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Lenox Lizwi Mhlanga on Saturday

THIS is not intended to look like a rip-off of the Real Housewives of Hollywood nor The Real Husbands of the same place. I will salute the person who announced on twitter that 2016 is looking to be a very slow year.

“If it were last year, it would have been Easter by now,” he wrote. Classic!

I will be the first to admit that last week’s column really surprised a lot of people. A flood of emails wanted to find out what had happened to me.

Had I been struck by lightning or whether I had hired a ghost writer to knock it out?

“Lenox, we want you to get real,” wrote another who thought I had lost it. Well, to cater for that lunatic fringe of my fan base, I will give it to you straight.

Last year I resolved not to set unrealistic resolutions for myself and look where it got me, the situation being what it has become, a hundred times worse than in previous years!

The Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies, some years ago, released tips on personal performance management which can be applied to our personal resolutions. They read like this: Don’t overload on resolutions. Make one or two. Set realistic goals. View the resolution as a chance to try new things, resolve to start doing something, not to quit doing something.

Examine what stopped you from being successful in the past and work toward eliminating that block. Make sure you are personally motivated.

Don’t internalise suggestions from others; make your goal something you’ve been planning to achieve for some time.

Well, I suppose this is gilt-edged stuff, because universities are paid lot of money to research on such stuff, so it just has to be true, right? Wrong!

And this is why.

Next year, I pledge to sleep more than I did this year the economy being the way it is, there’s hardly anything to do. I have perfected the art of sleeping with my eyes open meaning that I was able to fool my boss at the office for most of the year.

It has given the term ‘daydreaming’ a whole new meaning. This means that if you take the 12 hours I do at night then add the 11 at work, which leaves an hour to travel in between home and work.

I will live each day as if it were my last, the reason being evidence shows that these are surely the last days. Look at what the Book of Revelations predicted and tick it off what is happening nowadays. The proliferation of prophets, both false and otherwise, is another sure sign that the end is nigh.

I also resolve not to go outside when it rains, which is easy bearing in mind that there is hardly any rain due to the depletion of the ozone layer just because we have allowed vehicles to “smoke” on our roads. Never mind the human chimneys.

I resolve not to entertain members of churches that keep on reminding us that the end of the world is around the corner. I will certainly stop entertaining the guy from a certain church who despite reminding me that Jesus is about to come, bought thousands of dollars of real estate. I heard him murmuring something that sounded like, “If you can’t convince them, join them!”

This year, I will not wait until the last minute to come up with my resolutions for next year. I will be ready with my resolutions on the first day of 2017, so that I will not have to cobble up a bunch of lame excuses at the last minute.

I resolve not to let my inherent laziness get in the way of holding a good grudge.

I intend to cook more. However, if I ever try to cook Mopane worms, I will not put in so much salt in the hope of becoming more intelligent so that the final product becomes essentially a black, massive gob of disgusting salt flavoured toxic sludge that will send the Environmental Management Agency banging at my door.

I resolve to be more mysterious, even if people just think I’m being an idiot.

If this year I come up with a resolution in January, which is exactly what am doing, I will act on it immediately, instead of waiting until next January just so that I can make it an official New Year’s resolution.

I resolve to use the word “no” more often than my boss does. In fact, I will do it so often that I intend to earn the title of Dr No. No relation to the James Bond character of the same name. It happens to be a workplace joke and the boss is not laughing either!

When a cashier in a store gives me the wrong change, I will point out the mistake only when I’m the one losing money. I will not even bother rationalising this behaviour. I will simply enjoy it.

I will accept my bouts of inactivity with pride since laziness can be translated to mean rationing consciousness which is similar to sleeping, which I intend to do more of as indicated earlier.

I resolve to watch more television and occasionally listen to bad Zim dancehall music, like intensely vulgar hip hop, in order not to fall completely out of touch with decadent Western culture. I have to be fully aware of what to warn my sons for. The adage that the proof of the pudding is in the eating certainly applies in this case.

I will also plan to laugh at myself so as to justify why everyone else is laughing at me, in which case they are bound to look like idiots. Just like me.

Finally, I resolve not to feel guilty about stuff. If I tell myself that I will do something and then I don’t do it, I will not kick myself over it. I will simply remind myself that there will be plenty of other resolutions to keep in the coming years, if God is willing to allow me to live that long, and if the world does not end tomorrow.