I Resolve to Be Awesome

Okay. 2008 has less than three months left in it, and I don't have a prayer of completing any of my New Year's resolutions in time. So, it's time to achieve excellence by lowering the bar, scrapping the old resolutions and establishing this new set of goals to achieve before 2009:

Don't wear white pants after labor day. Tricky, but not impossible. I expect this to be helped by the fact that I don't own any white pants.

Don't sell national secrets to foreign powers. Luckily, I don't actually have any security clearance, even if those guys from Burkina Faso have been trying to get pretty chummy with me lately.

Don't get addicted to crack. Winners don't use drugs. Losers don't have to use drugs, either, so I've got my bases covered either way.

Don't drink alcohol before sundown. Woah, back up. We're trying to list goals that we actually have a chance of accomplishing here. At the rate things are going, I'll have broken this one by the end of the week.

Don't get humiliated on national television. It's a gamble, but one I'm willing to make. I'm not going to be at the American Idol tryouts, but you never know when you'll be the star attraction on an episode of Cops. Let's keep our fingers crossed on this one.

Don't make any Nobel-prize-winning breakthroughs in science, health, peacemaking, etc. Because I shouldn't be hogging all the credit for myself. It's time for someone else to be in the spotlight.

Don't get stabbed in a bar fight with Charles S. Dutton. Because only a fool gets into a bar fight with Charles S. Dutton.

If this goes well, I might actually make up some more goals and retroactively apply them to 2007. Self-improvement isn't so hard after all.