20 Generic New Year’s Resolutions for 2013

1. See 2012.  Ditto, and this time, mean it.
2. Write fewer words and say more with them.
3. Go to bed earlier and more often.  In some cases, stay there as long as possible.
4. Stop caring about your career and start caring most about getting something done.
5. It’s a free country.  Say what you want about it.  I’ll think what I want about what you said.  Neither of us will do

   

   anything about it other than listen or respond coherently.

6. Less anger, more effort.  (For a significant portion of you:  GET HELP)
7. Let’s shorten election cycles to three weeks, and allow representatives to have a career but after two terms you have to take one off and get a real job, and that does NOT include lobbying.  Lobbyists are required to clean the offices of the people they oppose and babysit their children.
8. Find all the ways to work on something in common, and if there’s time left over we can accuse, caricature, spin and lie about each other.
9. Read books at nine times the rate of watching cable news—any of it.
10. Go to church, synagogue, mosque and pray for real peace, demand it, work for it and embody it where you are.
11. Help the people next door and in the town where you are.  Get to know them first if possible.
12. Bathe daily.  This will change the entire country for the good.
13. Clean up after ourselves.
14. Go through 2013 without the following sins: condescension, gossip, apathy, entitlement,  public annoyance or appearing on a reality TV show.  For those already on reality television, especially any show with the word “housewife” on it, you must appear a minimum of five times with Momma and Honey Boo-Boo in ordinary clothes and without makeup or a microphone.
15. Think about where your food comes from.  Be glad, eat well, take care of your body.  It’s the only one we get.
16. Bring troops home as soon as possible, thank them by helping them, their families and especially those who are wounded.  The rest of us can stop living as though service is something only volunteers do.  Give something back if you don’t serve in the military.
17. If you want it, pay for it.  It’s a pretty simple concept.  To our leaders—if you will simply tell us the truth and why it will make it better, we might surprise you.  That can you keep kicking down the road is ours.
18. Bring back Twinkies.  We need them.  Okay, we want them.
19. Develop a flu shot for the current year’s flu.  No one seems to ever get last year’s flu.
20. The arts are the only thing that will keep us from going insane.  A musical instrument, paintbrush, pencil, keyboard or whittling knife in every household.  More band programs, art classes, poetry, fly-fishing, painting, storytelling, songwriting and acting.  Less of the rest of it.

Happy New Year!  That’s an IMPERATIVE not a SUBJUNCTIVE!  Thanks to all of you for reading my ramblings.  May this year bring you paid bills, happy kids, dogs and cats, and good friends.  I’m headed to the annual picker’s party I go to at Rob and Kathy’s house.  Music, food, friends.  Can’t beat it.

//