I’m old enough to know that New Year’s Resolutions are for suckers. Sure, blank slates offer motivation, but never as much as we hope. We’re lazy and it’s cold. And that’s fair. But I have been trying each Jan. 1 to pick a bit of a north star for the year. Just a kind of experience that I want to say yes to. I don’t rush to change any habits; I just keep this thing in mind.

This year I found that north star in the basement of an Irish pub. A kind of experience made up of three ingredients – third places, loose ties and third things – which I’ve come to see as a holy trinity of good times for humans.

I ruminate quite a bit over our hyper-digitized lives. But I also think a lot about gender. I can’t help it. I’m a 48-year-old woman, a separated mother of two boys, ages 11 and 8. And I’ve joked before that if you tried to draw a Venn diagram illustrating the overlapping interests of middle-aged women and school-aged boys, you wouldn’t have a Venn diagram.

But I’ve come to see a connection my boys and I share through a basic aspect of being who we are in the world that we’re in: it’s a lack of representation, of positive images of what it can look like and mean to grow up in their case, and to age in mine.

There are limits to the usefulness of naming things. Especially when it involves shiny new coinages fueled by the hungry ghost of the internet. When words get too sticky and our use of them sloppy, we become incurious and, worse, self-righteous, convinced that we understand things just cause we can pin words on them.