Category: Adulting

I haven’t really been shopping…

I had to have a tooth removed last Saturday, so I’ve been sleeping as much as possible because I can’t eat anything good – and I haven’t felt like I needed or especially wanted anything.

Saturday I AM going shed shopping though – we moved to Massachusetts from Texas four years ago this summer, in Texas I had a little jewelry company called Unrepeatables and Unrepeatables had her own room in the house – It acted as a studio and I loved it, giant windows, awesome light. Rather than sit on the sofa and watch TV I used to spend evenings there, making things, watching TV… I’d have sales on weekends and was stocking inventory in shops and I loved doing that. Then we moved and Unrepeatables got set up in the basement. Which flooded, had mice, had spiders, flooded again. After the mice I threw away so much of my stuff- crying hysterically, hauling stuff upstairs late at night, throwing it in a dumpster that I had in the driveway.  I was pathetic but it was really sad and felt like the end of my ability to be creative in a space that was mine. The lack of a creative outlet has been awful but it is almost at an end.

So- a shed. In April we bought the house that we have been living in since we moved up here and we have a 5 year plan to make it super spiffy and sell it. A pool house was never on my list of things that we needed to make the house marketable, but it is a thing that *I* need. Between now and when we sell, the “pool house” will be my studio… and just the thought of that makes me so fricking happy.  Maybe SO happy that I don’t want to spend my $ on stupid shit I don’t need? I’ll need supplies soon!

poolhouse
this is the dream but I have a feeling I’ll have to sacrifice the cute little porch.

The fun of this is that I HAVE been doing a lot of browsing for this space that doesn’t exist yet. My Pinterest board for this project is all over the place because I want to do ALL THE THINGS!  This tiny space will need to be a glass studio, and have a place for all of my polish, a worktable for jewelry making and sewing and I need a little sitting area so that I can have friends come hang out with me drinking vodka tonics. It needs excellent ventilation, access to a gas tank, heat and air conditioning and good lighting. So, just a couple things.

I’m hoping that Saturday I find the exact right one and can get it on order because I really need to make stuff! I’ve only been using my nail polish to paint my nails, and that’s just not right.

xoxo

PS: I’m wearing a necklace with a whale on it. I’ve got a list of things that I want to do this year and wearing something with a whale or a pig or an elephant on it is on that list. Learning to make school bread is also on the list.  Losing weight is NOT on that list in any form (eat healthy, exercise more, less junk food, etc.) for pretty much the first time ever. More brunch, less negative self-talk. Anyways, I feel cute as heck in my whale necklace.

Reclaiming Middle Age and Defying Sexist Anti-Aging Rules.

There was this piece in the Boston Globe last night about how we need to rebrand Middle Age for the generation who started calling Meditation  –  Mindfulness.

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by Beth Teitell

I turned 42 last week and now I have a bunion forming on my left foot. It hurt for the first time yesterday. There could be a whole post here about how my feet have always been my favorite feature and how I’m freaking out about losing my one physically attractive bit but that’s some shit I need to work through. My feet are still cute as heck but the rest of me isn’t bad either.

To mitigate the damage, however, I spent some time last weekend starting to edit my closet. Especially deleting uncomfortable heels. (You can have my Franco Sarto wedges when you pry them off my cold dead feet, but I’m setting the Rachel Roy studded snakeskin stilettos loose on Poshmark soon.)

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The Franco Sarto Frankie Wedge.  I have them in every color.

I don’t want my forties and fifties – my sixties- let’s be honest – any age ever, to be wished away in longing for my twenties and thirties. I want to understand and appreciate this age for what it is. And in the same way that people enthusiastically took back “fat” or “queer” or even the conversation about mental illness – reclaiming the power of those words for ourselves – maybe it is time to do the same for “middle aged”.  Or as Lisa Nagel in the Globe article calls it “mid-century modern”.

Women age, and we are told that as we age we become less valuable, less interesting, less desirable. We should be grateful for being given jobs, for being given attention, we should be quiet, motherly, soft, or we should be doing everything we can possibly do to pretend we are 10 years younger, suffering to be something else. Fuck. That. Noise. I do what I want. “Anti-Aging” is a trap – we are supposed to be panicking that someone younger is going to come along and replace us. We are supposed to put up with a stagnant job because we are lucky to get what we get.

There was an awesome piece in the New York Times last year by Ashton Applewhite about the BS “Anti-Aging Demon” and the way we disempower ourselves and each other when we compete viciously in a game where we aren’t even willing participants.

Appearance matters. Adornment pleases. But society’s obsession with the way women look is less about beauty than about obedience to a punishing external standard — and power. When women compete to “stay young,” we collude in our own disempowerment. When we rank other women by age, we reinforce ageism, sexism, lookism and patriarchy. What else we can we all agree on? This is one bad bargain. It sets us up to fail. It pits us against one another. It’s why the poorest of the poor, around the world, are old women of color.

Much in the same way that rich white men make billions of dollars a year on our dissatisfaction with our weight, other rich white men make billions of dollars a year on our dissatisfaction with our age.  Overturning those apple carts would be really satisfying.

I am just barely scratching at the surface of what should be a daily conversation. So get ready – there will be a lot more of this. In the meantime I’m following Ashton Applewhite’s Facebook page: This Chair Rocks. Join me!