I am getting gradually better at the customer service part of my job. After a number of years of ONLY paging (i.e., putting things back on shelves; fetching things from shelves), I have been working on the checkout desk now and then; and, recently, I’ve been increasing the number of desk shifts I cover for other people, in order to get more experience/money. I am getting less scared of the library patrons (I would not have described myself as “scared of them,” but it’s the explanation that matches my behavior), and less panicked/flustered when asked to do something I don’t immediately know how to do / don’t immediately understand. I can’t believe I am 50 years old and this is still an issue, but here we are, and at least it is nice to see there can be progress within repetition. I keep thinking about how, in my pharmacy job many years ago, there was an arc from panicked inexperience to calm expertise, and how gratifying it was to get to the point where I could take almost any problem and just SOLVE it. Insurance rejecting the claim? Diagnosed and fixed! Customer says their copay used to be $5 and now it’s $40? Investigated and explained! Customer needs something tricky, like an early refill of their medication to take on vacation, or a replacement for pills that fell into the sink, or maybe they’re from out of town and also normally use a different pharmacy chain but they’re having a medical situation and their doctor is trying to get them their medication here and it would be really nice if their $1200 medication could still go through their insurance and be $15? I GOTCHA. And I will get there with this job, too, if I keep practicing. The first two years are the hardest!

Yesterday I dealt with several situations a significant level up from what I used to be able to handle. One is a type of situation I’ve had several chances to deal with lately, and it’s where a patron has a book in mind, and they are giving me both the somewhat wrong name of the author AND the somewhat wrong name of the book. I used to punt that directly to a reference librarian (is “punt” the sports word I want? maybe I mean “hike” or “pass”), but now I spend at least a few minutes seeing if I can gently figure out what we’re looking for. (But not TOO long, because nobody wants that.) It’s very satisfying to untangle it and IN FACT FIND the thing they’re looking for. (Ah ha!! Thunderstruck by Erik Larson! Not Thunderstorm by Eric Lawson!)

I also dealt with a patron who started a conversation by saying WELP he’d lost $850, and then went into a long story about something he’d bought online that hadn’t worked out, and I managed to hold up my end of the conversation despite the non-library-related twists and turns, including one part where he said that in the last 16 years things in this country had really changed (hmm, what happened to this country for the first time in 2008 I wonder), and now the migrants were pouring in, and I said, Oh and also! there’s our downtown area! It was built for when this town was 1/3rd the size, and now it just can’t handle all the traffic, but there’s nowhere to expand! not without tearing down historic buildings!—which completely redirected him. He then kept talking long enough about those buildings, and about the cell phone coverage in the area, that a coworker attempted to bail me out by bringing me a little pile of work, but when I left the desk with that work, he started telling his story to two patrons with young children, so then I successfully extracted THEM from his conversation, and anyway I spend every work shift with damp underarms but also with increasing feelings of ability and competence.

Well, and increasing numbers of Work Stories. The other day I dealt with a patron who came up to the desk and was telling me about one of his many theories, this one involving AI—and then he paused and said, as if in sudden anxious consideration of my feelings: “Wait…are YOU a robot?” Friends, I was grateful to be wearing a mask on the lower half of my face, so that I only had to worry what my eyes were expressing. After a pause, during which I thought of the “meet them where they are” training of my eldercare job, I realized this was a question I could truthfully and directly and simply and easily answer, and so I did: “…No.” He went on with his story, reassured.

We are having some upheaval at work, and my last few shifts have been stressful and fraught instead of the usual happy and energizing, and I am trying to think about other things so let’s do the requested photos of (1) Nutmeg the Mother’s Day horse from Henry, and (2) the Mother’s Day cat embroidery from Elizabeth.

The twins are home from college and looking for summer jobs, and neither has had any luck so far. One major issue is that we have two cars for five drivers, and Paul and I take both cars for our jobs many days each week, so it’s hard for the kids to look for any job they’d need to drive to. We considered adding a third car—but even a used car would cost way, way more than they could earn over the summer, so that seems like the wrong way to do things, financially-speaking. And we do live just a few minutes’ walk from the center of town, so there are lots of businesses they can walk to. Businesses that do not seem to be hiring.

My sister-in-law told me about this 7-minute strength workout, which I have now done one (1) time. And by “done” I mean “attempted.” There are quite a few areas in which I will need to gradually approach the goal. For example: I cannot do even one push-up, no not even the knees kind. I can lower myself down to the floor, and I can even do it slowly and with control, but I cannot get back up. But I could easily work ON that for 30 seconds: I just did little partial push-ups, to the depth I COULD push back up from, and if I keep doing those consistently I will get better and better.

But standing on a chair was a complete bust. I put one foot on the seat of the chair, and then stood there for the entire 30 seconds trying to figure out a way to PARTIALLY do it. My sister-in-law says she’s using a step stool, so I will try that. I complained about this to the children, and Elizabeth, maintaining eye contact, put one foot ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER and then brought up her second foot. That seems wrong in its own way.

I am continuing to try to drink down some chia seeds or hemp hearts each day, For My (Peri-)Menopausal Health. I am continuing to feel as if there must be a better way to consume them (as far as I can tell, all the good ways are incompatible with keto). And yet: I DO succeed in getting myself on the outside of the seeds/hearts each time, and the main sacrifice is that I need to drink a bunch of water to wash them down; and I am supposed to be drinking a bunch of water with them anyway, so. Success! Triumph!

I don’t know if the seeds/hearts are improving my health, or how to tell. In so many cases, Nutritional Scripture must be taken On Faith. Fortunately, I am someone who enjoys Taking Pills, like when I have a 10-day course of antibiotics or whatever, and Food Rites can scratch that itch: I swish down my Nutritious Fiber, with its accompanying Striving and Very Mild Suffering, and I feel the happiness/satisfaction of having Taken My Medicine.

Long-time readers have noted that I did not talk about Mother’s Day this year. I am happy to report that it’s because Mother’s Day went well. There were doughnuts at breakfast, by my request; the line at the doughnut shop was reportedly LONG, which was pleasing to me: all those other mothers, receiving doughnuts too! For dinner, Paul made lasagna and rolls from scratch, after consulting with me well ahead of time to see if that was what I wanted. We watched a movie of my choice (The Hundred-Foot Journey); I try to choose something that no one except me is enthusiastic about, but that I think they WILL enjoy. William and Edward each bought me chocolates. Rob sent me an email. Elizabeth made me an embroidery of our cats. Henry bought me a plastic HORSE, like an 8-inch plastic horse of the sort girls my age used to collect along with Barbie dolls (I had neither plastic horses nor Barbie dolls as a child, but played with them at friends’ houses); and when I said no one had ever given me a horse before, he was pleased and said he’d suspected as much. He said the horse’s name is Nutmeg.

Well. Really, a success in every way. Sometimes it feels as if things cannot change, and that we cannot expect them to change, and in fact we are specifically TOLD not to expect things to change; but then sometimes they DO change, and what are we supposed to do with THAT.

Would you like to report in about your Mother’s Day? Please don’t feel that this is no longer a place to vent. I have to say, this is the downside of things going well this year: I actually do look forward to bonding with everyone else who has an upsetting Mother’s Day—but NOW look what’s happened.

(image from Target.com)

Recently I read The Menopause Manifesto by Dr. Jen Gunter (Target link; Amazon link). It seemed like it would be exactly my sort of thing in many ways, and I have liked/reposted many Dr. Gunter things online. I would say I liked the book more than I’ve liked the other perimenopause/menopause books I’ve tried (this one, for example, which I couldn’t tolerate and never finished), but I’d been hoping to end up liking it so much I’d want to buy copies for people I knew, and instead I didn’t feel like doing that. I’d look things up in it, though, because at least she is not using wordplay to create fake reasons for medical things (“MENopause causes many women to want to take a PAUSE from MEN!”).

Anyway, Dr. Gunter has convinced me that exercise will help with many, many things, and I appreciated that she led by saying frankly that it was her goal to convince us of that, and also that she herself had had to be convinced. So I am sorry to say I am trying more exercise. I get a fair amount of exercise at work, so on the three days I don’t work, I am taking longish walks, and also adding a few minutes of sullen core work on the days I can manage to force myself to add it. I absolutely am not going to do all the exercise I am supposed to be doing, I just won’t, but fortunately there is an option between “none” and “the amount that is too much to ask and I won’t do it,” so I will do that.

I also made a list of a bunch of foods that are supposed to help with various periomenopause things and with health overall, with an emphasis on the ones that work with keto (salmon! broccoli! kale! red cabbage! walnuts! cacao!). I enjoy the idea of taking food as a sort of medicine, and I like it when a food is referred to as “a nutritional powerhouse,” and so the thing I am trying to figure out right now is how to get chia seeds and hemp hearts into me as if they were NyQuil, or medicinal brandy, because the usual ways to eat them are not compatible with keto. I started by mixing a couple of tablespoons of one or the other into a glass of water or Powerade and drinking it down quick, and that is more doable than I would have expected (not much taste to either one, and I am good at swallowing pills/medicine, and it turns out I don’t struggle with drinking something that obviously has a bunch of seeds floating in it)—except that like a third of the chia seeds or hemp hearts end up stuck to the inside of the cup, so then I have to add more liquid and swish it around and drink it again, and then more liquid and swish and drink again, and at some point I start feeling like this is too much to do for just two tablespoons of something where the serving size is three tablespoons. Also, the chia seeds and/or hemp hearts get between my teeth. Well. I will keep thinking/trying.

I had such a down day today, and for NO GOOD REASON other than the looming presidential election and likely collapse of democracy! I had a good night’s sleep; I had the day off work so I went on a good long walk for my stupid physical and emotional health; I had a hot shower and I shaved my legs; I made my bed and I ate a good breakfast. And, after that excellent and promising start, I spent most of the day mooning pitifully around my house, feeling sad and cold and dismal and not able to think of or make myself do any of the many, many, MANY things that could have helped. And now that I have perked back up like a watered plant, it’s so easy to think of those things. Like, it wouldn’t even have taken much energy or motivation to just go upstairs and lie on my bed playing phone games in a patch of sunshine, instead of playing them in a chilly rocking chair in the dim living room, and I would have been warmer and maybe the sunshine would have been mood-bolstering. But did I do that? Did I hell!

I did make myself go to the grocery store, which didn’t help my mood but it got me out of the house and I got something done. And, when the grocery store was out of a few things, I got myself to make a second trip out of the house to another grocery store, one that’s more expensive but also has some different things than our usual grocery store—and as I’m typing this I am hearing this how my children would hear it: “Well, I went to a DIFFERENT grocery store and looked at some DIFFERENT groceries, so THAT was a LITTLE fun!” Oh dear. Well, but it WAS a little fun! I still felt inexplicably morose, but you know how sometimes it can almost feel good to feel morose? It started feeling a little bit of that, instead of the only-bad-to-feel-morose kind of morose from before. And I looked at their wider selection of International Foods, and I admired their wider array of take-home meal items, and I considered their new display of many varieties of salt water taffy, and I got a little overwhelmed by their much larger and more expensive floral section. I bought the things the usual grocery store was out of, plus two flavors of ice cream that our usual grocery store doesn’t carry, plus (again I hear this how my children would hear it) a package that was entirely a good and useful size of rubber band. Our usual grocery store has only the mixed pack including all the tiny useless ones that fall to the bottom of the miscellany drawer and breed depression.

I am experimenting with bedtime teas. This is actually Henry’s idea; he has been very Into Tea recently. I can’t remember if I told you already that I bought a clearance teapot at HomeGoods just to see if we’d use it, and now we use it all the time. Like, late morning on a weekend, Henry might say, “I’m putting on some Earl Grey; would you want some?”—and if I say yes, he’ll use two teabags and make a whole teapot of it. Or in the late afternoon he might make an herbal tea. I think this appeals to his Theatre Kid side: a little vintage, a little European, a little attention-getting. He’ll make a pot of tea when his Dungeons & Dragons group comes over, which I act very nonchalant about as if it is not a charming combination I will try to drop into conversations(/blog posts) with friends/relatives/co-workers. D & D & tea!

Where was I? Oh, yes: bedtime teas. We have several kinds, with varying combinations of melatonin/valerian/chamomile/etc., and I need to keep more careful track of (1) which ones I drink and (2) how long I let them steep and (3) how much of them I drink, because SOMETIMES it seems as if a sleepytime tea very gently helps me get to sleep and stay asleep, and SOMETIMES it seems as if it makes me sweat and have bad dreams and makes it hard to get up in the morning. And I don’t know which is the applicable variable. Henry suggests it might be completely other things not related to the tea, and that is also possible. I think it’s the tea, but it could for example be the tea + perimenopause.

I finally bought some eShakti jeans, something I have been putting off forever, even though it seemed like custom jeans might be the solution to literally my entire perimenopausal jeans problem. But they were expensive, and more importantly I would have to do all those measurements. Finally, finally, finally, I made myself do all the measurements, and I placed the order. I ordered three pairs, of three different styles.

There are several ways in which these are the worst jeans I have ever owned. Well, really only one way, and it’s the crushing disappointment: I EXPECT normal jeans to maybe not fit well or look good, but I DID think that by doing THE ULTIMATE CUSTOM JEANS I would get jeans that fit nicely and were comfortable. Instead, it’s as if someone who hates me took my exact measurements and used them to make jeans that would make me unhappy in as many ways as possible.

I have never had a “muffin top” issue in jeans, even though I am not slim and I carry a fair amount of weight in my tum area, so I used to be perplexed by the issue as experienced by others. Were people maybe wearing jeans a size too small? Well, these jeans give me a muffin top for the first time ever. All three pairs create it out of nowhere. I don’t know how they do it. It’s some sort of magic. Well, but also the jeans are too tight. But I have OTHER jeans that are too tight and do NOT create a muffin top. So, as I say: some sort of special custom magic.

I have shortish legs for my height, and I had thought IF NOTHING ELSE I would finally have jeans with the correct inseam. But no! The hems are still dragging on the ground for me to step on! How is this possible?? Some of the measurements I had to take were new ones for me, but inseam is VERY FAMILIAR. And it was easy to cuff a pair of my existing jeans to the right length, and then measure THAT to confirm the measurement I took of my leg. And yet!!

I made sure to take my measurements when I was at the highest end of my usual weight range. I took each measurement more than once, and wrote down the highest measurement I got; whenever possible, I rounded up. I did not want tight-tight jeans. I am currently in the middle of my weight range, and the jeans are still too tight. I had to struggle to get them on. And yet they ALSO need to be continually hitched up.

I had heard again and again that eShakti items Have!! Pockets!! And the jeans do have pockets. They are no better than the pockets of my usual, non-eShakti jeans: half of my phone fits in the pocket.

What it feels like to me is that I ordered absolutely non-custom jeans: it is exactly as if I chose a new brand, and I ordered the lower of the two sizes I fall between, and they’re ill-fitting like any jeans could be, and also too long as jeans always are on me, and that I should have ordered the higher of the two sizes I fall between. It does not feel as if I received jeans that were made for me in any way. It is difficult to describe how discouraging it is to FINALLY do the ULTIMATE AND MOST DIFFICULT AND EXPENSIVE option, and have it be the same as the normal, non-ultimate, non-extra-work-and-extra-money option.

EShakti promises that if you’re not happy, you can send the items back and they will be fixed. But there are two possibilities here:

1. Either I somehow did all my very careful measurements WRONG. In which case, this is not eShakti’s fault and they shouldn’t have to fix it.

2. Or else I did my very careful measurements RIGHT, and STILL got THREE DIFFERENT PAIRS of jeans that don’t fit right and make me miserable, in which case I don’t want to deal with this company at all anymore; I will just write this off as a failed experiment, and I will know better for the future. Extending the torture and disappointment and work by sending pictures of myself in the jeans (gah!!!), taking my measurements again, trying to list what about the jeans makes me unhappy (“Everything”), packing them up and mailing them, then quite likely receiving three pairs of jeans that STILL don’t fit—no thank you.

Plus: I already waited too long. In case you are about to urge me on this issue. This is one of my own personal Life Tax issues: for some reason, when I buy new clothes, I leave them sitting in the package for…well. Maybe I don’t want to say a time frame. It varies. But it often means I have gone past the return window.

What happened in this particular case was that I took out the first pair fairly promptly, like after only a couple of weeks. And they were so extremely disappointing, and the prospect of trying to fix the situation was so discouraging, I left the other two pairs in the box for months and months; after I tried on the second pair, and put it directly into the Goodwill bag, I waited so long I wasn’t even sure there WAS still another pair to try on. I finally tried on the third pair today, the pair I’d had the highest hopes for (because they were boot-cut, which is usually my favorite cut), and that brings us up to now. It is over a year since I placed the original order.

I will say this, though: at the grocery store this morning, two separate women stopped me to tell me how much they loved my jeans. Which is not something that typically happens. (The jeans are embroidered, so they are more eye-catching.) The jeans felt a little more comfortable, after that.

Elizabeth texted me at 7:30 on a Saturday morning that the 2024-2025 FAFSA was finally allowing online corrections. So apparently she has been keeping an eye on things. I went right downstairs and “fixed” my application (it claimed I had not signed it when I the hell HAD signed it), and now it is processing. Finally. In mid-April. It annoys me that it claims today is the day I submitted it, as if I put it off until today, as opposed to today being the day it allowed me to fix ITS OWN KNOWN ISSUE (SO MANY people got the “Whoops, you didn’t sign it!!” message after signing it—and then the “go back and sign it” button DID NOT WORK AND THERE WAS NO OTHER WAY TO FIX IT).

Anyway! Moving on! By which I mean saving this to stew about later when I should be sleeping!

We have acquired a fourth cat, and I have several things to say about this:

1. I know. I know that is too many cats. No: I KNOW.

2. In fact, I would say that four cats is twice as many cats as three. And three cats was already twice as many cats as two.

3. This new cat has medium-length fur (we always get short-haired varieties), and I am not at all sure I am up to this challenge. Already there are fur tumbleweeds.

But this was not an impulse-buy: I acquired this cat deliberately, after months of searching, EVEN KNOWING that four cats was too many. It was because our new kitten, acquired in the hopes that it would make our sad older boy cat less sad (our older girl cat does not want to hang out with other cats, but our older boy cat does, and he lost his cat buddy a little over a year ago), did not click with our older boy cat, and was instead making him even more unhappy by constantly chasing him and badgering him to play. When he wasn’t tormenting the old boy, the kitten followed me persistently, asking for interaction—which was super cute, but it felt like he was trying to fill a gap in his life. And so I regretted deciding not to follow the “kittens should be acquired in pairs” advice, and began the search for the second kitten we should have acquired.

Our original kitten is 11 months old, so I wasn’t looking for a KITTEN-kitten, just a young cat with similar energy levels. I was refreshing the shelter’s adoptable cats page every single day, and one day I found what I was looking for: a young male cat, 9 months old, described as playful and affectionate, who had been brought to the shelter because he was too playful and rambunctious for the older cat in his home. Longer fur than I’d prefer, but everything else sounded perfect. I went and got him that same day.

And, for the first time, bringing a new cat into our household has BROUGHT BALANCE instead of CREATING CHAOS. Now the two older orange cats cuddle together on the couch, which they did not do before. And the two younger black cats play and frolic together, and mostly leave the older orange cats alone. And I have seen our orange boy doing a little bit of playing with the kittens! And the original kitten still follows me around cutely, but less persistently.

Four is so many cats, though. The food!! The water!! The litter-box scooping!! THE FUR!!! There are cats simply EVERYWHERE.

(image from Amazon.com)

Commenter Slim mentioned reading All the Rage, by Darcy Lockman, and further mentioned having two copies to give away if we wanted to do something for Mother’s Day, which possibly we do. This is how Slim described the book:

Basically, straight married mothers’ brains are melting because our husbands think that doing a better job than their fathers is the same as doing a good job.

I don’t think I would mind dealing with all the stuff I have to do if I didn’t have to do it under the same roof as a grownass adult who makes my life harder.

Well, SOLD. I got a copy from my library, and I have finished it, and it is BRISTLING with slips of paper marking Good Parts. Some samples:

• “…couples with low levels of male partner participation in domestic chores are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. As satisfaction with a male partners’ help increases, so, too, do positive marital interactions, closeness, affirmation, and positive affect. As it decreases, thoughts of divorce, negative affect, and depression go up—for mothers. Although perceived unfairness predicts both unhappiness and distress for women, it predicts neither for men, who often do not seem to fully register the problem.”

• “Writes [Stephanie] Coontz, ‘Self-reliance and independence worked for men because women took care of dependence and obligation.'”

• “Worrying to no purposeful end is unfortunate, but productive worry stimulates action: the scheduling of well-child visits, the installation of outlet plugs, the introduction of solid foods. The fathers in Walzer’s study both pathologized their wives for their vigilance and connected it to their babies’ well-being. It is not, however, connected to a mother’s well-being.”

• “Yana’s husband never explicitly turns down her requests [for help with housework and children]—but he routinely fails to fulfill them.”

• “Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade summed up what she has seen like this: ‘Men find ways of being so difficult that it’s not worth it. You do it yourself.'”

• “Men do not pause to consider the experience of the other, or at the very least, they appear unmoved by it.”

• “Imagine if your children’s father said these things to you, directly and out loud: Women are easy to take advantage of, your efforts are ultimately unnecessary, the needs of our family are not worth my attention, and I’ll choose the more selfish thing. Fathers are implying every last bit of this with their resistance all the time.”

• I wish I had copied a quote from this section before returning the book, but I didn’t mark it so I forgot, but what I keep thinking about is the part where they found couples who said they were equals, where even the woman of the couple said they were equals and she was satisfied with the equal division of labor; and when the scientists/sociologists studied those couples, they found they were NOT equals and the women were doing more. In every single case.

The book did make me feel angry. But more than that, it made me feel Seen and Validated: the inequality I’m experiencing has been observed and analyzed in numerous studies; I am not imagining how unfair it is and how maddening it is; I am not the only one who can’t figure out how to fix it. And the WAYS in which it manifests, also Seen and Validated: the husbands who “forget” to do something, or just sort of Don’t Do It; the husbands who claim they just have to be asked to help (but the wives do not need to be asked); the husbands who know that if they drop the ball their wives will take care of it; the husbands who make their own lives the priority over everyone else’s while their wives work for the common good of the family; the husbands who simply Opt Out of responsibility for handling things, so that the wives are forced to handle all those things.

I recommend the book to you if your library has it—and, now that I’ve read it, would probably go so far as to recommend buying it if you can’t borrow it and can find it at an affordable price. And perhaps we will see about getting Slim’s copies out there for Mother’s Day—let’s think more on that.

This, THIS is the exact time of year to keep your eye out at the grocery store, at Trader Joe’s, at Target, for POTTED TULIPS. They are available right before Easter and not at any other time of year. It will be six sprouted tulip bulbs in a pot of dirt covered by a bright-pastel paper sleeve, and they will sell for $5 or $6 or $7, and you should not hesitate! You should BUY THEM, and use them to decorate your interior house! Don’t buy just one pot, if you can afford more! Buy two or three! or six or seven!

Because then, when they have wilted, you should bury them in your yard (or anywhere else: a roadside area! a park! a friend or family member’s yard as a surprise!), absolutely casually: just dig a casual roundish hole in your yard (or wherever!—but if it’s not your property, BE QUICK!) with a shovel, and then grab the six stems in a handful ’round the necks and use them to pull the whole soil clump out of the pot, and chunk the whole pot’s worth of soil/bulbs into the hole, and tuck/pat the soil around the base of the wilted stems as if you are doing a good job planting wilted flowers (this will make sure you are at least planting the bulbs right-side-up). It is in no way the right time of year to plant tulips; you are merely doing your part to avoid putting them in the landfill! And maybe that is all that will happen: they will gently decompose and return to the earth whenst they came. Or else they will be eaten by squirrels/chipmunks.

line-up of wilted potted daffodils/tulips waiting for me to go out with a shovel; generally they wait several weeks and then I get a surge of inspiration and plant them all at once

Or maybe!!: not!! And then, when they come up next spring, you will enjoy your FREE BONUS SURPRISE TULIPS!! I currently have many dozens of casually-buried potted tulips coming up in my yard, some from last year and some from the year before that and some from the year before that—and I cannot express how happy a thing that is. FREEEEEEEE TULIPS!! Last spring I got carried away and bought too many pots so as an experiment I planted two extra pots’ worth down by the mailbox, thinking there was NO WAY they would overcome the salt/sand near the roadside. And yet: here we are, it’s March and I see two distinct pot-shaped sections of tulips coming up!!! by the mailbox!!

ONE SURPRISE TULIP CLUMP COMING UP

…I have bought five more pots of them this year so far. AT LEAST TWO MORE POTS’ WORTH are joining the ones down by the mailbox!!

At my last check-up I tried to get my doctor to let me get the shingles shot early: I know of several people who got shingles before they turned 50, and they all say it was the worst pain they’d ever had, worse than childbirth. My doctor declined, and said she didn’t even recommend it right at age 50: she says she recommends getting it later, more like age 60—something about needing it to last the rest of your life. Well. I was not pleased. I went off in a huff! By which I mean I nodded and demurred and made no fuss whatsoever.

But now I am 50, so I can walk into a pharmacy and get the shingles vaccine without my doctor’s permission and have my insurance cover it, and I have not yet done it. I seem to be…chicken. But it is because I have heard the shingles vaccine is one of the very worst! And, worst of all: that it is not the FIRST of the required two shots that is so bad, it’s the SECOND! But once you get the first, you have to follow through and get the second! This is psychologically MUCH WORSE than if the first one were the bad one. But an unpleasant vaccine reaction? to avoid the worst pain of my life? I don’t understand why I am hesitating. It’s not as if I would mind staying in bed for a day and then writing a complaining blog post about it.

Speaking of turning 50, one of my biggest stressors these days is JEANS. I have always been a PEAR: I have a relatively small waist, and I wear a smaller size in tops than in bottoms, and anything long or one-piece (long coats, one-piece swimsuits, dresses) is difficult because of the discrepancy; I carry my weight in my rear and thighs; and I have never, even as a rangy pre-teen, had a flat stomach. But my weight is redistributing, so that I am carrying BOTHERINGLY MORE in my stomach, and it is THROWING EVERYTHING OFF. I don’t even know what fruit shape this is. I tried going up a size (I have about four sizes in storage), but that didn’t work at all: they didn’t fit right AND were too big. If I find jeans that fit at all, they need a belt, and also they look terrible in a way that tempts me to commit the grave error of blaming the body instead of the jeans: if they’re stretchy enough to be comfortable, they’re stretchy enough to SHOWCASE the new tum area, which I will accept but I do not wish to show off. I think this must be why so many older women give up on jeans and start buying Alfred Dunner separates. But I will not go gentle into that good night! (Well, except I searched online for Alfred Dunner to make sure that was still a thing, and ended up thinking “Ooooo actually those are pretty cute!”)

I am having a long run of being unable to face the telephone. I managed to make the ENT appointment because it felt like a potentially dire emergency, and I managed to make some phone calls when Elizabeth’s ambulance claim for her tree-nut reaction was rejected; but I have not managed to make quite a few other phone calls for appointments that need to be made and are causing me trouble. My glasses, for example: speaking of turning 50, apparently now I desperately need BIFOCALS/TRIFOCALS. Sometimes I think in a chipper way that this is FINE! plenty of people get behind on appointments for reasons completely unrelated to phone phobia and it’s JUST FINE! Other times I feel some level of despair: I am FIFTY YEARS OLD, why can’t I do this NORMAL LIFE THING?