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Character Marks

“Some people try to turn back their odometers.  Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way.  I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.” – Will Rogers

This summer we took some wonderful hiking trips and on one of them I ended up with my legs covered in a rash from poison oak.  That’s okay.  I would do it all over again.  But I do have some nasty pink scars left on my legs that I scratched so much that I think I invited some varicose veins to the surface to join the fun. Sometimes I just “own” the scars, sometimes I cover them up with concealer and sometimes I look up telephone numbers of doctors who inject veins to make them go away.

I think I’m at the stage where I’m on the fence of aging gracefully versus fighting the fight to keep a youthful appearance.  When I was in my late thirties,  I found a cool magazine clipping and I hung it on my mirror.  It had a picture of a beautiful woman with a few lines on her face.  It said something to the effect that “Beauty is accumulative and all of these lines are just character marks from the story of your life.”  That sounded so right . . . . when I was in my thirties.

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I love that quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous commencement speech.  It makes me feel winsome and hopeful at the same time.  When I’m 75, I guess I’ll look back at pictures taken of me now and wish that I looked like what I look like right now.

In today’s world of giant, overwhelming beauty stores like Ulta and Sephora, of every procedure available to turn you into whatever boob size/nose size/butt size/movie star you want, of impossibly attractive 80-year-old actresses like Jane Fonda, and households of Kardashian sisters becoming multi-millionaires primarily due to the hustling of their collective beauty, it’s hard to decide what your own limits are to “preserve and protect” versus letting it all go and just being free.

I guess it really does come down to doing what you want, what you value and what makes you feel good with the realization that you can’t stop others from doing what they feel the need to do and be.  Do you want to be that perfectly preserved, valuable, beautiful, ageless Barbie doll in the box or the much lived, loved, tattered and torn, worn for the wear, kindly and comely Velveteen rabbit?  Probably most of us will end up being something in-between and that is okay.  We have to forgive the flawless Barbies and the sanctimonious rabbits, though.  They have the right to their decisions and we have the right to ours.  Perhaps if we feel love and compassion for all of us as we work through this aging process together, those feelings will glow through and as a whole we will see beauty like we have never seen and it will be timeless.

This is Friday

In honor of all of my awesome James Madison University Alpha Sigma Alpha sisters (shout out) who have been so supportive of my published essay in The Fine Line magazine, I have written down this little “ode to Friday” with you in mind:

We love you Friday, oh yes we do!

We love you Friday, this much is true.

When you’re not with us, we’re blue.

Oh, Friday, we love you!!!

New readers, on Fridays I keep it superficial.  That’s just how I roll into the weekend.  I list three products/services/ideas that I really like and that have kept me hummin’ over the years.  I would be thrilled to see more recommendations in my Comments section from my readers.  Hint. Hint.  We could turn this into to something really useful and fun if everyone shared the love!!  Please feel free to check out previous Fridays for earlier recommendations.  So far, I’m not rescinding any of them.  No recalls.

Here we go:

Graptopetalum Pentandrum Superbum Flat Succulent – So I was trying to find the nickname of this beautiful plant on the internet and all that I could find is that it is in the subspecies “Superbum.”  Enough said.  I love all succulents but this one is queen of them all.  I discovered this gorgeous, drape-y, purple, impossible to kill succulent at a garage sale.  It is in that moment that I fell in love hard with succulent plants.  I have created probably 18 pots (I’m not a minimalist) of this succulent from the one little plant that I fell in love with at a garage sale. I even offered to pay full price for it. The neatest thing about the “drape-y grape-y” (my nickname for it) is that water beads up on it, so it looks like it is adorned in diamonds after it rains.  If you haven’t fallen on to the succulent bandwagon yet, this is the plant you want to start with and then don’t blame me for the obsession that happens next.

Sky Map app – My middle son “blinded me with science” with this awesome recommendation.  This app for your phone will tell you the name of every twinkly dot you see in the sky.  All you have to do is hold the phone up to the sky and you will know where Mars, Venus, the constellations and even the moon (being silly) is in accordance to where you are standing and looking up at the sky.  All you have to do is shake your phone to calibrate it.  Seriously.  I love this app!  It even works through your car windshield, although that is not how I would recommend using it for safety reasons.  Trust me on this.

Paul Mitchell Tea Tree Special Shampoo –  Anything with tea tree oil is invigorating.  In my twenties, I discovered tea tree shampoo when I found my head tingling in a great way after a shampoo from an “ahead of its time” beauty salon.  We used tea tree shampoo for a few years after that and then unfortunately, I got distracted by something on sale probably and forgot about it.  My boys were little guys at the time that we used it and they loved the zingy feel of it on their heads so much that it was a great bribe to get them into a bath tub.  I am so happy to have rediscovered this!  Honestly, sometimes I rub down my limbs with it because the sensation is so exhilarating!  It’s like cleaning your hair and your body with a York Peppermint Patty.  Seriously.

Okay, I cannot wait to see the Comments today!!  I’ll end with the Friday quote of the week:

“Music always sounds better on Friday.” – Lou Brutus

Have a great weekend!  I appreciate you reading my blog!  Big love and thanks!!

Insert Hand Over Mouth

“Before you say it,  Is it true?  Is it kind?  Is it necessary?” – Bernard Meltzer

I used to espouse the above quotation to my children so much that my youngest son took it and ran with it.  He said it so much and so loudly in school, that his second grade teacher made a giant poster board of those three questions and credited it to my son.   For the record, my son is not Bernard Meltzer.

In all fairness, this was more of a “do as I say, not as I do” teaching.  It is something to strive for every day, but I admittedly fall short.  I have a tendency to be blunt.  I also have a tendency to blame my bluntness on the fact that I’m a Sagittarius.  (As if a pseudoscience based on the alignment of planets excuses me for being an ass, but hell, taking accountability is a work in progress, too.)

We’ve all heard the saying that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason, but in a loud world filled with so much information, it sometimes feels like we need to shout to be heard.  And quickly.  The trick is to stop and to think and to ponder before shouting, I guess.  There is a Latin saying that when translated goes something like this, “Truth speaks for itself, if we let it speak.”

I have learned from experts that there are 5 simple rules for good communication. The first rule is to be in a place of empathy and compassion.  The second rule is to stay calm and try not to speak from an angry place.  The third rule is to use “I” statements instead of “you” statements to avoid blaming and shaming.  The 4th rule is to ask questions instead of lecturing.  “How do you think this situation makes me feel?” is a good question to ask another person for getting them to see things from your perspective. And the 5th rule is to make an agreement about things going forward and to forgive the past.  Of course, these rules work best if you are superhuman, or the emotionless Mr. Spock or the incredibly kind Dalai Lama, but nevertheless, they are something to strive for in our every day relationships.

There is a neat tee shirt company called Om + Ah London.  One of their best selling tees says this:  Be the reason someone believes in the goodness of people.  I imagine that being a thoughtful communicator would go a long way in achieving this goal.  The quote is certainly a worthwhile goal to strive for and possibly might be worth putting on a giant poster board right beside my desk.

Dream Come True

Okay, time for a dramatic moment.  I consider this a victory for all of us Second Halfers!  I’m officially a published writer today.  The wonderful digital magazine The Fine Line published one of my previous blogposts today.  You can find the link here:

https://thefinelinemag.com/

This is big for me.  It is a dream that I think I always had, to be a published writer, but I let it go latent. This moment is a huge reminder to myself to not listen to that ugly, negative, snarling, fearful voice in my head telling me that I’m not good enough, nobody cares about my ideas, and to just sit back and shut up and keep doing the dishes.  We all have that ugly voice raging at us and we need to silence him or her.  Now.  When our “ugly voice” is silenced we can hear the still, quiet, calm, peaceful, knowing voice that is inside all of us.  That is the voice which is beckoning us to share our true selves with the world.  When we do that, we are helping creation become what it is truly meant to be.  And that is a gift to ourselves and to the world.

“One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live – with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad – but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else’s.” – Michael Ignatieff

Second Halfers, our time has come.  We are ripened, wisened and brave.  We know who we are now and it is time that we love and accept who we are and share our total creation of ourselves, fully and honestly, with life.  We have championed our families, our careers, our mentors and our mentees, but it’s time to realize that it is good and right to champion ourselves as well.  I am so grateful to you all for your support and feedback on this blog.  Thank you for inspiring me to open up some latent dreams, and rallying me along the way.

” . . .sometimes, the fiercest thing you can do is to be unapologetic about who you are and what you want.” – Anonymous

 

Short and Sweet

A while back, I wrote a blog about an article that I had read.  The article claimed that studies had found that exhausted people are “socially repulsive.”  Well, guys, I was at the Monday Night Football game with my family last night and so this morning, I am feeling rather “socially repulsive.”  I don’t want to end up writing something regretful or incoherent, so I’ll just pass along this cool piece of advice.  A man on Quora named Takudzwa Razemba said that this is the best advice that he had ever received from his grandfather:

“If you’re persistent, you’ll get it.   If you’re consistent, you’ll keep it.  And if you’re grateful, you’ll attract more of it.”

Have a great day!  I’ll be back in better form tomorrow.

Just Say Thank You

 

Why is it so hard for us to accept compliments?  My friends and I got into a discussion about this the other day.  The topic came up because an electrician was at my home doing some work for us and he complimented a few things in our home.  Every time that he paid me a compliment, I rolled my eyes, made up some stupid quip about the item that he was complimenting, or I laughed.  Now, I know my etiquette.  I know that the proper thing is to just say “thank you,” but I didn’t do that and I didn’t even realize that I didn’t do it until he would respond to me like this, “Oh, so you don’t really like it?”  That response jolted me into some self-awareness of just how lousy I am at accepting compliments sometimes.

My friend said that when we don’t accept compliments we are actually insulting the person who paid the compliment.  When we put down what someone else says is nice, we are dissing their tastes.  We think that we are being kind or humble by not accepting compliments, but in reality we are rejecting their gift of kindness.  Another knee-jerk response to a compliment is to compliment the other person back.  But those “gotcha back” compliments seem kind of hollow, as a true compliment comes spontaneously from the heart, not as a “payback.”

Compliments are great. We should bask in them.  Mark Twain said, “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” Robert Orben said, “A compliment is verbal sunshine.”  Why not give the person who compliments a little “verbal sunshine” back with a big, bright smile and a, “Thank you. You just made my day!”  What is a better way to make both of you feel good???

We are unfortunately quick to accept criticism.  Even if we think we haven’t accepted the criticism, we ruminate on it all day long.  We stew in anger at the audacity of whomever criticized us or we sulk in shame as if making one mistake dooms us to the depths of hell.  If we are willing to put ourselves through all of that for criticism, constructive or not, why would we not allow ourselves to soak in the light of a kind compliment?  I think the cartoon character Happy Bunny says it best:

“Please put all criticisms in the form of a compliment.”

 

It is Fall

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” – Albert Camus

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.” – John Donne

Today is the first full day of fall.  I love this season.  I know so many people who say that autumn is their favorite season.  I live in Florida, but I grew up in Pennsylvania and I went to college in Virginia.  Both of those states admittedly have much prettier fall leaves than what we get in Florida.  Still, even Florida has its change of seasons.  My house has a lake behind it and behind that is a nature preserve.  In the fall, the light of the sun is finally able to poke through the preserve’s thick wall of trees and brush, hinting at the light that lives inside all of existence.  The Japanese people call this beautiful sight of “sunshine filtering through leaves”, komorebi.  I’m surprised that we English speakers don’t have just one word for that phenomenon because it is so lovely to behold.

“I love autumn, the season of the year that God seemed to have just put there for the beauty of it.” – Lee Maynard

When my son was on a travel soccer team trip a few years ago, we headed up north for a soccer tournament and one of the mothers, a native Floridian asked me timidly if I thought that it would be okay for her to bring back some colored leaves.  I said, “Honey, they will give you as many Hefty bags as you want.”  I remember the hours spent raking up the beautiful leaves in all of their splendor.  I remember all of the different school assignments and crafts involving the lovely leaves.  For some reason, those chores and assignments never seemed as agonizing as picking up fallen apples covered in bees in the summer or shoveling snow in the winter.  There is just something so comforting in all things relating to fall.  The gorgeous colored leaves, pumpkins, pumpkin spice, Halloween and Thanksgiving, swirling light winds, back to school, the start of football season, light sweaters and throws, etc. are all things of autumn and things that are almost universally appreciated.

“Autumn is the mellow season and what we lose in flowers, we more than gain in fruits.” – Samuel Butler

Second Halfers, we are autumn.  We have gone through the spring of our childhoods and the summer of becoming an adult.  We are in our full-color prime, bearing the fruits of who we really are and showing the world the beauty of the banquet of what we have to give.  We are calmer than in our previous seasons.  Our colors don’t necessarily burst, but our colors are vivid and show all that we have lived through and experienced, making our season’s colors the most beautiful of all – the colors that all of the world celebrates.  How blessed we are to be in this lovely season of our lives!

“Fall has always been my favorite season.  The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature has been saving all year for the grand finale.” – Lauren Destefano

Coin Flip

A great tip I learned a while ago is that when you are struggling with a really big decision, a really mammoth decision that just has you all tied up in knots and you don’t know what to do, you should just flip a coin.  Really, just flip a coin.

Now if that sounds ridiculous, let me explain.  You don’t make the decision based on how the coin lands.  You base your decision on what you are secretly hoping the result will be while the coin is still up in the air.  That moment will tell you the most about your strongest inner longings about the decision.  That very moment of hope gets you out of the analytical, calculating thinking mind and really to the very heart of things for you.

Try it.  It works a lot of the time.  And if it ends up being a bad decision, you can always just blame the coin.  Heads or tails?

Keep Calm and Friday On

Welcome to the best day of the week!  We made it!  Woop!  Woop!  New readers, every Friday I talk about some of my favorite things, products, services, etc. that have made a difference in my day-to-day life.  (please check out my previous Favorite Things Friday posts for other ideas of what to treat yourself with on this lovely Friday)  That being said, I have a confession to make.  In my first half of adulting, people in my life may have accused me of being a tad “impulsive”.  I’m working on getting better at that in my second half of adulting.  I feel like I need to add a disclaimer (kind of like the pharmacological advertisements) for fellow impulsive people like me before we get started today.  Here are a few things that impulsive people should be wary of:   

Amazon 1-Click;  maybe Amazon in general;  maybe-online shopping in general;  competitive bidding on eBay;  promo codes;  anything on sale;  cute shoes;  gifts with purchase;  long waits at the check-out counter;  potato chips and the like;  plates of cookies;  fad diets;  full pots of coffee;  anything with “miracle anti-aging” in its description;  buffets;  bookstores;  BOGO happy hours;  day trading;  sports betting;  casinos;  gym membership tours;  vacation clubs;  grab bags;  TJ Maxx;  animal shelters and/or pet stores or just anything furry with a cute face;  botox and fillers;  another lipstick/lipgloss;  and my single friends said that I should add, “right swiping”

Consider yourself warned, here we go:

Sunglasses w/Gradient Lenses:  This is more of just a great “favorite tip.”  Sunglasses are a personal thing.  What looks good on me may not look good on you.  It has a lot to do with face shape.  There are a lot of great sunglasses brands out there and for the record, I have read that most sunglasses, no matter what the brand, are manufactured by the same company. (true or not, I do not know)  I live in the Sunshine State, so I have about 75 pairs of sunglasses.  Seriously, I’m impulsive.  I think sunglasses are the ultimate accessory, right up there with shoes and handbags.  However, I started noticing when I poured over fashion mags and celebrity rags, that a particular type of sunglasses were especially attractive, alluring, sexy and magnetic.  What they all had in common were strongly gradient lenses.  These are the lenses that are dark on the top and get to almost clear at the bottom.  Celebrities like Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez almost always wear these types of sunglasses.  J-Lo is known to wear the Dita brand of sunglasses.  (now these are pricey, but almost all of their lenses are these gorgeous gradient types)  I picked out a great pair of Ray-Bans for my husband with these gradient lenses and while I have always been in love with him, every time that he wears these sunglasses, I fall “in lust” with him all over again.  If you want to feel like a rock star/movie star, I promise that these types of sunglasses will do the trick.

Moroccan Oil Beach Wave Mousse – I’m a sucker for anything that smells great.  This stuff smells so great, I could eat it.  And it works great, too.  It’s pricey, but a little bit goes a long way.  There are times that I have gotten a little too heavy handed with it and I have ended up back in the 80s with the “wet look.”  I have a head full of thin hair and this really helps pump up the volume and keeps things in place.  I love it!

Listerine Breath Strips – I love these!  I keep these little packets of “high impact” dissoluble strips in a cute leather pouch in my purse.  They are quick and discreet and perfect for using after eating meals like Philly Cheesesteaks.  Unlike mints, they have no sugar, no calories, and most kids don’t like them, so you don’t have to share.  They are strong, so if you have sinus problems, they might help in that area, as well?!?

Let’s end with a love letter to Friday, as seen on an internet post:

“Dear Friday, I’m so glad that we are back together.  I’m sorry that you had to see me with Monday-Thursday, but I swear I was thinking of you the whole time.”

Have a great weekend!  Thank you for reading my blog!

You So Funny

My daughter loves the TV show America’s Got Talent.  Thankfully she has much more wholesome and uplifting tastes in TV shows than her parents who stayed up past their bedtime to finish The Sinner last night and recently binge-watched the entire second season of Ozark in two days.  Occasionally, I would sit down with my daughter and watch AGT when there wasn’t anything dark and disturbing to watch instead.  This season I was utterly rooting for the comedian Vicki Barbolak to win.  I think that she is hilarious.  Vicki is warm, self-deprecating and has great natural timing.  She didn’t win, but she got far enough to guarantee a bright future in all sorts of comedic opportunities, in my opinion.  When I looked up Vicki on the internet, it turns out that she took her first comedy class when she was 38 years old.  What an inspiration for us Second Halfers!!

During AGT, one of the judges, Mel B who is a former Spice Girl band member, dressed as a unicorn and read from a joke book.  That brought me back to the days when my kids still had book fairs at school.   I gave my kids money for their book fairs with the insistence that they only buy books with that money.  They had better not come home with stuffed animals, 4-foot pencils or whoopie cushions . . . only books.  Invariably, at least one of them would come home with a joke book. (Retrospectively, I should have put joke books on the “DO NOT spend my money on this at the book fair” list.)  Now, I don’t know if the teachers still do this, or if kids can just read to Alexa or Siri now, but back then, their teachers required their students to read to a parent for at least 30 minutes every night.  So usually one of my kids would start reading their joke book to me.  That is when I would don my noise cancelling earplugs.  Okay, not really, but after 18 knock-knock jokes in a row, when I was ready to knock-knock my head into the wall, I would decide that this particular child was an excellent reader and really didn’t need anymore practice reading.  Looking back, I am wondering if the whole “read the joke book to Mom” was a well-thought-out scam to get out of reading.  My kids are clever like that.

Jokes are a funny thing. (no pun intended, seriously, I just reread that line and I had to laugh that I even wrote it.)  We have a love/hate relationship to jokes.  And humor is a very personal thing.  What I think is hysterical could easily fall flat to you.  Spontaneous humor is great, but it often never fails that in social circles, a joke telling session starts up and my palms start getting sweaty.  Everyone should have a few good jokes in their pockets for times like these.  I have a couple jokes that I have worn out so much that anyone who has ever met me, stood behind me in line or glanced at me funny, probably has heard me tell it.  I don’t like long jokes, because I always get so nervous telling them that my mind freezes and the punch line disappears into the thin air.  My friend once taught me a really short, corny easy joke that is so short that it’s impossible to forget the punchline and even though it’s a groaner, you get your joke-telling turn over fast.  I’m going to share it with you, because I love you guys and I want to give you something.  It goes like this:  “Two men walk into a bar.  Don’t worry, they have bumps on their heads, but they’re okay.”

Thank you, guys!  You’ve been great!  Give it up for Adulting – Second Half!! Woo-hoo!!!  See you tomorrow for what you’ve been waiting for all week, Favorite Things Friday!!!