New Year's Resolutions

This year I’m taking a hint from my good friend S. Moosebutt and choosing my New Year’s Resolutions more carefully, to improve my chances of success.

Therefore, in 2009, I hereby resolve to:

1. Continue my boycott of parsnips, under the assumption that they are not actually food. Indeed, I have watched Bear Grylls, Les Stroud, and Andrew Zimmern carefully for some time, and although I have seen one or more of them eat a number of awful things like grubs, scorpions, bats, live snakes, raw camel kidneys, decaying zebra, almost every kind of farmyard genitalia, and (in Bear’s case) human urine (his own) from a snake skin, I have never seen any of them eat a parsnip. Case closed.

2. Never use any grooming product that has the word “hegemony” on the label.

3. Have an occasional staggering but completely unimportant insight. For example, in the Pogo song, “Deck Us All with Boston Charlie,” if you pronounce “Charlie” with a Boston accent, it’s more like “Cholly” which then makes it a better rhyme with the third line, “Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley.” Wow. You think ol’ Walt planned it that way?

4. On average of once a week, have some uncomfortable dealing with someone who believes in their heart of hearts that it is their job to set the rest of us straight. So far this year, I think I’m good through mid-March. Just last night, I talked on the phone with someone who had an anatomical relationship with a large stick, so situated that it was miraculous that they could bend enough to tie their shoes.

5. Each and every day, be in a position to wonder which cat did it.