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2the9s, Style

Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s Only 39 for a few More Hours

the outside lane

Tomorrow is my birthday. I am turning 40. I’ve never been the type to shy away from my age, or from aging. My life has only gotten better as I have gotten older. I wouldn’t trade the arse I had at 17 for any of the knowledge I have now, even though that was one glorious arse. A casting director liked it well enough to put it in a pair of Lee jeans for advertisement. (Your friends never believe you when you point out a random, faceless backside and yelp, “That’s my butt!”)

My teens were the usual random horrors. My twenties were spent confused, hurt, and misguided. My thirties were fantastic. I spent seven years out of my thirties married to B, and two more dating him. I’ve had Thor for the last half of the previous decade, and nothing will spice up your life like a Thor. In the last couple of years, I have regained the self-confidence I lost somewhere around 21.

I am still surprised to realize that I’m not 17. I am surprised when my body won’t give me the output it did just ten years ago. I am surprised when it hits home that I am the adult with a child, not the child hanging out with adults. It’s funny to think that when my mother was 40, I was 12. I’m 40 and Thor is 5. I got a late start!

Oh, I am always taken aback when I look down and see these grown-up hands. But none of that is bad. It is all very, very good.

I feel like I am young enough to still do the things I want to do, but mature enough to properly estimate the level of importance to place on each desire. I am good at prioritizing, and good at keeping balanced. My memory is going south, and that’s a fact, so I need to start doing brain teasers or something to stimulate it. I’m looking forward to the next ten years.

And as a Hobbit style birthday present from me to Kim, here’s what I’m wearing today.
The shoes are actually a different style by Maripe, but are very similar to the Maripes pictured. Mine have a pointy toe and the buckle strap runs vertical to the ankle. Obviously, my earrings and ring are not nearly so expensive as those pictured, but one style is quite like the other.

2the9s, Style

Waist Not, Want Lot

the outside lane

I think I may have posted about the difficulties of changing your wardrobe along with changing jobs, but I don’t remember. Once it’s written down, it’s gone. No recollection. Actually, these days, once it is spoken it’s gone. I repeated the same thing to my husband last night without blinking. He said I used very similar inflection. I’m like a droid with a malfunctioning chip.

I digress.

When I left Posh Car Company, I was two years invested in a high profile business casual wardrobe. That meant I had a lot of really nice heels, good dresses, skirts, and trousers. Laid off from that job, I realized the folly of having rarely purchased anything that would not double for work wear. I invested in maxi dresses (the fashionable woman’s caftan) and lost my waist. You don’t realize how much your waistband works as an appetite suppresant until you spend two months in a muu-muu, then try to zip up your jeans. Oi!

My next job was at the Frat House, where the dress code was jeans and elderly metal band t-shirts. 4″ heels worn with wiggle dresses did not blend. And there was that whole 10lbs of jiggle I had added to my wiggle during the layoff. I bought some jeans and a few casual tops, enough to last for the few months of my contract there, but I never quite got my wardrobe under control.

I spent another two months on the job market, this time wearing my jeans because a) it was winter, and b) I wasn’t making the no-waistband mistake again! I went to work for Best Bank in Town, and that was decidedly professional. Hose required. Well, none of my pre-maxi dress debacle clothes fit me anymore. I had to transition again. With the help of Ross and the Norma Kamali line at WalMart, I did okay. I had just gotten my clothes into the shape I prefer when we started our move, and I started a new job.

Guess what? Business casual.

Once again, I find myself looking through my things wondering, “What am I supposed to do with my Joan Harris Hollaway dresses now?” Because I like to blend in to my office environment, not stand out like my former high school Vice Principal, who was known for her wearing of tea-length, spangled versions of Stevie Nicks style gowns, nosebleed high heels, and prom hair to do her walk throughs during lunch hours in the cafeteria. But I also want to feel purty.

Another issue is that it is winter again, and I am freezing, and I don’t care about being cute when I am cold. I only care about being comfortable. If cute happens to happen, bully for me, but my main concern is that my toes are warm.

All that to say, I am culling my wardrobe again, trying to find what works. So far, I’ve got it down to a few nice pair of trousers, and a couple of tops. I need more tops, but I have to find what works best on me. I’ll let you know what I come up with.

Meanwhile, today I am wearing a grape colored twin set over gray trousers, with pewter maryjanes on a 2″ heel.

Lancient History

You can take the woman out of her teens, but you can’t take the screaming teen out of the woman

the outside lane

Happy album release day, Duran Duran.

I grew up listening to Country & Western, almost exclusively. In our house, it was Willie, and Waylon, and Merle, Loretta, Dolly, and Patsy. Now and then I’d hear the Eagles or Elvis, but it was solid twang coming out of our stereos, with nary a hint of electric guitar. My mother loved disco, and she would play the Bee Gees and Barbra Streisand’s album of duets with Barry Gibb, but if I wanted to hear Chic or Elton John (and I did, oh, I did!), I had to wait until we went to the swimming pool and hope some teenager was already there with a loud transistor radio.

In sixth grade, a schoolmate came back from her winter break in London and brought a 12″ single by a band called Duran Duran. For whatever reason, our Spanish teacher let her play the album in class, and I was transfixed. Girls on Film. I was less impressed with the pictures of the band. Boys wearing makeup? Ew.

That attitude prevailed until the next summer, when Jamie and I reconnected at camp. She explained the beauty of the Taylor Taylor Taylor Rhodes LeBon quorum, and doled out Roger and Andy as my imaginary celebrity boyfriends. I balked. I didn’t want the short ones! I ended up with John and Andy, if I wanted him. Jamie got Simon, Nick, and Roger. A year later, I would try to pull the same stunt with Karen, for whose fandom I was responsible. She was my Duran Duran Padawan, and just as rebellious a one as I had been. She balked at Roger and Andy, too. I kept John, she got Nick, and we shared Simon back and forth.

Jamie actually owned pop music. I owned a Barbara Mandrell tape and got to play Blondie on the jukebox at the Waffle House. That was the closest to pop I had come. Jamie made me some tapes, and I cherished them like Gollum and the One Ring. (Then, a 7th grade science teacher –swearsies, the science teacher–convinced me that Duran Duran were devil worshippers and I would go to hell for listening to them, and I threw away my precious tape. A couple of weeks later, I decided I would risk hell and bought my very first cassette tape. 7 and the Ragged Tiger.)

The two of us spent our summer at Six Flags Over Texas, pumping quarters into the video machines to watch Rio and Hungry Like the Wolf, and buying trinkets to paint with, “Nick loves Jamie,” and “John loves Lane,” along with the biggest posters we could afford. Jamie made me a tiny photo album filled with pictures she had collected of John Taylor, and I carried it with me for good luck. We were silly, happy, baby-teens. We even figured out how we could tunnel under Reunion Arena to sneak in to see the band. All that was stopping us, in our thirteen-year-old glory, was not knowing how to get a bull dozer. (Wilier fans just hid under tableclothes on rolling tea trays. Wily, we were not.)

For Christmas that year, my mother bought me a casio mini keyboard, and I learned to play 7th Stranger. Badly. Repeatedly. I think my mother regretted that more than the Easy Bake Oven. She could fake eating the “cakes” I kept baking her until I ran out of cake mix (which she refused to replenish), but she couldn’t unhear me in my bedroom plinking away, slaving over the sheet music (I couldn’t read music then) and trying to hunt and peck my way into some semblence of melody. It was worse when I started trying to play Save a Prayer. I’m a vocalist, not an instrumentalist. That is well established. Like the fact that I am an eater, not a chef.

Aside from torturing my parents with my newfound musical tastes, and driving my father mad by wallpapering my bedroom in tear-outs from the magazines kept in business by my fandom, Duran Duran actually led me into some cultural awakenings.

I followed Simon LeBon’s lyrics into the school library, where I scandalized the librarian by checking out Candide and some dirty letters written by Voltaire–I wouldn’t have known they were dirty if she hadn’t told me. Kind of like when I read the Wife of Bath’s tale and just blinked and tilted my head a lot. Huh? Of course, reading Voltaire led me to Rousseau, and then I was off chasing after French Revolutionaries for five years. Interviews with Nick Rhodes sent me back to the library to check out Surrealism and sundry other art movements, and quite honestly, informed my whole outlook on modern art. John Taylor mentioned the books he was reading, so I read them. We have very different literary tastes, he and I. Roger never said anything, and Andy…well, Andy never said anything I thought worth following up on, so I can’t say that he was any influence at all. Also, Thunder stank.

I made friends who were also Duran Duran fans. Some were shocking in their balls out stalking-fanatacism, others practiced my milder forms of worship. In any case, just about every one of those friendships led to something else interesting.

Twenty years ago, you’d have found me at Sound Warehouse today, hoping to be the first to get the new album out of the cellophane, bouncing around with other Duranies. Since it is the age of the internet now, I’ve been hearing the first single for a couple of weeks and heard the whole album last week. Instead of meeting up with friends at the record store, I’m watching Facebook explode with the enthusiasm of my wasted youth.

Anyway, cheers to Duran Duran. I don’t care what anyone says, Wild Boys never lose it.

Uncategorized

Timber!

the outside lane

We are moved! Whew.

That is, we have moved everything we need from the country house into the town house, and will now work toward preparing the country house for sale. Then, after we sell it, we will move out of the leased town house and buy a new home, at which time we will move again. P.S. I forgot my knives and cookware, but I got all my shoes. This should tell you all you need to know about my kitchen prowess.

My jewelry cabinet fared well! That is, my jewelry inside the cabinet fared well. I nearly destroyed the cabinet itself. My mother gave me some furniture slides a while back, and I used those to move the cabinet. Those things are AMAZING, by the way. If you have to move any furniture, or anything heavy I highly recommend them. It was going well until I tripped, then the cabinet fell like a tree and I cried like a lumberjack. Don’t you bet it is an ugly thing when a lumberjack cries?

B came running into the room, assuming from the commotion and my wails that I had split myself in two. I sobbed and pointed, and wailed some more. I’m blaming stress. That and all I could think was, “Mom paid god knows how much for this for me, and I have destroyed it! Destroyed! I will never have anything this nice again!”

But, I had wrapped the cabinet well enough that none of the mirrors cracked, and the only damage was done to one of the top corners. Thank Grilled Cheezus for bubble wrap!

Even having been dropped and moved, and bounced around in a truck, all my jewelry stayed put in the sticky saran wrap. The earrings that were jogged out of place stuck to the wrap, so it was very easy to keep everything in tact. Happy!

Thor loves the new place. I am very comfortable and happy in the new place. B likes it and is very happy about how it changed our commutes.

Driving home the other day, I was thinking about how fortunate we are. We have worked hard for what we have, yes, but there are other people who have worked just as hard, and harder. We are very blessed and fortunate, and grateful for what we have. I am very thankful.

Uncategorized

No Means No

the outside lane

My son is five now, and he doesn’t like kisses anymore. He has pretty much refused to kiss me for the better part of a year, and now he is asking me not to kiss him. I’m sorry I ever turned down his baby slobber now. (No, I’m not. But mothers are supposed to say that, so I said it. I would still turn down slobbers.)

I have always wondered where people got the idea that no meant yes, or maybe, or just try a little harder. Years and years ago, I struck upon the idea that it was a principle learned in childhood. Parents teach their children that no only means no if it’s the parents saying it. For example, Thor says, “No, I don’t want a kiss,” and I say, “Haha!” tickle him til he laughs, then kiss him anyway. Or, worse, Thor says, “No, I don’t want a kiss,” and I pretend to cry until he relents.

Having forgotten my own epiphany, I have done both before. How confusing to a child. I am teaching him that his body is his own property, not to be touched in any way he does not like, but I’ll force my kisses on him? That’s not right.

Tonight, as I was tucking him in, I remembered. I asked if I could give him a kiss and he said no. I started to cajole him, and thought better of it. I hugged him instead and I said, “Okay, Bud. No kisses. If you don’t want them, you don’t have to have them.” I kissed his bear goodnight instead, just because I had one stuck on my lips and had to wipe it off somewhere. He offered his dinosaur up for another one.

I did hope he would decide that kisses for Bear and Dinosaur looked so good, he needed one, too. He did not. And that’s okay. Even though I really, really, really wanted to kiss his whole face.