Dave on New Year’s Resolutions

New Year’s Day is a day where we cast aside all the problems and worries that have plagued us during the year that has just gone, and likewise reflect on all the positive things that we have managed to achieve during that time as well.  It also gives people sufficient reason to party, sing songs and be merry, dance like a one-legged epileptic sparrow on an electric fence, and for the young and alcohol challenged, a great chance to go out and paint the town in peas and carrots.  And of course, make our New Year’s resolutions, where we say things like, I’m going to buff up and look like a stud, or for the aforementioned booze abusing young whipper-snappers, “I’ll never drink again.”

But New Year’s resolutions are seemingly always broken.  Well, as far as I am concerned anyway.  I never actually end up adhering to them.  For instance, this New Year’s Day, I made the resolution to go to the gym, start eating less and start moving more.  But if past experience is anything to go by, by this time next year, I will most likely be wearing jeans that were custom made in a tarpaulin factory in Macau and be classified as a dwarf planet by the Royal Astronomical Society.  By the following year, I will still be spouting the same old rhetoric that I’ve rambled on about since year zip and by then will have expanded beyond the Oort cloud and subsequently collapsed under my own mass into a black hole by 2020.

Of course, keeping to such resolutions can sometimes be easier said than done – Gym membership is often exorbitantly expensive.  For over one grand a year, you should expect yourself to be built like a Russian war memorial.  Right now, I look like I’m expecting quintuplets, so I would be expecting to come out at the end of the contract looking like Hulk Hogan.  At the price most gyms charge, however, I would ask for the following to be included into the contract – “If bullets don’t bounce off me, and I survive the ordeal, I’m taking you to Fair Go.”

So, perhaps it is time to start putting money where my mouth is, rather than food.  And I should start moving a bit more.  And I don’t just mean going to the bathroom, either.   Unless this bathroom happens to be on Stewart Island.