Women use New Year's as a time to get our shit together. For example, resolutions we might make include, "This year I'm going to lose weight and eat healthier," or "I'm going to give up smoking," or "I'm going to manage my time better this year." We are able to take inventory of ourselves and see that things need to be changed, whereas men cannot (or will not) admit anything is wrong with themselves.

You guys couldn't care less about your health, or whether you need to cut back on a bad habit. Most of you won't even admit that you're not eating right until after your second heart attack. You'll just keep ordering your value bacon cheeseburgers and telling yourself that the chest pain you're feeling is just a cold coming, because no real man is going to eat a salad unless it's sitting on a plate next to a baked pig. It had better be the whole pig too, damn it, because real men eat their animals whole. Grr!

Our dietary habits, which change with the New Year, are just one more reason that we outlive you. While, year after year, you chase your chili cheese fries with beer and cigarettes, we are trying to improve our lifestyles and health; and, by doing so, we are prolonging our lives. No wonder most men have heart attacks in their forties, while we are just reaching our sexual peak around age thirty-five. It's because we take better care of ourselves than you do.

Girl; Graphic by Joe Stafford

Even though we do not always stick to our New Year's resolutions, we at least attempt to do so. This proves that we care about ourselves more than men. We are willing to admit that we could spend more time in the gym, whereas men let themselves go and then paint faces on their overly large guts at the Super Bowl. We read the Surgeon General's warning on a pack of smokes, while most men don't even realize it's there.

We do not bury our heads in the sand like men. We see something wrong in the mirror, we admit it, and we make plans to fix it. If a man sees something wrong in the mirror, he goes into a world of denial and starts avoiding the mirror. If our doctor says we need to cut back on sugar, we do; if a doctor tells a man to cut back on sugar, he views it as a challenge and will probably overdose on Pixy Stix. We see how we struggled in school this semester and make more time to study; men assume everyone pulled a C in Film As Literature and learn nothing from their plummeting GPAs.

New Year's resolutions are just more proof of which sex is more conscientious. Obviously, women win for two major reasons: men are too oblivious to recognize that they are slowly killing themselves (even though good common sense says that the heart and bacon are not a match made in heaven), and we outlive them (and they can't really argue with us if they're not around, now can they?)

We see New Year's as a brand new start, and we like the idea of brand-new beginnings. As women, we are capable of embracing change, while men are creatures of habit and enjoy their filthy existences. They love to wallow in their cigar smoke and eat pork twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They are, after all, working toward their heart attacks.

Oh, I can hear it now: “I’m going to lose weight, I’m going to quit smoking, I’m going to quit going to the bars and going home with strange men I don’t know.” Yeah, right. We’ve all heard those a thousand times over.

New Year's Eve has a stigma around it. You look back on what you accomplished the previous year, and more often than not it was no different than the one before that. Yet, year after year, we make up these rules and goals for ourselves to follow that will, in the end, make us better people?

Guy; Graphic by Andrew Allen

On New Year's Eve, we feel that anything can go because hell, it’s the end of the year. Who can judge me now? Tomorrow is a new day, a new year, a new chance to set things right. Which, by the way, we wouldn’t even have to be doing if we'd kept them in the first place. We go out all night and party, get hammered, then God knows what, and then tell ourselves we’re going to be better people next year. What a load of crap.

Humans are creatures of habit. If you like eating donuts, you’re going to stay fat. If you like smoking and don’t really want to quit, then you never will. Let’s not kid ourselves here, folks.

You can tell yourself whatever you need to in order to make yourself feel better. Just don’t fool yourself and plan on keeping them. In the end, all they are is a tradition.