Category: Huffington Post

I’ve been on summer vacay, professionally known as a hiatus, but even fun in the sun couldn’t distract me from the Mel Gibson debacle calling to me from supermarket checkout lines to the evening news to family dinner conversations.

He’s a beast, isn’t he? Rage, mixed with misogyny and racism is just too grotesque to be ignored. What do you think we should do about it? Ban him from “The View?” Applaud that his talent agency has kicked him to the curb? Go easier on those Russian spies, to show solidarity to Oksana Grigorieva, his baby mama? Torch his homes? Start recording all our distasteful private conversations for future evidence?read more ›

Two days in a row I’ve been in a funk. Actually, yesterday felt like a long road of flat highway in Texas somewhere — empty and endless. Today feels like I’ll be lucky if I’m not crying by the time I finish this blog. Who knows, if I don’t snap out of it soon, I could slip into rage tomorrow and be in jail by dinner. These days aren’t worryingly frequent, but I do dread them and do anything I can to postpone them. Notice how I don’t say “prevent” them? That’s because I believe my almost-ex’s truism “bad feelings aren’t biodegradable.” They stick around hiding under the landfill like Styrofoam cups and disposable diapers. Sooner or later you are going to have to pick them all up and find a productive new use for them, but the chore seems so onerous.

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Me, pre- hair chop:

I had an epiphany recently and it said that a woman’s hair should not promise a fecundity that her ovaries can’t support. I went to my hairstylist with the order to “chop it all off” and let me tell you what a mass orgasm those words inspire in a salon! Immediately everyone in our vicinity was coming by with huge smiles and looks that could only be described as slightly feral. This is what they live for; someone coming in and letting them use every scissor, razor and thinning sheer at their disposal and then top it off with product (I love hairdresser lingo.)

Before my Girlfriends with long hair call me out as a hater, this was a very personal epiphany, although I do recommend considering it. Like most women, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my hair; wanting it straighter in my teens, curlier in my thirties, thicker in my forties and less gray (or as TV commercials say, “fewer grays,” which suggests that they are still so rare as to be individually addressed.)

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One of the few bright promises sustaining me while trudging through a divorce is Sex With a Stranger. I haven’t had it yet, nor do I see any immediate prospects, but I’m keeping the faith that it is out there. It’s been 27 years since I’ve had it, and I seem to think about it, a lot. In preparation, I’ve even started kegeling again at all red lights and TV commercials. Four pregnancies and four babies; so much fitness to achieve in so little time.

Here’s the awkward part of my fantasy life: it suffers from arrested development.

I imagine making intense eye contact across a crowded room and then feeling the obsessive anticipation that he’ll come find me. There would be, of course, hours of kissing and swollen lips after. After the frenzy of our first touch, we would grab and tear at each other’s clothes and I would be conquered. (I mean that in a feminist way, of course.) We would linger over the discovery of each other’s body, naked before open windows that let the sunlight dapple us and the light breeze caress us. Clearly I’ve stolen the inner life of one of my teenaged daughters.

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