My New Year’s Resolutions For Everyone Else
Resolve to heed these in 2020
I’ve made a lot of resolutions and broken them, so why bother? For this year, here are resolutions for all the rest of you.
1. If you start a sentence with “I don’t know how to tell you this” or “I don’t know how to say this,” you’ll end there, both for reasons of morality and accuracy.
2. You will not buzz me into your apartment for half a second so that I end up bouncing off the second door and having to go back and re-buzz. If you do this twice in a row, you’ll move to a castle with a giant door knocker and a pair of ogres to open and close it.
3. You will not use the phrase “the space” in any hiring attempt, unless you work for Elon Musk or NASA. If you’re in publishing and your ad says you need “someone who’s written articles in the [XYZ] space,” and you don’t realize you can just delete “the” and “space” and write “articles about XYZ,” you’ll quit immediately and be replaced by me.
4. You will not post a “cover” of a cool song on YouTube and then it turns out that it’s actually a “drum cover” in which you’re drumming to a record with your thumb and a Sharpie.
5. If I introduce you to your future spouse, you will give me 15 percent of the value of all the wedding gifts, plus pay for…
