Resolutions Without The Guilt

By Mark Leyner

People who consider themselves sophisticated tend to disparage the making of New Year's resolutions. ("My resolution is not to make resolutions" is surely the most irritating rejoinder since the deeply annoying "Let's not and say we did.") But it's easy to see why the snobs wince. Yes, New Year's resolutions are glib, sanctimonious and self-serving. Yes, they are the haiku of holiday kitsch. But isn't glib, sanctimonious, self-serving kitsch the glue that holds us together as Americans?

This year many of my closest personal friends, people who would ordinarily have no trouble tossing off a dozen or so resolutions, are having great difficulty. Why? Obviously it's the onerous burden of Y2K. As we all sit on the precipice of the new millennium, our legs dangling in the glorious future, the pledges that seemed sufficient in previous years--"I need to get on the StairMaster more" or "I'll be more patient with my kids"--just don't seem to pack enough vision and gravitas. But we must all fight this false sense of obligation to make grand, magnificently philosophical resolutions. As citizens, let's not allow our customarily banal and petty hopes for the ensuing year to be swept away by hyperbolic pomp.

If you're also having trouble, the first thing you should do is check out the resolutions that celebrities have made. You can either use them as inspirational springboards or simply appropriate them verbatim as your own. Surprisingly, celebrities are the consummate resolution makers. Asked a simple yes or no question (e.g., Will you be watching this year's Super Bowl on television?) your typical actor/singer/model will prattle on interminably about the Bhagavad-Gita, string theory and film restoration. But ask a celeb for a New Year's resolution and out comes a pithy, succinctly worded and cogent personal mission statement.

Take a recent resolution adduced by actress Bridget Fonda. Two simple words: "Floss regularly." Shorn of pretense and ringing with truth. Undaunted by the mundane at this august moment in the history of Western civilization is cnn legal analyst Greta Van Susteren. On the eve of the new millennium, she vows "to learn to comb my hair before my show rather than after." Medical and personal-grooming resolutions happen to be among my favorites. Here are two that I may or may not use this year, so feel free to borrow them if you'd like: "To actually mail in those occult fecal-blood tests that doctors always give you after checkups" and "to stop honking my rubber-bulb ear-wax-removal syringe during performances of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron." Personal resolutions may simply pertain to your own vocabulary. For 2000, Sarah Jessica Parker has pledged not to use the F word. I also have a couple of purely lexical resolutions: "Not to use the words hiatus and credenza in the same sentence as much this year" and "to stop using the word umbelliferous in conversation altogether. (If I have to indicate that something is like a carrot, I'll just say, 'It's like a carrot.' I won't say, 'It's umbelliferous.')"

Beware the prohibitive resolution though. You may find yourself victimized by the "don't-think-about-elephants" phenomenon. Injunctions against a certain activity can cause a person to become obsessed with engaging in that very activity. When I'm in a nonsmoking room in a hotel, all I can think about is smoking. Had I been in a smoking room, I wouldn't have given cigarettes a second thought. Prohibition stimulates desire. Put me in a non-haggis room and I'll immediately begin to crave haggis. Similarly, prohibitive New Year's resolutions can backfire. Vows like "I will stop cluttering up my ski chalet with ridiculous tchotchkes," "I will stop buying long-range North Korean missiles over the Internet" and "I will not humiliate my family by having oral sex with young women in my office" often result in even more tchotchkes, more Taepo Dong-1 rockets and more oral sex.

To prevent this sort of unintended backlash, try to keep your proscriptive pledges focused on specific aspects of relationships. Here are two such resolutions I'm considering: "Stop turning down dinner invitations from my brother and sister-in-law with the transparent excuse that they're rerunning my favorite episode of Walker, Texas Ranger that night" and "stop silently exulting or actually chortling when another parent tells me that his daughter had enormous difficulty with a homework assignment that my daughter found ridiculously easy."

This year a nice trivial resolution is our way of standing up to the hegemony of Y2K hype. And bearing in mind that New Year's-resolution making is traditionally an act of utter futility, it's critical that you keep yours as local and personal as possible. The guilt you may incur in having failed to end world hunger or stop global warming may be unendurable. But if you find yourself on Jan. 1, 2000, surrounded by cold, guttered candles and empty champagne bottles, already unflossed, thinking about elephants and muttering the F word, you can probably deal with it.

We should all feel lucky simply to have got out of the 20th century alive. Let's not sweat the big stuff.