New year’s
devolutions

by RAF KATIGBAK

This is a weird time of year for a lot of people in Montreal. Y’know, you’re just waking up from that post-holiday haze when one minute you’re snuggling with your loved ones, eating delicious turkey feasts, exchanging gifts and merriment and well wishes, and everything is like a Norman Rockwell painting except maybe in one painting a couple is having afternoon sex, then suddenly you’re walking back into work and everyone goes, “Hey, Happy New Year!” And you start wondering, “How late can you actually say that anyway” and then you sit down at your desk and look at the pile of work in your inbox then you look outside at the cold grey sky and say quietly to yourself, “I either need to move somewhere warmer or I will shoot myself and everyone in this goddamn office.”

But I don’t care what people say. This is my favourite time of year. Not because I like to watch the quiet magic of a light snowfall on a cosy winter night, or that the sight of little kids all bundled up in their snowsuits warms my heart, but rather because this is about the time everyone throws their bullshit New Year’s resolutions out the window and I can sit back and say, “I told you so.”

I mean, we’ve all been there. Show of hands who’s promised to lead a better, healthier, more productive life not more than two weeks ago, only to now say, “Maybe I’ll just quit smoking tomorrow,” or “I’ll just bring it down to ONE Krispy Kreme a week” or the old chestnut, “I bet that old Greek couple in the apartment across the street would actually be flattered to know I masturbate watching them eat breakfast every morning.” I thought so. But this year, I have a simple trick so that I never break any resolutions from now on. I just don’t make any.

Now, please understand, it’s not that I think I lead a perfect life. We all have bad habits we could do without. But you know what? Eff it. Maybe living a perfect life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, we thought we had a handle on the future when we entered the 2000s, but where did that get us? Economic collapse, a dying planet and the ShamWow. Sure, there were some highlights, like that black American president. Oh, and then there was that time the cashier at Harvey’s forgot to charge me for those Frings back in 2003… but it’s a whole new decade and it’s time to rethink our ideas of what living a “good life” is all about.

I have some bad habits, but maybe it’s these faults, these all-too-human shortcomings, that make me who I am. We are far from perfect beings and this is a far from perfect world, but how boring would it be if it were? Think about how lame it would be if everything was just awesome all the time. You know, you’d just be standing there and your friend is like, “Hey, check out that amazing double rainbow!” And you’d be like, “Yeah, sure Joey, it’s about exactly as awesome as that other double rainbow I saw two minutes ago, except this one didn’t have a unicorn riding on it with toonies shooting out of its ass. Booooooring.” Every hockey game would end in a tie and every episode of Jersey Shore would just be a bunch of nice Italian-American kids being nice to each other and not talking about abs and tanning and punching each other.

I think this next decade we should focus on one thing: love. I am not talking about the love between a man and woman’s swimsuit area, or the love between a man and a man, or a man and a horse, or a horse and a fire hydrant, or a combination of any of the above. You know what, just forget about love altogether. I’m talking about learning to accept the foibles that make us different, special, who we are. We are imperfect and we are kind of shitty. Let’s realize our wonderfulness by remembering not what we can be, but who we’re not. We are not perfect beings with giant egg heads who wear silver wizard robes and can move things with our minds and we certainly are not robots—with the possible exception of Mrs. Kalavinatos across the street, who I am convinced Mr. Kalavinatos keeps as a sex slave. We are humans, dangnabbit! So let’s smoke and eat and drink and get tans and punch each other already. It’s 2010!

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA