Evolving resolving

NEW YEAR’S resolutions strike me as the verbal equivalent of Halloween costumes. With rare exception, they tend to be perfunctory, last minute and about as original as a Spiderman outfit from Sav-on.

There’s also the matter of their inefficacy. Resolving to lose weight, quit smoking or spend more time with family members is admirable if, for many, unlikely. And while nothing beats my personal favorite of “Be more vigilant about applying self-tanner,” which I resolved in junior high, the one I find most fascinating has nothing to do with physical improvement. It’s “Be a better person.”

What does it mean exactly? Being a better person is gloriously nonspecific, as confusing and open to interpretation as the plot of “Donnie Darko.” Worse, it exists on a sliding scale. Surely Osama bin Laden doesn’t have the same action plan for moral self-improvement as, say, Sister Helen Prejean.

Besides, most of us realize that all good works don’t come from pure altruism. I know more than a few women (not me) who’ve volunteered for Habitat for Humanity just to find eligible, hammer-wielding bachelors. (Technically, this falls under the resolution “Be a more desperate person.” ) There are also the legions of aspiring screenwriters who flock to certain mentoring organizations in the hopes of not only nurturing the work of blighted youngsters but rubbing shoulders with people who might nurture their own movie treatments. If all the deals in the 1990s were made at AA meetings (or so the joke went), in 2005 they were made at comic book-writing workshops in the inner city.

I didn’t make a lot of deals last year, but I did try to be a better person. To be honest, it was a mixed bag. After fostering a couple of stray animals, befriending a troubled fourth-grader and attending Buddhist meditation classes (“Redesigning Your Mind”; “The American Bodhisattva”), I actually felt like a worse person. The stray dogs made my yard look like Beirut, the fourth-grader just wanted to borrow money and the cross-legged position required for meditation made my back hurt so much that I had to knock back a Vicodin and watch “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

This year I vowed that things would be different. Typing “how to be a better person” into Google (if only I’d thought of that before embarking on all that volunteerism), I found an article that boiled “goodness” down to eight rules espoused by the Bhavagad-Gita. Here’s a brief summary:

* Worship the God of your heart. I think most of us already do this. For instance, if the God of our heart really wants a jeweled Dolce & Gabbana handbag from bluefly.com, chances are we’ll go ahead and click “order now.” The Gita says this is OK, so in 2006 you could order two or three. If you feel anxiety or guilt, don’t judge it, just observe it.

* Maintain physical and environmental cleanliness. I’m afraid this means picking up dog poop even when the dog goes in a remote corner of a wilderness area. That’s a real drag, but on the other hand, if the dog is off-leash, and locating the poop requires trampling over bushes or slippery cliffs, my vote would be to pretend that the dog simply peed. Here again, don’t judge, just observe (actually, don’t observe.)

* Practice straightforwardness in dealing with others. On this score, thank the God of your heart for e-mail. For passive aggressives like myself, the ability to ask for a date or even a six-month extension on a book project by way of a typo-ridden, ellipses-laden communique enables evasiveness even more than caller ID. But that doesn’t mean we can’t up the ante in 2006. Consider dissolving that awful marriage or that toxic business partnership with a succinct, no-nonsense text message.

That might seem tacky, but that’s what we used to say about wearing flip-flops to work. Now everyone does it! Best of all, we now have machines to spray self-tanner on us so we don’t have to do it ourselves.

What, you may ask, is the point of making resolutions then? Once we improve ourselves, some technological advance just swoops down and renders the whole effort moot. Being a better person is probably no exception. Until then, though, my dog is on an all-liquid diet.