Archive | Age Matters

The Grinch Who Stole Sunrise

I can’t stand pumpkin spice anything. (I feel like this goes without saying.) I can’t stand when holiday music starts playing in November. I can’t stand holiday music period unless Otis Redding is singing it. But it kind of cracks me up when holiday festivities heat up even before Thanksgiving rolls around. Three times this week I have gotten home only hours before I normally rise, which is a fact I’d find even more fun if I weren’t a grown-up lady who still got up at 5:30 am every day. (I’m still having fun, to be clear; my cobwebs are officially being shaken out.) I think I am going to pen a song entitled “This Is How We Trick Our Circadian Rhythms.” You’ll be able to sing it to the melody of “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly.” Fa la la la la.

Free Ophelia

Yesterday I took an enormous step. It was the sort of step that instantly broke lifelong patterns but left no footprint visible to the world at large—the sort that is the hardest aspect of real (not chronological) adulthood. To celebrate, I did not drink a vat of cocktails or inhale a box of chocolates. (I’ve been unsweetened since February.) Rather, I ate a kale salad and attended a critics’ screening of “Hunger Games: Mockingbird—Part 2,” which proved far more pleasurable than its overly punctuated title.

In general, this farrago of earnest vegetables and YA female bad-assery is typical of the tweeny old lady I have become—as if I now embody the full spectrum of Ophelia Syndrome-free womanhood. The remaining question, not to put too fine a point on it, is fucking. That is, how to resurrect—or simply insurrect—my sexuality among the rubble of projections, pits, and pedestals that first bombard women in pre-pubescence. I do not have an answer yet. But to my immense surprise, I finally feel that I belong to myself. Here at the shores of what our culture declares Sad-Lady Spinsterville I have found Wonder Woman’s elusive Amazonia, and lo! it is liberating, if also confounding. This transition from objecthood to sweet subjectivity is the biggest step of all, and I’m even glad there’s not a map. There is, however, a manual, and it’s cracking me up, with every attendant pun.

Get This Party Started Right

Lately Mondays kill me, they really do. It’s a terrible feeling, especially as I’ve never been this sort of person before. When I graduated college I swore two things: That I would find an occupation that didn’t require a separate wardrobe—“beware of all enterprises that require new clothes!”—and that I wouldn’t be a 9-5 Working Josephina.

Two decades later, I still wear whatever I please and I still work very off hours. On the rare occasions that I am forced to ride a rush-hour train I feel dismay of the “oh, the humanity!” variety. Aside from washing my clothes at the laundromat, nothing makes me feel so much like my life has failed to meet my expectations. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy