We survived the first week of high school, huzzah! There were one or two hiccups along the way, but all in all, everything went pretty well. I am still unable to compute how it’s possible that my kid is in a high school. More than anything, that fact puts my own age into perspective. Because I see my son, the high-schooler, looking at me like I have all the answers and I realize that I am not, in fact, just a few years removed from where he’s at. More like 30, hah!

Not gonna lie, it always trips me up trying to imagine how my kids look at me. Even now, there is a world of difference (in my head) between me and my parents, and the idea that someone who is only a few years shy of adulthood sees me in the same way I see my parents is just WILD. More so than anything else in my life, my relationship with my parents remains a fossil of a time gone by. I might be 46, but I’m still 16 when it comes to my dad. And that’s not to say that he doesn’t treat me as an adult, or anything; just that, emotionally, we will always be on two sides of a certain divide. Even after 15 years as a mother, it’s still hard to process the fact that I have jumped to the other side — at least as far as my kids are concerned.

In other exciting news, my proof copy of Past Perfect Murder came in this week! I don’t think I’ve shared the cover before, so here it is:

I love it so much! My cover designer, Juliane Van Huizen, did a fantastic job again. It fits the vibe of the book so well, as well as the series as a whole. In this one, Inspector Hawthorne goes on a ‘working holiday’ in a small, idyllic English village, trying to discover if a couple of recent deaths are as accidental as they appear, or the work of a clever murderer. If you love Agatha Christie and Midsomer Murders, this is the perfect cozy read for you 😉 It’s coming out in October so stay tuned.

The start of the new football season (and the various dramas of the player transfer window) has filled up the little free time I’ve had (not devoted to writing/editing/prepping for publication), but I will not bore you with the details. I am thinking about doing a fantasy league sort of thing and forcing my husband to play along because he’s the only person I know in real life who is even remotely interested in football. Gonna call it a marital bonding exercise … though it might result in more fights than bonding, lmao! I will just say, following football is better than watching reality TV. So much drama, so many drama queens. I’m very happy with my decision to get back into (spectating) the sport, because everything else going on in the world right now is an absolute dumpster fire.

My daughter’s birthday is on Monday — she’ll be officially a teenager, wish me luck! — so I need to get my butt in gear and make some plans. I promised her a fun day, choose-your-own-adventure style, but that means I still have to come up with a menu of choices and rough schedule. The good news is that, since we’re practically the same person, we are going to have a blast together, no matter what. There will be books, and ramen, and boba tea involved, for sure.

Have a great weekend!

Recently, I listened to two fascinating podcast episodes that converged on a theme that left me with a lot to chew over. The first one is an older (2024) episode of Diabolical Lies, “Taylor Swift, Injectables, and Other Genres of Magical Thinking.” The second is a recent episode of Culture Study, “The Politics of White Women’s Hair,” in which Anne Helen Petersen interviewed Sarah Mesle, the author of Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women’s Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity. I can’t recommend both enough, and I am putting the book on my library request list too. There is a lot to unpack in their respective discussions, but one of the main themes could be summed up as: what is the ‘right way to woman’ and how does that uphold existing race and class structures.

The bottom line is that women — including those at the top of the hierarchy of marginalized groups thanks to their whiteness –always exist in a precarious position vis-a-vis power in a patriarchal capitalism society and that ‘womaning’ the right way is a hamster wheel of existential futility. It sounds depressing and it is. But at the micro level of beauty trends and such, it’s fascinating to observe how the machinery works to keep the hamster wheel constantly turning, exhausting women’s mental, emotional, and financial resources. And I think it’s a useful exercise because it exposes the guts of the lie; the more you see it for what it is, the less compelling it becomes.

Both episodes led me down tangents of reflection about my own engagement with beauty ideals. It’s natural to want to think that one is wise to capitalist trickery — who wants to admit they can be manipulated without their knowledge? — and surprisingly easy to reassure oneself that this is, in fact, the case. “I do X because I like X, not because society tells me that I should do X; that’s just a coincidence.” And, actually, the first part of that statement is probably true, in many cases. It’s possible to genuinely believe that a particular preference is the product of free, uninfluenced choice — even when it’s not. In most cases, it’s not … because we live in a society, not on a deserted island, and are subject to social conditioning from the moment we are born. But Western society is powered by the illusion of free choice and untrammelled individualism, so the system requires that people believe it.

I don’t think there is something inherently wrong about making decisions that are influenced by external forces, whether in our environment, social norms, etc. People are social creatures, and there is no getting away from that. But I do think it’s important to not be afraid to examine what those influences are, and how and why they exert themselves on us. We need to see the machinery clearly. I can tell you, it can be pretty darn uncomfortable. The discomfort of accepting one isn’t free of external influence is the easy part (hard as it may seem at first). It’s a lot harder to dig deeper and confront the fact that some choices which, on the surface, seem either value-neutral or aligned with one’s consciously held values are, actually, a lot more complicated and ‘messy’ than they appear.

And it’s hard to sit with that messiness — because, sometimes, that’s all you can do, at least to start.

That’s the stage I’m currently at: sitting with the mess of unpacked choices.

For example: hair. We could talk about this for hours, but I’ll try to keep it brief. For most of my 30s, I rocked various short haircuts. Then, when the pandemic hit, I stopped cutting it — first for practical reasons, then as a kind of challenge (how long can I go?), and finally as an aesthetic choice. I decided that I liked long hair on me and, since hair takes forever to grow, keeping it long made more sense than going through a constant cut-grow cycle.

That was 5 years ago, and my hair has stayed long. It’s currently almost down to my butt, because I haven’t had a trim in about 4 or 5 months. I’ve gotten really lazy about haircuts, which is a nice bonus of long hair. [Anything that allows me to be lazy and not have to do something is great in my books.] This past week, I’ve been thinking about why I keep my hair long, digging deeper than the ‘obvious’ reasons I just gave. One of the reasons that surfaced is that my long hair is a protest against the idea of “age appropriateness”. I’m not sure if it’s still the message that young women receive these days, but when I was in my 20s, the general social consensus was that, after a certain age, women should not have long hair. That long hair wasn’t polished/elegant/mature enough. That there is a whiff of desperation about long hair on older woman; clinging on to one’s youth and fooling nobody.

I like long hair in the same way that I like wearing clothes I wore in my twenties: it doesn’t make me feel like I’m 26 again, but it does make me feel like I’m not ‘trapped’ by my age. I don’t want to be defined by my age, so I don’t confine myself to the aesthetics that supposedly define my age. I love being in my 40s; I love the wisdom and experience and personal growth I’ve earned getting here. I am not interested in disavowing those things by pretending to be younger. I want to celebrate them … but I also want to challenge some aspects of what supposedly comes with age. Or, rather, I want to enlarge the definition. Passion, curiosity, and excitement don’t only belong to youth; they don’t need to be jettisoned in order to give experience its due. Wisdom and curiosity can co-exist. They should coexist.

I am no less vital at 46 than I was at 26, whatever biology might dictate. And I want the world to see that. Long hair is one of my signals.

But …

It’s more complicated than that. Because long hair carries many more and complex connotations. I might say (and believe) that my meaning is X, but that doesn’t exclude Y and Z from the conversation. If long hair is equated with youth, and youth has a premium in society, and I am a woman who has been conditioned from childhood to strive for social status, can I truly say that my choice to have long hair is completely divorced from any consideration of social value? Is there not a part of me, unconscious or otherwise, that enjoys and benefits from the privilege that is conferred by proximity to youth? There probably is, much as I don’t like to think about it or accept it.

Does that mean that I am going to cut my hair short now?

No, of course not. What long hair means to me hasn’t changed. The fact that I still, experientially, enjoy having long hair hasn’t changed. Cutting my hair doesn’t save me from the hamster wheel. Because if it says, on one hand, “I reject the supremacy of youth,” it also puts me back into the “women of a certain age should look like this” bucket.

So, what was the point of the whole exercise? To understand what lies behind a choice that seems reflexive — the values, the messages, the nuances. That clarity is a good thing. Being able to confront uncomfortable facts and grapple with nuances and hold contradictions is part of growing up, growing wise.

I was going to talk about Botox next, but this post is already too long so let’s save that for another time.

I would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve had a chance to listen to the podcasts I mentioned. Let’s talk about it in the comments!

I am very much a collector at heart, so you would be forgiven for questioning that title, but here’s the thing: the accident is the what not the why. Some collections are intentional; methodically planned, sought, assembled. Other collections just … sorta … happen. Sometimes, it happens because you find one cool thing and decide that you like it and want to find more to keep it company. Sometimes, it happens because you find and buy a bunch of what seem like random one-offs until, one day, you realize that you’ve got yourself a collection.

It’s no secret that I love accessories, but not all accessories are born equal. Take sunglasses, for example. I’ve never been a sunglasses girlie. To me, they’re functional objects first, decorative ones a very distant second. I don’t like spending money on them. [It might be ass-backwards, but my brain believes in splurging on things it finds beautiful, and saving money on function.] My eyes are very sensitive to light, so sunglasses are a necessity, but I’ve never given them a lot of thought.

So, tell me, then, why I’ve now got a collection of nearly a dozen sunglasses?

One word: thrifting.

What else? Thrifting can make a collector out of pretty much anyone who is dedicated to the hunt, never mind those of us with a predisposition towards collecting. In my case, sunglasseses are far from the only ‘accidental’ collection I started thanks to thrifting. Most of those other collections started because thrifting exposed me to something cool I hadn’t known existed before (e.g. Nemadji pottery) and I became obsessed. The sunglasses? Those just seemed to multiply, somehow.

I don’t always look at the sunglasses rack when I go to the thrift store. In fact, I almost never do — because sunglasses aren’t really my thing. But nearly every time I do look, I seem to find a cool designer pair. And if I’m not a sucker for sunglasses, I am a sucker for a good bargain. Designer sunglasses are ridiculously expensive … except at the thrifts. Sure, I’ll buy a $5 pair. Why not? If I lose or break one, I’ll have a back-up. Sensible, right? Well, that’s how you end up with a dozen, eventually.

The funniest (ironic?) part is that, 9 times out of 10, I end up wearing the same pair. I’ve had it for a few years now and the coating on the frame is starting to peel, but I can’t bring myself to let it go. The other thing about me and objects I consider functional is that I will wear them into the ground. Like, until the wheels come off and then some. Doesn’t matter if I have better options; the habit (of using/wearing the old thing) has me in a chokehold.

But, yeah, I should probably pick a new daily pair. One of these days, I will.

Let’s look at the options, shall we?

Let’s start with all my Quays. The bottom pair is my current fave/daily. The others are fun but they’re too “statement” for daily use. I need something a little more subdued, unless I’m going all out with a more maximalist kind of vibe.

From top to bottom: Cavalli, Vogue, Alfred Sung. All of these have a fun retro flair, but the first two are a little more over-the-top. I’ve been wearing the bottom pair a fair bit lately. It has a Y2K vibe that suits my current aesthetic — probably because they are from the early 2000s. They’re in mint condition, too. [Like all the sunglasses I thrift. Always check for scratches!] I’m not sure the shape suits my face as well as the cat-eye Quay pair, but they’re a solid option.

From top to bottom: Dior, Dior, McQueen. I am not 100% sure the top pair is authentic, but the other two definitely are. Would you believe me that I paid $10 or less for each of these? It’s true. In fact, it’s true for all of the sunglasses in my collection. The top pair is cool; I like the reflective lenses, lookswise. However, not a huge fan of this particular colour of lenses to wear (it leans a bit too yellow).

I love the classic style of the middle pair, but it’s a bit too narrow for my face; if I wear it for an extended period, it starts to hurt around the temples. My daughter has her eye on these sunglasses, however, so I think they’ll probably “disappear” from my collection one of these days.

The McQueen pair is perfect; a more refined version of my trusty Quays. Weirdly enough, I’d forgotten that I had this pair until I started writing this post. They managed to get lost in my big bowl of sunglasses, somehow. Yes, I keep most of my sunglasses in a bowl on a console table near the front door — easy access when I’m on my way out. Are you horrified? I told you I’m not precious about sunglasses. [And it’s another reason why I’d never spend hundreds of dollars on a pair.] I did decide to rescue this pair and store it in a proper case … at least until it’s their turn to become my daily.

This Tom Ford pair are the only sunglasses I kinda, sorta babied from the start. Honestly, they are really, really nice so even I felt bad about just shoving them in a bowl. I thrifted the case separately, by the way. Don’t sleep on that section of the thrift store either. You can find some very nice cases, usually for $5 or less. I’ve found three different velvet Gucci cases, that each for $40+ on eBay. An expensive sunglasses case makes even less sense to me than expensive sunglasses, but I won’t pass up a stylish one if it’s practically free.

And there you have it: my accidental sunglasses collection. I’m pretty sure there’s at least one pair (or two) that I’ve forgotten in some drawer or other, so it’s safe to say that I’m not in any danger of running out of backups any time soon.

Do you have any accidental collections? Let’s talk about it!