Posted on: Monday, January 3, 2005

ABOUT MEN

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Because I'm as sick of other people's New Year's resolutions as you are, I hereby resolutely resolve not to make any new resolutions in this column.

Unless I do. In which case, I'm just trying to underscore how unresolute I really am.

Or not.

It's not that I have anything against self-improvement. It's a natural and mostly positive impulse that leads people to take the otherwise arbitrary passage of one year to the next as an opportunity to establish higher standards for themselves, to set goals that, if achieved, will testify to their strength of will.

And maybe there really are people who make good on their resolutions. Surely somewhere out there, people with iron resolve really do lose the weight and keep it off, devote more of their time to charity, stop smoking, spend more time with the family, cook at home more, put in those 20 minutes of exercise three times a week. Good on them.

Yet there's something suspect about personal promises aired publically. While they ensure a sort of accountability, they also dispose of the traditionally masculine notion that if something is meaningful to you, you should keep it to yourself.

Add to that our contemporary American soiling of the very concept of resolve — "We do what we want and figs to you if you disagree" — and the whole idea seems vaguely egotistical.

Now, promising to do without that third finger of evening Scotch is hardly comparable to, oh, using deception to justify the imposition of your ideological aims on a conquered nation, but the surety of purpose that anchors both is much the same. It's the belief that our motives are noble and our will superior.

And they often are not.

I've never actually made a New Year's resolution, but I have been stubbornly resolute about a wealth of causes personal and otherwise.

A few efforts (grad school, sunscreen, no more Tom Hanks movies) worked out for the better. Some were successful in a careful-what-you-wish-for way. (I once gained 12 pounds on a dare in what my supposed friend Chuck proudly termed the "Fat Mike Experiment." I spent the next year worrying that my heart was going to explode.)

And, of course, some were just clear failures, either of effect or personal integrity.

My 1999-2000 boycott of Starbucks, for example, went shockingly unnoticed — and it didn't even bring Coffee Manoa back. And, despite the November election results, I have not yet moved to Canada.

But if our public resolutions are just bear traps of pride and willfulness, what's the alternative? How about a continual good-faith process of evaluation and adaptation? How about just a quiet promise to ourselves that we'll do better, be better, and make the world better on whatever terms we can?

It's settled then. That's my resolution.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2461.