What are your resolutions?

It's that time of the year again. You eat at restaurants that make you pay double the normal price and still put you on the waiting list until the last minute, you drink every possible kind of concoction you can think of and get unbelievably smashed, and you hear the word "Resolutions". Yup. New year, new beginning. What are your new year's resolutions? How many people make resolutions that they actually take seriously?

My BFFs and I have this annual ritual where we write our resolutions on tiny pieces of paper, staple or seal them up in envelopes and commission a "trustee" to hang on to them until a similar gathering the following year to open them up and see if any of them have been achieved. We then proceed to do the same thing for the next year. One year they were kept on the Xmas tree of the BFF whose birthday we were celebrating. Another year it was kept by the one whose flat we went to get blitzed. I don't know who gets to keep them this year or where it's going to be done coz I don't get to participate. This year I'm celebrating New Year's alone here in China. So, it's just me and my trusted apple-green Dell notebook.

Out of habit, I typed up a list anyway. My resolutions are generally the same every year, because they almost always only get half-achieved (I've only paid up and cancelled half of my ridiculous collection of credit cards, and no amount of sleep is ever enough for me anyway, who am I kidding?). This year, however, I've added what I'd like to believe to be a more interesting (and more achievable) one. I read 12 books last year, which averages to about 1 a month. This year I resolve to read 18. Why this comes to be on the list will be mentioned in another post at a later time.

What I'd really like to know is, do people still make resolutions at the beginning of the new year? How many of you out there really set out to achieve these resolutions? Are they the same every year? If you have an interesting or extraordinary one (it may be something simple but extraordinary by your standards), pray share.