I Cut My Hair and Nobody Noticed

Okay, well, that's not true. A girl noticed at the end of the day, but I had interacted with MANY people throughout the day and no one said a THING. I mean, when you chop of 8-10 inches of hair, you kind of expect SOMEONE to notice. Or maybe it just looks bad. But I've had worse haircuts. With bangs. You should have seen my face when it was finished. It was like someone had hit my face with a BANG!

Oh, well. At least someone who needs a wig will get one thanks to the POUNDS of hair I cut off. I hope they get noticed. I hope they look really good.

Put Your Blog To Bed

30

I was at a staff luncheon a few months ago, meeting my new colleagues, when one of my younger colleagues asked me, "Summer, how old are you?" I tried to make a joke by saying something dumb (but in my mind, oh so witty) that when I was a senior in high school it was COOL to wear a t-shirt that had Bart Simpson declaring "Have a cow, man!" This was funny until I realized with HORROR that she and a few others were trying to DO THE MATH and figure it out. So I told them. "35. I am 35." My young, twenty-something fresh faced colleague said with all the warmth and kindness in the world, "Oh, I would have never thought you were THAT old. I thought you were like, 27."

This of course was a compliment. I have made such "compliments" to people who were older than me, and it reminded me with hilarity of an Onion article I saw a few years ago, with the headline "Woman looks Great for a Thirty-Two Year Old." This is the world you sometimes live in when you are in your thirties and mingling with people in their twenties. The thing that I like about these exchanges is that I know my colleague doesn't think it will EVER happen to them--being older than they are in a cultural sense, in a realer sense. I certainly didn't and every time I've gotten panicked about the reality of aging (i.e no longer "cool" or "relevant") I think of what a wise woman once said to me about getting older, "It beats the alternative." (the alternative being dead and forever young)

Tonight I am going out to celebrate my friend Adrienne's 30th birthday. I've known Adrienne's 30th birthday was coming because well, she started telling me about it about 6 months ago, with her dark brown eyes growing ever larger, as if to signify, THIS IS IT. I didn't help toning down the significance. Instead, I'd get excited and ask her with eyes equally wide, "SO WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO?"

All you folks older than me will laugh at the weight I am implying to the 30th birthday, but I think it is a significant one. Not everyone I know was terrified of turning 30, but I was. It was like graduating from college all over again and being faced with "Well, there goes my life plan, NOW WHAT?" Granted, literally EVERYTHING in my life went KAPUT when I turned 30, but it was a necessary death. I have come to believe that heading into your 30's is the REAL graduation into adulthood. It's a time when you get a taste of time really passing, and in that taste, you realize you are still hungry and so you start actually figuring out WHAT you are hungry for and HOW are you going to get it.

My friend Judy told me years and years ago, "The great thing about being an adult is that if you want to have a hot fudge sundae for breakfast you can." She was 21 when she said this, and I've thought about this many times because what she really was saying is that when you graduate to adulthood you are your own boss. Nothing can be truer than in your 30's--when you ave some experience under your belt to know what works and what DOESN'T work. My friend Julie says it gets even better when you are in your 40's and 50's, because, you stop giving a rat's ass about a lot of stuff. As she says, "They don't call them the 'Fuck You Fifties' for nothing."

This is what I shared with Adrienne when I talked about turning 30. I think when you turn 30 you are on the brink of the greatest gift aging can ever give you--the sense that time is passing with or without us and we have a choice to run with it or let it pass by. It's a call to arms.

So welcome to the fold, Ms. Adrienne. Happy Birthday! We are so glad to have you.

Creative Times

...too busy to post properly...must get back to drawing portraits for the next calendar...

In the meantime, please check out Eleanor Traubman's excellent Creative Times Blog. It's featuring ME.

Eleanor ventured out into my neighborhood one morning and we had a good breakfast and talked about creativity, the downfalls of meeting our heroes, and what happens when you actually COMMIT to following your pleasures. Yay for following your pleasures!

Eleanor's blog is filled with creative folks--Sesame Street, Unknown New York and more. I highly recommend a serious browse through the archives.

Yesterday I drew a picture of Karen Carpenter and Graham took one look at it and said, "Those are some TEETH, Summer." I should have shown him this drawing of Billie Jean King from the 2007 calendar as an anecdote. Maybe I'll start a Great Gals with Great Teeth calendar just to shake things up.

Only One Quote from the Best Advice Letter I've Ever Read

Bake a Blog

and to drink

Post Potter Depression

Alright, I am breaking my comment break, because I just finished the last of the Harry Potter books and I am so surprised by my sense of loss that who can you turn to--but the world outside?

I am not going to even mention a single thing about the inside of the book--so if you haven't read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I will NOT RUIN A DANG THING for you. I was so paranoid about being told anything about it. When I was walking into a crowded bookstore a month ago, a couple in front of me started talking. The woman asked her friend, "Did you read the last Harry Potter book?" And he replied yes he had. I heard her say, "There's something that confused me..." and I IMMEDIATELY PLUGGED MY EARS and started HUMMING. I probably looked like a lunatic, but this is New York City, so luckily lunatics are a dime a dozen.

I will say, that while I have enjoyed the Harry Potter series tremendously, I haven't been OBSESSED with it. My friend Rico who runs a bookstore had SOBBING and SHAKING people show up at his store at 11:58 the night the book was coming out. I am not of that ilk--I could wait. I actually, I could wait because I hadn't read the book before it yet. Once I got through the Half-Blood Prince, I could see why people were clamoring for this book. It had quite a cliff hanger. Yet, still I didn't see my life having been shaped in anyway by HP.

This weekend, I literally stayed up until midnight and read the last 250 pages. Graham had long since gone to bed. When I was done I called my folks in Canada and was able to at least bond with them over the book. Graham, who's pleasure reading is a history of the Pentagon, has had no interest whatsoever in HP, and often looks at me like I have LOST IT when I try to share some exciting little tidbit of the storyline. So, it was good to spill my guts to two fellow readers, who had sent me the book in the first place. I just kept saying. "I feel so sad. It's weird. I didn't expect to feel this way." And Pam, who long ago had her upper lip permanently stiffened (God Bless her British Colombian self), said quietly, "I know exactly what you mean. I felt at a loss too. I didn't know what to do with it."

And when I hung up, I sat in the living room and ate a bowl of cereal, just thinking about it all. It was strangely quiet in the neighborhood. I kept thinking, "Now what?" As if my whole life had been heading towards this goal. I thought about the reality of JK Rowling--how she sat down and created this world we all came to be submerge in and I realized that I never once thought of her, as I read these books--which is its own kind of magic. When I went to bed, I just kept thinking thank you. Thank you, for your great effort.