My 2023 New Years Divination
Here's the transcript of your thoughts for the next 72 hours
Thursday, Dec. 29th, 2022:
It’s nearly New Years Eve and that means it’s almost time to blow the little kazoo that shoots the paper tube out, and wear the pointy hat, AND sing Auld Lang Syne arm-in-arm with your best friends. Don’t forget! This year you’re leaving the party no later than 1am so that you can get to bed at a reasonable hour. You need a good night’s sleep so that the next day you can finally - FINALLY - get to the gym. No excuses this time! Six days a week for at least six hours a day, as well as a floating “recovery” day in which you’ll swim for three hours and then just do a light two hour jog whilst eating your lunch (remember to pack food items that are easily “gripped” while running, like lo-cal bagel dogs or sticks of butter if you’re on Keto)
If you’ve plugged your macros into MyFitnessPal correctly, that means you should be able to lose 432 pounds by July 17th. Just in time to fit into the tux for your brother’s wedding to his bitch girlfriend Tara who looks exactly like your mom (I mean…exactly like her. It’s gross). There’s something very disconcerting about talking to her, and it’s not just the mom thing. It’s like she maintains eye contact with you for too long? There’s something about how she talks that gives you that involuntary cringe reaction. Basically everyone in the family hates her but no one will say anything to him. You should say something to him. But then again yeah right because just watch if you say something to him, everyone else will suddenly act like they haven’t been whispering the exact same things and once again you’ll look like the asshole. Anyway, you’re very happy for him and want to show him that you care by looking fit at his wedding (?)
But it’s not really about the looks, right? It’s all about “health.” You want to get healthy. You want your knees to feel good, right? You want to join an intramural whirlyball league, right? You’re going to be 40 in two years, don’t you want to be able to clean the gutters on your house without experiencing a sudden back spasm? A back spasm so powerful that it causes you to slip and roll down the shingles and onto your front lawn, a moment that will be secretly recounted by your neighbor Darren as “absolutely hilarious. Not the part of him getting paralyzed from the waist down, but the actual fall was hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing.”
These next few days are going to be magical. Can’t you just feel it? The butterfly within is ready to burst forth! You just have to stay in the right mindset.
Friday, Dec. 30th, 2022:
Health is key. Not only in body but in thoughts as well. It all starts with the NYE party. Nothing too grand this year. Just a little soiree with some besties. A little cake, a little champagne, some risotto-stuffed mushrooms and Ryan Seacrest on the TV. Sure, you’ve had some real bangers in the past, but you’re an adult now and you are learning to appreciate “balance.” That’s your resolution, in fact. To cut down on the black and white thinking and go easy on yourself. Sure you can be a little more mindful of what you eat and what you drink, but more than that you can really listen to your body. It will tell you what it needs. Just listen to your body.
Okay, update: you were going to do the laid-back soiree thing but your best friend Luke called with some news (you secretly can’t stand Luke but he has the best hookups for drugs and stuff) (you’re probably not going to do any drugs this year, but still it’s nice to be around someone like that who is just sort of a magnet for the nefarious fringes of society, they tend to get you access to all the best kinds of experiences). Anyway, Luke was saying that there is a whole room rented out in the back of Chintz (you had thought the bar got cancelled over the “stop asian hate thing” last year but it was all due to a misunderstanding and there was no asian hate going on there, but then some people thought it was anti-Jewish or anti-Roma or something but then apparently they released a statement saying that “Chintz” was the nickname of their dead friend or something so it was fine). Anyway so they have this whole back room rented out at Chintz and - wait for it - Angela Bartelt is going to be there!
Yes, that Angela Bartelt. The one you’ve been in love with for like - forever - and recently invited her to join this bocce league with you and she actually said yes and so while that wasn’t like “proof” of anything, it did show that she was at least interested in being in the same room as you at the same time and like…I don’t know…participating? In activities with you? Anyway your mind is now basically spinning because this is the perfect scenario for you to make something happen. PLUS for the first time in a long time things could happen because you know she is recently single, this guy Dan from your Bocce league gave you the scoop that she was on the outs with Arnie or Ernie or Earnest or whatever the name of her boyfriend was and so she is BACK on the market.
Bottom line this: it’s game on for NYE!
Saturday, Dec. 31st, 2022:
It’s time to get ready to go out for the big night! But, oh wait, you have nothing to wear. Just the same tired shit you’ve been wearing for the last 8 years. Why do you still have this slime-green rugby shirt with the off-white collar? You haven’t worn that since high school, how has it survived all of the boxings and un-boxings at each of your 12 apartments you’ve moved to in the last 14 years of your life? More importantly, how have you moved an average of once every 1.17 years for your entire adult life?
Don’t think about that. That’s how you always get stuck in your head, looking at the big picture rather than keeping your eye focused on the small things. The small things are usually what matter the most! You will donate that rugby shirt tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow, you’ll be a hung over. And also you’ll definitely not be too hung over to go to the gym, but that’s all the more reason you won’t donate the shirt tomorrow. But soon. Next week. That’s what this balance thing is all about. Your mind wants you to do things now, get things done, but your body says “hey Tiger - how about a little balance? Why do something now when you can just relax?” That’s what balance is all about. Learning to relax. And not the type of relaxing you usually do, which is playing the Witcher 3 for six hours and then masturbating to something you write substack posts complaining about how porn like that is destroying the moral fabric of society. But guess what? Balance is about that too - learning to live with the fact that you are sometimes hypocritical. Sometimes you’re even often hypocritical.
Plus this shirt thing is the perfect way to try out your new prioritization system. This new system is an integral part of “The Plan” as you’re now referring to it in your mind. You have a new system for stuff you want to push off a little while. You can just “write it and forget it.” That’s part of the new plan, you’re going to add your commitments (not calling them “errands” anymore, they are “commitments”) to a brand new tearaway daily schedule you bought on Amazon for $22.95. You’ll add that little clothing donation car ride to your new schedule right now. Well, not right this instant. Technically the tearaway schedule isn’t here yet. Amazon said it was supposed to be here yesterday but then updated it so that now it’s coming somewhere between Jan 1st and March 12th. It’s fine. You’ll write it on a sticky note and then transfer it over when it gets here. But not now. Your body is telling you something!
Shhh!!
Listen!!
Your body says it is HUNGRY. You need to listen to this cue. Even though you’ve already eaten six slices of pizza in the last forty minutes, your body is telling you once again to eat pizza. It’s important to honor this cue, because even if right now it will cause you to gain some weight, eventually it will help you lose weight. It doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does often sometimes work. That’s what it said on this book about “intuitive eating” you found. You said on this book and not in this book because you’re trying to build up more authenticity this year, and your authentic truth here is that you’ve only read the back cover of the book so far. However: from what you’ve read on that back cover, you are very much vibing with the content.
Three more pieces of pizza down the hatch, time to log them into MyFitnessPal. The slices seemed on the smaller side, so you’re going to put them down as “Extra Small Slice of Diet Pizza x 3.” Only 40 calories! Eating healthy doesn’t have to be hard (that’s a story you’ve been telling yourself. A lot of your limitations come from stories you’ve told yourself, and so now you’re only telling yourself good stories about yourself).
The big night is upon you, and you’re ready. You’ve pulled out all the stops, even went and bought a purple shirt at Men’s Wearhouse (the woman there said it was “off-brown” but you don’t believe in that color). The shirt was $189, and you definitely didn’t have the money for that but at the same time you’re probably going to start freelancing in 2023? So that will easily cover the cost as long as you sell like three or four of your prints. Not the time to worry about that, it’s off to the party at Chintz!
Sunday, Jan. 1st, 2023:
Well.
That was a doozy. Things didn’t go quite as planned. Going into that evening, you were not counting on the pizza running through you so quickly. You also were not counting on Angela Bartelt basically hooking up with that guy Dan from Bocce League all night. That was so gross, she has no idea how gross that guy is. You can just tell that Dan is the type of guy that just uses women. But of course he is, that’s the type of guys that women go for. It’s not even anything he says, it’s just the way he “is.” You can tell he’s the type of guy who doesn’t think about himself a lot. Not as in a “he’s not arrogant” way (he’s totally arrogant) but more like he’s just living his life on autopilot. Women are attracted to that. Women aren’t attracted to men who are constantly in tune with their feelings and who are engaged in a process of careful self-examination, because those sorts of things show a lack of confidence. Confidence really is key, but also confidence is such a lowly trait. When people say they like confidence, they really mean they don’t like people who think critically about their lives.
You’re thinking critically about your life though, aren’t you? Well, perhaps you weren’t thinking too critically last night when - after walking 2.5 miles home muttering drunkenly to yourself - you ate the remainder of your XL Papa Johns pizza and dropped a gigantic splotch of marinara and grease all over your $189 off-brown shirt. You then proceeded to spray stain-remover on it so that you could return it to Men’s Wearhouse, but then in the morning you almost cried when you realized that you sprayed Scrubbing Bubbles on the stain instead of Stain Remover, and this did nothing but leave a huge white petechiae over the entirety of the front of the shirt. You had to throw the shirt in the garbage, which was an understandable thing to do given that it had no longer had any value either as a garment or as an item of sale.
But at least you dragged yourself to the gym.
You would have loved to have said that didn’t you? “At least I dragged myself to the gym.” But unfortunately you can’t say that because it is now New Year’s Day and the gym is closed. Because it’s New Years Day. Everything is closed, other than Papa Johns. Another XL six-cheese “Tour de Italy” pizza is just what the doctor ordered to make this hangover go away now, and also you have $5 credit because you wrote an email to customer service about the sauce distribution on one of your pizzas three months ago and they put a credit in your account or something. Or maybe you already used that last night. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. It doesn’t even matter that having six cheeses on a pizza in no way equates a “Tour of Italy.” You just need the comfort of squeezing your teeth around that buttery crust and tangy sauce and melty cheese(s).
You forgot to do dishes this week, so you have no clean plates. You forgot to go shopping this week, so you have no paper plates either. But it turns out that Amazon did ship that tearaway daily planner, just to the wrong address. Some Good Samaritan must have placed it back on your porch, because you actually managed to grab the package before stumbling up to your 14th apartment in 12 years last night, and used most of the pages of January and February cleaning up the vomit off your bathroom floor.
You tear away some date from March and place your pizza on top of it. It is a perfect fit for this slice. It’s thick, too. Good stock. The grease won’t even be able to bleed through. The pizza slice is only 40 calories. You’re on your way.
Happy New Year Everyone.
-H.P.