10 New Year's Resolutions You Can Break Without Feeling Guilty

By John McDonnell

Most of us start the new year with a lot of big plans for changing our lives, but we lose momentum around January 6 and by the end of the month our resolutions are a distant memory -- and that’s when the guilt starts.

Here is a list of resolutions for people who are good at breaking resolutions. They’re resolutions that you won’t feel guilty about breaking; in fact, you should feel terrific about breaking these ones.

1. Get less sleep. Who needs sleep? It’s a waste of time, and we could spend that time on video games, social networking, email, TV, and any of a dozen other activities that  give us the buzz that makes us forget how tired we are. Besides, if we needed so much sleep anyway, why did God create caffeine?
2. Eat more fast food. Vegetables are boring. Just pound down another burger, fries, and supersize soda and let your digestive system handle the problem of trying to get something nutritious out of all that junk.
3. Avoid exercise at all costs. There is absolutely no reason to walk when you can get in a car and ride somewhere, even if it’s to the end of the driveway to pick up the mail. Gym memberships are expensive, and all those sweaty bodies are no fun to be around.
4. Do not talk to people unless absolutely necessary. People are stupid and they have nothing interesting to say. There is no point in interacting with them unless you have a screen in front of you.
5. Spend more time online. The real world is a place where there are rainy days, demanding bosses, crabby co-workers, and family members who expect things from you just because you’re related to them. It’s much more fun to live in the virtual world where you can be a superhero or hot babe, and conquer worlds with the click of a mouse. Of course, it’s all fantasy, but what’s wrong with that?
6. Do not ever read anything longer than a text message again. What’s the point of books and newspapers anyway? All those words, and really, what are they saying? Stupid stuff about politics and history, science, morality. And poetry -- what’s up with that? Why can’t those people just say what they mean?
7. Run your credit card up to the max. There are so many shiny toys to buy, and if you have a credit card why not use it? Saving money is for sissies. When the credit card bill comes in pay the minimum amount, because, hey, you need the extra money to buy more stuff.
8. Do not practice random acts of kindness. There is no reason to smile at strangers, compliment your co-workers, pat someone on the back, or do anything that might bring happiness to someone’s life. People are just obstacles in your way each day, and it’s a waste of time to take your headphones off and engage with them.
9. Do not have a positive attitude. Life sucks and there is no reason to pretty it up. If something bad can happen it will; that’s just keeping it real.
10.  Do not ever ask Big Questions. There’s too much manufactured excitement every minute of the day to ask questions like: Why am I here? What am I doing with my life? Am I being the best that I can be? Those kind of questions take too much time off the merry-go-round to answer, and it’s easier to just flit from one attention-grabbing item to the next as the day goes by.

There you have it, ten New Year’s resolutions that you can break without feeling guilty. In fact,if you break even one of these resolutions, you can look back next December 31 and figure you had a pretty good year.

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The "Love Handle" Approach To Language

By John McDonnell

If you’ve ever called the fat around your waist “love handles” or ever said a friend was “downsized” when he was fired, you’ve used euphemisms. We all do it, according to Ralph Keyes, author of “Euphemania: Our Love Affair With Euphemisms”. I heard Ralph interviewed on NPR the other day, and I want to buy his book because I love the way we humans try to pretty up the unpleasant things in our lives by using fancy words for them.

I have a graduate degree in English, so I’ve read a lot of poetry, and I’m on good terms with simile and metaphor and the way language can be used to convey reality in many creative ways. I love euphemisms because they show verbal creativity and humor (although there’s a fair bit of hypocrisy in there too).

Like saying “powder room” for toilet.

Or “misspeak” for lie.

Or how about “correctional facility” for prison? “Big-boned” or “full-figured” for fat?

The military is famous for its euphemisms. Here are a few:

“wet work” for assassination;

“collateral damage” for civilian deaths;

“friendly fire” for soldiers killed by their own comrades;

and “soft targets” for humans.

One of my favorite military euphemisms is, “strategic movement to the rear” for retreat.

Corporations can be every bit as euphemistic as the military, though. Besides “downsizing”, modern corporate speak has given us “called on the carpet” for being disciplined, “outsourcing” for sending work abroad, “a market correction” for a drastic plunge in stock prices, a “merger” for a corporate takeover, “negative cash flow” for losing money, and “right-sizing” for laying people off. Actually, the list of corporate euphemisms for laying off employees would take up more space than the Bible.

And then there are the so-called dirty words. George Carlin had a famous comedy routine about the “Seven Dirty Words” you couldn’t say on the air in the U.S. These are words that used to be taboo in polite company, so people would use euphemisms for them. Of course, today the taboos are breaking down, and you can hear many of the Seven Dirty Words on TV and radio every day.

Carlin called euphemisms “soft language”. He didn’t like them, because he thought that euphemisms were an attempt to deny reality. He had a whole riff on why “shell shock” is a better term than “post-traumatic stress disorder”, because it’s “simple, honest, direct” language.

It’s true that we sometimes use euphemisms to avoid naming unpleasant things. We soften the reality with a euphemism so we don’t have to think about the nasty stuff underneath.

As long as humans exist, however, the situation won’t change. We have an innate ability to see fish eggs and call it caviar, or cow dung and. . . well, you get the idea.

What’s your favorite euphemism?

The Jersey Boys And Me

By John McDonnell

I went to see Jersey Boys last weekend, and it put me in my Birthday Funk.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the show. It’s a terrific show, about Franki Valli and the Four Seasons, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

It’s just that the Four Seasons’ music was the background for a lot of my youth, and hearing all those great old songs like “Walk Like A Man”, “Sherry”, “Dawn", “Rag Doll”, and others made me realize how long it’s been since I was a teenager.

And with a birthday coming in a few days, that time of my life is fast disappearing into the rearview mirror.

This is an annual event for me, a one-day funk that comes a week before my birthday. It’s like a 24-hour emotional virus, and when my birthday comes I’m happy again, but for that one day a gray cloud appears and spreads shadows over my thoughts.

For that one day I look at my life and see only the broken dreams, missed opportunities, lost chances, all the things I should have done or could have done, the times when I should have said or done something that -- drumroll here -- Would Have Made Everything Different.

I run the movie of my life and stop it at critical moments, then sit there in the darkened theater of my mind and say, “Do you remember this, John? The time when you didn’t work hard enough/speak up/follow your heart/know your priorities/play by the rules/grab for the gusto or any of a hundred other things that you should have done but didn’t? How do you think your life might have turned out if you’d acted differently back then? Usually, the answer is, “You would have been a smashing success and everything you touched would be golden. Forever.”

It’s like in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when the Ghost of Christmas Past comes and harangues old Scrooge with thoughts of what his life could have been if he’d taken a different path.

Jersey Boys spurred some of this thinking because along with those great old songs is a story of four boys from the hardscrabble part of New Jersey who started out with a dream of making it big in the music business in the 1950s, and after a lot of struggle and hard work, they made it to the top. They had the same dreams as millions of other young people of their own or any generation, but the difference is they made their dreams come true.

It’s inspirational, but it also makes anyone facing a birthday after the age of 40 wonder, “Could that have been me?”. When you’re in your 20s you can still tell yourself you’re laying the groundwork to achieve your youthful dreams. In your 30s reality is starting to intrude, but you think, “I’m just a late bloomer. I’ll come into my own any day now.”

When 40 rolls around you start looking up biographies of people, like Colonel Sanders, who became successful in middle age or later. When you get past 50, though, the “late bloomer” line starts to wear thin.

It’s enough to make you get very blue when you have another birthday approaching.

But I know the drill, because it happens every year. I’ll be in this funk for a day, maybe two, and then I’ll snap out of it. I’ll realize that I haven’t done too badly, come to think of it. I’m heading toward my third decade of a happy marriage, and I have four kids who love me and laugh at my jokes. That alone is worth more than a hit Broadway show in my book. My career? Well, it isn’t Jersey Boys level, but it’s perking along, and every day I get to do work that I enjoy -- how many people can say that? 

And hey, if you pay attention to what happened between the songs of Jersey Boys, you realize that it wasn’t all applause and hit songs for the Four Seasons -- all those years of touring took a heavy toll on their families. There are failed marriages, jealousy, heartache, and broken dreams in that show, singing counterpoint to all those hit numbers.

So maybe I’ll tell the Ghost of Christmas Past to bug off, and don’t come back till next year.

And remember the lyrics to “Let’s Hang On”:

“Let’s hang on to what we’ve got
Don’t let go girl we’ve got a lot,
Got a lot of love between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on,
To what we’ve got.”