New Years Resolutions

The irony of new year "resolutions" has struck me, officially. 
I think the root of the problem is that New Years is an Event. It has greeting cards, a place in my mobile calender, a chirpy saying to throw across the office to a depressed coworker. Although it is an awkward saying, I think. "Happy New Year!" doesn't seem to have anything remotely personal implied. It's not like "Happy Birthday", where you know that the sayer at least has some kind of genuine connection with you, and thus wants to congratulate you on being born (which seem stupid - surely they should congratulate the mothers: "Happy day-you-spent-six-hours-pushing-a-large-object-out-of-a-small-space!"). But "Happy New Year" is about as exciting as "Happy Tuesday!". Yes, it happens to everyone. The only change is writing 11 instead of 10 when dating things, and most of us won't even register that and will continue to confuse administrators by writing the wrong date on insurance forms.


So it's an Event, on facebook and otherwise, and everyone loves to get excited for these things. Events are times in which basic human courtesies and polite rules of society can be broken. Lines can be toed! And further than that, the new year gets people thinking "Hell, I've made it through 2010, I deserve to go wild!" People take crayons and scribble all over the lines! 
My point being that when everyone's going insane, getting fat and drunk leading up to midnight, they seem to forget that at 12:01, the resolutions they responsibly and inevitably made kick in. So, quitting drinking, going for runs and eating organic, saying sorry to your neighbour for all the house parties, starting stamp collecting and buying an iron are all on your head. And you know you can't just ignore them. The way resolutions work is that you struggle to maintain them and then, three months later, justify giving them up and pretend they never happened. But to throw them in within the first ten minutes? The guilt would drive you mad. 
So you're stuck, at 12:06 on New Years Day, at the pinnacle of your madness and badness, thinking "I MUST GO JOGGING, A LA NEW YEARS RESOLUTION, OR I AM A PATHETIC HUMAN BEING WHO HAS THE PUNY WILLPOWER OF TRASHY CELEBRITIES LIKE LINDSAY LOHAN AND BRITNEY SPEARS. OH MY GOD I AM GOING TO END UP BALD IN COURT WITH A MONITOR AROUND MY ANKLE. SPIRALING ADDICTIONS HERE I COME." 


Case study: since New Years, I have spent my days in bed, on the phone for stupidly long periods of time, eating whatever is closest and googling things. It is 7th January (thankfully my new years resolutions did not include such blatantly unrealistic goals as "get fit" or "be more positive". But whatever they were, they have definitely not been in action the past week.) 
The only sensible solution is to have New Years (the Event) and then, much later, new years (the day the resolutions actually start). I'm thinking some time in May.