In case you haven’t yet started counting down, there are only 353 days left in the new year. That means you only have 353 days left to break your New Year’s resolutions and fail to make yourself a slightly less crappy person.

Normally, I do not consider myself to be a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. Whereas other people see the start of a new year to be a symbolic dawn on a golden age of losing weight and drinking less, to me January first simply marks the start of the month-or-so-long period where I write the wrong date on all my checks.

So although I usually don’t resolve to better myself, this year I decided to write some resolutions. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m perfect in every way possible and resolving to change myself would be like trying to improve the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by adding track lighting.

However, my one resolution this year was to not write any bad columns, and I didn’t want to break it so soon by doing my original idea and writing a column about how wacky the concept of interim classes is. I mean, this is still going to a bad column, but at least it will also be ironic. Therefore, I resolve to. . .

• Watch more television. I believe this one is self-explanatory. I feel I am not nearly as well informed as I should be and I will remedy this by irradiating my eyeballs from the warm glow of the idiot box, and there is nothing about that concept which I don’t think will improve me as a person.

  
  

• Get seriously injured for all the pity I’d receive. Let me explain: due to my being a bubble boy up until the time my parents found out that puberty isn’t contagious and I was going to go through it no matter how hard they tried to prevent it, I was able to go most of my life without enduring any major injuries save for a few broken toes.

  However, this past year I sprained my ankle so badly that it turned black, and was delighted to discover how much attention and pity I received from people once they thought my foot was going to fall off. Do you realize how much tail I could get if my sternum was completely crushed and collapsed in on itself? Or how popular I would be if I were covered in third-degree burns? Cha-ching!

  
  

• Kick my cough syrup addiction. It’s not so much that I like the trippy drugs in cough syrup; I just really, really hate coughing. When I say I need my fix, I’m talking about the insatiable desire to have a throat so clear and free of phlegm that the inside of my throat looks like a fire pole.

  And as such, as I’m not so concerned with a chemical dependency as I am with the fear that my throat will be devoid of all friction and my tongue will just slide down my esophagus.

  
  

• Beat up a celebrity. Or if I can’t muscle my way past Sean Penn’s or Carrot Top’s bodyguards, then I at least want to kick an Amish person’s ass. Those Amish think they know everything and holy crap it makes me so mad! (note to any Amish readers who might be offended: why aren’t you shunning technology? Don’t you know what Amish means?)

  
  

• Start smoking. Everybody makes such a great big to-do about wanting to stop smoking, but I can see a lot of benefits that come with picking up the habit. For example, since smoking is outlawed inside most buildings, smokers are constantly exposed to fresh air and the great outdoors.

  Plus, since smokers tend to congregate towards those monolithic ashtrays, they get to interact socially with people with similar interests, like smoking. And in addition to touring Flavor Country (Flavor Country a trademark of Phillip Morris, all rights reserved), which is someplace I’ve always wanted to visit because of the eclectic gift shops and charming diners there, I’ve always thought it would be nice to get mouth cancer and die before I get too senile for my own good.

  
  

• End world hunger. See, the point of this resolution is that if I’m going to fail all my New Year’s resolutions, I at least want to fail them because I didn’t get around to doing them, not because I resolved not to do something that I’m going to do anyway.

  If I resolve to lose weight then it looks really bad when I start eating with a funnel before February. However, if I resolve to do something like feed all the starving children of the world then it doesn’t look all that bad when it doesn’t get done.