1. Here is a new conversation starter, if you need one: if your personality was a house or a building, what would it be? A cabin in the woods? A sleek apartment on the 40th floor of a high rise? An apartment in a library? Mine would be an unremarkable 1970s 3-bed/2-bath rancher above ground, and NORAD underneath. I think Doug's would be the house we live in now, which is a 1970s (hmmm, might be a theme) A-frame, with big windows facing the mountains and a walkout basement.
My mom's would be a mid-size brick house similar to the ones in the "nice part of town" in the town where I went to high school, with enormous azaleas and hydrangeas out front and no basement at all, and one of those doorbells that sounds like chimes when you ring it. (That was how I knew oooh, these people have CLASS when I lived there.) Also, the azaleas and hydrangeas would always be in bloom.
2. Rabbit hole: I googled NORAD to see what it actually means, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it does not mean what I thought it meant. I was thinking of the super-secret underground military command center in Independence Day or a dozen other movies, an enormous, 20-stories deep complex of labs and archives and mainframe computers. Apparently that is actually the Cheyenne Mountain command center, built during the cold war and currently on "standby," whatever that means. NORAD is the North American defense alliance between Canada and the US that is currently housed at Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs. But hopefully and ungrammatically you got what I meant in #1. (This is actually a pretty interesting rabbit hole if you are so inclined.)
3. In a column in the NYT, fashion editor Vanessa Friedman answered a question from a reader about how short a skirt can be in a professional environment. I thought her response was unusually thoughtful, especially from a fashion editor (which is on me for having assumptions about how a fashion editor would think). Here is a gift link. "If you are constantly worrying that your skirts are too short, they probably are, not because of any immutable rule but because thinking about what other people think is occupying too much of your brain."
4. Which eventually circles back to my current thing, about how different people are just wired differently. It takes no extra energy for someone with a more flamboyant personality to dress to be noticed--it probably gives them energy. For me, it would drain me dry. I do not want to think about my clothes after I put them on, and certainly not about people's reaction to them. Yet in our worst moments, probably the "loud" dresser looks down on me as drab, and I look down on her for being superficial. I've been really working on this, on being able to support people around me in being their own best selves, without judgment from me, even when they're very different from me with very different priorities. And you know what? It's really hard and I'm not great at it.
5. We keep wanting to find "our people," but eventually you realize everybody is just dang different. Is that why we suddenly all feel alone? How many women my age have I heard in the past year say they don't have any friends? (not many, honestly, but given that it's not something people usually confess to, a few is probably indicative of a lot more.) Fifty years ago, we were all in a forced community of proximity. Your neighbors were your people. You might have been a jock or a theater kid or a cool kid, but everybody you knew was right there. We didn't know what people in Helena or Greensboro or Reno (or Tokyo or Lagos or Bern) thought because we didn't have access to them. Now we have this false sense that if we just look hard enough, we could find the people who love the same books as us, vote the same, agree on what’s important, have the same work ethic. And sometimes you can. But maybe I shouldn’t let that be a substitute for reaching out to the person next door.
6. Written in mid-July, and promptly forgotten: In my post about the diet books, I really had not intended to bring up dieting. I was just looking for a segue into the "late night thoughts" at the end. The bit with my friends and the Whole30 book was three (four?) years ago, and I've barely thought about it since. But once that post was up, I ended up face-to-face with my own ambivalence about dieting.
There are a million reasons why diet culture is bad, bad, bad. You don't need me to tell you, I hope. We all know that. It's a negative mindset that will eat you up from the inside and take away all your enjoyment of food. It reinforces unrealistic, unhealthy, stereotypes about how women "should" look. But on the other hand, I have let myself get too heavy for the clothes I have, and for the activity level I want to have. I'm only about ten pounds over where I want to be, but I'm 40-ish pounds over my pre-kid weight. I'll never lose all of it. I am just fine with never being pre-kid thin again. But the last 10-15 pounds are, uh, weighing heavy on me (sorry).
7. Written last week, having completely forgotten that I wrote that last month: I did not circle back around to losing my winter "fluff"-- the 5-10 pounds I seem to gain every winter--because I hate thinking about weight. It's such a triggering issue (for sure for me, and probably for most women), that I will warn you in advance, if you are male, never bring it up. Never.
But I must have lost the winter weight somehow, because I pulled out a pair of capris that I haven't worn in at least two years thinking I would throw them in with the stuff I was taking to goodwill. I figured there was no way they would still fit. But I tried them on, and they fit perfectly. And it suddenly occurred to me: maybe this is just the size my body is now. Maybe I'm not a bad person because I've added a little padding over the years. Maybe I haven't "let myself go" -- which is a comment that makes me laugh because I spend triple the amount of time on my appearance now than I did when I was 30. Maybe I should quit feeling guilty and ashamed about my 63-year-old pudginess and just enjoy having a relatively healthy body. Go, me.
Have a good weekend.
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