Simply acting as if you don’t remember making the resolution doesn’t work in this case because you are fairly certain someone videotaped you making it. You believe this happened because, as you were climbing up on the coffee table, you vaguely recall yelling something to the effect, “Someone get a video camera, I want my New Year’s resolution recorded because I’m serious about keeping this one.”

Of course, when you said this, you were slurring your words slightly so that they came out sounding something like a combination of English, Croatian and a Joe Cocker song. You aren’t sure anyone actually understood what you said.

Nonetheless, since waking up New Year’s Day you’ve been checking the Internet hourly fully expecting the videotaped footage to eventually show up posted online somewhere.

But not all New Year’s resolutions are made in a haze of noise makers and gallons of cheap sparkling wine. Sometimes, they are made in the sober light of day by people who are actually serious about “changing their lives,” “getting things back on track,” or “recovering from a recent lobotomy.”

These people represent 34 percent of the adult population (source: completely made up). And, yes, I could sit back and do nothing to help them, just as you are. But I must ask myself: can I somehow avoid helping the situation yet still write an entire column about it? Call me a dreamer, but that is my plan.

Therefore, first I’ll identify the three main categories of New Year’s resolutions; next I’ll make fun of them; and third, I’ll offer impractical and absurd advice. When you think about it, it’s exactly what Dr. Phil does everyday on his show.

The number one New Year’s resolution (source: thin air) is to start a new diet. We Americans love diets. Shortly after starvation stopped being a major issue in America we started going on diets. And there are thousands of new diets to choose from. “The Atkins Diet,” “The South Beach Diet,” “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Diet,” “The Dark, Scary Alley Diet,” etc.

The problem is, the more we diet, the larger we Americans seem to be getting. We are now officially huge. The federal government keeps reminding us of this with report after report about how incredibly obese we are. It has reached a point where many scientists have stopped worrying about global warming raising sea levels, and started worrying about the large number of obese Americans causing North America to sink.

SOLUTION: Stop dieting America, before our coastal lands are permanently underwater.

The next most popular resolution is to exercise more. This is a corollary to dieting, since we are always told you can’t maintain a healthy lifestyle without doing both. But no one wants to exercise. Some experts have attempted to make it sound like fun, first by calling it jogging, then aerobics, and now Pilates. But in the end it is still exercise, which by definition means it isn’t “sitting on the sofa watching TV,” something we Americans never need to make a resolution to do.

SOLUTION: Make a resolution to spend more time sitting on the sofa watching TV, then maybe, reverse psychology-like, you’ll start exercising more.

The last category includes all the other resolutions we can think of. These always involve learning something such as a foreign language or playing the zither. Things that if we were really interested in, we would have learned to do 20 years ago.

SOLUTION: Stop making stupid resolutions to do stuff you have absolutely zero desire to do. While you’re at it, ratchet back on the cheap sparking wine next New Year’s Eve, too.

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