mid summer midlife crisis: or how to find yourself in 23 simple steps

Step 1: Allow yourself to stop working in gainful employment and enjoy the fact that your husband found a job making twice what he made before, thus lettting you stay home and 'find yourself'.
Step 2: Acknowledge you've lost yourself.
Step 3: Look for yourself in new places: how about in a new house--that's right: consider moving, yes physically packing up all your possessions and moving...maybe you're closer by than you thought....consider moving like a mile down the road.
Step 4: Realize you're not in a new house, you're somewhere in the current house. Start looking all over the house for yourself.
Step 5: Look in the hall closet. Hey, maybe you're in an old box of home hair highlighting kit.
Step 6: Do not use box of home hair highlighting as directed. Make paste of hairlightener and mix through dark hair. Leave on an hour longer than directed while watching Divorce Court and Judge Hatchett. Rinse, apply toner and conditioner. Gently dry hair. Observe results. Scream with laughter. Make comparisons between your now orange head and Little Orphan Annie, Carrot Top, Chuckie, and Run Lola Run.
Step 7: Call Clairol hotline get a prescription for Ash Blonde Natural Instincts to tone color down.
Step 8: Act naturally as you enter Target with your new Clown Hair, buy quick fix product. Apply prescription as needed, seek help if symptoms persist.
Step 9: Sleep on it. Decide you need professional help. That is....a professional colorist. Google around until you find someone who's suitable, but also somewhat anonymous.
Step 10: Go see professional colorist. DON'T BRING ANY VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO LOOK LIKE LEAVE IT UP TO THE COLORIST YOU'VE NEVER MET BEFORE TO DECIDE YOUR BEST LOOK.
Step 11: Remember "Sun In"? You put it on your hair in seventh grade and then put the blowdryer on it to lighten your hair but it made it copper , not blonde? Allow colorist to make your hair look freshly "Sun-In-ed".
Step 12: Kindly ask for some basic foil highlights that will suggest that you have blonde hair, not Chuckie hair.
Step 13: Return home feeling better since hair is blown out. Notice that you sorta have Stripper Hair now. Hopeful ambivalence sets in....
Step 14: Meet your husband for dinner. Guy at table across the room keeps checking you out....husband's comment is "Your hair is lighter" he doesn't notice the sexy element of the new do. Notice that other blonde girls smile at you a little bit differently. Are they laughing inside or do they think you're now part of the Volume 30 Developer Cult?
Step 15: Take digital pictures of yourself smiling in different light settings...indoor and outdoor. Have a reality check. Yes, lighter is indeed better. The sun will come out tomorrow.
Step 16: Go to your friend's wedding with your new blonde hair. Notice that no one comments on it. You've done the reality check with the camera, so you know it's because they're all jealous. Feel the beginnings of "blonde girl 'tude".
Step 17: Just to quiet that nagging suscpicion that they're really not jealous but in fact think you look like a freak, take .5 mg of Xanax. Now, go ahead and drink three to four large glasses of white wine.
Step 18: As the party starts winding down, make a good decision to assume responsibility for all the leftover white wine. Drink a total of maybe 1.5 liters of wine.
Step 19: Ah, you should be feeling about as trashed as you've ever felt before by now. As you sit on the sidelines watching everyone move and clean up, remember that the last time you were this drunk unintentionally was the instance when you were 19 and discovered that Mickey's is actually malt liquor, not beer. As you ponder your history as an accidental lush, engage the waitstaff in slurred, but perfectly grammatical Spanish. Direct them to take the wine or it will be a total waste. Rant about waste for a while.
Step 20: Arrive at the afterparty and find a comfortable chair--you're going to be there a while. As other revelers work to catch up to your intoxicated state by way of hard liquors and beer, get your husband's friend to keep pouring Coke in a water bottle for you. Add grenadine. Add other non alcoholic mixtures. Sip on your drunken concoction.
Step 21: Your husband is so gallant that he makes you think of Tom Brokow's Greatest Generation. Keep calling him "greatest generation" as he pours you into the passenger seat and gives you a diet pepsi for the road.
Step 22: Have one sip of diet pepsi then convulse with the worst hiccups ever experienced by a newly blonde 30 year old woman on the way from Houston to Austin at 2am on a Sunday morning. Pass out for 3 hours. Wake up in Austin---just drunk, not trashed.
Step 23: The next day, take it easy and drink fluids. Find yourself watching subtle British cinema with subtitles because you can never understand what they're bloody saying.

But there you are...soaking up AC with your husband on a Sunday afternoon....with new hair....and the first superlative drunk of your thirties under your belt....by way of the wrong house down the street, your hall closet, the beautician's chair, your friend's wedding, and the shortest long drive home.

some of the ice cream flavors in dolores hidalgo

shrimp*+
cajeta*
rose*^
avocado*^
mole*
corn*^
queso
chocolate
vanilla
mango*
guayaba
lemon
raspberry

*flavor I tried
^odd, but go ahead and try this at home
+yep, disgusting as it sounds

reasons to be thankful for vigilent dogs

men come to the door uninvited: I'm scared, dogs bark.
thunderclaps shake the glass in the windows: The dogs watch the windows, I watch the roof.
dinner alone in darkness that wraps around the fence and pours into the yard: I leave a little food, the dogs join me to dine.

questions during an interview (possibly not worthy of a response)

Do you have any questions?
What are the three things that you value most?
You'll be required to dial through a phone system and wait for customer service for about an hour a day, do you have any problem with that?
How do you feel about investing your own money into marketing our Fortune 500 company?
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Would you like something to drink?
Would you like to sit in a room by yourself and write a hundred form letters a day?
When can you start?

things one should not find humorous in a bathroom

Here are some things women find disgusting in public bathrooms:

unflushed commodes
impolite odors
empty toilet tissue rolls
water of unknown origin welled on the bathroom floor

This last item is what I discovered in the restroom of a massive bookstore. I was wearing sandals and noticed the questionable liquid puddled around the commodes as my bare toe touched the cold wetness. So out loud I say, "Uck." An Asian woman comes out of the stall next to me and scrunches her face into the universal word for grody.

I check under the stalls. There's dry land under the feet of a lady in the large stall. I decide to wait for her to finish.

My Asian comisserator gives up unrelieved, washes her hands and leaves the room.

The lady in the stall starts chortling. I realize her silence wasn't earnest concentration on the deed at hand. She was listening to someone speak to her on her cell phone. She speaks in a low tone so I can't make out what she's saying. Is she saying, "It's so funny--I'm in the only dry stall and I'm holding this woman's bladder captive"?

She's not speaking English. I only know how to say, the other two commodes are broken in two languages. Senora? Miss? I tell her, "los otros banos estan rotos hay agua en el piso" and the English equivalent.

"Oh, oh. OK. So sorry." She pulls what sounds like several feet of toilet paper off the tube. A short pause, then perhaps ten more feet of toilet paper. A short pause. Just two more feet of toilet paper. Ok that's enough. Then she flushes. I'm betting on whether all that bulk will go down. Her phone plays a dance beat. She answers, "hello? hello?"

Now, out of politeness or embarrassment, she sprays something that smells like Pledge into a little cloud that dissapates through the joints in the steel walls. Out through the wide door, she slips one foot in front of the other like she's ice skating. She is also Asian. I chalk one up to effort without efficacy for speaking Spanish to her.

"Oh, so sorry. I was talking to my sister."

I'm on the verge of laughing out loud, but I keep my eyes on the puddly white floor. Oh no, that's OK I reply. As I get ready to finally relieve myself, I wonder all at once:

• Did her sister, perhaps somewhere in Asia, realize that this woman was talking to her while taking a crap at a bookstore?
• Was there some reason this woman couldn't talk to her sister some other place than the handicap crapper at the bookstore? (Flash: Angry Asian husband handing out no more than 2 squares of TP at a time...) Was the restroom her only refuge?
• Does this lady have a thing for paper products?

After she washed her hands, I could hear her coax about 6 feet of paper towels from the dispenser. She was a tiny person, what could she be drying?

For a moment, the bathroom is quiet. Personal. My own. Like swimming alone in the pool at the gym. The library at noon on Wednesday. Inded, we can feel private in public places, but discovered, interrupted our faces turn flush.