Maybe. Resolutions—and life changes—aren’t really about the physical.

Circumstantial change is doomed to fail, because circumstances themselves change. Eventually, despite your best efforts to avoid them, God is going to drop a chocolate souffle in your lap, with a Blackberry on top, and some porn on the Blackberry (starring, ironically, the world-renowned Chocolate Souffle, again with a Blackberry on top—her lover, not the device. And some oddly utilized carrots). It’s the God double decker: Blackberry on Chocolate Souffle on Blackberry on chocolate souffle. And you’ll indulge, because you never figured out how to overcome these things; they’ve just been held at bay on a long mental leash. On the bright side, you get to read God’s Blackberry. What’s the deal with famine.

I think that real change is sculpted from something less volatile than circumstance: thought. While you might think you think new thoughts often, you’re probably doing little more than changing outfits. Sure, some days you wear the jeans, other days the shorts, and still others the khakis with the embarrassing stain from that time God hurled chocolate souffle at your crotch all willy-nilly. And some days you worry about your job first and family second. But you only have so much space in that closet. (And yes, I compare your brain to a small closet. Poetic license.)

Only once you extinguish the urge, only once you can spend all day with your Blackberry (the device, not the porn star) and never take it out of your pants (the device), will you be able to watch in twitchless satisfaction as your friend fingers his own Blackberry (ambiguous). God can throw all the souffle He wants, but you’ll never bite. Then maybe He’ll start tossing it at the people who are actually hungry, because seriously God, famine. What’s up.

* Why does “carrot” epitomize an attractive reward, as in “carrot or stick”? Who does things for carrots?

Daylight mirrors your existence; you can’t help but remember you’re alive everywhere you go: Pedestrians move out of your way, an intimate conversation dwindles while you pass, civilization carves out space for you.

Night, less courteous. You can look around, to be sure, but it seems that at any moment a ficus could take your place should the land-Lord decide that you’re a bad use of real estate at the corner of Forest and Cowper. Nothing bends for you after sundown.

Tonight I cross an intersection against a man in a grizzled gray beard. His pants are pleated in a dozen directions, and his fly is open. His red plaid shirt is pulled out through it like a rose blossoming from the unlikeliest of places, but it is well watered with amber…rain. His body bobs and swivels, his back is grossly arched and his head is down, and he looks like a scythe chopping lazily through a world that is of a much swampier consistency than mine, a jello to my smooth garlic aioli (no wonder he looks so tired). I can’t say he’s moving so much as being moved, frame by frame, a marvel of claymation. His arms shuffle to some beat but it’s not mine. He’s singing something but there’s no music playing. An original.

It seems a pure coincidence that he crosses at the crosswalk, and I think if there happened to be a mountain or a desert here, he would cross those instead.

Side by side in the dark. He doesn’t change a thing, his timbre and gaze and shuffle all metronomic: a true steward of nighttime callousness. I, on the other hand, have stopped singing in hot self-awareness. He cuts me nothing, but I’ve carved out his space, a scythe in deed if not form.

I don’t want him to hear me. I’m not sure he even knows I’m there, but I am embarrassed that the man with the blooming crotch will hear me, and in that moment I am only certain that one of us is crazy.

If you define perfection by the absence of failures that other people notice, as so many people seem to, then the only way you will ever be perfect is to sit in a dark hut in the Rockies and graciously decline to participate in life. After all, you can’t fail at what you don’t attempt. Of course, nobody will know of your perfection in such circumstances, so you’ll have to send out frequent telegrams:

1:00PM: STILL PERFECT.

And then, in celebration of your success:

1:03PM: BLOW US.
-MANKIND

(When I said nobody likes perfection, I especially meant mankind.)

But now we have a quandary: you don’t like your imperfections but nobody else wants your… perfections. Whatever you’re worried about, the problem is rarely the flaw itself, but the way you respond to it. For instance, let’s say you’re not naturally funny, which is in fact the word on you right now. Your instinct will be to force everything into a joke, even though the best humor creeps up slowly and coyly from behind, placing its hand on your funny bone, caressing it, circling it gently as if to tease, until—

Sorry. Carried away.

The point is, the best humor is spontaneous. Say you’re at a restaurant and you order the artichoke heart appetizer. You might think it’d be funny to grab your heart, begin mock-choking, and wink: “Whoa, they weren’t kidding with those artiCHOKE hearts.” But this isn’t funny. It’s tasteless and forced, perpetuating the widely held idea, even by me now, that you’re a humorless hack.

If you had just waited a few more minutes, odds are that your friend Roberto with the comically small trachea would have begun actually choking. THEN you could have chimed in with a “Well, they don’t call ‘em artichoke hearts for nothing,” and all your friends would burst out laughing, and the waiter would pause to slap his knee mid-heimlich, and even Roberto would have to concede through hand gestures that it was a “good one” before surrendering to the icy scythe of death. This is humor. Just make sure Roberto doesn’t get credit for the joke posthumously.

I find that the best way to deal with your anxieties is to play a mental game of T-Ball, but I call it N-Ball, N for Neurosis, or Not patent infringement. Take all the ish that’s bothering you, wrap it up into a neat little ball of anger and frustration and embarrassment and resentment, and put it on an imaginary tee shaped like an “N”. For instance, right now I’m worried that “N-Ball” is a stupid name because it’s called T-Ball because it’s a “tee”, not because it’s shaped like a T, which it’s not, and even then an N-shaped tee is still a tee. So I’d package that thought up and put it onto my… N.

Now pick up the bat and take your hardest swing. You can’t tap the ball into the infield or you’ll just retrieve it again, and again, batting the same thoughts around until you die, and then your family, thinking that you simply must love that ball because you spent your whole life batting it around, will bury you with it, and you’ll spend eternity with your neuroses while the other corpses are all laid back. So, you have to knock it out of the park and into the surrounding streets, far enough that it will never be seen again.

There. Feel better, don’t you? If not, gaze out into the blue horizon and the green expanse. Take a whiff of the freshly mown lawn. Then turn around and beat the bloody shit out of the umpire. That always seals the deal for me. Who does he think he is, judging everything you do? The judge?

I’m thinking of manufacturing N-Ball as the first commercial sporting equipment ever to be prescribed by therapists. It would of course be a gimmick, like the Staples Easy button, except that the purpose of mine would be to absolve the heartache that underpins our mortality, while the purpose of the Easy button is to upsell thumbtacks and corrugated cardboard. I feel mine warrants a higher price point.

If you’re a highly advanced worrier, you don’t just spend your time worrying about your issues; you also spend time worrying about the fact that you worry so much. Just package up those meta-worries into another ball and place it onto the second leg of your N-tee:

o  o < — second leg for meta-worry support
| \ |

If you worry about how much you worry about how much you worry, you do not belong in this class. Please leave and go invent W-Ball to sustain your mutant anxiety.

Whatever your level, the key is to recognize that everyone has their own anxieties to bat around, and they’re far too focused on them to worry about yours. We’re a criss-cross of baseball diamonds and batters swinging in solitude, striking out or hitting big and rounding the bases, but in either case ending where we began. Your friend might be a paragon of composure, but you will never truly know her until you’ve walked a mile with her balls.

As someone who has already resolved his life and is merely shooting for status quo, I thought I’d share some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years to avoid being Crowed.

The first thing you’ll want to do is come up with the list of things that you want to change about yourself. After a whole year of worrying about Darfur refugees and AIDS victims, this is finally your chance to think about you. Who are you? And more importantly: what the hell is wrong with you?

To answer this question, you need only walk outside your door and look around. Mother Earth has rolled out the dessert cart and you are its fruit-and-cheese platter. The window cleaner is taller. The crossing guard’s vest masks a bulging six-pack. And look at that man in the coffee shop with the chiseled jaw and the radiant charisma. Hi there! I’m looking right back atcha.

Are these people just inherently superior to you? Well, in some cases. The window cleaner didn’t get that tall by resolving for it, dumbass. But that doesn’t mean you can’t Windex up your inferior genes to boost their resale value. It’s probably too late to be a better father to your kids, but steroids never expire.

How and when you write your resolutions has a great deal to do with whether or not you will keep them. Writing your list on a Chili’s bib or an etch-a-sketch betrays a lack of confidence. I like to engrave my commitments onto something more permanent and valuable, such as my childhood blanket or my cousin.

Before you get too far into your list, however, you should stop and verify that this year’s New Years falls cleanly on the boundaries of space and time. Would you ever start a diet on a Wednesday? Of course not. It’s far more logical to begin on a Monday. So make sure that it’s a nice round year, like 5000, because it’s pretty inane to make wholesale changes right in the middle of a millennium.

Once you finish your list, take a look at it. Scary, isn’t it? It’s not even New Years and already your goals seem to be running away from you. That’s because you wrote them on your cousin. Haul him back here and pull out the red pen. It’s editing time.

Did Sheryl Crow wanna have a lot of fun? Did she want a veritable shit-ton of fun delivered to her doorstep? No. She just wanted “a little fun.” And although she failed even at that, you can still heed her lesson in modesty. Look through your list and soften or remove any adjectives or qualifiers that might discourage your success. For instance, “Eat Healthy” becomes “Eat Healthier” or simply, “Eat.”

If settling for less embarrasses you, consider that some of the most successful people in history compromised on their goals. When President John F. Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, he first vowed to a trembling populace: No harm shall befall this great nation. But when historians later unearthed his diary and broke the My Little Pony seal, they found: Well, maybe just Arkansas. Today, political scientists and 49 states celebrate Kennedy’s bold compromise.

Relinquishing your bad habits is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. Sheryl’s poignant ballad, “The First Cut is the Deepest,” chronicles her childhood struggle to give up creme brulée.

Empirical evidence suggests that the best way to kick a habit is to get it out of your system. For example, nearly 100% of people who successfully quit smoking had smoked before quitting.

So in order to purge your bad habits, you must set aside a few days before New Years and overdose on all of them in parallel. Go ahead. Smoke some alcohol. Nosh on buffalo wings as you rack up catastrophic debt. If all goes well, January 1 should find you face down in an alleyway awash in chicken puke and flanked by creditors. You are now ready to confront the year head on. As soon as you are able to stand upright.