Kirk Novak: Who’s the President? What year is it?

I am going to do a bunch of things for the rest of my life, many of which started before 2014, but hopefully there is more than one more year left in my tank.

I refuse to enumerate them because everything might happen at once and then my OCD would probably give me an aneurysm trying to quantify everything into a logical order.

• I am going to come into a large sum of money.

• I am going to explore and appreciate the natural beauty of this wonderfully dynamic planet every opportunity that comes my way, instead of only near the end of my daily run when everything takes on a dreamlike quality because I am terribly deprived of oxygen and seconds away from my heart saying, “Fuck it.”

• I am going to tell the people that I love that I love them whenever I want to tell them instead of wondering if they want to hear it.

  If a person doesn’t want to hear that they’re loved, well, that might be a good reason to hate them.

• I am going to marvel at technology instead of fearing its advances. I can draw a dick on a photo and send it to a friend, call my mom and tell her I love her, find where the weed at with the weedmaps app, and complete my graduate school application, all on a cellular telephone!

  I am also going to do more things naked in front of the computer because the NSA is always watching.

• I am going to embrace my faults and acknowledge that they define me as much as any positive traits that are eluding me at this very moment. I may not pronounce many words correctly, but I can capitalize on that and make people laugh at me!

  Laugh at me, laugh with me, I am no longer discerning.

• I will be a friend to the people that want to be my friend, even if they are completely unbearable.

• I will ostracize toxic people from my life.

  If you are an old white man holding political office with a chin that waggles as he speaks, you will be getting obnoxious tweets from some random weirdo named @novakkirk on Twitter. You will block him.

  If you are just someone I went to high school with, or someone I know from somewhere that I haven’t seen in a decade, then I am going to guess that there is a gaping chasm between our values which precludes any friendship whatsoever. I will block you.

  Your “opinions” that you want me to “respect” are hurting the people I love.

  Sometimes, your opinions are harmless but incredibly stupid, and your willingness to share them forcefully means that I don’t want to be around you because you are no fun at parties or pretty much ever.

• I am going to try and continue to shape my perspective by trying to imagine how things would affect me if I were a woman, or anybody that is something other than white, or a person who identifies as anything other than heterosexual, or maybe all of these things at once because some people are and they are all people, people.

  Except for the Irish.

• I am going to try and never intentionally hurt another human being, which means that I am going to try and consider consequences to my actions that are unforeseeable without introspective contemplation.

  I hope that I become kinder to everyone except assholes, I am going to try to be an even bigger asshole to them.

  Frankly, I am good at it, I enjoy it, and I am unwilling to let that talent lie fallow.

  Like Walter White and methsmanship! I just fucking a nailed a contemporary reference.

  2014 is going great already.

• I am going to apologize when I make mistakes.

  Please see previous resolution.

I feel like I have just codified the framework for some kind of personal philosophy or moral system.

The “Don’t Be a Dick, Dick!” lifestyle method. People would order that book from a commercial that runs at midnight on a UHF channel in the 80s.

Maybe I do only have one more year left.