Outdated

I just had a birthday recently, and while I'm not going to start lying about my age anytime soon, I have to admit to feeling a little over the hill. I know, silly thirty-three-year-old whining. I'm the latest birthday among my closest friends, I've no grey hair to speak of, and all my faculties are intact. Maybe just a tiny amount of complaining?

The two main things that made me start feeling outdated were my daughter starting kindergarten and my attending classes at the junior college. On the one hand, I'm of the average age for parents of Small Person's classmates. On the other, I'm a generation older than my classmates, most of whom graduated high school recently. I feel somewhat out of place in both environments. Walking through campus to attend my own class, however, I feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. I'm so obviously (to my mind) older, uncool, unaware of the social conventions. The texting, the clothing, music, slang, is all unfamiliar. I'm old.

To be fair, I felt very similarly when I actually was in high school. I didn't really fit in, and always felt some level of anxiety about that. I guess I had a coinciding level of impatience with those who did fit in, also. Maybe I was just old before my time. The phrase "those dang kids" already leaping to my lips a good forty years before it was necessary. Whatever. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop giving those kids dirty looks when their phones ring mid-class.

As for the kindergarten... That's just another arena for my social dysmorphia. What can I say, I'm a mess of issues. This one reads like this: I'm old enough to be more successful, better dressed, more organized, etc. than I currently am. Why am I not? These other people seem so much more together than I am. Except when they don't, and then I hope I look better in comparison. Lame.

The moral of this post? I apparently worry too much about what other people think of me. Quit it.

And, I should get some eye cream.

My old ponies

Butterscotch and Blossom sit on the windowsill in my daughter’s play area. They were born in 1982, so they’re getting on in age – Blossom’s got missing hair, artfully replaced by a bunch of lilac and yellow ribbons – but their expressions are still patient and placid, friendly and calm.

They’re My Little Ponies -- the Barbies of the animal kingdom, with their girlish prancing forms and large, coy eyes. And they are my My Little Ponies, accumulated during the years when pre-teen horse craziness and an affinity for bright colors intersected.

I had many, and last time we were at my mother’s house we dug them out of the closet for my daughter.

But I feel weird about them, the way they are anthropomorphized – in a way that suggests, if not overtly, sexiness and all the “girl” qualities of flirtatiousness and shiny, shiny hair.

Blossom and Butterscotch are from the first run of ponies, before they got quite so bad, but I have some from later years, too, and they only get more ridiculous.

I’m not sure if I want my daughter to subtly absorb all this weird stuff -- I mean, these ponies come with everything from sparkly combs to wedding dresses, disco gear and roller skates (all of which I own). I try to gracefully accept the fact that I should relax and let her organize them by size, which is what she does with them, and stop worrying. (Of course I could always sell them…)

But they do sort of bug me out. I don't approve and at the same time I cherish them in the way one cherishes a loved toy from a happy childhood.

Especially old Blossom.

Carla Bruni and women being men

There was an article in Vanity Fair about Carla Bruni.

I admit to not having ever heard of her before she ended up with Sarkozy, so I was curious.

Now, it’s a fairly flattering profile, and superficial, I know…but I was interested in my own reactions to it.

My first was the typical tear-down a woman does when confronted with another woman who is (a) beautiful at forty, (b) rich, (c) successful in modeling! and music!, and (d) now a major VIP.

“Oh, well, she’s not that gorgeous. And it's airbrushed. And she’s an heiress, so it’s all given to her on a platter. She’s a rock star groupie, and please, breathy folky music with soul-searching lyrics? Give me a break…"

But the more I read, the more I started to admire her.

She’s described in masculine terms – as an “alpha female” or as a hunter of men.

To me what that says about her is that she feels entitled, something women have a problem with. I’m not talking about our modern American environment-wrecking entitlement, but rather the ability to demand rather than to apologize, ask, then apologize for asking.

It reminded me of something I heard on NPR – an interview with Norah Vincent, a woman who went undercover as a man. (She’s not transgender, this was just to find out how the other half lives.) She said one of the lessons she would take back to her woman life from her stint as man was that men are much more comfortable demanding things, or rather asking for things without apology, without flirting, without looking like we just don’t want to bother anybody but would you mind just a little bit…

So maybe Carla Bruni is a homewrecker, if she feels like making music rather than being a muse, so much the better. I don’t even care if it’s good.