My main earlobe piercings got a little irritated, so this morning I dipped the earring studs in antibiotic ointment before putting them into my ears. This is a tip my Aunt Barb mentioned to me when I was a pre-teen. My mom didn’t have pierced ears, and so neither of us knew this idea. (I have heard about NOT doing it for cartilage piercings, in case you are suddenly feeling anxious.)

I was thinking about all the other beauty/care tips that get handed down and around. My mom’s friend Carol is the one who mentioned you have to use some sort of shaving cream or lotion or soap when you shave your legs with a disposable razor: my mom used my dad’s electric razor, so I’d thought disposable razors worked on the same “dry legs, no added substances” principle and gave myself a nasty razor burn.

Carol is also the one who told me you could water down an overly-intense lipstick by putting on lip balm/gloss first, then dabbing on the lipstick lightly, then rubbing your lips together to mix.

My friend Melanie’s mom is the one who taught us to wash our faces: first, run the washcloth under hot water and hold it against your face for a little while to open the pores; then put soap on the washcloth and wash and rinse your face; then, run the washcloth under cold water and hold it against your face for a little while to close the pores. I don’t even do it this way, yet I think of it as The Way To Wash Your Face.

My brother’s friend Robin had a much older sister who taught us to put a little bit of conditioner in our hair after towel-drying it but before blow-drying it. This was in the era of perming, blow-drying, and using a curling iron, so we were all looking for ways to turn straw back into hair.

I wish I could remember and thank whoever was so persuasive about face lotion that I started using it every day from age 12 onward. It might have been one of the teen magazines I read, or maybe Cosmo. Well worth the price of the subscription, if so. I bought Oil of Olay with my $1.25/hour babysitting money.

Amy, a girl in my youth group who was 16 when I was 12, is the one who mentioned that sometimes you need to shave armpits in more than one direction. She’s also the one who taught me how to feather my hair. And to match all my eye make-up to my eye-color, which I no longer do, but it was fun at the time.

My grandmother demonstrated how to spray perfume on a wrist, then touch the wrists together lightly, then touch the wrists lightly to the sides of the neck.

My mom taught me how to put wet hair into a towel turban. I think often of something I saw a long time ago (surely one of you will know what this was) where Elaine from Seinfeld tosses a pile of towels to a line of towel-clad women (could one of the women have been Elliot from Scrubs? but if so, WHY?), and we look away, and there’s a fwip-fwip-fwip sound, and when we look back all of them have towel-turbaned heads, and Elaine says “I love how we all know how to do that.” What IS this from? It’s in my memory like it’s a commercial.

I’m trying to remember other tips and who told them to me. In the meantime, who taught what to you?

I keep trying to get people with tattoos to tell me how much it hurt and what the pain was like, I think because I am worried I would get started on a tattoo and then not be able to finish. But pain is too hard to describe, and anyway it varies so much based on where and who. Three things that have set my mind at ease recently:

1. LOTS of people get tattoos. And though I am sure it has happened, I have not yet heard someone say that they got one and will never get another because of the pain; and I have not yet heard someone say they have only a partial tattoo because the pain was too intense to complete it. …Though saying this one out loud is certainly a mistake. How at this point can anyone who HAS heard such a story keep themselves from telling it to me now, for SCIENCE? But in this case I would like to knit a little non-scientific comfort blanket to hold, so shhhhhhhh. Tell me later, AFTER I write a post about what it was like to get a tattoo. I will try to remember to specifically invite such stories at that time. For now, I am leaning on the huge number of people who go back again and again for MORE tattoos. (Go ahead and tell THOSE stories now, if you like.)

2. I can get a VERY VERY SMALL tattoo to start. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before. But if I wanted to I could get like ONE FRECKLE tattooed on my shoulder, just to see. I don’t think I’ll go THAT small, but I could do a teensy little flower or something. I don’t have to impress the tattoo artist with my originality, I can just pick something out of a book.

3. The cartilage piercing. I don’t want to seem to be comparing several seconds of sharp pain to the long-haul burn of tattoo pain, but that experience built a little structure in my brain, where “scared of pain” got paired up with “pleased and strutting after doing it anyway.”

I was thinking it would be fun and motivating if all of us who had been putting off tattoos could all plan to go on the same day, but the logistics of that are not workable. Plus, there’s a Right Mood, I think. Like, some days I just THINK of doing some task and my stomach lurches teeteringly into my poor throat, and other days I’m like, “Sure, let’s do it!” I feel fidgety even trying to say “Let’s aim for October!” The big hurdle for me right now isn’t even the pain, it’s the fear of going somewhere new and doing something new. That is going to take a very particular kind of mood.

Let’s say a person were bracing for, at best, a period of civil unrest, and at worst something more like worldwide unrest. What might a person stock up on, to prepare in a calm, reasonable way that doesn’t include building a bomb shelter or converting all our cash to gold and burying it in the yard? My usual favorite kind of emergency preparedness is to buy things we’d use ANYWAY, but get significantly ahead of the supply we’d usually have on hand. I also like to buy things that meet a variety of emergency needs: things we could use in a power outage, a serious snowstorm, a presidential candidate calling followers to riot, sudden flooding, etc.

I’ve read enough books set in the second World War to know that coffee, tea, and sugar got scarce pretty quick. Those are easy to acquire in reasonable quantities, and easy to donate or use up if they don’t turn out to be needed. Canned things are handy, of course: soups, vegetables, fruits, legumes, tuna. Peanut butter is good dense low-perishable nutrition. Dried fruits, nuts. Crackers and dry cereals last a long time. Granola bars, meal-replacement bars. Rice, dried beans. Powdered milk. Water.

Good to have flashlights, batteries, candles, matches, oil lanterns; we have those things anyway for storms. We have nightlights similar to these; they come on automatically if the power fails, and they can then be unplugged and used as already-fully-charged flashlights. Extra can-opener. We have a crank-operated radio similar to this one, that can also kind of charge a cell phone (i.e., a few minutes’ worth, for making a quick phone call).

In a situation where a person might fear the general public, a weapon would be nice; if a person were not comfortable with a gun, a person could purchase a few pepper spray canisters (I have two black and one pink; now that I know it exists, I’m also getting one in turquoise). It’s not going to hold off an army, but it’ll help with someone who’s gotten a bit out of hand.

I’d rather not even have to worry about toilet paper, and it’s not like we’d need to worry about using up a surplus of it if it turned out the surplus were unneeded. Plastic bags: garbage bags but also I’m going to let the little Target-sized ones build up. A jug of bleach. Baking soda, vinegar, paper towels. Wet wipes. We have a couple of boxes of disposable plastic gloves on hand anyway (Paul uses them when cutting hot peppers), and a couple pairs of reusable cleaning-type plastic gloves. Duct tape.

I’m not planning to buy extra, but I’ll be making sure we’re nowhere near about to run out of our basic medicines: ibuprofen, antihistamines, prescriptions, antibiotic ointment. Maybe I’ll get a little ahead on bottles of multivitamins, just for the comforting aspect of it. We’ve got tons of band-aids already, and some bandages.

I’ll get a little ahead on cat food and cat litter, too.

I’ll plan to keep the cars fairly full of gas, rather than letting them run low. If there are things we WILL need pretty soon (socks, undies, printer paper), I’ll buy them sooner rather than later.

A clothesline is a nice multipurpose item; I got this one. Two hundred feet is enough to use it as a clothesline and still have extra to use as rope.

I already have a little survival-manual collection:

Department of Defense U.S. Army Survival Manual
The Forager’s Harvest
50 Most Common Medicinal Herbs

I have no idea if they’re any good. I’ve never opened them, let alone read them. It’s OWNING them that makes me feel better.

We have a pretty good supply of blankets and quilts already, and a sleeping bag per person I think. Actually, I think we only have enough sleeping bags for the kids. *adds “two sleeping bags” to list*

More ideas for the list?

Paul brought home nearly an entire large veggie-lovers pizza from a work event because no one else wanted it. I’d never had a veggie-lovers pizza before, so I tried a slice—and found that unfortunately the crust had gotten kind of icky and soggy. Paul wondered if it would work to scrape the toppings off into some scrambled eggs, since he knows I like vegetables in scrambled eggs. I tried that for lunch today and it was the sort of thing that made me put another tick mark on the “pro” side of the Marrying Paul pros-and-cons list.

I have applied for a passport, and if you’ve never done that before, perhaps you find the thought as intimidating as I did. I was worried too because I know it’s the sort of government-paperwork thing where you can get to the front of the line and find out you forgot something or did a form wrong and have to go all the way home and come back another day. It’s going to vary from person to person and from place to place, but I can give you the gist of how it went for me.

I started by thinking, “I don’t even know where to go for information on this. DMV or City Hall or something?” In the U.S., you go here: Department of State: Passports and International Travel. There is a Passport Wizard thingie to help you figure out (1) what you need to have and (2) what form you need to fill out. I’d thought this would be a waste of time, but actually it was very useful in two ways: first, because it gave me the information it said it would give me; and second, because it helped organize my mind and made the task seem manageable. Here is the list I made of things I would need for my own adult, first-timer passport:

1. certified copy of birth certificate
2. driver’s license
3. photocopy of front AND back of driver’s license
4. two copies of passport photo
5. Form DS-11, completed but NOT SIGNED
6. check for passport, made out to U.S. Department of State (name and birthdate on check)
7. check for execution fee, made out to application place
8. appointment for passport application

I found this a little overwhelming, but on the other hand was able to say, “Okay, well, I can at least go get the passport pictures taken,” or “Okay, well, I can just dig out the certified copy of my birth certificate.” I had a manilla envelope to collect the various things in.

You can do your own passport photo, but after looking at the list of requirements about backgrounds and inches and sizes and angles, I opted to spend $12.99 to have it done by someone who already knew the drill. I searched online for “passport photo” and it pulled up a bunch of places near me; I had it done at a drugstore that also has a photo-processing department. You are not allowed to smile (the site said a “natural smile” was okay, but the drugstore and postmaster agreed that the rule was NO smiles), so practice ahead of time looking alert and pleasant without smiling. I did not practice (or rather, I’d practiced a natural smile), and my photo looks like I’m exhausted and probably coming down with something. You’re allowed to wear glasses, but there was a note that as of November 1st glasses would no longer be allowed in passport photos, so I didn’t wear mine.

I gathered all my stuff together and drove half an hour to the nearest post office that does passport applications. I don’t know if I’ve gotten more nervous with age or what, but my face was hot and my hands were icy. And then everything went perfectly fine: I got a really nice clerk, and I had all the right paperwork with me, and everything was fine, and the whole thing was over in about ten minutes. They take the certified copy of your birth certificate to send in with the application, but he says they’ll send that back.

Entire cost: $140 for passport book/card, $25 for post office’s application fee, and $13 for the passport photos = $178.

Now to get six more. I started on Paul’s, but the envelope his mother labeled “birth certificate” was actually a decorative thing from the hospital where he was born, so this morning I sent off $32 to get an actual certified copy of his actual birth certificate.

My last day of work is coming this week, and my supervisor continues to ask me to fill shifts and go to new clients. I wonder if this will continue even after my last day. It reminds me of my last day at my pharmacy job when, in the middle of the last-day celebration, complete with doughnuts and a box of coffee, the pharmacist pulled me aside to say he knew this was my last day but could I possibly fill in the next day 9:00-6:00. I looked at him with a mix of panic and pity and managed to say no. That was a job where I once worked 29 days in a row (that is, seven days a week, no weekends) because I was the only wage-earner at my house and I felt I couldn’t say no to offered work; I finally said no to the offer of a Day 30, because I thought I was about to have a breakdown. I would prefer to NEVER AGAIN work in a job where I am called to fill shifts.

I am reading Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam, and it is okay so far, but the comma situation is going to drive me berserk. (I thought of this after using rather a lot of commas in the previous paragraph.) Here is a sample:

Lulu’s hair, just like the hair on that disembodied bust of Barbie, a birthday present on which she was meant to practice the feminine arts, could be pinned up prettily, pulled over her shoulder casually, or folded into a lush, delicious chignon. Lulu wore it to her waist, once upon a time, a much younger woman, though now, in her sixties, it’s mannishly cropped, which has the effect of making her face appear even finer.

It makes me feel as if I can’t breathe on a normal rhythm.

Let’s talk about two other books.

First, Dietland, by Sarai Walker.

I found this book so absorbing that I ran a red light while thinking about it, luckily with no consequences beyond burning embarrassment and the shaky sense of a narrow and lucky escape. I was trying to think of how to describe the book to Paul, and I knew there was a word I wanted but I couldn’t find it—and then I found it on the cover of the book: “subversive.” It looks like chick-lit, but notice that cupcake on the cover is a grenade.

Reading it, I thought, “I’ll bet this is her first novel”—and it is. It’s choppy, it’s oddly-paced, it’s confusing in places: at several points the main character was reading a book, and while she was doing so I couldn’t tell whose plotline we were following, hers or that of the woman in the book she was reading. There’s a serious lack of focus: are we talking about THIS issue or are we talking about THAT issue? It’s all tangled up together in one hot absorbing spinning satisfying mess. (Can you tell I’m reluctant to use commas so soon after criticizing someone else’s usage?) It’s a dark revengeful fantasy-adventure for anyone who has felt fed-up with issues surrounding women’s bodies and the way others treat them. I found it moderately life-changing and would recommend it despite its rough spots.

Next, a radical change of tone: A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman.

(image from Amazon.com)

The reviews are so mixed, you’d never think people were reading the same book. Everything from “So incredibly boring, just an old guy’s daily schedule, nothing even happens??” to “LIFE-CHANGING, THE MOST TENDER CHARMING BOOK I HAVE EVER READ, I WILL NEVER FORGET IT.” I lean heavily toward the latter, and felt similarly toward Britt-Marie Was Here. I have My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry in my library bag.