Your New Year's Resolution is Doomed to Fail

New Year’s resolutions? Kind of a downer. For every person who actually manages to give up Facebook for good, or stop fighting with their parents, there are 100 people whose January 1st purchase of "Mime Training for Dummies" will end up gathering dust inside their abandoned invisible box. Take a good, hard look at your resolution, then read our list to find out how it will fail in 2012.

The Burnout: “I’ll never look at a TV again!” “I will grow huge biceps today.” “WHY DON’T I KNOW FRENCH YET.” These are the words of a resolutioner who spends early January attempting to master parkour, listening to Learn a Foreign Language! podcasts instead of sleeping, and subsisting on gallons of guacamole because she’s now a raw vegan. Following this initial period of intense resolution activity, you will allow yourself a single peanut, or glance at US Weekly when you could be reading Moby Dick in German, after which you’ll pronounce yourself a failure and hook your face directly to a cake IV.

The Low Bar: “I’ll go to school five days a week, and not go only two days a week,” you tell yourself. “I’ll start taking the stairs to my room instead of the elevator!” you promise, though you live in a one-story house. Stop mistaking “resolutions” for “existence.”

The Teamup: This is the resolution you make with a friend, to, say, get in shape together. First, you’ll meet every morning, bright and early, for your shared jog. As January wears on, you’ll start to consider your co-resolutioner less as a friend and more as a malevolently cheery Fascist dictator. You’ll eyeball each other’s lunches and offer passive-aggressive advice on how to lighten up. From there you’ll progress to spiking her Activia with pure lard and replacing her running shoes with bags of snakes. And the friendship will fall, another New Year’s casualty.

The Frankly Confusing: Should 2012 really be the year in which you eat more goat meat? Why?

The Quixotic yet Hypocritical Quest: “I’ll spend 2012 promoting world peace, and nothing but world peace!” you say, while casually slam-dunking your little brother into a recycling bin because he messed with your TiVo. Big resolutions are vast and impenetrable. We appreciate your moxie, but this is the time to think smaller. Resolutions start at home .

We're still giggling over "Mime Training for Dummies." What was your resolution this year? Do you feel an impending failure in your future?

Related post: New Year's Resolutions for the Weak-Willed