By Jon Show. Ah, it’s the New Year. A time of renewal. A time to put the successes and failures of the past year behind us and start anew. A spiritual rebirth, if you will.
Except that I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions. The whole wait until January 1 thing to address your glaring deficiencies just seems arbitrary and lazy. Wanna stop hitting the vape or exercise more often or be a better parent? I don’t understand waiting until some future date on the calendar. Why not just do it now?
However, we live in a culture that embraces New Year’s Resolutions so I have decided to create a few. Not for myself, mind you. I don’t believe in them. But I do have some for the people around me.
Mother of Dragons
Please stop folding my laundry. We’ve been living together for maybe 17 years? 18 years? Pretty sure we’ve been married for 15. During that span I don’t believe you’ve ever done one load of my laundry, which is fine. I started doing my laundry when I was 12 and you know I don’t like other people doing it anyway. However, when you decide to do laundry and mine is still in the dryer and you don’t possess the patience to wait for me to come home to fold it, you fold it in a manner that can only be described as unacceptable.
With T-shirts you do this weird double fold that results in a shirt having so many wrinkles that it looks like it was sitting in the dirty laundry pile in Future Man’s room. Socks paired with socks that don’t even resemble each other. And then there’s the pants and shorts. You fold them with the butt pockets facing each other and then barrel roll them into a pile resulting in —you guessed it—lots of wrinkles. I hate wrinkles. Please stop.
Future Man
Pick something up. Anything. I don’t even care if it’s yours. Scooters and bikes left in the front yard. Sometimes not even our front yard. Socks left everywhere. Everywhere. Left shoe in my room and the right shoe – who knows? I could clothe every tween star on Disney Channel with the number of shirts currently sitting in our garage.
Last Christmas I bought you three dozen lacrosse balls and put them in a bucket. There are currently five left in the bucket but there are at least two dozen in sprawling locations throughout our yard. As I write this I can look out the window and see three lacrosse balls under one bush. PICK THEM UP.
Blonde Bomber
I make a lot of different things for dinner in an effort to avoid raising chicken finger kids. I drag you to Vietnamese restaurants and roadside taco joints and Puerto Rican food trucks. So on average I’d say you’re probably more adventurous eaters than most kids, but whenever I ask you what you want for dinner you respond every, single, time with: SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLS OHMYGAWD OHMYGAWD OHMYGAWD I WANT SPAGHETTI AND MEATBALLZZZZZZ!!!
I can’t feed you spaghetti and meatballs six days a week. No one can eat spaghetti and meatballs six days a week without developing a coronary issue in less than a year. No one can eat spaghetti and meatballs every day without eventually coming to resemble a meatball.
The day I ask for dinner ideas and you say something other than spaghetti and meatballs I swear I’ll pay you straight cash.
Lightning
I know you don’t understand English but please, just please stop eating the Blonde Bomber’s socks. I can’t fathom what attracts you to them. By the time you find them they’ve probably been worn for three straight days and smell like rancid celery. And even though you can’t understand me, I know you know it’s wrong because a sock will sit on the ground for hours during the day, and the minute we go to bed you’ve pounced on it like a fresh T-bone.
Her ankle socks are too small to chew on so you swallow them whole. And days later, once you regurgitate them (usually onto the living room rug —which is the only carpeting on the entire first floor) it’s a barely recognizable condensed tube of gooey cotton. Which, if this occurs when no one is home, you eat again. This is, objectively, the most disgusting thing in the history of the world.
Norman & Ethel
My parents have managed to avoid these pages but their time is up. Ethel, you show up at my house on a weekly basis trying to unload crap you don’t want but also don’t want to throw away. Please stop bringing it to my house. No one wants it. You’re one gift-wrapped-cat away from becoming the old lady in “Christmas Vacation.” Norman, you don’t want to give away anything, ever, so I’ll need your help in this endeavor.
• • •
So there we have it family. Your To-Do List, if you will, for the New Year.
I’m hopeful for you but I’m also not holding out much hope. According to Google only 8 percent of all resolutions stick, so by February I’ll probably be walking around with spaghetti sauce on my wrinkled pants while picking up lacrosse balls in my front yard as the dog vomits an Elsa sock and my mom stops by to give me a wicker basket with a broken handle.
Happy New Year!
