Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

June 29 2006

On the one hand...

A few days ago, I made my monthly pilgrimage to my nail salon. I always (and very secretly) wanted to have nice looking nails, but I had pretty much given up on that particular expression of female beauty. My nails, in their natural state, or after a home done manicure, are just plain ugly. About a year ago, I decided that I am now willing to pay someone $35 to do something about it, and began the acrylic nail experience I had always associated with true empty-headedness.

As if that were not embarrassing enough, I also have been getting my eyebrows waxed there every three or four months. Yes, on Tuesday, I actually paid someone to pour hot wax on my eyebrows and then rip it off. That form of torture was then followed up by a bit of tweezing, a process that is far more uncomfortable than the wax part of this superficial journey.

As a teenager, I looked at the pretty young girls around me and felt hopeless (and somewhat desperate) about my own appearance. Looking at magazine models made me want to crawl into a hole. My solution was to dismiss it all as frivolous crap, dress myself in bell bottoms and character t-shirts, and triumphantly avoid both mirrors and make-up.

It worked, more-or-less.

As I entered my 50s, I found my attitude about this sort of things was changing. As a younger woman, I had felt like people either chose beauty or brains, and that as long as I had the latter, the first was too silly to think about.

These days, a whole lot of things, and not just arguably inconsequential things like manicures, seem less black and white, less dichotomous. I can even occasionally understand the rationality behind political ideas I don't support.

I guess it could be that I am getting more mellow, or less passionate, but I don't see it that way. Instead, I see myself as being less rigid, less judgmental, and more accepting of other ways of navigating through the world. I still have enormous passion when it comes to injustice or social responsibility, and in fact, now that my days of active mom-hood and full time employment are over, I have more time to work (in my own way) on those important issues.

In any case, I didn't feel even the slightest bit ashamed when, lovely manicured nails and all, I put in my hours this week at the local housing not-for-profit that gets most of my volunteer time these days. My nails may have French tips, but I'm still not afraid of getting my hands dirty.