Favorite Philosopher's Blog

When I was in grade school sometimes we’d fool around with words – who didn’t – and exchanged the first letter of our last name with the first letter of our first name – making me Hary Morton.  Talk about a glimpse into the future.  Middle aged women, riddle me this: what the HELL is with the facial hair that grows as fast as those time-lapse  movies where the blade of grass grows from nothing to seven inches in three seconds?  My bathroom cabinet is filled with various and sundry remedies: Sally Hansen chemical depilatory, NADS, beeswax both hot and cool formula, little gadgets with essentially sandpaper on them (hair just glides away, yeah right) and of course the glue-ey strips that supposedly rip the hair of your face, not to mention some kind of bleachy product for the upper lip peach fuzz for in between torturous hair removal sessions.

The chemical cream is the easiest and works well and I’ve learned the hard way that it is best to set a timer  –  I think I’ve already related the story of my grand entrance at my 30th college reunion that included a “beard” and “mustache” not of hair but of red, scaly skin resulting from forgetting I had the stuff on my face while I packed.  So much for not being caught dead with facial hair when I met my party buddies.  I ‘fessed up, everyone had a good laugh, no harm done.

It was time again the other night. Chemical cream.  Five minutes.  Done.  However, it is important to get out the magnifying mirror because without fail, there they are – the Spartans of the facial hair universe.  They are long, they are strong, they resist the cream. They resist all the above mentioned products.  Not only that, because they have apparently now been stripped of anything that might be considered texture, they refuse to be grabbed by a tweezer.  I always prevail, but WTF?  Why do those hairs grow so much faster than the others?  One day they are not there (I check often, obsessively) , the next day I’ve got an entire United Nations Plaza of freak flags flying proud on my face.

The magnifying mirror also reveals their opposite – tiny fine hairs just above and at the corners of the lips that make me appear as if I descended from a walrus.  A big ol’ hair is ultimately painless to remove once you get ahold of it.  Not the baby hairs, that as a group seem to suck themselves back into the skin when you try to grab them.  Once you succeed at that task, ripping those little suckers out as a group is exponentially more painful than one lone hair.

Every four – six weeks, I succumb to cultural norms of beauty and cut the grass on my face, and use an edge clipper on my eyebrows and (gasp) the edges of my nostrils…that’s new in recent times.  I don’t know if I just didn’t notice the nose hairs before and people were too nice to say anything, as if I had a piece of spinach in my teeth, or whether they are the latest arsenal in the facial hair war against my youthful visage.

My sister and I have a running joke.  She will lose five pounds at the same time I seem to pick up five – we believe now that through some quirk of nature we are actually sharing the same five pounds and that they are travelling from Illinois to California and back again.  My son, Andy, was lamenting the other night that his hairline seems to have receded a bit “overnight.”  “It happened so FAST!” he said.  Uh huh.  I think I know where his hair went.

Went skiing again the other day.  It was the first time since 2009 when I took a nasty spill and wrenched my knee.  There were no major injuries – at least not that didn’t heal, but even childbirth isn’t as painful as a knee that swells up to twice its normal size.  I may have mentioned before that I learned to ski on the Adirondacks of New York, and after two treks down the bunny hill my boyfriend got disgusted and I rode to the top of the mountain where they waved goodbye and said they’d see me at the bar.  In other words, I’ve never had a lesson.

Over the years I picked up tips here and there and because I don’t like to fall, I am generally very conservative and enjoy going back and forth, back and forth.  What happened in 2009 was that the icy slopes of the morning, which are easy for me since I learned to ski in the east, turned into slushy slopes in the afternoon, which are not so easy for me.  The snow was just soft enough that I felt confident going a little faster.  Then I hit some real slush.  Any skier can tell you that what happens next is your skis stop dead and your body keeps going, a classic physics lesson in momentum if there ever was one.  Al said he literally watched me going head over heels that day.  It was the last run of the day, obviously, and I managed to ski down – lightly on my left leg – and by the time we got home I was in agony.  An xray the next day was negative and my visit to a fellow physical therapist revealed my knee was still stable – therefore no ligament tears or anything.

I have spend the last year getting my knee in better shape – yoga and strength training.  The first thing I noticed was how much easier it is to get up off the lift.  When you approach the exit point, the lift chair is practically on the ground – you sort of wait for it to lift you up a little more but at some point you have to stand up without using your hands, or you just push the chair seat back down with you on it.  All this on a slippery surface.  All skiers hate this part and when I figure out a better way, I will quit my day job.

Nevertheless, I was dismayed to discover that I was terrified to ski down on an intermediate slope, which has been my venue for some 30 years of on again-off again skiing.  I skied for an hour and was nearly in tears.  I didn’t feel in control.  It’s not that anything was really different, except that now I understood first hand how being not fully in control, if not totally out of control, could have devastating consequences on my body.

Truly discouraged on the beautiful, sunny, 35 degree Tahoe mountain day, I took off my skis and decided to gondola back to base.  Only the gondola doesn’t go back to base, it goes to a parking garage, so I gondola’ed back to where I was mid mountain, put my skis back on and made my way down the hill once again.  When I got down there I was delighted to realize that I could take a free ski lesson – midweek at Sugar Bowl, the ticket included rental and free lessons!  I knew I would need a lesson if I was ever to feel confident again.

I am not one to give up.  The senior discount for skiers starts at 70 and if there is a God who made mountains, I will be skiing when I’m 70. The afternoon lesson started at 1:30, so I went back to the car, ate lunch, slept in the sun like an old dog, and waited for the lesson to start.

Miracles happen.  The young men who are young enough to be my sons were polite and encouraging, and assured me that by the end of the hour I would feel good about skiing again, that my fear was normal and they had seen it all before (How could they? They were babies!)  As it turned out it was a semi-private lesson rather than a group lesson because only one other woman was at my level  Alex called us “strong skiers, who needed some tips.”  I liked that assessment.

The next hour was the best hour I’ve ever had skiing.  I learned how to complete my turns and turn uphill when I felt out of control.  Turning has never been a problem for me – that’s the problem!  I could go back and forth like an Olympian slalom skier with only one disadvantage – I didn’t know how to stop on command.  I do now.   I also learned how to “skate” to the lift line, instead of dragging myself along like a zombie on skis, my arms planting the poles and taking one step forward, two steps back, exhausted by the time I got to the lift.

Everything was going well until a middle aged snowboarder zigged when he should have zagged and, although I saw him out of the corner of my eye, I zagged when I should have  zigged, and we defied the laws of physics by trying to occupy the same place at the same time.  There went my knee.  It was not so bad this time, it’s muscular in nature, of that I’m sure, and I also wear a helmet now, so when my head hit the snow I was pleased that the extra $10 bucks for the rental had not been wasted.  By 1:30 p.m. it was just above 40 degrees and it was hot wearing that helmet, I had almost decided not to wear it for the afternoon. So I also learned how to get up from a fall, which had always been torture for me.  It’s a real “duh” moment – you take off one of your skis and stand up on the ski-less boot.  It’s amazing was a lesson can do!

I was in mild discomfort so decided to call it a day, but my fear of the morning had thankfully dissipated, and I look forward to carrying out my game plan: a) I will purchase my own boots for better fit and ergo better control. b) I will take another lesson.  c) I have an appointment with a sports ortho doctor who will help me decide upon the proper brace to wear for skiing.  d) I will ski until I qualify for the senior discount!  To infinity – and beyond!

When we went camping when I was a kid, my Mom used to say the same things over and over again.  Anyone born before 1980 probably doesn’t know what this idiom means, but she “sounded like a broken record.”  For the benefit of the young, when an LP would get a scratch, it would “skip” and it would “skip”, and it would “skip”, and it would “skip”, and it would scrrrtch repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase, repeat the phrase scrrrtch until you would bump the needle arm lightly with your finger to move it past the scratch, “scrrrtch,” and it would continue on unless of course it hit another scratch, hit another scratch, hit another scratch, hit another scratch scrrrtch…

Dad came up with the idea of numbering Mom’s frequent phrases.  Here, for you reading pleasure, straight from a camping journal circa 1967, are some examples:

#59 – “Mary, did you go to the bathroom?”  Apparently I was one of those kids who would forget to go until we were ten minutes into our day excursion, at which point I would need a bathroom.  Now.  I think Andy inherited that from me.

#22 – “Where could you get a meal like this?”  Anyone who camps knows what this means.  Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Potato Buds and Oscar Meyer Wieners taste like a White House state dinner when you’re camping.  Something about the outdoors.  Mom said that one a lot – almost every night I think.  Maybe what she really meant was “Really, I should just cook this at home most nights, don’t you agree?”

#17 – “The sun burns at these high altitudes.”  We usually went to the Grand Tetons on our camping trips.  Mom would remind us frequently of the danger of sunburn because it was usually so cool.  I grew up and forgot; when Al and I took a canoe out on Jackson Lake on our honeymoon trip to our new home in San Francisco, we got to take a photo of my fire red back with SOS written on it in aloe cream.  Ouch.  #17 indeed.

and finally:

#20 – “Let’s get organized.”  Mom was and is nothing if not an organized person.  I am not so organized although I long to be so.   I often say in my head “I need to get organized” but struggle to actually accomplish it.  It has to do with procrastination more than anything else.

Now I am facing 2011 with many new pursuits and I’m getting a little nervous at the prospect.  I need to get a schedule.  I need to keep to it.  I need to make to do lists, check them twice, put them in appropriate folders, mark them on one calendar and one calendar ONLY.  I need to find out the library hours, the gym hours, then  fit them in around the online classes, the chorus rehearsals, the designated quilting nights with Terri, the meditation time, the undisturbed reading time and damn-it-all, the work time.  I really hate sleep, but I keep reading everywhere that people who sleep less than 5.5 hours a night have more trouble losing weight and more danger of dementia.  Which means I have to quit this hate relationship I have with sleep and this love relationship I have with caffeine, or be doomed to be stuck in a chair, unable to get up and not knowing why I really need to.

I am going to start tonight, as soon as I finish this little diatribe, by categorizing my blog entries.  So far most of them are in “uncategorized” which is not helpful for the future when I might want to remember what I wrote and use it for something else.

I shall leave you with this.  On one of our trips  we saw a ranger talk on how mountain meadows are always in the process of turning into lakes, and vice versa.  Thereafter, whenever Mom saw a swamp in our alpine travels, she would muse “I wonder if that is a meadow turning into a lake or a lake turning into a meadow?”  That earned the spot of #1 in our Mom’s sayings catalog.  As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I may have to change the title of this blog to My Second Favorite Philosopher.  You have to admit, that #1 is about as philosophical as you can get and she would have to be, without a doubt, my favorite philosopher!

Now I’m off to #20…