Me & the City of Angels & Unwieldy Undergarments

So last Tuesday, I'm standing in front of the mirror in the (late) morning, trying to get my hair into one of those chic high ponytails, with the top all poofy and runway. And the more I stand there...back-combing, yes, I am ratting my hair and no, apparently it didn't go out in the 80's because here I am, seizing the frazzle, teasing my uninterested hair into something it does not want to do. And I get it to semi-work, except it's a little bumpy...it's like a country road of hair, really, potholes and ditches, people with hay sticks between their teeth swerving to avoid bad style...
Exhibit A-ish: Like today's bumpy effortlessness...but much higher...bumpier...with more purpose...more ditches...

So I just leave it and figure if I can't win at the hair, I will be a rockstar of makeup...yeah, I'm feeling rebellious, funky. I wanna have some jagged edges (not like the kind in my ponytail). I'm gonna work this makeup. (I'd grabbed a smokey, smeary, smudgy thick black/brown eyeliner from CVS the day before.) I'm gonna look like Joan Jett...minus the cool mullet and hyper-repetitive song about rock n' roll (sorry, the water torture chorus of that thing has always done the electric slide over my last nerve). I am totally working this. I'm not even going to try to put this on correctly. I am feeling so cool today that I'm just going to smear it in thick lines under my eyes and at my upper lash line then rub it in with my finger. Did I mention it gets pretty warm here in LA in the summer? Well, I had no sooner put on the finishing smears & gone to grab my tepid coffee when I decided to take another peek at my irresistible self. I looked like a raccoon's great Aunt Betty. A very cool, rebellious raccoon Aunt Betty. 
 (My little girl actually asked me when I came home that night, "Your eyes, umm...There's umm...Mommy, have you been crying?")
Exhibit B: So, the eye makeup looked a little like wikipedia's raccoon here...perhaps not extending quite that far down.
 

So, I'm torturing my hair, wearing Aunt Betty Raccoon Barracuda makeup and I'm thinking about Seize the Dazzle. Thinking about what I've named my business, how important self-expression and freedom and self-love truly are to me..and I realize that in this heat, I just can't do one more thing to myself, other than the obsessive compulsive jewelry challenge I will undertake within moments, which is LITERALLY seizing the dazzle of my jewelry armoire and adorning my ears, neck, wrists and fingers with it, which is its own artform, SO....I decide to forego...the waist-cinching, boobie-lifting, tummy-flattening undergarment that is basically like a tightly woven elastic teeshirt...


Exhibit C: Modern torture devices tried on by men...tee hee hee...

See, I'm a proud girl. I'm a proud woman. I'm not excited about parading around the world looking like I'm about to win Mrs. Backfat 2014. That's just not how I roll (ahem...). So, it takes a lot for me to just say, You know what? I'm not willing to be hot and yucky and disgruntled (albeit smoothly so) because stretchy plastic t-shirts can make a raccoon go rabid if you know what I'm saying. Coupled with the searing sun here in this city of pretense and angels, I just was not willing. So I forewent (is that even a word?) the undergarment of modern-medieval torture and risked the idea of whomever seeing me and thinking, Aww, that pregnant lady really took the extra effort today...the pregnancy must be messing with her eyesight...  With my hair looking like a hay bale gone wild (with a tail) and my eye makeup dipped fresh from a vat of kohl, no one would even notice my rolly belly, my giant bosom (god, I love saying that word) and the current extraplanetary overvoluptuousness of my hips in a not-so-little black dress.

Exhibit D: Artist in XLBD last year at Art After Dark

Why again on God's verdant Earth would I EVER want to share these things with you? Temporary insanity? Permanent insanity? Because I just had to share the laugh. I firmly (no pun intended..I jigglingly?) believe that instead of carrying shame for being on a steady incline of weight gain over the past decade (including the glorious, human body-ballooning experiment called pregnancy...twice)...it's time to release those feelings and welcome my true self at my true weight. (So I can give her a hug hello that will also be a hug goodbye.) Time to stop beating myself up for riding the wild coaster of clothes-too-tight/clothes too loose, following-an-exercise-program/falling-off-the-exercycle. It's time to be Me. Moi. Seize the Diva of my size. Enough.

Exhibit DD (oh, I crack myself up). This was my 38th birthday. I was feeling artsy and pretty and squozen.

This is me. Here. Telling you I'm forgiving myself for dropping thirty pounds then getting pregnant (five years ago) and scooping the weight back up easy as a spoon to Dulce du Leche Haagen Dazs. Forgiving myself for falling into the pesto of numbness and twirling it around my fork and eating it instead of talking about being depressed about not living up to my potential!! [Ouch.] I'm beginning again. Seizing the dazzle of myself, this life, its hills, its hips, its smooth and its bumpy. Its real, divine beauty.

Did I mention where I was going the other day? What this was all for?
Miss Raccoon was going to the art studio...Alone.

xo,
Julia :)

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