The Year of Living Vicariously, Part I

Friends, meet Rachel.



Is she just damn adorable? Just look at her. I decided that, as a segue back into blogging again after...ahem, 17 months..I will be doing a short series using Rachel as my inspiration. She has given me the thumbs-up, so here we go!

I have been fortunate to work with Rachel every day for the past year, but I’ve actually known her since our days at the aforementioned Mean and Palooka. That was six long years ago, and of course in those days, we all had to wear The Uniform; black pants and shoes, chef whites, and the infamous little penis hat.

Never mind that, except for switching to a bitchin’ Christopher Elbow ball cap, I’m pretty much in that same ensemble today. While one could argue that this need for headwear speaks to a serious vocational error somewhere along the line, I posit that I would happily sport a propeller beanie if they asked me, rather than work in some horrid toxic office where I could dress to the nines while having the very soul crushed out of me. Call me silly; one must have one’s priorities.

Wearing a uniform means I really only need a small wardrobe, although, for reasons I will explain forthwith, I am really pushing the envelope on the definition of “small”, and not in a positive way. Having no social life whatsofuckingever just exacerbates the problem. I am rarely required to go many places that don’t end in “_ostco” or “_arget” , which is kind of handy, really, as those tend to be the places I buy whatever sad excuse for attire I actually do wear.

It wasn’t always this way, let me assure you. There was a time, before children, before the Bush Administration, that I had superfluous income; no, really! Enough to bankroll a very nice closet, let us say. That era happened to coincide with my physical peak, too, so not only could I afford to shop at the stores that I now just have to walk past, but I actually fit into something in the single digits in those places. It’s an odd memory; not like it actually happened to me, but like I remember seeing it on tv or something. Such a long time ago that I’m starting to think I just imagined the whole episode. Or maybe, I’m blocking those thoughts out so I don’t get so dejected I drive into a bridge abutment on my way home from work.

No, at this stage of my life, I have to focus on something other than my own badgering narcissism, and concentrate on getting the bills paid, cultivating the character of the little person who calls me Mama, and being head cheerleader for my Better Half. I can’t allow my ego-bashing to get in the way of finishing science projects and laundry and shit.

Which is why I wanted to tell you, finally, about Rachel. She is the retail manager, not an Oompah Loompah in need of a hat like myself, so she can wear whatever she feels like wearing on any given day. And let me tell you; the girl is something to behold.

First of all, she’s a dancer, and all those years of hard work, all that stretching, all that sweat has paid off in a big way. Her waist is, like, thissmall, her posture is positively bloody imperial, her legs are carved out of soapstone. Anything she wears looks like it was made bespoke, and she walks with such a regal bearing. I can look through the glass partition wall that separates the production kitchen from the retail storefront, and I see the effect her presence has on people, strangers. I don’t know if she even knows how beautiful she is.

I feel an anomalous connection with Rachel that at first I wasn’t able to positively classify. Of course, she is a super-cool girl, and would be even if she looked different. I’d be her fan if I was blind, honestly. But it occurred to me one day at work, maybe 6 months ago, why exactly I was so interested in her. It hit me like an apple on the head; she’s me.

When I look at her, it’s a little like looking into a telescope, looking far out into space and a long way back in time, to when I was at the pinnacle of my physical potential. I’ve told her many times, while I relied on the weight room and the Rollerblades instead of the dance studio, her body type is so like mine naturally, that I get all weirdly wistful sometimes. She’s had my former hair several times, too, and I have pictures to prove it. I wonder sometimes if I’m creeping her out; wouldn‘t be the first time, I suppose.

There’s something I call The Curse of Woman, and while I’ve never mentioned it by name, I have spoken at length on the general notion: that we as women do not know our own corporeal power up close. We are farsighted but not far-seeing, able to see beauty in others, but unable to recognize it in our own mirror. Only when it has faded, and drifted too far away to grasp at and pull back, do we see the truth.

Working around many young women, in their twenties or younger yet, I have been privy to many conversations about the horrors of being too something: fat (to which I am always tempted to add the following thought: “don’t count your money in front of the poor”), or ugly, or whatever way imperfect, and I want to grab these girls by the shoulders and shake them until their heads come off. Not because I’m jealous. Not because I think I know better, or because I don’t want to hear it.

Someone needs to make them know: You have everything going for you, right now. You have time, metabolism, gravity, energy, collagen, all of nature on your side. You will never be in this place again.

Wallow in it.

You will just have to trust me on this one. And in the meantime, I hope you don't mind if I live vicariously through you for a little while, Rach.

...to be continued...

By the way, thanks, friends. It's good to be back.

The Physics of Fat

Alright, class, please consider the following equation, and solve for n:

patience ≤ n ÷ hormones – time of day

Anyone? Anyone? Before we get to the answer, let’s think about the elements we do know.

The first variable we must account for is PATIENCE.

I had my first (and only. I think…) baby at 36 years old, and while I’m glad in many ways that it turned out that way, it is no joke that poppin’ ‘em out young has its advantages, and not doing so, its drawbacks. The first thing people say when the subject comes up is invariably some riff on “but you have more patience as an older parent,” to which I reply “BULLFUCKINGSHIT.”

Let us not kid ourselves; getting older is a contract with the devil for which there is no opt-out clause. While part of me is diggin’ part of it, most of the process sorely tries my tolerance for folly. Where I once had the patience of, if not exactly Job, at least one of your minor saints (here’s a list for you to choose from; my favorite: St. Maurice, Patron Saint of Cramps), as the years rack up ever more swiftly, I find myself inching perilously close to Granny Clampettville. If I had a vegetable garden, I’d be out there right now with a shotgun chasing chickens out of it, with my hair in a bun. I do not suffer fools gladly, especially when the rhuematis’ is worrying me.

The second variable is HORMONES, a very dodgy business in general, but particularly as it pertains to the question at hand. I have been one very fortunate individual in this regard, at least up until the last few years; my husband still can’t tell when , um…how shall I put this…the Red Sox are in town? We need a clean-up in aisle one? Miss Scarlett's come home to Tara? It’s officially hummer week?

Yes, hard as it may be to believe, I, Robyn, am a bit squeamish myself about such matters. Suffice to say that other than bleeding like a Tarantino movie, I don’t display many outward symptoms of, uh… uterine jihad. So hormonal concerns never played much of a role in my daily affairs, that is, until I became someone’s Mommy, when Nature decided to play a funny joke and twiddle all the little dials on my internal mixing board. Now, the mix is all muddy and the bass is WAAAY too loud. Some days, I am less able to conceal my utter exasperation than on others, and suffice to say that much of this has to do with where Aunt Flo is in relation to my house.

Lastly, we must account for TIME OF DAY. Since my ass is still unemployed, it’s less a matter of being tired from a long day in the mines than just being strung out from going to the library and the bank in the same day. While fat. Without a nap. It’s no mystery that mornings can be a stressful period for families with school-age children, but I propose that contrary to logic, the internal pressure actually increases exponentially until bedtime, due to various tenets of quantum mechanics I will not bore you with at this time. It is not unusual for me to have crossed the event horizon irrevocably by 9 pm, in which case I am unable to watch The Daily Show/Colbert Report with both eyes open. So you see my urge to find the answer to this equation.

Alright, then; anyone want to venture a guess what our missing variable might be? No?

Energy, class. The answer to my problem is energy. Let’s look at it again, with n solved:

patience ≤ energy ÷ hormones – time of day

My patience is less than or equal to (but never, ever >) my energy level, which is divided by my hormone level minus the time of day the measurement takes place. Does this make sense?
Mathematics may be as good a place as any to look for an explanation of my zombie tendencies. Here’s a golden energy oldie you all know and love:

E=mc²

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Do you know what the speed of light is??? Like, fast, yo! And times itself, even! If Einstein is correct, I should have enough energy stored in my own personal mass to equal a handful of hydrogen bombs. Why the hell can’t I have a couple of beers without needing a nap, then? Whatever, Albert…

I have relied many times on medical science to bridge the gap between the force required to execute all the necessary tasks in any given day and my natural state of body at rest, and found that while this may be an effective short-term solution, it doesn’t do much to allay the problem in the long term. When the bottle of Twinlab Ripped Fuel is finally gone, when the Phentermine prescription runs out, when the CVS energy-shot freebies ultimately run dry, the clock is ticking on my energy stockpile.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; I fully get that eating properly and staying in shape trigger an increase in energy. But what does one do if one cannot muster the necessary inertia to put the chain reaction in motion in the first place?

Who out there finds themselves lacking the element of energy more than they used to? How does this manifest itself for you? What’s your solution?

Class?

The Old Gray Mule

The other night, as I performed the Dreaded Bedtime Ritual in the attempt to persuade the offspring to lie down and actually sleep, we hit a little snag. In between the part when she puts her pajamas on backward, and the final “no more goofiness!” threat, we added an extra element; an explanation of why we don’t go to sleep with gum in our mouths.

Everyone addresses this eventually, and I’m sure for most it’s a sentence or two at the longest, and then on with the routine. For my kid, a simple explanation rarely sticks. A back-story is required to drive the point home, and while I will cop to fabricating them from time to time when I don’t have a good one at hand, I had a bona fide personal anecdote waiting for just such an occasion.

As a little girl, my hair was exactly like my daughter’s is now, other than the length; she likes hers in an old-fashioned bob with bangs, and I wore mine like a damn dirty hippie, long and disobedient. Texture-wise, though, she’s a total throwback; for both of us, no amount of brushing or conditioner could make up for the follicular insurgency factor. Despite the care with which I brush out every snaggle each morning, by the time I arrive to pick her up in the afternoon, that hair has declared anarchy and somehow converted to Rastafarianism at the same time. I well recall my mother cursing like the merchant marine under her breath as she yanked and jerked a brush through my gorgon-caliber dreads each night before bath time; I have, regrettably, passed on the rebel hair gene. Sorry, kid.

I managed to hang onto that unruly pelt until 4th grade, until the night I broke the rule and didn’t throw out the gum I’d been masticating all evening, which was the reason that the next day, I was on my way to the salon for my first-ever haircut. Unplanned, but not negotiable, unless I wanted to spend the next year growing out the bald spot that corresponded to the place I’d found the contraband wad of grape Bubblicious that morning.

In every life, there are defining moments. Some are smaller than others. Some aren’t even recognized until much later. I can recall the exact words of the woman who first took scissors to my mutinous mane, and they clearly delineate the beginning of the end of those carefree days with no thought whatsoever about my hair.

“Oh my God, this little girl has gray hair!”

It did not matter that my new cut was a jaunty Wedge, the very height of elementary chic in 1977. It mattered a little that I went from looking like the feral child of Ted Nugent to looking like Dorothy Hamill, and in the process lost about a quarter of my total mass and weight. It mattered mightily that I was suddenly and for the first time aware of my own mortality, if only peripherally. Children don’t have gray hair. Old people have gray hair, and then they die. Even my scalp liked to break rules, it seemed.

In all candor, at the time I was just mostly annoyed. Every stylist in the large salon crowded around my chair to see my abnormality for themselves, up close. Once I left the scene of my mortification, life went on, and I swear I was able to run faster without all that fur on my head. No one else knew I was a senior citizen masquerading as a 4th grader, so I readily forgot, too. But from that day onward, I saw the specter of my own eventual decline and demise, from afar, in the rearview mirror.

Not that I’m obsessed with death; quite the contrary. I’ve never been afraid of it, truly, unless it involves a tractor-trailer or a pitchfork-wielding maniac with a hard-on. But knowing that the clock of your youth is ticking is a strange sort of awareness, and it helped make me an even weirder kid.

I was probably doomed from the get-go. My father was totally white-headed by the time I was a toddler; I don’t recall him ever having a color on his head, despite all the Grecian Formula he was using (now I realize this stuff is like self-tanner for the hair; I am definitely my father’s child). I was apparently not sharp enough to grasp that my mom colored her hair regularly; I just thought she had dark brown hair that grew fast enough to need a cut once every three weeks. And her sister, my Aunt Myrtle, had lost all her color by the time she was 25, according to family legend (although I will totally take that genetic bequest, if it’s part of a package deal; Myrtle is 100 years old and still drinks Guinness, loves candy and watches sports nonstop).

By the time I was in my early twenties, my natural chestnut-brown had begun to fade, and for a brief, shining moment, this worked for me; all of the colors within the spectrum of human hair color lived together in peace on my cranium at once. I remember a trip to Worlds of Fun with a boy I was goo-goo over, and him sitting behind me on the Viking’s Voyager and telling me how beautiful my hair was; “It’s every color in the world!”

This lasted, like, a year. Tops.

Then, it was a matter of coming to terms with the idea of coloring it every 4-6 weeks for the rest of my life. No problem. Except it costs how much? Okay, I’ll learn to do it myself. And don’t forget not to dye it green by accident, the day before being a bridesmaid! Or get busy and go a couple weeks too long between dye jobs, unless I feel like rocking a skunk ‘do. And forget about having long hair anymore; soaking it in chemicals that regularly is not exactly conducive to glorious long locks, I do not care what Sarah Jessica Parker says to the contrary. And God help you if you want to flat-iron or curl it.

Face it, sad sack; you got one option. Short and wavy. Shut up and deal.

I love it when I tell people how gray I am naturally; it serves to find out lots of interesting information about them that I may or may not have cared to know.

Like, how out of touch with reality are they? JD’s father once told me he likes “the natural look, with that streak of gray in front.” This from the man who told JD “You’re such a talented singer; why don’t you just get a record contract?”

Oh, how I wish it were that simple, like growing a silver racing stripe framing my face, a la Stacy London. No, no, no. It’s like this:

Only with gray Play-Doh. And slightly less facial hair.

Listen, if I were lucky enough to have been born with olive skin and brown eyes, I might be okay with letting go and letting it do its thing. Or if it grew in all luminous and silver. But alas; as y'all should know by now, I am completely devoid of natural coloring of any kind. If the hair were white, too, I'm afraid I might look like the Headless Horseman. I'm already scary enough to children, aren't I?

So let the old girl have her last few years of vanity, please? I'll look like Ed Asner soon enough.

I'm interested to know what my readers plan on doing with the impending gray? Are you ballsy enough to go for the full monty?