Hair Brained

Apparently, a correlation has been found between the location of a woman's ponytail and her intelligence. Her perceived intelligence, that is. The credentials of the folks putting forth the theory are, at best, questionable, but to be on the safe side I've tied my hair back today at the nape of my neck. The last thing I need is to be taken for a fool.

In a nutshell, the higher the tail, the ditsier the gal. As far as I can tell, cheerleaders and teenagers are exempt from stereotyping based on ponytail angle; a high bouncy one is for them, if anything, more an indicator of liveliness than stupidity. But put a middle aged woman in one of those and she screams moron. At any age, tie it up at the top of your head and, well, I won't repeat the politically incorrect adjective used in the article but let's just say we're talking IQ in the double digits. On a good hair day.

I never knew hair could tell us so much about a person. I always thought I wore a ponytail to keep my tangled, unruly mess out of my face. Actually, I've always thought that a ponytail of any kind showed a certain level of common sense and ingenuity, not to mention an admirable lack of vanity about coiffure. Who knew I could be so off the mark?

I wonder if mens' hair offers up its own variety of valuable information. Male pattern baldness aside, there's still lots of news to be gleaned from the hair that seems to sprout from every follicle once a man hits forty. A cyber dating buddy recently sent me the following excerpt from the profile of his latest "perfect match":

I have a huge body hair fetish, and am looking for only the hairiest men out there. I mean hairy everywhere: entire back and shoulders as well as chest, covered DENSELY with hair everywhere.

Clearly, the beastly look speaks to this woman. But what does all that fur say? What lusty secrets does she hear from those curly, sweaty strands? Whatever the case, my buddy was all over it; he cancelled all his waxing appointments, and was, he admitted, completely aroused by the prospect of having this woman braid his back. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but it sounds like someone's ponytail is maybe a bit too tight. I don't have a picture of the gorilla lover, but if there's a ponytail location that suggests totally fucking nuts, I'm guessing that's where hers is.

From now on, before I go on a date, I'm going to demand to see clear pictures of the guy's torso -- all views. I'm not sure what the level of hairiness will tell me, but if the information is there, I will find it. As long as I wear my thinking cap and keep my ponytail on the down low.

The Bottom of the Curve

Great news! Researchers have come up with a new theory of happiness, and it’s an upside down parabola, with middle age right smack at the bottom where it belongs. It’s only gonna get better from here.

Some studies scream with flaws, but this one seems pretty airtight, and there’s no way I’m looking to debunk a hypothesis that has me on the fast track to euphoria. And the article I read was in The Economist; the British sound so intelligent I tend to believe them, no matter what they say. (Really, who else but a Brit could spell “aging” with an “e” and not be subject to ridicule?)

The theory certainly rings true for me so far, especially the part that points to the forties and early fifties as being the peak time of unhappiness. It’s almost making me giddy with excitement about my next birthday (only ten months to go). According to the researchers, happiness goes hand in hand with our physical deterioration; at some point, we simply stop striving for what we haven’t achieved and accept our limitations, realizing time is short and we might as well enjoy ourselves. Sure, having kids leave the nest and having some financial security helps, but it’s more about our physiological and emotional development than anything else.

I’ve never wanted to be someone else – someone younger, or prettier, or smarter, or richer – although I certainly have wished on occasion to not be me. I mean that only in the sense that I regret certain mistakes, and regret having to suffer the consequences of whatever life tosses my way, whether or not I’m at fault. But I’ve never wanted to trade places and become another person; for better or worse, I’ve grown very accustomed to the person I am, and don’t really have the inclination or the energy to get to know someone else. Mrs. Potato Head is here to stay.

When I look at my children and marvel at their youthful glow and their optimism and their bodies that don’t creak and the wealth of opportunities that lay before them, I do so not with envy but with joy mixed with lots of worry. I worry that they will become less youthful (they will), that they will become more jaded (they will), that they will one day suffer aches and pains (they will), and that one day the world will no longer seem to be their oyster (it won’t). They will (I hope) go through the stages of life and experience joy and sadness and success and frustration and the daily ebb and flow of contentment. And all I can do is watch and hope for the best.

At least now, I can reassure them that when the going gets tough, there is a light at the end of the tunnel – although that light seems, well, light years away for them. Only those of us who’vemade it to the bottom of the “u-bend” and beyond know just how quickly time passes.

I probably won’t even have to tell them that things will get better. Within a few years, they’ll be watching me as I swing from the rafters, my ecstasy unfolding before their very eyes, and they’ll get it.

Stirring the Pot

The closest I came this year to making a new year's resolution was promising my daughter I'd actually cook something new at least three times a week. I've been grabbing all sorts of ingredients, stirring them up, and letting them simmer. We never know how it's going to taste, and more often than not it's bound to be a recipe for disaster. Maybe, every once in a while, it'll be delicious. So many ingredients, so many variables. Life, and in our house these days, dinner, can be full of surprises.

Years ago, when my father was dying, I had lunch with a friend who was also on the verge of losing her dad. I was losing my favorite person on earth; she was losing a man who had, at times, caused her great emotional pain, and she was struggling with the ambivalence that goes along with years of unresolved conflict. Watching a parent die, no matter what the relationship looked like, is nasty business.

And it's complicated. It draws out all your emotions and stirs them up into a big mysterious stew and lets them simmer for what seems an eternity. A recipe for disaster some days; you just never know how the pain is going to taste. At that lunch, on that particular day, my friend and I descended inexplicably into a hysterical fit of laughter. An observer would have thought we were discussing anything but the death of a loved one. Sure, we had tears in our eyes, but laughter does that to you. There's just such a fine line between joy and pain. Indifference is so much simpler.

I thought about that lunch yesterday as I sat drinking a Starbucks, cackling with what would have appeared, to the casual listener, to be unadulterated amusement. I was on a conference call (yes, I'm very important) with my attorney and my financial adviser, discussing the sorry state of my finances and the relative costs and benefits of pursuing further discovery. Hilarious. The mere concept of having a conversation with an attorney about prudent spending when every sentence you utter costs another pound of flesh makes me giggle.

Every once in a while, with good reason, I need a good cry, but the truth is laughter is usually the best medicine. At the very least, that phone call helped me burn a few calories; I had come in from the cold thinking I'd never thaw out, and by the time I was done, I was sweating bullets. And I felt better than I had all day, despite the various disturbing revelations I experienced during the call. Wringing my hands and moaning wouldn't have changed the facts, and the cardiovascular benefits would have been negligible. You just gotta laugh.

Last night's stew was vegetarian chili. It was neither disastrous nor delicious. No voracious shoveling in, no scornful pushing around on the plate. Pure and simple indifference was what I got from those ungrateful children. Easy to recognize; not at all complicated. They were unmoved by the eight hours it took to cook it. (Who cares if those eight hours took place in a crock pot; eight hours is eight hours.)

I just had to laugh.

The Windy City

My new best friend, Jose, came to fix the fence while I was away. Once again my world is self contained, protected. Theoretically.

Miss Jill, he calls me. Actually, Miss Yill. “Everything is all okay, Miss Yill,” was the message I picked up from him when I landed at Ohare the other day. If I had known everything could be okay for only two hundred fifty dollars, I would have arranged for Jose to mend my fence a lot sooner.

Last year at this time, I came home from a wonderful few days with my daughters to a world in which the shit started to hit the fan and wouldn’t stop. The era of the friendly separation officially ended, and acrimonious divorce proceedings began. Within weeks, my theory that the official, court-sanctioned break up of my marriage would be civilized, with attorneys acting only as liaisons as they expertly navigated the system for us while we went on with our lives, was blown to smithereens.

It’s been a year during which all my fences have been blown wide open; I’ve been battered at regular intervals by powerful storms, but the greatest bruising comes simply from the harsh winds of change. There are reminders everywhere, of the good, the bad, and the ugly, all of the haphazard pieces of my life which have become so comfortably familiar. It’s difficult to let go of any of it, and I find myself clinging sometimes to an irrational hope that the clocks will turn back and everything will simply go on, as it was. For better or for worse, just like we promised before God stepped aside and let the state take over. I think God needs to intervene at this end of things.

The mourning process that accompanies divorce moves at a snail’s pace. I suppose it’s difficult to achieve closure and acceptance when something can’t be pronounced clinically dead. The marriage and its trappings continue to breathe, and take on a life of their own that seems so much larger than the life you’ve suddenly been left to figure out. Even when you’ve chosen to finally pull the plug, it takes an excruciatingly long time to sever the connection. It’s as if somebody put crazy glue in the sockets.

Jose may have fixed the fences, but the new slats of wood are so different in color from the rest of the fence it looks as if he simply slapped on a bandaid. But really it's just a fresh scar, a scar that will fade over time and eventually become almost indistinguishable from the parts that were not broken. Almost, but not quite.

At any rate, Jose says everything’s okay. Maybe he’s right. Maybe the harsh winds will change direction, and the old wounds will begin to heal.

Mama Mia!!!

Some guy bought my younger daughter a drink the other day. Okay, we were poolside in Mexico, it was a virgin pina colada, and the guy – the hotel owner’s grandson – was too shy to approach her so had a friend do his bidding, but still. Add to that all the young men fawning over my older daughter the minute she would flash a smile and I began to wish I had brought along a bodyguard. Or maybe an octagenarian with failing eyesight so at least I could get some attention.

As is usually the case for me (in my wildest dreams), all I need to do is wish for something and there it is. Poof! A handsome young Italian cop in a speedo was not exactly what I had in mind, but somehow this fairy tale version of a bodyguard materialized by our sides two days into our Mexican vacation and seemed to have nothing better to do than hang with us. (Ha ha, hang!) My mother always told me you could spot a European just by looking at his shoes. Well, Officer Angelo’s flip flops looked perfectly ordinary to me, but the skimpy bathing suit lurking beneath his long beach shorts was a dead giveaway. Let’s just say that when I kept looking down, it wasn’t exactly because I was being coy. And the accented English; dio mio!

Well thank goodness I didn't wish too hard for the blind old fart. My lazy beach vacation had suddenly been upgraded to a sightseeing trip. Goodbye fireman fantasy, hello Italian law enforcement. I immediately started imagining my upcoming crime spree in Italy, just so I can snag a pat down. (Sure, I was not exactly the object of Officer Angelo’s attention, but really, who gives a shit? A little eye candy went a long way toward alleviating the tedium of the endless hot and sunny hot days.)

Language barriers and cultural differences aside, our scantily clad Roman cop was a fine addition to our vacation. Guess I’m a sucker for a guy in a uniform, and his were top-notch; his white jeans in the evening left little more to the imagination than the speedo. Polite, soft-spoken, attentive to our every whim – they don’t make ‘em like that on the Jersey Shore. Or on the shores of Lake Michigan, for that matter. This was no Saturday Night Fever Italian from my neck of the woods in Brooklyn; this was the real Macoy. Maconi?

The hotel owner's grandson never showed up again, which was kind of disappointing since I had been harboring grand hopes for a round of drinks for our entire crew. At least we still had Officer Angelo, his rippling muscles ready to be flexed at a moment's notice should anyone unsavory invade our space. He kept a watchful eye on my girls. And me, well, there was really nothing left for me to do except keep a watchful eye on Angelo.

Pink Paradise Lost?

The pink and white paradise where we honeymooned twenty-five years ago remains unchanged. The palm trees are as verdant and stately as they always were, the flowers as brightly colored and plump as if they had been painted onto the impossibly lush landscape. Pink jeeps still rumble by on the hilly paths to the casitas, the drivers chipper and ageless. Fresh croissants and coffee still appear as if by magic in the morning through the box cut into the wall of the casita; nothing there has become worn out or stale.

On my first evening this time around, as I looked in the mirror over the bed, I wondered why the person looking back at me had so many more wrinkles. I suppose paradise wouldn’t be paradise if it was affected by the ravages of time, but mere mortals are fair game, and twenty-five years have taken their toll.

Sounds like I got my panties in a knot, I know, complaining this way as I settled in for a few days of rest and relaxation with my daughters in a ridiculously beautiful place where people seemed to exist just to cater to us. Maybe it was just the petty annoyance of my thighs rubbing together after a month long chocolate binge. Or maybe it was the really attractive excavation I performed on my chin when I detected the beginnings of what would have remained an invisible zit had I not tried to squeeze the living crap out of it. Or maybe it was just that for some reason (possibly the ten minute headstand I did in a yoga class the week before) I couldn’t move my neck. The warm Acapulco sun had not yet worked its magic on my little infirmities, much less my psyche.

Even sunshine and warmth can’t fix everything though. The memories are just so hard to shake. When we arrived here for our honeymoon, everything seemed so full of promise; the meticulously manicured hotel grounds were merely a confirmation of it all. This time, the perfection seemed to stand in stark contrast to all that has gone awry.

With the marriage, that is. There I was with my daughters, two of the beautiful fruits of my labor, so full of promise and dreams. I may be a little worse for the wear, but perfection is an illusion, and even in the painted pink and white utopia so many years ago, things weren’t exactly as they seemed. Just ask the maid who walked into our little love nest to find me sitting on the toilet and puking my guts out in the bathroom garbage pail, begging my new husband to whisk me away from this god awful country. Was it an omen? No, I don’t think so. Just garden variety food poisoning; even paradise has its dirty little secrets.

There was an upside to the stiff neck, I think. It stopped me from spending the week turning around, looking back.

Feliz Ano Nuevo

I woke yesterday morning to all the detritus of New Year’s Eve and then some. Every year, on the first of January, I sneer at the concept of a New Year’s resolution, knowing full well that the first morning of the year inevitably begins with a pounding headache and a startling inability to function. This year January 1st fell on a Saturday, which will allow many of us to cling to the fiction that our fresh new existences can remain on hold until Monday.

At least I didn’t wake up to miserable weather. The Acapulco sky turns blue every morning, like clockwork, and the ocean breeze allows you to acclimate gently to the blazing heat of the day. But even there, where life can seem like paradise (as long as you don’t venture out onto the streets teeming with cars on the verge of break down and scantily clad people who shouldn’t be scantily clad) New Year’s Day starts with a buzz kill.

Still sprawled sideways across my bed, I looked out onto our pretty pink patio only to see piles of dirty dishes on the table, and a trail of chewed up leftovers that had been dragged by nocturnal critters across the tile. Some of the uneaten food wasn’t even appealing to the critters, and still lay shriveled and hardened on the crusty plates. Music still blared from a club across Acapulco Bay (I envisioned throngs of revelers passed out in their party masks on the makeshift dance floor) and the loud pop of an occasional stray firework pierced the morning quiet. To top it off, I stumbled over to the little box in the wall of our casita where I am generally greeted by a basket of fruit and rolls and a lukewarm pot of coffee and found it empty, except for the final hotel bill listing our incidentals for the week.

Cynical as I am, though, I tried hard to start the year off on a positive note, and trudged off to the gym to try to minimize the effects of the seventeen tons of guacamole and chips I’d eaten in the last five days. Back home in the tundra, the gym is where even the laziest slackers head on New Year’s Day, deluding themselves into thinking something will change. I gotta hand it to the folks at the hotel in Acapulco, not feeding into that kind of bullshit. The gym had not even been straightened from the day before. There were no towels, there was no water, and there was certainly no equivalent of the valet service offered in January at my home gym so the brand new exercise nuts won’t have to walk from their cars.

Why kid myself? I turned around and went back to the room to await delivery of my breakfast, and set my mind to thinking about where I would get my final guacamole fix before heading home.