Make it last the whole year. Laugh when you feel like crying.
Encourage other people to laugh. At you, with you. This is no time for pickiness or being precious.
Laugh as if no-one is watching, even if you look and sound insane.
The leader of the supposed free world looks and sounds like that most of the time, without bothering to laugh, so why should you be embarrassed?
Go orange as a confidence booster if you think it would help.
That will be the only way to cope in an election year here likely to be fraught with awfulness and a wider world where rules don’t seem to matter.
I am trying to live up to such a resolution, but with mixed results so far.
The extended family started well on the silliness front on Christmas afternoon with front-row seats to a storm wending its way up the harbour.
Like crazed sports fans responding to their team scoring, a whoop went up every time we saw lightning.
(Mexican waves would have completed the picture, but we weren’t co-ordinated/organised enough for that. I blame the bubbly.)
Cheap entertainment and more exciting than anyone’s Christmas presents, even my battery-operated secateurs.
By New Year’s Eve I was feeling less hilarious.
Uncomfortable. It was like I had enough spare tyres dangling around my midriff to come to the rescue of any driver of a truck and trailer unit whose tyres had been slashed in a drunken moment by a New Year reveller.
The skin was sensitive on these flubberjubs (a term coined by my sister the Earthquake Baby to describe those mysteriously tenacious wobbly folds which festoon the gut area of any mummy who is not yummy).
I was confronted by the awful reality when I frequently peered in the mirror to see if there was any rash. Nothing, apart from a vicious assault on the eyeballs.
This had followed days of scoffing ham, Christmas cake, mincemeat pies, chocolates, and scorched almonds, as well as anything else I would normally eat.
This calorific onslaught included a packet of salted caramel scorched almonds. I bought them in error and then tried to overcome my disappointment by chomping my way through the whole lot to see if I would acquire a taste for them. I didn’t. They are an abomination.
I vowed to eat better and exercise more (after I had polished off any stray chocolates, cake, and mincemeat pies and even a lonely piece of pecan pie on my son’s bench when I was supposed to be feeding my grandsons’ pet rabbits. Waste not, want not).
My Christmas over-indulgence had gone too far this season, I told myself, convinced the tenderness was the result of all that gluttony stretching my skin to breaking point (as you can tell, my 57% in School Cert science has never let me down).
Reduced calorie intake and some brisk walking over at least three days did not seem to be doing anything to stop the skin sensitivity and the sight in the mirror was not improving either.
"It feels a bit like shingles, but there is no rash," I whined to my companion after a painful night.
He was doing his Crazy Cat Gentleman/guerrilla native tree planting thing in North Otago and mercifully spared the task of examining the flubberjubs to give a second opinion.
A few hours later there was the unmistakable herpes zoster rash forming in all its blistered glory. Duh.
I should have known better since it is the third time in the last 40 years I have had shingles.
I have been pathetically consoling myself that failure to recognise when history is repeating itself is not a trait confined to me. (At least I had the nous to seek anti-viral medication promptly, remembering how effective it was last time in lessening the impact of the illness).
What is worse is wilful amnesia about how badly it turned out last time and a refusal to acknowledge repetition is also likely to end in tears.
We are already seeing that unfolding on the world stage with the United States blundering into another country contrary to international law. When does that ever end well?
Here, I am bracing myself for our political parties to re-package and regurgitate some of their old policy souffles in the hope they can trick us into thinking these duds can rise the second or umpteenth time round. Extra police anyone? Another serving of boot camps/beneficiary bashing/wokester worrying/thinly disguised racism? Anything tough they can do, we can do tougher. Lock ’em up. Roads, roads, roads. Vroom, vroom. Growth, growth, growth.
Aargh. Sorry, I meant to say laugh. You know you want to.
■ Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
