Silver linings (or not)

Sara's recent post about grey hair, and our response to it, reflects a lot of similar thoughts I've had on the topic. On the one hand, of course I want to accept my age. (But of course, I don't want to look too old while doing so.) Of course I want to age gracefully. (But just not too soon.)

I've wondered what I'll do when the time comes to deal with it. Aside from all the problematic health concerns linking cancer risks to darker hair dyes, and the problematic costs associated with the natural (e.g. henna) dyes (well, for that matter, surely even the most dastardly carcinogenic hair dyes must get expensive after a while), there's the old Institute baggage of the notion that we must accept ungrudging our ten unchangeables, such as aging and death.

(I don't actually believe this anymore, by the way. Death is inevitable, but that doesn't mean we don't strive to fight it every chance we get. It's a product of the curse, and therefore not something that we should just accept glibly without protest.)

Of course there seems something inherently dishonest about dyeing one's hair, just to pretend that one looks different from how one really appears. But that hurdle can be quickly resolved by pointing out that it's just as dishonest to wear makeup and coloured contacts, or to shave one's legs, or to get braces, or wear high heels.

No, my biggest problem with the notion of dyeing one's hair is the societal concession to an inflated standard of beauty. Just as the popular advent of make-up ('Painting like an Indian,' as Dad Gilbreth jeeringly called it in Cheaper By The Dozen) last century leveled the playing field for the masses and undermined the relative natural beauty of the genuinely good-looking, so the widespread and almost universal dyeing of hair gives us an inflated notion of youth. Most women who would otherwise go grey do dye their hair, because everyone else does, so we have come to associate grey hair with an exaggerated sense of oldness.

For that reason alone, I'd be eager to see society re-establish a rational, sensible acceptance of grey hair as compatible with vibrance and youth. But am I going to participate in countering the current trend? Probably not until the backlash grows to be a widespread phenomenon. No blazing of fashion trails for me.

I read recently (maybe in a review of this book?) that various tests and studies had proven that grey hair only advances the perception of one's age to the average viewer by three years. Whatever. I don't need to look three years older than I am. When I am thirty, fair and square, I will be perfectly happy to look thirty, thank you very much. Meanwhile, I will try very hard not to stress about it, since stress is supposed to bring on ye old hoary head.

Snow!

We had a winter storm warning on Wednesday, which was shortly followed up by the winter storm itself. Atlanta promptly shut down; as the first flurries of white flakes came down, every activity was canceled and the stores ran out of bread, milk, and toilet paper. I thought it was an urban legend when I moved here, but it's true: whenever it snows here (not too often, granted) people flock to the stores to stock up on supplies.

Meanwhile, Jane and Ella enjoyed their first brush with snow:

I know things have been slow with the recent writers' strike...

But honestly, is this the best they could do?

I won't tell you what movie I just finished watching, because that might give it away, but in the fit of scoffing that resulted I came up with the following obvious plot devices employed by low-budget and apparently desperate writers:

- In the dramatic confrontation scene, where the Hero confronts and fights with the Villain, sufficiently immobilise the Heroine so that her role is reduced to helpless screaming. For best effects, rig it so that her screams coincide with the most tense moments of the struggle, to further distract the Hero and highten the suspense. Give her enough of a free hand that we can waste precious screen moments by cutting back and forth between the epic conflict and her frantic struggles, but not so much that she breaks free and does something actually productive, such as clobber the Villain.

- When the relationship threatens to drag, bring in an additional potential love interest. Make her blonde. Trot her out and let her run her paces for a few scenes, then dust her off and return her to the wings from whence you plucked her so that the main characters can get on with their spectacular misunderstandings.

- Throw in a few sunset scenes. Zoom in on close-ups of the Hero's and Heroine's fake sobbing (didn't any of these people read Encyclopedia Brown?? Come on, we all know that when tears run from the outside corners of the eyes, they're not real!) in an attempt to distract from the obvious paintedness of the sunset.

- For good resolution, simply pair off characters with the likeliest candidates. Kill off all the leftovers so that nobody ends up alone.

$100 sapphire...check. Now what?

When we went on our Alaska jaunt last summer, I think I mentioned that the high point of the trip, aside from the abundant food and the midnight chocolate, was dashing about from shop to shop at every port of call, collecting free trinkets. My plan was to work some of these into nice little Christmas presents, which didn't pan out so well, as a recent cleaning frenzy unearthed the crumpled bag of treasures buried under some obscure pile of Deal-Withs. Ah, memories!

One of them is a blue sapphire. It was billed as genuine, and touted as being worth $100. Is Alaska really so short on tourists, and long on sapphires, that they've taken to giving these little gems away as a thank-you gift for visiting their humble shores, you wonder? Not quite - rest assured that they have a plan. When I entered the store, flourishing my stateroom coupon, I was offered the incredible chance to have the free stone mounted in a ring or pendant for only $50. Never one to throw good money after...um...well, no money, I declined the offer and walked out of there with my head held high, clutching my $100 sapphire, with no notion of what to do with it but with a very strong fondness for it, as, after all, it was Genuine, not to mention worth $100.

(This is not an isolated incident, by the way. Another store promised free freshwater pearl pendants, and then spent several minutes explaining to me why I needed to buy their $10 sterling silver chain to wear the pendant on. Finally they just gave up and let me have the pendant. I still haven't figured out what to wear it with.)

Now we're being followed by rocks

Just finished watching Pirates III and all I can say is, What? That's it???

No, seriously, now what? Is there going to be yet another movie to tie up all the rest of the loose ends satisfactorily? Hate to wreak havoc on this nice trilogy motif we had going, but there has to be a better resolution than once every ten years.

This is the woman scorned like which Hell hath no fury.

A minor diatribe

Internet shorthand will always be with us (at least as long as we have the internet), but that won't stop me from gnashing my teeth at all the little expressions I find particularly irksome. And the one which at this moment has aroused my derision is the phrase dh, shorthand for, I can only suppose, Dear Husband.

A small part of me (a very, very small part) wants to like the convention, because it sounds so charming and refined to refer to someone as Dear. It also sounds almost British (as in, 'Dear Charlotte,' or 'Dear Mamma'), and anything British is sure to score high points with my passing fancy.

Another part of me wants to stop being annoyed by it, because some people whose writings I otherwise like tend to employ it, and I don't want to catch them in the crossfire of my snide and possibly quite irrational dislike.

Another part of me wants to encourage any instance of niceness and civility in our language that I find, because of course it is laudable to consider one's husband dear, isn't it?

But mainly I just find it annoying. It's a very tiresome cheapening of the language, like a case of chronic italics in an impressionable teenager or the overuse of the word 'love' to mean all things from mildly be interested in to passionately adore.

And why the need to perpetually tack on the chirpy adjective? It almost suggests some kind of insecurity, that one needs so flamboyantly to wear one's heart on one's sleeve and insist how dear one's husband is. It seems to imply a kind of superiority, in stark contrast to those of us poor saps who are so blase as not to publicly call our husbands dear at every opportunity. If you're content to let your husband off with the mere title of husband, which is nothing if not prosaically descriptive, without any reference to the state of your relationship with him, well then! We can see just how loving a wife you are!

In fact, why stop at dh? Why not go gung-ho for this Positive Speech thing and make up all kinds of cute little acronyms to demonstrate vociferously just how wonderful and healthy and enthusiastic we really are? How about my brat (beautiful righteous adorable tot) or my lunk (loving unselfish nice kid) or my gross (gorgeous reliable opinionated svelte spouse)? Yes, why don't we start scattering these little tidbits throughout our conversation and see if the wonderful trend will catch on?

Or is the point to be deliberately unintelligible? Is that why the lazy but somewhat onomatopoetic LOL was abandoned for the more obscure, erudite, and hence now wildly popular ROTFLOL? Because if it makes too much sense, then it wouldn't be clever and original enough to use it, now would it?

Goldilocks

Jane is quickly getting the world all figured out and, per her perfectionist nature, methodically and systematically putting everything in its place.

It happened a few weeks ago that she noted a difference in heights by commenting, 'Jane is little; Mama is big.' Mama did not like this depiction, and promptly informed Jane that while Papa may be big, Mama is medium. So Jane dutifully took in this tidbit of information and proceeded to run with it (in a very methodical and systematic way, of course).

Many days later Michael coughed, and Jane commented, 'Papa's big cough!' She then turned to me and observed, 'Mama has a medium cough.'

Jane is not satisfied with one-sided conversations, so I must not only acknowledge what she says, but agree with her whole-heartedly:

Jane: Papa has a big cough!
Mama: Yes, Papa has a big cough.
Jane: Mama has a medium cough!
Mama: Yes, Mama's cough is medium.
Jane: Jane has a little cough! (cough, cough)
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little cough.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes.
Jane: Ella has a smaller cough!
Mama: Yes, yes, Jane, Ella does have a smaller cough, doesn't she??

These conversations happen fairly frequently now, and they tend to be rather predictable.

Jane: Papa has a big sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Papa's sneeze is big
Jane: Mama has a medium sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Mama's sneeze is medium
Jane: Jane has a little sneeze!
Mama: Yes, Jane has a little sneeze.
Jane: Ella has a smaller sneeze!
Mama: Yes, she does.

And the possibilities are endless. Jane will never run out of gambits.

These boots were made for walkin'

There is a little sketch somewhere by a famous artist of a man with multiple limbs doing cartwheels inside a big circle, the point of which is to prove that the length of the arms, fully extended, should exactly match the height of the body, or thereabouts. There are also optical illusions out there involving top hats and brims, which have something to do with ratios of height to width and all that.

Apparently footwear manufacturers draw their inspiration from these tidbits and decide that the circumference of a woman's calf must exactly match the length of her lower leg, from knee to heel, even including, say, a four-inch stacked heel for good measure (stop and admire my self-restraint for not ending that sentence with 'to boot.' Ha, ha!) From which you are to conclude that my long quest for a good-fitting black boot (or any colour boot, for that matter) continues unfulfilled.

I don't have particularly skinny legs. I am not plump, and I think my calves are about right for my height, and so it bothers me no end that absolutely no boot out there exists which will fit properly. All I want is a nice pair of basic leather (preferably zip-up) boots. I am past caring about price and will gladly pay any amount (and I already checked, and they don't sell boots at CVS) of ready money just to buy a good pair of boots that could last me a few seasons. Seriously, this search has been on for most of my married life, and you would think that at least one season they might come out with a normal boot for a normal-sized leg.