Stay Inside the Lines

Look, I get it. We are all under tremendous stress. Balancing work and family. Taking care of homes and cars. Paying bills. It’s all we can do to make it through a day, let alone plan for self-care. We should all be meditating and sleeping at least eight hours and doing yoga and just being present, in the moment, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

Well, I made time for that a few weeks ago. My friend MH posted a thing on Facebook about an adult coloring workshop. For $10, you could go to an art studio and have some snacks and maybe a glass of wine and just color, not like Paw Patrol or Barbie pictures, but real designs with lots of little spaces for color to go. I looked at her post and thought, hmmm, that might be fun, especially with MH. I asked her if she was going to go, and she said she wasn’t sure, and she asked me if I was going to go. It turned into one of those I’ll go if you’ll go scenarios. We had a date.

I told my sister about our upcoming plans, just in casual conversation, and she was like, you need a workshop to color? She had a point. I pretty much mastered coloring about forty-one years ago. I even worked on my technique a bit when my girls were little. I pointed out it was at an art studio for a fee, so they had to call it something. Workshop was just as good a name as any.

The night arrived, and MH and I rode together downtown and grabbed a quick bite to eat. I had stashed a bottle of wine in my car, since coloring when you are an adult means you get to drink. We drove around trying to find the art studio, which was in an old house in a sketchy part of town. I overthought the part where I hoped my car wouldn’t be stolen or burglarized, and then I thought about how much I needed to color. Like an adult. We decided to leave the wine in the car. The whole thing sort of begged for sobriety.

I don’t know if you follow the news much, but there have been a few studies recently about the benefits of coloring. According to some researchers, you get the same effects from coloring as you would from meditating. It’s all the rage now. You can find a whole variety of intricately patterned coloring books at Barnes and Noble or online from Amazon. Hell, I even saw a weird little Reader’s Digest version of an adult coloring book in the grocery store checkout line today, which is how you know it’s time to stop.

MH and I went inside and were pleasantly surprised to see it was a real art studio with real art on the walls and the smell of paint heavy in the air. We found our way downstairs to a room with folding chairs and tables on which boxes of markers, crayons, and colored pencils were arranged. On another table against the wall were stacks of coloring sheets like you would see in a preschool class, only instead of sheep and apples and shit, they had skull designs on them. Seventies music played softly in the background. At one of the tables, two women were coloring intently while carrying on a very loud conversation. One of the women had brought her own coloring set, a very professional assortment of crayons and pencils and pastels. She took her coloring very seriously.

We signed in and were greeted by the hostess/artist in residence. She looked artsy, with her skull t-shirt and messy grey bun and very friendly smile. We settled in at the other end of the table away from the loud talkers. We felt awkward, unsure if we should sit near them but not really wanting to but then feeling bad like they would think we didn’t want to sit near them. We didn’t verbalize this, but rather communicated it through a series of facial expressions and eye contact.

We got down to coloring business. A few more women showed up and filled in the empty seats around the table. I noted that there were no men present. Men would never attend a coloring workshop, at least not any of the men I know, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it. Hey men, you should, because the whole place is crawling with the ladies. Except they were all pretty much bat shit crazy.

How do I know this? Well, as the wine poured and the crayons scribbled, the other women began to play an elaborate game of top that. You know how someone will tell you about a bad day and then someone else tells how their day was worse? That’s how the game is played.   It’s not an official game, it’s more of a subtle dance of human nature tweaked with a smattering of ego, or, if you are the winner, grandiose narcissism.

These women took the game very seriously. One of them told how she had just traveled to China, so another one had to explain she lived in Nepal and lived off yak milk or something. That one also turned out to be a nude model, which was another detail we didn’t need to know. Another one commented on her failed marriage, which prompted someone else to tell us about her brother’s suicide. MH and I began to color faster.

More wine was sipped, and then the woman with the professional coloring kit looked at me and realized she knew me. We are both members of the Chosen people, so apparently, we really do all know each other. She started asking me all these questions about my temple, screaming them at me from across the room. It went on long enough for the rest of the tragedy parade to stop and observe this tangent. MH kept her head down and colored furiously, wearing down all the points on the new crayons.

“This isn’t very relaxing,” I said to her. “I think this might be harder than meditating.”

“I know,” she said. “I have to get this right. This is really triggering my OCD.”

I stopped trying to make it look good and just started filling in all the white space. The hostess walked in the room carrying a bowl of snack mix.

“Here, eat up, ladies. I would but I’m gluten free,” she said to the room.

“Of course you are,” I whispered to MH.
“I had a waffle two months ago and I still have a rash,” she overshared, and then she pulled up her shirt so we could all stare at the angry boils on her trunk.

I finished my skull, sat back, and quietly said to MH, who was still hard at work,” Done. Should I start another one?”

 

MH normally has a sweet little southern voice that is reminiscent of hummingbirds sipping at fragrant honeysuckle. She answered, “NO!” with Satan’s own larynx.

The rashy gluten-free hostess drew names from a bowl for some door prizes. I won a skull ornament. I was hoping to win the jar of little clay teeth that sat on a shelf, but that was actually for sale. MH decided she would finish hers at home. She gathered up her jacket and purse, announced she needed to get home to her children for bedtime and whatnot, and we skedaddled out of there.

On the car ride home, we sat quietly for about five minutes. Then MH said,” What the fuck was that?”

“Oh good, I thought it was just me,” I laughed. “Next time you feel like coloring, just bring your coloring book over to my house for a play date. I’ll have some gluten-free snacks for you.”

“There won’t be a next time,” she said. “Coloring is too much pressure. All those lines and spaces that need to be filled up. Too much pressure. That wasn’t relaxing and peaceful at all.”

“At least we weren’t the crazy ones,” I pointed out.

 I don’t know what MH did with her skull page, but I hung mine on the fridge because that’s where all art should go. That way, every time I opened the fridge, I could remember how adult coloring isn’t like meditation, but being with friends is.

Ditching the Double Standard

I am sick and tired of the double standard.      

My friend MS’s daughter wore, as she put it, the “dreaded yoga pants,” to high school, and for violating the dress code, she received in-school suspension. The same week, the school planned “water play” day for the students, and the girls were instructed to not wear white t-shirts. MS was pretty upset about the suspension, but more so that the same week, the school in essence sponsored a wet t-shirt contest for the high school students and then gave it a name that half the student body uses as a keyword for porn searches. Why is it not okay to wear long black fitted pants one day, but the next day students are encouraged to soak and squirt each other, making their clothing not only sopping wet but also clingy and revealing?

The whole dress code issue is out of hand lately, with top students being stripped of their honors for wearing spaghetti strap dresses to award ceremonies and plus sized students banned from proms because even in a long sleeved gown, cleavage is showing. School dress codes and fashion trends have never seen eye to eye, but the burden of this issue is always on the female students.  Wouldn’t it be great if school administrators could stop being the fashion police and get back to the business of educating?

I am a fan of uniforms for this very reason. Between the ridiculously overpriced preppy clothes that are so popular in the south, the attempting to dress for the temperature, also a Southern issue, and the constant uncertainty of what is or isn’t permissible, uniforms would pretty much solve all of those problems. I don’t understand why more parents don’t see it as a pretty easy solution.

That isn’t the only double standard that has me all riled up right now.

While young girls face all that pressure to look or dress a certain way, they have no end to the burden of maintaining an unrealistic and usually unattainable physical appearance. Women face an enormous amount of pressure to preserve their youthful look but men are allowed to age gracefully. I can name a handful of men that are still considered sexy despite their advanced age, wrinkled faces, and graying hair. I can only think of one woman with gray hair, Jamie Lee Curtis, and all she is fit to do is sell yogurt that helps you shit.

Men have somehow managed to turn bald heads into something so desirable that even men with hair want to shave their heads. I will never understand why anyone with a perfectly good head of hair would prefer to shear it off in the name of fashion, but it appears to be a trend that is here to stay.  Just a reminder, men, enjoy it while you have it. Chances are good that one day you won’t have it to cut off.

What’s your opinion of the hipster beard? I have to admit, I find them fascinating, but at the same time, how fucking unfair is that? I have been shaving my legs and armpits for over thirty years now, and for at least the last decade and a half, I have felt like I had to reduce the amount of hair in the basement because even pubic hair has been subjected to social pressure. Meanwhile, men have even less to do to maintain any sense of good hygiene. They can let both their face and crotch hair grow out to caveman proportions, and everybody is super cool with it.

The epitome of the double standard is something called dad bod. Dad bod is what a guy looks like when he drinks all the beer and eats all the bacon cheeseburgers he wants, leaving him with a borderline barrel gut and noodly thin arms from not lifting anything heavier than he can fit in his mouth. You know, like your dad. It isn’t a repulsive form, it’s just a normal body, maybe a little pudgy in the middle, maybe a little touch of gynomastia, not enough to make people cringe, but enough to say, hey, I don’t need to look like I do Cross Fit. I am comfortable in my body.

Name me one woman you know who is comfortable in her body, ever.

Men have reached a point where they have totally given up. They can be bald, hairy, flabby, gray, wrinkled, whatever, and they somehow make it not just acceptable but hip.  Women, on the other hand, are having Brazilian waxes and labial rejuvenation surgery because even their pussies can’t look old.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that baby vaginas are in and have been for a while? Anyone else creeped out about that?

I would say it’s time to embrace the mom bod, but I too have been conditioned to think that mom bods are better not seen by the naked eye. I don’t want to gawk at another woman’s lumpy cellulite and stretch marks and wrinkles and sagging breasts any more than I want to look at my own. Blech. Droopy knee skin. Bat wing upper arms. Turkey necks. So many ways to self loathe. Are women going to be able to start growing out their upper lips and those three wiry chin hairs? If men can be lumbersexuals with questionable hygiene and dad bods, can we trend #lunchladylook?

In an ideal world, we would stop judging others and ourselves by our outer layer. We would go back to considering intellect, compassion, ingenuity, hard work, creativity, friendship, humor, empathy, and caring as the things that are important, the things that matter.  Kim Kardashian’s or Nicki Minaj’s butt wouldn’t be more important than ending world hunger or saving the whales. Girls at school would be more concerned with being top of the class and less concerned with who has the straightest, blondest hair. 

We have our priorities all fucking wrong, which is why a girl is excluded from learning because she wore the wrong pants to school. It’s also why a woman who grew another human inside her body feels like she needs to surgically remove her loose skin before she can wear a bikini, or why a post-menopausal woman feels she needs to continue having a moist vagina to compete with her husband’s Cialis prescription. We forgot how to value what makes a woman amazing at every age, and it has very little to do with how she looks.