Saturday, December 30, 2006

The List

I am formally lodging a complaint with the Powers That Be about New Years Resolutions Lists.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that those lists are great. I used to make one of them every year myself. I believe that I started this practice when I was in Therapy. That in and of itself probably says a whole lot about my List.

But an even greater problem with The List other than my general neurotic state, which The List quite clearly pointed out, was that the older I got, the longer The List got.

Each year like clockwork I would sit down and look at last years List and figure out where in the grand scheme of things I stood. And somehow, no matter how many of those things on The List that I had accomplished, there were still one or two things that I had just never quite gotten around to. So of course, they went onto the NEXT years List.

Now I’m no mathematical whiz, but even I can see that over the years The List will ultimately seem to grow at an alarming rate. And to be perfectly honest, having attained the ripe old age of 44, I now find the length of The List positively exhausting just to read. These days looking at The List just makes me want to lie down with a cold rag on my forehead and take a nap.

And lets face it. The List is essentially a list of our shortcomings. You are putting in writing all the messed up, stupid things that you did that year. It’s like that tag on the hairdryer that says “Do Not Use While In Shower”. You KNOW that someone HAD to have done this for it to be on The List in the first place!

So for the sake of all of us that bathe with electrical appliances and never get everything on The List done, I am formally boycotting The List.

And that’s going right up there at the top, at #1.

3 comments:

Dagny said...

I never do the list because I've always figured that if one really wants to change something, one should not have to wait until the beginning of the year to make that decision. One should be able to make the necessary changes at anytime during the year.

Romance said...

my only list item is to subscribe to more magazines... it has been the only thing for many years and I always have great reading material - if not and odd assortment....

Calamity Jen said...

I read your post and have only this to say: Amen!