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Archives from 2002-2006

I’m sure there’s a way to live life without overthinking the smallest, most ridiculously inconsequential things, but I’ve been like this forever and I think it’s just the way it’s always going to be. Shoe shopping, for instance. I recently decided I needed a pair of boots. Like, those short boots. Booties? Do we really call those booties? That’s like calling shorts pantsies, isn’t it? But short boots sounds unnecessarily derogative, like I’m making fun of their height. Look, I’m talking about those boots that are kind of more like shoes, ankle boots, ANYWAY. I don’t really know why I got a message from the universe telling me to get this type of boot, my only explanation is that I exist in a mostly solitary world of repetitive housekeeping and child-Uber tasks and sometimes, frankly, I must engineer my own pleasure.

So I go out to find these boots, but I don’t like the awkwardness of asking someone to bring me different sizes because that makes me feel like an intolerable queen of some foot-specific country (“Fetch me a 7.5, peasant, and be quick about it!”) and I’m too impatient for Zappos so I head to DSW. They put DSW on the sign because it sounds slightly more trendy than its real name, Designer Shoe Warehouse. Whoo, that warehouse comes with a real lame-o feeling to it, doesn’t it? It’s like Dress Barn. Like no matter how cute whatever you buy may be, you’re always going to be embarrassed to admit where you bought it. “Oh, this? I got it at Purse Dumpster.”

DSW is uncool but I love it because I can just try on whatever without having to, you know, talk to another human being. (Although I do always feel bad about pulling out all the tissue and shoe forms over and over then inevitably being unable to get them all back the way they were, I can just imagine the poor employee going through the racks with the same head-explodey sensation I get when I find toothpaste on the mirror again, what is wrong with people.) I found a spiffy pair of boots after a massive amount of dithering over various styles and heel heights, so yay! New boots!

But then I got home with my boots and I realized I didn’t know how to wear them. I mean, yeah, put them on my feet, I had that part figured out, but I was picturing them with skinny jeans — because my idea of embracing fashion is to watch it suspiciously for several years before deciding to give it a shot, long after it’s gone out of style — and when I stood in front of the mirror with my skinny jeans and boots I did not look lanky and effortlessly edgy, I looked stumpy and awkward. Here were my legs, then a sudden transition to boot. It wasn’t really flattering. The word that came to mind was hooves.

Deep down, I know the real problem is that I’m endlessly self-critical and I will never stop comparing my own normal self to Stars: They’re Just Like Us! photos of impossibly gorgeous starlets who are younger than most of the mustard jars in my fridge, and of course I’m not going to look like them with my DSW footwear and stretched-out Target jeans. Still, I embarked on a Google quest to solve my problem and thus contributed to one of the millions of pathetic Yoda-sounding search strings typed by The Olds: “Skinny jeans and ankle boots how to wear?”

There are, naturally, a plethora of articles that address this specific cry into the void, complete with explanatory photos. I learned that one shouldn’t tuck one’s pants into the boot, because you need a break in the line of the leg at the ankle to avoid the stumpiness. Okay then! Cuffing seems to be key, but oh ho ho, not the wrong kind of cuffing. Apparently there are right ways and wrong ways to roll up your jeans, as evidenced by this actual sentence I have copied verbatim from one of the how-to posts I found: This is a cuffing style that you have to be careful with.

Well! Talk about a sentence custom-designed to send a cold trickle of sweat down my spine. This is how a person comes to own 37 identical grey hoodies, because at least if my head isn’t actively trapped in a sleeve when I leave the house I can be mostly certain I’m dressed correctly.

In conclusion, I’ve yet to wear my new boots because I’m scared of failing the jean-cuff challenge and accidentally sending out a suburban white lady gang sign that gets me roped into some sort of yoga battle, contestants forced into frog pose while struggling to clench their buttocks over the staccato outburst brewing from their morning bowl of Kashi “As much protein as an egg, more startling midday farts than a boxcar of lentils!” GoLean cereal, the young Snapchat-savvy audience standing by with their superior ankle line breaks, shaking their balayage highlights in disapproval. I knew this was going to happen ALL ALONG, I’ll be thinking to myself, stamping out a pitiful S.O.S. on the lavender-scented mat with my maybe-cute hooves.

Does a person ever feel the age they are? Rooted, precisely and comfortably, in their actual age instead of scrabbling against it like a key in a lock that won’t turn? I wonder. I’m 42 now and I make lots of jokes about feeling old when I give in to the siren-call of the bed linens at 8:47 PM or blink confusedly when one of my children announces that someone was REKT, BRO, but I don’t really feel 42. I have to say I do because we’re supposed to embrace the natural process of aging and revel in our increased wisdom and decrease of fucks given, but the truth is I feel like I’m forever stuck somewhere on the road in the rearview — my late twenties, maybe. Still awkward, still trying to figure it all out, still wondering what I’m going to be when I grow up.

My giant children are proof positive that I’m officially middle-aged, of course. One of them has the audacity to be eleven, can you believe that shit? Eleven. I look at his beetled brow and still see that suspicious baby sometimes, clever editing that offers glimpses of what I remember amongst the long-limbed tangle of sweetness and all-out Bershon he is now. They’re undeniably big kids, but I suppose they also ricochet from one internal age to the next — impossibly, heartbreakingly mature one minute, stomping like a toddler the next.

There are times when I’m truly startled by my aging, and even a little frightened. The other day my arm was pressed against something and the light was shining in and I noticed I was basically one big crinkle. When did that start happening, the crinkling? My skin doesn’t plump up any more, it just gives way. That’s disturbing. It feels like a loss, I don’t care how many Dove ads you make me watch.

The alternative is no good (“Wot, so my choice is or death?”) so I suppose I should be at peace with the fluctuating disconnect between reality and my secret belief that every “Your Birthdate Must Be On or Before This Date to Purchase Alcohol” grocery store sign contains a comical typo. Maybe the forties are a decade of denial, and I’ll feel more settled when I have half a century under my belt. Or maybe not. More and more, it seems to me that it’s important to allow myself to feel weird and a little lost and a lot uncertain, because there’s so much peace when I stop resisting and fretting and questioning and just be who I am, not old or young or good or bad but a human work in progress. A jumbled drawer of shit that has never fit quite right and the occasional glorious pair of perfectly broken-in jeans, crinkled and worn in places and comfortable as hell.

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