msmeta’s musings on the meaning of life at middle age — and beyond.
And for those of us whose lives are now weary, stale, flat and unprofitable with the conclusion of Season Four of Project Runway, the NYTimes offers a sliver of hope. (And Bravo’s parent company NBC is HOPPING mad at the Weinsteins for trying to sell the Peabody-winning show out from under them.)
It’s a cat fight! Stay tuned!
For those of us who are trying to come up with interesting things to blog about on a daily basis, (thanks, Jane) and who may be wondering if we want to put in the effort to make a blog profitable, the NYTimes offers this:
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
The article lists a couple of heart attacks, a near death and this:
“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.” “This is not sustainable,” he said.
Indeed. The technology and entertainment blogs would seem to be the most competitive, with the spoils going to whoever gets the latest info up first, so I imagine their casualties would be high.
But what about those of us with more modest aims, who use our blogs as a form of therapy or mere communication? I haven’t made the commitment to blog every day, although I try to, and sometimes, if something comes up, I blog more than once during the day. (And I’m just about ruling out any income from this meager effort, particularly since WordPress is a little stinky on that point.)
I guess I don’t want this to become one of those sites that I sometimes find when I google a topic. The topic is still there on the blog, often written in lively prose by an interesting blogger. But the site has been long abandoned, with the last post dating from December 2005 (or some forlorn date). Sometimes it’s the clear the blog has evolved into something else, but often it just dies. From what? A lack of interest? A motocycle accident? A stroke? A jealous spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend?
I’ve worked in news/media/PR for 25 years, and perhaps when I started this blog I understood the terror of the blank page (or the blank screen) better than most. It’s difficult to sustain a conversation without reverting to the latest cute thing my toddler said or a complete travelogue of my trip to the beach/mall/hospital/bar. But I also remember someone once saying that anyone who has made it through four years in an American high school probably has enough material for several books. True enough.
Who? Gene Puerling died late last month at 78. And if you don’t know who he is, you should. I grew up obsessed with my older brother’s Four Freshman albums and learned to sing harmony from them. I moved on to the Beach Boys, Manhattan Transfer and Take 6, and I loved my sons’ Boys to Men CDs. And they all owe a debt of gratitude to Puerling, who was the godfather of close-harmony singing. The recordings by his studio group, The Singers Unlimited, with the peerless Bonnie Herman, are masterworks. May his heavenly choirs be in perfect tune and vibrato-less!
Vanity Fair, that bastion of impartiality, begs to differ that women aren’t funny in this.
“There is no question that there are a million more funny women than there used to be,” says Nora Ephron, the writer and film director. “But everything has more women. There are more women in a whole bunch of places, and this is one of them.” Ephron knows exactly why female comedians are currently much more successful than they used to be. “Here’s the answer to any question: cable,” she says. “There are so many hours to fill, and they ran out of men, so then there were women.”
Ah, Nora. Don’t miss I Feel Bad About My Neck, her collection of essays on aging. And for those of us of a certain age, there’s always Mrs. Hughes. Oh, and the ageless Rita Rudner, who claims that men are afraid of eyelash curlers. “I keep one under my pillow instead of a gun,” she says. And this: “My husband are trying to decide whether to get a puppy or have a baby. We’re trying to decide if we want to ruin our carpets or ruin our lives.”
With the economy in the tank, perhaps it is time for me to blog on one of my favorite topics: thrifting.
When we moved to Chicago, I became a trailing spouse holed up in the top floor of a Victorian three-flat with two manic little boys and little money. I met a great woman, Susan, at church, who always seemed to have it all together. Like me, she was a refugee from the West, but seemed to have this whole Chicago big-city thing figured out, and she and her two children always looked smashing.
“So,” I asked her hesitantly one day, “Where do you buy your clothes?” I was expecting her to name Marshall Fields (RIP, sigh…) or some other pricey place, but I was surprised. “Amvets!” she said cheerily, and proceeded to take me shopping with her. Read the rest of this entry »
WARNING! POSSIBLE TMI ALERT! Musings on starting a period yesterday, at age 56, after six months of no-shows and actually getting my HOPES UP:
• A study from Norway shows that the older a woman stops menstruating permanently, the longer she lives. Women who go into menopause later than age 52 live longer than those who go into menopause earlier.
• For unknown reasons, having a first period at a young age and going through menopause at a late age seem to put women at a slightly higher risk for developing endometrial cancer.
• Nulliparous (childless) women and women who went through menopause later in life had significantly less cognitive decline. These results suggest that greater lifetime exposure to endogenous estrogen may be associated with less age-related cognitive decline.
• Having a late menopause usually runs in families, but it can also happen if you are overweight.
• Unfortunately late menopause can raise new health concerns or still cause menopause symptoms, resulting from the body’s decreasing production of hormones. Osteoporosis and heart disease are the most serious potential health concerns of the late menopause years.
Kill me now.
Rachel Donadio, in a recent NYTimes article, makes the case for literature being a possible deal-breaker when it comes to relationships:
Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the … problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers.
The Spouse and I bonded early on a love of Shakespeare, despite an on-going argument about it being great theatre or great literature (he would win, of course, but Will is still a damn good read). Our tastes have kind of diverged from there, his to a diet of Stephen King, Orson Scott Card and Frank Herbert and the like, mine to a lot of non-fiction, mystery novels and works by women. We’ll occasionally exchange titles, but we certainly don’t base our relationship on books in common.
Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.”
In point, one of Donadio’s literary interviewees has a partner who doesn’t read at all: “When she wants to talk about books, she goes to her book group.”
I’m just happy he reads. In fact, he probably spends more time reading than I do. Our sons hardly read at all, which makes me feel guilty (I just couldn’t read The Cat in the Hat for the 400th time) and I’m finding that a lot of their generation doesn’t read, either. It takes too much of their time.
What I’m reading now: It’s a toss-up between an early Denise Mina crime novel and The Madwoman in the Attic, a critical examination of 18th century woman writers (for my Jane Austen Book Club). I frequently read two books at once.
What gets read at your house?
Revlon apparently has seen the error of its ways, and is retrenching. According to Ellen Byron at the Wall Street Journal,
Starting this week, TV ads starring longtime spokeswoman Halle Berry will introduce a line of Revlon makeup infused with minerals. Print ads launched in magazines last month featured Jessica Alba touting new Revlon foundation in a bottle that lets consumers’ customize their shade, and this month she is featured in lipstick ads.
The blitz marks the first major initiatives since the company’s Vital Radiance cosmetics line aimed at older women flopped 18 months ago, leading to the ouster of its chief executive, more than $70 million in losses, the dismissal of about 10% of its U.S. work force and a new strategy for Revlon.
It made me wonder if L’Oreal has got any game with its ads featuring Diane Keaton and her delicate but aging locks?
The Vital Radiance line failed largely because of marketing missteps. For example, it didn’t incorporate the well-known Revlon brand name, hired unrecognizable models as spokeswomen and cost more than consumers cared to spend. By contrast, the antiaging makeup lines by Procter & Gamble’s Cover Girl and L’Oréal’s namesake brand respectively feature celebrity spokeswomen Christie Brinkley and Diane Keaton.
Well, fine, but Revlon’s abandoning of the entire makeup line in favor of something with a more youthful appeal makes me wonder: Are women of a certain age not buying cosmetics? Or are they not buying cosmetics aimed at THEM? If I were a forty-something (and I am not) and had to choose between Ms. Berry and Ms. Keaton, well, I suppose there wouldn’t be a choice.
But what about us fifty-somethings? The ousted Revlon ads apparently featured attractive but genuinely older women, and they flopped. Are we kidding ourselves? Are we not interested in buying things touted by models who — GOOD GRACIOUS! — are as old as we are? I know the women I see at Chico’s generally are NOT the same age or size as the youngish models featured in their ads and catalogs, but they do aim their clothing at women of a certain age. Is this denial on our part?
Will we EVER get a chance to feel comfortable in the skin we’re in? If we don’t, I’m afraid it will be our fault.
The NYTimes recently featured a story about a new Web site for the 40+ crowd: Wowowow, a title the founders had to wrest away from a porn site.
The fare on the new PG-13 Wowowow is in some ways no different than that of other women-focused community Web sites like iVillage: horoscopes and posts about love and marriage, health and fashion. Wowowow also has political commentary, but what is particularly distinctive are the conversations, …which read like deeper and more intimate versions of the “hot topics” segment of the television gabfest “The View.”
“It was very loose and fun and intimate,” [Candace] Bergen said of participating in the discussions, which the women have practiced while the site is in beta mode. The cozy tone of the exchanges, the participants say, reflects their decades-long overlapping friendships, stretching back to the 1960s and ’70s when many were among the first women pioneering their media and entertainment fields
Candace Bergen? Oh, yeah, and Peggy Noonan, Joan Juliet Buck (one of my favorite Vogue writers), Lily Tomlin, Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners), Whoopi Goldberg and site founders Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells and Joni Evans, all media titans (or titanias) and all of a certain age. Nice cast.
Wowowow’s chief appeal may be the glimpse it promises into the personal lives and beliefs of a group of businesswomen who broke through glass ceilings… “IVillage has always puzzled me,” said Ms. Buck, a contributing editor to Vogue and a consulting editor to Wowowow. “I love the idea but it’s like Macy’s or something.”
Gee, I ASPIRE to shop at Macy’s. I hope they’re not too lofty for the rest of toiling away at home, in classrooms or middle-management.
Statistics show there is a market for such a site. A comScore Media Metrix study of the growth in visitors among the top 100 United States Internet properties found that women’s community sites were, along with political sites, the top gaining Internet category last year.
Well, that’s certainly some vindication for my earlier lament over the dearth of sites. I know I’ll be logging in.
(FYI. I clipped this from another blog that I have been experimenting with, so if you find another blog with this entry, I have in essence plagiarized MYSELF.)
I dashed over to Costco during my lunch hour to pick up some prescriptions (my co-pay was $170 — Yikes!) and was surprised to see at least four older men and women (65+) who had very young children with them, clearly caregivers. One older couple had two very lively little boys that were almost too much for them to handle, especially in a store with so many distractions.
I’m not sure what I think about that. I was fortunate to only work part-time when my children were very small, and I was grateful to my mother and in-laws when they watched my children for me, but it wasn’t a regular thing. I used daycare and preschool, even when we were in Chicago and had to drive miles to get to them. I recognize there can be extenuating circumstances, such as single parenthood and unemployment, that can make childcare a real financial drain. But is it fair or even appropriate to ask older parents to take on a second career as a parent?
I marvel at stories of grandparents who, when their children stumble or fall, take on the care of their grandchildren, with great personal satisfaction. In some cultures, grandparents do a great deal of the child-rearing, and I’m sure everyone benefits.
The old joke says that the reason why women over 50 don’t have babies is that we’d forget where we put them. (I’ll pause here for laughter…) I have a new little granddaughter that I dearly love, and I’m looking forward to the day when she can come to our house to play while her parents are gone. But I’m not sure I’m equipped physically or mentally to do it on a full-time basis. Any thoughts?
I, msmeta, am a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow writer, reader, wife and mother languishing in a dusty corner of the Great American West. I have spent several years lurking online, but I'm ready to join the conversation. I just hope I have something to say. I'm particularly interested in issues facing women at midlife. Look for posts on books, American culture, middle age, thrift shops, shoes, family, politics, religion and maybe even the occasional rant if I'm irritated enough.
Thanks for stopping by!
