July 21st, 2021

Five years have passed since my last blog entry. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about this site. When I found it (thanks to Facebook 'memories'), I decided to surf through it to see what I was thinking about in my forties. Wow. I was obsessed with my looks and my fading youth. Yeah, I still am, but not nearly to the same degree. Above, there is me at 43; at almost 51; and now, at 56. I haven't had any cosmetic procedures, I almost never wear makeup anymore, and I've lost the near-constant obsession with looking young. At 56, you really need to surrender--you've lost that battle. Youth is overrated, anyway; the young people I know now are mostly miserable and lost. I wouldn't want to trade places with anyone I know in their 20s, 30s, or even 40s. I have fought hard the last several years to overcome multiple traumas, which was mostly what all the self absorption was all about. That, and after a global pandemic that has killed millions of people and left millions of others in precarious economic and health situations, I don't have a lot of energy to write about my aging face and body. I'm lucky I'm not dead or permanently disabled from the fucking virus. 

I realize now that an overwhelming obsession with one's looks often happens because the messages you received growing up were largely about your appearance. I was always praised and loved because I was young and beautiful. I learned the same lesson over and over again: you are amazing and desirable not due to who you are, but to how you present yourself. I felt important and powerful because I hadn't lived long on the planet and I fit the culture's standard for hot. So, when you reach an age where youth is slipping away, there is panic and anxiety. Will I be loved as a middle-aged women? Will I be loved as an old woman? Will I be abandoned because I am no longer desirable, because I can't be the content of some man's fantasy? Will I lose jobs, friends, opportunities, my husband, when the face I present to the world has clearly been marked my time and experiences?

Menopause was no fun, but it blasted open all the fragile barriers that I had built to protect my true self. All the ways that I tried to protect myself from my past, my terrible emotional pain, and the realities that I did not wish to face head on, stopped working. Real estate obsessions, shopping sprees, Hollywood, even religion and spirituality had become tools of diversion and distraction. I did not want to look at what I had endured as a child and teen, and how those traumas fed into my frantic need to stay busy and fragmented as I pursued endless projects. Eventually, however, what you seek to avoid will find you. Suffice to say, when all that repressed material comes roaring to the surface, it's a shock to your brain and body. That dark night of the soul threatened to kill me. But it didn't. I'm still here. 

Covid has created a weird limbo. I don't teach anywhere but through my laptop since March 2020. I mostly live in Idyllwild now, in an adorable cabin 10 minutes from town. We still have the Simi house, although Ty spends more time there than I do. My marriage has survived a lot of rough times. My kid is holding up, but I still wish I could make her life less stressful and painful. I have learned that we are very limited in that regard; if I try to save anyone from their path, the consequences are swift. It does not work to attempt to remove other's suffering. Suffering, I suppose, is the only path for growth for most of us. 

Before Covid slammed into the scene, I lived in Granada for a few months in Fall 2019. I did not want to come back. I had found my happy place, my soul's home. But you can't simply declare that the life you spent so long building was no longer relevant. So I came home. Ty and I were planning our next trip for June 2020. That did not happen. Nor did it happen in July. September? Nope. So here we are, hoping that the Delta variant doesn't close down the world. If we can hang on to this fragile recovery, we will be back in Spain in September for a couple of months. 

But I no longer expect anything outside of me to be a solution to existential despair. Pandemics bring a considerable amount of depression and anxiety, especially for those--like me--who were already dealing with those issues. There is no solution to pain but to feel it, no matter where you are, no matter how old you are, no matter how beautiful or successful you may appear to others. I have felt a great deal of pain since coming back from Spain and enduring multiple losses even before Covid sunk its claws into us all. I don't wish for these difficult feelings to disappear; I don't fight them anymore, or try to run away from them by filling my wrinkles with rooster gel. Now, what you see is what you get. I am honest with myself and others. 

Yeah, I feel crappy pretty much every day, but there is also so much beauty around me and abundant love. I am comfortable with the fact that existence can be confusing, contradictory, and incomprehensible. I don't try to figure it all out anymore, or unravel the secrets of the Universe. She can keep her secrets. I try to focus on the small pleasures that make the days interesting--a great macaroon, a new lizard that pops up under the deck, the sound of the wind in the pines, the smell of the earth after a thunderstorm. The light here in Idyllwild is so gorgeous and mysterious at this time of the evening--summer is in full swing, and the crickets chirp at night, and the screech owls sit on our balcony making odd bird noises that I listen to at 3:00 AM when I can't sleep. 

My unhappiness has been all about my ego. I thought I could find answers to unanswerable questions, and I got really pissed off and morose when my mind wasn't up to the task of figuring out reality. I fumed when my family didn't meet my expectations or respond to me the way I wanted them to. I freaked out when I realized that I am the only one responsible for my happiness, satisfaction, and growth in this life. I wanted something outside of me to make me happy: a Craftsman by the beach, friends who would sacrifice anything for me, family that could read my mind and love and support me exactly when I needed it, a church that was perfect and free from sin, a spiritual practice that would answer all my questions and enlighten me, etc. The list is endless. Point is, I have behaved like a true narcissist who thinks that everything and everyone should serve my needs. I'm still adjusting to the reality that this is all my job. 

Yup, I am still most definitely a work in progress. I'm pissed that I'm going to be 60 in 3 1/2 years. But part of me doesn't give a shit about that anymore. I mean, if Dolly Parton can look crazy hot at 75 in a Playboy Bunny outfit, well, maybe age is more about perspective, just like everything else. I don't want to be an angry, resentful person who spends way too much time taking selfies to prop up a fragile ego. Nope, time for the frustrated child and the vain, insecure teenager to chill out and let the adult go enjoy her tacos at La Casita. So with that, I bid you all adieu, and if anyone is still out there, have a blessed evening. And summer. 

WHERE HAVE I BEEN THE LAST FOUR YEARS????

Hi everybody!

It's fun to write a blog when you know that nobody will be reading. That's because I haven't written anything in over four years. Why is that, you ask? Well, because my life unraveled four years ago, and I am still putting together the pieces.

First of all, my kid had a crisis . . . a really, big, bad, scary crisis. As all you moms know, if you're kid has a problem, YOU have a problem. I can't go into details, because I respect her privacy. More importantly, she's pretty happy right now, and so I don't need to dredge up what happened four years ago. So I won't. Suffice to say, the kid recovered much faster than her parents. Her parents are still hurting.

Then, of course, 2012 was the year that I realized we were going to lose our house. In 2013, we did. We escaped to Camarillo. Then, after I discovered how miserable I was there and how haunted that house was, we came back. For the last two years, we've been perched up on a hill overlooking the entire San Fernando Valley, which is awesome except for the noise and light pollution. I am not in nature, as it turns out, only NEAR nature. That has been the cause of more upset than one can imagine. You see, I am a Highly Sensitive Person who is drained and freaked out and stressed by noise. So I can't handle the roar of traffic, no matter how desirable the area or how perfect the view.

I turned 50 last May and I'm about to turn 51. It sucks and I hate it. I have to be honest here; if you want to read what I SHOULD feel or remind me how grateful I should be for all that I have (I know; I do know how lucky I am, believe me), please don't read any further.

I hate my age for many reasons. First of all, I am too young to accept the weight of the number. More than anything, it's the culture that hurts me. I am bombarded with messages from multiple sources about what my age "means." I am lumped in with people over 70, as if I had anything in common with the Boomers. I am constantly reminded that I am not hot, not anybody's idea of attractive, and should not grow my hair long or wear a bikini (gross, a 51 year old in a bikini, please cover up). There are social and cultural rules that didn't apply to me a year ago, but now do--simply due to a number that is so arbitrary and bizarre that I can't wrap my head around it.

I'm not denying that things change. I went through menopause this last year--actually my last period was June, 2014, on the first day of summer school. Since then, my poor body tries to have a period but just can't manage it. For those of you upset or disgusted that I would talk about periods and menopause, get the hell over it. Because I am going to write about all of those things that I'm not "supposed" to, and I'm giving myself the gift of not caring what the critics think. OK, so back to hormones. Hormones rule pretty much everything, as I've discovered. The hot flashes come and go, but hey, I got my first hot flash almost ten years ago, so that's nothing new. What IS new is what happens to your skin. That firm, dewy, plump skin that we can hang onto until we turn 46 (the year you age quickly, especially if your kid has a crisis) disappears, leaving you with hollowed out eye sockets, no cheeks, loose skin under your neck, super dry skin everywhere and the general sense that you need to start shedding some serious dough to see who, among all those plastic surgeons in the valley, might return to you what you have lost. Here is a photo where you can see what I'm talking about:

"Before" shows me at 43. "After" shows me now, at almost 51. Yeah, depressing. I'm not ugly now, but I'm different--leaner, dryer, more like beef jerky and less like a plump steak. Also, of course, I am not wearing makeup in the "after" picture, which doesn't help. My point is, there is nothing we can do about aging, and I've learned from my culture, my parents and pretty much everything I read, hear, experience, etc. that getting older is TERRIBLE, awful, depressing, takes you closer to DEATH, and so on.

Finally, what happens, is that you just burn yourself out on these thoughts. There is a decent chance that I'm only halfway to my death. I probably have well over 40 years left. That's a long time to spend unhappy about anything. The real problem I have is not wanting to grow up or make the transition into the second half of my life. I've always been young, and now I'm being dragged kicking and screaming into new territory, where I don't know the rules and I don't understand what comes next. I did everything I was supposed to do--I got my degrees, my houses, my awesome job, and now I just hit "REPEAT" every day, because I don't know what else I am supposed to do!!!!!

I experimented with the entertainment industry (NO THANK YOU), I burned myself out on the paranormal and the constant study of life after death; realizing that I was spending all of this time on the survival of consciousness and yet had no clue how to actually live the life I am currently in. So the 'paranormal' and all the silliness around it has left me totally uninterested in continuing to record random snippets of disembodied voices, because after all, HOW MANY TIMES can you send out audio files of weird sounds that nobody is going to listen to anyway? My friendships all dissolved as well, for many, many reasons, but probably because they were based on fantasies of becoming a little rich and a little famous via our teams of intrepid explorers of dark rooms.

No interest has come along to replace those things I did for myself and myself alone. I am pretty lost, truth be told. That is why it bothers me to be almost 51: I have nothing to show but an older face and body for the passage of time. I am renting a house when I always owned one before; I have zero prospects for finding satisfaction or interest in the 'paranormal' again; my friendships have dwindled and disappeared; my kid is raised, so I don't even have to do that anymore; and I just don't feel excited about anything.

But I love my kid and my husband. I love Nod and I'm trying to love the new cat, who hides under the bed 99% of the time. I love my sister, I love Connor and Angelina, I love Tricia and Mike and Eva and Mother and Father Supancic, I love Moo and P-A, I love Marsha, I love Nik and Trina, I love Ania and Jennifer and Margarita . . . I love my cabin in the mountains with a different love, because obviously it's not a person . . . I love Kimberly and Erin and Jennifer . . . I love Nana and Faf and Granny and Grandpa and Aunt Mildred and Uncle Al and I love Grandpa Joe and Grandma Joe and Uncle George and Uncle Don and BEN!

And I love ALL my students, even the ones hard to love, even the ones who don't want my love, and I love my pastor who works so hard with a very difficult group of people.

So I keep loving and hope that all the rest will fall into place on its own. It usually does.

--Kirsten

Technical Issues

Navigation by WebRing. Hmmmm . . . Webring asked me to post the above somewhere in my blog . . . but I don't know why, and I'm wondering if this whole page is about to explode . . .

WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED IN THE LAST THREE YEARS?!?!?!?

Wow. You have got to be kidding me. I haven't written in this thing for three years???? What the hell have I been up to? Hmmmm . . . . a few things . . . I'm contemplating forclosure after a cluster f**k with the "servicing company" otherwise known as Indy Mac. The grief, the horrible grief . . . hard to imagine unless you're going through it, or you've been there. I suppose we'll all be out of here and maybe somewhere in Camarillo by December . . . unless there is a Miracle, but mortgage companies don't lend themselves to miracles. Lesson? Actually, I discovered that the Universe continues to work in mysterious ways. As I was crying while driving down Topanga, I looked up and saw a huge billboard: "MOVING IS THE BEST MEDICINE." Granted, it was advice for arthritis sufferers, but how appropriate!! And then the clincher, today, at Dumetz and Canoga, a sign on the local church: "Joy comes not from owning things, but from the people you love." Isn't that more than simply synchronicity? THAT, my friends, was a sign. Also, regarding my ever-expanding obsession with my aging face, I started some "Refirme" treatments, but no more fillers. Here's a pic of me now:

I don't know if I look older, younger, the same, whatever. I do know that the new issue is sagging skin under my neck, which is why I am doing three more Refirme treatments before I give up. Now before you accuse me of rampant superficiality, I am doing volunteer work in Long Beach with Pastor Bell, I founded a paranormal group that I maintain and nurture in spite of the drama, I take care of an emotionally delicate teenager, I run my household, I teach until I can't see straight and intervene to help my students in every way, and I take good care of my family, friends and furry and feathered companions. Plus, I've had a hell of a last few months. I added a job at CSUCI, then lost it; I was hospitalized for a mystery illness that kept me interned for 5 days; my dearest one suffered a complete emotional breakdown and confessed to horrible, unimaginable things that broke my heart into a thousand pieces; my husband was downsized; we're losing our house; the "big show" for the Paranormal Housewives never materialized, and I suspect we were greviously used; Kenny died in July of 2010; but . . . . ANGELINA was born in June of 2011, and I was there that day, the 4th . . . and my parents are still healthy, if crazy. Ty and I are still in love. Nod is happy and fat, Bingo still drools his love all over me, and Gracie bites less. There's just too much to say here. Too much. Maybe I'll write more later, if anyone cares. Or even if they don't. K

Verdict on Radiesse: Uhhhhhh . . . .

OK, so at some point I'm going to rot away like an old pumpkin, facial fillers or no. But before then, how far am I willing to go?

My experience so far with Radiesse is neither glowing nor disastrous. A good deal of what I thought were awesome results from the filler turned out to be swelling from the procedure. Now, if I could just figure out a way to have a permanently swollen face, I'd be forever young! Truth be told, the lines are back. Not like they were; there is more fullness around my mouth, but you have to be me in order to notice it.

That kind of bummed me out, to be honest. I didn't want everyone to know I had something "done," but I also wanted someone to say, "My, you look so refreshed! Did you take a vacation or change your hair?" Well, not a single, solitary soul has noticed anything whatsoever. My family and even my husband see no sign that anything changed on my face. They haven't skipped around proclaiming how young and dewy I look; far from it. As my holiday depression rages on, I suppose I look either the same or older, due to my Grinch-y misery when the sun don't shine.

Also on the down side was the fact that the needles hit some facial nerves, and I freaked out over the patchy numbness that affected parts of my face, especially the tip of my nose, my upper gum and my cheekbones. After much anxious Internet searching, I figured out that the injections triggered the "trigeminal" facial nerve(s), and that it's a "rare" side effect of facial filler injections, but it does happen . . . to a very lucky few. The numbness is pretty much gone now, but again, I don't have spectacular results to show for it.

The other down side is that there is just enough of a difference to make me tempted to continue the process. I know, I'm an idiot. But hear me out. Those lines were more like folds, and I think that I don't see spectacular results because there was a significant amount of correction that needed to be done, more than I anticipated--and I very quickly became accustomed to the new look, however subtle, and so now the rest of my face needs some balance. It's the Stendahl syndrome all over again; the story goes that someone gave the notoriously Spartan Stendahl a rich, elegant red robe for Christmas, and all it did was point out to him how dismal the rest of his possessions were. This created a rabid desire to upgrade his room and his stuff, so he did what he had to do to keep the peace with himself: throw out the luxurious red robe.

If you asked, I would tell you immediately what else I want to do: Coolaser for face and neck, a tad more filler in my cheeks, and maybe just a smidge more around my mouth. That's it, I swear. The lovely Dr. Ourian would agree that my desires are easily realized and very reasonable. But I know that this is the edge of a cliff. First of all, there is no money for such "facial maintenance" and second of all, the worst thing that could happen to me would be unlimited funds for such "touch-ups". I think that I will probably give in at some point in the next couple of years and finish the job that I started. Lord, my face is a job. Well, I guess it is. It's the job of giving oneself the gift of NOT BEING FRICKIN' annoyed every single time I look in the mirror.

I give my Radiesse injections a C+. Not great, could be better, but a solid effort, as teachers like to say when a student has not excelled in any way whatsoever. What's next? Nothing in the short run. Just me and the slightly dingy pink robe. If I could just get the right slippers . . .

Why I Suck as a Friend

OK, so here's an "After" picture, even though it's not a great picture. But that's not the subject of the post.

So, why am I a bad friend? Because I don't like to confront people, not even my husband. If I am hurt, angry, resentful or upset, I just let it fester. I don't let the person know how I really feel. That ball of negative energy grows and becomes infected, so the result is I end up avoiding the person/people in question, evading all contact, creating excuses, simply pretending that nothing is really wrong when in truth, everything is wrong.

Sometimes with a friend there is an elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. We step around the bloated carcass, try not to look at it, but when it starts to stink, we have to say something, right? No, I just choose to leave the room and ignore the obvious. I have lost so many friendships because I am not honest. I avoid pain, and in the process I become lonely. My loneliness breeds isolation, and my isolation creates anti-social tendencies. When I get to that point, forget it--I will simply lock myself in my cocoon and ruminate.

I'm at that point now, where my lack of courage to confront issues with family and friends has created that huge, bloated dead elephant in the room. What did I do? I left the damn room and slipped out the back door instead of simply saying, "hey, guys, let's drag that horrid dead thing out of the room and go get a pizza!!"

Loneliness, resentment and anger are crappy companions. But they're all mine, until I find the courage and the spiritual insight to guide me along a better path.

A New You!!!!

ABOVE is the AFTER picture! Now I'm wondering if perhaps there was some "over" correction . . . not sure.





My first cosmetic procedure. It wasn't easy. Dr. Simon injected my face with lidocaine while his nurse wiped away the blood. Then, quickly and efficiently, he filled in my smile lines with Radiesse. My face was numb, my hands were sweaty, I was in full-on panic attack mode, but I still asked him if he could fix the scar tissue on my knuckles from years of scratching them raw. "Of course," he said, "but first you have to work on your stress. Meditate. Then I can make your hands like new, like baby skin." Work on my stress??? What a thing to say. Come to think of it, this procedure was my reward for receiving tenure, an odd reward, really. It hurt like hell, it swelled up and bruised, and since instead of resting that day I cleaned the entire house, I was quite ill by Saturday night. I felt hot and tired and dizzy and slightly naseous. All in all, the first couple of days sucked.

Of course, everyone downplays that part. The truth is, Radiesse is painful for awhile, and you won't feel like yourself until you heal, and THAT might take a week or more. So, how do I feel now? It's been three days, and I have to admit that the absence of those folds around my mouth has made me giddy at times. I don't know why I hated my smile lines as much as I did; everyone told me that they were a positive thing, a way of showing the world that I was a happy person. However, every time I looked in the mirror at a certain angle, those lines were all I could see. They were sunken reminders of my weight loss, which happened around the time of my divorce, so perhaps those lines were somehow connected to the pain and loss of that bleak period. I don't know for sure, but I do know that I looked much older because of them, and I wasn't ready.

That's what it came down to. Whatever anyone else thought, the furrows were a sure sign of age, and I wasn't quite prepared to age gracefully. Without those lines, whether or not it's an illusion, I feel that I have taken back the damage of the divorce and the marks it indented me with. Stupid? Maybe. But know I have the face of the woman who had not yet known how painful life could become. It feels like I conquered the past, even if only in a small way. If I could do that for under a $1,000 bucks and the effects last nearly 2 years, then I think perhaps it was a wise investment for me.

But . . . says the evil, critical voice that lives in my head . . . you can't conquer time. At some point, we age, and no amount of filler will change that. Yes, I know. I realize that Radiesse is not the cure for aging and mortality. I don't think that was my real reason. I have accepted the fact that my face will never look 25 again, and actually, I am not really interested in that anymore. Dr. Simon, with a few zaps of the Coolaser and some more filler could actually give me that 25 year old face for a few more years, but I am done now. Yeah, right, says my mother, "it's a slippery slope, you'll be back."

I don't think I'll do much else for the forseeable future. I don't feel the need. I'm also not wealthy--I've maxed out my vanity budget. I guess what this all came down to was this: I accept the reality of aging, but there was something I needed to erase from my past. I was tired of the reminder--the sunken cheeks, the lines--that at one point I lost 30 pounds because I was sad. I wanted to eat, but my life had dissolved into the ether. I was gaunt, frail, underweight and utterly devastated. My cheeks disappeared into hollows and furrows. I was hungry, but I couldn't eat. Now, I look like the woman who was healthy and happy. Maybe no one else will see it--but I do--every day. My face matches my heart: full.