LET'S TRY SLOGANS INSTEAD OF RESOLUTIONS FOR '93

After the boxes, crumpled holiday paper, broken pieces of rippled ribbon have all been picked up and the floor is navigable again, I sit down with a satisfied sigh and ask myself, "Now what's next?" It's a rhetorical question. Celebration of a new year is next, of course. And, oh, so soon. I can't sit very long.

After the glut of parties, the feeding frenzy of fattening, but oh so delicious, goodies, we pull ourselves up short and generally assume the attitude that "the party's over." Back to school, back to work, back to the project we dropped somewhere around Thanksgiving. Back to good old plain living. Somehow to me it is a comfortable thought.

The only "baggage" we try to carry into the new year are resolutions. I call them "baggage" because, although such resolutions are generally to do something that we haven't been doing but should or want to in order to improve ourselves. They have or can become causes of certain mild depressions when we see ourselves slip-sliding away from the new lifestyle we'd planned.

I've always maintained that it is good to make New Year's Resolutions for we may, at the least, live two weeks out of the year being what we want to be saying, thinking and doing what we have resolved to do. Say you are 75 years old, you've lived 1190 days as you think you should have. But at 75, one has lived 27,372 days. 1190 out of 27,372 days isn't a very good ratio.

So I'm beginning to think in terms of ditching resolutions in favor of guiding slogans such as, for the coming year, "Get free in '93,' "Get wee in '93," "Taste, touch smell, hear, but above all, see (inwardly as well as outwardly) in '93."

Such slogans, if adopted for your own, do not have to be continuous as resolutions do, and you avoid any annoyance of slippage or downright clinical depression if you can't live up to what you think is such a simple thing as a New Year's Resolution.

Consider "Get fee in '93." Free of what, you might ask. You can name it to suit your own desires.

Suppose your "get free" means to quit steamrollering over other persons' conversations, beginning your own spoken comment before the one you're talking to has finished his or her's. Of course you may never get anything said in these times.

The TV media has spread this ill-mannered style of conversation to such an extent folks are beginning to think it is the thing to do. Smart. With it. On the ball. Crossfire is the worst offender, but all the TV discussion groups are guilty. Sometimes in order to move on quickly (time is the boss now) after a listener has grasped what the speaker is trying to get at, the listener begins his response. Sometimes it is an electronic shut-off. This is Larry King's forte. While I admire Larry's acumen for almost instantaneous understanding of that the call-in speaker is trying, haltingly, to say, I see him snap them off in mid-sentence and get on with his guests, forming the question himself. My heart goes out to the dismissed caller. I see him or her sitting there with a suddenly singing telephone in his ear and perhaps blushing with embarrassment because he was not able to talk concisely.

I know the world's in a hurry, but are interruptions and over-talking the way to go?

All the above is just an example of a slogan that can be worked on all year instead of a rigid resolution that is easily given up after the first break, say the 13th of January.

Hey, have I been speechifying? If so, let me stop and tell you about my New Year's plan. I'm going to find the green and white checked tablecloth (it's been lost for a year), spread it on my kitchen table. I'm not expecting company, so on it will go an "everyday' setting of blue decorated ironstone dishes (enough of red and green!). There'll be a water glass that Mama took from a cereal box long, long ago when you could find such pleasant surprises in cereal boxes. I'll have some black-eyed peas, cabbage, a serving of corned beef, a cornbread muffin and a large red apple for lunch. After tidying up, I'll get my new red-backed Big Chief tablet and a No. 2 yellow pencil, since my penny pencil has worn down to such a stub I can no longer hold it and write. On page one my slogan for '93? Maybe it will be "Omit the me, me, me in me in '93."

REJOICE!