New Year's Irresolution.

By NANCY GIBBS

New Year's is the season of superstition--the fireworks driving out demons, the bells ringing in a new age. Women on the Isle of Man used to sprinkle the floor with ashes on New Year's Eve, then look for footprints in the morning: steps leading toward the door portended a death; steps entering meant a birth in the family. Texans believed eating black-eyed peas would bring good luck. In Scottish Hogmanay celebrations, you want the first foot that crosses the threshold after midnight to belong to a dark-haired man bearing a small gift, for that will bless the year to come.

It takes truly magical thinking to imagine we will keep resolutions that experience suggests are impossible: to live greener, fit into a size 4, learn Chinese. One study found that nearly a quarter of us lapse within a week, the vast majority before the year is out. Since human frailty is a law of nature, states are compensating with some rules of their own--what are laws if not expectations carved in stone? As of the New Year, you can no longer text-message while driving in Washington State. North Carolina bar owners have to recycle their bottles, and politicians have to tell the truth: all candidates will be asked if they've ever been convicted of a felony, and lying when they answer would count as one. Airlines have resolved to treat us better, but in case they lapse, New York's new Passengers' Bill of Rights guarantees no incarceration for more than three hours without food, water and a working toilet.

As for smokers, willpower now carries a badge: you can no longer light up in a car with a minor in it in California, or in most public places in Illinois. The most draconian measures have come in France, where it seemed cafes once had two smoking sections: one for smokers, one for heavy smokers. With a ban now in place, Paris authorities are handing out 10,000 "pocket ashtrays" to keep the streets from looking like gerbil cages.

Maybe we'd have better luck keeping our promises if we aimed them differently. Resolve to sleep a little more, play with the kids when we're supposed to be working. Then we'll have something to celebrate next year--and maybe resolve to raise the bar in 2009.