A Glory?

If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her (1 Corinthians 1:15)

Thank you, crazy St Paul, for this little gem. 

Question: what if a woman have "a long hair"? Still a glory? What if it's on her chin? What if, like an iceberg, 11/12s of this hair is below the surface and must be coaxed from a woman's face with pointy pieces of iron, gentle, gentle, just a little non-trembly tugging, a slow and nauseating unraveling of wiry glory? Does one cry Hosana when this one hair finally emerges and is pluck't or is cursing more appropriate because the hair is no longer covered (by face skin) and, if you didn't know it before you've now heard it here, Paul also insisted that women cover their head hairs up for also oddly unexplained reasons. Is face hair the same as head hair? We are nearing the epistemological nexus of the definition and lived experience of "glory" here and we are missing key information

The Bible is forever leaving out the important bits. 

Looks like St Paul here might have known a thing or two about chin hairs himself. 

I assume he is leaving out the details because too much glory is bad for girls. He's a little sweet on us, you know that, right? It's why he is so stern with us. Because he really, really likes us and perhaps even steals a look at us from time to time when he thinks we're not paying any attention. 

That's it for today's Adventures in Exegesis. I'm going to explore the eschatology of toenails one of these days soon so do be sure to never check back. 

Wiggly

What kind of mother locks herself in the bathroom with the tub running and the fan on so she can eat the last Klondike bar without her child hearing the wrapper crinkling until it is too late?

Go ahead, heap your contumely upon me. I've done worse.

I used to eat spiders. All the kids on our crescent did it at least some of the time. I think there was some sort of mom cult thing going on where they decided in their pointy-bra'd way that if we were busy catching and eating spiders we wouldn't be pestering them for food or attention, so they whispered to us in our dreams that we should really be spending more time eating spiders and less time begging for story-time. That they would love us more than they did our siblings--and since at least half of us were Catholic, there were a lot of siblings to be competed with--if we came home late in the afternoon full of spiders, tuckered out and ready for bed. That spider protein would make us better looking than the other kids, smarter than the other kids, and stronger than any kids in the history of the neighborhood. Spider silk would make our hair fine but so so strong and it might even help parachute us safely to the ground when we flung ourselves from trees. Spider eyes would help us win Kick the Can, even at night. The hemocyanin in spider blood, with its strange blue tint, might fool a prince into thinking we were in fact blue-blooded in that all-important royal way and we would be swept off to live in a castle forever. This was the part I imagine my mother enjoyed the most: helping me fantasize about going to live somewhere else, to leave my smelly runners in someone else's country, to spit toothpaste inexpertly in someone else's sink, to play my never-fucking-ending arpeggios on someone else's fucking piano.

The little grey spider that lives in the upper northwest corner of our shower waves her elegant little legs at me as I sit here on the bath mat licking mint and chocolate from my horrible stubby fingers. She has seen me do this before. I'm going to eat her next and dream of turrets.

Maybe this time

I've thought I was back before. Quite a few times over the past few months/maybe a year, it's occurred to me "Ah, now is the time when I've put this all behind me." "This all" = cancer, cancer, dementia, dementia, overdose, dementia, emotional breakdown....none of it mine (yet). One of those dementias is my dog's, for the love of GOD.

It occurs to me that this is what the second half of life is all about: learning to live without. Without certain beloved people, without certainty, without routine. I went back to work--and failed miserably. I went back to writing--and wound up staring out the window for hours at a time, contemplating (with a depth of contemplation I'd previously never experienced) the ass end of a plastic goose on an overstated plinth in the neighbor's back yard. I went back to yoga--and remained in the fetal position in the dark until they turned on all the studio lights and made "we are closing this building" noises.

But something happened the other day that made me think that there's a new chapter writing itself. It went like this:

Russian mammogram technician: Maybe you have *face* of first wife, but you have breasts of second wife."

RIGHT?

I'm back, aren't I?
!!!