New Year's Resolutions 2007

• I promise to stop giving strangers nasty looks for having more fun than me in public.
• I promise to feed my cat on an "every day" basis rather than the current "whenever I feel like it" basis.
• I promise not to yell hateful and racist things at the television when I'm alone and assume my neighbors know I'm not serious. This includes obsessively repeating "I am Dr. Tang from Pyongyang" in a stereotypical accent every three seconds when an Asian doctor is on screen.
• I promise to stop assuming people are idiots and instead wait until they inevitably prove it to classify them as such.
• I promise not to sort everyone I know into their Hogwarts houses and use that information to decide whether I like them or not. In a similar vein, I promise not to assume I'm better than people because I'm a Ravenclaw.
• I promise to go one week without hating toddlers.
• I promise to start sending people coded messages in Wingdings font like we used to do in junior high. Because that's cool.
• I promise to judge movies on their quality instead of the hotness of their characters.
• I promise to watch Nanny McPhee once a week.
• I promise to start admitting I don't know important people and facts when talking online instead of looking them up real fast on Wikipedia and acting like I already knew.
• I promise to replace light bulbs when they go out instead of calling it "mood lighting".
• I promise to stop pushing my cat off the table while she is sleeping.
• I promise to stop using exaggerated cat abuse to get a laugh.
• I promise to stop singing "Jesus on the Mainline" when I see skinny bearded men on the subway.
• Finally, I promise not to pretend the new year is a time for intense introspection and renewal and think I'm making myself into a completely different person because emotional plastic surgery happens on its own, not when the calendar says so. If you can't do it in May or September, you can't do it in January. So I promise to put no pressure on myself by worrying about changing myself and then feeling bad for myself when I fail. But furthermore, I promise that in 2008, I will look back on what has changed and give myself due credit.