Out From Under

I type as I sit with my feet in a basin of warm water. After I’m done here, I’ll be giving myself a pedicure. This is all part of a decision to pamper myself at the end of a harried week. The next six weeks will be a long stretch of still more harried. So, let’s have a respite in the midst, shall we?

I’ll give myself a pedicure, I’ll do my nails, I’ll shave and oil and lotion and perfume. Maybe I’ll even hot-oil my hair. How it can be dry and at the same time a mass of frizz because of the out of this world humidity, I simply do not know, but that is the sad truth. My face is framed by — no, buried under! — an enormous mass of dark auburn waves-turned-fuzz.

Once I viewed all this as decadence. Tim-wasting. Frivolous. Unnecessary. Of course, I was also then in my dewy youth, with naturally smooth, taut skin and naturally wavy-cum-curly and yet somehow shiny hair.

I think I’m past my dewy youth now. Yesterday, at the library, a book caught my eye. “How not to look old.” I walked past, strong and firm. I don’t read that stuff. I wandered back, walked away. I don’t want that stuff. I wandered back and shoved it in my bag. Truth of the matter is, I don’t want to admit to being one of those women who reads that stuff. But I am.

I snuck that book home from the library like I used to sneak home Cosmo when I was fourteen. Cosmo, my grandfather called “every woman’s guide on how to be a whore”. Lest you be picturing the prudish, conservative patriarch, let me remind you of which grandfather I mean. Grandad was not offended by the sexiness of the magazine, nor by the thought that women could be autonomously sexual. What offended him was the magazine’s incessant, unrelenting focus on sex, as if that’s all a woman had to offer the world.

“There’s a whole lot more to you than ‘ten ways to give him a rise’, young lady.”

True enough.

Now I know ten way and then some, and have learned to ensure my own rises, too. I’ve found a career or two, I’m reasonably established in life. I may even be on my way to making my mark on the world. Though the final arbiters decide that after you’re dead and buried, I’m somewhat hopeful.

When skin is fresh, and hair is sleek, and boundless energy is a given, pampering is a decadence. When times moves on and gravity turns out to be a bitch, and 10:00 seems a perfectly reasonable bedtime, thankyouverymuch, such pampering is no longer decadent. It’s largely a necessity.

Hell, some days it’s a positive virtue.

Today, I am … ahhhh… being virtuous.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 6:35 am and is filed under Ilona's Take. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.