The Pixie Fixie.

Ahhh, to look like '80s icon Winona Ryder in all her pixie perfection. C'est possible. 

Oh dear; it's been a while since I've written a blogue here. Well, I've been off doing other things--writing a novel or two or three and praying like witch burning at the stake that they get published. Having various breakdowns and subsequent breakthroughs. Making the kind of personal discoveries that women make when they get old approach a certain age. You know, the kind of personal discoveries that lead women to take art classes. Or cut all their hair off.

In the past six weeks, I've gotten two haircuts:
Cut #1: After growing out a pixie that made me look like Ripley in Aliens 3 (my least favorite of the Aliens franchise), I had decently long hair, though with rabid split ends. The stylist, bless her heart (Kind Code for "Idiote," said with disdainful French accent) cut my hair into a rectangular shape reminiscent of a brown paper bag.

Cut #2: The second stylist hacked at my hair like I'd blasphemed his sainted grandmother and he'd been waiting for years to get revenge. Most mornings I wake up looking like Medusa in a car wash. Le Hubbins laughs. That's just what every 50-ish mature woman wants: to be made sport of.

Cut #3: Today, I'm doing what middle-aged women ladies of a certain age do while they're enrolling in art classes that will finally free their long-silenced inner children: getting another pixie cut. I have no choice--my hair is totally jacked--but I'm also looking forward to the Jeanne d'Arc freedom that is the Pixie Fixie. Finally, I can stop thinking about my hair and start doing the kind of intense navel-gazing that makes every little freakin' thing so darn meaningful.

If you, like moi, have a pixie fixation, check out Pixie Forever, which is as sassily written as it is stimulating to the hair follicles.

Kisses, misses.

You, Too, Can Be a Zombie!

 "Don't shoot me--I'm just really tired!!"

“Hey,” my beloved husband said last night, “There’s a contest to win a stagger-on role as a zombie on The Walking Dead.” No need, mon amour; I win that contest every night.

Insomnia is the latest fun surprise in this minefield known as midlife. (BTW, it’s only “midlife” if I live to be 96—which, if I don’t get some decent sleep soon, I won’t.) Possible reasons: Fluctuation in body temperature due to the roller coaster ride of hormones. Anxiety. Way vivid dreams. Or, my personal favorite: No reason at all. That’s some expert’s way of saying, “We have no f*cking clue, so we’re putting it down to ‘You’re going bat$#!t crazy.’”  That’s the medical term for it, and the best explanation I’ve heard yet.  

Some Well-Meaning Friends have said, “Just take Ambien.”

Me: “I’d have to take it every freakin’ night.”

W-MFs: “ . . . And? That’s what I do.”

Me: “Dude(s)—that’s like a mild drug addiction.”

W-MFs: “You say that like it's a bad thing.”

Some other non-addictive solutions include taking Valerian, an herb in capsule or tea form that promotes sleep; skipping the alcohol and caffeine at night (Get-out-of-town! Why didn’t I think of that?! ß heavy sarcasm); and getting your estrogen and progesterone levels checked. Whuffo'? 'Cause progesterone is the magical hormone that, among other things, helps you sleep. When it drops during this special time in life when Mother Nature’s trying to bench you permanently (more on that soon), it’s Night of the Living Dead time.

I’ve tried Valerian; it tends to work for about four hours, after which—bing!—I’m awake. I work at home, so I don't get anxious about falling asleep on the job the next day (what am I going to do, fire me?). I try to roll with the sudden wakey-wakeys; the wee small hours of the morning have been a good time for me to practice meditation, and some of my best ideas have come to me then. 

Howevs, if you have to get to a real job the next day and you're turning into a zombie from lack of sleep, use your last functioning brain cell to make an appointment with your doc. But read this interesting article from the Wall Street Journal first; it debunks a lot of the fear-inducing info going around about hormone replacement therapy. While HRT is not for everyone, it may be an iPOW (In Praise of Older Woman)'s only defense against becoming a zombiegrrrl. 

A hormone check with the Lady Doc is in my future, but until then I’m working the Valerian angle. I’m also going to try running again; maybe I can sleep through the night by wearing myself out. If not, at least I’ll be a superfit zombiegrrrl. 

"Arrrgh,"

Fabi

Trend I Shan't Be Following

The other day, I sat on the train next to a woman who was storing her cell phone in her cleavage.

I $#!t you not.

The cell was in a bright pink cover, which was cute and coordinated well with the girl/woman's outfit. But it was nestled securely in her ample assets, which, like the phone, were on full display. (It looked something like the photo above, but her look was less sportif.)

Perhaps her cell was set on "vibrate," and she either really didn't want to miss that call or needed a little extra joy in her life. Perhaps I'm getting old, not more mature as I like to say, and this is what the kids are doing now.

I was going to run off a whole litany of why this is wrong in so many exciting and varied ways, but really, that would be redundant. If only I'd had the moxie to take a photo of her... But my own phone was, tragically old-fashionedly fuddy-duddily, in my bag.

Qué-evah, chicas.

Lists: Much "To Do" About Nothing

A big part of spring cleaning for me is going through old notebooks--checking for numbers I haven't put in my phone, scraps of ideas for stories, and other important stuff that shouldn't be shredded. As I go through these notebooks, I see a lot of to-do lists over the past few years (it's been a while since I've cleared off my desk). And I'm noticing a pattern.

One recurring theme on the lists reads, "Study [fill in language here]." For years, I've wanted to be able to speak a second language. Sometimes it's French, sometimes Spanish, and I cheated on both of them with Italian. (Ho pauro il cane: I fear the dog.) After years of putting this on to-do lists, I'll finally be able to check this one off in about six months, if I continue with my Spanish classes. Ten years if I don't.

Another pattern: obsession with my weight. There are many, many--many--lists of what I ate on any given day. I won't bore you with the guessable, carb-free details. The lists are filled with joyless food and condemnation of weights I'd kill to be at right now. But if I had to eat what's on those lists, it would kill me. So I'm letting that one go.

Ah, at last we've arrived at My Point. I think I've previously mentioned a friend's mantra of "Fix it or forget it." My variation on that theme is "Do, or don't." Part of Fabulousness in any language is skipping the future tense and using the present ("I'm doing this now") or the past ("Done!"). I have to stop making lists that say the same freakin' thing over and over. There just aren't enough trees in the world.

The Big Fat Lie.

40s: not always fabulous. There, I said it. Now I can treat myself to a breakfast of pout on toast. Or make the best of a changing situation.

My 40s have been a total cakewalk--until this year. (Which would be the year I decided to start a blog called Fabulous, Never Better. $#¡t.) Until now, I didn't even know I was getting older. I looked the same as when I was 36, possibly better; I got married at 43, published at 45, and had more confidence and less crap in my head than ever. If this was getting older, I was in.

Then I turned 47. Lines appeared on my face for the first time in my formerly line-free life. That didn't bug me as much as the small but significant amount of weight I gained that took me into the next pants size, which would be O. Not zero--"O," for obsessive. My feelings of self-worth, self-esteem, self-blah blah blah are all tied up in these pounds. This leads to the snake dining on its own tail: I diet, feel virtuous, but am miserable as I love food; then I eat, gain weight, and feel sad, yet happy. Hours of boring, obsessive fun that keeps me from thinking about bigger issues.

Simply put: Women in their 40s start gaining weight due to metabolic slowdown. (Not my friend Christina, blogger of Fallen Princess, but she's got the Dorian Gray rotting-portrait-in-the-closet thing going on. Damn her.) That's just a fact, and not very fabulous news. Howevs, my fabulous friend Alice, who's in her 50s and in the best shape of her life, listened to my diet/no diet rant recently and said (wait for it, here's the kicker): "I can't turn every part of my life into work." 

I almost dropped my fried plantain over that one. She's right--between work, keeping the home from turning into Grey Gardens, relationships, exercising (for fitness, not to banish fatness), etc., do I need another project, i.e. judging every single thing I put in my mouth? <---sounds like hell to me.

Thus begins the experiment: striking a balance between relaxation and going to hell in an Apres Midi du Chien handbag. More on this soon.

Besos, beauties.

Now is Not the Time to Buy Green Bananas

My friend Dan taught me that saying. Translation: Don't waste time, because we don't know how much of it we have.

The question of the day on my favorite Spanish-language morning show--and I'm so darn proud of myself for being able to understand it!--was, "Do you think the world is coming to an end?" This was, of course in reference to the disasters of late, and you can take your pick from natural (earthquake, tsunami) or man-made (Libya, global warming leading to flooding). Given the news of the day, I voted "Sí."

One of the things I've been putting off for decades is learning how to speak Spanish. I took French in high school and in continuing ed classes. When I got to Paris, I could only speak in fragmented sentences about basic necessities, such as more wine and a larger size skirt. I had absolutely no idea what people were saying; it might have been, "You've had enough, lady," and "I could've told you that, J. Lo," for all I know.

The combination of getting older becoming more mature and el mundo looking very much like an Irwin Allen disaster film is making me re-examine life's little to-do list, mostly moving things up. I write cards to say thank you. I tell people that they're important to me. And since I've actually lost work because no hablo español, I'm moving the language lessons up from "someday when I'm in the nursing home" to "ahora." (Of course, part of the idea behind this entire blog was reduced to hilarious ashes here.)

I don't really believe the world is coming to an end, though I do ache for all the suffering that's going on. After prayers are said and donations are made, I choose to take advantage of the time I have by not waiting for any more bananas to ripen.

Besos, chuletas locas.

Linguistics, Semantics, and Other Awesome Words

Retirement: a concept that, post- or current recession (whether you're an optimist or a realist), probably has to be retired. In this case, though, I'm not referring to myself--I don't want to retire--but to certain overused, underage words. To wit:

Awesome.
Amazing. 
Cooooooooool.


I love these words. I've used them since I became aware of them back in the Tedolithic Period--that would be 1989, the year Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure came out. Linguistics experts would argue that modern "Awesome!"-speak can be traced back as far as 1982, when Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl" single created a whole new language, but I think dude-speak really took off as commonplace with B&T. Discuss.

Since I'm old mature enough to have been around for both, I wonder if it's time for me to stop using these words. For one thing, words like amazing are now very un-amazing, having been overused into impotence. For another, I wonder if someone with grey streaks in her hair--no matter how adorable they may be--sounds stupid when saying, "That's ah-MAAAAAYZING!" Or worse: Giving someone the thumbs-up of approval while intoning, "Awesome." I mean, who the f*c% am I, Keanu Reeves?

Even Kee, as those of us who worked in the teen mag world used to lovingly refer to him, probably does not say "Awesome." Yes, even Cool Breeze Over the Mountain probably wanted to sound like an adult at some point. And what a fine adult he's turned into...

... Jeez, where was I? Oh yes! My question: Woman over 40. Hair greying beautifully. Opens mouth and says, "Awesome" or "amazing." Wrong? Meh? Who cares? Discuss.

Besos, chicas fabulosas y hermano hotcha.

PS: I think I can still use "cool," since that's been around since the Jazz Age. Si? No?