By now, the New Year is old news. Live with something for two or three weeks and you get used to it. It’s like when you buy a new chair and put it in a spot that never used to have furniture: at first, you trip over it all the time, but finally, many shin bruises later, you reach a point where you only trip over it in the dark or when you’re thinking about something else or when someone you want to impress is in your living room.
Old news or not, however, I’ve just begun thinking about the New Year. I’m a few steps behind. Having just returned from a winter break in which sad is having to ice my knee with frozen broccoli because we cooked the corn, and happy is finding a reason to put my shoes on, I’m feeling heavily sedated.
To illustrate: In an opera about my life (“Giacchi Maggio”), Rosemary Clooney would be singing the lead — taking over from, say, PJ Harvey — and she’d only be using the middle five notes of her range. If I painted a self-portrait, it’d be a symphony in taupe and beige. In my autobiography (mostly a pulse-pounding page-turner in the tradition of “Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry, Vol. A2: Amines, Aliphatic to Antibiotics”), this chapter would consist of simple declarative sentences with no figure of speech more jarring than “blue as the sky.”
The point of all this overwrought metaphor is that I’m thinking slowly enough to have just now arrived at my New Year’s resolution. And the reason I’m mentioning this to the vast reading public is I think I may have found the perfect one. Do you want to know what it is?
(Since this newspaper is a print medium, with very limited audio capabilities, I sincerely hope no one answered that last question. Obviously I’m going to tell you whether you want to know or not.)
All right. It is, “Don’t be an idiot.”
See? It’s infinitely adaptable, according to your personal definition of idiocy. For instance, if you find going to class to be a waste of time on the level of spoon collecting, you can hereby order yourself not to go. (If you’re a spoon collector, however, I must remind you that writing furious letters to opinion columnists is idiotic in the extreme.) In the mornings, you can pull your blankets up around your ears to muffle the sounds of your idiot roommates leaving for class, and then you can slip back into sleep with a glow of righteousness warming your pillow.
You can justify anything this way. Want to quit your job as a stockbroker in order to adapt your haiku biography of Twiggy for the stage? Well, you’d be an idiot not to jump the hell off the corporate ladder while still in possession of your soul. Want to get a tattoo of Young MC on your forehead? Hey, if something happened to you, they wouldn’t even need dental records to identify your body; it’s the only considerate thing to do. Want to kill and eat people? Only idiots limit themselves to the socially accepted sources of protein. There’s a world of nutrition out there.
Ideally, I guess, one would use this philosophy for good. (Which depends on your definition of good, but you know what I mean.) Improve yourself, throw out those bad habits … yawn. That’s what I’ll be doing, although I’ll probably have given up by the time you read this.
Me, I’m using “Don’t be an idiot” to mean “Don’t do anything you’ll regret later” — which, incidentally, is the best advice I’ve ever been given. It really boils down to “Don’t do anything that will cause you to call yourself an idiot and mean it,” but that’s not nearly as catchy.
And it also means “Stop wasting your time lamenting the idiocies of the past, because the ensuing waste of time is idiotic in the extreme,” but that’s one of the least catchy resolutions I can think of. (Barring “Learn to say the books of the Old Testament in order, without mixing up Deuteronomy with Leviticus or Zephaniah with Zachariah or skipping Chronicles the way you often do,” and things of that sort.)
Luckily, idiocy is in the eye of the beholder. And clichés are in the column of the writer.
I favor this New Year’s resolution because it has nothing to do with virtue, unless you want to interpret it that way. Virtue is useful but boring; making yourself become virtuous is both boring and horrendously difficult. Whereas if you define your idiocy carefully enough, you’ll fly through 2003 with the mellow smugness of someone who’s both achieving goals and enjoying it. Happy cannibalism.
Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.
