WashingTina

Middle age is a trip. In your head, you’re still a kid. But your body has decided to utterly betray you. (Well, mine has, anyway.) It’s a tale as old as time . . . you ache when you’ve done nothing but sneeze or roll over in bed the wrong way. (I know someone who actually cracked a rib coughing.) Skin sags or wrinkles or has a weird brown spot that wasn’t there yesterday, but is definitely there today, taunting you with the smugness of a liver spot. But the real betrayal, or at least the one that I am the most furious about, is the hair. Every hair on my body has decided to revolt against me, as if I haven’t conditioned and cared for it lovingly for years. The hair on my head started taunting me years ago, as if some great foreshadow of what to expect at 40, when it would simply give up altogether. Grey hairs began to spring from my scalp when I was 19 years old. I callously plucked them (despite my mother’s promise that 10 new ones would grow in its place-- well, Mom, you were right a...

In these days of mask use as a method of public safety and self preservation*, I’ve been thinking about how sometimes personality is lost when you can’t show your face. Sure, you can “smize” and try to convey your emotions, but it’s definitely more challenging than in “the before times” when we walked around unfettered and freely smiling at each other. Still, despite its minor inconveniences (and because of its promise of preventing pestilence and disease), I’m fully, 100 percent in favor of mask use. But that’s not the point of this story. It’s just that masks and facial recognition got me thinking about the challenges of recognizing people under masks and sunglasses and other facial accoutrements. And that reminded me of a few of our early Palm Springs adventures at Halloween parties, and the slightly more fun kinds of masks. Do you know how hard it is when you meet someone for the first time at a Halloween party? Then, you run into them later and they know you and you have nothing b...

Three years. A moment. An eternity. That’s how long I’ve been gone. It’s how long I’ve been here. It’s when my life ended. It’s when it began. It was the saddest day I have ever lived through.  I knew, we knew, that leaving was the best and only way forward. But it was so hard. To leave everyone and everything behind.  The unknown is always a little scary. A new place. A new home. A new life.  When I was in high school, I used to daydream about moving away. Going to a school where nobody knew me. Where I could reinvent myself as someone different. Someone smarter, cooler, more fun than the same kids I had known all my life knew me to be. I’d fantasize about how the kids at my new school would see me as the mysterious new girl and I’d suddenly become popular and interesting. And then I’d stop daydreaming and head off to field hockey practice with the friends I’d had since middle school.  It’s an entirely different experience to run away from home when you’re an adult....

I have a problem. (To be honest, I probably have a lot of problems. But we’re going to talk about a specific one today.) I am a lifelong procrastinator. I have become so practiced in the art of procrastination, I could easily win an Olympic gold medal in it. Odes, missives, legends, and sonnets could be written to the practiced art of procrastination at which I have come to excel. My procrastination knows no bounds. It is among my super powers (shamefully). It’s definitely not something I should brag about, but, as you’ll quickly learn, I’ve embraced it in such a way that it seems to serve me well (and by that I mean, it is not serving me well). There are times when I procrastinate to the point that it’s almost paralyzing. Mind you, I don’t think anyone else is aware of this paralysis. But I know it’s there. Over the years, I’ve learned to compensate for this paralyzing procrastination. If you asked people with whom I work, nobody would know that I sit and chew on a project until there...

There’s always something going on in Palm Springs. (Okay, maybe not right now, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, but most of the time, you can find some sort of shenanigans to get into.) Evidence the evening shortly after we moved here, three years ago. We were staying in a hotel for a few weeks while we looked for somewhere to live, and frequently found ourselves strolling around downtown in the afternoons and evenings looking for something to do. We didn’t know anyone besides each other, so we’d pick one of the restaurants or bars downtown, sit at the bar and chat up the bartender and whomever might be sitting there. We’ve since learned that this is how it goes here . . . pretty much everyone is up for a chat pretty much all of the time.  One such day, we went into one of the local bars for a libation (fair warning, a lot of my stories start this way). We sat inside because, being August, it was 110 degrees out. While we were ordering our drinks, we noticed a group of people ...

I had a revelation the other day. It wasn’t a speaking-in-tongues or seeing-visions kind of revelation. I didn’t awake from a dream with sudden clarity about the state of the world and my place in it. I wasn’t moved to head to the local house of worship and confess my sins. And it definitely wasn’t a joyful Alvin Ailey-inspired dance kind of revelation. Still, something occurred to me that hadn’t before.  At the age of 44, while eating a sad American-Chinese takeout from Panda Express (don’t judge me...it’s a worldwide pandemic and that’s as close as we could get to Chinese delivery around here), I realized that I really like celery. I might even love it. I told you...not earth shattering. Still, it’s something I hadn’t quite settled on until that day, eating substandard faux ethnic food and picking out chunks of celery as the “best part.” (I also know that it really says something about the food that the celery was the best part. . . or does it say something about me?) As I sat th...

I t’s hard to know the moment your heart breaks for home. Mine feels a little bit broken all the time. There are moments when it’s just fractures, cracks even. And then there are the days when it feels like it’s shattered and will never be put back together. I miss my friends. I miss my family. And I miss my city.  I love D.C. I love it like a family member. I love the potholed streets that never seem to be smooth. I love the dysfunctional local government, beholden to Congress, that pretends to assert itself even when it can’t. I love the awful drivers from Maryland and Virginia who clog the streets and don’t know how to make it around Dupont Circle. And, oh, how I love Dupont Circle.  That marble fountain (that never seems to run properly -- it’s either overflowing, or trickling out of only three spouts, or dry as a bone) is the center of the universe to me. I’ve told my husband that when I die, I want my ashes scattered in Dupont Circle. “With all the rats and the dog pee?”...

Watch this space. Or don't. That's your choice.