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“A world in white gets underway/

I want to be with you/

Be with you night and day/

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.”

-Bono, humanitarian and Certified Badass

            I’m really not a big fan of these society-mandated “NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS,” if only for the fact that I can’t seem to stick to them for more than two months after their hurried initiation. Attribute it to my two-year-old attention span or my consistent belief that I am already perfect and need to change nothing about myself if you must, but making secret little promises to work out or make better grades has never really appealed to me.

            I guess I’m just very comfortable with my life as it already is: collecting over-priced comic books, making inappropriate jokes, eating unhealthy quantities of equally unhealthy food. I could have relatively easily predicted my life at the end of last year’s bitterly cold December, with me still obsessed with Star Wars, still singing to the steering wheel along with the radio, and still writing crammed little pieces of poetry into crammed little notebooks.

            This all being said, there are a few things that I would like to accomplish in the next twelve months. And so I would like to introduce:

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth-and-Fourteenth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: A new year can inspire both hope in the future, and disappointment in the past. Unless you are me, in which case you just are excited to be alive, and don’t even believe in the Gregorian calendar. That being said, this next “year” I swear I will:

                                                                       

·      1. Figure out where I stand politically: I assume that I am conservative, if only for the fact that I grew up that way. But I need to figure out why I believe what I do, having not paid enough (or any) attention in Government class (apologies to my wonderful teacher.) I hope to all that is holy that I’m not liberal.

·      2. Write a book: Why the hell not?

·      3. Continue to play with toys: I have copied this resolution from a scrap of paragraph in my writing journal. This really means that I will be “buying toys in mint condition and never opening them, storing them in my closet back home where they will slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.”

·      4. Actually learning how to play guitar and harmonica: No more of this basic chord crap. Now that I know how to relatively play these instruments, I might as well get good at it.

·      5. Read more: I still haven’t finished the book that I started on the first day of the semester. As a self-proclaimed “avid reader”, I really don’t do any reading at all. My latest discovery is historical memoirs, so hopefully that both helps me boost my daily literary patterns, and helps me figure out 1.

·      6. Stop cursing: Nah...fuck it.

·      7. Stop drinking so much Mountain Dew: More generally, eating healthier because, let’s be honest, relying on Easy-Mac, Oreos, and Gatorade as my three main sources of sustenance won’t be doing miracles for my physique in the long run.

            This year I am most thankful for both the friends I have made in BIGCOLLEGETOWN and the friends that I have held onto and gotten even closer to here back home. Every year, I find myself looking back and realizing how much I’ve matured and grown as a person, which I can only attribute to the influence of those around me. And, whether other people can tell or not, I have been improving in leaps and bounds throughout the past few years. But I can mature only up to a point: everything past acting like a ten-year-old is no fun at all.

            So now let’s take this 365 days of white to see if my inner ten-year-old let’s me actually finish these seven NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS.