Tag: capitalism

Loving Our Laugh Lines

It is possible to love our laugh lines. If we could bottle our sense of humor and sell it to other women who are ashamed of how they look we’d be billionaires. Indeed employing a sense of humor is what got me as far as I have in life jumping over the hurdles I faced.

We have to laugh, or we’re not going to survive whatever hell and heartache is in our lives. And on the topic of pretty I would like to give a spoonful of humor to help the medicine go down.

That is: If astrology is to be believed I’ve kept up a youthful appearance because the sign Gemini appears in my horoscope. Whatever. Could that really be why I look 15 years younger than I am–61 today?

The picture above was taken with an iPhone in May. I think an iPhone camera makes everyone look good in photos.

Ordinarily like in the photo above I don’t wear foundation and blush anymore. Just eyeliner or mascara and lipstick. I won’t leave the house without swiping on lipstick.

The author of The Problem with Pretty stated that the average women uses 10 to 12 products per day to get ready to go out into the world. Like deodorant, cleansers, shampoo, and setting spray, etc.

In reality I do nothing to my face except use micellar water to take off the eyeliner. On the advice of Jessica Cruel the editor-in-chief of the online Allure beauty magazine I bought the Glow Recipe ceramide cleanser. Sometimes I use the cleanser. Other times I do not.

You and I will wake up when real life intervenes with our normal routine. Acting as the caregiver for a mother who is 88 will change your perception of the need to go under the knife to scalpel yourself seductive to men.

An 88-year old woman who has wrinkles like rivers and mottled purple skin isn’t going to show up like 70-year old Maye Musk in a magazine advertisement for makeup like Cover Girl or was it Maybelline.

The fact that a double-8s octogenarian is still kicking and alive shows that longevity counts more than using potions and lotions to remain youthful. The Grim Reaper won’t be fooled by our youthful appearance when he comes to get us on our last day.

For three years on my birthday I treated myself to a Sephora makeover. Of course I looked gorgeous after the makeup artist powdered and puffed me. Whatever to this too. Soon after I didn’t have the energy and couldn’t muster the desire to put on a full face of makeup like in the After photo she took.

Reading The Problem with Pretty was enough to get me to shore up my feeling that I don’t care to impress other people with how I look. Not when idiot men in the patriarchy are pulling women’s purse strings in capitalist America to get us to toe the line and eyeliner to conform to their definition of pretty.

Sez who that you and I are nothing unless others like and approve of us?

Feeling ashamed of our bodies or anything else about ourselves and feeling unworthy is all too common. The author exposes that often it’s us women judging each other.

In a coming blog entry I might write about and explore the topic of the intergenerational shame you and I can feel that we inherited from our mothers.

Smile! You want to look real pretty smile! Smiling is an instant face and mood lift. You’ll look better and feel better smiling than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a cosmetic procedure.

The Nutmeg’s Curse

It’s funny or maybe not how a common pantry staple like a bottle of nutmeg was once a resource the Dutch East India Company harvested with slave labor in the global south in the eighteenth century.

I won’t tolerate capitalist racism like that and which is still going on in Asia and elsewhere. I will tell you to check out of the library or even buy and read The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amital Ghosh. The Brooklyn author exposes the biggest culprit of climate change as gas-guzzling U.S. military machines.

Refugees flee their home countries because of the wars. Ninety-five percent are law-abiding citizens. The floods and wildfires that climate change cause are what uproot people to America as well.

I’ve been anti-war for decades. I frown on nationalism too.

The neoliberal political creed centers personal responsibility as the marker of economic security–when it’s systems and policies like neoliberalism that keep people in our place.

No–I’m not always Green and in light of the fact that capitalism is the cause of climate change.

A woman I helped out as a thank-you gift gave me a plastic bottle of strawberry poundcake foaming hand wash. I took the gift and will buy another bottle for myself as I’ve come to like it.

So–ease up on yourself when you order take-out in a plastic container. Recycle the container and be satisfied you’re done with it.

The greater harm is that hot plastic leaches chemicals into food. So–transfer the food to a dish when it arrives.

I’m all for giving a Thank You that delights the receiver.