What the hell is wrong with people? Even the New York Times is applauding the Superbowl half-time show as “empowering” for women! Some crap about proving that age is just a number, because look how hot J. Lo is at fifty years old!

PLEASE tell me that you agree with me, that the show was as disempowering to women as if they’d been scrubbing dishes on their hands and knees.

What is empowering about women having to wear stripper outfits and shake their asses? What is empowering about the hours spent getting hair extensions and spray tans and investing in personal trainers? I see it’s empowering for the people who provide the services and for the cosmetic surgery industry but for women?? Bitch please.

It’s not empowering to feel you must look like you’re in your twenties when you’re fifty. It seems sad to me. Even Brad Pitt is allowed to look weathered. It seems like oppression. Maybe in the age of Trump, oppression is empowering?

Shakira is gorgeous and I have to say she’s a really good dancer. She looks like a fit 43 year old. Not a miracle of make-up and hair professionals, but a genuine babe, you know? Good for her.

But most of the accolades are going to Jennifer Lopez, who makes it look SO HARD, with every step and ass-wiggle seeming to visibly cause her anxiety. When is desperation empowering? When she sang something about “I’m still Jenny from the block” my husband and I both laughed out loud.

Jesus Christ, empowering my flat ass.

As for Demi Lovato singing the National Anthem, I’m relieved for her that she lived through it but what about just taking a knee??

And no, I didn’t watch the whole show or any of the actual game, so don’t start with me.

While I’m here, let me quote a recent message from a reader:

Damn, you’ve got some serious self-loathing going on. Someone in standard issue old-lady-red lipstick should maybe throttle back the ageist bullshit.

Haha, not a chance of throttling back anything! I’m just trying to make America great again.

On Saturday night, I went to take off my eye make-up and got a couple of those flat cotton pads you use to remove your nail polish.

GUESS WHAT COMES NEXT!

Correct! I absentmindedly reached for the nail polish remover instead of the make-up remover, dampened the pad with it, and rubbed it on my eyelid. I smelled my mistake immediately.

What followed after a bloodcurdling scream was a dramatic episode of eye washing, attended by my poor husband who stood ready to drive to the ER while I whined, “It won’t matter if I’m already blind.” I didn’t want to open my eye to find out, until rinsing my eyelid a few hundred times. Then I poured distilled water in my eye for around 15 minutes. In the end, I was deeply shaken but still fully sighted.

Now I know that I can’t be trusted to do anything involving household products, matches, medications, what else? I’ve known for a while that my hands don’t always know what they’re doing, and I might throw away something valuable if the other hand is holding a used paper towel. It’s gone beyond the state of “not present.” My brain is somewhere else entirely, and often the somewhere else is literally oblivion.

Naturally I feel scared of what’s to come. I went to take that little online test to screen for senility and scored one point less than a couple of years ago. I googled dementia and Alzheimer’s and learned that you need a whole work-up to get a diagnosis. The drugs you’re taking, your levels of vitamin B-something, depression, all these things could be affecting your cognition.

The meds I take can all affect memory, and my sleep deprivation is no joke either. Deep down though, I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.

When I can’t use words, it’s going to be unbearable, unless I forget that I love words. I guess that could work out. But surely I’ll know if I can’t think of common nouns or the names of my loved ones. The other day, I couldn’t remember Anderson Cooper’s name. It took forever to retrieve it. Right now I can remember Steve Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo, but I just forgot the name of Rev Al Sharpton. Do I need these names, one might ask, and the answer is yes! I need to remember everything I know!

If only we could selectively control our memory files, deleting Taylor Swift stuff to make room for new passwords. I want to hang on to all adjectives! Laying in bed this morning (unless it’s lying in bed, I CAN’T REMEMBER) I couldn’t think of the word “transcend”. It’s not as dire as putting nail polish remover on your eye but still, it’s upsetting.

Many years ago, I predicted the advent of nursing homes for baby-boomers, where music of the 60s would be piped in all day long. There would be a chain of these facilities called “Summer of Love”, where residents would know all the lyrics of every Dylan and Beatles song, even if they couldn’t recall their own names. Just as every cynical joke about the future has now become a grim reality, there are already nursing homes and elderly day-care centers that try to create a bygone era for the comfort of the residents. They use facades of 50s diners or 40’s gas stations, and set up fake little bus benches for people to congregate around. To me, this is gas-lighting, but to the companies behind this business model, it’s a useful way to control behavior.

Now that it’s just around the corner for me, please don’t put me somewhere where they play Eric Clapton or the Eagles! In fact, once my hair stops looking good, I’d like someone to kill me, swiftly and humanely, with a heavy frying pan.

Do any of you have a bottom line for “quality of life” or do you look forward to hiking well into your 90s, bragging about your Boniva and reverse mortgages?

Just kidding. 65 is old, very old, a time of Medicare, high cholesterol, and a dread of seeing that your shoes are untied and you have to go ALL THE WAY DOWN THERE to tie them.

Last week on my birthday, I wore my discounted Burberry dress to go out to dinner, vaping my MedMen product before leaving the house. The bridge entrance to Long Beach was closed, so we took a different route that had us driving around lost for a quite a while. Suddenly we made a turn and found we were driving into oncoming traffic. I didn’t see my life rewinding before my eyes but I did feel a frisson of excitement: WE’RE GOING TO DIE! I thought for a moment, and it was okay, because I was strapped into my seat-belt and wearing a nice dress. It would be quick and better than being cut into pieces by a maniac (too much crime TV.)

Anyway, we lived to make a u-turn. Dinner was good. The restaurant had huge screens showing 80s MTV videos, including my favorite Pat Benator song, Love is a Battlefield. She’s a warrior in a tube top and scrunched-down boots, shouting, “We are young!!!!”

Being young is really great. If you’re reading this and you’re young, go out and do everything except opiates, and don’t date guys from the internet who will cut you into pieces and throw them in a ditch so it takes law enforcement seven months to find you.

I hate the commercials I keep seeing with grey-haired old ladies tramping through the hills, bragging about how good they feel and how much they still plan to do. Fuck them.

I really don’t want to do anything, and I’m too old to do it anyway. I do want to finish up my time on earth with less mental suffering. So I keep reading about depression and PTSD, every new study, new treatments, new evidence that your very DNA is a portent of doom. I know that rumination is not helpful but I pretend that what I’m doing is “research.”

But now, my “research” has led me to Metacognitive Therapy. The strategy here is to stop the rumination by interrupting it. Not analyzing why you do it or why you can’t control it. When the thought appears, don’t engage with it. Practice turning your attention elsewhere. Simple as that. Also, add more activities to your daily life, limiting your time to churn worries and self-recrimination.

When you’re caught up in negative rumination, your brain is struggling with itself but it thinks it must continue, like it’s a taking the SAT and isn’t allowed to turn it in, incomplete.

My plan is to listen to more music, read short stories, write more, smoke more weed, find some volunteer work with disabled people, make some bad folk art and keep my hair looking good.

I’m still going to think about death because I like the subject. For example, this story of an 104 year old man who wanted to get it over with is so touching and filled with profound questions and insights. David Goodall seems like a great guy who was more than ready to exit. I love his last words before losing consciousness:

This is taking an awfully long time.

Thoughts, advice, birthday wishes, anyone?

Yesterday I bought a pair of Levi’s with tummy control. It was a milestone. And a defeat.

You know all those commercials about “belly fat?” And maybe you say to yourself, Ew, what a slob, I wouldn’t let that happen to me!

But after a certain age, your tummy appears out of nowhere. You used to worry about your thighs or something, but you never gave a thought to your tummy. When you look down and realize you’re on your way to becoming a sumo wrestler, it’s too late.

So now I still wear the same size but it isn’t the same. I hate it. I can’t wear a fitted t shirt or everyone will know. At home, I can sit on the couch and mourn the rolls of flab, resigned to the fact that they aren’t going anywhere. I perk up at the new ads about Cool Sculpting, a procedure that promises to freeze and evaporate your tummy fat.  If only! I think it would be worth a few thousand to have a  flat stomach again.

And yet, how could you do that, knowing there are starving refugees living in tents without anything? Your flat stomach would be a sin against humanity. So instead of sinning against humanity, I went to try on the new Levi’s.

Sure enough, they hold your tummy in, with an extra layer of something. They look just like regular skinny jeans. Whereas those Not Your Daughter’s jeans are cut for elephants and are super unflattering. I bought the new Levi’s, even though I was horrified that they cost $98. Ninety-eight dollars may be a transgression verging on sin, especially given the stacks of jeans in my closet.

Later at home, I tried on my new jeans. I noticed that they smelled funny. Not funny, but awful. An awful chemical smell that I couldn’t quite identify. So I took off the tags and hand-washed them in cold water. Then I rinsed them with Downy. Then I put them in a warm dryer. When I took them out, they still smelled awful.

I asked my husband to smell them, even though he hates being ordered to smell things. He thought he smelled cleaning fluid.

I’m going to exchange the jeans, unless all the tummy-control Levi’s smell like cleaning fluid, as a punishment for my vanity. Maybe I am double cursed with a tummy roll AND a heightened sensitivity to smell. (see hyperosmia.) But what’s a person supposed to do? Just go around like that and embrace the aging process?

I reject the aging process. I would rather cut off my head than have grey hair. I don’t want to get flappy arms. I don’t want to deal with it at all.

Have you seen Elon Musk’s mother in her new ads for Cover Girl? She’s got the white crew-cut and the dark lipstick, and she smugly declares in her murderous South African accent:

They say at a certain age, you just stop caring. I wonder what age that is.

Complaining about Maye Musk to my sister, who hadn’t seen the ads, I showed her some pictures on my phone and noted that she’s 69 years old. My sister exclaimed, “Is that all? She looks much older!”

I felt a bit better about my tummy fat. I guess as long as I have Elon’s mother, I can carry on. But I still want the jeans.

Because I’m old. O.L.D. Too old for these Union Jack boots, even though I love Union Jacks, from a graphic standpoint and because some of my happiest years were in London.

I ordered the boots in two sizes, because with free shipping and returns, who cares? When they came today, I was amazed at how much they looked like the pictures online. Even more so, actually!

I stood up for only a moment before realizing I could never walk in them. The heels are at least 6 inches high. I’m too old to get up and measure them but trust me. I thought the platforms would help but they didn’t.  I was way up in the clouds, far far away from the ground that I desperately don’t want to fall on.

I showed them to my husband before putting them back in the box. He tried not to smirk and quickly looked away.

What does he know?! I thought.

Later, he shared his epiphany about the boots: I’m just too old for them.

I’m pretty sure this is a first. We talk about aging and how we plan to continue doing it. We don’t want to be slobs and we don’t want to change our respective styles. We don’t want to be deluded assholes, though. And so far, so good.

But now I felt defensive about the stupid boots. I insisted that if only I could walk in them, I could make them “work.” I would wear them with long wide jeans, and only the toes would show. IT WOULD BE A POP OF FUCKING COLOR, ALRIGHT?

He was dubious and I took it as a vote of no-confidence in my taste and self-awareness. Like I might suddenly wear black lipstick and a mini-dress with a lampshade on my head. Like I don’t know what I’m doing.

Or do I?

Tell me the truth: Are the boots a sign of senility or a grave miscalculation? Or both or neither? Don’t hold back.

Tonight we watched what my husband and I call ‘Our Sunday Shows.’

We’re like decrepit retiree’s, with nothing more exciting to do at night than watch TV. I can’t remember what young people do at night.

Anyway, Sunday night is packed with Cable series that are always ending or beginning a new season. One show will have its season finale, leaving me feeling anxious and abandoned, but another one will start up. Mostly they’re crap but we watch them faithfully.

Tonight we watched True Detective, Ray Donovan, and Ballers, all stupid and disappointing, but we’ll be back for more next Sunday. Despite the stupidity of these particular shows, we feel we have standards. I will never, and I mean never, watch Game of Thrones. I know in my heart that I don’t want to see dragons or women on horseback yelling at their armies.

Likewise, I didn’t watch Madmen because I can’t stand that guy’s face and I’m not interested in advertising or period irony.

True Detective was so magnificent last year! This year, it’s a big mess that’s hard to follow and doesn’t make sense anyway. No one can act, the dialogue is lame and stilted, and the Chinatown aspects are forced and idiotic. Plus, I miss every other line of dialogue because no one will fucking enunciate.

Ray Donovan is a truly terrible show but I’ve come to appreciate how bad it is. The best part is how Liev Scheiber refuses to make a facial expression. All the characters are repellent and all the accents are laughably inept.

Ballers is new but it seems promising in the stupid department. There’s a lot of male posturing and a lot of girls in bikinis, since it’s a Mark Wahlberg production. But it stars The Rock, who is always compellingly strange: Is he black or Mexican or Asian? Why is his head so small that he looks like a dinosaur? Is he gay or what? What is the source of his obscure charm?

During the week, we try to find things on Netflix that might actually be good but it’s hit and miss. If nothing is on, we are happy to play with our computers or read.

But Sunday night is special because Our Shows are on, and we hate to miss a single unintelligible moment.

What shows do you guys like to watch?

I had a close call the other day, when I came across an expensive and totally inappropriate fashion piece that ignited my fantasy of being an angry schoolgirl.

Look at how bad ass this is! I pictured my self wearing it with a white tank top and black jeans.

It even says ‘loser’ on the front! It’s so ME, I thought. It’s some kind of polyester and costs around $600, but I was THIS CLOSE to buying it.

Then I found a lookbook for the designer, showing sulky young girls wearing the jacket with a Goth Lolita flair, smoking cigarettes and clearly ditching school.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’m not an angry schoolgirl anymore, at least not on the outside.  No one wants to see grandma in her kooky jackets at this point. It was a highly unpleasant epiphany.

I’m still not over it. Yesterday, I waked into my husband’s home ‘office’ wearing a faded pair of Levi’s with a black wife beater and demanded, “DO I LOOK TWENTY-TWO?” He answered Yes, like a dutiful robot, but he may have been trying not to laugh. I don’t even know why I chose 22; it could be Gwyneth Paltrow‘s famous boast of a “butt like a 22 year old stripper.” That’s the kind of statement you can never forget. It’s part of why we all hate her.

Sometimes I wonder about the function of fashion, even though I’ve read more than my share of long-winded essays on the subject. What are we really trying to express with the clothes we wear? Our coolness? Our amazing taste or ingenuity? Our credit card limit? Are we trying to project our inner selves or to create a false identity?

Normcore was a great trend, even though it was preposterously stupid. Normcore is like having a private joke with yourself: Haha, I look like a boring Nothing but I’m doing it on purpose, that’s how hip I am!

It’s so much better than the current trend of paying a trillion dollars to look like a bedraggled biker.

I just want to make peace between who I am inside with who I am outside. As if that could happen.

My dog is senile. He is sixteen years old, even though we refused to admit he was getting on.

Living in denial was easy until he lost his mind.

Poor Pico! He is completely nuts. He doesn’t know what he’s doing or where he’s going or what to do when he needs to move backwards or turn around.

He howls for hours. He pants and whines. He often needs help to stand up because his rear legs are so wobbly. He has arthritis and I don’t know what else. The vet advised us that any kind of surgery was out of the question. I like her for not trying to squeeze money out of us.

She’s a wonderful vet even though she’s unsure about penises. My BFF remarked that Pico’s penis is probably the first one she’s seen in years. I think that’s to her credit. She didn’t mind at all when Pico shat on her floor.

I don’t know whether ‘shat’ is a word but I’m using it anyway. My dog has been shitting in the house for more than a week. This ties into my recurring dream that everything is Shit.

This morning, Pico backed himself under a couch and started howling. The more I tried to pull him free, the more he reversed, moving more of his body under the couch and getting stuck. I tried to lift up the couch like mothers can do when their child is underneath a car, but this supermom thing doesn’t seem to work with dogs.

I ran outside and got the drug dealer from the house next to the house next door. He lifted the couch and took a phone call from someone named ‘Josh.’ “I’ll call you in a few minutes, babe” he told Josh.

I am really at a loss here.

Pico still likes his food, even though he forgets where the bowl is. Otherwise, his life seems pretty awful, with all the confusion and anxiety. I personally will not be the one to pull the plug because I’m already permanently traumatized.

Advice, dog owners?

It’s easy not to care about looking old when you’re not old.

Later, it’s just a constant struggle to accept the changes in your face, the face that in your mind is eternally 18 or 30 or whenever you liked it best.

Seeing Carine and Madonna look like women in their 50’s is such a comfort! Get old, you two!

I decided to see the difference between a face in repose and a face smiling.

I made the biggest smile my face could do, and voila! I’m genuinely old.

If   you have no expression, you can keep up the illusion of youthfulness.

I am unable to age gracefully because I’m too shallow and preoccupied with appearance. I want everyone to wrinkle up like a prune. The only procedure I would rule out if I were a millionaire is the lip enhancement, because nothing says tragedy like a duckface.

I am waiting patiently for Demi Moore’s face to fall. On the day it does, the drinks are on me!

How do feel you will handle getting old? If you are old, how hard is it for you to combat vanity?