Series: The Difference Between 18 and 45

Another post in my continuing series (when I think of them): The Difference Between 18 and 45.

At 18, you can't imagine what getting older feels like.

At 45, you know what it feels like. It feels just like being 18.

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As long as we are alive, we age. We know this intellectually. We see the old lady in the mirror staring back at us. Somewhere along the line we stop being "hot stuff" and start being "ma'am". The evidence is overwhelming.

But emotionally...I'm that 18 year old. With 27 years more experience.

Yup, it's really not so different. I still feel like I'm full of potential. I'm still learning and experiencing new things. Sure I'm a little stuck in my ways - just like I was at 18. It's not an age thing, it's a personality thing.

Life's a little more complicated, but that's where the experience comes in. You don't start to learn to juggle with fire clubs. You start with beanbags and work your way up. (Beanbags don't roll away like balls when you drop them.) (You WILL drop them.) It still feels remarkably the same, though.

I'm not sure there's a point to this, other than some mental meanderings on the subject. And that maybe it's not a good idea to marginalize anyone based solely on their age. Because, you know, it's likely they feel just like you do.

Nail Polish, Tropical Chrome, And Me

I've been wearing nail polish on my toes in the summer for years now.

It all started at a party many years ago, where one nail polish fanatic attendee brought most of her collection, and was doing up the toes of pretty much anyone who wanted them, men and women alike. Knowing I am rather fond of the color purple (understatement of the year), she did up my toes in Elizabeth Arden "Knightsbridge", a luscious dark purple.

I couldn't stop looking them them. My toes were cute. They were purple. They made me happy. How could something so simple as a layer of colored lacquer make me smile so much?

But smile I did, and I started making an effort with my toes every summer after that. I didn't bother in the winter because it snows here. I wear closed-toe shoes. No one is going to see my toes except at the pool, and frankly, no one there cares.

Except for this winter. See, last July I had a bit of an accident with the vacuum cleaner resulting in the loss of one of my big toenails. (Hint: don't vacuum in bare feet when you're angry. Yes, it hurt. A lot. But I digress.)

Fortunately the loss was only temporary, and a new nail started growing back in short order. Unfortunately, that new nail was kind of ugly for awhile, so when the weather turned colder I kept right on painting my toenails. I didn't want to look at it. I change the color every two weeks or so, so it's not like I didn't keep an eye on it for anything untoward.

Of course, painting one's toenails in the winter required some more winter-themed colors, which led me in a roundabout way to the nail polish bloggers out there. Talk about temptation. It's so much better seeing pictures of the colors on actual nails in different lights than in the bottle. It turned me off of some of the colors I'd liked online and threw me head over heels in love with others.

I still didn't paint my fingers. I type for a living, and I can feel the weight of the polish on my fingertips. I also thought polish on my very short nails (see typing above) didn't look as nice as it does on long nails. When I was in high school I used to have reasonably long nails that I kept painted very nicely, long before I started this love affair with the computers. (It was the dark ages. We didn't HAVE personal computers. Yet somehow we managed to entertain ourselves, hard as that might be to believe.)

Of course that's changed - I'd bought a polish I really wanted to try out but I'd just done up my toes and they were looking great and I didn't want to repolish them but I really couldn't wait. So it occurred to me that I had 10 perfectly good (well, reasonably acceptable) nails that could actually wear that polish, and away I went.

No, I am not keeping my fingernails polished all the time. Right now they are because I took the plunge and ordered some polishes online (for what I would have paid for three bottles in a local cosmetics store I got four and that includes the shipping) and couldn't wait to try them. I don't have the time or interest to become as obsessed with my nails as I did in high school.

Because unlike then, I know that the perfect manicure isn't going to make me beautiful. Or more popular. Or attract people to me. It's not going to make my hands look long and elegant. It's not going to change who I am.

What it does do is make me smile. A lot. I look at the color on my fingers and think "Wow, what a GREAT color! And I can carry it around with me and look at it any time I want to!" That makes me happy all out of proportion to the time and effort it took.

I'm all for making myself happy.

Anyway, I should put in a plug for a couple of these colors. They're all by China Glaze. No, no pictures because my fingers are not photogenic, but if you search the name of the color and "China Glaze" you'll find plenty.

On my toes is Watermelon Rind, it's a green/teal with glass flecks in it. It's shiny. It's one of THE colors that many people online are swooning over. It's swoon-worthy. I'm not sure it's quite the color of a watermelon rind, but that's just a little quibble. It's from the Summer Days collection which means it's limited, which is my big quibble. Many of the best colors are limited, and the permanent collections are boring.

I was wearing another polish from the Summer Days collection on my fingers, Grape Juice. It's kind of a light purple (no foolin') with glass flecks. More shiny. It's way lighter than actual grape juice and probably doesn't taste as good, but then actual grape juice wouldn't look as good on your fingers. Not to mention making them sticky.

Today I swapped it out for one of the polishes from the Romantique collection (see what I mean about all the good stuff being limited? Grrr.). It's called Harmony and it's a metallic purple. Whereas the previous two polishes are glittery shiny, this is metallic chrome shiny. And purple. Very, very purple.

When I put it on, and you can get away with only one coat of this it's so dense and pigmented, I kept looking at it because I KNEW I'd seen that color before. It took me a moment to place it, but then it came to me:

Tropical Chrome.

Tropical Chrome was another limited (!) nail polish from Revlon, part of the Color Chrome collection, about what, five years ago? It was one of my favorite colors ever. So much a favorite that I named one of my online identities after it. (So now you know.) And here I'd found another polish that was reminiscent of it - how cool is that?

Except it's not reminiscent. It's an exact duplicate.

Seriously, I did up one finger in Tropical Chrome and the rest in Harmony and you can't tell the difference. Not in low light, not in bright sunlight. They are the same color.

Maybe some people get upset when they find out they've spent their hard earned money on a nail polish color they already have. Me, I'm delighted. I always wondered what I was going to do once my bottle of Tropical Chrome ran out.

Now I have to wonder what I'm going to do when my Tropical Chrome AND my Harmony run out. Perhaps I'll stash away another bottle just in case.

They're Baaaaack....

Way back when in this blog, so far back I can't be bothered to look for it (hey, at least I'm honest), I wrote about how I was finally being diagnosed with the genetic disorder Metabolic Syndrome and how I lost a lot of weight making some changes to deal with this. (No, I didn't diet. I still don't.)

Anyway, one of the unanticipated but delightful side effects was that my rack of doom became less doomish. Let's fact it, my breasts never became what anyone would call small, but they shrank to the size where I could find bras that fit that weren't conical or kevlar vests or so butt ugly they should be burned for that reason alone. I could find them in regular department stores for reasonable prices. In colors! And prints! And they were pretty all by themselves and even prettier on. Not to mention the really nice silhouettes they created.

You can probably guess what happened. The perimenopause fairy came to visit and left an unwelcome present. A lot of present. Everything I'd lost.

So I'm back in the realm of the one department store that does carry a decent selection of larger cup sizes (because it's only the cup size that's gone back up, the fairy let me keep the smaller band size which of course makes finding undergarments even more difficult because many of the bras that come in larger cup sizes have their smallest band size one size above mine) and specialty shops. Of fucking ugly bras. Of underwires that come up to my clavicle because my breasts are apparently SO huge they need to be completely wrapped up lest they try to make a break for it.

I come back to the main reasons that most women wear the wrong size bra is because that's what what they can 1. find and 2. afford. If I just went up one band size and down one cup size it probably wouldn't fit quite right, but oh god, the options I would have would double. Triple, even. And the prices would halve.

I am Not Happy about any of this.

Not only because it's expensive. Not only because I don't know what the heck I'm going to wear under tops that show some cleavage because let's face it, if I have to have a rack of this size, I might as well show it off. Not only because I can't "buy ahead" if I find bras I like because who the hell knows what size I'm going to be in six months so when these bras wear out I get to go through this whole time-comsuming, costly, and chafing-filled process again. (Yes, when you try on 25 or 30 bras in succession, eventually the rubbing of the industrial fabrics as they go on and off your body starts to chafe and hurt. A lot. Same with jeans, actually. But that's another posting.)

But because I had no control over this whatsoever.

This happened without me doing anything. Without me being evil or eating the wrong things or not exercising or whatever the thing you need to do to be virtuous today is. Without any weight gain, actually (I know what I weigh and it has not changed). A person might think that maybe, just maybe, you can't control every last thing about your body and it's going to damn well do exactly what it wants to.

I realize that by writing about this that anyone who knows me in real life is probably going to stare at my chest the next time we see each other, but it's not exactly as if my breasts can hide. They've always been fairly obvious topological features, it's just now they're like Mount Everest (still growing!) instead of the Rocky Mountains.

But next time that perimenopause fairy comes around, I'm grabbing a fly swatter and going after her.

a rant: is friendship really worth it?

So I've just spent a bunch of time today trying to set up Yet Another Social Networking Page For The Business I Sort Of Work for and Yet Another Goddamned Chat Service So I Can Talk To My So-Called Friends.

Neither one of which is going well. The first appears to be very business unfriendly (it keeps wanting my personal information and I refuse to give that because it's not appropriate - this is a business presence, not my own personal presence) and the second seems to have no way to add contacts for text chat. And I'm frustrated because I have every other IM known to mankind and while they're all quirky, none have ever fought me so hard.

Which makes me ask the meta-question: is it really worth it?

The latter problem above, at least, is so I can try to maintain the sort of friendships I have online. I used to like these people. I used to care a lot. But at this point it seems like if I want to maintain any kind of connection I get to spend all my time figuring out the latest hot site, I don't spend any energy actually like, you know, *talking* to these people.

Because as soon as I've got it figured out and work my way through the frustration, they're gone. Yup, there's another new hot site/IM/whatever and they're there....and I get to go through the whole mess again.

Frankly, I'm tired. And it's not like anyone ever offers to help.

When these friends do go slumming back to one of the older but still quite functional technologies where I still hang out, I find that I'm not glad to see them anymore. I look at them and all they do is remind me of the anger and frustration and the overhead involved in trying to maintain any kind of relationship. Any warmth and affection I felt gets quickly overshadowed.

Which comes back to my title question: is it worth it to even try to maintain friendships online anymore? From my perspective, these days it's all overhead, no reward.

Observing

Two thoughts on observation:

When doing the grocery shopping, I've observed that more and more people are bringing at least one reusable bag to the store. Not everyone, not even the majority, but it's no longer an odd thing to see.

I'm one of them. I started using the reusables because we were becoming overwhelmed with plastic bags. I do reuse the grocery store bags for scooping the litter boxes, but even though the cats are champion producers of cat doots, there is no way they could keep their output at the level where all those bags would be needed.

And I've found if I'm just a little more conscientious with the produce bags (which yes, I still use because they keep the eggplants and avocados from getting all dinged up in those reusable bags), I have more than enough bags to deal with the cat effluvia issue.

Nope, I'm not perfect with the reusables - I try to keep one in the car at all times, but sometimes I forget to bring it into the store. Sometimes I go to the store without one. Sometimes I forget to say "no bag, thanks" when I'm just picking up one item. I'm human. I've got other things on my mind.

I'm satisfied with how it's going because I've observed a difference. No, it doesn't inspire me to do more. It is completion as it is.

---

With respect to body issues, I've become convinced that seeing only one type of body, the only type deemed acceptable for public display, shown on TV and in the movies is deluding society into believing that that's what people really look like, and if you don't, you're defective.

Fueling this delusion is the fact that they can use this lie to sell you stuff. We all know that.

But does anyone ever do anything about it?

I have been. No, not defacing posters or refusing to watch TV again (although let's face it, most of the shows I watch are things like Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters where non-actress/models show up once in awhile), but by actually looking at people. Real people. The people who actually populate day to day life rather than inhabit a small screen.

By "looking at" I don't mean staring, I mean observing. Noting. Not evaluating them on some kind of attractiveness scale or determining their worth by "how hot are they to me", but simply looking at them as they are.

And you know what? Not everyone looks like the people on TV. In fact, most people don't. Gasp, shock, surprise.

They're tall. And short. And skinny and fat. And old and young and their skin tones vary. Some have curly hair, some have gray hair, some have no hair. Some have more weight above their waists, some below. And on and on and on.

You'd almost think that's the way people are supposed to be - different. And that there's nothing wrong or unacceptable about that.

I always feel so much better about myself after, say, a trip to the mall or the zoo when I've spent some time just observing others. It has nothing to do with such base thoughts as "well, at least I'm not as ugly/old/whatever as they are". It's more along the lines of "you know, I'm just one more person, one more variant on a theme, I don't look like them and they don't look like me and we don't have to look like each other to be just perfectly fine and healthy and live productive lives."

Of course, that doesn't sell things. Then again, I don't think I want to be sold to any more anyway.

Why I Probably Won't Read Your Personal Blog

For a long time now, longer than many of my friends probably have patience for, I've been ranting about blogs. It seems a bit hypocritical, given that I have several of my own, but I recently came to the realization that I'm not ranting about blogs in general, I'm ranting against the use of a personal blog as a substitute for actual conversation and interpersonal communication.

A personal blog answers the social question "how are you doing"? It's not one of the many entertainment blogs out there, a few of which I read because they are, well, entertaining. Some make me laugh, some make me think, some offer new perspectives. But in all cases, I can say I really don't care how the writers are doing on a personal level. I wish them well in that same vague, general way that I wish for all the folks who entertain me - because I want them to go on entertaining me. But it's not the same sense of caring and interest that I have for my friends. Because they're not my friends. They are providers and I am a consumer and that's the extent of it.

When I ask a friend how they're doing, it's more than a factual inquiry about the current state and events of their life. It's an invitation to start a conversation, to engage in mutual sharing. To discuss and enlighten and offer feedback and all those other opportunities to form and strengthen human relationships. To be friends.

Relationships of all kinds take work. Repeating stories for different friends is work. However, if you think about it, you aren't really repeating exactly the same story at all. Every time you tell it to a different friend you include or elide details based on your relationship with the person and your knowledge of that person's individual interests. For example, when telling people about my recent trip to NYC, I found myself talking more about the fabric stores to people who sew, and more about the food to my foodie friends. Same story, different perspectives. I guarantee if you wrote such a story on your blog you would not be giving me the details I really wanted to hear and you'd be boring me with the information I'm not interested in - adjustments you make automatically when you talk to an individual.

Which is really the crux of the matter: when you tell someone "go read my blog" instead of actually talking to them, they've stopped being an individual. They're just another reader...or consumer, as I mentioned above.

When you think about it, it's incredibly insulting. The message sent is: "My time and energy are valuable so I will not spend any on you." The corrollary is, of course, "Your time is worthless so of course you can spend it remembering to read my blog and remembering what I said and reacting appropriately when and if I actually talk to you."

I've been on the internet for 24 years. (Yes, it was all around long before web browsers - different method of access, same themes and memes. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.) I've learned many things over that time, but one of the big ones has been and continues to be that just because you read what someone wrote doesn't mean they're your friend. Or you have any kind of personal connection to them at all.

Friendship is about mutuality. A friend is someone who asks how you are and cares about the answer. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If I must read your blog to find out how you are, you are NOT asking how I am. And even though I'm kind of slow at catching on sometimes, eventually I get the picture.

So what's the "probably" about in the title? Sometimes the blogging is about the writing. It's the equivalent of being asked to review a story or essay someone wrote, or a position paper or a resume. Maybe there are the pictures of a meal that I can look at as they're describing it to me. Something that's not in lieu of conversation, but in addition to it.

Am I being a hypocrite by having a blog of my own? Perhaps, but I don't think so. First, this isn't a personal blog where I share the minutiae of my life. It's a place for me get to essays out of my head so I don't have to remember them any more.

Second, I don't expect my friends to read anything here. Or anyone else, come to think of it. I get warm fuzzies when people do read and like it, but even if no one did, I'd keep on writing it. It's for me, not them.

When I want my friends to know something, I tell them personally because they matter. I hope the same is true of them.

Feelin' Old.

Unlike turning 30 or 40, I'm having some issues with turning 45. Yup, I've managed to stay alive on this planet for almost 45 years, and for the first time in awhile, a birthday is bothering me.

Part of the reason why is that I allowed my picture to be taken last weekend. I knew I was going to appear on people's cameras when I accepted the gift of a ticket to the Project Runway Season 6 finale fashion show, and I was ok with it at the time. I'd always wanted to see the show and meet some of the designers, and it was a lovely opportunity dropped in to my lap - more good than the downside of smiling for the camera.

See, I don't photograph well. This is not saying that I'm ugly, or I stop clocks, or little children run screaming for their parents when they see me. I'm not. It's simply that the shape of my face does not reflect light in such a manner that a camera can capture a good likeness of what the human eye sees. People who know me and love me and think I'm kind of cute have looked at pictures of me and said "That's YOU? Were you ill?" The number of "good" pictures of me are very few indeed. This is why I assiduously avoid cameras - they're not doing me any favors.

I know all this intellectually. I've done all mental gyrations and compared what I see in a mirror (another two dimensional likeness of a three dimensional object) with what the camera captured, and still...it bothers me emotionally. Emotionally I'm taking what I see in the .jpgs as absolute truth. I don't know of any exercises to change that.

So we get back to the pictures taken this weekend. They were indoors, a close flash, non-professional equipment - a recipe for disaster. The flash highlighted every bit of gray in my hair and flattened out my face, while simultaneously highlighting every sag in it (weight loss is so lovely for aging your looks quickly. But it's all good! Really! No downsides about it! (sarcasm, if you couldn't tell)). I look so old and tired, when I was really delighted and having a wonderful time.

It didn't help that I was already among the oldest people in that room, and among the women of similar age, was the only one who didn't dye her hair (and some of those dye jobs left something to be desired, but I digress). Where I was already feeling inadequate because it was New York, and I already know I fail as an East Coast Woman because I just don't care enough to put in that kind of effort when only other women who are already putting in that kind of effort will notice. (I left the east coast long ago for many reasons, this is only one of them, and maybe I'll write an essay about them all sometime.) So I freely admit my long-cherished insecurities were already on full alert.

I can't say it was all bad. First, I reconfirmed that yes, dark purple is my color and the neckline on my dark purple cashmere sweater really does look good on me. Second, ever since I bought them, I've thought my Shiny Purple Glasses walked the fine line between tacky and stylish. Now I'm firmly on the side that they're stylish - I love how they look. They really are a good shape and color for my face.

The upshot is that I'm feeling really old and decrepit right now. I know it's not the truth intellectually, but emotions don't listen to all that reason crap. They just see that I'm about to be in a new survey demographic (45-54) and say "it's all over, you're useless". I know this too shall pass, but it sucks while it's still moving on.