ellenspictures

Category: Body

  • the blue-tint rinse

    the blue-tint rinse

    Just yesterday, when we were all alive, four generations of women, all related

    My grandmother – we all called her “Boo” (not in the above picture) – was one of those quintessential dignified little old ladies whose concept of appearance was rooted in looking presentable whenever she needed to look presentable. She had a process for doing everything and this included making sure that her hair was colored the “right” color of gray. Gray was okay, but it couldn’t be yellow, it had to have the “bluish” cast to it.

    Achieving this required the “blue-tint rinse”, as it was explained to me by my mother who answered my curious question: “What’s that on the pillow case – why is it dark-ish?” No doubt my mom was thinking “@#%^!! I have now a pillow case that has to be bleached or it’s ruined!!” but to me she said, “Oh, that’s probably from Boo’s hair dye – just coming off on the pillow case.” Hmmmm…? Little me didn’t really know much about hair dye at that time… Neither Mom or my other grandmother did “hair dye”. Both had dark-ish based hair color, and so they grayed naturally – kind of into a charcoal set of tones. Boo, however, had the thinnish, light brown hair color, originally, that ended up being the gray of the “yellow variety” – not what she desired – hence the need for the “blue tint rinse”.

    As a little kid I saw groups of little old ladies at lunch when I was with my grandmother (not Boo), and at times I remember thinking about the varied hues of their gray hair – some kind of went “pink”, some “lilac”, some “blue”, and some stayed yellow if they didn’t have the gift of hair that my grandmother had – the lovely charcoal, wiry, naturally highlighted gray hair…

    Here I am, and I haven’t seen my natural hair color in almost 30 years! Crazy as it is, I began to play with hair color when I was in my late 30’s. It was required because I had to do something to feel better during a reinvention period when I had discovered that I had a cheating husband. That is another story for a different day.

    But for now, I try to go with it and not stand out too much. I’ve tried going lighter, but I feel like I’m fading. One day I will gently get into my natural state, but I’m not ready yet. My grandson recently told me that I couldn’t be a grandmother because I wasn’t old. I’ll keep that remark. Out of the mouths of babes…

  • the problems with conversing during physical therapy

    the problems with conversing during physical therapy

     

    Oh my gosh.  Well, as people who know me understand, I like to chat and I like humor.  I figure that the only way through a painful physical therapy session is to try to take my mind off of it by laughing and having conversations.  Anyone would.  This is NOT your puffy relaxing Swedish massage.  It hurts.  Sometimes, it hurts BAD.  I am a person who has a lot of knots, old injuries and very tight places that need to be ironed out.

    This therapist at my Chiro’s office has been a fairly reasonable conversationalist and tells funny stories, to get your mind off of the pain, until recently.  Well.  You know the “gun thing”, and then there is the “health insurance thing”, and then there is the “conspiracy theory thing” consisting of the belief system that we have a dictator for a president who was sent to us by evil people yada, yada yada… As luck would have it, it turns out that he is one of “those people” who have the conspiracy theory all worked out.

    Yep.  And this guy is as serious as a heart attack.  Which is all the more scary.  The more passionate he got about his rant, the harder he worked on pushing on those knotty places and almost bending me until I was breaking in two!  Oh goodness me.

    IMG_5223As I did not agree with him by responding “Hell yeah!”, and instead tried to take the middle-of-the-road approach, and be as neutral as possible, he seemed to take offense and got a bit angry sounding… Yeah, this tact does not work with some people.  He really got revved up.  It was on the scary side by that point and thank God the clock wound down for the session.  Who knows if I would have been able to walk out of there had it gone on much longer!

    The next day, I visited with my Chiro about this situation.  He said that he and the other clinic owners would deal with this – kind of encourage the guy to not converse about politics, religion, etc., with the patients.  In my mind, it was “Good luck with that.  He will begin to harp on his constitutional rights of free speech!”  Oh well.  There will not be any more visits from ME to this guy.  Nope.

    It was also suggested that I view this video from Saturday Night Live whereby such situations could be handled in the future!  Talk about hilarious.  He said that I should bring Adele to my next visit!  Hey, put this in your CD player!

  • the dimensions of time and trouble

    the dimensions of time and trouble

    Tactical.

    The alternate reality where Rob played, unconstrained...

    That’s a word that really deals with the immediate situation.  The “situation room”.  You have a problem, you deal with it, you make the problem go away (for now), you get sleep at night.  Fine.

    Dealing with long-term chronic illnesses – now that’s a concept where we apply both the tactical and the strategic.

    So much possibility...
    So much possibility…

    Remember.  None of us leave this planet alive.

    DSC00145We go somewhere else and leave the shell.  We all hope that the somewhere else is a good place, and not “the bad place”.  Sometimes we might rightly feel that some of our human comeuppance has been already held on the planet – if you listen to the news, you think “wow, this is really some weird shit…” – “what will they think of next?”

    Very complex.  Very confusing.  That’s why they call it “faith”.  You have to have it in order to survive through those rough patches.

    In the meantime, we deal with the strategic (eat healthy, get regular activity – not too much, not too little, just right…) and read all the research that comes out about what we’re doing – coffee is good, coffee is bad; one drink a day is good, drinking is bad; eggs and butter are bad, eggs and butter are good; carbs are bad, you need some carbs, just not some others… good grief…

    web over webIf you can’t remember your password, you have early onset Alzheimer’s — really?  Which password of the thousand that I have set, over the years, so that if/when someone hacks me, they won’t hack ALL of my accounts (naïve)…  I am supposed to remember those.  yeah.  right.

    Sometimes I am convinced that there is this great “anxiety generator” out there, making market for the yoga studios – there is something in it for everybody, right?  Everybody has to eat.  The people that don’t figure this out, and that they have to work to get food end up under the bridge living in cardboard boxes – and don’t call me paranoid, it just seems that there is always someone living under the bridge in cardboard boxes, no matter what we do to try to keep that from happening.

    Same thing with the jerks who “beat and cheat” – kids, wives, girlfriends, whatever – no matter how it is quelled on one hand, someone decides that they won’t support the quelling anymore, so it builds up.  Harper’s Bizarre.  Serial what-cha-ma-call-em’s…

    Oh, I digressed.

    Back to “long-term chronic diseases” — So you get pushed and pulled by media and news reports.  You try not to scare the shit out of yourself by reading too much of this “non” information on the net, complete with ads for drugs that look at what you’re lookin’ at and configure it “just for you” – lovely – and you may wonder, does it really matter after all?  Because, in the end of our time here on earth, we will either lose that battle with some sort of “long-term chronic disease” or else we will stroke out, fall down and go boom, have a coronary, be hit over the head, stabbed, or whatever happens that will take us out in an “acute incident or episode”.

    Whatever.  I guess I wonder why freak out?  Maybe its a wobbly.  We have not yet reached the Zen of our existence.  It’s maybe because we are not getting our way.  Its the anger because our dreams of what we thought we would be don’t turn out as we expected.  We have to go the other way, not the way we wanted to go, both figuratively and literally.

    We live in the clouds the rest of the time,  floating through life day by day, as time accelerates to the event horizon, the older you get, the less time you have, so you should appreciate when you wake up and take a breath every day – and make that coffee that smells and tastes so good – and go places, do things, kiss butterflies, chase dragonflies, love your loved ones, and of course, try not to leave a legend that is like “Ichabod Crane”, but rather one that everyone remembers fondly…

    Maybe it is just how we are, and we are realizing more about it every day.  I wish I could be back in time to interview my relatives who are now unreachable such that I could understand their thoughts, but I can’t right now.

    In the meantime, it’s live life to the fullest, get over the bumps in the road, ask for help moving the boulders and love your loved ones, telling them you love them as much as you can, as often as possible.

    It’s important for your family – and of course – for your history… and theirs, too.