Random Realizations
With the exception of catching a cold, it’s been a fantastic week. Fun things to do, plenty of excitement and opportunities to wear high heels. And along with my trend of expanding wisdom with increasing age, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve discovered over the past seven days. Maybe some of them will be helpful.
- Birthdays are awesome, especially when your kids make you cards.
- With chocolate inside.
- It is possible to survive a week without diet Coke.
- When staying in a chic hotel with exciting on-site nightlife, you have to expect drunken hotel guests.
- Who are incapable of moderating their voices in quiet hallways.
- At 1:25, 1:54, 2:17 and 3:20 am.
- While lying awake silently cursing rude hotel guests, it is possible to forget all semblance of manners or empathy or respect for human life.
- Children get tired-and-cranky exponentially faster when playing at other children’s houses.
- A good playdate can last for eighteen hours, but requires devoted host parents. (XOXO)
- The best possible time to run into people from your past, say, college, is when you are decked to the nines in an expensive dress, killer shoes, hip jewels, and freshly-straightened hair and out for a date with your cutie-patootie hubs at The Four Seasons.
- No matter where you order it, shellfish-over-pasta is just shellfish-over-pasta. Lesson learned.
- However, it is possible to do some very exciting things the next morning with french toast.
- It is possible to still have things to talk with one’s husband about for nearly a whole day, even after seventeen years.
- Chic young things at swanky, hip bars in boutique hotels spend too much time on their cell phones texting people who are elsewhere and not enough time enjoying their surroundings.
- Although they seem to enjoy their fifteen-dollar vodka-and-tonics plenty.
- Thirty-nine and cancer-ridden means that four cocktails over the course of an evening, even with food, will result in a hangover.
- Irrespective of the quantity of water consumed during the same evening.
- Hangovers are quickly dispatched while lying in a pouffy hotel bed watching TV and eating salt-water taffy for breakfast.
- Coughing at night is more annoying than drunken hotel guests outside your room.
- Divorce can be avoided by sending the coughing party (me) to sleep in the guest room.
- All drivers who are not me are complete and utter morons.
- Especially when I’m running late.
I hope I have enlightened you with some of my new old-woman wisdom. I’m home from chemo and off for my daily kip. If you need me, I’ll be in my office.
I Love Birthdays
Isn’t it sad how most women fear getting older? How much money we spend on facial treatments, personal trainers, Lycra undergarments, and hair dye to avoid the appearance of aging? Like the bimbos on Jersey Shore are really having any more fun than actual grown-ups.
Today is my 39th birthday. If you’d asked me three years ago whether I’d see 39, I might have said no. And I know there are a lot of people out there who will quake at the impending doom of the big four-oh, worrying that it symbolizes the fading of youth, the approach of pop-culture irrelevance, the relegation to “old-person” status. (Okay, maybe not Dara Torres.)
Not me. I’m thrilled to be having a birthday at all. And if I get the chance to go grey, to get (more) wrinkly, I’ll be excited about it. Not just because it’ll save me a fortune in blonde highlights, but because it will advertise my success. It will broadcast the triumph of will, love, modern medicine and good nutrition over the evil cancer monster. It will announce to the world that I am more interesting than I was at 25, more complex, a better friend, partner, and parent. I will have wisdom to share, stories to tell, funnier jokes. (I’m willing to let the bikini go for funnier jokes.)
I know I come back to this analogy frequently, but I feel like aging adds more and more intricate pieces to the mosaic image that is my life. The pixels get smaller, the details crisper, the image sharper. More interesting.
Old people are cool. Bring it on.