These two are also the foundations of the billion-dollar self-help industry, which assumes that we all need help and will pay through the nose to get it.
But what if we actually like ourselves? What if we accept that our flaws, like our better qualities, are a vital component of our personalities, i.e. the things that make you you? Which is not to say that we must be proud of our imperfections, only that we must acknowledge them, apologize for them when necessary, and live with them the way nations live with North Korea. Then our New Year’s resolutions, liberated from over-optimism ("I will lose 50 pounds by living on parsley") and self-abasement ("I will never eat chocolate again"), would become so much more manageable.
For starters, I will read at least one book every week. I’ve figured out the easiest way to do it: Stop watching television. Consider how much time you spend watching TV. You think that you only watch The Daily Show or Bakekang one hour a day tops, but you may actually be wasting hours channel-surfing. The remote control clicker is an insidious device. It not only makes your thumb spastic, but it alters your perception of time. It makes you think you’re zipping through all the channels in seconds, when in reality you’re spending a few minutes on each show to see who or what is in it. Before you know it, hours have passed and you’ve watched an entire season of 21 Jump Street that you had no intention of watching since Johnny Depp was no longer in it.
This may sound like a radical statement, but you can live without television! Don’t worry about having nothing to contribute to the small talk in school or at the office: you can watch all the TV shows you want on DVD, free from the tyranny of network schedules. You can fast-forward through the boring stuff. And in the unlikely event that you miss something really good on TV, you can be sure that someone will post it on YouTube. Better yet, you can tell your friends about the fascinating book you’re reading.
In my case, I realized that the reason I always had the idiot box on was not so much for its content as for the artificial company it provided.
With the TV on, it felt like there were other people in the house. To address this solitude, I now simply put on a DVD, so I am surrounded by whoever I care to have around, be they drag queens from Barcelona, paparazzi from Rome, or chatty strangers on many trains. And I have more time to read. This year I’m planning to take on the Russians. Yes, the gloomy doorstoppers. Wish me luck.
My second New Year’s resolution: I will stop pulling my hair. From early childhood I’ve had this weird compulsion to pull out my hair. I find myself yanking strands from my scalp for no reason, and before I know it there’s enough hair on the desk to clog a drain. Fortunately these "attacks" are not frequent, and I have masses of hair that grow back very fast (hence the variety of hair lengths on my head). My hair-pulling sessions are usually followed by the fear that I am going bald, then by Exorcist-type contortions before the bathroom mirror as I try to see the back of my own head. I looked up the hair-pulling compulsion in a book of obsessive-compulsive disorders and diagnosed myself with borderline trichotillomania. Serious cases lead to patches of baldness, obviously, and one woman who was thought to be pregnant turned out to have swallowed a huge ball of her own hair.
Recently I’ve noticed that some friends have begun to lose their hair – a perfectly normal part of the aging process – and it struck me that my hair-pulling is rude and ungracious. How can I be so cavalier with my own hair when people I care about are losing theirs? So from here on I’m going to watch myself.
Third, I will eat vegetables. Not because they’re good for me – the worst possible reason to do something, and the best deterrent to doing it – but because it’s occurred to me that I may be depriving my palate of surprises. Self-deprivation: Bad. Trying new things: Good.
Finally, I resolve to embrace "randomness" and put my iPod on "Shuffle" mode. This is how I listen to music: I scroll down the song list, choose the piece, click, listen. When it’s done, I peruse the list again, click, and listen. I can spend what seems like hours deciding what I will hear next. Which is a ridiculous waste of time because the iPod contains my music library, which means all the music was already chosen beforehand, and by me. In this case unlimited free will is too time-consuming. Therefore I have resolved to keep my iPod on "Shuffle."
This not-so-random selection process results in startling combinations: Bach, Radiohead, Seu Jorge, Jacques Brel and Ben Folds Five tumbling out one after the other. It’s odd and wonderful; it reminds us that not everything is under our control, and it shouldn’t be.