Thirty Five is the New Twenty Seven

The problem with turning thirty-five years old is that it's the year everyone starts to say, "Ooh. Well, you don't LOOK THIRTY-FIVE" in this sort of patronizing, conciliatory way when they say "Happy birthday," and ask how old you are. Oh, man, I hate that. It's particularly annoying coming from twenty somethings. I just want to smack them. You know, the twenty somethings who are always saying things like, "I'm dating AN OLDER MAN," and you find out the guy is thirty-one and the twenty something is twenty-five.

They always use actors who are way older than thirty-five to play a thirty-five year old on TV, so people think that real people who are thirty-five look younger than thirty-five. Anyway, I'm healthy, I wear sunscreen, I exercise and I have melanin, so I'm hardly spackling my wrinkles with silicone line filler and hoisting my boobs off the ground. Actually, the only sign I've seen that I'm aging is that I have a few gray hairs. Now that's weird. My gray hairs are totally different from my regular dark brown hair... the brown hair is pliable and shiny and each strand is very fine, but the gray hairs are very thick and kind of wiry. It's pretty gross, actually. I went so far as to pull out the couple of gray hairs that lie along my part. The rest of them, I just leave alone.

All in all I'm dealing with the thirty-five thing pretty well, I think. So far.

I really think thirty-five is the new twenty-seven. I think I should put that on a tee shirt.

A Rose by any other name

Dannii Minogue is the younger sister of Kylie Minogue, lesser known to those of us in the United States, but apparently wildly famous in them there Australia, New Zealand, and Asia parts. Her full name is Danielle Jane Minogue.

Dannii is an interesting nickname for Danielle. My name is also Danielle, but I go by Dani, which seems woefully SHORT now that I know about Dannii. I mean, think of all the extra letters I could have had. And when you do a web search for "Dannii" you're pretty much only going to find Dannii Minogue, which speaks to the originality of the name with the additional letters.

I had a job a few years ago where there was a woman named Dennie. Our boss was British and maybe because of the way Dennie and Dani sounded to him, he thought the names were too similar. I told him he could call me Danielle, but there was a guy named Daniel, so he didn't want to call me Danielle either. I don't really know why it mattered, but maybe because it was a customer service type job where you have to giv your name out to customers all the time, he felt it was important that we all have a unique name. To me, since there was no Dani or Danny or Danielle, I didn't see why I had to be renamed, but I decided to be Elle; the second half of Danielle. Only I don't really like the sound of Elle, which sounds like El, as in "el", which is just the masculine "the" in Spanish, as in el perro or el insecto. So I made them pronounce it like "Ellie" but spell it "Elle". To me, this was funny, and kind of my way of getting back at everyone for making me change my damned name. It was weird. People would call my name at work "Elle. Elle. ELLE!" and I wouldn't respond... or I would go to sign a note or Post It and start to write "D-a-n" oops, try again.

There were three Mikes there at one point, with one Mike being the owner of the company. Since he didn't do customer service, another guy was also allowed to be Mike, but he was Big Mike. Then another Mike came and was faced with the same ultimatum I was faced with: we want to hire you, but... you'll need to choose a different name. He ended up using his surname; I can't remember what it was, but it sounded like a first name. Big Mike left, and another Mike was hired, and he decided to go by "Tony", which I think was his middle name.

The whole thing falls under the category of truly f-ing ridiculous things I have done for money, a category which is broad and vast indeed.

Now that my eyes have been opened to the existence of Kylie Minogue's sister, and the truly exotic spelling options available to those of us named Danielle, my nickname name looks like a dull and lusterless, straightforward, four letter word in comparison! And don't get me started on Anna Nicole Smith's daughter Dannielynn. My friend Ei is fond of calling me "Dani-Lynn!" in a high pitched, screechy voice with a poor imitation of a Southern accent (she's from New York). Perhaps it is time to re-invent myself!

Bros before Hos

At work I sit in what's called a "bullpen configuration" by the people at Herman Miller, designers and manufacturers of modern office spaces. There are four of us who sit in pretty close quarters. It's well-designed, if I must say so myself; but I was the project manager on this new office space, so I'm biased. At any rate, my task was to fit four people into a very small space, one person who is the IT manager, and she needs room for all her cables and computers and laptops and keyboards, and one is the CFO, and of course he needed quiet, privacy, and status. The third person is a trainer who trains new staff and teaches them how to drive a forklift, and warehouse safety, and what the differences are between four dozen varieties of tangerines, etc. Fitting him in was easy, because he had no say in the matter. He took his position just as the finishing touches were being put on the bullpen. The fourth person is me.

So, we sit in a bullpen. We have no privacy from each other, but no one else can see us unless they actually move our flexible wavy screen that blocks the opening aside and enter the bullpen. Most people, including our CEO, are rather polite about this. From the outside, people say, "Knock Knock" or "hi... can I come in?"

The only person who doesn't do this is Leggy, the boss of the trainer guy. She feels entitled to come barging right in, gangly arms and legs flying, talk to him in her loud screechy voice even though the other three of us are working in complete silence, and stand in the non-existent space between him and me so that I can't move my chair. She also feels entitled to tell him he looks tired, needs more rest, needs to shave, needs to get married, and "I thought you said you were going to cut your hair! You didn't cut your hair! You said you were going to! You didn't!" The guy is easygoing, really good-looking; he's Japanese-Irish, about six foot five, and has long black wavy hair which he keeps in a low ponytail. And unlike a lot of the people I work with, he doesn't smell. Leggy is homely, dresses like a fool, is really rude, and has wiry hair that's about 1/3 black and 2/3 iron gray, to her shoulders and with no particular style, and she has a mean-looking little mouth and silver braces. She also wears shorts to work. Not long shorts or pedal pushers or culottes or clamdiggers. Shortie shorts.
I really don't know where she gets off criticizing anyone's style or grooming.

So the other day she came barging in, and in the middle of berating him about one thing or another, she sees that he has this "Bros before Hos" thing on his desktop.
Now, the IT manager and I had seen it earlier, and we thought it was funny, first of all because it's satirical and it IS funny, and secondly because we both prefer Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton, and it seems most of our workplace is pro-Hillary, and damned vocal about it. Plus, there aren't any other people besides us who will see this guy's desktop, so we are pretty much the extent of who could possibly be offended. But Leggy immediately bellowed, "I FIND THAT OFFENSIVE. THAT IS SEXIST AND RACIST. TAKE IT DOWN. NOW." First of all, she should have told him that privately. Secondly, we're all people of color, and she's white. Thirdly, she's the most classist, offensive person I know, always on and on about fat people and fat children and fat America. (I think she has an eating disorder. She eats her lunch out of a Tupperware smaller than a deck of cards, and when we had a potluck, she asked the woman who made pigs in blankets if there was any nutritional value in them.)

The Bros before Hoes thing is actually a tee shirt design. Oh, how I would love to buy it, wear it, and get sent home on a beautiful sunny day soon! I could probably get the IT manager in on this with me.

My Avocation

In the novel I talked about below, in the afterlife, everyone does a job they love. Money isn't really an issue for the dead, and the main characters seem to always have as much money as they need. Everyone works, though; each person chooses an "avocation". The main character, Liz, works with dogs (she can understand their language), and John Lennon is a gardener. An avocation is whatever they will love doing.

I often wonder how many people are doing what they would most love doing. As for me, I'm not sure what I would most love doing for work. I've done work in the past that I loved. I loved talking to people about sex but heck, I was earning $11.82 an hour. At times, I loved teaching high school, but there were a lot of things about it that weren't right for me. I loved working in a bookstore in college.

I'm looking for a new job, not because I don't like mine; it's a fun job with a lot of autonomy and I get to write, research, and do some graphic design. Sometimes I love it, but I don't LOVE it. There's a glass ceiling and I've gone as high as I can go, and that's one issue, but also, I don't LOVE my job.

Once you start looking for a new job, it's easy to get "senioritis" -- really cranky and lazy and uninspired. To stay focused, I'm doing this Pollyanna-ish thing that really works amazingly well for me; saying "I'm going to do my best today" and really doing it! I don't have to do anything perfectly; just my best. Ironically, this goody-goody stuff makes me happier at work, and it's pretty much what got me through college and what keeps me exercising.

For a Good Cry: Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

Last night I finished reading the novel Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. (The first image is the UK cover, which I think is more beautiful and expresses better what's inside the cover than the US cover, below.) Toward the last few pages, I cried and cried. The premise of this novel (and it's a work of adolescent lit, a genre I love) is that a young woman is killed by a hit and run driver and she ends up in the afterlife, called "Elsewhere". There, people age backward, dead artists, like Picasso, are working on new paintings, and Liz, the main character, changes and matures through the novel in ways that are funny and sad. It's such a bittersweet story.

I really am the worst at describing novels, so check it out here.

The Big Duds of Winter

It's officially spring and time to reflect on my closet and all the things I stupidly spent money on and never wore last winter. (This exercise is not to beat oneself up, but rather to learn something about one's own taste, fashion sense, preferences and future expenditures.)

I actually did remarkably well; most of these are small items:

1.) Lush Charity Pot body lotion.
I was told by someone who works at one of the shops that the lotion smells like a less-strong version of their Honey I Washed the Kids soap. which smells like honey. It does not. It smells yucky and flowery and kind of like Jergens. It's like Essence of H'ospital, or eau de Nursing Home. Lush stuff is nice, though, and somewhat pricey, and coveted by some people, so I urged DD, "Take it to your work and put it in the bathroom or kitchen." He refused, saying he didn't want to smell it on anyone. I haven't taken it to my work either. (there's a shared refrigerator and a small grubby kitchen at my work, and any food that anyone brings to share, from stale doughnuts to an aging two liter of flat Coke to an unmarked brick of smelly cheese will be gobbled up quickly, but as for highly-fragranced smelly luxury lotion, I don't think anyone will want it)

2. a Harajuku Lovers Angel Kitty purse
I don't know what I was thinking. It felt cheap and plastic-like. It looked cheap and plastic-like. It was small and couldn't really hold any stuff.

3. a pair of Hue brand mustard yellow opaque tights
I don't even remember what I planned to wear these tights with, but they're so ugly, and mustard yellow is such a bad color on me, even far away from my face down there on my legs and feet! They're still in their package.

4. a pink lucite cube choker necklace
Chokers never look good on me. I have a very short neck, and chokers only bisect the neck, cutting it into two even shorter halves. It's like my head is sitting right on top of the choker necklace. I already know this, and yet-- Behold, the pink lucite choker!

6. Do bad makeup purchases even count? That's a whole 'nother can of whoop ass. There's a whole category of my bad makeup purchases, a category called "Lipsticks which are Paler than my Own Lips and which make Me Look Like the Walking Dead." This category includes MAC lipstick colors Snob, Pink Plaid, Craving, Pervette, and Creme de La Femme, among others.