2011 – The New Year
January 1st, 2011
Welcome to 2011, a fresh start. 2010 was an eventful year, both good and bad – the release of the iPad, Toyota’s recall of 5.2 million vehicles, BP’s oil spill, and most locally, the record-breaking snowfall in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Now it is time to get a fresh start, whatever your needed fresh start may be. Whether you plan to eat healthier in the coming year or invent an impenetrable personal force field, or simply forget the rough year you may have had, this is the time to do it.
I have always enjoyed New Years because I’ve always been an avid list-maker, and getting to make a justified list of the things I hope to accomplish in the coming 365 days is one of the most fun innovations. This year, I encourage you to make goals to do more than the cliche resolutions that can be found all over just by searching on Google. It seems that the resolution makers have gotten into a rut – they hope to get in shape, get a better job, go back to school, quit smoking/drinking, enjoy life more, learn something new, and/or get organized. This brings me to the conclusion that the American public is a group of uneducated, unhealthy, depressed and ignorant slobs that hope that in one year they can become a whole new species. This is certainly not true. So, while these are good goals to set and should be things that we are striving for anyway and really shouldn’t need a holiday to remind us, I encourage you this year to make goals for yourself that will spice up your life and in turn you might even end up achieving the aforementioned popular resolutions anyway.
Donate your time to charity. Bake for your neighbor or someone who deserves a little reminder that says, “Hey, I think you’re awesome.” Relive your childhood every now and then – that favorite game you used to love to play or the soup your grandmother made, take time to indulge in it and remember the good times – before you had to deal with taxes, angry teenage offspring, and overbearing mother-in-laws. Repair a broken relationship – there’s enough hate in the world already, you don’t need an unreasonable argument from ten years ago keeping you from calling up your friend when there is great news to share.
If all else fails, here are some more that are sure to spark conversation for the next 525,600 minutes or so of your life: Wear more orange. Learn 2000 Chinese characters. Hire a sidekick. Get your comma problems under control. Stop telling the same story at every get-together. And most importantly, take your dog to bathe in the river of the Nile.