Facial Toner

"Mary, you are in your early twenties right?"

Surely it doesn't count if you lie to an eight year old. "Yes. Very early twenties."

"Well, how old are you exactly?"

"I am twenty - four."

"Hmm. That means you are turning twenty - five in April."

"......yes....."

"So ACTUALLY, you are in your mid twenties."

*Whimper*

I had a crisis when I turned 18: suddenly I could drink legally and I was supposed to vote. That seemed much too grown up for me, and I spent the morning of my eighteenth birthday in tears. And now, with twenty - five just around the corner, I feel another crisis coming on. A quarter life crisis. Because...I can officially say I am......a quarter CENTURY old.

I know. I know. Twenty - five isn't that aged. But the thing is.....I am noticing some changes that I really don't like.

For one thing, I bought a teeth whitening kit the other day. I am not sure if the current state of my teeth is the product of age or tea, but I will blame the former before I blame the latter because......I can't give up tea.

Then, there is my skin. I have always had nearly perfect skin, without ever having to do anything to warrant that. I washed my face when I remembered. I put on moisturizer if I thought my skin felt dry. But mostly, I did nothing.

Not so anymore. Suddenly I have weird dry patches and weird break out patches and I am completely and utterly obsessed with how clogged my pores feel. What a first world problem to have, am I right? Maybe I should go Africa and get my priorities straight.

But...BUT... this morning I noticed two tiny indentations between my eyebrows that DON'T GO AWAY EVEN WHEN I STOP FURROWING MY EYEBROWS. They are there PERMANENTLY.

So, I went to Kiehl's, mostly because it was the first place I saw when I entered the mall, plus every time I open InStyle, I see a huge spread on them. I was barely inside the store when I was nabbed by an extremely solicitous assistant who seemed completely anxious to know what I needed help with. She ushered me into a chair, and I sobbed out my woeful story.

"Well, your skin doesn't really look that bad. But I will do an analysis anyway." She blotted my face with some weird tester sticks, compared the results to a chart and came back with her diagnosis. "You have completely normal skin, with dry patches on your cheeks."

I could have told her that. "But I want AMAZING skin. I want it to stop getting OLD."

"We can certainly help. Wait one minute."

*A short BBM conversation later:* "Darling. So wonderful to meet you."

I looked up into the face of a perfectly dressed, perfectly coiffed man, outfitted in a WHITE LAB COAT, gazing with concern and oozing helpfulness. "Tell me your story. Leave nothing out." He fixed his eyes on mine like a sympathetic priest during confession, and made small noises of affirmation as I told him the whole history of my skin. As I finished, he gasped just a little.

"What do we hear missing? Hmm? A crucial element." He looked expectantly at the shop assistant.

"Toning. She doesn't tone her skin."

"Precisely. Sweetheart. You MUST tone. Absolutely ESSENTIAL. It must become a daily element of your beauty regimen. This (handing me a bottle filled with amber liquid) is what you need. It has hand - picked calendula petals."

Well, if they are hand-picked.....

"And now. Cleanser. Tell me. What is hardest on your skin? Stress? Fluctuating hormones?"

"Oh hormones, hands down. They rule my life."

"Sweetheart, it happens to ALL of us. This will just save your life. "

He has fluctuating hormones too? Do all men have fluctuating hormones? Or just ones who desire to identify very closely with women?

"And I suspect you might just LOVE this: our Midnight Recovery Concentrate. It works miracles."

"Will it even out my skin tone? And help with my wrinkles? If I don't get something that helps, I will need Botox in my forehead by thirty!"

"Oh darling, we've ALL been there. Pat this on after you cleanse and tone, and then seal it with this moisturizer. Magic. Perfection."

"And you are SURE this will work?"

"We will call you next week to make sure it does. You will have glowing skin in no time."

I grasped the counter full of products as if my life depended on it. Both plastic surgery and a burqa seemed inevitable if I didn't buy ALL of the face-saving products. So, a short credit card swipe later, and I was on my way into Victoria's Secret.

Bad idea. You know what I'm talking about. What woman, ever, in any circumstance, wants to be surrounded by posters of VICTORIA'S SECRET MODELS??

Umm.......

I started contemplating extensive liposuction and a full body lift, along with a potential height increase of at least six inches.

At which point I realized I was starting to let myself be crazy... and that maybe the crazy had started when I so eagerly latched onto facial toner with hand-picked calendula leaves, simply because I have a wrinkle on my forehead and a dry spot on my cheek.

But it is so, so easy. North American culture is hard-wired to make us look in the mirror and hate what we see. Case in point: at my sibling's school about half of the mothers look as if they are psychopathic mass murders. Their faces are so full of Botox that they can't smile or move their eyebrows.

After wandering around small town Greece and France I think I am suffering a culture shock. In both places, I became accustomed to graceful, naturally aged faces. They were beautiful in their expressiveness and in the stories the laugh lines and eye-smile crinkles told.

I didn't really realize how much I liked the look of everyone until I re-entered North America, and was faced on a daily basis with smooth faced, airbrushed perfection. I became acclimatized very quickly and....

ended up with a charming gay man ministering to me in Kiehl's, and a bag full of special liquids meant to halt my intensely speedy aging process.

I am the crazy I don't wish to see in the world. Whoops.

Ash Wednesday. Blrg.

Today is Ash Wednesday. The first day of Lent.

I love Lent. It is such an enriching time full of quite moments of prayer, deep self sacrifice, and epic growths in holiness.

I look forward to it every year.

...................Hmmm......Nope.

Absolutely not.

In no way shape or form is this true.

In fact, I hate Lent and usually begin to dread it the day after Christmas, with ever growing hiccups of despair as the calendar creeps forward to the day when I am supposed to get ashes slapped on my forehead and wear them proudly until I *accidentally* but very vigorously scrub them off.

I suppose it's good that I don't like Lent. I am not sure one is actually supposed to enjoy a season of penance and being better-than-normal. That would kind of defeat the purpose.

The thing about Lent is, that simply as a side effect of "giving something up" or trying to attend Mass more, or adding in a few extra prayers here and there, one pays a little more attention to the spiritual side of one's life. And there is the rub.

I don't know about you, but I usually end up wanting to throw the towel in after about a week. Being extra holy becomes too hard. The deep black crevices in my spiritual life open themselves up and swallow me, leaving me no choice but to acknowledge the inevitability of a disturbingly long time in Purgatorio.

Lent this year promises to be nothing different. In fact, it might promise to be something worse.

Oh yes. Already. Before the close of the first day. Failure.

Instead of "giving something up," I decided I would, for the whole of Lent, work on being nicer and more charitable to everyone around me. Maybe work on Patience a little. I saw visions of myself walking around on a cloud of sweetness and light, spreading joy and happiness with each serene glance and graceful gesture that I bestowed on the minions around me.

I was dressed in flowing white, with perfectly styled hair and glistening skin....

Oh wait. Back to my goodness.

I woke up, dressed NOT in flowing white, with hair that looked as if it was an extra large fur ball regurgitated by an obese cat, and skin that desperately needs professional intervention.

To be fair, looking like that, I didn't really have a choice to be anything more or less than a complete bitch. It took precisely fifteen minutes and twenty five seconds for me to bite off, with rabid glee and complete satisfaction, the heads of every single person around me and possibly make them wish that I had never been born. Or, more terribly, that they had never been born.

And then I decided to go to an Ashram because, really, if one religion doesn't work why not try another? Am I right?

Now, at the close of the day, I have come to a conclusion, because there is no other conclusion - that doesn't inspire utter despair - which I can come to.

To enmesh myself in a cliche: What matters is that I get back up. What matters is that I keep trying. What matters is that I face the reality of myself and know that I tend towards head biting and soul crushing. YES - I will try hard NOT to be that way, HOWEVER... let's be honest - very often I WILL succumb to my true self. Just because I keep tripping, doesn't mean I should stop walking. Even if I fall flat on my face, I should get back up. Who wants to stare at concrete? Or have sidewalk bugs crawl up your nose?

So here I am, trying to be nice, inclined to be mean, full of failure, but intending to keep trying. And I have Forty Days to focus in on that.

Lent was MADE for people like me.

And maybe even for you too ;)

Twenty. Days.

So......According to my last blog post, I posted exactly twenty days ago.

Lame. LAME.

I have excuses, I really do. But is an excuse ever really an excuse? I mean, shouldn't you just be able to suck back excuses, steam roll over them and continue on, life as normal?

Possibly.

But that would make me perfect. That, I am not.

Wait. Scratch that. That is a blatant lie. Everyone who knows me knows of my perfection.

I have no idea what my problem is, then. Perhaps I don't even have a problem.

Anyway. Many things have happened in the last twenty days. I have been to Lourdes again, where it was consistently assumed I was Italian. I was, yet again, and still naked, shoved, into frigid water that almost made my body short circuit but miraculously didn't kill me.

Imagine that. Dying at Lourdes from hypothermia caused by water meant to......heal you. Oh the irony. I probably shouldn't even laugh at that.

But I am.

On my way back from Lourdes, or perhaps it was on the way to Lourdes, I stopped in Toulouse for a few hours and, as is always the case, the area around the train station is remarkably seedy and disgusting.

This was made up for by the fact that I had the interesting experience of passing a brothel, stopping to figure out what it was before actually realizing what it was, peeking through the window, and having my eyeballs scream at me in protest. I proceeded to rinse them with bleach. The pain distracted me from the images imprinted irrevocably on my mind.

I mean seriously. If you work in a brothel shouldn't you be at least passably pretty and show some semblance of muscle tone? Or at the VERY least a disinclination to eat every single item on a buffet table?

Maybe it was a cheap place. I have no idea of these things. Maybe at higher class establishments the girls have to not look like trolls and actually try to fit into something smaller than a circus tent with an addition added on for a particularly busy night.

But enough about brothels.

A few days after Lourdes, I hopped on a plane and flew home to, essentially, get some blood work done and pow-wow with serious faced doctors about various aspects of my body and its oddities. Here I stay for a few months until I go join a convent or something.

I'm sorry. I should stop making that joke. It weirds people out too much. I don't know why. I think I would make an excellent nun. Don't you?

Don't even bother to answer that.

In any case, I am here to tell you that you should expect programming to resume as usual.

Your life will no longer be empty and devoid of joy when you check this corner of the blogosphere and find it unattended to. Yet again.

At least, I hope this is the case. Because really, what can I write about beyond things like my special European import, or the fact that my hair is currently purple and I am currently banned from chocolate?

Maybe you don't even want to know.

I am not sure even I want to know.

A Story Because I Am Lazy

So, having been absent for approximately 2.5 trillion light years, I have something to share with you.

I am entering a convent.

Next month.

Weird, right?

But it is un-avoidable. God has called me, and I must follow.

Or go to hell.

Because that is how it works.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Just kidding.

---------------------------------------------------------------

In other news, a lot a lot has been happening in my life, but instead of telling you about it, you get to read a story because I happen to be lazy. This story can serve a dual purpose by fulfilling my writing club obligation as well as giving you something to read.

A few weeks ago the lovely Meaghen, the fabulous Maja and I all decided that we needed to form a writers club. We would write two pages once a week, share it, and talk about it.

I put writing my story off until it was almost too late to get it done. Typical.

But now that it IS done, you get to see the product of my brains when I start to type without planning and give myself a deadline of one hour.

Lucky, lucky you.

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Duck

Warm air pulls her into the store and out of the cold as the sliding glass doors whisper open. Intoxicating smells waft over from the bakery, tempting her with the siren call of fresh, hot carbs.

She slides her coin into the handle of the cart and struggles with the locking mechanism - is it just her, or can no one else get it to work either? - and, after a few tries, yanks the cart free from its brothers. She plops her purse into the space meant for a toddler and rifles through its pockets, trying to find her list. A whispered curse escapes her lips as she digs deeper and deeper into the bowels of her bag, past coins and crumbs and candy wrappers and, amongst all that, still does not find the raggedy bit of paper she needs.

A pause in the frantic search: she stares into space as if trying to backtrack her morning. The list - where has she put it? Methodically she starts unzipping all the pockets of her jacket. Nothing. She digs her hands into the front pockets of her pants. Nadda. And then....a flash of remembrance zipps across her face: she pats her butt and sighs happily. Her slim fingers wriggle themselves inside the back pocket of her jeans and with a squeal of triumph, she reveals her list in all its glory.

She directs the cart towards the back of the store, towards the meat section. Duck. They better have some in. He likes duck. A small moan escapes her at the thought of no duck. Hurriedly she pushes the cart down the long aisle, desperate to discover the trajectory of her evening. It all rests, she feels deep in her soul, on the duck.

At the meat counter she taps the pointed toe of her black boot impatiently. An old lady is talking to the butcher in a wavering high pitched voice about her need for liver. Her doctor, she pipes into the butcher’s face, has told her that she must have liver. The butcher is in no hurry to get rid of her; he nods in sympathetic understanding and chats back to her as he wraps up the quivering red mass for the old woman.

Finally, finally, the old lady meanders off.

She approaches the counter; it feels as if the direction of her future rests on the answer to her question.

“Duck. I need duck for tonight.”

“A whole one? Breasts?”

“Breasts, preferably.”

“No problem. How many?”

“Two, please.”

"Coming right up."

The weight lifts off her shoulders; she stands a little straighter. Her smile goes from merely polite, to fully genuine. They have duck. It is a sign: the evening will be perfect.

With a swirl of brown paper and a length of twine, the butcher hands over her precious package, tells her to have a good day, and turns to his next customer.

The heels of her boots clip clop her to the produce section where she picks over the baby potatoes, trying, it seems, to find some that are all exactly the same size and shape.

That accomplished, she moves over to the assortment of bagged lettuces, examining them as closely as she can without actually tearing the bags open, searching for one with no signs of wilting.

Tomatoes are examined with extra attention spent on the smell, but it is when she gets to the raspberries that things get interesting. Container after container is meticulously examined - each and every one is discarded with a little sniff of disgust. The raspberries must be perfect; most of them are weeping piles of mush.

Looking surreptitiously over her shoulder she starts to shuffle raspberries between containers. The perfect ones go into one container, the ugly ones go into any other of the available containers.

Done with the produce section, she makes her way towards the bakery. Her final stop. If they have some fresh sourdough...MAN...she will have nothing to fear. It’s his favorite bread. Her eyes rest on the round bulbous loaf she is convinced she needs, a happy sigh issues out of her, and with that, all the remaining tension trapped in her body seems to float away.

Lined up at the cash register, she stares smilingly into space as she plans out her afternoon of cooking. Everything will be perfect. This is the start of a new a start. The duck and sourdough serve as confirmation.

I start to scan her items and she cheerily asks how my day is going. Before I can answer, she is distracted by the buzzing of her phone. Her eyes scan the screen of her Blackberry, skipping over the words of the text message.

Her shoulders sag. The ray of light in her face, so vibrantly there a moment ago, scuttles away leaving bleak despair.

“He couldn’t even call.”

“I’m sorry?”

“My husband. I was planning a special dinner. We were going to start over. But he has a meeting. Last minute. You know that means?”

I don’t answer. She isn’t really talking to me anyway.

Her voice drops low as she twists the massive, sparkling diamond on her left hand. “He’s not going to give her up. He’s not.”

She grabs her bag from the place where toddlers sit and walks, as if in a trance, towards the sliding doors of the store.

“Fucking duck.”