Loser

"She's a two-time loser," is the phrase he used to describe a twice-divorced member of his extended family. I was having a beer with a friend from high school, someone I hadn't seen in the intervening 1,000 years since graduation. That phrase hung in the air for a couple of seconds, as I deliberated over whether I should take it personally or not. I wondered if he -- happily married for many years -- automatically thought of *every* divorced person as a loser, me in particular.

We were having a nice easy time reconnecting, sharing both the good and bad bullet points of our adult lives. He knew I was divorced, and I had even shared with him some of the "why" details of the breakdown of my marriage. He certainly didn't treat me as if he thinks of me as a loser, hopelessly tainted by the stink of marital failure. I think "two-time loser" is something he just routinely says when asked about the marital status of this particular person, whose two divorces frankly seem like the least of her troubles.

But that phrase stuck in my craw (wherever the hell that is), and I have now regurgitated it up for your consumption. That phrase seems like it's a kind of shorthand I've heard used by other people -- notably all married. Instead of detailing *all* the f*ckups in someone's life to prove that this "loser" is fairly exiled in Loserville, one can long-story-short-it by just bringing up the fact that he/she is divorced. And the higher the divorce count, the easier it is to write someone off.

Even though I can see how my behavior contributed to my shitty marriage and that I stayed far, far too long in it, I don't think of myself as a loser. Unlucky? Perhaps. Emotionally unenlightened? Certainly. But a loser? Emphatically no. While my ex may not have valued any of my good qualities, I do. And I know others who do too.

Every divorce has its own story. Some are as simple and trite as The Bridges of Madison County, others as tragic as Sophie's Choice. Then there are the ones like mine, blacker than Catch-22.

Junking the Junk Food

A couple weeks ago I came across my list of goals for 2013. I found it underneath my dresser, where it must have fallen months ago, since it was blanketed by a mortifyingly thick layer of dust. I laughed when I noticed my number two goal for the year: become more organized. I assume I'm automatically disqualified from that goal, since I couldn't even be bothered to keep track of the index card listing my goals.

Although I didn't reach all my goals, I was happy to realize that I've met *some* of them. One of the biggest goals I met was avoiding junk food. I ate a lot of kale this year. A lot. In fact, if I were to suddenly snap and do something unfathomable or criminal, I think I'd have a good shot at dodging the consequences with "the kale defense," essentially the opposite of the Twinkie defense, which blamed some asshole's criminal behavior on his over-consumption of the poster child of junk food -- the Twinkie. I contend eating nothing except the highly nutritious, but slightly bitter, kale is enough to drive anyone to do desperate, crazy things. But I'm not a hardcore purist. I take my kale deliciously adulterated with lemon, apples, almonds, and parmesan cheese, in a modified version of the Waldorf salad.

Avoiding junk food wasn't just about improving my already pretty good eating habits. My bigger goal was harder: avoiding *emotional* junk food. In my case, emotional junk food is dating men who are inappropriate for me. Dating a guy who is too young is the equivalent of eating a deep-fried Twinkie. Sure, it might be momentarily appealing, but 15 minutes later, the nausea sets in. For me, dating a guy who's not looking for a long-term relationship is like eating french fries and pizza for dinner every night. I can't do that anymore. It makes me feel shitty.

Remember Bugles -- that tasteless corn-based snack in the shape of a horn? When I was a kid, I would eat one Bugle after another in a junk-food-zombie trance, even though I never really liked them! Kid logic compelled me to pick the shitty junk food I didn't even really like over apples or other healthy snack options. Dating Carny was like mindlessly eating a box of Bugles.    

Thanks to kale and Frenchy, I largely avoided junk food this year. Even if I didn't have the kale salad of relationships that I do, I feel capable of recognizing emotional junk food, which helps me take it out of my cart and put it back on the shelf before I buy it. My new goal -- besides getting more organized -- is to be able to automatically walk past the all junk food without even putting it in my cart.

50 and Unfiltered

A few weeks ago, I went to a new movie by a director whose previous films I've liked. I expected to like this movie too, but it spent a lot of time begging me to fall in love with it, which naturally is a recipe for me to hate it. Overall I found it "cringingly precious," as if this director had fallen and hit his head, and had instantly become an unlikely adoring fan of those horrible Thomas Kincaide paintings, the visual equivalent of eating a dozen heavily frosted cupcakes. As the credits were rolling, I turned to my friend and said something I normally would have left unspoken, reigned in by my filter of self consciousness. "She sure has a lot of moles," I said loudly in reference to the lead actress. It's the kind of thing I can only imagine a crotchety old lady would say after sitting through a movie she didn't really like.

This isn't the only time I've knowingly ignored my filter and just blurted out what I was thinking. But it's something I've been doing more frequently. I know the type of thing I *should* say, but I end up choosing to say the unfiltered thought instead, not just to be funny, but because it's the truth -- unvarnished, but honest. 

Like nudists and swingers, people without a filter are both fascinating and horrifying to me. Most of the filterless people I've known have been older women (think Kathie Lee Gifford), although I've known young people without filters too. For American women, middle age is often the first time we practice taking off the filter on a regular basis. Maybe all that practice without a filter in middle age is what leads to all the old women who've permanently lost theirs.

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for bullshit, which is why I've become so weary of politics and why I grew so weary of my marriage. Filtering oneself -- if you end up not saying what you really want to say -- is just another form of bullshit. Now having hit 50, I'm venturing into the second half of my life armed with a very limited capacity for bullshit and my big mouth.

Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

A Lot Younger Than That

"Someone has a birthday coming up I see," she said as she handed back my driver's license to me. "Um, yes--a big one," I replied as I wondered how to avoid talking in cliches about birthdays and age. "Oh? What birthday is it?" she asked. "My fiftieth," I said in a normal speaking volume, not the hushed whisper often used when speaking about that particular age or cancer or something else as equally dreaded. No one was in the waiting room with me, so I was spared the admittedly ridiculous ritual of furtively looking around and lowering my voice before telling her what birthday I was soon going to mark.

She abruptly pulled her head up from the computer and stared at me for a few seconds before exclaiming, "Oh, you look a lot younger than that." I gave her a big smile and a quick thank-you, all the while praying she wouldn't get more specific. Please Lady, allow me to bask in the welcome sweet vagueness of "a lot younger than that." But she wanted to keep going. "You look like you're 42!" she gushed, as if she were giving me a great compliment. 'Aw f*ck -- there it is,' I thought.

At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful jerk, I find being tagged anywhere in my forties sounds old. Agewise, I'm now so advanced, even my age compliments sound old to me. Coming from a cute woman in her late 20s, it felt like she was really saying, 'You look like you're only *slightly* over the hill.'

I wish I could resolve my ambivalent feelings about turning the big 5 - 0. I often feel lucky when people occasionally think I look younger than my actual age. But almost as often, I feel embarrassed that I am not-so-reluctantly buying into the absurdity that it's just better to be younger -- as if one had a choice in the matter.

Are We There Yet?

"Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street," sang Taylor Swift right before I flipped the radio dial to another station. It's the only line of *any* of her songs that I like. Not that it relates to me and my life, but I appreciate a good simile when I hear it. If I were singing that song (or having that song sung about me), I would revise that line to: "Loving him is like driving an older, but well maintained, Volvo on a limited-access traffic-clogged toll road on a rain-soaked day." It's not catchy or poetic like the Maserati line, but such is my life. Twenty-five years from now, I imagine Taylor Swift's songs will be filled with similar turgid lyrics drawn from her middle-aged life.

Love -- the redux version -- is trickier in mid life. Not only do you have to go through the hard, often confusing work of finding someone with whom you might want to spend a big chunk of your future -- someone who "gets" you and won't bore or annoy the shit out of you over the long term -- but then you have the very complicated task of trying to weave together two lives already interwoven with the threads of children, making a living, and other responsibilities one accumulates as a middle-aged adult. All of these complications act as brakes on runaway love, and while that can be frustrating, it's probably a good thing.

Unlike falling in love in my 20s, second-time-around love at 49 is more cautious. It's like being a good driver who is tempted to go faster, but chooses to drive in the slower lane because it feels safer when you've got a kid or two in the Volvo with you. It'll take longer to get where I'm going, which is annoying, but that's the tradeoff -- feeling safely in control while enduring my own frequent irritating complaint, "Are we *there* yet?"

Listening to My Gut and Kim Basinger

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." -- Kim Basinger

I think it's fair to say I'm a fair person. I've been told that I bend over backwards to be fair to other people. One might think that would be a good thing, but it's a quality that hasn't always served me well. When I was married, I always took my ex at his word, even when what he said was at odds with my nagging intuition. It felt like the "fair" thing to do, since only *he* would be able to explain the truth of *his* inner life. What I overlooked is that one must have the capability, the motivation, and the courage to be emotionally honest, and therein lies the rub. To be fair -- because it's hard *not* to be -- I don't believe that most of my ex's emotional dishonesty was deliberate, but it was a series of lies that stung me all the same. If a friend accidentally slams a car door on your hand, it still hurts like a mo-fo, even when it's not deliberate.

Education is expensive -- whether you pay in cash or in painful emotional regret. It's even more expensive if you keep taking a class and failing, as I did with Intuition 101. One of the biggest things I've learned from the breakup of my marriage is the importance of heeding my intuition. I will *never* take anyone at their word if my intuition is poking me in the stomach and telling me something else. Ignoring what my gut was telling me in favor of my ex's explanations that didn't add up was a very expensive lesson I only began to understand after we reached the fork in the road called Splitsville.

Truth reveals itself in behavior, not words. When someone's behavior and words diverge, intuition is the warning system that alerts you to that divide. If you're lucky like I am, you have at least one close friend who won't let you get away with *any* emotional bullshit created to ignore or deny the existence of that divide. But even if I weren't so fortunate, I now rely on my intuition to do the same thing. And I'm paying attention enough to be able to ace Intuition 101 this time around. Maybe I'll even go on to write the book Intuition for Dumbshits, since I lived that way most of my life. 

Bonfire of the Middle-Aged Vanities

A few days ago, I noticed a guy in his 40s in a Honda Civic with a rear spoiler. A Honda Civic! I can't even believe they *make* rear spoilers for Civics. Isn't that the same thing as stenciling a skull on your fanny pack? You can add whatever you want to your fanny pack, but you'll never change its fundamental essence. It'll always be that unflattering belly pouch worn by people *not* trying to bring sexy back.

It's hard to believe the guy with the rear spoiler bought it for anything other than cosmetic reasons. I am told a rear spoiler is not just a car decoration, but that it has aerodynamic properties that keep the back end of the car on the ground during high speeds and hard cornering. Okay, but the dude had a car seat in the back, so how fast does he drive and how much hard cornering is he doing with a baby on board? I rest my case.

As I had just started to enjoy my smug reverie about the poor guy's vanity, it was rudely interrupted by the unwelcome thought that I'm guilty of the same thing. The frosty pink lipstick that often adorns my lips is the rear spoiler and I am the Honda Civic. Lipstick, or indeed any noticeable makeup, seems like it's for young women -- not someone who is a month away from being able to join AARP. But I like it. Wearing frosty pink lipstick makes me *feel* good. Plus, I hear it's supposed to be helpful with the hard cornering of turning 50.

I just hope frosty pink lipstick is not a gateway drug to other more obvious vanities. I hope I don't turn into the 90-year-old woman who continues to dye her hair a jarringly unnatural dark brown because she thinks her real hair will make her look old. Or the 65-year-old lady with surgically enhanced perky breasts. As a woman, trying to figure out how to be appropriately sexy in middle age can be as confusing as it was as a teenager. Instead of being "too young" to be a certain kind of sexy, the confusing obstacle is being too old. I look forward to AARP sorting it all out for me. In the meantime, I will wear my frosty pink lipstick proudly as I continue to be entertained by the middle-aged vanities of myself and others.