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You can’t barge into the bathroom when I’m getting ready to take a shower–my first 10 minutes to myself in 18 hours–and then scream, “Eeew, big, white naked mommy!!!!” at the top of your lungs.

You can barge in, and keep your pie hole shut. Or you can stay out of the bathroom and shriek your adorable observations about my body, the naked whiteness of which you will have been mercifully spared. You can’t do both.

I mean, you can, but I really wish you wouldn’t.

Third option entails me getting rich enough to afford my own bathroom, but that’s a long term long shot. And the fourth…I can’t go into that but it involves duct tape and quite possibly my local child welfare agency.

I’m having a yogurt. It calms me down.

Photo CC brianandjacklyn

Today they tried to deliver my new couch and we found that the made-in-California plum softsuede behemoth didn’t fit into my rinky-dink New York City elevator. The driver had to shlep it back to the warehouse. After thwacking myself repeatedly on the head for not measuring the elevator before ordering the couch (who measures elevators?) I spent the afternoon working on solutions.

Having it carried up 19 flights would have cost about half of what the sofa itself cost. Sending it back to the company for them to modify it would have cost hundreds in shipping and labor and I’d have no couch for another six weeks. The only thing that made sense is to have the couch’s arm taken off and then reattached in my apartment. (more…)

And I won’t be doing THIS (which until the end for the climax…the music swells!)

And I won’t be listening to opera while I’m NOT doing it. And I’m starting to think the way my body has “shifted and move around” is the way it should have been all along and that my 20s were the aberration, and that that’s OK. I’m 44, half a piano, as my friend the pianist says. I’d like to be a whole piano and then some. And I STILL won’t do this. Not that any sane person would.

Have a great day.

Sorry it’s been awhile. I moved (just across the street but it may as well have been to Utah, what with all the packing, purging and chaos) and had deadlines front, back and sideways, not to mention endless IKEA to assemble. A writer I know pointed out that they do big business in divorce and suggested that she and I approach them to do a “setting up your life post-split” mag-a-log (one of those magazines you pick up and kind of get into before you realize that they’re one long single-sponsor ad and then just feel pissed that you spent the three minutes a day you have to read on a big ad). I think it would make a great parody. Stories like, “Loss, Love and Laminate,” or “How to Furnish A Home Now that You’re Poor.” Yeesh.

No, but things are good. I’m at a very cheesy dude ranch in upstate New York with my daughters. My feeling about this trip was, if they’re happy, I’m happy. Given all that’s going on, if they wanted to eat fries at most meals, I’m not going to get all Scroogey and halve their portions like I usually do; if they want to play laser tag and pretend to repeatedly shoot one another, far be it from me to make the stink I normally would about how murder is, you know, bad; and if they wanted to sing Katy Perry at karaoke night, as long as they didn’t actually realize they were singing about having crazy sex without regrets or, presumably, contraception, hell, I’m going to get into explaining it? Nope. Not this week. I decided to let up and lower my parenting standards just a hair. So far, no one is on drugs, obese or carving satanic pentagrams in the flesh of her arms.
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I’m in the middle of moving (big Formerly moment, sending out my new snail mail address and land line phone number, like I have more than five actual human friends who visit me elsewhere than Facebook) so this will be brief. I signed up for Groupon the other day and got this as an announcement for a salon discount:

“Left untended, human hairs grow so long and unruly that passing grandmothers often mistake skulls for skeins of yarn to crochet into sweater capes. Tame tempting head threads with today’s Groupon to [SALON X'S] Soho location on LaFayette Street.”

The ad went onto say that a “cadre of versed hairstylists enact a full array of cuts and colors to match the aura of each of their distinctive clients.” I’m not altogether sure I want my aura matched so much as a little volume trimmed in, so my face won’t look so thin and I won’t look so tired. I’m also not sure I need my hair cutter to speak in iambic pentameter. Finally, the salon promises to “reinvigorate enervated coiffures with enough energy to power small windmills and electroshock sagging silhouettes.”

They want to electroshock my silhouette. My silhouette might be able to use a little something something, but I’m prepared to rule out electroshock. I’m not saying now that we’re Formerlies we want to run out and get a mom cut by rote. That helmet thing doesn’t work on anyone. Nor am I against long hair for women who are not teenagers. I have it, in fact.

But I have a question for you all: Are you done getting radical haircuts or colors at this point? Or are you still prepared for a electroshocking of your silhouette? How does that play on us non-teenagers, in your opinion? And do you think it’ll give you that same sense of feeling different than everyone else that it might have in your 20s. Do you still need to feel that way? (I know I don’t, and that’s a good thing.)

photo by Saffy CC

Too freakin’ true. This is by Jessica Hagy, on her blog, Indexed (I hope she doesn’t mind that I lifted her art to show it off. Go visit her, too! Thanks, Cory, for sharing.)

I’ll only add that I can deal with the pimples and I can deal with the wrinkles. It’s the pimples ON the wrinkles that really kick my ass.

Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, etc.

My girls, who are 7, Skype their little friend Dahlia from school like it’s nothing. And it is nothing to them. But to me? It’s huge. I remember when “video phones” were a fantasy. I used to be relieved that there was no such thing so I didn’t have to worry whether I was dressed or bleaching my mustache before answering the phone.

I know it’s incredibly square and old-sounding to say this, but I feel like we’re living in the future and any day now, we’ll be strapping on the jet packs and zipping off to school, eating pills from a home vending machine that encompass an entire meal and being waited on by a robot maid.

At the same time, the hapless dad will still have rough days at the office and a priggish boss and get stuck in air traffic and the mom will look like Betty Rubble and be way smarter than him and the daughter Judy will want to be in a pop band and the world will not have changed at all but for the bells and whistles.

Let’s do an inventory of what was on the Jetsons or was the stuff of our imagination when we were kids that has now come to pass: video phones, robot domestics…what else? I seem to remember a lot of conveyor belts, which Whole Foods has for sushi, but I don’t think that’s new. I remember wondering why everyone didn’t have walkie talkies, and now we all essentially do. What am I missing?

Sorry for the long post drought. I have been busy–getting ready to move, work deadlines, all of that. I have a few posts queued up in my head, but for now, check this out. Sarah Hampson of the Globe and Mail up in Toronto says it well and no, I don’t just like her because she interviewed me for her article (although I’m glad she did.)

More soon and have a great day.

Photo by Vancouver Laser CC

Our family goes gray late, and so I haven’t yet thought seriously about coloring my hair. I have maybe eight or 10 visible grays, not enough to do anything about, if that’s what I decide to do. Oh, who am I kidding? I will totally color my hair when he time comes. I can already tell I won’t have the beautiful silver grays so much as the pale wiry yellowish grays that defy a flat iron.

My girls (who are 7) have been pestering me to put a streak in their hair for years now. Their little friend has had one (pink, then green) since pre-K, and honestly, I didn’t see a reason to say no. It’s hair, not a tattoo. It can and will be undone with the passage of time. I’m not one of those people who believes dying your hair an unconventional color is a like gateway drug to satanic worship. And I didn’t like spraying that toxic temporary stuff we used every so often. So with their dad’s OK, I took them over to Supercuts this weekend. The results, above. They are thrilled.

I did notice the complete lack of desire on my part to dabble, which is not surprising. I’ve never felt the urge to before, and at 43, none was forthcoming. The girls didn’t even ask what color I wanted to try, and neither did the stylists. Not that long ago, I might have found that mildly offensive, as in, What, I’m so obviously Formerly that fuschia bangs are not an option for me? Now, not even a pang. That’s probably more telling than anything having to do with hair.

Yep. Officially over myself.

OK, now I’m really starting to worry.

Those of you who have been reading this blog since the beginning and/or have read My Formerly Hot Life know that while on any given day I veer wildly between shock and occasional horror at the realities of adult tweendom and good-humored acceptance of aging, mostly I strive to laugh at the whole ridiculous inevitable mess and get on with my day. Laughing at myself for caring as much as I do about no longer being young takes the sting out, and I can truthfully say that the overall direction of my emotional trajectory is toward greater happiness and acceptance and life satisfaction.

And then something comes up and knocks me on my disappearing ass and I’m startled anew by the whole process.

I was just in the gym and the TV was tuned to Regis and Kelly, a show I used to catch as I dressed to leave the house and, well, feel a little superior to the folks calling in from somewhere to the trivia portion of the show with answers about yesterday’s celebrity guest that proved they never missed an episode. What did Emeril Lagasse say was his least favorite vegetable as a child, that he used to feed to his dog, who puked under the table, thus revealing his deception to his mother? Please. I had someplace to go, which made me better, somehow a more evolved human. I’m not proud to have been such a snob, but that’s what flashed through my head. (more…)