This New Year Will Be Different: I’ll Remake Myself Anew

This year, as the earth inevitably crosses into the dateline of January 1st, my whole life will change. I resolve to begin a daily transcendental meditation practice.

Starting tomorrow, I will live in the present.

This New Year, I will drink 100 ounces of crystalline glacier geyser water every day. My skin will radiate. It will glow in the dark.

This year I will eat healthy. No substance shall pass my lips that has not been grown organically free range, put through a 3-step water filtration process (whether liquid or solid), and then blessed by a Tibetan monk named Karma Dawa who once met the Dalai Lama.

This year, I’ll never be tired. Every day will be leg day.

Starting January 1st, I’ll give up cigarettes. I have never smoked, but I will start so I may quit.

In 2018, I will confront all my personal demons. I will face my father’s withholding of approval, even when he gives me that look that says he’s still that upset that I, his only son, didn’t become a stockbroker.

This year, I will stop deluding myself that I can do a handstand scorpion pose in yoga. Unless ending my self-delusion is itself a delusion.

I will get out of my comfort zone. Each day I’ll do something that scares me and prove my father’s predictions of my failure wrong. I’ll learn to fly blindfolded while handling snakes and then he’ll really be sorry.

This year I will put all my earnings into savings. I’ll refuse to spend on food, and opt instead to forage in the urban wilderness of grocery store dumpsters. This will in no way counteract my healthy eating goal.

I will pare down my belongings to the essentials, keeping only one clay bowl and a sole copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which will double as a napkin.

I will travel the country in solitude in a 65 square-foot converted van I have made my home. It’ll never read as creepy thanks to its design aesthetic: minimalist modern.

This year I will find The One. She’s a Rhodes scholar named Willow who bears a striking resemblance to model Gigi Hadid. We will spend every night at her place, as she dislikes my “vause,” which is my portmanteau of “van” and “house.”

This year I will use solitude to write my book, an epic novel of historical fiction about about a deeply, transcendentally spiritual man who goes where the winds may carry him — unless that is away from his girlfriend, Willow — as he wins his father’s respect. But it will take place in the nineteenth-century American West. Hence: historical. It will win a Pulitzer and a MacArthur Genius Grant before it’s printed.

I will return from seclusion to bask in my newfound fame and fortune. My father will read my award-winning unprinted manuscript, look at me teary-eyed, and say he’s proud. I will savor it for the three seconds before he adds, “I still wish you worked at Goldman Sachs.”