For 2016 I have made only one New Year’s resolution: to face the truth. It’s a big one, but it’s nice and versatile. It covers a multitude of things I think could be improved about my life.
I will face the truth about the Pilates DVDs. This is the year I will stop taking Pilates DVDs on holidays with me. I’ve been dragging the same two all over the world for about nine years and do you know how many times I have done Pilates on holidays? Zero times. They make me feel guilty for not doing Pilates on holidays when I don’t even do it when I’m at home. This foolishness has got to stop.
I will face the truth that I prefer exercising indoors. I wish I liked running out in the fresh air, with the dogs and the show-offs, but honestly, it’s too hot and sunny, there are too many people watching, and the television screens are too few and far between. The only way I can justify watching the kind of crappy TV shows I like is to watch them while riding the exercise bike or doing crunches or squats. So that is what I shall do.
I will face the truth of my uncoolness. On Saturday I came screechingly face to face with my own lack of street cred when I looked up the meaning of the expression ‘no diggity’. It’s been on my radar for a while, and then I started to get into the song of the same title by Chet Faker. (I received an excellent mixed CD from Other Jess for Christmas on which she had sandwiched some fashionable young people’s music in between some Icehouse and David Grey, to ease me into it.) Imagine my surprise to learn that ‘no diggity’ isn’t, as I had assumed, street slang for ‘no dignity’. It means ‘no doubt’ or ‘for sure’. Huh. Although when you are a white woman in your late thirties driving around the lower north shore in a Prius listening to it and doing that slow smooth head nod thing that makes other people look hip and me look like I am a cat trying to swallow a worming tablet, while stuck behind a bus with an ad for Andre Rieu on the back, perhaps it does mean no dignity.
H laughed at me for a long time about my ‘no diggity’ misunderstanding, which is rather rich coming from a man who until a couple of years back though that kid gloves were what you had to wear if your boxing opponent was a child.
I will face the truth about the ramekins. In the sideboard that houses our DVD player and DVDs, there are fourteen blue ramekins. They are very pretty but far too numerous. They were wedding presents. We registered for them.
I think I thought marriage was going to involve a lot more ramekin-based activities that it turned out to. I must have thought I would be hosting a lot of dinner parties with small pots of pâte and individual crèmes brûlées. Maybe I thought getting married would transport me back to the 1960s. I feel the ramekins mock me every time I open the sideboard to find the Kimba The White Lion DVD.
The ramekins need to go, or at least go somewhere harder to see, like the two large and six mini tagines that are in the highest cupboard in the house. Really. Tagines. Have you got one? How many times have you used it? It’s not a coincidence that they are shaped like a dunce’s cap. I am the dunce of decluttering and I should wear a ceramic cone on my head and sit in the corner, facing the wall. Then, after I have thought about my hoarding, truth-avoiding behaviour, I will pack up the ramekins and the tagines and take them to the ceramics pound where they will be found a home where they can run free and be loved. Ramekins and tagines are not just for Christmas, they are for life. We would all do well to remember that.
I will face the truth that eating sugar makes me feel rubbish. I really hate this fact because it’s very fashionable to stop eating sugar, and if there’s anything I hate more than being unfashionable it’s being fashionable, but it is what it is. So I’m having a bash at quitting sugar. The closest I have come before is tipping the excess icing sugar off my third cinnamon scroll before I eat it, but that was usually more about the fear of inhaling it and choking.
It’s only been a week, but I have stuck to my savoury guns quite seriously and it’s going very well if you ignore how grumpy I am all the time and how much weight I’ve gained from all the fried chicken I have been eating to compensate.
Other truths that I am planning to face this year but which I am currently just sneaking glances at from around the tree I’m metaphorically hiding behind include the fact that blogs and books do not write themselves, renovations do not occur unless you organise them and shouting at children is maybe not the most effective parenting tool one could employ.
What were your New Year’s Resolutions?