Yikes.  Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see my mother.  I am not saying Mom’s a bad person or anything- her heart is in the right place, but sometimes she can be scatterbrained.  Maybe my surprise comes from my own presumption that I was going to be more flexible, more with it, more cosmopolitan, etc. than Mom was.  When we were kids she seemed to be (and truly was) incredibly naive.  Working in the public school system has done much to erode her naivete, especially now that she works in one of the poorest sections of Crack Town and she gets to see exactly why some people should be forbidden to breed and/or to have custody of children. 

I have my own brand of naivete that comes from spending the past 20 years or thereabouts firmly entrenched in white middle class suburbia.  I freely admit I have absolutely no idea (nor do I care) what songs are on the Top 40- I despise rap music and don’t care for country either, so my knowledge of popular music ends around 1985.  I also really don’t give a rat’s ass about fashion other than it pisses me off that it’s hard to find shirts with frigging sleeves and I really hate the “hipster” style pants which obviously were not made for women who have a.) given birth, or b.) had abdominal surgeries, in which case I am disqualified from attempting to wear them on both counts.   I want pants that go up to my waist, thank you.  And I want shirts with sleeves to cover my meaty arms that are still meaty, although thanks to the shake weight thing, the flabby flaps underneath them have mostly been replaced with muscle.  See, these things sound like Mom talking, as she would repeat the nuns’ admonitions (she went to an old school Catholic school ) about modest dress and all that.  Mom learned about coverage from Catholic nuns who wore the full length nun habits:

Back in the day I had no problem with mini-skirts, fishnets, displaying cleavage, etc.  My quest for modesty today springs more from a desire to be polite.  There are things the rest of the world shouldn’t have to endure, namely the visions of an aging cougar’s thunder thighs, meaty arms or sagging boobs.  I don’t think I am to the point of needing to don the nun’s habit, or even to resign myself to the muumuu, although the nun’s habit would save on hairspray.  I hope if I get to this point though, that someone will put me out of their misery, or at least cover the important stuff up.

I am surprised that there is a TV commercial pawning a prescription cream to fight the scourge of female facial hair.  It is a lesser known scourge of cougardom that post-menopausal women grow facial hair.  Yeah, I mean like beards and mustaches, and I am not talking just about certain ethnic groups whose women are hairy from birth, but about women of northern European descent like myself.  I’ve been using the face Nair for the past few years.  Unlike leg hair, arm hair and unmentionable hair, shaving face hair  just makes it grow back worse.  Plucking is just too labor-intensive even though I have had to tenaciously fight the unibrow since my teens.  It’s not just about the unibrow these days, although Mom was wrong about that.  I pluck and pluck just as much as ever and my eyebrows do NOT “naturally thin out.”   Two days of no plucking and The Unibrow Returns.  With a vengeance. But now it’s the unibrow AND chin hair and upper lip hair and farking sideburns for heaven’s sake. 

I can’t afford to pay $60 for a month’s worth of a script cream to keep face hair from growing in the first place, but I can pay $5 for a bottle of face Nair to burn it off every week or so.  I so wish I could afford laser hair removal, and that I could get rid of leg, arm, pits & bits, unibrow, and face hair forever.  I think Permanent Unwanted Hair Removal needs to be #1 on my Bucket List.   The Bucket List is something I need to start putting together.  Assuming that at 41 I am middle-aged, if I’m lucky I might have another 40 years to accomplish it.

I love Halloween.  It’s one of my favorite holidays even though some people argue that Christians shouldn’t celebrate it.  I don’t have a problem with it as long as nobody is sacrificing black cats or damaging property or anything.  But for a diabetic, Halloween is difficult.  I can’t have the candy.  I used to love the candy.  I hope Mom keeps Dad away from the candy. 

As a kid I wasn’t diabetic and I could enjoy the candy cornucopia with impunity.  KitKats, Snickers, Mounds, Milky Ways, Milk Duds, Smarties, Tootsie Pops, Sweet Tarts, Reeses, Hershey bars, I loved them all.   Today I have to be satisfied with watching Steve-o and his buddies stuff their faces with chocolate,  as I am wistfully chomping away on sugarless spearmint gum. Dammit.  But I can still dress up.