Vol. 36 of Thursday Third Things
On changing your life and the great diminishment
A picture of a picture from a recent wedding
👵 Am I Too Old To Change My Life?
An aunt once told me she likes to tell people she’s 10 years older than she actually is so that people will say, “Oh my god, you look amazing!” In a strange way, that set a really lovely precedent for me growing up in which I didn’t fear aging but rather found it a point of pride. I always yearned to be older than I was, at which point adults would say, “Just wait. You’ll spend the rest of your life wishing you were still 18.” But I gotta tell ya, I have never ever once wished to be 18 again (though I have wished for the kind of freedom being an undergraduate offers a person - but that really has nothing to do with being 18).
In fact, I don’t think I’ve hit the age yet that I wish I could go back to. 31 feels pretty good so far and I’m definitely the least stupid I’ve ever been, which is nice (though still pretty stupid), and I don't have aches or pains to complain about just yet.
That being said, I know there will come a point where my body won’t work as well as it does right now and the universe will begin pulling certain opportunities off the table, so to speak. But outside of physical ability, it seems the rest of our experiences as we age are up to us.
“As we get older,” Anne Boyd says in this piece, “it seems as if our horizons get smaller. My world before I began to travel felt so small. I was so busy that I spent my life in my car, in my house, and in my office. Getting out to see new things—let alone to look at the sky—was a rare occurrence. My trips to Europe over the three summers that I taught study abroad—in Ireland, Austria, and France—opened up the world to me again. And at the end of those summers, it was so hard to go back home. But I did, and life slid right back into overdrive. As we get older, it also seems that we start to feel less and less like the world is there for us to explore. We worry about moving, traveling, or simply giving up what is familiar.”
While volunteering with hospice last year (and working exclusively with patients under 60) I found being around so much death didn’t necessarily make me fear aging, but it did make the present feel just a little more urgent. I’ve written about it so much, but I think too many people are too certain they will have a long and healthy (bodily and financially) retirement and put life off until then. But what happens when retirement never arrives? Or it arrives but you’re very ill?
I don’t think anyone is too old to change their lives. But as Boyd asks, “The bigger question is, can we reinvent ourselves, become someone different, after we’ve spent so many years pursuing one path?”
📉 The Great Diminishment
So I’m not going to name names, but last month, some friends and I were in a small-ish mountain town, eating at a Mexican joint, when a couple of bites into the meal we all sort of collectively set down our forks, looked at each other, and wondered, “Are these possibly the worst enchiladas we have ever eaten?” There was nothing “gross” about them, or unsafe. They just sucked: Boiled, dry chicken breast (with absolutely no seasoning), wrapped in a mediocre white tortilla, with what appeared to be jarred tomatillo salsa poured over the top. I believe we paid somewhere in the range of $12-$15 a plate and were sorely disappointed. When I shared this news with my friend — a local who lived in town — she said, “Well, I’m not kidding when I tell you that is literally the best food in town.”
Sure the town is fairly remote and difficult to access, but c’mon, you can’t tell me it’s too remote for some cumin and chili powder. I have no proof, but I think the food was as bland and mediocre as it was because the owners knew they could get away with it. They knew that just about every experience from food to healthcare had grown so beige and poorly crafted over the last couple of decades that they charge a normal enchilada price (squeezing every last dollar out of the meal) for an entirely substandard enchilada experience. Which is exactly what Catherine Shannon points out in this piece.
“You can’t get exponential growth out of finite resources and a plummeting birth rate. But you can squeeze the margins, make things a bit worse, hope no one notices (they will), and charge people the same or more.”
🧽 What Makes Women Clean?
I’ve recognized over the years with friends and roommates and romantic partners that if the spectrum of cleanliness runs on a scale of 100, with 0 being a biohazard health risk hoarder and 100 being a person who steam sanitizes their home everyday, I am probably a 45. I tend toward messiness but not in a critical way (and not so much dirtiness, more like. clothes on the floor, books and papers piled everywhere, suitcases languishing half packed for weeks after the actual trip, etc.), However, I find myself absolutely craving an organized, clean home. I can’t relax in my space if it’s messy. My sleep gets funky, my brain gets scattered, and I have trouble concentrating. Sitting down to read a book just feels so much better when the living room is picked up and swept with a nice smelling candle flickering on the coffee table.
Which might be a way of saying, I don’t know how to feel done if my house is not clean. It doesn’t feel like guilt to me (no one really comes into my home since moving so it’s just me and J and our own messes) but perhaps I could feel relaxed if I wasn’t carrying some internalized guilt and shame around womanhood and cleanliness.
And perhaps I could accomplish more with my life if I wasn’t dedicating twice the amount of time to it that my male counterparts are.
“Men are socialized to see their spaces as utilitarian, spaces that serve them. Women, we serve our spaces.”
🌳 The Trees Told Me To Vote For Kamala Harris
The humor on voting we needed (and also why not to take internet comments seriously).
⏳ Sweet, Sweet Negative Time
This gist is this: Photons can spend a negative amount of time passing through a cloud of atoms. Or rather, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.
What does this mean? “Even though the phenomenon is astonishing, it has no impact on our understanding of time itself.”
So there you have it I guess? I’m still not sure on this one. But I love the concept of negative time.
🖼️ Can You Look At One Piece Of Art For 10 Minutes?
Well, can you? I feel like I’ve written about this before, but back in undergrad, a modern art teacher assigned us one painting in the local art museum to sit with for at least one hour. I wish like hell I could remember which painting I went and stared at, but all I remember was that I did it, it was very hard, many people stared at me (probably more so than the art), and it was also very rewarding.
10 minutes should be a breeze then, right?
✒️ Spell Your Name With Satellite Images
I just like entering my name over and over again to see what it comes up with.