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Unachievable resolutions are out, embracing middle age is in … not that anyone notices.
Here we are again, facing the pressure to make New Year resolutions when so much time has passed since I broke the last ones that I no longer recall what they were. I have considered this year approaching my resolutions differently. Each year, I choose selfimproving things, such as cutting out sugar, which never last beyond thinking how wasteful it would be not to eat the last Christmas mince pie in the tin on the morning of January 1. If I was the sort of person who planned ahead, I would eat the last mince pie on New Year’s Eve, but I’m usually eating the third- and second-tolast ones then and so worried that the mince-pie season is drawing to a close that I sometimes make a fresh batch. Whatever form the sugar hit takes, that resolution is always doomed.
Bearing in mind the old maxim that you do not get different results by doing the same things, I thought that this New Year I should drop self-improvement and instead embrace the upside of being middle-aged.
Middle-aged women often complain that they are invisible. Not completely invisible, because we still have to take our shoes off at US airports, so something notices we exist, even if it is only X-ray machines. But I feel invisible enough that it is pointless being well behaved or doing things that might improve my appearance when not even the X-ray machine notices what I look like, much less cares. Problem is, I don’t, either. I would, for example, stop going to the gym, but I never started. I would give up buying make-up, but I already have.
Instead, I am resolving to live differently in
2019, though not in a sociopathic kind of way. For starters, I would like to hurl my phone into the Potomac River, but the sense of freedom would last only until I wanted to talk to anyone who was not standing in front of me. I will try to support only small, independent businesses and I will try to be nicer, although, as a middle-aged woman, I do not expect anyone to notice.
The United Nations has declared 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. Uh huh. The periodic table is one of those things that, if you are not a scientist, you only ever use by rattling off after too many gins at a party: “HydrogenHeliumLithiumBerylliumBoronCarbonNitrogenOxygenFluorineNeon,” and it’s usually somewhere after oxygen, I notice, that many people who studied arts or accounting start to falter and have another drink.
There is, for some, the handy mnemonic “Harry, He Likes Beer By Cupfuls, Not Over Frothy”, but Harry would have to like a lot more than cups full of flat beer to help anyone recite the whole table.
Apparently there is a point to it, other than recitals at parties, but I do not remember what it is. However, I do recall our architect once pointing to corrosion in something and saying with a sigh, “This is what happens when plumbers don’t understand the periodic table.” I nodded in agreement, trying to imply by the careful inclination of my chin that, yes, those damn plumbers who don’t know the atomic weight of elements are the source of all rust, although actually not having a clue myself what the plumbers had done incorrectly.
Maybe the UN will teach me the answer in 2019, or maybe not. In particular, 2019 was designated as the International Year of the Periodic Table because it is 150 years old this year. I am happy to drink to that.
“This is what happens when plumbers don’t understand the periodic table.”