Happy New Year! May the black-eyed peas be scrumptious today. And although you may pooh-pooh that old superstition about a man being the first to come through your front door, let's hope it's at least not the cops. May you not be stuck in the gift-return line at the store. May the New Year represent, if not exactly a new you, at least a renewed state of mind.
In the event that you are still struggling to come up with your New Year's resolutions, I am, as always, happy to help.
Here, torn from the headlines (and, in a few cases, from the Talkmistress' personal experiences) is the annual list of:
SUGGESTED NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS
◼️ To think twice before you invade ... whether the thing you're pondering invading is a country or your in-laws' liquor cabinet.
◼️ Not to take over anything you can't run.
◼️ To schedule a month off for your 2023 winter holiday vacation in order to leave well before the inevitably horrid weather and return home well after, thereby maybe not getting your flights canceled.
◼️ In trying to get ahead, or elected, to at least just lie about the stuff that can't easily be disproved.
◼️ Not to do anything for which your adorable young child might embarrass you on national TV.
◼️ Not to let your temper ruin your big moment/future ... whether you're Moses or Will Smith.
◼️ To for sure not accept social- media connection requests from all those self-professed cryptocurrency "kings" and "queens" (and to question even those social-media messages that appear to come from people who are actually your connections).
◼️ To avoid finally deciding to jump on a trend bandwagon after hanging back and resisting for a while. I promise you that the very minute you jump in, you and everybody else who did will start to get criticized and ridiculed and/or some news report will come out saying the trend could have bad consequences. (Not that I, er, got off into that "upload your selfies and let this app reimagine you in another time/persona" craze. Ahem.)
◼️ To realize that not only are the commercials sometimes more entertaining than the shows, they often have better music. (My 2022 iTunes downloads included the mellow hip-hop ditty "Water" by Lauren Brewster, played on the Moen Faucets commercial. And I love Free Design's "Love You," the whimsical, beautifully harmonious 1970 a cappella song from the Zillow commercial. Yeah, my music tastes tend to run in various directions.)
◼️ Not to use stupid stuff in which to hide stupid stuff when you travel ... for instance, hiding your gun in a raw chicken, then stuffing said chicken into your luggage. You will get caught. (I'm still not over the fellow who, in 2019, hid a pound of cocaine under his already-criminal-looking toupee at the Barcelona, Spain, airport.)
◼️ Not to leave running cars, babies, babies in running cars, space heaters or your health unattended even for a second.
◼️ (Young men) To aspire to be something more than the obscure boyfriend who fathered the latest celebrity chick's baby.
◼️ (Young women) To aspire to be something more than one of the multiple babymamas of a celebrity dude.
◼️ To get out there in the world and satisfy your curiosity about things, no matter how offbeat those things may be. If it's science related, you might even win an Ig Nobel prize — "the prize for comical scientific achievement" — held before the annual Nobel Prize giveaway. (Winners of the 2022 awards, according to an Associated Press story, included researchers who were awash with the desire to look into the sex lives of ... not making this up ... constipated scorpions. Also winning were "researchers who looked at why legal documents can be so utterly baffling, even to lawyers themselves." Now there you go.)
◼️ To take care of your mental health, per announcements from celebrities who've been doing so lately ... and like the respondents to the Dec. 21 Healthy Minds poll taken by the American Psychiatric Association in December. "More adults in the U.S. expect to be more stressed in 2023 than at this time last year, but they also say they're more willing to take steps to tackle that stress," the survey reveals, according to a Dec. 22 story posted at nbcnews.com.
◼️ To take nothing for granted, and I mean nothing: Shorts-and-swimsuit weather, especially after our Christmastime Ice Age (it got so cold here, I thought I saw a woolly mammoth lumber past our condo building). America's freedoms which — although more than a few of us out there may feel differently right now — still beat those of many countries. And yes, I'll mention it again: Indoor plumbing.
◼️ To learn from history. To learn from history. To learn from history.
New year, new email: hwilliams@adgnewsroom.com