Bateman: A total New Year’s makeover

Ah, here it comes — a new year, offering the prospect of a fresh start. Maybe 2012 is when… Ah, here it comes — a new year, offering the prospect of a fresh start. Maybe 2012 is when you’ll finally get up off your sweatpant-cushioned behinds, and everything will stop being so terrible all the time. Or maybe it won’t. Who knows, really?

None of that matters right now, anyway. What matters is helping you devise the greatest list of New Year’s resolutions in the history of mankind. Let’s start with the most obvious category.

1) Weight: Whether you’ve got too much of it or too little of it, your weight needs to change. Maybe you’re a puny shrimp who desperately needs to hardgain the freshman 15. Perhaps you’re a dead ringer for the Michelin Man but secretly aspire to the rail-thin physique of a hip, young singer-songwriter. Either way, look in the nearest mirror. Are you happy with the person whose likeness appears therein?  No, of course not. You don’t look anything like all those celebrities you know and love. Which brings us to …

2) Hair: Your hair’s a hot mess. People are talking. Do something about it.

3) Eyes: That color just isn’t working for you. Get tinted contacts.

4) Nose: Yikes. Take out some more student loans, and pay for a rhinoplasty.

5) Personality: If you’re a real know-it-all, tone it down and let other people talk. Feel like you don’t have anything interesting to say? Wikipedia some cool new facts about the Higgs boson and the Grand Coulee Dam that you can slip into casual conversations at the local coffee shop. Class clowns and party animals ought to take it down a notch; that act you’ve ripped off from hot college comedian Dane Cook is getting stale. They’re not laughing at your jokes anymore. Or our jokes, for that matter — but hey, you’re the one reading this column, so it looks like the joke’s on you. Shy boys and girls ought to put themselves out there, mingle a bit and feel unafraid to crack wise when the moment strikes. Remember: Nobody likes a wallflower.

6) School: Man, last year was so hectic. All that studying, all those exams … how on earth did you survive? Well, our advice to you is to take it easy next term. Buy a PlayStation 3 and book a nice long trip to Skyrim. Kick back, eat a half-dozen $5 pizza pies — an absolute must if you’re following resolution No. 1 — and enjoy the show. But what about you slackers? Uh-oh, looks like you’ll have to hit the books. Spend some quality time at the library with your wireless signal disabled, attempting to read the texts you’ve purchased for all your “blow-off” and “cake” classes. That might mean actually removing the clear plastic seals and thereby halving their resale value, but hey — the one quality needed for resolving all these resolutions is steely resolve.

7) Relationships: Single, in a relationship, engaged, married, it’s complicated — regardless of your status, you’ve got to shake things up for the mere sake of shaking them up. Doesn’t it get so darned tedious after a while? Imagine going from being a bored, lonely loser playing Madden 2012 in your tiny rathole of an apartment to living the contented life of a person with a significant other who watches your every move and tries to sneak peeks at the texts you’re sending to your other sweeties. Or vice versa: ditching your ball and chain, fleeing that domestic gulag where you’ve been imprisoned for the last year and getting back to a swinging single life of playing Madden 2012 back in that awesome studio apartment you used to rent.

8) Money: You need more of it, of course. Otherwise, how will you pay for all of the finer things you want? And even if you have enough money right now to buy some of those finer things, do you have enough to buy every single one of the finer things currently available on the planet? If you can’t afford a rocket ship, death ray, street luge track or solid-gold deathbed, you haven’t reached your full potential. And even if you can afford that junk, wouldn’t you like to have enough money to finance the time travel research that would enable you to travel back to the year of your birth, thus ensuring that there will never be even a single millisecond of your precious lifespan where you weren’t the greatest and most powerful person alive?

There you have it, people: a blueprint for a completely new you, one that isn’t half as lame and un-Bieberlike as the current you. However, even if 2012 turns out to be the year that you go from being gr4 to at least gr8, perhaps even gr10 — it won’t be enough. After all, 2013 is right around the corner — a year away, tops — and you’ll soon be required to reassess all of the things that went haywire in 2012. The same goes for 2014, 2015 and every other year that rounds that corner. That is, until they stop coming at all.

Ain’t life grand?  We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.

Oliver Bateman and his friends invented the Moustache Club of America, a website that specializes in hot college humor. You can read their hilarious stories about keg parties and hipster hoedowns at moustacheclubofamerica.com. And if you’ve got a killer suggestion for a column that (hopefully) has something to do with hardgaining, $5 pies or Maddens 2006-2012, send it to oliver.lee1@gmail.com.