RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//On beauty standards, vanity, aging, skin-care, Botox, and choosing your author brand. I promise they’re related! Also Indie authors going to Traditional Publishing and the pitfalls, and a cool data point on series drop-off.
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I have this overly informative scale.
Yes, I weigh myself every day. In the era when I did not (the Dark Years), I accumulated an astonishing amount of weight, seemingly out of nowhere. (You can make zooming space noises with that, if you like.)
On my Excel graph that shows my weight since 1997 (oh, come on – you knew I had one), there’s a big gap for the Dark Years. At the end of them, five years later, my weight was up more than 32 pounds. Ugly ugly ugly. Ignorance may be bliss, but it can be hell on the body fat.
I remember buying that scale, in 2002, coming back from a weekend in the mountains. I was starting to get those rolls of fat on my rib cage, you know? The ones where you really can’t pretend that it’s muscle or hip-spread. We stopped at a Bed, Bath and Beyond and I bought a simple scale that I step onto until I’d cut back on stuffing myself for a week. Thus I don’t really know how high it got. Clinging to my blissful ignorance.
That was two scales ago. Now I have this fancy/shmancy one that shows me not only my weight, but also my body fat percentage, muscle percentage, visceral fat percentage, metabolic rate and my metabolic age.
It’s the last one that really kills me.
Oh, my weight is still too high – about six pounds over the high end of my BMI. My body fat is in the “overfat” arena, which is tremendously annoying. But, to add insult to injury, this scale tells me, every damn day that I’m three to four years older than I am.
Even if I kick her.
Oh, it’s not as bad as it has been. At a couple of points in time (Dark Months), she had me over 50. We’ve bargained it down from there. But she still insists that, metabolically, fattily, I’m older than I am.
Otherwise, I’m a youthful person. I come from a family of youthful women. People say I look younger than I am. I admit I have ego tied up in it.
So, while it’s nice to see my weight come down, the body fat percentage decrease, what really makes my day is when I lose a year overnight. I feel like Merlin, aging backwards, growing younger.
I’m not really inclined towards anorexia, but I could see wanting to keep working to peel those years away. Erasing the pounds until I’m a sweet, young thing again.
Eh, who am I kidding?
I’ll be happy to shake the “overfat” insult.
//
The other day as I was driving home, this woman pulled out in front of me.
I knew she was going to do it. I could see her from a ways off, watching the oncoming traffic to her right. Whatever it is that telegraphs what other drivers are going to do, told me that she’d already decided to go after that group coming from her right. She looked at me, now approaching from her left, but pulled out anyway.
She had already made up her mind, after all.
Much has been made lately of the split-second decision. The knowing without conscious thought, as in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. It’s an interesting concept, and I think Gladwell makes good points, in both Blink and Tipping Point, about how we decide, from life-mates to editors buying manuscripts. (Same thing?) This plays into what I was talking about yesterday, with how our brains filter information.
It’s important to be decisive. Without decision, you are paralyzed. Unable to act. And it’s nearly impossible to analyze all the factors that go into a decision in reasonable time to act. If you wait until you’ve analyzed every possibilty, every variable, the moment has passed.
Decision means to cut away — same root as incision, only you take it out instead of cutting in. You cut away your other options until only one remains
The important thing, I’m thinking, is that only one course of action remains for just that moment. If conditions change, you have to be ready to alter the decision. The lady in the other car made her decision, but she was then unwilling to let go of it when another factor, me approaching from the other direction, presented itself.
Much is made, also, of the ability to stick to decisions. To select a course of action and persevere regardless of obstacles. We’ve all witnessed the virtue in that. Countless stories abound of people who achieve great things this way. However, we can all think of people who persisted along a course of action regardless of the fact that it wasn’t working. If I decide to drill my way through a brick wall by banging my head against it, it’s likely my skull will give before the wall does, no matter how strong my resolve.
But then, it would be a bad decision in the first place.
I’m a fan of the bad decision, actually. I truly believe it’s better to make a bad decision than no decision. The paralysis of trying to make the perfect decision is excrutiating. The key is then being willing to constantly reevaluate the decisions I’ve made. To question the basis for them. Why did I believe my skull was stronger than brick at the time. Perhaps I should reconsider my assumptions.
It takes resilience and flexibility. Something that grows more difficult as we grow older. Just as our bodies tend to stiffen, so do our assumptions. Young people are sometimes derided for being flighty — changing majors and mates with flagrant flexibility. They are urged to pick one thing/person and commit.
Perhaps those of us who’ve gotten good at committing should be urged to reassess.
//Laramie has one movie theater.
To speak of. There’s actually a second one, but they show the $2 movies and the every-other Sunday film series movies that come out on DVD a week later in an ancient and virtually unheated venue. I kid you not — people bring blankets with them. It’s not a cosmopolitan town.
So, the real movie theater has six screens and if we’re lucky, they’ll slip an Academy Award nominee in with the flicks intended to entice the high school and college crowd. Six screens is a big step up for us, because there used to be only two and now the one side that was split into four parts has stadium seating. Big excitement for us.
But the bathrooms are exactly the same as when I first moved to town, exactly 20 years ago last August. This means I’ve been dashing out of movies to pee in the exact same stall (second one down, because the first is for handicapped access) since I was 21 years old. The wall of mirrors over the sinks have reflected the last 20 years of aging, and the full length mirror to the right of the door has provided proof that I weigh 20 pounds more than I did then. I would say a pound a year isn’t that bad, but it was a fair amount more than that for a while and is thankfully back down again.
It’s funny — I like the image in the mirror now more than I did then. Any of those thens, really. I dashed out of “Taken” last night (the best of the six possibililties and pretty decent, though I was pouting over not getting to see “The Wrestler” or “Slumdog Millionaire”) to hit the loo and thought of this on the way out. Sunday night, I’ve been cleaning house all day: I did not cute up to go to the movies. But in my jeans, sweater and make-up free state, I looked just fine as I opened the door to head back in. I didn’t even pause to pivot for the critical side-angle/backside evaluation.
Which is what it comes down to, I suppose. Greater generosity with myself. In fact, I forgot at first to pay attention to the mirror, until it hit me that we’re moving in six months. I’ll lose my chronicle of appearance. All those me’s will stay behind, recorded in the women’s restroom mirrors. Grad student, young stepmother, older stepmother. The me of today. The me yet to come won’t be seen in those mirrors.
There’s something to be said for that.
//I’ve been drinking too much wine again lately. It’s one of those things that just gradually ramps up. Over the holidays I indulged in both food and drink — including beer, which I love but is verboten if I want a flat tummy, which I do — but I’m ostensibly back on my training program, to get the body fat down just a little more. Only I haven’t quite ramped down the wine consumption.
It’s all a tolerance thing. If I don’t drink anything for a couple of weeks, then one glass of wine is enough. It’ll be delicious and satisfying, and perhaps even give me a little warm buzz. Maybe it’s the dark January evenings, but I haven’t done a ruthless, no alcohol diet yet this year. Instead I’m sipping red wine all evening long. It doesn’t help that Barefoot came out with the biggie bottle of red zin — it’s the wine version of hot chocolate. A pretty glass, a sparkling fire and that spicey bloody wine makes the winter evenings worthwhile.
And though I rarely get drunk, and haven’t made myself sick from booze in probably ten years (though we were all dragging rear Christmas morning this year from some really excellent champagne), I am so compelled by Pink’s Sober video.
I’ve been into Pink’s angry white chick music since her I’m Not Dead Yet album. Before that I’d written her off as a frothy hip-hopper, confused in my mind with Lil Kim and her ilk. I’ve since picked up her earlier stuff, too, and while there is some hip-hoppy stuff (apparently she was pushed that way by her early producers), a lot of it is raw and real and moving to me.
While I, even in my most dedicated Gamma Phi Beta college days, was never the party girl Pink depicts in her video, there’s a part of her I know. Perhaps it’s that ever-present fear that you could slip that far. Fall over the edge into an oblivion where you no longer recognize yourself. Pink’s plaintive cry “why do I feel this party’s over?” echoes the somber realization of the over-40 woman. I’m having to realize that the days of perfect resilience are over. I no longer blithely burn everything I eat and drink.
A friend of mine is an adrenaline junkie. He’s made a career of it. A fabulous career of doing amazing things like climbing unclimable mountains and kayaking through ice floes and writing about it all. Just after New Year’s he went ice climbing with a friend. An avalanche roared over them and the friend died. I saw my friend yesterday and I almost didn’t recognize him, he looked so unaccountably aged. Perhaps it’s the grief dragging him down and he’ll recover. But I wonder what the over-50 adventure athlete does when the activities he’s defined himself with are too much for him to recover from. Not all of them face this moment — many get themselves killed before that. I suppose the one who survives redefines himself. Fortunately my friend is a great writer and a man of many talents.
It’s easy to feel like the party’s over when you hit the realization that second two-thirds of your life aren’t going to be quite as on fire as the first third. Or second half vs. first half. But maybe it’s just that it’s a different party. A party in which I can be satisfied with a single glass of wine.
Maybe two.