Disappointment.

Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away, I thought I wanted to be an actress. I watched movies like "Sophie's Choice" and "Frances", and was simply amazed at the talent of the women who portrayed the title roles. They left me stunned, and sobbing, and in awe with their performances. But it wasn't just the dramatic actresses I adored, it was also the comedic actresses who weren't afraid to look and act goofy in front of the entire world that made me fall in love with the idea of acting. I not only admired these women, I wanted to BE them.

Okay, pause that story.

I am currently reading this book (loaned to me by a 40-something friend who received it as a gift from another 40-something friend). The author's approach to the changes occurring as a result of her own aging, and the underlying disconnect between how we perceive ourselves versus how the world perceives us as formerly-hot 40-something women, hits very close to home. She handles it with humor which helps, but it's still kind of like getting a bucket of cold water tossed in your face at times. Also, it's hard to take her complaints about her body too seriously when you see the photo of her on the book's jacket (she's obviously in shape and gets frequent facials). Anyhoo, all of this has got me thinking about how utterly fucked up our (and by "our" I mean collective American) ideas about female aging are which then led me to the whole plastic surgery thing.

Plastic surgery can be used for such positive things such as rebuilding a breast cancer survivor's breast, correcting a stigmatizing birth defect, and helping burn victims with their recovery. And I can certainly see the attraction of having a tummy tuck after having a couple of C-sections or a breast lift after nursing some babies. If it makes you feel sexier, more confident, prouder, etc., and you've got the time/money, GO FOR IT. However, when it having plastic surgery becomes such a normal and accepted part of trying to reverse the aging process because--God forbid--we actually look our ages as women, then I call bullshit.

Let's get back to those actresses I was talking about when I started this post. Some of them, like Meryl Streep, have had very little (if anything) "done" to their faces and bodies. But others have gone under the knife (often more than once) in an effort to roll back nature's odometer, and instead, have utterly messed up their God-given beauty that--guess what--would've remained classic and lovely if they'd just let it be. But instead they look like this:

Yikes.

And this:


Oh...Meg. Why?!

 And this:


Rocking the same look for 40 years + competing with your daughter = Blech

Granted, I have NO idea what the pressure for perfection in Hollywood must be like. It must seriously suck ass because there are so few working actresses--both young and old--who DON'T alter their looks in some way as a result of that pressure. But if these beautiful, talented women refuse to accept their physical flaws or age gracefully--Hell, even age at all--what does that mean for those of us who aren't quite as beautiful/talented? It's no wonder that so many of us struggle mightily to accept the fact that we're (ahem) middle-aged when our peers in the public eye would rather knife and inject and augment themselves to the point of ridiculousness than admit that the old grey mare ain't what she used to be. Our role models are, sadly, few and far between.

Let's try this again, shall we?

A couple of years ago, I signed up for NaBloPoMo, but lasted like 4 days before I screwed up and didn't post. So I'm trying it again.

First a little catch up:

Today's my 2nd wedding anniversary. To celebrate, we went out of town for the weekend (while the wonderful Dah kept The Geej). Not FAR out of town, mind you, but it still felt like a vacation. We rented a little cabin on the Blanco river in a tiny town near here called Wimberley. The house sits on 25 acres and has about 500 feet of private riverfront. The weather was amazingly perfect, and we had a very nice time. Saturday afternoon, after a short foray into town for lunch, we came back and just lounged on the banks of the river for hours. Yes, I dozed and felt totally relaxed--something that doesn't happen as frequently as I wished it would. Saturday night, BH built a fire in the fire place (yay!) and we watched the Texas Rangers win their first game in the World Series (double yay!).

Isn't this freakin' GORGEOUS?!

I was sad to leave yesterday, but we had to get back to town for HALLOWEEN!!!

Once again, we went to a friend's house to trick-or-treat in their neighborhood with a pack of goblins and their parents. It was lots of fun, and our hosts had made food for the grown-ups and the kids, so you know, bonus! The Geej was a black cat:

I had to practically BEG her to don this costume. The original one she'd picked out was some ridiculous, semi-slutty outfit called a "Batt-erina", that included fingerless black satin gloves, fishnet stockings, and of course lots and lots of sequins. She saw it in a costume catalogue we got in the mail. What the HELL people?! I am not crafty, and so cannot (and probably will not ever) actually make her a Halloween costume. It's just not going to happen. So I'm stuck with the consumer options for little girls' costumes that pretty much break down into the categories of Disney and/or slutty. Sigh...

As far as anniversary plans for today, we don't have any. It's a Monday after all. And the Rangers are playing tonight and (hopefully) managing to pull of a win so that they stay alive in this series. And I'm tired. And did I mention that it's Monday?

More Pine Curtain?

On Facebook. And Twitter.

As you might imagine, I update my status a lot.

You've been warned.

Revealing

I've told you that I'm currently taking a once-a-week writing workshop that's been going on since September 30th, but I haven't really shared anything I've written for class with y'all. But since one of my classmates did (and did a fine job, I might add), I figured I would too.

First, a bit of background.

We had an in-class writing assignment that went kind of like this: Pick a 10-year period in your life. Then write--in three word increments--some descriptive phrases of that time, roughly three phrases per year. For a wordy (ahem) individual like myself, this was an interesting challenge. But I did it. Then most of the people in the class read their list of phrases. It was very interesting and sometimes really funny to hear others' phrases and imagine what was behind them. At the end of class, Spike gave us this homework: Pick one of the phrases and write 1,000 about it. The period of time I chose was age 20 to 30, and although a LOT happened during that time, I won't bore you with my three-word phrases. Instead, I'll bore you with just one of the three-word phrases that I decided to elaborate upon. (Please remember, this is creative non-fiction, so there's a little artistic license going on here. But only a tiny bit.)

Summer Without Rain

The grass in the small front yard of our rented house had burned to a crisp over a month ago. Now the lone large tree in the front yard was quickly losing its leaves in an effort to conserve what little moisture it might be able to access through its deep roots. Our A/C ran constantly, all of the creeks were dried up, the lake levels were quickly receding and most of the city pools were closed due to drought restrictions. It was hot and dry and miserable, and there was simply no relief. We’d gone over two months without a bit of rain, and it was only a few days into August. I kept having fantasies of running away; just getting in my car and driving north until I finally hit cooler, greener pastures. Almost every night, I dreamed of rain. My roommate Courtney and I bought a twelve pack of cheap beer and wrote “SAVE FOR A RAINY DAY” in black Sharpie on the outside of the box. Then we shoved it into the back of the fridge and pledged that on the first day we got any real rain, we were going to sit out on our front porch and finish that sucker.


See, those are the kind of plans you can commit to when you don’t have “real” jobs. At least not the kind of jobs you’re supposed easily land once you graduate from a really good university, which we’d both done that previous spring. I was working a temp job at a roofing company in an insanely sketchy part of town, while Courtney was a hostess at a Tex-Mex restaurant. We were both making less than ten dollars an hour. Besides the pathetic pay, the downside of Courtney’s job was that she came home from work REEKING of Mexican food and waiter/waitress drama after every shift. The downside of mine was that I had a super sleazy boss named Dick (yes, really) who had a huge oil painting of a panther hanging behind his desk and enjoyed taking long, epic dumps in the roofing company’s only bathroom, which just happened to be right by my desk. Yeah, we were living large, as they say.

One day I was at work, and Dick slinked out of his wood paneled office chewing on a toothpick like he always did. He had on a cheap, too-small button down shirt with no undershirt beneath. The fabric was pale and so thin I could see his nipples through the front. He wore a thick gold chain and medallion, and had his shirt unbuttoned about one button more than any self-respecting man should EVER consider doing. “I’ll be back after lunch, Cutie,” he said while walking out the door. I shuddered a bit at his pet name for me. “Bye,” I countered, utterly unenthused about the idea of him returning after lunch, or ever for that matter.

I cracked my book and began to read. Reading is how I filled the time between fielding infrequent calls and speaking broken Spanish to the workers who had questions. I tried to lose myself in my book, but couldn’t. I’d had a particularly mind-numbing morning and had smelled one-too-many of Dick’s bowel movements. Suddenly, I began to unravel and started crying, hard. What the FUCK was I doing there?! Why couldn’t I find a better job? I mean, who DOESN’T need a perky, recently-graduated English/Theatre double major working for them, right? Between the early morning bong hits, the gallons of beer I was regularly drinking, and the dimwit brain donors I’d been spending the majority of my time with, I became quite sure I was turning into a worthless slacker idiot with no future. How the hell was I going to fix this?! Well, not by working at the Greater Austin Roofing Company via a crappy temp agency, that was for sure. So I pulled myself together enough to call my “Career Liaison” at Personnel People and informed her that that Friday would be my last at that fucking place and that, no, I wasn’t interested in another assignment. I had no back-up employment plan, but knowing that I was done with the temp job crapshoot I’d been dealing with off and on since graduation felt wildly liberating.

That Friday, the blazing hot sun woke me up through my east-facing bedroom windows. It was the beginning of day sixty-four without rain, and the temperature was already in the mid-eighties despite the early hour. But I wasn’t pissy, I was excited. It was my last day at the roofing place, and the last time I would ever have to look at Dick’s squinched up face and dandruff-filled comb-over. It was the last time I’d have to see the sad faces of the immigrant workers that Dick yelled at with evil regularity. It was the last time I’d have to drive to that glorified warehouse office with a fifty pound ball of dread sitting in my stomach. Mercifully, I was uncommonly busy that day, and the hours passed without much notice. When five o’clock came, I yelled a cursory, “Bye Dick!” as I opened the door to the parking lot. Since there were no windows in the crappy office and I hadn’t stepped outside since lunchtime, I had no idea that dark, menacing clouds had started rolling in from the east. The temperature was dropping, the wind was gusting, and it smelled like rain. Delicious fucking rain. I nearly squealed with glee. I jumped in my car and started home. About half-way there, big, fat raindrops started to fall. By the time I pulled up in front of our house, the rain was coming down in sheets, and Courtney was sitting on the front porch with our rainy day twelve pack and a big grin on her face. “Finally!!” she yelled to me happily as I walked from my car to the front steps, not caring that I was getting soaked.


Finally, indeed.

It's about to get heavy.

It’s not easy to admit that at one time in your life you were a really evil person. But I was, for a while, a terribly heartless and cruel girl. I was not this way all the time, mind you. During the school year, I was a pretty good kid with lots of friends and good grades. My wicked side seemed to lie dormant until my annual trip to summer camp. There, in that microcosm of all things adolescent, I discovered my dark side and claimed two victims along the way.

Tormenting a girl named Terri Jo was my first foray into peer torture, or bullying. We were cabin mates during my second summer at camp, right after finishing fifth grade. We were eleven. Terri Jo was a tad goofy and lanky, not unlike almost every other eleven-year-old girl in the world including myself. She had a mass of untamed curly brown hair on her head and big brown eyes. She was from a small town ten miles from mine and used to trumpet the fact that she and her younger brother had been adopted. “Chosen” she called it. She let on that her parents shuttled her and her brother off to an endless series of camps over the summer. Basically, they spent the entire summer away from home while their parents traveled around. Terri Jo was loud and rambunctious, and always tried a bit too hard to fit in. But my friends and I decided not to let her.

I’m not sure why I focused my viciousness on Terri Jo. Maybe she annoyed me. Maybe it was because she didn’t seem to have as many nice clothes and things as the rest of us. Or maybe (and this seems far more likely in hindsight) I figured she was just a bit weirder and more insecure than I was, and picking on her gave me a perceived “upper hand” among the rest of our cabin mates. Whatever the screwed-up reasoning, I was relentless. When she had crushes on the guy counselors, I’d tell them right in front of her just to embarrass her. I cut her training bra in half and hung the halves on either end of her bunk bed. I covered her sheets with powdered laundry detergent right before lights out. And one evening after everyone had showered, I waited outside the bathhouse with an accomplice, and we ripped Terri Jo’s towel off causing her to streak back to the cabin naked and crying. Meanwhile, my friend and I rolled on the ground laughing our asses off.

With this last act of meanness, I’d finally done something worthy of a real reprimand. I had to “go to the office” where one of the camp’s directors sat me down and gave me a good talking to. Then he made me sew Terri Jo’s bra back together. Then he made me call my mother and tell her what I’d done and that I was in trouble. Then he made me apologize to Terri Jo in front of the entire cabin. And he warned me that if I didn’t leave her completely alone until the end of camp, they’d call my parents to come and get me. I remember being ashamed of what I’d done, but more than that, I was pissed off that I’d been caught.

It was surprisingly easy to avoid Terri Jo those last few days of camp. She simply went from being the object of torment to being completely ignored by my cohorts and me. She was totally ostracized. One night during the free hours between supper and our scheduled evening activity, I saw her wandering in the big field that made up the outer reaches of the campus. The sun was setting, and in the brilliant orange light, I could make out that she was talking to herself while she picked wildflowers and poked anthills with a stick. She was utterly alone, and it was more or less my fault. It’s an image that still haunts me to this day.

The following summer, I chose a new victim: Katherine. She was trim and athletic, with a short blonde bob haircut. And she had the biggest buckteeth I’d ever seen. She loved horses, and claimed to have some back where she was from. She loved horses so much, in fact, that she brought plastic model horses with her to camp and lined them up in the windowsill next to her bunk. And she’d dress them up with homemade horse outfits she’d brought with her. She’d even wander out to the horse stables to “talk” with the horses between our scheduled activities. In other words, she was a prime target for my summer of malevolence. However, I was more covert with my meanness toward Katherine than I had been with Terri Jo. I’d been caught once, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Instead, my cabin mates and I made fun of Katherine behind her back and did stupid stuff like stripping her horses and putting them in compromising positions while she was out of the cabin. We’d impersonate her by sticking our teeth out and neighing whenever we wanted to crack each other up. She was terrified of spiders, so we gathered up a bunch of dead ones we’d found around the cabin, and put them on her bed. But the meanest thing we ever did was read her diary.

I’m not sure where she had gone, but Katherine wasn’t in the cabin one afternoon while we were having “rest period.” We’d seen her writing in her diary, and my friends Kelly, Mary and I went snooping around for it. It wasn’t hard to find wedged in between her mattress and the frame of the bunk bed. We seized it and started scanning it for anything worth making fun of. There were a few passages about some boy she’d had a crush on at school. “Jason smiled at me today in the hall.” “Jason asked to borrow my pen.” And the saddest: “Jason threw a tennis ball at me today after lunch. I think he likes me.” But the entry that REALLY made us howl was the one about her cat “Puff” that had gotten hit by a car and killed. For some reason, that story really tickled our collective funny bone—especially when read aloud while doing our best Katherine impersonations, complete with stuck out teeth and a horse neigh or two thrown in. We were horrible. Eventually Katherine found out that we’d violated her privacy and, justifiably, threw a fit. She told our counselors, and once again, I received a talking to. After that, she spent more and more time at the stables and as little time as possible with us.

Somehow, over the course of my remaining years as a camper, I managed to end up in the same cabin with Terri Jo and with Katherine one more time each (Katherine when we were 13 and Terri Jo when we were 14). My meanness was still there, but not as pronounced and obvious. They were both just left out of everything that the rest of the cabin might have been doing.

I think of what Terri Jo and Katherine must have felt like as they came driving in through the camp gates those second years, with their cabin assignments in their hands, reading that I was going to be in their cabin...again. I try and imagine the dread they must have felt knowing what the next two weeks held in store for them. Some kids hate going to camp because of the heat or the mosquitoes. These girls hated camp because of me and my all-too-willing friends and our totally misguided belief that we were somehow superior to them.

The most ironic thing about this is that around this same time (age 13 and 14), I began to be bullied at school by some older girls who didn’t like the fact that “their guys” (the boys in ninth grade) were friends with me. They would wait for me at lunch time and say horrible things to me as I walked past them on my way to the cafeteria. They would taunt me in the halls whenever they’d see me, and they even started threatening me with violence. I got so freaked out that I spent a great deal of my lunch periods hanging out in the choir room with my choir director, eating and talking and avoiding the meanness. But somehow, even though I was a pretty smart kid, it never occurred to me that the tormenting that I was receiving was just a taste of what my victims had experienced at summer camp. In fact, my ah-ha moment didn’t come until many years later.

As an adult, it’s easy to look back and see that I was an immature, geeky only child from a divorced middle class family who intensely wanted to fit in and be cooler than I was. But these were things I just couldn’t pull it off in my normal, day-to-day life at home and at school, so I jumped at the chance to declare myself an Alpha kid at camp and deliberately hurt those who I perceived as weak.

These memories have haunted me for many years, but they've been even more present lately because of the powerful “It Gets Better” project that’s sweeping the country thanks to the social media. Believe me: It is very hard to admit that you were once a bully, even if you’ve learned from your mistakes and are sincerely, deeply sorry for your actions. I was a good, smart kid who excelled in school and had friends. I came from a home where I was loved and supported. There was no “after-school special” type of reason for me to behave as I did. I am responsible for my actions—there is no one and nothing to blame for how I treated Terri Jo and Katherine. There is also little in my life that makes me more ashamed than what I did to those girls during those long ago summers. My biggest hope is that they have no memory of me, and that they can’t even conjure up my name or my face in their minds. But in all likelihood, they remember me quite well, and that breaks my heart.

Music Lover

Tuesday night, BH and I went to see Sufjan Stevens at The Long Center, and I'm still recovering.

A word about my relationship with Sufjan's music: It's not often that I can remember where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard a particular artist. But I can do that with REM, PJ Harvey, Rufus Wainwright, and Sufjan. It was back when I was renting Karla's house, and I was on my way home from work, stuck in traffic, listening to "All Things Considered." They were interviewing Sufjan and playing clips from his album "(Come On Feel The) Illinois," and I was completely taken by him and his music. It was so different than anything I'd heard--simultaneously complex and delicate. I found myself scrambling for a pen and some paper so I could write down his name and the name of the album so I could purchase it immediately. I have loved and been fascinated by his music ever since.

Fast forward to Tuesday night. I bought our tickets to this concert the second they came out, however, I was bummed because the best I could get were upper balcony. But it didn't matter. The sound quality at The Long Center is exceptional, and Sufjan's band is so large, that our perspective was actually kind of nice. And I know his music, so I expected the concert to be goodm, but it was EXCELLENT. This is just the 7th show on their tour to support an EP that came out this summer and his latest album that came out on 10/12. So there was a lot of joy and energy to their playing. But I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of his music that I found myself crying at times. Dorky, I know, but it happens. It happened when I went to see Rufus Wainwright at the Paramount when it was just him and his piano. There were times while he was playing--and on Tuesday, while Sufjan was playing--when I felt like I couldn't breathe, like if I did, it would break the spell he'd cast on me. That's because, to me, seeing Sufjan (and Rufus and a very few other musicians I love) in concert means being able to watch a genius at work, which is not something we get to do every day.

Sufjan is a young (only 35!), highly-prolific multi-instrumentalist/singer, who writes poetic lyrics and difficult lovely arrangements for his extremely original songs. If that isn't the definition of a genius, I don't know what is. After spending a couple of hours watching and listening to Sufjan perform, I was blissful and inspired. I couldn't stop smiling while we walked to our car. I will never be able to listen to his recorded music the same way again because I now have this whole other point of reference--an additional layer, as it were--to appreciate added to music I already loved.

Sigh...I feel so lucky.