It’s January 1st once more, which means it’s time to reinvent your entire life from scratch yet again. Gone are those halcyon days when people awoke on New Year’s Day, looked in the mirror, and thought to themselves, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” Alas, this holiday dispels contentment, disregards recent successes, assumes the worst in you, and demands you rethink your life now. Not on February 14th or June 22nd, or some random day in otherwise meaningless August, but now, because federal law mandates that Things can only begin on January 1st.

I’ve never been great with New Year’s resolutions. I can’t think of the last one I ever even chose, let alone the last time I actually attained one. Though we see renewal symbolized in the rough annual transition from Father Time and his 365-day reign of terror to Baby New Year and his inevitable future letdown, beginning my personal transitions on a meaningful date has never worked for me. My most successful diet began on a July 5th. I proposed to my wife on December 26th. I was baptized on the Sunday after a Thanksgiving. My first comic book was given to me sometime in a December. I had to start wearing glasses one nameless summer month. The forces of change laugh at our puny human concept of calendars.

My wife and I discussed 2014 over lunch today and our hopes for areas in which we’d like to see some improvements, changes, miracles, or reasons not to feel shameful. We’ve not yet pinned any plans to our schedule, partly because we’d like to put the holidays further behind us and leave any such resolutions free of the “New Year’s” stigma. Considering how many millions of people we see experiencing New Year’s letdown halfway into every January, we’re reluctant to predestine ourselves like that.

To that end, I’ve been thinking: if any resolutions I brainstorm today are 101% likely to go up in flames anyway, then why not aim even higher? Why let my own limitations or the boundaries of reality hold me back? Why not shoot for the stars and come up with some flat-out awesome resolutions that are just as likely to happen as the simple ones I’d probably weaken too much to keep in the first place?

So far my New Year’s resolutions looks like this:

* Get down to my scientifically calculated ideal weight of 105 pounds

* Read one novel for every day of the year

* Enroll in online courses and obtain bachelor’s degrees in fifteen different disciplines

* Complete every household repair on every to-do list I’ve ever brainstormed, until our entire home is 100% brand-new, futurist-approved

* Invent the cure for any and every condition that even thinks about taking a loved one away from us

* Kickstarter campaign to fund my “Let me sit at home and blog about whatever until retirement” project

* Purchase hundreds of thousands of Twitter-bot Followers, create the illusion of fame, and wait for Hollywood agents to come make me an offer

* Solve ten cold cases from local Homicide files

* Make cameos on three TV shows

* Acquire two super-powers, at least one of them useful in combat

* Decline a nomination to a political office

* Watch five sequels that were totally worth the price of admission

* Win the Internets — ALL of them

* Enjoy one sport for more than four hours out of the year

The best part of this list is already knowing the ending of each and every respective quest, spoilers and all. The meaningful part will be in the journeys themselves, not the destinations, and in measuring how far away I end up from the goal. I may end up thousands of miles away from self-improvement civilization, but the panoramic view from that distance should be spectacular.

And now, it’s time I got back to other, more challenging tasks with even higher risks of failure, such as nailing down our 2014 household budget…