By the time you read this, the New Year will have arrived, or nearly so. Long ago, my wife and I resolved to write our resolutions for each New Year on a slip of paper and place them inside a Christmas ornament. The plan was that the next year, while unpacking the holiday decorations, we’d open the ornament and bask in the glow of this reminder of our successful self-improvement.
But as it turned out, we usually just had a good laugh at our failures. That ornament-stuffing resolution, like many over the years, has been forgotten—but it lasted longer than most.
Many New Year’s resolution experts—a job title that does not require a track record of successfully making and keeping resolutions, by the way—say that people often make the mistake of being too vague or too ambitious in setting goals. It’s easily seen in our monthlong usages of yearlong gym memberships, or dietary changes that last until the first temptation or stressful moment (or maybe the second, or the third).
Learning from the experts, I decided to make several small, specific resolutions this time, instead of one big one. My new motto: “A modest goal is easily met.” Also, since one of my past goals was to stop procrastinating, I decided to take two weeks in December and get my resolutions out of the way before the New Year.
There are three skills I don’t possess that might make for good resolutions. The first, inspired by an “epic fail” escape room experience and regular episodes of Survivor, was the ability to do a slide puzzle quickly. The second, blowing a bubble with bubble gum, was something I never learned in childhood, resulting in years of secret shame whenever people popped away around me. The third, making a loud, shrill whistle using one or both hands, just seemed like something that could come in handy one day, especially if I found myself needing to quickly summon a horse, cowboy-style.
I thought unlocking the key to slide puzzles would be easy. A friend once showed me the technique for solving a Rubik’s Cube, based on the application of a series of algorithms; a 2-D slide puzzle had to be simpler than that, right?
Sure enough, there are a few step-by-step guides available to read online. After reviewing them, I found a website that offered free slide puzzle challenges, and off I went.
There are many varieties of slide puzzles—3×3, 4×4, 5×5, each referring to the number of rows and columns—filtered down to two basic types: numbered and unnumbered. I started with numbered, which means each tile has not just a small piece of a larger picture, but also a number indicating its final position in the solved puzzle.
Bobby Fischer famously solved a “15 Puzzle” (4×4 numbered slide puzzle) in 17 seconds on The Tonight Show in 1972. My own attempts took a bit longer. I focused on 5×5 numbered puzzles, and an early effort took over 20 minutes and 1,000 moves. In 20 additional tries over the course of two weeks, I made steady improvement, topping out at 216 moves in 2 minutes, 59 seconds. This was encouraging—it wasn’t too late to teach this old dog some new tricks. It was enough of an improvement that I deemed my goal completed. (Tackling unnumbered slide puzzles would have been less enjoyable and more time consuming, so I was happy to skip past that particular rabbit hole.)
My other two resolutions would prove significantly more difficult to pursue. With the aid of that which makes all things possible—YouTube tutorial videos—I endeavored to uncover the secrets of bubble blowing and hand-aided whistling. I did learn several things, including the fact that watching close-ups of people chewing gum and sticking their fingers in their mouths isn’t very appealing. I moved on to diagrams and step-by-step written instructions instead.
Armed with a pound of individually wrapped Dubble Bubble gum (one of the gums of choice for bubble-blowing champs), I monitored my own efforts with a hand mirror, as recommended by most tutorials. Witnessing every halting bit of progress was like watching a baby deer learn to walk, except not as beautiful or as quick. If bubble blowing were as essential to survival as a fawn moving upright, I’d be easy pickings for any predator. I wanted to avoid embarrassment by conducting these exercises in private, but a bubble just wasn’t happening. With a sugary coating on my teeth, and my hat and gum in hand, I was forced to beg the consultation of two expert in-house bubble blowers: my wife and daughter.
We sat for an hour or so, chewing a modern version of modified tree bark, just as natives of Central America had centuries before. Like those natives, we talked and laughed, though the laughing was mostly at my expense. My family members would share tips and demonstrate bubble-blowing techniques; I’d try to duplicate their actions, getting closer to success but never really arriving.
“It’s so easy!” my wife said repeatedly. First she put the emphasis on “so,” then on “easy,” then, as her patience began to falter, on both. After more practice, I managed to produce a bubble around an inch in diameter. It only existed for a brief moment, but it didn’t matter. My resolution wasn’t to set the Guinness world record for bubble blowing, just to learn how to do it. Mission accomplished.
My third goal, whistling loudly with one or two hands assisting, proved to be the most challenging of all. I can pucker-whistle just fine, and even carry a tune, but in adding a hand to the mix, I might as well have slapped it over my mouth and saved a lot of time and trouble. My face turned red, veins bulging in my head as I blew forcefully over and over, to no effect. Finally, after many, many attempts, I heard a sound that resembled the loud, high-pitched one I aspired to create.
Like the bubble, it was ephemeral—quickly come and gone, and not to be repeated anytime soon. Still, it did happen once, and therefore never needs to happen again; technically, I did learn to whistle.
Self-improvement rarely comes easily. Trying to repeatedly expel air, whether through a barrier of ill-prepared gum or through a tiny opening in one’s lips, is kind of like suffocating in reverse. Between the staring at slide puzzles, the gum chewing, the lip and tongue manipulations, and the intense concentration, I had a headache throughout the entire two-week process.
Was it all worth it? Probably not, but at least if the subject of New Year’s resolutions comes up—and be warned, I may be directing conversations that way for the foreseeable future—I’ll be able to say I’ve already set and achieved mine. While my friends and neighbors struggle to better themselves in more traditional ways, I’ll be lounging about, enjoying the new, improved, and self-satisfied version of myself. Happy New Year, suckers!
Peter Dabbene’s website is peterdabbene.com. His latest works, the story “Farewell Tour” and the poem “The Lotus Eater” can be read at potatosoupjournal.com and blueasanorange.weebly.com/current-issue.
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