Many Happy Returns

I've noticed that people tend to freak out around the New Year. They make all these resolutions at once, ones they know they won't be able to keep longer than Valentine's Day, and then they get all down on themselves, and feel bad because they've gone back to smoking, or skipping the gym, or eating Nutella out of the jar, or giggling maliciously whenever they think of their boss's toddler, because it looks like a baby ManBearPig.

Look - it might be nice to stop some of those things. Maybe you'll live longer or sleep better or get better performance evaluations if you change. Or maybe not.

Maybe, instead of feeling shitty about yourself because you can't ever remember to water your plants or because your carbon footprint is ginormous, or because you'd rather watch Gossip Girl than The MacNeil Lehrer Hour, you could try to accept that a lot of your wackest characteristics, if repressed, will just pop up somewhere else. Maybe that explains Mitt Romney. I don't know. It just seems like we waste all this energy fighting who we are, when who we are might really not be so bad at all.

To help you on your journey, here is a short list of things that may change temporarily, but will always return to what they know they should be:

1. Toast, when left on the counter for long enough without being consumed, will once again become bread. If it is buttered, and then abandoned, it will simply become bread with butter.

2. A Raisinet, if left unattended and unprotected in the bottom of a purse, will eventually return to its original, natural state as a pure, unadorned raisin. (I don't know what happens to the chocoalte, and I would not suggest that you make either part into a snack, but you have to respect the perseverance of the raisin nonetheless.)

3. A show poodle, even after it has been mercilessly shaved and plucked and bow-tied for years, if left the fuck alone, will regrow its lovely curly coat and resume life as a regular dog.

4. A chameleon, with it's tail violently removed, will grow a new tail. Provided Bear Grylls doesn't eat him first.

There are, of course, exceptions. A jug of apple cider, if left unattended in the corner of a basement for the better part of a decade, may evolve into a fermented cocktail of sorts. (Although any pulpy fruit byproduct that can withstand thousands of days alone in some forgotten portion of a subterranean pantry was perhaps never meant to make it to the table as cider in the first place.)

What am I saying? Just this: Be the Raisinet, man.

If by the spring you've foregone the balanced macrobiotic meals and eight glasses of wheat germ infused water a day, and are back to your usual dinners of whiskey and jelly beans, don't be too hard on yourself. At the very least, it probably means you'll never end up strapping the family dog to the roof of your car.