I'm reminding myself

I'm trying to be happy. I'm reminding myself to decorate my walls with photos. I volunteered in a research study on depression where they zap your brain with electricity while you identify and remember the emotional expression on people's faces. I volunteered in another research study on depression where they played me Youtube videos through a VR headset and had me recount what I saw in detail. 

I'm trying to be happy. I'm reminding myself to say hello to the doorman the first time I see him on his shift. Good morning. Hi. Have a nice night. The doormen start expecting my greeting and preemptively wave. 

I'm reminding myself to read for pleasure sometime. To watch a movie on an international flight. 

I returned late at night to my parking garage. I parked on the third floor and sat for a while. Two men in a sparkling SUV joked and hassled one another in the row behind me. I got out of my car and crossed to the elevator. When I hit the down button it lit up and then went out. I tried again, and the elevator would not come so I took the stairs. Behind me, a man dressed in all back descended from the floor above. We went slowly, me sore and limping from the basketball games I had just played, him keeping his distance. 

The steel steps let out onto the down town sidewalk. I waited and held the door for the man as he exited. "That's so nice." He said to me. 

Serenity Prayer

I talked Joe's ear off yesterday about makeup. The basic female condition of makeup and botox and carting around huge suitcases full of clothes and hair dryers and straighteners and creams and scales. I don't like it. I almost fear it. Maybe I do fear it. 

Nobody Panic podcast did an episode on how to get a wax. I have never managed my pubic hair apart from trying to maneuver a razor to clean up the crease of my upper leg. I feel unsophisticated in this. But I've been satisfied with my sex life so far. I haven't minded wearing little board shorts as swimsuit bottoms. And I've grilled each man who's seen me in the buff, at knife point, as to whether he thinks it's okay. So far I've gotten the all-clear. (Although, I tend to only hook up with men who are nice, possibly in part because I don't want to hear the true answer to this question.) 

Stevie, NP podcast host, says that waxing is painful and expensive and she feels unfeminist for doing it, but if she doesn't get it done she feels dirty. The mental struggle over it has gotten very boring, so she just gets it done. My mental struggles around the point have not been enough to inspire me to action. 

I would like to occasionally give myself a new face. That seems like a big benefit of makeup. I could signal to everyone, Oh, fancy Amy is out tonight. Or edgy Amy. Or #girlboss Amy. Or just Amy who's taken this night seriously. But that shit takes time and makeup and experimentation. People figure out their look over the course of years. 

Getting older brings the spectre of more extreme procedures: botox, fillers, laser treatments, and whatever they think of next. It feels like penance for the crime of aging. You're doing something morally wrong by rounding into your 40s. 

I was telling Joe about my sense, even at a young age, of getting away with something by rejecting the work of trying to be beautiful. It felt, it feels, like breaking the rules. The core of it came to me -- less noble than feminism -- something that you could needle point on a pillow. I like to think of it like the serenity prayer: 

Lord, may I experience love and affection throughout my life without having to do anything too expensive or uninteresting to me. 

Single Gals

This has been on my mind. I went home to Colorado for my friend, Jessica's wedding. I grew up with Jess as part of the camping group, a group of around seven families that would go pop-up camping together every summer. We've gotten to the stage in life when some of the parents in the camping group have started to die. Glen Hoit died last year of pancreatic cancer. His wife, Terry, is one of the matriarchs in the group, maybe the matriarch. She's tough and brassy and, more intimidating than that, she's funny. Glen's death and absence is felt deeply by everyone, but especially by Terry of course.

She had to have someone sell Glen's truck when he died. She re-did the entire inside of her living room. She's an honest person and hasn't hid her feelings of grief. (Although anything she says usually has a laugh or a joke hot on its heels.) 

The camping group, like my parents, doesn't really believe in divorce. Only one couple of the seven got a divorce, and that was late in life, once the kids had all gone to college. I am going through something of a divorce. I went home to Colorado and was around the camping group without my husband for the first time. Terry pulled me aside. She said, 

"Have you noticed that, as a single gal, there are all these men waiting in the wings ready to help you out? They just come out of nowhere, dying to fix your problems." 

The attention is different. I have noticed that. But the thing that stuck out to me about what Terry said was that she put the two of us in the same category. "Single gals." She lost her husband to cancer. I've sort of aimlessly squandered mine. But she put us on the same level. She said, "You're with me."