Zits & Wrinkles

I know I should have moisturized all those nights and mornings since like 1998, and that if I had, the wrinkle situation wouldn’t be escalating so rapidly. But I’m okay with that. I understand that my lack of action had consequences.

I also know that there isn’t a thing I could have done to prevent the onslaught of gray hair at my temples. It’s REALLY out of control, and that’s just the genetic lottery. Am I as okay with this as I am with the wrinkle situation? Can I cope with the fact that I had no hand in this hair color situation and that there’s nothing I could have done to prevent it?

Not really. But I guess this is life. Tottering along on the line between what we can control and what we can’t.

Moisturized and in bed,

Abby

I am sitting in the aft lavatory on our flight from Memphis to LGA, and I see myself in the mirror. I have the following thought progression:

1) Damn, my forehead wrinkles are totally out of control.
2) I should be less worried, or something.
3) What do Mom’s forehead wrinkles look like?
4) Huh. I have no idea.
5) Wait, why can’t I picture Mom’s forehead wrinkles??
6) … … …
7) AH. BANGS.

30+ years, explained.

So, you’re going to a hip concert tonight? It’s General Admission and there are no seats? AND you’re a sort of grumpy old person, either for real or just on the inside? Then you have come to the right place!

When your much cooler friend tells you that the concert is at a venue without seats, the first thing you hear, I know, is “Your old self will be standing up on a sloping concrete floor for three hours.” This means two very important things:

1. You must wear shoes that allow you to do this.
2. You must not bring anything too bulky that you will have to hold.

Thing 1 is a nonissue for young people, who do not get lower back aches if they stand up too long (also, they are young enough to correct their terrible posture, whereas you failed to do so and are probably forever damned to slouch, shoulders rounded and gut out, until your dying day, when you will also probably have a hump) in uncomfortable shoes or otherwise. Point is, this is a challenge for you! Because maybe you are not SO old that you are resigned to looking like a haggard crone, but also not so young that you enjoy standing up. There is only one solution to this problem, and it is Danskos. Ask your vastly more accomplished doctor friends, they will tell you the same thing. Fashion be damned! Short people behind you be damned! Wear them with pride and experience minimal discomfort! Also come on, you know by now that of all potential demographics, boys at concerts definitely don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, so just put on your clunky old lady shoes and go.

Thing 2 is slightly more complicated, especially given the weather. March 31, in some places, is springtime! But obviously not where you live, where your weather widget said the high would be 40 degrees today. Normally, today, you’d have worn a shirt, a sweater, a scarf and a coat. But gurrrrl, if you are going to stand up later for three hours surrounded by humans, you are gonna have to modify that. You do not want to be holding a real coat, but you have to commute to work in the cold and the concert in the cold! So you put on a tank top. Then a T-shirt. Then a long-sleeved cotton shirt. Then a cardigan, possibly (definitely) the one you wore to work yesterday. Then your thinnest fleece jacket and a hat that can scrunch up into nothing.

WHOA, you say! That is a lot of stuff! Not really. They are all thin layers, but they will keep you plenty warm outside, even if you do look a little bit like a puffy weirdo on the train and have to disrobe significantly when you get to work.

BUT, you say, what are you going to do with all of those layers when you get to the show? You will have so many things! No, my child, no.

Go to your closet. Or under your bed. Or wherever you keep that really fugly, busted, potentially canvas cross-body bag that you bought from a cart at the mall in 1998. You know the one—definitely squarish, wide strap, many pockets and zippers? Good. Now: downsize your big ol’ ladywallet (not a euphemism) into a tiny packet of cash, ID, Metrocard, credit card. You don’t need to be carrying the 2011 Renegade Craft Fair schedule with you today, or your 16 Handles punchcard, or your dental insurance card.

Put the makeup you swear you will remember to put on after work, and just the stuff you know you’ll use, in a bag with your hand sanitizer (THIS IS NEW YORK), Rolaids (YOU ARE OLD) and Advil (SAME). Yeah yeah, take your breakfast Chobani, too, but only because you will have eaten that by concert time. You do not get to take your Kindle, sorry, or your Camelbak, but you can get through a day without “Goblet of Fire,” and you can use a normal water bottle like everyone else. And hey, remember that tiny umbrella you bought that time you had a date in Brooklyn, and it was rainy, but you didn’t want to compromise your tiny purse? Wasn’t it appropriate that that dude was so tiny, too? Totes. Anyway, pop that sucker in there, because of course it is a little rainy today, too.

Anyway, those few things in that horrendous purse leave puh-LENTY of room for your discarded layers, and you can tie your very thin fleece around the outside of the bag, and voila!

See? With just a few compromises, you can be only mildly inconvenienced by your necessary belongings and lack of fashion sense, and, obviously, free to boogie. All around you will be foolish people in their early 20s whose backs hurt because they wore Chuck Taylors, or who are carrying their down jackets, or who are inexplicably thin and effortlessly unburdened by pain or belongings. You can smile and enjoy yourself, because one day the former group will grow up and stop trying to be cool, while the latter group definitely has a drug problem.

I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.

And I don’t think that love is here in this expensive suite in this lovely hotel in Paris.

- Yeah, Carrie Bradshaw, in the series finale, whatever, don’t be an asshole about it.

Because incidentally, it was true about me (you know, sans the expensive suite in the lovely hotel in Paris) about seven years ago when this sucker aired. And then it wasn’t for a little while, and I was weirded out by myself. And then it was again, and then it wasn’t, for a long time, which was actually totally fine.

But now, I recently realized, it is true again (and again sans the expensive suite in the lovely hotel in Paris, what’s with that?). And I am finding the “looking for” part itself somewhat inconvenient, because I still haven’t learned how to do it, or I’ve forgotten, or something.

I need some Bradshaw willingness to be a little ridiculous about it, which I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. But then again, I haven’t met many people I could fall even silly in love with, which, let’s be honest, was once among my special talents. But oh man, oh man, am I there now.

Feelings, y’all.

Today, as we’ve established, was beautiful.

At 4:30, I tried to convince Meg to DITCH THE GYM with me and drink a beer outside instead.

But Meg had post-gym plans and did not want to be sloshed for them, and my pants are too tight, and I am going to afternoon drink tomorrow and then eat insanely delicious schmaltz-laden old Jewish man food on Sunday, so dammit, fine, let’s go.

And Kristin, who teaches the 5:30 Super Sculpt class that Meg and I love so much, knew what a sacrifice it was for all of us to be there, in the basement of the Crunch, missing happy hour on this gorgeous, gorgeous evening, so hot damn did she give us our money’s worth. Meg and I practically laughed through the ab series because it hurt so much, after 45 minutes of crazy arm work and jumping jacks. And then? Oh, then I decided to stay for her 6:30 Street Jazz class, because I used to think I could dance.

I cannot dance.

At 7:30 I was drenched, head to toe, hair soaking wet, and still couldn’t do the combination properly. I figured out too late in the class that I had to be counting, out loud, to stay in-step. And I never quite got certain transitions. So I will be back. I will be in the front where I can see, I will count loudly, and I will get that shit right. Until then, I am going to fucking sleep, because I am pretty much destroyed, and I have my first triathlon training practice in the morning. Fortunately, it is like, the world’s shortest jog. Huzzah! Then: daytime drinking!

I KNOW it’s fake. I know it’s going to be at least 20 degrees colder tomorrow and for the following week. Which makes today, and the fact that I am at my desk till after 5, and, let’s be honest, the fact that I am going to the gym after work instead of immediately playing outsideall the more cruel. All I want to do is go outside and sit in the grass in the sun and read my silly book before spring goes away again! And as close as I will get is having my window open right next to me and a 20 minute lunchtime stroll.

Sad sad sad sad g

Do you ever have those nights of sleep where you feel like your body is doing like, HEAVY processing?

Last night, after delicious eel (for two!) for dinner, I felt totally fine and went to bed at a reasonable hour. But then I was somehow up ALL NIGHT, sweating, sore throat, stomach ache, stiff neck, pounding headache, all those weird, middle-of-the-night ailments.

And then I woke up and felt fine, but with a slight taste of eel in my mouth. Yick.

It’s March fourth, which is my parts-of-college boyfriend’s birthday. He’s turning 31.

When we started up with our highly dramatic, on-again-off-again shenanigans, I was 18 and he was 21.

This means that that was almost ten years ago. I just figured out that it’s not QUITE a decade (!) because it was the latter portion of 2001, but still. We got so old so fast.

Anyway, I like it better here. Thank goodness.

The difficulty here is that I do not own leggings-appropriate sweaters or dresses. I’m just not a tunic-wearer. All of my dresses are Actual Dress Length (so closer to my knees than my junk) and all of my sweaters are Actual Sweater Length (so closer to my hip than my junk).

So I have on this preposterous short “dress” from Forever21 over my leggings, because my butt needs coverage, and pants are just too much to think about this morning. Now if only I could avoid SHOES.

That is all.

It’s all fun and games until you get home on Friday night to find a letter from the IRS saying you owe them about 5.5 weeks of your salary because, they say, you incorrectly filled out a form (a year ago, about the previous year).

So yes, I’ve had a total breakdown tonight, thank you for asking. As Futt will attest, I did at least manage to make a grilled cheese and watch Community before I called my mother IN TOTAL HYSTERICS.

This happens every few years. Just when I think I know, like and understand what’s going on in the complex world of pop culture, just when I think I have my finger on the pulse and a firm handle on things, Radiohead goes and releases a new album.

And every time, I try it.

And every time, I don’t like it. I don’t even make it through full tracks.

I don’t know what it is! I like all kinds of stuff! Weird stuff! Not weird stuff! But you put anything from their oeuvre but a few tracks of Kid A (or maybe it’s OK Computer, I don’t even know) on when I’m in the room, and I guarantee you that in 45 seconds, I will be stink-eyeing everyone and trying to figure out 1/ what the fuck is that noise and b/how can I supplant whoever’s music that is with something way less bad.

Obviously, I want to like it. I know that Thom and the Gang are Important To My Generation and to the art and industry and all, but it just doesn’t take.

This was particularly embarrassing in the summer of 2006, when the Nice Normal Human I was dating in Chicago surprise(!)d me with tickets to see Radiohead at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater, operating under the assumptions that I was like everyone else my age, actually knew any of their songs and liked them (boy did I show him!). To be fair, we had not been dating very long, and I did appear to be a totally normal 23-year-old at the time, but the truth was, I couldn’t even recognize Creep yet. I still only sort of can, let’s be honest. So anyway, yeah, I saw Radiohead, from a really good seat in a not-huge venue, and even that didn’t make it take.

So here we are. The King of Limbs. Lotus Flower. Still not doing it for me. It is a little better if I do not watch the video, but no, not something I want to listen to repeatedly. Stink-eye.

On the upside, I no longer think that not liking Radiohead means I have some kind of intellectual defect. And I recognize that people who think it means I have an intellectual defect are the ones with the intellectual defects. But it took a lot of time and a lot of boys to figure that out (because duh, it’s always boys with the oppressive Radiohead boners).

So that is my Saturday Morning Manifesto for the week. I don’t like Radiohead. Go forth and have brunch, my children.

I vaguely remember rolling over in the night and thinking, “Did I just hear/feel a tear?” but since I also manage to work things like car alarms right into conversations (as noises humans make) in dreams, I guess I did not think much of it.

And then I woke up to find like an 7-inch tear across the bottom of my favorite, oldest sleeping shorts, which I or my mom must have purchased at Old Navy about a decade ago. They have hearts and arrows on them! At some point overnight, the weak edge above the front hem just gave out as I sleep-maneuvered… and then the tear turned up the front. So what I really woke up to was like an easy access pajama flap on one side of the front of my shorts. Not salvageable and not worth sewing, because really, the seams on these shorts were about the disintegrate in the way that only 10-year-old Old Navy cotton can.

Let the quest for new shorts begin!

PS, I saved the defective flap. Weird?
PPS, Yesterday and today, my hair has moved into Mrs. Harrison territory. That’s my third grade teacher. I think she was like 65 when I had her.

Well.

That was easily the most expensive haircut I’ve ever gotten, and also easily the fastest one, because I forget that when you have short hair, haircuts take like 40 seconds.

So, all tips in (that’s coat check, washer, and cutter/stylist dude), I’m out $150 and some change. In 35 minutes from start to finish. Crikey. It’s literally half that in Atlanta.

Adding to the hurt is the fact that I look like someone’s brunette grandma, or maybe Richard Simmons, because when you cut short, curly hair, IT FREAKS OUT. Fortunately, I have done this enough times to know that in 3 days, it will look somewhere between normal and cute. But tonight? Look out, men of Glee trivia (yeah, that’s my next stop). You may be gayer than the day is long, but you won’t be able to resist my little old lady/exercise icon charms.

If you have been paying superclose attention or are one of the lucky bastards who gets to see me in real life, you may have noticed that I have been braiding back the front of my hair religiously for weeks. This is because of what I have started lovingly referring to as The Joey Lawrence, the ungraceful FLOP that the front right side of my hair has taken to executing 90% of the time.

But Joey’s hours are numbered! By five, exactly! The good people at Bumble & bumble will be shaping him into something a little less wily this evening, because I am a really good bridesmaid and sort of vain, and 3.5 weeks before I have to look good in all of Jessica and Adam’s wedding pictures is the right time for a trimmerino.

That is all!