In which I was serially sexually abused as a child by a slightly older male relative.
So, yeah, #metoo. Me, too. My perpetrator even went to prison for it. (Not for me, but for others, later.)
I honestly don’t think it affected me in any measurable way. I was never hurt or damaged. For years I thought it must have affected me badly, because my culture tells me how horrible and awful it is to be touched sexually without consent, but now? At 49? Nah. I don’t see it.
And I looked for it, the awful traces of it, for years. I positively delved through my own psyche, looking for horrific damage, rage, frigidity, timidity. I don’t find it. Because being touched sexually is not like starving to death, or being wounded, or living in a war zone. It’s mostly just irritating, if I’m honest. Which I am.
This is how I ended it, finally: at, like, twelve or so, I decided it was fucking annoying, so I brandished a pair of scissors at him, and told him to fuck off. And that was that. Because he was horny and stupid, but not violent. Which of course makes me lucky. I get that.
There are at least two experiences I had as a young woman that I could, if I wished, call rape. But I don’t. I was never violently jumped by strangers; the experiences I could name rape, if I were a different person, were ones I’d entered into through choices I’d made myself, and I take responsibility for that. I put myself there. That’s the price of sexual freedom.
Now. What’s making me sad about this fucking hashtag is that this is, again, some sort of women’s movement, not a human movement.
What about the thousands upon thousands of men and boys who have also been abused, assaulted, raped? It doesn’t matter that it happened to them? Where’s the fucking compassion and inclusiveness, bitches?
Swear to God. Your husbands, your cousins, your own sons? Sure, it happens statistically less frequently to them, but damn it, ladies. It happens. Being one in a hundred doesn’t make it less awful. But the hashtag isn’t inviting their stories, oh no. It’s about women being victims. Same as it ever was, feminism.
Furthermore, the blame for all of this is fully placed on “men.” The elusive, predatory, cruel, power-hungry man. And that absurd psychological tenant from the 50’s that erroneously states that it’s “about power,” not sexual appetite.
I know I’ll get lambasted for it, but how is there NO EMPHASIS PLACED on women’s choices, or their responsibility to honor and protect themselves? The sexual liberation movement appears to have been taken not as a new level of freedom and responsibility, but a free-for-all entree into dangerous situations without any awareness of self-protection!
If all your #metoo experiences are from your childhood or the boardroom, so be it. You’re innocent as the driven snow, and a lamb to men’s wolves. But if you were ever in the wrong place at the wrong time, especially and particularly if you knew better, well, that’s on you. That’s the responsibility of freedom. If you make dumbass choices, you reap the results… and they’re yours.
In other words, if you take a knife to a known gunfight, yes, that is your own damn fault.
Own your freedom and your choices, ladies. I say this not because I lack compassion, but because for every #metoo post about being raped, genuinely raped, there are a thousand about being ogled. And fuck that.
Because:
If you’re a male, particularly a cis male, with a #metoo story, I’m deeply sorry nobody appears to give a fuck.
It’s unloving and exclusive and selfish and wrong, and I apologize for my sex being such angry, heartless attention whores.
I’m also certain that only a very successful, wealthy, healthy, and primarily safe culture can focus so much on sexual molestation. Being leered at, having your butt touched or your bra snapped, remains a social faux pas, not a fucking PTSD-inducing experience. Violent rape is bad, of course, of course, but horny men awkwardly plying their “game” at the wrong time will not fuck up your life unless you decide you’re that fucking delicate.
Which — spoiler! — you’re not. Unless you decide to be.
If you say no to a man in power à la casting couch scenarios and get ruined for it, well, that’s clearly bullshit. Speak up, when and if you can. I’m not saying there aren’t asshole, powerful, predatory men, because there are. There aren’t a lot of them, honestly, but they are there, and sure, write manifestos about how All Men Are Responsible for reining that shit in, if you must — even though you don’t write similar manifestos about reining in ball-busting bitches who ruin otherwise perfectly decent men — and pretend it’s not very much like suggesting all Muslims are responsible for ISIS. Whatever. I don’t care.
But so much of the #metoo thing is just women bitching about the fact that men have libidos, are frequently awkward and dumb about it, and do dumb shit that is more annoying than damaging. You want men to have better manners? Fine, reinstate the age of manners. They’re not that bright, men, really. Manners were probably invented by women to keep men in line in the first place, and most of them went out the window when feminists started being offended at having doors held open for them.
I find that #metoo, overall, is more offensive than moving, more self-righteous than loving, more exclusive than inclusive. Much of what’s being “protested” is male sexual desire and awkwardness, and this undermines the real issue of those, of both sexes and all genders, who have been legitimately damaged.
In which there’s a lecture.
When your business is open each day only because your staff are getting the rest of the food, shelter, and medicine they need to survive via charity because you’re not paying them enough to buy their own, it means either that you’re not a viable business because you cannot pay a living wage, or that you’re a greedy asshole who will not pay a living wage.
Either way, you remain in business only because the rest of the community you operate in is providing your employees the EBT, gas vouchers, and health care you’re not. Which is to say that, if you were operating in a community that was not providing this lack, you’d already be closed because your staff would stop showing up, and you can’t run a business without staff, right? And hungry, sick, and homeless people tend to have a hard time getting to work each day.
No one who works a full-time job, even as a lowly dishwasher, should need assistance to survive. If you’re not paying the warm bodies who allow you to open your doors each day enough to rent a room, eat modestly, travel to and from work, save a bit, and see a doctor, you shouldn’t be in business. Because you’re not a thriving concern, you’re literally dependent on welfare.
Yes, it is true you’re forced into this horrific model by monsters like Walmart, who drove prices down so low they’re unsustainable, but the facts still stand: if you can’t afford to pay a living wage, one that keeps your people above the poverty line, your business has already failed.
If you can only afford staff from near, at, or below the poverty line, well, then you simply cannot expect them to show up regularly, or have knowledge or education, or be healthy or enthusiastic or empowered or happy, or smell clean or have decent clothing. Because that’s what fucking poverty means. I know a lot of privileged conservatives think that people are poor because they “waste” their money on things like cell phones, but that’s bullshit. A cell phone is a cultural norm; everybody has a cell phone. Anybody who works full time or more should have one, and probably needs one more than you do.
It’s not what poor people spend their money on — hint: it’s exactly the same stuff you spend your money on, asshole — it’s the hatred people feel toward those who earn less than themselves, and the idea of the stereotypical willfully ignorant, addicted, lazy “poor person.” That person is so rare s/he barely exists. The vast majority of the poor in America work full-time in two, or often more, jobs. They’re not lazy, they’re systemically underpaid by a broken economy.
When I worked at Home Depot, half the people I worked with had second jobs, and half of those were grandmothers. Women in their 50’s and 60’s, working more than full time to make ends meet because their families had needs or they were too, too proud to get assistance. Do you really think that any white, 50-something, educated, experienced grandmother should have to work more than one full-time job? Really? Well, that’s who “the poor” are. Sure, there are some junkies, some crazies, some lazies, but MOST POOR PEOPLE ARE JUST LIKE YOU ONLY WITH DIFFERENT LUCK. That’s it. Their morals, values, and work ethics are the same as yours, they just can’t get jobs that pay a living wage, because the number of jobs that do pay a living wage is very low.
The federal poverty level is $15,060 a year. No one could live on that without help. Period. If you were actually a kid with a part-time job flipping burgers, fine, you don’t need a living wage, but the people flipping your burgers aren’t kids living at home earning spending money. They’re struggling retirees, with mortgages they used to pay with their decent and now non-existent middle class jobs.
Ten bucks an hour, full-time for 52 weeks, earns $20,800 a year. Very few areas of the country where someone can both earn that and live on it. Telling someone to move to those areas is ignorant and stupid, because nobody making $20,800 a year can afford to move. Moving is expensive, and it requires so many basics: transportation or money to buy it, the ability to take enough time off without income to move, so many factors non-poor people take for granted. Moving is difficult with money; impossible without it.
Fifteen bucks an hour earns $31,200 a year. That’s all. That’s it. Just barely twice the goddamned poverty level. It is by no means a lavish lifestyle, but it’s enough to have shelter and food and transportation and savings and healthcare. It’s enough to not be a burden on others.
I make a little over ten bucks an hour. For each hour I spend being screamed at by angry customers and abused by hostile corporate policies, I can buy some mouthwash and a pair of cheap socks. Or a single, low-quality meal out. Or a t-shirt.
Doesn’t matter how many hours you work yourself or how hard. If you’re underpaying but your staff are alive to come to work, somebody — the community, welfare — is subsidizing them on your behalf, and you’ve failed to provide your people what they need.
In which I put this on Facebook the other day. Since it’s mine, I’m cross-posting here.
To the many, many white people in my timeline confused about the football thing:
Goodness, you really think these players are kneeling because they’ve been indoctrinated against toxic masculinity and/or wholesome American values?
THEY’RE PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS, for heaven’s sake, they literally embody masculinity and American values, by your own lights. It’s why you watch them. They’ve all experienced first-hand what it is to excel in a masculine endeavor, and what it is to actually “make it against all odds” in this nation, making millions for playing a game on TV.
A very quick bit of online research will show you that they’re peacefully — using a few moments of their time on TV, while you’re actually paying attention to them —
protesting the deaths of Americans.
Unarmed, innocent Americans, black and brown, killed and jailed, systematically, without repercussion, by the machinery of the state. Murdered by police officers (it happens all the time here in Minneapolis; children shot and killed, unarmed men shot and killed, innocent Americans SHOT and KILLED by cops who face no discipline for murder), incarcerated to feed the private prison wealth-generating machine, because of their color, overwhelmingly their skin color, more than any other measurable factor.
These problems are horrific and they exist, and have existed, and your ability to ignore them is wholly due to your whiteness.
If you think more black and brown people are dead and in jail because, well, that’s just how black and brown people are: they’re low class, in gangs, inherently more violent, they prefer ghettos, they’re tribal and ignorant and addicted and warlike by nature: UNPACK THAT. You either know it’s due to systematic economic disparity, or you believe black and brown people are inherently, genetically less civilized than yourself.
To rephrase, for emphasis: you either think it’s fine that people are routinely and systemically disadvantaged due to their skin color, which makes you a racist; or you think they’re lazy, which makes you a racist; or you think they’re fundamentally more criminal than whites, which makes you a racist. You might be a racist, no matter what you think you are, if you believe skin color has ANYTHING to do with how human beings are to be treated by other human beings. Read this paragraph again.
So that, friends, is why they kneel.
If you think otherwise, if you think they’re doing anything else, disrespecting the flag or using their fame to feed some weird form of entitlement, you are wrong, just wrong, incorrect; safe in your cocoon of whiteness, far, far less likely to be murdered by cops or incarcerated without due process like your darker co-Americans because of your skin color.
They kneel, for a few minutes while they’re on TV and you’re looking at them, the ONLY time you’re even thinking about them, to get you to quit being indignant and start being compassionate, to quietly and gently and without lectures encourage you to quit complaining about the so-called violation of your stupid, stupid entertainment and THINK, ask questions, wonder why, and take some time to learn what it means, here in 2017, to be black or brown in The United States of America.
In which OMG SUPERMAD WHITE CHICKS.
She appears to think that football is real, and not a massive for-profit performance. IT’S ENTERTAINMENT. There is no promise of safety from offense.
Is it offensive? Sure, I guess, if you think football is real. Meekly, weakly, intentionally offensive.
He’s doing it because it makes white ladies aghast; it’s a sit-in, it’s peaceful protest, it’s a way of saying,
Hey, black people get killed by cops every day, innocent black people, far more frequently than should be, just for being black, why don’t you just model in your hearts and minds how that might feel for a minute, why don’t you quit being offended that your entertainment’s got a smudge of meaningless “disrespect” and think about how you would feel if your man got shot to death in front of you and your baby during a routine traffic stop because of his skin color, or your little boy got shot for playing with a toy gun because of his skin color. Just for a minute.
Just for a minute.
Just for a minute.
That’s all. He’s not a soldier. He’s not burning the flag. He’s using his fame politically, and that might jangle in the context of entertainment, but hey. That’s entertainment. Ever seen the Oscars? Ever?
Note also that our mother of the year puts “love” well after food, shelter. She feels her duties are material, not ineffable. Which is why she’s butthurt about someone peacefully making a point about a kind of ineffable pain she’ll never bother to try to understand, during her elective, optional form of ridiculous, bloated, faux-military entertainment.
Faux-military. It’s fucking football. It’s a game.
Does she have every right to be offended? Yes. In this country, yes. Absolutely yes.
As do I, to say she’s missing the point entirely, and looks a right twat doing so.
I’ve lived in Minneapolis for three years now, and the only time the mayor ever tweeted — repeatedly — about a shooting death? The victim was a white woman, shot by a black cop. The dozens of other shootings? No response. It turns out that you’re statistically far more likely to be fatally wounded by a cop if you’re not white.
Are a lot of criminals black? Sure. But statistically, based on population, most criminals — violent and non —
are white. And I don’t understand why blacks die by cop so much, but it sure does look like entrenched racism, and that needs to be contemplated. Which is why a football player, one who by all accounts donates extensively and has been said to have been seen teaching the Constitution to disenfranchised urban (black) kids, is kneeling during the anthem.
So think about it. Just for a minute.
In which I STILL don’t understand how people can know so little about the services they use.
If you were the majority of Floridian customers I assisted during my shift at work this evening, you’ve just been through a massive 500-year storm that destroyed tons of shit, you either don’t have power or you’re running a generator, and you’re astonished that you can’t watch TV.
You don’t have power! Why in the fuck do you think your cable and internet should work? Irma was one of the strongest storms in recorded history. It did at least eighteen billion in insured losses damage (not counting crop losses or flood insurance), infrastructure is destroyed, farms are destroyed (Irma took almost half of the citrus crop in some areas), you had to fucking evacuate, and you can’t believe you didn’t return home to functioning internet?
Really?! YOUR CELL PHONE’S OBVIOUSLY WORKING, AND THAT’S A GODDAMNED TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLE CONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES, but you’re mad anyway?
I have compassion for you, I do. It must have been and must still be incredibly stressful. But being a dick to customer service reps because you haven’t had internet for four days is just weird. Shit’s broken, my people, important shit, and if your neighbors down the block have cable and you don’t, well, I’m sorry. Life’s not always fair. Go watch TV at their house.
Multiple customers told me it was absolutely unacceptable for an outage to last four days. They demanded refunds, threatened to cancel (which, please, if you could get service from anybody else you’d already have it, and we both know it). It was a 500-year storm! Read a book, be glad you’re alive, and chill the fuck out! There are innumerable people out there working day and night to restore power, internet, cable. It takes time!
One customer admitted she had no power at home and was charging her cell phone at the corner store, but still freaked out about not having wifi in her house. It blew my mind. EVEN IF there wasn’t an outage and WE WERE DELIVERING INTERNET TO YOUR HOME, sweetie, IT WON’T WORK IF YOUR ROUTER ISN’T GETTING POWER. How can you not know that?
Furthermore, how can you not realize that if your house doesn’t have electricity, the node providing your cable probably doesn’t, either? Sure, installations like that have generators, but they only run if you can get to them to put fuel in them. If gas or the generators themselves aren’t accessible, they’ll go down. The network is vast, interdependent, and complicated, and service crews can’t even start working on them until cleared to do so by authorities. Internet service doesn’t just fall out of the sky, for fuck’s sake. Power outages, destroyed equipment, line cuts: there are tons of them because A MASSIVE GODDAMNED ACT OF GOD JUST ROLLED THROUGH.
I’m sorry your kids are driving you nuts without screens to occupy them, and I’m sure it’s a bitch, but your internet and cable will be restored when it’s restored. You need to back the fuck off the ignorant attitude and be glad you’re all still alive with homes to return to. It’s not like your provider somehow fucked up; it was an act of God. And at least your cell phone still works. You may be going over your data plan, but at least you’re online.
In which there are styles of handwriting to look at.
For no real reason, I’m trying to figure out which style of cursive I learned.
I’m beginning to suspect that changing schools so often actually exposed me to multiple systems, because no single script style encompasses how I form my letters — D’Nealian, modified Spencerian, Zaner-Bloser, and New American Cursive all seem to show up in how I think letters should be written and the strokes I use to form them.
New American Cursive is pretty close, and I feel sure I was exposed to it at some point, but it uses hard angles where I think I learned loops. That’s nearly my capital G, for example, but I’d do loops rather than the hard angles at the NE and SW points of the figure.
My mother was a Boeing draftsman at some point so my print style was definitely influenced by hers, which was a form of block printing I can’t seem to google; possibly what was once known as Architectural Lettering but perfectly slanted, something like this:
Having no pressing need to master block printing, I’d like to learn something super pretty and fancy, like this lovely Ladies’ Spencerian, for example, but probably won’t master it.
Although that capital Z is much closer to the one I use than the New American Cursive one; I think my Z is either Zaner-Bloser, D’Nealian, or the Palmer Method?
Maybe? I really have no idea; it’s been so long and I’ve let my handwriting atrophy so much it would take an expert to figure it out! However, I have a new, cheap, extra fine fountain pen and a tiny ruled booklet, so perhaps I’ll add “practice my letters and listen to classical music” to my list of hobbies-intended-to-get-me-offline.
In which I don’t really do this anymore.
I used to read in bars all the time. Paper books in the day, then Newtons, PDAs, eBook readers, phones and Kindles.
Most bars have at least some comfortable seating with a reasonable amount of light, and they have drinks, too, of course. Nothing better than a book and a cocktail.
And they often have snacks, if not a full menu, should you should happen to read right through to the next mealtime.
An afternoon spent reading a good book in a bar can be freakin’ wonderful. This guy knows how it’s done:
I remember, back in the day, bitching about people bothering me while I was reading in bars. “Whatcha reading?” is a question I used to answer in earnest, believing that people were actually interested in the answer, but after awhile I discovered the only correct answer to a random, unsolicited “Hey. Whatcha readin’?”
That answer is: “A book.”
People who ask you what you’re reading in a bar do not care that you’re reading science fiction with a really interesting take on consciousness that reminds me of some Vedanta I’ve read and also makes me wonder about the Three Laws and if Asimov’s robots could genuinely want to not be programmed morally. No, people don’t want to have a cool discussion about consciousness, they’re just doing bar behavior, which is generally to talk to people. Especially girls. Especially girls who are reading a book in a bar.
These days I don’t go to bars nearly as often as I used to, and when I do go it’s specifically to drink (usually because it’s past ten o’clock and you can’t buy booze after that outside of a bar in this state), not to hang out and read. And even if I do read, it’s usually just stupid social media on my phone.
Which is, of course, not real reading. Nowhere near.
I read a little in a bar on my birthday last year. I went to the VFW in the afternoon and had cheese curds and a bloody mary, and if I recall correctly I had my Paperwhite with me, as well as my traveler’s notebook. But it wasn’t really an afternoon of comfortable reading in a bar the way I remember it. I sat at the front bar, which is modern and loud and cold and not comfortable, and I drank my delicious adult beverage so quickly I passed through the mellow buzz so perfect for reading in about six minutes, and mostly I just wrote in my journal and made myself sick on fried cheese.
These days, I read much less long-form material than I used to. This is mostly due to quitting smoking. I used to sit outside and smoke and read; now I vape inside, which means I can be in front of the computer. I used to read a hundred books a year at the minimum; since I quit smoking, I’ve read far less than half that.
Smoking wasn’t the only reason, though. I’d also started to get annoyed with fiction; when you’ve read voraciously all your life, you’ve already read most stories in one form or another. There are, even in SF, only so many plots, only so many unique world-building twists. I can only stomach certain forms of romance, and only for so long, and even period piece mysteries require the right mood.
Short sci-fi, my previous go-to when I couldn’t find anything to read, had started going away from science and into gender and queer issues, which is fine, but not typically interesting to me when I’m trying to read science fiction. I mean, if you can say something about sex or gender inside a sci-fi story that has interesting sci and fi, that’s great, but just putting a gay couple in space without examining the space itself or the science that sustains it? Boring, after the twelfth time you encounter it, because it’s not sci-fi. It’s just a story about a gay couple you’re using as a platform to lecture people about your social politics; you’re not really examining the broader human condition or asking insightful questions. If you can put your characters in Nevada without needing to change the story at all, you’re not writing sci-fi, which is what I bought that magazine for in the first place, thanks tons, you’re just writing regular old fiction I am not hugely interested in reading.
Case in point: I bought the current issue of Asimov’s magazine. Properly called Asimov’s Science Fiction. I’m not reading the stories in order, but the two I’ve read so for are ghost stories. Fiction, yes, but not science. I mean, they’re good stories, but I’d expect to find them in some other sort of magazine.
I mean, really: where is the actual hard science fiction? I’m giving it some years off, deliberately, so, hopefully, I’ll have a stack of brilliant shit to read when I come back to it.
Right now I’m reading Sagan’s Contact, because somehow I’d never read it before, LeGuin’s Birthday of the World, a couple of memoirs (May Sarton and Ram Dass), and a bunch of Hindu and Buddhist non-fiction like The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I also have two imported detective mysteries I bought in treeware format from the bookstore on 26th, but I’m barely halfway through one of them because they’re not backlit, our apartment is dim because we always use screens, and I never think to read them when the sun’s up.
But the point is, and I know I’ve said this before, I’m getting really tired of fucking social media. I spend hours just scrolling through shit, not reading or knitting or doing anything interesting even to myself, so it may be time to just back into the habit of spending an occasional afternoon in a bar nursing a cocktail and horking down some long-form reading. I don’t have to login to work until six, which means I don’t have to start dinner ’til five, which means I could snuggle up in a chair somewhere from lunchtime on, if I wanted, and I bet it would be far more relaxing and less frenetic than millions of tiny short bits of half-insane arguments sandwiched in between horrific news reports and dumb jokes. In the same way as I want to return to long-form reading, I’m drifting back to broadcast TV rather than on-demand services. If something is on, you watch it or not, no pausing, and then either you’ve seen it or it’s gone. The news is the news, not endless links to articles that may or may not be news, or batshit crazy noise masquerading as news, or outright propaganda. There’s something relaxing about the transience, and it’s no better or worse than Amazon or Netflix, really, although I’m fine with bingeing a series now and again.
Anyway, I’m going to go read now. I hope Florida’s all right in the morning, but I really doubt it will be and I’m terrified of the death toll. They’re predicting up to nine feet of storm surge in some areas, and a lot of humans and animals had no way to evacuate. I chatted with Floridians at work all night tonight, wanting to know if their home security systems were still up, and had to tell a lot of them that it looks like their homes don’t even have power anymore, let alone internet so they can view their camera feeds from the shelter.
In which I have a morbid new approach that really seems to be working.
I have developed a new litany.
Whenever there’s A Sensation my mind desires to become frightened of, I tell it this:
You have a fatal, untreatable, inoperable disease. You are dying, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. You’re bound to have sensations. As long as you’re not in pain, there’s nothing that can be done. Let it go.
Weirdly enough, it’s working. Apparently the hook my mind has been using lately to tumble me into hell has been “DO I NEED TO DO SOMETHING? Is this A Real Sensation? Do I need to See A Doctor? Is this just a panic attack or do I really have [heart disease/organ failure/diabetes/stroke]? What shall I DO?”
With this little story, though, the answer to that is “nothing.” It makes the sensations non-actionable (and have the added benefit of increasing dispassion and decreasing attachment). I can just go, oh, yeah, a sensation — flutters in my chest, dizziness, laziness (er, fatigue), shortness of breath, tingling hands and feet, all the shit I have when I panic — and not be caught up in a whirlwind of mental bullshit.
Yes, I tell myself, you are actually dying, we all are, nothing to be done about it. It comes when it comes. It’s working great; I haven’t had a full-blown attack in a couple of weeks!
Being crazy is hard work, but sometimes you manage to hack your own brain just enough to get by.
In which it’s just random vacuous noise about the outer, but in my inner life weird shit is going on. Jai Ma!
We went out to dinner yesterday at Little Tijuana. Tostadas!
Today, I received new bath things!
Before:
(That is a color picture. Honest.)
After:
Way more teal than I expected, but hey, it’s fine.
I attempted to do laundry, but the machines were busy so I just left the basket on the table. That’s been like six hours ago now.
I got a new dress. (It doesn’t make me less fat. It’s super comfy, but I look a bit like a sausage in saran wrap.)
The bed is made!
I got a new keyboard today! It’s a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000. I love it.
I worked 4 hours and 13 minutes. It was a’ight. (Chat is way better than phones, although last night was a shit show due to a botched firmware update. Three chats at a time the entire night, with upwards of 31 waiting in the queue.)
I have just done the dishes.
There is a bowl on the counter filled with ripe, red tomatoes from our plants on the side of the building.
I’m considering dropping cash on a pedi and a cut & color, just so I don’t look completely frumpy at the things — friends’ wedding (which I’m officiating, OMFG), and my aunt & uncle’s 50th anniversary party, and my gramma’s 95th birthday party — later this month. It should look as if one’s at least making an effort, even if she really, well, isn’t!
Those, as they say, are the things!
