Robindon has officially ended, which means we're overdue for one of my periodic columns on health, beauty and Timeless Wisdom.
The Holy Month of Robindon, when I fast and pray and try to lose the weight I've gained in the summer drinking beer and in the holidays eating chocolate, usually coincides with the calendar month of January. This year it was late, owing to social obligations heedlessly entered into by my spouse.
(Does that sound like blaming someone else for my own failings? My friend Mary Hart said when we were young, and it became an adage: "What is the purpose of having a boyfriend if you still don't have a date for your work Christmas party?" I've postulated the matrimonial corollary: "What is the point of having a husband except for the evasion of personal responsibility?"
Regardless whose fault it was, no wagons got climbed on around here until almost halfway through January. Therefore, this year the Holy Month o' dragged on until Valentine's Day, when it fizzled happily out amid the chocolate and red wine traditional to the occasion. But even with this extended January, somehow I never got around to writing my customary Robindon column on diet, exercise and the meaning of life.
That's on top of having missed both Christmas and my birthday 2019, my usual occasions for imparting pearls o'. Thus I thought I should grind out at least one column about beauty tips and the human condition before the Timeless Wisdom backs up and attacks my brain, and I have to start wrestling strangers to the ground and forcing it on them. Let's go!
Tenet 1: Take your own advice:
People who read newspapers always seem to read the obits, the arrest report and the advice column, so when I started The Planet (four years ago this month!) I made sure to carry all three. I could get arrests from the sheriff's department and obits from the funeral homes, but somebody had to write the advice column and I knew it couldn't me. What did I know? I was 50-something but age had not brought me maturity, wisdom or charm. Hell, I was still waiting patiently for my secondary sex characteristics.
So I kept casting about for somebody to write an advice column. Meanwhile, I made up fake ones, supposedly written by the only columnists I could think of who would give worse advice than me. These included my dog Rosie ("Personally, I would bite them"); Hitler ("Kill zem! Kill zem! Kill zem!") and Charlene the Small-Town Snoop ("Nobody’s laughing at you in church, hon. What they’re laughing at is the preacher’s wife and that Smith boy, who just come home from the Air Force with his uniform and his nice tan.")
Despite all this, nobody ever stepped up to take over the Timeless Wisdom slot at The Planet. Meanwhile, though, I got so disgusted with the advice I read in the "real newspaper" that I organized my fake columnists, plus a few more--Socrates, Charles Manson and my friend Sardo who was always advising me to buy hiking boots just like his--into "the Dear Abby Appeals Board." They'd revisit Abby's stupider replies, tell her she was an ignorant slut and, eventually, give the advice seeker a better answer.
Of course Socrates, Rosie and Hitler weren't really producing this advice, I was, and maybe it bolstered my confidence. One way or the other, it finally struck me I had the edge on both Dear Abby and Billy Graham. To quote Charlene the Small-Town Snoop, "Abby ain't been the same since she died." I had as much leg to stand on telling people how to live as a couple of dead people.
And actually, at my age I really have racked up a morsel of wisdom here and there and suffered some serious pain getting it. So my advice is not so awful and my big resolution for 2020 is to take it myself. Why not use what I've learned from the past to make my own life happier, as opposed to shoving it down other people's throats? And you probably could say the same.
Taking my own advice is really the basis of most of what I have to offer here. To wit:
Tenet 2: Do unto yourself no worse than you would to blameless strangers.
Women beat up on themselves. I'm as guilty of it as anybody. I often depend on self-deprecation for what passes as humor in these pages. It's a nasty habit, though I do think it's a more acceptable failing than the corresponding male vice of self-aggrandizement. Once I had a job interview with a man who explained to me he was God's second-in-command. That guy could have benefited from a few years of my childhood--there are some folks who need less self-esteem, and most of 'em have the kind of private parts that dangle.
But I've got the other kind and as for self-esteem--well! One day recently I had a dramatic illustration of how bad an offender I am in the self-loathing department:
Robert Burns wrote:
O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
Little did he know that in a century or so we would get that giftie with the invention of photography and no fat girl would ever be happy again. I look fine in my mirror but cameras make me look like part of a documentary on inbreeding in the rural South.
Now it's gotten exponentially worse with the advent of live streaming. Cover local government meetings for a small independent newspaper and you, too, will see your vanilla pudding face and burgeoning backside every time you venture onto the internet. I have hated every minute!
But I've gotten used to it, and this day I'm telling you about, when footage of a meeting I'd covered had caught my eye on Facebook, I was watching myself from behind with practiced hatred. I observed with disgust the graceless way I heaved myself to my feet for the pledge of allegiance. I cringed at the broad expanses of my billowing buttocks. Then I sneered at my fiddly little habit of reaching behind to flick the hair off my shoulder.
Which is when I noticed it wasn't my hair.
Also, hadn't I been sitting on the other side of the room? Plus those weren't my clothes. Finally I realized the truth: It wasn't me! I had been sitting there eviscerating somebody else with my self-hatred beams--somebody I'd always considered, in fact, attractive and nicely turned-out. It was just some similarity in the blouse she was wearing that had made me think she was me for those few seconds.
I'm still not quite sure what to make of all this. Perhaps the woman I'd mistaken for me was actually a great deal more repulsive than I'd initially realized? But another possibility is maybe we women should cut ourselves a little slack already! If we can't love ourselves, we could at least limit the contempt we heap on ourselves to the amount we would on somebody who looked like us.
A final takeaway is plain common sense: I'm happier on this side of the camera, so I advised myself then and there to stay behind and not in front of the goddam things.
Tenet 3: Don't let anybody mess with your head.
I'm not talking about your delicate psyche. I am talking about your hair! After all these years of fussing with mine, having the Hair Talk with other women and paying money I could ill afford at salons, at the venerable age of did-you-really-think-I-was-going-to-tell-you I have finally figured out the best thing I can do with my hair is leave it the hell alone.
When I say not to let anybody mess with it, I'm including hairdressers. I'm including them rather emphatically! Just as we've perverted health care by paying providers based on how much they drug, hospitalize and cut us, we pay hairdressers according to how much they dye, perm and cut. Emphasis on final word! The standard salon unit of exchange is the "haircut." Hairdressers are trained to have the same relationship with hair as cops do with meth. Go into a salon and odds are you'll come out with less hair than when you went in--and odds are, you'll regret it bitterly for the rest of your life.
I stopped going to salons not from principle but because I had started operating an independent newspaper and simply couldn't afford them. So my hair grew long and since then I've noticed I'm happier that way. Also, I've noticed that other women come up to me and say, (A) "My hair used to be that long;" (B) "My hair used to be longer than yours"; or (C) "My hair used to be that long. Of course, I rolled it every day."
Statement (B), of course, carries a little casual one-upmanship--"I do everything better than you," while Statement (C) is overtly aggressive: "I looked better with long hair than you do. By Christ, I still look better." But both (B) and (C) still carry the wistful longing of (A), which translates to: "What was I thinking to cut off my pretty hair?"
Once when I was in my 20s, a young male person asked me that same question about other girls. I think maybe some pretty young thing he had a crush on, who had long beautiful blond hair, had recently shown up without it and he was genuinely puzzled why anybody would willingly do something like that to herself. I explained that if you had a pretty face and a perfect little body, a short haircut could highlight them.
I think I believed it back then. (It's why I kept my own hair long!) But if it's true, and if we know that in general men prefer long hair, why do we feel this mad biological urge to cut off our hair in middle age as our faces wrinkle, nobody's figure is all that perfect anymore, and our husbands begin looking speculatively at Waffle House waitresses? Really, it beats the hell out of me.
There are good reasons to cut off your hair--new baby, serious illness, bad perm--but I think mostly women do it just because they want a change. When that's the case I think they should consider something a little less irreversible. So many times I see women posting pics of their new short haircuts on Facebook as if they've accomplished something clever and brave and I think, oh, law, why couldn't she just have filed for divorce or burned down the house for insurance?
Of course I've done it myself. I recall myself sitting in the salon chair at 50 saying, "Shorter, darker, neater," like I knew what I was talking about. And I suppose I was happy for a while like that. Maybe everybody goes through a Tousled stage. But sooner or later I started looking at young girls and thinking, "My hair used to be that long..."
You'll hear that short hair is less trouble but it seemed to me I was always having to fuss with it, trying to give it some kind of look. Long hair, you wash it, you comb it, it hangs down, it's hair, there's nothing wrong with it. It's a look.
Furthermore, long hair is a dominant trait. Not as in inheritable but as in the first thing you see. Like instead of people saying: "Look at that fat girl walking down the road," they say, "Look at the hair on that fat girl!" I met an acquaintance in the grocery store the other day who greeted me: "Look how long your hair's gotten." It wasn't as nice, maybe, as "You look great," but it beat "Have you been sick?" or "I didn't know they made jeans that size." Hell, I'll take it.
I know women with short hair who look great and I'm not trying to change their minds. For myself, though, I've realized that, in just the way I shudder at the perky look-what-I did! haircut posts on FB, I also tend to unconsciously give the stamp of approval to pics of long hair. Like that new flaxen-maned Georgia senator, Kelly Loeffler? Her appointment makes people worry that she bought her way into the Senate and that corporate money is perverting democracy. When I see her photo I worry about all that, too, but I add, "Good hair." I have thought the same thing about mug shots I've used in arrest reports.
Finally, for me long hair has stood the see-oursels-as-others-see-us test. Recently I was given a framed photo of a nice group shot, me and three friends, one of whom has since died. The picture was taken during my Tousled phase and I registered first love, then grief, then the fact that I was so much larger than everybody else it looked as if there might have been more but I'd eaten them. And what was my hair supposed to be doing anyway?
Then last week I got a Facebook ping that I'd been tagged in somebody else's photo, and I did the usual anticipatory cringe. Imagine my delight when I checked it out and saw all the camera had caught was the back of my head, which meant: hair. The back of my head looked fine!
(Of course, it was the back of somebody's head Robert Burns was talking about in the poem I keep quoting, which was called To a Louse. But shall we not go there?)
Anyway, I think I've finally got the hair thing figured out. But if you are out there thinking you can't grow your hair long because you're too old, the next topic I want to discuss is--
Tenet 4: You're not too old for anything!
When I was 23 I remember there was some job I wanted but I decided not to apply because I thought the employer would consider me too old for it. I'd been out of college two years for Pete's sake! Now I think, 23? You're not too old for anything at 23. You could probably get away with training wheels. Thumb-sucking!
But damned if I didn't squander the rest of my youth thinking like that. When, I worried, are you too old to wear junior sizes? To go back to school? To become a sexy femme fatale in a slinky black dress who makes the other women fear she is fixin' to vamp their husbands? Eventually, I figured out that the answers to those questions are (a) when you're too fat for 'em, (b) when you know everything, and (c) dream on, ducks!
And finally I advised myself not to waste one more nanosecond of my life worrying I was too old for anything. One of the things you learn as you age is that when you were young you were a priggish little prisspot. I was, anyway. What kind of nerve did I have making up rules about what old people should and shouldn't do?
Also, getting old resembles being young so much that it's hard to draw any hard-and-fast lines. Like I've noticed that diapers are now being marketed to my generation and not for use on grandchildren! I'm not there--yet--but I'm old enough for the pee-when-you-sneeze thing, I can't digest some foods the way I used to, and just this winter I've developed a marked partiality to a certain fleece throw that I take with me from room to room. So if I'm not too old to pee my pants, get tummy-owies or carry a blankie, how can I be too old for a miniskirt or tattoo?
I don't really want a miniskirt--they were never that kind to me back in the day, and whereas I forgive I don't forget--and I retain a prejudice against tattoos from my youth, when they were only for what biker magazine covers referred to as "liver-quiverin' biker bitches," who used initials on their ass the way nice girls used engagement rings. But the Suzy Homemaker EZ Bake Oven I didn't get for the Christmas of 1967 is still available on Ebay and as for slutty black dresses--ladies, you might want to lock up your husbands!
I will put on that slinky black dress the second I'm thin enough to zip it up the back, or when I finally break down and order one of those Shapermint neo-girdles I see advertised online. I won't be stymied by any notion of being mutton dressed as lamb, because my philosophy is...
Tenet 5: Wear what the f--k you want.
I didn't make that up. It's from a clever article I read online, written by a woman fed up with articles she'd read online advising what clothes women over 50 should wear. Her idea was, back off! At 50-plus we're old enough to wear whatever the (bleep) we like.
I remember reading an article about what women in their 30s should wear back when I was in that decade of my life. (Not on the internet. We didn't have the internet when I was young. We read words chiseled into tablets, or occasionally Cosmopolitan.) The article advised large stud earrings, bold and noticeable ones because "at 30-something, you've found your style and you're confident about sticking to it." That puzzled me. I had no idea what the appropriate thing to wear was. That's why I was reading the magazine.
I still have no idea. The difference now is that I no longer give a flyin' flip. But I've noticed that nobody else is all that sure, either, as demonstrated by the prevalence of all those aforementioned click-bait articles you still see online: "Best haircuts for women over 50"; "Best summer styles for the 40-plus crowd." Click on one of those, as I did recently, and you'll surmise that the writers don't really have a clue, either. Ones I've read on hair suggest, all in the same article:
Wearing it long
Cutting it short
Wearing it in loose curls
Perming it into tight curls
Straightening it
Parting it on the side
Parting it in the middle
Letting it go gray to show you're proud of your age.
Coloring it subtly to suggest youth
Dying it purple to tell the world to kiss your ass.
The articles on clothes are much the same. It really does all boil down to: Wear what the f--k you want. This has become my fashion mantra.
And again, the fashion question often ties into Tenet 4, the age thing. I remember packing for a summer trip when I was 48 and my husband was 50. I suggested that maybe T-shirts with pictures and messages were inappropriate for a man of 50. He looked hurt and confused, and then he said angrily that maybe tank tops and shorts were inappropriate garb for a woman of 50. "I'm 48," I squeaked, but I was also hurt and confused.
I always wore kakhi shorts and black tank tops in the summer. It was practically my uniform. Was there a cutoff point where I was supposed to have switched to floral-print flour-sack grandma dresses? To hell with that! But at length I understood I had suggested a similar deadline to my husband. As a commercial artist, one of his first jobs had been designing T-shirts, and he is still always drawing a picture to go on a T-shirt for one or another of his hobby groups--was he supposed to stop wearing them? He had always worn T-shirts. Well! I told you I was a prick.
But I get it now. Just as there isn't one kind of human being to be or act like, there isn't one kind of 50-year-old, 60-year-old, 70-, 80-, whatever, way to dress, either; and it's useless trying to live by preconceptions we formed as young people, before our little heads had emerged from our anuses. Wear what the f--k you want.
But back to my femme fatale dress: if you think simple shame will stop me from inappropriate wardrobe choices, think again. I've decided...
Tenet 6: Embarrassment is for losers!
No kidding. One of the few perks of this sensescin' biz is you finally get some kind of control over your emotions, and you figure out the negative ones are a waste of time--which as an old person you no longer have a lot of.
For me, the big one was fear. In my life I have been afraid of everything from those caterpillars with a white line down their backs to what happens to us after we die. Once--I think I was 27--I learned how to pee standing up because I had developed an irrational fear of being discovered dead on the toilet.
Which brings us to the ramifications of fear. Fear accounts for most of the other negative emotions. Worry is fear of what may or may not happen, and embarrassment is fear of being laughed at. I was worried about the possibility of dying on the throne because it would be so embarrassing.
Of course there's no way to conquer fear altogether, but I have managed mostly to stop worrying. What good does it do, logically? If something terrible happens, it happens, whether or not you worry about it. The difference in worrying versus not worrying is you have to be miserable about it longer. Here's a useful adage: "Worry is interest you pay on a loan that's not due." I have worried about things that had almost no possibility of happening--for God's sake, the toilet thing!--which is to say I've paid interest on money I hadn't borrowed. The universe owes me store credit!
Another worry trick: I like to say, "I'm not one to worry." It's become a catch phrase. Why? I come from a family of liars so deep-rooted and natural they lie when there's no reason to, just to stay in practice. Thus never telling a lie myself became a matter of fierce conviction for me, one of the few parts of me I'm proud of besides the back of my head. So if I say, "I'm not one to worry," and then I do worry, that makes me a liar, and we can't have that.
As for embarrassment, that's almost as easy to push from your mind. Logic again: What good does it do? You look in the mirror after you've been talking to someone and notice there's a booger peeking coquettishly out of your left nostril. Being embarrassed about it isn't going to erase the thing from having happened, it just means you suffer for it longer.
Banishing embarrassment can be not just a matter of self-esteem but basic survival. I had a friend who when she was a teenager swallowed a whole bottle of aspirin because she was worried her brother's girlfriend might have taken something she said the wrong way. She tried to commit suicide from simple social embarrassment. And teenagers today frequently off themselves in reaction to social media shaming, such as naked pictures.
In geezerhood these things no longer make sense to you. I'd look much worse in a "sext" than any 17-year-old could manage, I'll bet the farm, but I'm not fixin' to do myself in just because people despise me. I am, like, used to it.
That's the essence of it. I'm not sure if overcoming embarrassment is a matter of conquering one's emotions so much as getting inured to humiliation, of just living long enough to live stuff down. Whatevs, I'm mostly over it. What I figure is, it wasn't me who had to look at the booger. As for the toilet death thing, it finally occurred to me that you probably can't feel embarrassed when you're dead. That's the whole point of people killing themselves from shame, right?
And before we leave the subject entirely, in case anybody is wondering, the secret to peeing standing up is to pee hard.
Or anyway, do the best you can...
I need to say in conclusion--because remember, I'm against lies--that if you can consistently take your own advice, be on your own side, wear anything without embarrassment, you're doing better than I am! God knows I try to practice what I preach, but I screwed up just the other day.
I came home after a public hearing and had no sooner popped open my laptop than what to my wondering eyes did appear but: My ass. I hadn't even accomplished the sub-tenet about staying on the right side of the camera!
So once again I sat there at the computer watching in horror as my video avatar lumbered in front of the camera like Paul Bunyan, only giant not from head to toe but side to side. The great behemoth shambled the length of the large room, always, like the moon orbiting the earth, managing to keep its prodigious backside to the camera. There was no ambiguity about who it was this time, though, because it was wearing my coat. Which, reaching center stage, it removed, stretching the material out in its arms so that--somehow!--it grew yet wider, seeming to fill the entire room with its bulk, absorbing all light, blotting out the sun.....
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," I shrieked, loud enough that my husband rushed in from the kitchen, thinking I was having a stroke.
I managed to turn it in into a belly laugh by the time he opened the door. "I'm fine," I said and snapped the laptop shut decisively. Then I added, with grim determination:
"Good hair."
