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New Year’s Resolutions

If there’s one ritual in our culture that drives people to the depths of depression more than any other, it has to be making New Year’s resolutions.

Ironically, the custom is meant to bring hope for the New Year, a fresh start and opportunity to improve yourself and your life.  Give me a break.  Why not just take a giant metaphorical highlighter and emphasize everything that is wrong or pathetic about you?

Some popular resolutions:  (according to Wikipedia!)

Lose weight (translation – I’m a fat ass.)

Drink less alcohol (translation – I’m a drunk ass.)

Get a better education (translation – I’m a dumbass.)

Get a better job (translation – I’m a working stiff-ass.)

This is not my idea of self improvement.  Self deprecation?  Yes.  Personal contempt?  Probably.  First step toward self-deliverance  into the afterlife?  Oh, most definitely. 

And while some people may still find it noble to swallow their pride and proclaim a formal effort to improve themselves, I’d like to squash those turds with another fun fact from Wikipedia:  only 12 percent of people actually achieve their goals.  Good luck sucka!

But I don’t blame people for failing to meet these goals.  I blame the whole charade of resolutions.  It’s simply too easy to set a goal and too easy to give up.  We need help.  We need motivation.  We need Jigsaw.

Sure, the “Saw” character has been painted as a twisted serial killer, but I’d like to suggest that he may just be the greatest misunderstood motivational speaker ever.  His neat deathly contraptions have motivated less-than-remarkable people to cut off limbs, dig out eyeballs and blow other people away.  Think of the success he could bring to goal-setters!

“Jigsaw’s New Year’s Resolution ‘Get Fit or Die Trying’ Program”

For the fatty – Locked in a room for one year, there’s a bomb attached to a treadmill.  The bomb must be diffused daily by running a set number of miles in a certain amount of time.  Watch the pounds melt off!  Or get blown up!

For the alky – Wearing a neat pair of specially designed “gloves” surgically attached to the hands, a sensor will crush fingers when in proximity to alcohol.  And if they touch alcohol, they blow up.

For the dummy – Special implants in the eyes will burn out the entire eyeball, and blow up, unless they are subjected to educational stimulus daily. 

For the boss’s lacky – A weekly quota of respectable job applications or self-employed business plans must be filled out otherwise it will be thousands of paper cuts (using the job applications attached to a functional and pissed off General Grievous) and a dunk tank full of rubbing alcohol…and bombs.

Yeah, these methods may be a little extreme, but I’ll be damned if they don’t get the job done, not to mention provide enough material for 13 or 14 more movies.