other|matters

Madhubala

I will never have a washboard-flat stomach no matter how many sit-ups I do. And these hips are here to stay.

I can’t help it, I’m Punjabi.

I recently saw a photo of fortysomething Demi Moore and a TV advert for some torturous exercise contraption featuring a 50-year old woman (or “grandmother” as they kept calling her). They both had bony bodies and tight faces as they strutted in their scanties. It made me droop with exhaustion thinking of the standards they represented as normal for the average woman and as desirable to the average man.

When is it going to be OK for a girl to become a woman who fills out and ages?

(more…)

There is a need we have for “eternity.”

When we reach the final years of our lives, meaning “old age,” we see a change in our role in the world. The world is no longer our uncharted domain, waiting for us to conquer it. Now, we find ourselves vulnerable to the world. Little things that we ignored in our younger days now disturb us. As we find our mental and physical capacities decrease we find that we are vulnerable. (more…)

When something happens to me, he would frequently say.

Nothing will happen to you, I would say.

But if it does.

If it does, he would continue. If it did, for example, I was not to move to a smaller apartment. If it did I would be surrounded by people. If it did I would need to make plans to feed these people. If it did I would marry again within the year.

You don’t understand, I would say.

And in fact he did not. Nor did I: we were equally incapable of imagining the reality of life without the other. This will not be a story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life, a catalyst for the discovery that (a point typically introduced in such accounts by the precocious child of the bereaved) “you can love more than one person.” Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time. “She didn’t know the songs,” I recall being told that a friend of a friend had said after an attempt to repeat the experience.

- Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), written after the death of her husband of forty years.

Retreads are quality posts from yesterweeks that are given a second run on Fridays. This piece was originally shared by BARAKA (then a guest contributor) on 4 June 2006..

I’m what the nurses call a hard stick. My veins literally go into hiding & shrivel at the sight of a needle.

I need to drink gallons of water starting the day before to plumb them & even then the special IV nurse must be summoned to hot-pack my arms for 20-30 minutes just to locate a vein, tight-wrap, dig around, & repeatedly poke at it to finally get a very small IV in place. The IV is supposed to last at least three days, but I’m lucky if I can make it that far without it getting downright irritable.

(more…)