My Day of Beauty
Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: I Feel Fine sung by Curtis Stigers
Topic: Body Awareness

I woke up this morning dreaming that I was spending the day at the spa, and at the end of my beauty treatments, I got a full body massage.  Wishful thinking!  I have never had a day at the spa, nor a full body massage from a professional massage therapist, but what a dream that would have been compared to the day I actually had!

I am leaving for Michigan and Chad's wedding in four hours and twelve minutes.  In preparation, I took a vacation day to try to get beautiful.  What a joke!  What happened to the days when I could order a dress in a size 8 from a catalog and have it fit perfectly, spend $10 on lipstick and eyeshadow, put a coat of polish on my own nails by myself, and make an appointment to get my hair styled at a salon and look beautiful in about ninety minutes? 

Now I have to spend HOURS trying on dresses with various undergarments to try to find something even halfway flattering.  For this wedding I ended up going with separates because my upper body is a larger size than my lower body.  I also have to spend hours searching for what might be the right shades of eyeshadow, lip color, and blush before I come home and spend hours experimenting with all the different powders and pencils and creams trying (and failing) to achieve the youthful, natural look I used to get in less than ten minutes. 

The biggest reason for this is that I simply don't wear makeup in my real life any more and so it just isn't second nature.  When Hans and I started getting serious, he made it clear that he thought I looked most beautiful "natural."  He likes my hair best straight and down and just after I've woken up before I've brushed it.  He thinks the message I send to the world when I wear makeup is that I'm insecure.  He thinks nail polish - especially on toes - looks trashy, while I LOVE to look down and see a bright color on pretty hands.  I stopped "doing" my hair because it is so thick and heavy that it requires massive product (or a perm, which Hans really hates) to hold a style and Hans is allergic to any product that has fragrance added.  Needless to say, I haven't worn perfume in the last twelve years.  I started to feel after awhile that I was missing a big part of myself by banishing all beauty products from my life, and I rebelled.  Unfortunately, I now find myself allergic to most eye makeup and products with fragrance added, so the last time I bought makeup was seven years ago for my own wedding.  The thing that broke my heart the most is that Cover Girl stopped making the Candlelit Dreams eyeshadow kit!  I discovered this four-pack of mauves and pinks when I was nineteen and it was the only eyeshadow I wore until I was thirty!  Now I don't know what I'm going to do....

So I spent the day doing my own manicure and pedicure and coloring and highlighting my own hair.  I got a really good cut two weeks ago that Hans also likes.  He tried to convince me that I had a nice, natural halo of highlights around my face already from a summer spent in the sun and that my gray hairs weren't noticeable.  I, however, see only my grays when I look in the mirror and insisted on coloring my hair.  I didn't think we could afford for me to get it done professionally, so I agonized over the choices available at CVS before finally buying a color and highlight 2-in-1 kit that said it was for dark brown to black hair and that it would minimize red/orange tones.  The allover color is a pretty good match, fairly close to what my hair naturally looks like in February.  The highlights, however, are a completely different story!  They turned bright orange!!  

I panicked and called everyone I could think of for advice - including Loreal but their line was constantly busy, apparently because many other women in bathrooms around the ccountry were flipping out over their results, too - before finally realizing that I could bury the most glaring of the orange patches (in my bangs!) by parting my hair on the other side.  Then I put my hair in a tight ponytail and headed outt for the post office because I had books I absolutely had to get in the mail today for work.  My intention was to go straight from the post office to the first hair salon I could find - I'm still going to a salon in Wake Forest 90 minutes away because I'm too afraid to let anyone else cut my hair, but I didn't have time to drive there today.  I don't know anyone in the town where I live or within a  forty minute drive.  I bonded with my neighbor one afternoon when I thought Hans had left me because she's the only person I know in North Carolina who is going through a divorce and I was in desperate need of a consultation, but she wasn't home today and it might have been too weird for me to show up at her door a second time all freaked out and asking for advice.  So I went to the person in town who probably knows me best - the postman!  Him I see a couple times a week and we chat about all the places we've lived and the weather and so when he was weighing my books today I asked, "Your wife doesn't by any chance run a beauty salon, does she?"

"Why?"

"Because I just died my hair orange!"

He protested that he didn't see orange, so I took the ponytail down and fluffed the hair around my bangs, and he still said he didn't see orange. 

At this point, a woman came out from the back and said, "I have dark hair, too, and I pay someone a lot of money to put that color in my hair." 

They each asked me to turn around for them and they both insisted that it looked good, that it didn't need fixing, and that I should go to Michigan and enjoy my best friend's wedding.  Now, I know this is pathetic, but this is how crazy my life is!  Yes, I really did take the advice of two near strangers at the post office, left my hair free of its ponytail holder, and continued on to Michael's where I bought the beading wire I needed to make the earrings I designed to go with the two-piece dress I'm wearing to the wedding, and then on to the grocery store, where I think one man did something of a doubletake when I passed, but I can't be sure.

In any event, I have prepared Chad that a very colorful, giant, satin shrouded clown with orange, straggly hair and gaudy makeup may be in attendance at his wedding.  He said he'll still love me no matter how I look.  And, how I'll look is still in question, because I have only practiced my hair once - and I did not succeed in putting it up - and I still haven't nailed down my eyshadow combination or tried all of my makeup on all at once.  I'm going to wash my hair six times tomorrow to try to get the color to fade some, and there's nothing else I can do at this point.  It's all quite sad!

Luckily, the wedding is at 1:00 on Saturday so I won't have much longer to agonize about it.  I'm hoping to spend some time with the guys later that evening, and I want to visit the cemetery on Sunday morning.  Then, I will either see Tad or my cousin and his family in the afternoon/evening, and then we're heading back home Monday.  It will be a whirlwind, but hopefully a good whirlwind - just like the rest of my life. 

Now, if I could only get that full body massage....  At this point, though, I have to just settle for three hours of sleep next to a man who has promised to tell me I look beautiful on Saturday whether he thinks I really do or not!

This Morning's Surprises
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

This morning Kaija and I came downstairs to find a small snake resting on a stick on our dining room table.  The snake and the stick were both contained in a 2 gallon plastic jar that once held pork rinds, my mom's gag gift to Hans last Christmas.  Inside the jar, there were also two fist sized rocks and a small plastic lid turned upside down and filled with water.  The very thin snake had the markings of a copperhead, but I couldn't tell by the shape of its small head whether it truly was a copperhead or the non-venomous look-alike that also inhabits this region. 

I find it amusing that my husband, who was so tired when he got home from work last night at 8:30 that he wanted to go straight to bed, took the time to poke holes in a plastic lid and create this makeshift reptile terrarium and then go out in the dark and catch a snake that he knew had a very small chance of being venomous.  Apparently he was so wrapped up in the task, he forgot to lock either lock on the front door before he came to bed - my and Kaija's second surprise of the morning.

If things had gone very badly overnight, we might have come downstairs to find that we had been robbed (although no one would probably want anything but the t.v. and that sucker's so heavy one man would have a difficult time lifting it off the mantle) and been bitten by a copperhead that had somehow escaped through one of the airholes in the plastic jar.

Hans would really like to take the snake to work to put on his desk - and the people he works with now would probably get a kick out of that (plus, it would give Hans a little bit of an edge and make him seem a little less square and normal in comparison with everyone else) - but we agreed the snake would be too difficult to feed.  I tried to get him to release the snake before he left for work this morning because I'm worried about its energy needs, but the best I could get was an agreement that he would let the snake go tonight when he gets home from work.  I checked each of the airholes really closely to make sure the snake couldn't somehow squeeze through any of them - the lid is a very rigid plastic and the holes are all smaller than the snake's head - while I am at work today because if it were to get loose, Kaija would immediately want to investigate.  Even though the snake is small, if it is poisonous, Kaija would be a goner because she is small, too, and young snakes tend to release all of their venom at once, rather than keep some in reserve as older snakes do.

Hans had clearly wanted the snake to be a surprise for me this morning because he didn't tell me about it when he came in last night.  (It's not the first time I've found a snake in a jar in my house.)  I asked Hans whether the "Hey, that's a cool snake on the dining room table," response I gave him when I returned from walking Kaija was the one he was looking for, or whether he was hoping to scare me.  He said if he wanted to scare me he would have put it in bed with me instead.  Aren't boys fun?

 

Happy Lammas!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Daily Eruptions

Today is Lammas, or Lughnasadh, or the summer cross-quarter, or the true Midsummer (even though in Europe Midsummer is celebrated on the summer solstice).  I love that!  August usually brings to mind the end of summer, when in reality it marks only the midpoint.  In the U. S., a second planting of summer wheat could be put in the ground tomorrow morning and mature in time for a fall harvest.  So there is still time to play in the sun!  (Although it is so hot and humid in the south, I usually do most of my playing before the sun is fully up or just at sunset.)

I got a late start this year on my summer fitness program, due in large part to my sprained ankle in June.  I didn't get up to my full walking program until July, but I walked 25 days last month, so I'm happy.  I saw my family practitioner on Monday and she was excited about my weight loss and very encouraging.  We agreed that this month I would add in a strength training routine to speed my progress.  On Sunday, I also tried running for the first time since I sprained my ankle on the solstice and I think it's strong enough to handle run/walk intervals.  It's still the tiniest bit swollen and it hurts a little if I've been on it too long, but I think it's healing well.  I had hoped to start riding my bike again, but Hans left his job two weeks ago, so I may be without health insurance for awhile.  I do not trust myself or North Carolina drivers well enough to ride without health insurance, so that may have to wait for the fall or for next spring.

The only other news of late is that my doctor switched my ADHD medication.  I was on a low dose stimulant that was giving me small benefits, and we would have liked to try increasing the dose, but it was raising my blood pressure and had to be stopped.  So now I'm trying a long-acting non-stimulant that will take awhile to build up in my system, meaning it may be awhile before I see any results.  So far, the only result I've seen is that I want to sleep all day, but that probably has more to do with the drug I took away than with the drug I added in!

The Little Man Behind the Curtain
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I know it only shows my naivete that I continue to be shocked by Shrub's decisions.  I just can't see how a man who thinks of himself as a good guy can make wrong moves over and over without batting an eye.  (Actually, he does bat an eye - he blinks altogether too frequently, which makes me trust him even less....)  He makes his own rules, doesn't feel accountable to anyone, and is so out of touch. 

My personal feelings about the man aside, I feel he truly did the country - and the world - a disservice today when he used his first veto ever to stop Congress's bill to increase federal funding for stem cell research. 

Thankfully, Congress can override the veto.  You can contact your members of congress directly or add your name to the following petition to encourage the nation's lawmakers to stick to their guns:

http://www.hillaryclinton.com/action/stemcellresearch/?sc=e.20060719

Anyone who truly respects Life, as the President says he does, should understand that stem cell research offers Life and Hope and improved Quality of Life for thousands and thousands of people.  Before he died, Christopher Reeve was such an advocate for the need for this research.  I'm relieved he's not around to be disappointed again by this administration's short-sightedness, but my heart breaks for all the other families who are waiting for the kinds of miracles this research might one day deliver.

Detox
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I'm in my fourth caffeine-free day, my head is splitting, and I'm cranky!!  It usually takes three days of detox for me to get the chemical balance in my body restored so I can be pleasant and hopeful.  It's a little scary, therefore, that I still feel like this on Day Four.  On Saturday I ended up giving the last 18 cans of caffeinated Mountain Dew I had to my neighbors.  I've been drinking nothing but ice water since, but today I am indulging in caffeine-free Mountain Dew as a booster to get me through what I hope is the final push. 

I have to remember I don't have the self-control to use caffeine in moderation and my body can't tolerate caffeine at the level I really like to use!  No more experimentation needed....

Two Reasons Why I Like My Job
Mood:  happy
Topic: Daily Eruptions

Variety and Creativity!  

On Wednesday, I was able to show Sudie the dress I bought for Chad's wedding and get her opinion.  She thought it was a little too Junior League for me and that I needed to give it a little more edge to match my personality.  (I love that she and Hans think I have spunk and an edge.  I see myself as so plain and boring most days.  And my neighbors think I'm a total weirdo!)  So we discussed belts (au courant), and wraps (sturdy material of a single color to give my shoulders more structure) and jewelry (very long earrings I'm going to design and make myself) and hair (sleek, shiny ponytail vs. curly and piled on top of my head) and shoes (colorful and very high with a wide heel so I don't sink into the ground every step).  Very fun!

And this morning, my to-do list has included Internet research on Red Howler Monkeys (alouatta seniculus) and comforting a 140-lb. Great Dane who's been in the house less than 24 hours.  Sudie is adopting him from Mid Atlantic Great Dane Rescue League, http://www.magdrl.org/.  Luckily, he has not been abused, but in his less than two years of life, he has lived in at least three different homes and was finally surrendered because his last owner couldn't handle him.  He has not been housebroken or leash trained, but he is the sweetest, gentlest thing!  He's huge, even though he's a little too skinny around the hips and middle, but he doesn't seem to use that power.  He'll eat the smallest pieces of dehydrated chicken strips from your hand without you ever feeling his teeth or tongue.  Sudie is crate training him to start so her other two Great Danes will have a chance to get used to him and he'll learn some house rules.  I'm supposed to leave him crated whenever Sudie is gone, but this morning he seemed so lonely and upset while Sudie was out.  I laid on the floor by his crate for awhile and petted him though the metal bars, which he seemed to like, but he wouldn't lie down and he was breathing hard.  Then I went back into the office to work, and Sudie's three year old Dane got him worked up again.  When I went back out, he had scrunched up the padding from the floor of the crate into a  little ball and was standing on only the metal pan.  I couldn't leave him that way, so I (bravely!) opened the door and crawled into the crate with him and lifted his legs one at a time until I had stretched the padding back out.  Then I sat in the open door and he laid down and put his head in my lap and let me stroke his ears and the top of his head.  This seemed to relax him, and that's all it took.  He's stolen my heart!  Unfortunately, I know from experience that probably means I'm in for heartbreak somewhere down the line.  But for now, just looking at him makes me happy.

Sometimes You Don't Get the Results You Expect...
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Daily Eruptions

...and sometimes you do. The caffeine experiment, predictably, is turning out badly. The idea was to have one 12 oz. fully caffeinated Mountain Dew each day around 11:00 a.m. to see if I can tolerate a small amount and see what benefits I receive. My experience has been that a small amount of caffeine in the late morning can help me focus and get through the heart of my day. I think somedays I also feel happier when I have caffeine in my system. The problem is that having Mountain Dew in the house, and having caffeine in my body, makes drinking only one can per day difficult. I end up wanting one with dinner and then one doesn't "feel" like enough because the soda industry has trained me to expect 20 oz. or more now, not a mere 12, so I end up drinking three a day instead of one. This adds 510 calories (from high fructose corn syrup - a substance the human body does not know how to process) to my diet and then makes it difficult to sleep. And, if I get too much caffeine build up, I get free-floating guilt attacks and sometimes even anxiety attacks.

Yesterday I drank three cans. On top of that, I bought a dress for Chad and La Toya's wedding. My OCD kicked in and I was awake until 2:45 a.m. buzzing on caffeine and obsessing about jewelry and shoes and make up and worrying about whether I should spend two months trying to learn to do something with my long, straight hair on my own or try to find a hairdresser to put it up for me on the day of the wedding. Then, I obsessed about the dress iteself, worrying about whether an ankle-length dress is appropriate for an afternoon wedding and worrying that, even though it is a very simple, straight, spaghetti strap design, the length or material might look as though I'm trying too hard, or worse, might look as though I think I'm part of the wedding party, and I definitely am not.

The worst part is that after getting hardly any sleep, I wasn't willing to drag myself out of bed at 5:00 to walk before work. So yesterday's mistakes are lingering and diminishing my effectiveness today. Isn't that always the way?

Aging Well?
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Daily Eruptions

I got carded yesterday!

I was buying a case of Mountain Dew, which I have never let myself do before (a six-pack is my usual limit), and the cashier, glimpsing it out of the corner of her eye while she rang up my Kleenex, mistook it for alcohol and said, "You don't look quite 27. I need to see some I.D." At first I was confused, then happy! Considering my 20-year high school reunion is happening next month, being carded was a huge rush! Of course, one could argue that getting carded by a woman who mistook Mountain Dew for beer is no great accomplishment. Or, you could take Hans's view and argue that the cashier carded me because I had such a guilty look on my face for buying so much caffeine. (I counter that by saying that the caffeine is an Experiment - with a capital "E" - in ADHD management, and so I had no reason to look guilty.) I was asked a few months ago by a cashier at Lowes Foods if I were a student at Elon College, so I'm sticking with the story that I am simply aging well.

The last time I bought alcohol was a single wine cooler that I didn't finish eight years ago at a bar in Sandusky. The Big Ride was passing through there and I dragged Ron, Randy, Cindy, and an under the weather Zoi downtown the night we arrived. (We were saving the roller coasters for the next day!) Of the group, I was the only one who got carded, maybe because I looked out of my element in a bar. The rotten bartender looked at my driver's license and said, "Man, you're even older than me!" So much for his tip....

Now all I need to do is convince RealAge.com that I'm still young enough to be carded!

July Already??
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Apparently May and June are black hole months for me at work. In 2005 and 2006, both of those months just got completely swallowed up in tech issues and small details and I feel like I went to bed at the end of April and woke up in July. I can hardly remember the events of the past two months. Part of it is that in both my professional and personal lives a great deal of the work was internal, so there's very little "evidence" of change or growth or progress of any kind.

Luckily, I survived and have managed finally to set up both new computers in both of my offices at work. I still have to figure out how I'm going to update each of them on a weekly basis without their being networked and I have to find a printer/scanner for the studio, but those issues feel like small potatoes after the struggles I had just to get the machines up and running. I don't know what it is about me and PCs. My Apples and I have always gotten along great, but PCs are simply not intuitive for me. James says I have a lack of knowledge and familiarity with PCs because of my job path, and I'm sure he's right. If I had gone straight into the business world, rather than playing around in the nonprofit world for so long, I would have gained PC experience and expertise much more quickly. I considered buying two new Macs to work on at Sudie's, but her tech guy knows nothing about Macs and I want her to have support on her technology for the life of the computers, regardless of whether I am here or not, so I decided to go with her tech guy's recommendations. The computers are faster and much cooler than the old, clunky laptop I've been working on for the last year and a half, so I think I'll be happy once I get used to the new machines.

As for my personal life: I started the first steps of a lifestyle management program I'm hoping will help with the ADHD, including a moderate dose of a medication from which I am seeing only the subtlest of results. Hans and I had a major eruption in our marriage that, while extremely scary at the time, seems to have gone a long way toward smoothing things out for our future. I did a face plant and sprained my right ankle in a big way while I was out "celebrating" the solstice last month by running a wooded trail I had never been on before. I'm learning that medication won't prioritize my to-do list for me or even help me make sure I'm working on priority tasks once I've categorized them - translation: medication is not discipline in pill form. I'm learning that I need to make a plan for reevaluating my strategies every time I adopt a new strategy so that I don't find myself reevaluating only a few days after adoption and too soon for me to see any results. I'm learning that I need to set aside time every day with a clearly defined start and end in which I can obsess and worry and second-guess - and then I need to get on with my day and follow through on whatever schedule or plan I have created. I'm learning that my time really is my own but that it is finite and I have to impose limits, whether I like it or not, on what I attempt to accomplish if I want to see results. (Although, my most recent One Spirit catalog listed a book about how to do everything you want...Refuse to Choose! by Barbara Sher, but, as a perfectionist and a procrastinator who already thinks she can do more than she really can, I'm a little too scared to read that right now.) Most surprising, I'm learning that I still have a lot of work to do to learn to trust myself. I seriously thought I'd tackled that issue already. Wasn't that what college and the early nineties were all about? Academic probation and suicidal impulses and therapy and losing Ken (and Marc, and John, and Aaron's friendship) and learning to be without a boyfriend and surviving PIRG and surviving weekly critique workshops in a master's writing program in Los Angeles and awful, awful, sexist, ageist Ned at ACMG in Seattle - weren't all of those experiences designed to teach me to trust myself? Can't I be done with that lesson now? Maybe all of those were successful lessons and I did learn to trust myself then, but have somehow forgotten everything I learned in the years since? I knew how to trust myself for six weeks in 1998 when I was on a cross-country bike trip, but, psychologically, I crashed immediately after and maybe I still haven't recovered. Distressing, but what is there to do except face it, and get going?

Silent Visitor
Mood:  sad
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had another dream this morning of Ken. He's visited me in my dreams every six months or so since I wrote to him via Classmates.com, but he doesn't speak. This morning he knocked at the door of a house I was living in and we went outside to a small trailer I seemed to be using as a writing studio. Then he was gone and I had the urge to email him at home, but even in the dream I restrained myself from doing that because I know it's against the "rules" he and his wife must have.

I woke up feeling more frustrated by this visit than any of the others because I couldn't sense any emotion or reason behind it. Once, he showed me his children and once he just sat with me and I woke up feeling peaceful, but this morning he just appeared and disappeared.

When I got to work this morning, a small, cornflower blue butterfly blocked my path for a few moments by flitting back and forth in front of my feet. Of course, this, too, reminded me of Ken because when we were breaking up I had recently heard about the butterfly effect for the first time and in one of his letters he asked me if I still felt him moving in my life even though I no longer saw him. So butterflies remind me of a man I haven't seen in seventeen years - how crazy does that make me?

I think he's on my mind because the class of 1986 is having its 20-year reunion next month and I don't think I'm going to go. I can't really justify the expense of going all the way to Michigan for it because I have to go (and WANT to go) to Chad and LaToya's wedding in Michigan only three weeks later and two trips in one month is beyond our budget. Plus, most of the people I really care about seeing are already in contact with me, many are from a different class, and most will be at Chad's wedding. I might like to see Brian and Paul and a few other people, but since I've reconnected with Scott in San Francisco, I've pretty well caught up again with the people who left a void. The thing that's still pulling me to go is Ken (and Tad whom I bugged for months to save the date before I knew Chad's wedding was happening and whom, of course, I would love to see). But, there is a chance Ken won't go to any of the reunion activities, and even if he did, he'd probably take Christine and I wouldn't have a chance to talk to him, anyway. There's also a chance that my being there might keep him away. I talked to Scott in S. F. about this (because the sweet man called me on a Sunday evening out of the blue!), and he wondered what I could possibly have to say to Ken now. Of course this is a reasonable question to which there probably is no reasonable answer, but it's one that still haunts me.