New Year, Old You!

Confession: reading "New Year, New Me!" quotes makes me want to repeatedly get into unmarked vans and hope for not the best. That's right, friends: I have emerged from my two month hiatus of "has she finally eaten herself to death?" just in time to remind you that three years ago, you probably promised yourself that January would be the month you finally commit to eating nothing but lemon-water and sad memories. After day three, you probably fainted and, as your limp body rolled down the escalator like a freshly defrosted turkey, you made a mental note to stop the madness.  Two years ago, you likely made a resolution to be more sociable, finally genuinely accepting that Facebook party invitation from that guy who sends out like eighty a week. You know, that guy - the one you can't remember adding on Facebook. The guy named DJ SteezeOnWheeze, where SteezeOnWheeze was somehow allowed as a last name, and every second word is capitalized, and you want to remove him from your friends list, but you're not sure how you know him and he might turn out to be someone important so you keep him on just in case. This is the guy who 'spins' 'tracks' at that really cool place between the Shawarma Emporium and a laundromat for the homeless, and two years ago, it was time to make a change in your life so you said yes to his next event. The new sociable you paid the $8 to get into that party, bopped your head to those hot-off-the-Serbian-press mashups of Adele and Cotton-eye Joe while dreaming about the $1.49 menu at McDonald's, and later went home unfriending Mr.Steez once and for all. What was wrong with staying home to marathon-watch the Kardashians, anyway?

And remember last year? You said you'd read more, didn't you? You said you'd finish Anna Karenina, but the long words made you want to take lots of naps. You switched to The Secret, but it felt like there were too many secrets as it was. You picked up Garfield Does Sunday, but the phone rang, and you ended up promising yourself that you'd set aside five minutes a day to catch up on that comic with the guy with the huge nose but like, comics are getting so philosophical these days and newspapers are outdated anyway.  Why, dear resolution-makers, would this year be any different? And why try to be a 'new' you anyway? What's wrong with the old you? Do you just not like the old you? What if that's all you needed to change? Look, I'm being a hypocrite here, because I make resolutions left, right and centre. But I stick to them. Why? Because I'm fucking perfect and motivated and disciplined, and also I'm lying because the only time I actually stuck to them was when I went on a raw diet for a month and the time I got so fat I literally had to go on a 30 diet of cheese and meat for people who have zero ambition. Every other year, I've made goals to be more tanned, less hairy, less of an idiot, more of a shopper, less poor, more fragrant, less pizza, more velvet coat hangers. I haven't changed, but I sure have spent a ton of weeks actively hating myself for not having stuck to those goals. Booooring.

My suggestion to you, as we plunge into what will certainly be another year of Oh My God, is to stay exactly as you are. And, if you want to eat a salad here and there, that's cool. If you catch a headline in a newspaper article that makes you wanna learn more about Bulgaria and suddenly you're worldly and kinda look like George Clooney's wife by consequence, great. But lets stop with the all-encompassing promises to radically change ourselves. We've put in so many years building who we are now - lets honour those people, as hairy as those people may be.

I hope you all ate so much Christmas food you considered barfing to make space for more. I hope someone's cat broke their glass ornament, and someone said "If I have to watch Elf one more time, I swear..." and that at least one person sang the Mariah Carey song that is basically the one definitive song of the holidays.

I hope you remembered to love yourselves despite the meat sweats, and that you continue to love yourselves into 2016, because really, New Year, Old You. And that person is awesome.

Also yesterday I fell out of a bus.