It’s still fairly early in January and I want to take this time to share some of my New Year’s resolutions with the students of Grand Valley State University.

Making resolutions is atypical for me, not because I have nothing to change — with my winning personality and buff physique — but because I know how unmotivated I can be when it comes to making drastic life alterations.

Yet, since graduation is at the end of this semester, this could likely be one of the most important years of my life. As such, I want to make the most of it and can only achieve that by setting myself a number of goals for this year. These aren’t the usual “lose weight” or “go to the gym” or “take a shower” ones because everyone picks those. Also, I’ve already lost weight and gone to the gym this year.

These repetitive resolutions are the easiest to break; you keep going to the gym until you miss one day, and then one day becomes two until it snowballs into an entire year. Due to that fact — and the fact that it’s hard to snowball anything with the amount of snow we’ve received this year — these are my alternative resolutions:

RESOLUTION 1: Stop hating things. It may surprise people, but I’m a big ol’ hater (h8r to the younger generation, who apparently communicate via algebra). I hate a lot of things for no reason besides the brief satisfaction of loathing. However, perpetual abhorrence to the world is not the most attractive trait, so I’ll tone it down for the sake of others.

RESOLUTION 2: Buy some kind of day planner. Whether it’s a 25-cent booklet or a BlackBerry (one of these may be out of my price range), I need something to keep my life in order. Somehow, scribbling assignments on the back of my hand wasn’t as effective of a system as I had planned. I’m sure I made a note to purchase a solution at some point, and then accidentally erased my hand and, therefore, my memory with a quick shower. (Oh no, I ruined the joke from earlier!)

RESOLUTION 3: Use Wikipedia less, read books more. Seriously, it’s a problem.

RESOLUTION 4: Get a bigger bed. The area where I sleep is the size of an iPad and it’s not very comfortable for my 6’3” body. Girls hate it too (they have their reasons). When I get a new place, my first order of business is bed-buying. Or I can put a couple of twins together, but that would just take up more space on an already tiny bed.

One of the easiest things to do in life is to set goals, and it’s one of the hardest things to complete them. I mean, when I was little, I wanted to be a dinosaur astronaut (any way you read that would be accurate). And while I’m mature now (I’m more flexible on the “astronaut” part), I still don’t know how to follow through. This overwhelming apathy can be daunting, but I’m fighting to overcome it. 2014 could be a great year for me — wait, it’s 2012?! Okay, I’m buying a planner right now. [email protected]