A new way to make resolutions: Month by month, a better you

We all can agree that this is the least essential holiday of the year. No one mopes around the week before saying, "I'm just not in the New Year's Day spirit this year." It has one song, and no one understands it. "Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?" I don't know, should they? You want a list and some reasons?

This would be the spot where I plug in a shopworn rant against resolutions, but I actually have a useful suggestion. Don't make a list of things you'll change today. Think of things you'll do in the coming months. Space out your bursts of enthusiasm and inevitable disappointment. Some suggestions follow.

January: Learn another language. I've been taking an online Spanish class, and the first 25 lessons are all designed around the idea that the boy is drinking the water and the mother is eating the apples, a situation I have never encountered in my years of visits to Mexico. I would prefer more useful phrases, like, "There is no reason the police dog should be sniffing my luggage." Or, "Will $200 be enough, officer?"

February: Increase the weights on the machines at the gym, so you can blame your constant aches and pains on exercise instead of advancing age.

March: Relearn an old skill, like balancing the checkbook. And spend some time untangling the landline's phone cord, the long one you got so you could walk around and talk.

April: Take up ballroom dancing. Then put it down almost immediately, because you have the rhythm and natural grace of an upright vacuum cleaner in a mild earthquake.

May: Set aside time every day for meditation. Concentrate on letting go of the things you cannot change, like the composition of the Italian government or the position of the sun in the Milky Way. Hey, that was easy.

June: Go through your photos and select the ones that tell the most important stories, then print them out in a book. This will be daunting, because you'll have hundreds of pictures. Eliminate the ones that consist of people sitting around a table somewhere; this should bring it down to a few dozen.

July: Learn a new cuisine. Pick something no one knows, so when you finally serve it, no one can tell if it's good or not and will think, "Well, I suppose yak is one of your gamier meats, and that explains the hair."

August: Ever considered making your own hoppy, full-flavored beer? Now's the time to consider it, and then abandon it because you have no idea what you're doing, and that stuff is just awful.

September: Reach out to someone you haven't seen in years and see how long it takes to remember why.

October: Take up Bonsai, the art of making very small trees. Put them out on the boulevard so those tiny, yippy dogs can feel like giants for once.

November: Lose weight in preparation for gaining it over the holidays. Use the Kato diet, which is like Keto except you eat only fried green hornets.

December: Start an online memory-building class, because you didn't remember any of the things you'd meant to do this year.

Or: Carry on in your own way, with incremental improvements here and there that give you the illusion of altering your fundamentally unalterable personality. No one's perfect. Except for my wife. And even she doesn't know why the mother is always eating apples.

james.lileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 • Twitter: @Lileks • facebook.com/james.lileks