RIVER CITY JOURNAL: RESOLVING TO BE REAL IS THE KEY

The thing about New Year's resolutions is how impractical they are. You never make a resolution to floss twice a day. Instead, you vow to take off 50 pounds in three days.

See?

Most New Year's resolutions are the off-ramp on the road to failure. You solemnly swear to do things that are outside the realm of reality. If what you proposed to do in the new year weren't so farfetched, you wouldn't need to make a resolution, now would you?

So here is your advice for making resolutions: Get real.

As a matter of fact, that should be Resolution No. 1 on the list: "Do some practical things that ordinarily get erased almost every day from your 'To Do' list."

Some examples:

Impractical: Avoid between-meal snacks.

Practical: Eat fruit between meals.

Impractical: Exercise regularly.

Practical: Explore the hiking trails in nearby national forests whenever it is a pretty weekend.

Impractical: Lose 50 pounds by Monday.

Practical: Try to lose enough weight so you can button your suit coat before it wears out.

One thing you have decided to do while 1995 in still in its infancy is to learn to whistle with your fingers in your mouth. You know, that piercing, high-pitched kind of whistle that can be heard all over the stadium when 80,000 football fans are screaming their heads off. That kind of whistle.

Recently you were at a party where guests were invited to compete for prizes by showing their skills with a hula hoop. You noticed one of your co-workers, a normally sane and quiet young woman, cheered on the competitors by putting two fingers in her mouth and scorching the air with a shrill whistle that broke glass in two states.

That kind of whistle.

When you were in the first or second grade all your contemporaries learned the standard whistle -- blowing air between pursed lips, and you spent days puffing and turning your lips every which way until one afternoon, on the way home from school (two and a half miles and uphill both ways) there came miraculous sound from your mouth: a soft, flute-like tone. You jumped for joy. And spent the next several months trying to get the tone to vary so you could whistle melodies like everyone else. Eventually you got the hang of it.

That is what your co-worker said it takes to learn how to whistle with your fingers in your mouth. You just keep trying and trying and trying and trying.

"It's all in the tongue," said another co-worker, also able to sound like a crossed-wire public-address system with an attitude.

Pretty silly, wanting to be able to whistle real loud. But if Jo Anne and Jay and Darren can do it, so can you. That means it is a practical goal, even if you start having dizzy spells because you keep blowing all the air out of your lungs.

There are other resolutions, no doubt, that might have a more profound impact on the world in which you live.

Thousands of you will make those resolutions. Indeed, some of you may just pull it off by writing that best-selling novel or forging world peace or saving orphans from burning buildings. Godspeed if you think practical people didn't discover penicillin or write an oratorio that is more popular today than when it was written more than 200 years ago.

Just remember: "Save humanity" is an impractical resolution. "Get their attention" is pretty reasonable.

R. Joe Sullivan is editor of the Southeast Missourian.