On Coveting Beautiful Things

The book above I read in five hours. The author mines her personal history as a depressed teen slathering on makeup and collecting seashells to plumb the perils of hoarding beautiful things.

Those marble countertops in the kitchens of the rich homeowners she profiles for a design magazine come with a high cost. The illiterate Latino men who work in the marble factories get ill inhaling the silica dust and can even die from lung disease.

Those dozen red roses appearing on Valentine’s Day every year are cut and harvested with modern slave labor. My Romeo doesn’t have to give me roses.

At the end of the book the author cops to her everlasting infatuation with the cut flowers and her sooty mascara.

What’s a gal or guy or even a person who doesn’t identify as either supposed to do when we’re attracted to glitter born of gloom?

My plan is to plunk down cash on only two new tee shirts for my summer wardrobe. Those velvet-flocked hangers are a curse because they allow you to cram tons of clothes into your closet.

Reading The Ugly History of Beautiful Things I had an intense distaste for the colonizers and their dirty deeds in trading with countries like China and India in the 1700s and 1800s. The author details how explorers along the Silk Road were nefarious in treating the native people. This is the ugly history of consumption.

How to sparkle and shine and buy cut flowers with impunity? It hinges on advocating for worker’s rights first of all. Voting with our wallets.

It comes down to what I wrote about in my health and fitness blog: I promoted there my Little Bites philosophy of not biting off more than you can chew and consuming everything in moderation.

This is borne out by research that the authors of Happy Money cite: The fewer items you have the more you’ll like each one.

Let’s go for a little glam as a special treat and opt out of overconsumption. Our wallets are not bottomless wells. Our joy can be infinite with consideration of the ugly history of beautiful things before we take home everything that attracts us.

I confess that it’s all too easy to experience overwhelm seeing the overstuffed closet. The rod to hell is paved with unused purchases.

My hope is that I can give followers hope: Once you Just Say No to impulse buying that overwhelm should be reduced if not totally end. I know that I saved my sanity when I carefully considered what I wanted to buy. No more heading to the register with whatever catches my eye!

In this regard a new book about the art of dressing that I’m reading now I’ll review soon. We really don’t need 500 items of clothing clogging our closets and dumped in our dresser drawers.

I feel like I’ve been a broken record in writing about this too. Perhaps though it can be a refresher to boost our confidence. Too often too many of us do what we think we’re supposed to do and follow along in doing what’s popular like loading up on fashion loot. To get other people’s approval we often mirror what they’re doing.

So I’d like this blog entry to be a liberating voice of hope that gives followers permission to say: “No way. I can do without that latest gimcrack and still be happy.”

On Not Caring

I received a free copy of the guide above. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in parts of the book.

The We Do Not Care Club has gotten over caring about the inequities of the changes you experience as a woman getting older.

Like the sudden muffin top. Just put on a tee shirt or blouse that covers the side of your waist bulging over your jeans. Wear a cropped top to your heart’s content when you’re home and no one’s around.

Post-40 we have the right to get out of bed at 1:00 a.m., turn on Netflix, and watch old Seinfeld episodes until the rooster crows. The iconic New York City laugh-a-minute sitcom is the cure for whatever ailment has come on.

The ideal issue to not care about is throwing money at conveniences like a housecleaner or a meal delivery service.. If you can afford to spring for these things when you’re 50 I say: Just Do It.

You can join a real We Do Not Care Club in your area or online devoted to a specific hot-mess dilemma.

Perhaps the liberating effect of not caring is the ultimate rebellion against the patriarchal-induced shame women all too often follow lockstep into having.

After reading the guide I was ready to kick ass.

As it’s nobody’s business but yours and mine how we choose to live our lives when we’re in perimenopause, menopause, and beyond.

Perhaps us Generation X girls paved the way for others to rock the world on fire with their confidence.

We Do Not Care. End of Story.

Others should not care that we do not care.

Coming together to laugh and cry over what we’re experiencing surely is the remedy for believing the lies that we’re over the hill and have an expiration date for vitality.

In the end though I do care about having vitality in the face of my body and all its parts veering east west and south.

I hope you will join the sisters in the We Do Not Care Club. Even if you don’t identify as a woman surely you have things not to care about either when you’re getting older.

2026 Harper’s Bazaar Beauty Issue

Harper’s Bazaar is back with their perennial Beauty issue. Beauty in all its vibrant individual forms is not to be discounted as a worthy tonic for the ugly in society like war and ongoing injustice.

What can be defined as a work of beauty is vast. There is beauty in self-acceptance. There is beauty in overcoming a hardship. There is beauty in feeling what we feel.

All around us beauty exists.

There is beauty in going through what we experience in life as our lives are not lived in vain.

There’s no shame in anyone’s game. It’s time to recognize as beautiful what gives each of us joy.

That could be watching a video of a kitten. Or having a caffe latte at 3:00 in the afternoon. Or buying a pair of whimsical socks at a local boutique in our neighborhood

All around us beauty exists. I think everyone should install “I Am Light” the song by India.Arie in their iTunes library or on a device. The vocalist gets at how she is not her physical attributes or any of the markers that can be seen.

India.Arie croons that “I Am Light” and like her we are all light. We are light for each other in the darkness.

There’s beauty in our differentness which is a gift we give each other.

God did not stamp human beings out with a cookie cutter. Right. We are all beautiful.

Life is Beauty Full. Case closed.

I think I’ve written this all before so must sound like a broken record.

Bending the Rules

I checked the above new book out of the library. I liked the guide for its historical perspective on how individuals have dressed in Fashion Beyond the Binary for hundreds of centuries.

However, as ever I dislike using labels of any kind. Do away with the labels. Choose your own definition. Invent a new word to describe yourself that no one else is using.

I champion that the best way to defy a stereotype is to be the Ineffable You. Leave them guessing. Choose your own self-definition that has nothing to do with a term assigned to everyone everywhere.

It could be that “birds of a feather flock together.” Yet I’m interested in Fashion Beyond the Commonplace.

Self-expression is the ultimate form of healing and bridge back to health. The only thing hanging out in a closet should be a fabulous frock not our identity.

To dress to please yourself in however you want to dress is the way to go. So even if you’re a girl who dresses in skirts it’s how you style your outfit that can be unique. Each of us tells a story through our clothing.

The road to Identity Freedom is paved with fashion choices that give us sartorial freedom. Our outfits are the vocabulary we use to express ourselves.

Chris wears the boots in this town. Not stilettoes. And so too followers can decide for yourselves how to dress and define yourself when the language is limited.

The New Eco-Conscious Way

This book is a riveting read that I read through in only one day.

There’s another way of being eco-conscious and that is to attend to our personal economy. Though this book touches on how women prop up the external economy it’s worth talking about the money measures we take to keep ourselves afloat financially.

I’m waiting on that kind of book that doesn’t insult readers by assuming all women are clueless when it comes to our finances.

The author of Swiftynomics reinforces the myth of the all-good mother. I might be reading into this however it appears the author buys into the myth of motherhood as the ideal role for women in society.

In the end, when she listed options for righting the injustice talked about, she should’ve included the alternative of choosing not to have kids.

Swiftynomics is the call to pay mothers cash for raising their kids in the home when they don’t have a job.

I think all women should be paid for caregiving. Even those of us who are members of the Open Faced Sandwich Generation: single women with a career and no kids who are caregivers for older parents.

Sadly, doing right the thing and giving a payment to caregivers will be seen as a socialist grab-bag by the ruling elite including women elected leaders.

To her credit the author talks about women who have banded together to alleviate the burden of caregiving. Like when mothers at the height of Covid formed Education Pods where they set up computers in garages and hired teachers or others to instruct their children.

Though that option really was limited to well-off women. What’s the solution?

To decide for ourselves if we want to have kids. And if we choose to start a family nail our boyfriend or husband or other partner to chipping in equally to child-rearing and household chores.

Pay for a housecleaner if we can afford to have someone come clean. Put our shoes down and insist that our partner see things our way.

Lastly where the author of Swiftynomics errs is in saying that women’s caregiving is invisible labor.

It’s not invisible. The elected leaders in power can see clearly that women are wrecking our health and finances engaged in this burden of unpaid emotional and often physical labor.

They simple think we should want to do this caregiving. That it is our natural role in life and the highest good to aspire to.

Tell that to a daughter whose mother or father has been a narcissist that harmed their children. Then having to care for this parent seems like a raw deal.

I rest my case. Read this book anyway. It really is a riveting read.

Sparkle and Shine

The Breathe magazine Building Better Habits edition has a feature article titled Dressing the Part. About choosing outfits to improve your mood.

Per the editors:

“When you add a bit of sparkle, even it it’s just putting on a necklace with your T-shirt, you can feel more sparkling in life.”

There’s proof of this in real life. Take this: One day a person canceled our plans. Imagine getting dressed up then having nowhere to go.

It makes a positive difference on an ordinary day to be sitting on the couch in elevated clothes.

For those of us who can’t afford a $150/therapy session dressing up on the regular can’t be beat.

Though if you have clinical depression or otherwise need professional help I say reach out to find out where you can get that help.

With another birthday coming on I have what could be considering a shocking confession: In my life other things are taking priority.

It goes without saying that I’ll always make the effort to dress well.

Only today I realize that when so much going on in the world is not right there’s no shame in taking a beat to accept this tenet:

Everyone living on earth is doing the best we can with what we were given.

On a day that the shoes are not shined or our hair doesn’t look like a Drybar salon blowout: This is OK folks.

What this sad and at times screwed-up world needs is for us to understand that not everyone is going to show up dressed for an event when there’s no event.

To have compassion should be expected. Besides who wants to rack up debt buying clothes if it means we can’t afford to retire from our jobs at a decent age.

That said I’ll take the necklace to make an outfit sparkle so that I feel sparkling.

This chain reaction doesn’t have to cost $1,000 for the hardware.

There’s no shame in this love of adornment either.

Shine on!

Getting Organized to Spark Joy

I Googled top 10 health blogs and found the Dr. Rangan Chatterjee (British MD) show Feel Better Live More.

The episode I tried to tune into was an interview with Joshua Fields Millburn the Minimalist creator. The topic was: Why Decluttering Your Home Can Calm Your Mind and Improve Your Wellbeing.

30 minutes into the podcast I shut it off as no specific steps were given to help listeners improve our wellbeing. Instead of offering an action plan Fields Millburn gave an academic treatise on the subject.

What stood out is that the guest speaker said the average person has 300,000 items in their home. We throw out 85 pounds of clothes every year.

What! I wondered how this could be possible. As I keep clothing items for over 5 years routinely.

The simple habit to improve wellbeing is to not bring home excess stuff in the first place. Filling a void in our life by buying things won’t fill us up or make us happy.

Forget the Minimalist. Sign up for the KonMari email newsletters instead. I’ll take Marie Kondo any day over a verbose rambling expert. Kondo’s newsletters are short and list 5 or 6 tactics you can use to spark joy.

Perhaps in the end this is why I was disenchanted with the two men talking on the podcast: They focused on what was going wrong with consumerism. Not on how exactly to Spark Joy. After 30 minutes of listening to the Feel Better Live More podcast episode on decluttering I had no real idea about how to get happy via other means apart from buying things.

I think I must be the biggest fan of Marie Kondo and her Spark Joy ethic precisely because for over 5 years now in my blogs I’ve talked about doing what you love to feel good and to heal from ill-ness. Which consumerism taken to the extreme might just be considered a dis-order.

This month of January is Get Organized Month. I’ve created a category Get Organized Month for readers to click on in the future.

I have no idea about other folks yet I want to read or hear about an itemized list of steps to take via an action plan. I don’t want an analysis of what’s wrong. I want a clear specific agenda on how to make things right. Then I’ll decide if the advice is worth using.

The expression is: “Take what works and leave the rest.”

I’ll end here by saying that lately I’ve been tempted to buy clothes. As I’ve discarded a ton of clothing items that yes I’ve had for at least 7 or 8 years. You want to get happy? You and I are not going to get happy sitting around all day in pajama pants that are worn and faded and have seen better days.

Right. Get rid of the items that make you feel sad or depressed. Replace them with new clean colorful clothing to feel good.

Round here there was a snowstorm. We don’t want to experience cabin fever and the winter doldrums sitting on our bums typing at a computer in 10-year old rags.

This is common sense. After my mini-shopping spree I won’t be buying anything else new.

What really sparks joy for me now is using recipes I find in magazines to create healthy meals.

Eating well to feel good sure beats racking up charges on a credit card. Plus it’s cheaper and really does spark the joy that can be missing from our lives in these dark days.

Less is Liberation

Buy this book!

It’s a short hardcover with specific actionable tactics to use to achieve and live in freedom from dropping dead from ill health. That said ill health which is the result of grinding our bodies and brains through a pepper mill of exhausting overwork performed to measure our success in society.

I bought the new book above that was just published this fall. Christine Platt gives readers a method to overcoming what she calls the “overwhelm.” The busywork we burden ourselves with by doing too much in a performance to prove our worth to others.

I bought this book because I was so impressed with her first book that I checked out of the library The Afrominimalist’s Guide to Living with Less. Though nearly each chapter contains a Love Note to Black Women I read the love notes even though I’m White.

While reading the first two chapters of the guide radical insight streamed into my head in my own words. Platt’s book was the springboard for wanting to share these ideas in a blog entry.

Nowhere in Less is Liberation does Platt acknowledge this exact truth: Wellness is Justice. Liberating yourself from grind culture is Justice. Less is Liberation because doing less is Justice.

The definition of justice is “right action.” For persons who have experienced illness, trauma, or injustice, engaging in a true wellness practice is yes a form of self-initiated “restorative justice.”

We as “Individuals who live with __________________ “(whatever our hardship is) can act to heal ourselves from overwhelm. Some of us will require pills to heal; others won’t

The definition of restorative justice is:

“A process in which all the stakeholders affected by an injustice have the opportunity to discuss the consequences of the injustice and what might be done to put them right.”

We cannot “outsource” our healing to a so-called expert peddling one-solution-fits-all schemes like the latest diet or techno gizmo.

As ever I trusted Christine Platt because her book was a memoir-with-manifesto based on her lived experience. An Integrative Health Coach told Platt that the author was unwell.

Becoming well by becoming the person we choose to be is the right action to take to liberate ourselves from any kind of “overwhelm.”

Becoming this original one-and-only self is a form of justice in a society where women and others who are not White men are told to do what we’re told. (I hear the lyrics to the Rage Against the Machine song coming into my head now about doing what they tell you.)

It’s imperative that we get ourselves to the point where we KO the fear and shame that others impose on us for not conforming to their expectations of who we should be.

Before each of us gets to where we become ill not just unwell is the ideal time to read Less is Liberation. By no means am I a people pleaser like Platt was. Nor do I think Normal is a town worth living in if we have to repress our individuality to get others to like and accept us.

However I bought this book as preemptive proactive guide to halting overwhelm before it actually comes roaring into my life full-on or even at all.

Twenty-five years ago I saw the writing on the wall when I was denied a promotion at an office job. Realizing I couldn’t get ahead when a supervisor controlled my fate I hit the road right then. Found a job where I could do what I wanted to do: help people by giving them information they could use to better themselves.

Sounds like what I’m writing in my blogs doesn’t it?

The fact is other people of all colors stripes dots and persuasions are judging you and me and trying to make us feel guilty for acting true to ourselves. They would be out of business if they had no one to blame for being a racist or had no one to dominate and submit to them from a pulpit of any kind.

These high horses haven’t even met you and me and gotten to know who we truly are before they shame us for our perceived sins.

I wouldn’t wait to read Less is Liberation. Sentences beg to be highlighted in yellow. I attached mini colored tabs to pages where key advice was given.

This book is worth its weight in gold–and it’s a yellow book to boot.

We owe it to ourselves to Be Well. Even living with illness we can fashion our own version of wellness.

Simply More

Buy the book! I contest that even if you’re not a person who has been told you’re “too much” you could be a person that others frown on simply for taking up space.

Either way Cynthia Erivo in her just-published manifesto gives readers permission for us to be the fullest iteration of our ourselves.

Despite with and because of the fear we might have this is exactly why each of us should not cater to cowards. Kick the shame that others try to impose on us too.

I recommend installing Simply More on a device like an iPad. It’s worth reading again and again in moments of self-doubt. At the times when we are tempted to internalize the shame.

The administration of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts/RADA discriminated against Cynthia Erivo while she studied there in England. Then the actor wins an Emmy Tony and Grammy. RADA courts her as their Vice President which she is today.

Cynthia Erivo’s story is exactly the lantern to shine for all of us to walk down our path to freedom from fear and shame. The actor illuminates all the colors of everyone’s self-worth.

Sadly I don’t think the hate and judgment will ever go away. They’re the evergreen expressions of cowards who are too insecure in their own inferiority complex to give others applause.

Take the stage I tell you. Be too much. Be yourself. Shine brightly like a ball of fire or have a quiet sparkle either way.

2026 is arriving soon. The time to pump up the volume on praising each other for our badass beauty.

Today more than ever we need more brave lamp lighters casting a glow in the darkness.

Harper’s Bazaar Art Issue 2025

The image is a photo of Harper's Bazaar Art issue theme.

Today Art is censored. Literature is Art. Living our lives is an artistic expression of ourselves in motion. We can be alive and animated or gorgeous and grieving.

The whole kit of our emotions deserves to be expressed. Everyone is an Artist in our own way. Our mind is the medium for our thoughts. Our body is the medium for illustrating our physical nature out on the street.

Even an accountant who crunches numbers is creative when they come up with ways to save a client money or maximize their profits.

Ever since December 2019 I’ve identified as an Artist. Feel free I would tell everyone to follow your heart and make whatever kind of art rocks your world as a creator.

And this is the rub: We are all creators. Even though some of us through their negative words and beliefs are destroyers.

I want to be on the side of affirming the dignity of Life of everyone living on Earth.

In this season should you celebrate a holiday I hope you find cheer and comfort in whatever the theme of your holiday is.

Make Art I tell you all of my followers. Everything and anything can be a work of Art when we expand our notion of what is an artistic endeavor.

Walking down the street in winter holding a cardboard cup of hot chocolate. As you go home from a Starbucks you dipped into after you got out of the train.

Even in the movement down the street I say you are being artistic holding the cup. Like walking down a runway.

Let’s celebrate Art this month along with Harper’s Bazaar.

It’s time to valorize making Art instead of what appears to be going on: The destruction of dignity and compassion for those of us who DV8 by censoring Artists who champion these subjects in their work.

The definition of normal is “average or ordinary or of or conforming to a standard or type.”

It’s too late in history to keep things opaque about the value of every human being no matter their color creed or orientation.

We need to bring to light everywhere Art is created the soul of our humanity. Not allow our creativity to be crushed by the forces that be.

And hey I’ll end here with this: Why can’t an Artist portray ordinary people like the woman and man in the painting titled if I remember American Gothic?

What if it was seen as ordinary that a person could love who they want to love or have a body that they love despite others hating or fearing that body or expression of love?

Love wins. That’s the message I want to spread as I celebrate Christmas in a spiritual way not religious way.

Making Art is an expression of Love. We cannot be deterred from making Art today when everything matters.

And sometimes speaking out through our Art is as simple and effective as walking down that street and taking up space holding the cup of hot chocolate in our hands.