Resolutions Gone Wrong

For those who carefully debated New Year’s resolutions and drafted strict contracts with themselves and stuck with it for a whole month, congratulations, both of you. For the rest of us whose willpower is about as strong as a string bikini in a massive wave, we have to admit our failures.

I know we all had the best of intentions for being super healthy and dieting and cutting out alcohol. You get rid of all the tempting substances and are fine with your seltzer water and kale. Celery juice is surprisingly satisfying and the 10 cups of Sleepytime tea would have completely calmed your anxiety if you weren’t up all night peeing.

But then you start to feel the cracks in your armor. You wonder as you binge-watch the Food Network if the cooking sherry wouldn’t actually be great over ice with a little kombucha. You start hunting through the freezer full of veggie burgers to find the half eaten dark chocolate bar you used for the holiday tiramisu and dip it in the apricot jam some friend’s child brought over for a snack. Then you think, well, how about oatmeal cookies? Maybe there is a healthy way to make them with coconut milk and chick peas.

You literally feel Julia Child rolling over in her grave.

Productive. The key is being productive. You go around and check behind the couch cushions and in your car seat and get all your loose change. This will make a satisfying night out at Coinstar in King Kullen. As you do not need any food because, hell, you have a box of frozen peas and a kumquat at your house, you take the receipt for your King Kullen’s ransom and buy enough toilet paper to last you until 2022.

You decide it is time to tackle all those projects around the house. There is that red wine stain you meant to get out of the carpet. Well the best way to get out a red wine stain they say, is to use white wine. But then there will be white wine in the house. But no, wait, it is not wine but carpet cleaner that you will be ingesting. That does not count surely.

These are not proud moments.

You start to read your first edition of Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” you bought as an investment in college. You put the book down after five pages and turn on “Below Deck.” Ok, next resolution is meditation. The key is to control the mind, which in turn will control the cravings. You download the meditation app so you can hit it at any moment and have a soothing voice, preferably male and Scottish, tell you how to turn off your monkey mind and descend deeply and calmly into a beta state where you do not think about your skinny jeans which don’t fit or the cost of your health insurance which just went up or whether all that money being raised on Facebook for the fires in Australia is really going to help the poor koalas or that bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau you forgot about in the closet but wonder how long it will be nouveau before it will not be nouveau and might just be old.

Well, maybe you are not a morning meditator and can try it later. Only of course to realize its symbol is the same color as your dating app and once you get on that you go down a whole other rabbit hole that is pretty much the exact opposite of meditation.

Oh, for goodness sake, you tell yourself, just go for a walk. It is then that you bump into your friend looking skinny and healthy and bright and clear with no self-loathing. “How are your resolutions going?” she asks. “I can’t tell you as my resolution is to give up being friends with perfect people.”

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