Every New Year’s Eve, before I put on my party shoes and hit the bowling alley, I retreat to a quiet spot under my bed, summon my will (on loan from God), and come up with a resolution. I write down this resolution and promise myself to abide by it throughout the upcoming year – no ifs, ands, or…well…no ifs or ands. Over the years, I have kept a fairly accurate record of my New Year’s resolutions. Recently I compiled a list of these resolutions from birth to the present. Here they are:

Age 1: Switch from breast milk to 1%. I didn’t last long with 1% and had to face the fact that I was an addict; it was only two weeks after New Year’s and I was back on the boob.
Age 2: Take on a second language. The language I was speaking at the time made my parents talk to me like I was an idiot. I succeeded, and cooing became my second language, while French became my first. My parents stopped talking to me like I was an idiot, but now all they wanted was advice on wine.
Age 3: Two resolutions this year: join a gym and stop soiling myself. It was a bad year. I couldn’t fill out the gym application, and I was up to 12 Pampers a day. I think it was because of my new diet of applesauce and LEGOs. That year, my parents coined the phrase “shitting bricks.”
Age 4: Have my Dr. Seuss tattoo removed. I thought it was so bitchin’ when I got it, but I had been young and foolish. Anyway, the newest fad in nursery school was Where The Wild Things Are. Seuss was sooo terrible twos.
Age 5: Quit believing in Santa Claus. I had quit three times the year before: once for three weeks, once for a month, and once for three months, but each time, due to stress, I’d go back to believing. This year I’d quit for good.
Age 6: Drive safer with my Big Wheel. In the previous year, I had crashed three Big Wheels, and my insurance rates skyrocketed.
Age 7: More leap-frogging. I just felt it was a passion I had ignored for too long. At that time, I was reading The Artist’s Way, which taught me to rekindle forgotten passions. Unfortunately, the rediscovery of my love for leap-frogging lasted only a few weeks, for when I gave up on The Artist’s Way around chapter 9, the leap-frogging, once again, took a back seat to other activities, such as running a stick along a picket fence.
Age 8: Move my money from the piggy bank into a Roth IRA. The interest earned in a piggy bank was close to nothing. I also started investing in strip-mall real estate.
Age 9: Learn how to ride a bike. My father tried to teach me by saying that riding a bike was “just like sex.” I didn’t know what sex was like, so naturally I failed to understand the metaphor and, as a result, didn’t learn how to ride a bike until months later when I saw my first porno.
Age 10: Hock my bike and buy as much porn as I could get my callused little prepubescent mitts on.
Age 11: Learn how to spit blood like Gene Simmons of KISS, which I did. That was the year I became popular with the kids who wore the trench coats. It was also the year my parents stopped loving me.
Age 12: Respect my teachers more, even if they were all dumber than I was.
Age 13: Write a book about the weird kid in my science class, Harry Potter, before someone else did. Shit.
Age 14: Commit to something other than buying 6 CDs at regular club price over the next 3 years.
Age 15: Lose my virginity.
Age 16: Lose my virginity.
Age 17: Lose my virginity.
Age 18: Never pay for sex again, because the itching was unbearable.
Age 19: Buy a huge cool-looking snake for my dorm room, so when girls came over, I could say, “Check out my huge cool-looking snake.”
Age 20: Quit smoking pot. The next day, I totally forgot that I had made this resolution (I was stoned when I made it), so I just resolved to floss more.
Age 21: Apply what I learned in college to the real world. Unfortunately, no businesses seemed to have a need for a peppy chicken mascot.
Age 22: Buckle down and focus all my energy on a career in writing, which I did immediately (immediately after spending four years in Boulder, Colorado, bussing tables and advocating hemp).
Age 23: Feel lost and alone, and have debilitating panic attacks as much as possible. I had no problem keeping that resolution.
Age 24: Come up with an epic, life-changing resolution for the following year.
Age 25: I have no account of my resolution for that year.
Age 26: Either quit doing cocaine or stop calling my parents while I was on cocaine. I compromised and quit calling my parents entirely.
Age 27: Finish something that I started, for the first time in my life. It took me the whole year, but I did it, and you better believe I framed that TV Guide crossword puzzle.
Age 28: Start believing in Santa Claus again. Everyone else had let me down.
Age 29: Spend a good three to four hours a day, every day, sitting alone, trying to figure out where all the time has gone.