Moojinorbit

Because this whole blog is, inevitably, an experiment in making my already fairly public personal life even more so, I think I’ll buck up and finally write about the child thing.

No, not my inner child; she’s doing fine, ornery as ever. I’m talking about the child I’m trying to conceive of conceiving. Baby W., for the time being. The baby that might someday appear in my world. The baby that might turn out to be only a series of thoughts over a series of years.

Exciting, overwhelming thoughts.

Let me first say that I had no idea–no idea–that even getting my life ready to bring a child into the world would be this difficult. Andria and I were talking about this a couple of days ago. When we were younger I think both of us figured that the whole ‘baby thing’ would have already fallen into place long before this point in our lives. But if you’re not in a heterosexual relationship it really turns out to be a whole different ballgame. (Sorry, Mom. I know you told me so.) Things just do not line up automatically for most of us. I can think of at least six reasons for this:

1. You can’t have an “oops” baby (unless you’re up to something that’s probably not doing wonders for your relationship anyway).
2. You can’t be back-and-forth about having a baby and then just decide to skip birth control and let the Universe decide.
3. Thanks to all the loving Christians in our great egalitarian democracy, the myriad protections of legal marriage are not an option in 49 states, which means that
4. Same-sex couples or single lesbians and gay men have to plan it a lot more carefully, which turns out to be a painstaking process involving legal contracts, medical investigation, ethical decisionmaking, psychology, and most likely a good deal of money. The lesbians I know who have gone through fertility testing, sperm bank conception, and/or insemination have spent in the range of $4,000-$7,000–just to get pregnant.
5. Your entire social and familial world is most likely not breathing down your neck about “having a family” or making you feel like you’re somehow deficient if you don’t. This has positive aspects (although my mom does a fair amount of “reminding” me about the baby thing), but the flipside is that people often assume you don’t want or shouldn’t have kids. (Maybe this makes us wonder if we don’t want or shouldn’t have kids…)
6. By the time you’re at a semi-comfortable place in your relationship and/or career to consider kids, your straight friends with kids start to seem fairly miserable or have dropped off the planet due to childrearing. Meanwhile, your non-parenting lesbian friends are just starting to take really good vacations and throw beautifully sophisticated dinner parties and the like. You’re thinking, “gee, should I throw a grenade in all this and have a kid or, instead, have a nice, rich life for a couple decades and just be an auntie/friend/godmother to the kids I know whose parents could use some help?”

Maybe the last one is just me, but I’m betting some of you can relate. I also think there’s a lot of appeal to being gay or lesbian auntie/uncle people in a world of families that need a lot more support. I think I could be a better aunt, but I love being one and I know it’s a commitment I can deepen as I choose, which is a gift.

Okay, having said all this, I have invited Dawn and Marce, two of my longest, most trusted friends to come over tonight to talk about the possibility of Baby W. I’m doing this because it’s a conversation I want to have with them before I abandon my child-bearing hopes in the face of still not having secured the committed relationship I want in time to do this via a primary partnership. Having done some more concrete investigation into the conception process this last year, and thought a lot about what it would be like to do it alone, I’m pretty overwhelmed by the idea. Could I do it “by myself”? Probably, by the skin of my teeth, crawling on my hands and knees. (Like that double cliché?) Would I want to? Hell no; I’d need some serious support.

I’m also meeting with D. and M. because sometimes I have this vision that raising a child could be a more creative love-collaboration than we tend to support in a nuclear family-obsessed society. Frankly, the nuclear families I know are having a hard enough time with it anyway and, as we know, all kinds of families are creating their own definition of a loving nucleus when the conventional plan doesn’t work out. Maybe, as Hillary says, it does take a village. Maybe I could do it if I wasn’t in the commitment entirely alone.

I’m not saying I’m going to do it. I’m saying I’m going to think about doing it and talk it through with some more loved ones. My immediate family already supports me (though I think Daddy’d be in for a big surprise!), but they live in California. Eric & Jen support me, but they’ve got their hands full (in case you haven’t read Jen’s blog lately).

Dawn and Marce are two amazing women who don’t expect to bear their own children. Both have reiterated over the years that they would like to actively be part of the life of any child I might raise. They may regret saying that. They also live here, at least for now. I want them to be involved if Baby Wadsworth happened–that would be such a lucky child!–but we also need to figure out what that might mean. What part of “involved” could I count on? What would commitment mean in this context? Babysitting is one thing, but every kid needs people they can count on their whole lives. So does every parent.

I just had a hilarious image: If I had a kid at 40-41, all three of us will be breaking the 70 mark when B. Wadsworth hits 30. And if I have my way, we’ll all be shacking up w/ our partners in the moojie retirement home of our dreams, the Victorian we buy with the hired maid, nurse, and cook. Marce’ll be limping around on her wooden stump leg. Dubber will be reading on a couch, in her Depends. I’ll be trying to get the cookies in the oven with my tremor hands. That kid will have a helluva time explaining us to his/her fiancé.

Anyway, who knows. But what if instead of a nuclear family planet with satellites, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends who occasionally swim in and out of our orbit, we built a web of loving connection for a child? I don’t know if I’d go with an anonymous donor or my friend Kevin who’s generously offered his DNA, but what if that web also included Kevin and his partner Pagan? What if a child had a dozen people s/he considered grandparents? Would my life be an insane tangle of negotiated relationships or could it be an incredible web of love?

Also: the whole thing scares the living daylights out of me.

Anyone up for this?

Check out this cool marvel of divine engineering I found this morning:

Unfortunately, until I replace my broken digital camera I have to use my Mac to take photos. It’s pretty funny dragging the laptop over to the fence, but how cool is it that the MacBook has a camera built into it? I wish the image was clearer, but, trust me, those dragonfly wings are incredible. Beautiful web-like devices, perfectly aligned. And at the end of the tail are these fin gismos that I’m guessing help him/her steer. Anyway, just thought I’d share that.

Also, another sweet miracle happened in my household recently. Last summer I bought a pretty little cactus, a tiny thing only about three inches in diameter. A succulent sage green momma flower, with two babies, one tucked on each side. But somehow I blew it, or they didn’t like the pot I put them in, or it got too blazing in the August sun, because first one of the babies dried up and then the momma didn’t look too happy either. I took them inside and put them on a windowsill for milder light. They seemed to do a lot better over the winter, but then one day in the early spring when the sun came out after what seemed like weeks, I made the mistake of putting them back outside for some sunlight and next thing I knew the mom looked sunburned and the other baby had shriveled up too. I think this was too much for the momma because half of her just kind of dried up and the other half looked like it was clinging for dear life, like this:

Who knows what I was doing wrong. I don’t think I overwatered. I couldn’t seem to figure out what kind of light she wanted.

But last week I turned the pot around on the windowsill and saw this cool rebirthing happening:

I took both these pictures today, so what you are seeing is the cactus from two sides. On this side is a whole new baby cactus pushing its way out from under the half-baked older one. Looks healthy and fine, just happily growing.

Believe me, I’m just going to leave well enough alone and appreciate.

Hello again.

For those of you who thought I might have fallen off the planet, no, I didn’t. I did, however, spend four days in Tennessee, which is a bit like falling off the planet. Maybe I’ll tell you about that sometime; for now, I’m leaving E. (and the South and the Army) out of all this. 

For those of you who thought I was kidding about bartending, you should know that my target, The Magnolia Hotel, appears to have hired me as of this morning, though it won’t be official until my criminal background check comes back (and god knows what that will mean given my checkered past). I interviewed with the Food & Beverage Manager, Jim, a gentleman I quite enjoyed, and we both agree that I seem like a good match for this part-time gig as a banquet bartender and occasional fill-in at Harry’s. (I also may have sold a business writing workshop through the Write Doctors to the hotel.)

Okay, but backing up a little. I posted about my bartender ambitions back in May, but then I didn’t update you. Long story short, I first just thought about it, then scoped out some bars with Dawn and Andria, only to conclude that I still wanted to try for The Magnolia, my first instinct. Then I couldn’t figure out how to apply, so I sat down one day and wrote a crazy cover letter that I ran only by Tanya, who liked it. Then I tromped downtown and left it for Jim, the guy at the Mag. I tried to give it to some other hotels, but they were so massive scale that they basically shuttled me like a rat into grimy back corridors where I was supposed to fill out application forms and stuff. It was actually pretty intimidating and made me feel like a desperate loser in seconds flat. I started down one of those corridors and then decided that before I went through with it I probably needed to figure out who I’d put as references, given that I’ve spent the last 10 years in academia and none in point-of-sale jobs (or at least not the same kind of point-of-sale jobs). I pretty much ran out of there and called Tanya who kindly took me out for the best mojito in town, which I sucked down while nervously marveling at my hair-brained schemes.

Over the next week I more or less forgot about the letter, figuring that it was probably laughed right into the trash. If not, I figured, the Universe would take care of it. Actually, I felt a bit embarrassed every time I thought about it. But today, when Jim told me how much he liked it and how he actually showed it to two 20-year old DU students (gulp; hope they don’t know me) as an example of “showing some go-to and focus on what you want,” I glowed a little. So I’m going to share it with you. I’ll tell you more about the job on Saturday, after my first wedding shift.

***

June 12, 2007

Nancy Wadsworth

Some of you may recall that I had a brand new rosebush stolen from my front porch about a month ago. (See Rose Burglar, and Jen’s hilarious comment.) Well, this morning I received what I will consider an apology. I’m watering my outside plants at 7:15 and notice two sturdy metal outdoor chairs, in great shape, positioned expectantly in the planter along the south wall of the house. No sign of the gifter, no note.

But they’re nice chairs and it seems that either someone planned to have a little chat and watch the people go by or wanted me to have a little treat. Maybe a guilty rose burglar who knows he did wrong.

Anyway, a reminder that random acts of thievery can be offset by random acts of gifting.

Did one of you do that? Grandpa?

My friend Cat Celebrezze had a look at my blog recently. (See her link at sidebar.) She said she liked it. She also used the term “self-indulgent”–not critically, just stating a fact. True, true. But I guess that’s kind of the point for me; it’s all about me and my astigmatic lens on the world. Given that I spend most of my days trying to think about why human beings collectively do what they do, or why they don’t do what they should if they really wanted to change the world, and I work with an endless parade of students about what they think and write, and I realize that at the end of the day if I don’t have some kind of self-indulgent expressive outlet I’m going to go insane.

But this post is not about me. This post is the first in what I hope will be an ongoing series dedicated to moojes I admire. I should’ve done it sooner. I guess I had to get a lot of “me” out of the way first. I’ve got a few saved up, though, like I can’t wait to write about getting to watch the Fairy Godmother of Rock n Roll, Stevie Nicks at Red Rocks a couple weeks ago.

Enough with the prelude.

Johnette Napolitano. This is the former lead singer and bassist of the ’90s band Concrete Blonde, who brought you the great black candlelit vampire anthems “Joey,” “Caroline,” and “Tomorrow, Wendy” from Bloodletting. They had other stuff you’d remember if it came on the radio right now (“Someday?” “Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man”), but I think after Bloodletting they never got the credit they deserved. Was it Clear Channel’s market carving that pushed them out of any recognizable “popular” niche? Did a member stumble down the sorry road headed for a VH-1 “Where are They Now”? Unless I’m missing something, their last album was in 2002, and hardly anyone was listening by then. Which meant that one of the greatest voices rock ever birthed was drifting into obscurity.

On the bright side, such an unfortunate decline means Grandpa and I had a chance to watch this furious enigma wail for $16 at The Walnut Room, a tiny venue with crystal clear sound, tonight. No fucking kidding. And the woman was a force of nature. Long black tank dress over silky black pants, an unruly mop of dark hair frizzing at the edges, wild eyes that lit up crazily on particularly high, low, or loud notes, tattoos snaking around her shoulders–she was a vision of power and vitriol and grace.

So don’t you cry
it’ll give you lines around your eyes.
You gotta to try not to live so much of life alone.
And if I see you getting crazy by the bottom of the bottle
I’ll take you home
I’ll take you home
I’ll take you home.

I’m guessing she’s maybe 50 now. Probably an alcoholic, given the bottle of red wine she was slugging from all night and her reference to “not going to rehab” in one of her songs–but defiant and unrepentant in a way that I had to respect. I’m not saying she wasn’t poised, she just had her own version of it. Periodically she’d fly into a blistering rant about the President or the war or whatever came to mind; righteous messy little tirades that she’d just as quickly reel in. Most of the time it was just her and her slate-black 6-string and this voice…

How to describe the voice? Like if you died and went to heaven and opened a door to find a room filled with powerful, unflinching, battle-marked, dirt-smeared goddesses as far as the eye could see, Johnette would be the queen of them all, and her voice would transport you to a place of sobbing gratitude.

Like if the Divine gave you a huge suitcase of vocal talent and then made you walk a million miles over red dirt and mud rivers and scree, until one day you clawed down to the dark velvety core of yourself and started singing.

Howls. Long, rich vibrating notes, delicate pitch changes. Rolling hills of sound. Expert pullbacks into whisper, then blossoming explosions of melody. Serious, badass, womanly-crusty voice. Backing herself up the whole way with just an acoustic guitar. I really, really want to link an mp.3 to this post but can’t figure out how.

I’m sad that Johnette has not gleaned the fame she deserves. (I wonder if her new solo album, Scarred, tells any of that story.) But so glad that she is out there writing songs from her Joshua Tree hideaway, still making albums, and showing up to give everything she’s got to small, lucky crowds like us.

I’m amazed at plants for the way they spring stubbornly back. Two weeks ago after a freak afternoon hailstorm my little xeriscaped backyard looked like it had endured the bombing of Dresden. A couple days later I clipped tattered limbs back and plucked shredded leaves, not knowing what would become of these creatures battered in full adolescent bloom. Would they survive the trauma? Would they pull back their color and shrink away until next year? Would they die?

Nope. Every day I inspect them I see more life. Soft green emerges from what appeared to be dry shoots. Leaves and buds proliferate from the very base of the pruned places. Flowers begin again where the vicious wind bent the old stems in half. I even think everything looks more invigorated than before, like it’s meeting a challenge. No one seems to be complaining, just aiming for the sunshine and going on with the business of living.

And I love weeding for the therapeutic value of it. Yes, I just praised plant life and now I’m revelling in destroying some of the most resilient botanical members–the underground mafia of the garden. Pig weed so tenacious it feels, as Grandpa puts it, like Satan himself is clutching the root. Grasses that find their way through weed shields and tons of rock on top. Ordinary dandelions able to survive in miniscule cracks of sidewalk. My admiration is massive, my respect complete. Oh, but the pleasure of yanking those buggers out and plopping them in a pile to wither in the sunshine until I toss them in the dumpster. The joy of systematic destruction just to achieve tidier beds, prettier walkways.

I don’t like weed killers other than my own hands. It makes me sad to see pigweed blanch, struggle, and give up. I’d rather yank and yank until I pull a muscle in my back–only to fail to pluck the whole thing and discover new leaves sprouting up again in a month. I appreciate that weeds are, collectively, a contender that if we battle with our own hands and not our chemical warfare (but probably even with it) will gain the upper hand and take over as soon as we stop fighting. If we all walked out of Denver, the city’d be drowning in weeds in less than a year. I love that.

Give me spring things in their delicate tenacity. Give me weed things in their clinging audacity. Yes, and Yes.

p.s.: Want to hear something funny? My mom thought the post Rocky Road: The New Crack was an erotic entry about cunnilingus or something. She goes, “God, Nanny, ‘the new crack?’ I don’t know if I should know about that!” I’m like, “But it’s not like I’ve done crack or anything.” She’s goes, “Oh! I thought you were referring to a different crack.” She was a little disturbed, and then I was even more disturbed, but, hey, she’s the one who went there. Strangely enough, none of you lesbians did.

The Universe is creating growth opportunities for me again. Let’s just admit that it never does stop. I notice, though, that after enough faith-challenging experiences I’ve started to honestly see these things as opportunities, not (just) disasters, and that’s got to count for something.

So, without going into the gory details, suffice it to say that I’ve come into some bracing financial challenges this summer. I already knew July through September were going to be trying because of the way I chose to be paid this year at DU, but yesterday I found out that my initial safety net/back up plan sort of, well, dissolved. I’m not putting this out there a plea for help. Not at all, though I welcome suggestions. But I do suspect that writing about it, rather than quietly stuffing it into my nightmares, will be useful.

The thing is, I know it’s all going to work out fine, even if it looks harrowing from here. I know because 1) it always has, and 2) I’m totally ready to embrace this lifelong challenge around finances, and the other stuff that’s connected to it. Bring it on, baby.

Now, I decided to work on this money demon every day for the next five weeks as part of a class at unchurch I’m taking on “Breakthroughs,” so you’ll probably have to deal with some related posts. (Never fear; I’m sure I’ll still have plenty to say about important things like ice cream too. In fact, if Mama’s gon’ be wresting that money demon, she’s gon’ need some serious ice cream. Y’all got anything to beat Rocky Road?)

Let me start with the reservoir. The image came to me last night in a meditation, and I realized I’ve never had a sense of “extra,” of “more where that came from,” of “plenty set aside if we need it” where money was concerned. In writing this, I am not blaming my parents. Life happened, divorce happened, everyone was stretched and did the best they could. And that “extra” money that Mom and Jim (my sweet stepdad) came up with to help me buy my house last year was the most wonderfully empowering windfall of my life. So I’m not saying I’m not extraordinarily blessed, because I am.

But let’s face it, my dad also grew up in a poor Iowa farming family that would bitch-slap you for throwing away a plastic bag because there might be some use for it down the road. He was so sculpted by his Midwest Protestant scarcity mentality that he would, much to my dismay, make us hang our clothes on the line in the backyard in affluent Newport Beach, not because it smelled sweet but because using the dryer cost money. Needless to say, no one in Newport hung their clothes on the line. That old cowboy worked his ass off (still does at almost 80) driving his 1970-something Ford Econoline van (like this one driven by Kojak) from construction site to construction site to make sure we had rent money, clothes to wear, food to eat. But then he’d spend Saturday afternoons polishing his Cadillac Biarritz or his swanky 1956 white Lincoln Continental in the driveway. As hard as he toiled, any sense of luxury or excess was reserved for him alone, as his gemstone-encrusted belt buckles attested. Back-to-school shopping was all about Sears and Fed-Mart, and I’m not saying I don’t partly get it now, but in a town where kids bought their Guess! jeans and Polo shirts at Neiman Marcus, it was hard to feel like I matched up.

You can imagine how helpful someone like my dad was with alimony. It seemed like he was always “saving,” but the results were rarely about reward, appreciation, or pleasure; only maintenance. At Christmas we’d have a tiny tree, and Jesus, and one present each–unless there had been something “big” we wanted earlier in the year, in which case that would count as our Christmas present. It’s not all his fault, but giving was not easy for him. Chloe offset Cowboy’s miserliness with generosity, but never was it outside my awareness that she survived on a tight teacher’s budget that was usually busting at the seams. When she happily bucked up for designer jeans I wanted to throw up at the counter, I felt so guilty and selfish. But I still really, really wanted the jeans. I wanted to fit in with my wealthy peers, at least at the baseline.

My dad’s iron grip on the green just made me want to indulge when I had it; I didn’t want to be someone who held onto money so jealously. Besides, I enjoyed exercising my autonomy once I was working to buy the stuff he wouldn’t buy me–like a phone to call my friends on. And watching my mom work to keep her head above water made me want to be cautious but also generous. And so, between them both, you see, I cannot say that money felt like a safe thing, a solid backdrop of security, or something I even understood. I never had a sense of it being a resource we had that enabled us to do other things, something that we could trust. So even though I saved up money from my after school jobs to buy my first VW Beetle, and even though I was not spoiled like a lot of kids I knew, I never had a sense of true savings, of savings-as-security, of savings-as-options-down-the-line.

No surprise, then, that money has not been a well for me so much as a mine. I may be maintaining a pretty decent garden on the topsoil for a while, but when the unexpected happens, or when I know of no other reserve source to access, money becomes a hole that I dig for costly underground resources. The diamond mines of student loans. The coal mines of credit card debt. The wasteful process and desperate experience of carving into the earth when I haven’t planned well enough how my energy should be spent, my resources protected, my future guarded.

Fortunately, I have made significant progress in these areas. I have succesfully cut away large amounts of consumer debt. I finally have an asset that will gain equity. I have been learning to save and to be more intentional. But I am still totally ill-prepared for contingencies and the unexpected. Thus, as the Universe would have it, I have manifested this recent crisis, another in a lifelong string of such crises, to raise my consciousness about how this is going to change. Which gets me back to the reservoir I want to create.

A reservoir. A place where a precious resource (yes, even money) is built up and preserved. A source that can be drawn from when needed, but always attentively replaced, so that it remains perpetually available. A well that nutures even as it exists quietly, ready. Beyond survival, beyond filling up the hole and closing the mine, beyond tilling the topsoil, building a deep, rich reservoir.

It may take awhile, it may take a revolution, but this is where I’m headed.

Gulp.

I have all kinds of updates to post, about life-after-haircut (above), about D.U.’s graduation, about seeing my adorable nieces tonight–stuff like that. But I think what I really want to tell you about is Haagen Dazs Rocky Road ice cream (also above, in case you hadn’t noticed).

Okay, seriously. Remember before every single brand of ice cream had fifty million different things in it, like oreos and heath bars and macadamia nuts, cookie dough, chocolate covered cherries, fishie crackers, dingleberries? Remember when your mom took you to the ice cream counter just at the local drug store to get an ice cream cone? Back then your choices were pretty much limited to chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate chip, pralines & cream, maybe peppermint stick (my favorite, when I was lucky and they had it). And there was always Rocky Road.

I’m obviously dating myself (jeez, on so many levels) and most of you probably don’t remember life before Ben & Jerry’s. But I’d say Rocky Road was the New York Super Fudge Chunk of the ’70s. (Wikipedia, however, tells us it dates all the way back to 1929!) I didn’t pay it much heed as a kid, being absorbed with peppermint stick and/or chocolate chip–and then bubblegum when Swenson’s busted that miracle out. Come to think of it, I kind of thought of Rocky Road as boring “grown up” ice cream. But recently I picked up a pint of the Haagen Dazs version and have not been the same since. (Maybe that means I’m a grown up. Nahh…)

I don’t know if I can describe it, but I have to try. First, I recommend letting it sit at room temp about five minutes before digging in, because you want the marshmallow stuff to be a little soft. The chocolate is velvety and not overpowering, just totally classic chocolate ice cream sweetness. Tastes like it came out of a home cranker after two hours of kids cranking at a summer picnic–but better. Then your spoon runs up against an almond or two, and it is such a pleasure biting into that rich, earthy, ever so salty taste, with the creamy chocolate melting around it in your mouth. So you’re grooving on that for awhile and watching your movie or whatever, thinking, mmm, I forgot how good Rocky Road is, digging absent-mindedly for more almonds, and the next thing you know your tongue has discovered something it never, ever wants to leave. It’s the most exquisitely satisfying sweetness–not spongy, not airy, just a tad sticky, actually a little slimy, but OH. MY. GOD. is it delicious. I don’t know how in the heck they make that marshmallow goo in there, but the first time my tongue registered it, I looked down into the container (because of course I don’t eat it out of no silly bowl) and went, what the heck IS that? I really can’t think of a fattening sweet thing that tastes any better than that gooey white stuff–not cotton candy, not cake, not Smarties, not Red Vines, not even Breyer’s natural vanilla (a definite ice cream contender). For me at least, it just resonates in the center of my being and I am, for seconds at a time, swimming around in the warm ether of heaven. Then of course I have to go spelunking for more goo, more chocolate, more nuts, more goo!

Boy, I better not set that stuff out on my front porch. It’ll be gone in seconds flat like the rose bush and pretty soon there’ll be dealers pedaling it on street corners.

One last note: H.D. sells both a “light” and a regular version and, as far as I can tell, they’re identical, so that’s a bonus if you plan to scarf down, say, three pints in a sitting.

Loving, loving, loving the haircut.

It feels fantastic–light, clean, feminine, free, and sparkly wth silver, mainly at the temples. Shannon completely got my vision and I think gave me a great cut. Jen reminded me that her title on her card is “Hairapist,” and I get it.  I’m thinking my $60 went quite a bit further, in fact, than my last therapy session.

Watching the true pattern of my gray emerge was actually fun. I was impressed to discover that there’s quite a clean line between the dark and the really, really silver–and I like it. My sister in law, Mary, also sent me some pics of my nephew today and in this one I noticed just how similar my gray pattern is to Bill’s. 

Actually, my hair doesn’t really look drastically different from Bill’s. I’ll post something when I get my hands on a camera. What a beautiful family, huh? How adorable is my sweet Reilly?

Okay, I know this blog is by definition self-absorbed (since it’s basically all about me and my observations) but I do think I’ve gone a little too far in the last few posts, so I’m going to stop with the hair report and sign off before I offer way more detail on my cosmetic journey than anyone ever needed. 

You thought I was joking, didn’t you? But I wasn’t. I just got off the phone with Rita B Salon, having made a commitment to cut my hair off. I mean OFF, like to less than two inches long. Shannon, our local lesbian avante garde punk coif mistress is going to do it. (This, by the way, is the woman who, when Grandpa first saw her was described thus: “Jesus, that woman needs to do something with her hair! Looks like she stuck her finger in a light socket!” But then again Kris spent most of her life mulleted in Pueblo and is not much for spikes. I’m not saying she doesn’t have good taste. Love you, G’Pa!)

Shannon’s never cut my hair before but I picked her instead of my cheaper gayboy Johnny at Fantastic Sam’s because a) I’ve come to admire the bold artistry of her work; b) I’m making a purposefully radical move, which I think requires an unflinching, even enthusiastic perspective on the part of the stylist; and c) I get the feeling that if I cried in front of her she’d just happily pass me a Kleenex and keep cutting.

And I’m giving myself permission to cry. Because the bottom line is that I’m cutting my hair really short because I realize I’ve become afraid of all the gray I have. I’m afraid of it making me look old, too old, “older than I am.” I’m afraid of it reminding me that I am, in fact, officially pushing 40 (2/8/08). And that fear gives it more power than I want it to have. So I’ve decided to face it, look it in the eye, as it were; cut off all that’s been dyed and see what the pattern underneath really is. And then spend at least a few days seeing how I feel about it, loving it, making peace with it. Then if I decide to play with color, or just dye the whole mess, I’ll do that. But I’ll at least have given myself a conscious pause.

In a series of pictures of me as a newborn, my dad is cradling me in his beautiful carpenter arms, wearing a white t-shirt. He’s looking down at me, smiling, and his full head of hair is almost entirely silver, with enough dark underneath to make him really handsome. He was only 40. My brother, at 37, who had the deepest brown-black hair growing up, is full salt-and-pepper now. My mom’s a different story; she didn’t get seriously gray until much later, and, besides, she’s dyed her hair red for as long as I can remember. So from my fraternal line we are a family that is, as they say, “premature” gray. Not a big deal for the men; my brother doesn’t seem to worry about it and people say it makes him look distinctive.

But women get a whole different message about gray than men and it pisses me off. Incredible cultural baggage is dumped on us about even a few gray hairs (and everything else, of course) and there’s part of me–the feminist, the Aquarius, the rebel?–that just doesn’t want to buy into it. Don’t get me wrong: I have no judgment about women coloring their hair; I think it is absolutely our aesthetic prerogative and we should do whatever the heck we want to with our bodies, including facelifts, or Botox, or whatever we choose. The point is that even if I do decide to color my hair again, which I’m sure I will, whether it’s later this week or five years from now, I just don’t want to do it with fear gnawing at the edges. In fact, I don’t want to age with fear gnawing at the edges. Yet as I’ve been creeping closer to 40, and perhaps especially because I’m still single, it’s very much been happening. I’m increasingly critical of my body (a body that is fine, healthy, and actually pretty rockin), about the wrinkles under my eyes, about the sun spots on my forehead, about those funny places you stumble upon where you find–egads!–crepe skin. And this just adds to the general pool of life-anxiety I’m always trying to manage. Who needs the fucking extra?

I distinctly remember being 10, and one of my mom’s friends, who was about 40, had short hair that was getting gray, that she did not dye. I thought she was awesome and I distinctly remember thinking that I wanted to be like her when I grew up: beautiful and strong in a natural, but still stylish way.

Tanya and I have talked about this several times, and one of her points is that if gray, or whatever color, hair doesn’t seem to fit your personality, because your whole life, say, you were a sandy blonde, or you’re just in a redhead phase, then you should go for the coloring that fits you. I don’t disagree. In fact, I think Viveca, for example, looks more “Viv” the blonder she is. (After all, she’s half Swedish.) My hair had a lot of blonde in it until I moved to New York, and maybe I’ll go back to that. Or maybe I’ll make use of the porousness of the grey and dye a few pieces of my new hair PINK! You don’t think I would?

But for now I’m committing to spending a little time with what is and working on not being afraid of it, embracing it even. Even if it means the curls are much shorter for awhile and I burp up a little when I walk by a mirror for a few days.

Wish me luck. Haircut’s in a half hour.