One Red Hot Country Mama!

I have been thinking lately about aging and beauty. Yes, both men and women obsess about youth and beauty… and always have… but it is amazing how by chance beauty happens to be and how being young and beautiful doesn’t make sense. 

I am in my 30s now, and still get some attention. In fact, I was out on a date recently and some unknown drunk guy actually gave the guy I was with a high five. My date was pretty surprised by that, but to me, it was just the skirt, the heels and the guy was probably doing all kinds of crazy stuff that night – complimentary but no big deal. I’m just an average girl, made above average by dressing up for an evening out. And that night I definitely preferred to be with my kind and thoughtful date who liked me for me than the guy who was giving me the street attention.

So, I don’t have too many insecurities in that area… but still, in my 30s, I have noticed my guy friends’ and colleagues’ fascination with girls in their teens and early 20s and I have a strange nostalgia about that period in my life being over. 

Thinking back to my own experiences at 13-15, I was not at all pretty. Braces, zits, not much form to my body… nothing special whatsoever (so I thought at the time). I remember relying on sense of humor and conversation to make up for it, and even when my friends and I used to cross the Ontario/Quebec border at the too-young-age of 15 to go to the Hull bars, it was always my friends who were getting hit on while they treated me as though I was invisible.

Then suddenly somewhere between 15-16, everything happened at once and I became visible. The braces were gone, I got a new hair style, my zits cleared up I started to get some shape… and suddenly, everywhere I went there were guys whistling at me, wanting to talk to me and watching me. It was bizarre. I started to wear miniskirts (at times they looked like belts) and minishorts – increasing the phenomena. I knew I didn’t really ‘deserve’ to have this attention, it wasn’t an achievement like high marks in school… but it was interesting. I had no idea about the effect I was having on much older men. It was more of a fun thing for attention from guys my own age.

Things kept escalating. When I was about 20, there was one random marriage proposal from an older man I hardly knew and another guy in his late-20s who lived in his car for a few weeks hoping I would join him on a 6-week holiday. I also remember a guy in a BMW who used to follow me around the winter streets of Ottawa asking me to join him for a ride and dinner (which was tempting – you would understand if you have ever been in Ottawa in January).  The whole thing was so strange, and it didn’t really make sense.   

I was in some sort of center of attention, but I felt I didn’t deserve it. It was a very confusing part of my life – I had no idea what I was doing with myself, and I was not confident. I had difficulty in expressing myself verbally, so people would think I was unintelligent due to that and other stereotypes about young women, and it would frustrate me that people were not taking me seriously. I was also frustrated by being poor all the time, and for a long period I could only afford to make pea soup and rice for my dinners… but knew I could choose to go on a date and dine at one of the nicest restaurants in town. And yeah, sometimes I did choose to go out instead of stay in. 

So – back then I longed to be older… to be able to express myself and have my ideas heard, to have financial independence, to have my own car and place and to make some sort of impact. Little did I know that once I attained those things I would long to be younger again… and feel strangely nostalgic for that attention that didn’t make sense.

But loving youth is not something unique to our culture or new. I guess this is the truth about youth and beauty -  men continually long for younger women, older women long to be the younger women again, and younger women don’t really know what the heck is going on… until they get older.

I got back from Costa Rica yesterday, and basically, Costa Rica is paradise. There is so much lushness and life. One day my sister and I were scuba diving at the bottom of the ocean, and the next day we were in a cloud forest, a special rain forest with a unique ecology since it is formed at the level of clouds. That is just how amazing it was.   

The highlight of the whole trip was the scuba diving. My sister was very afraid of seeing sharks, but after some persistance I convinced her to go, me knowing rationally that most sharks are not man-eaters and it is precious to see them given that they are becoming endangered species.

Our guide, who was a tall, slim, tanned, and cute Columbian spent most of the day flirting with us. He dubbed us "his beautiful girls" which was somehow very touching. We followed him under water, while he helped us with our gages and made sure that we were okay and didn’t get lost.

So – we were under water milling around in wonder, swimming with schools of fish, carefully examining the ocean floor for interesting finds and suddenly, we saw the shark. Even though I knew they wouldn’t hurt us… I was paralyzed by fear, and I suddenly could not breathe properly. At this point, the dominant model for human response to stress would predict either fight (which is not realistic in this case) or flight (which would not be possible, given my inexperience with the equipment). So… what happened? Neither.

After freezing for a while, I quickly swam up to the cute Columbian guide and held his hand tight… and I would not let go for a few minutes. After I got home I did some research on the Fight or Flight response, and found that there is actually another way of coping with stress which is Tend and Befriend. According to this theory, humans have a tendency to come together in difficult times, and helps them deal with stress by joining together as a group. So, the guide was temporarily irresistible, but a few minutes later… when I tried to let go and he kept holding on, somehow my tend and befriend impulse was already gone . My sister, who was officially afraid of sharks, was totally cool and had no stress response whatsoever.

On top of the sharks, we saw three seahorses,
some clown shrimp and a sea turtle. We could not believe the luck. We
were with some very experienced American divers that day, who had been
on hundreds of dives and had never seen those animals. So – I learned a lot about creatures while I was under the ocean in Costa Rica.

A creative person I work with sent this to me today – it is a kind of Mr. Potatohead but for Picasso – go ahead and look.

Oh yes, I have wasted plenty-o-time tonight playing on this . Here is my rendition of Warm Soup. Enjoy.

We need labels because we need to simplify things in order to make sense of them. But, I find often-times gets in the way of communication since it over-simplifies it. Like – a friend says his new girlfriend is great – but surely she is not great 100% of the time. Likely she has something wrong with her – like ugly feet or is late sometimes.

So – what the friend means is that she is mostly great or usually great, but since qualifiers get exhausting, we just simplify the whole pile of experiences and impressions into one word – great. Ah well, good enough we think. The same thing goes for the negative.

And, I think that most people that sit down and write seriously struggle with the simplifying aspect of words. But, dwelling on things and expressing them creatively can have the opposite and value-creating effect. Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth says this on expanding beyond labels:

This is what great artists sense and succeed in conveying in their art. Van Gogh didn’t say "That’s just an old chair." He looked, and looked and looked. Then he sat in front of a canvas and took up the brush. The chair itself would have sold for the equivalent of a few dollars. The painting of that same chair today would fetch in excess of $25 million.*

So – the expression of something has far more value than the thing itself after some skilled contemplation from the right person. I find this very interesting.

*Pg 26 of this edition

My best friend and I are in Seattle for the weekend – a spontaneous thing that occurred after we realized that we both didn’t have any plans for the weekend and we both wanted to get out of our respective cities (she is from Vancouver and I am from Toronto).

The first thing we noticed was how forward American men are compared to Canadian ones. Where we come from you go out to a crowded club but still have a quiet night since Canadian guys tend to give you space and wait for you to approach them. In Seattle though, we were getting approached by dozens of guys – it seemed like almost every 10 minutes someone was talking to us. It was fun and we really liked the boldness of American men.

Another thing we noticed was all of the other Canadians that were there – coincidentally, the Toronto Blue Jays were playing the Seattle Mariners last night. Canadians were there waving their giant flags, singing the national anthem at the top of their lungs and saying "Canada says hello" to passers-by. I realized that Americans would never come to a Canadian city, wave the stars and stripes and say "America says hello". Funny that us Canadians are forward in that way, if not in all ways .