamia chocolates, or you've never balanced your checkbook. This is not the side of you that tiny dog could give a buck and a dog* about. What we are talking about here (and she closes in, finally, upon the thesis) is selecting a goal that you once had for yourself in a former, younger moment of weakness, back when you had more free time and bigger ambitions, before you spent two and a half daily hours sitting at stoplights in the rain, or filing your vaguely worrisome, but inactionable work-emails into folders you will not revisit, or hating your thirty extra pounds, and exhuming this cadaverous dream, for another chance at life.

I have decided, for example, to be a writer. Reasons I have not been one for ten years and counting:

• I'm a person who just doesn't get to be a novelist, not in this lifetime, by order of the grand boring ass moneymaking script of American life.
• Other, better, magical people are novelists. Not me.
• Shouldn't I be researching ways to nudge ahead of the competition at the next annual corporate performance review instead of entertaining these childish ideas?

I hereby declare these reasons to be sheer asshattery, and declare myself, on the order of tiny dog, to be a novelist. I have written one, and now must:

• Write another
• Write short stories
• Enter contests. Lose and try again. Perhaps forever.

If I do the things above in 2K4... a weird thing is bound to happen. I will be writing things. Grabbing dictionary... a writer is... one that writes. People-- It's a miracle!!

What are you going to do in 2K4 that will flaunt common wisdom about you and your own limitations? It sounds corny perhaps, but after my participation in Nanowrimo this November, I know it works.

People, join me in this quest to make life less of a hassle-laden nightmare by placing your half-baked dreams back into the oven in 2K4. What is yours going to be?

Remember: If not 2K4, then 2K when?

*buck and a dog: weird saying of my brother's. Must be said rapidly, as though a single word.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.