By Paul Preston
With the turning of the seasons and another chance to see a baby in a sash heartlessly depose an old man in a sash, many of you will follow the ancient tradition of making a New Year's Resolution, or, as it is called in many southeastern dialects, "kidding yourself." To help you brace for the shock of being unable to exceed your already depressing standards, BoUNCe has devised a simple chart explaining how unreasonable some popular resolutions are. Resolution reasonability is based on a scale from 0 to 4, 0 being something you could do without even knowing you've done it and 4 being something even Ernest Hemingway couldn't do, like quitting drinking or dying a natural death.
- Learn an art style/language/bloodsport; 2. Yes, it can be done, and yes, you do have the capacity to accomplish this, and yes, it would be great if you did. The thing is, statistically there's a one in five chance that you'll actually go through with it. Beware your attention span.
- Lose weight; 2. Normally, losing weight only requires you to exhibit the kind of run-of-the-mill restraint and discipline that generally keeps people from being overweight to begin with. If you could do it, you probably already would've, but it's never to late for a Richard Simmons rescue.
- Write a book; 3. I know, writing pages of nonsense on end is such a rush, but let me save you some time on failing at this. You know when you're writing and you think, "hey, this is pretty good. I bet people want to read this"? Go online, do a search for any major movie characters from the past few years, and know that the 23,000 word erotic fanfic about Harry Potter impregnating Legolas was written by a guy thinking that exact same thing.
- Become Vegetarian; 1. This hardly constitutes a real change of lifestyle. If you have an actual reason to go veggie, being unable to choose french fries instead of a hot dog really kinda makes you seem weak willed.
- Get to know myself; 0. Okay, you just lost a lot of my respect. Most people can manage this with, like, 20 minutes of thinking hard. How little do I respect this one? The SMARTEST people who choose this are the ones who know to use it as an excuse to take an expensive vacation.
- Conquer the world/ become a billionaire/ rally an army of incredibly hot women at your command; 4. Here's what you should know; James Bond villains have funding like only Hollywood would think up, Bill Gates has a circle in hell reserved specifically for him, and Hugh Hefner is the Second Coming of Lord Christ Himself. Are you Jesus 2.0? Yeah, didn't think so, and you never will be.
- Learn guitar; 2. I can take this down to a 0.5 for you right now: Hold your left and middle index fingers together on your left hand. Now press them against the second and third thickest strings really hard, between those second and third little bars on the neck of the guitar. Strum the strings. Get laid.