A few years back, I gave up New Year’s Resolutions when it occurred to me that they're set up to guarantee failure — thereby resulting in feelings of inadequacy, melancholy, frustration, and a ravenous desire for salty, cheese snacks. In fact, studies by wellness professionals, nutritionists, psychologists and the manufacturers of salty cheese snacks recently suggest several things that are LESS harmful for you than making New Year’s Resolutions. Among them:

1. Smoking four packs of non-filter Camels a day.

2. Standing on a street corner in Nuevo Laredo holding up comical posters that poke fun at the Los Zetas drug cartel.

Despite this, several celebrities have reached out to me requesting my services to “ghost-write” their resolutions. So far, I’ve contracted with the following, and herewith is a sampling of the work I’ve done.

1. Kanye West resolves to spend the bulk of 2017 in quiet, Thoreau-like contemplation of nature and to introduce a line of hemorrhoid balm containing exotic spicy peppers.

2. President-elect Donald Trump resolves to undertake a monkish vow of silence and henceforth communicate exclusively via Twitter. A caveat: through executive order, Trump will alter the dictates of the popular social networking service so that he alone can use 143 characters. (When I pointed out to the president elect that, more than likely, the wording for such an executive order would probably require more than 143 characters, I was fired.)

3. This isn’t a sampling of my hired resolution writing, but rather the Tweet in which I was dismissed as Trump’s resolution ghostwriter: “@rickkoster is a stupey. Big stupey. Boo @rickkoster. Don’t believe in ghosts, writers or otherwise.”

4. The newly assembled New Orleans Street Gang Coalition resolves to come up with an ad campaign to emphasize that, while the city’s per capita gun violence/homicide rate is actually higher than Chicago’s, “The only reason we have tourist victims is because NOLA is a lot more fun to visit than Chicago!”

5. George RR Martin resolves to expand the cast of “Game of Thrones” including a group of non-tenured faculty members from a community college wizard school as well as a wise-cracking pony to be voiced by ex-hockey star-turned-ESPN-analyst/ducktail-hair-enthusiast Barry Melrose.