I tried to get a picture of Phyllis' triumphant return from the vet, but the welcoming committee got in the way.

Sometimes Misbehaving Tuesday is all in the head. While the day’s external activities were dominated by grocery shopping, CSA pickup, and taking one of the cats to the vet, the day’s internal activities were dominated by the dirty. Filthy. Profane. Oh, I had a head full, alright. Maybe the heat is getting to me oh who am I kidding. I couldn’t even get through that sentence without smirking. It’s not the heat. Not the heat outside, anyway.

For my younger readers, a word of advice: Ladies, try to plan your lives so that you have some free time in your mid-thirties because YOWZA. Just trust me on this, you do not want to miss whatever the hormone thing is that hits you and turns you into a nineteen year old boy, albeit a nineteen year old boy who is into boys with tattoos and glasses and sometimes just the tattoos will do fine, and if they’re tall enough what is going on from the neck up doesn’t even matter because the only thing I remember about the guy in front of me in line at Whole Foods is the tattoo on his tanned arm, peeking out from under a burgundy t-shirt.

So, this is what you have to look forward to, girlfriends. You will hit your mid-thirties and you will turn into a young gay man. And it will be AWESOME.

Anyway, I took Phyllis to the vet, and if you ask her, that was some pretty damn overt misbehaving. Her plaintive yyyeeeows and rrrowwuuus from the carrier eventually became just plain owwws as she realized that I was definitely transporting her to the place where they put things in her butt. If you ask the other cat or either of the dogs, I misbehaved by leaving them behind while taking Phyllis somewhere that smells like things. What was I thinking?

So, that’s it. Sometimes Misbehaving Tuesday IS all in the head, but still, it wouldn’t be Misbehaving without cute shoes, right? Shoes!

I. Getting Off On It

It was weird to start off the week misbehaving, but I am certainly not one to let a little three day weekend get between me and my regularly scheduled mischief. After the usual Tuesday work and erranding, I gave a nod to the stack of bills that need to be mailed out, ambivalently eyed the copy of the sutras I am supposed to finish by this weekend but have barely started (why I am I resisting the readings for this training with ever fiber of my being?), and went out to spend the rest of the gift certificates from my birthday.

See? Shoes, yes, but this is the expensive pedicure. I do a better job myself.

There were shoes involved, of course: delicate, girly flip-flops that make me smile. There was also a purchase of funky embroidered tank tops (one in orange!) from the girls’ department at Old Navy.

I have written about this before; I am always a little conflicted about getting stuff from the kids’ department. But f that. Yes, I kind of get off on being small enough to get stuff from the kids’ department, and as long everything fits and I’m not decking myself out in Hello Kitty and Underoos*, there is nothing wrong with this.

II. Getting Off Of It

This picture of the newly planted garden has nothing to do with the post. But, yay garden! Tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, and zucchini.

Sometimes I have bad ideas. Recent bad ideas include the “vintage” bedroom furniture that is tiny and loud and leaves splinters all over my clothes, and hormonal birth control**. Let me state for the record: What the hell was I thinking? Knowing my sensitivity to drugs and hormones, what on earth made me think this was a good idea? I intentionally did not look up side effects before I went on it because I am suggestible, but tonight I did, only to find out that I have had most of them, from thinning hair to a distended gut to low libido and other issues related to adult misbehaving. The only ones I didn’t have were the mood swings and irritability, or maybe I did, but who could tell? Ha.

So, after two months of unpleasantness, on Saturday I decided to get off the stuff. Now I’m just waiting for the side effects to subside, and musing on the irony of birth control that makes one less attractive and causes sex to be incredibly uncomfortable. No wonder it is so effective.

III. Getting Off On Me

I have been cautious about sharing the rest of the photos from the Atomic Cheesecake shoot with people I know, but I did send the link on to a dear old friend. He has long been one of the safe people in my life, a twenty year friendship that has always had a cousinly feel to it. This was his evaluation of the pics:

Holy shit. Is it weird to admit to one of your oldest, established friends that she has turned into a righteous babe and her [pics] are hotter than the surface of the sun? ‘Cause it feels weird. It was a little uncomfortable, actually. I could barely bring myself to masturbate to them a second time.

Thanks, man. Take a nap and give it a few hours. Now that’s a happy ending to a Misbehaving Tuesday.

*1. Why aren’t there still Underoos? 2. Why aren’t there Underoos for adults? I had C-3PO Underoos when I was five, and I would like to have them back, please.
**Did this just come out “birthday control?” Yes it did.

Instead, I am going to write about myself and my shoes and my feet.

My feet have been a vanity for me for a long, long time. Even when I was at my least girly, I loved wearing sandals and having neatly painted toenails, and open-toed shoes in the office were a violation of professional dress that I committed with willful joy. I have nice feet, and as long as I take care of them, they look good, even when the rest of me does not.

It’s not just my feet, though. Feet in general are awesome. Anyone who has been to my classes a few times has probably heard me riff on feet during shoulderstand. It is good to look up to your feet sometimes. They do so much for you, root you to the earth, take you everywhere you need to go, even while stuffed into uncomfortable shoes. Look at them, get to know them, love them, so sayeth Lauren, the champion of the foot.

First blog shoe pic (I think). 5/18/09.

Over the past year, as this blog moved from being a journal that just happened to be public to something consciously created for public consumption, I started paying closer attention to patterns in my posts, and realized that I write about shoes and feet (and fiction and frolic and food) an awful lot, and thus the tagline was born. I also started minding other widely read blogs, and learned to take advantage of the platform not just as a verbal medium, but as a visual medium, too. So, instead of just writing about shoes a lot, there were pictures of shoes with my feet in them, which didn’t bother me a bit, because, hey, my feet look good.

This was the beginning of developing an online persona, which really, truly, is just me, in blog form. I don’t know if I became the blog or the blog became me, but a year later, here I am, in all of my shoeyness.

Along the way a funny thing happened to my vanity. The more I looked at my feet and the more readers I brought on who also looked at my feet, the more I started to notice the flaws. Where once I would snap a picture or two of a pair of sandals, crop it and post, I now take quite a few, because I see every little asymmetry, every ridge in the nail polish, the way that the third and fourth toes on my right foot press down at a funny angle when I stand, causing a divot at the knuckle (Are toe joints knuckles? Toe knuckles?), how if I lean a certain way to get the picture my little toes start to turn sideways, I notice all of it. A couple of weeks ago I caught myself liking my feet less and for the first time ever, wishing that this thing or the other about them were different.

I’m over it, but it was a wake up call about vanity. The criticism really comes to life around the things are actually the most beautiful and the most unique, the most me. I am this way about my hair, my nose, my writing… it took me twenty years to figure out that that the thing in my writing that I found weird and awkward was really the “voice” that always got high praise.

I know this isn’t just me. I invite my readers who are rolling into middle age with me to take a quick scan of the features -physical or otherwise- that stoke the most self-criticism and treat them with some kindness. They have carried you through the world this far. Treat yourself with some kindness, please. Love you. I do.

All that said, for those of you who read this far, a peripherally shoe-related loose end: back in January when I won the smut contest, I promised I would post a picture of myself in the little schoolgirl skirt I won. It is not that I have been holding out, I just forgot, and picking up last Misbehaving Tuesday’s saddle shoes today reminded me. So, here it is, right in time for post #500:

I moved sloooowly today, enjoying every misbehaving minute of it. I ordered a pair of saddle shoes this morning to replace a pair I got rid of some time ago; the toes were too pointy, and the whole thing just didn’t look quite right. I love saddle shoes; there is something kind of stylish and innocent and vaguely kinky -if your head is in the right place- about them all at once. Thanks to the wonders of Payless, cheap, non-leather, rounded toe saddle shoes (made under appalling conditions, I KNOW) abound. So, there you go: shoes.

The shoes were a good idea, and probably the last one I had today. When I left for the usual Tuesday errands, plus a little meandering through Mt. Washington Village just for the misbehaving fun of it, I noticed the gray sky, noticed the cold, and considered going back inside for a coat. I decided to go without, figuring it wasn’t supposed to rain until afternoon. Except that it was afternoon, and by the time I got to Mt. Washington the rain was pouring. So much for that.

I had to make a quick stop at Sam’s Club, which gives me anxiety because a) I detest supporting the whole WalMart empire but for a variety of boring reasons related to Scott’s job we have to have a membership there, and b) there is only one thing I ever, ever buy there, but buying that one thing requires walking through the whole store doing math in my head about all of the things I am not going to buy. Case in point: Lara bars are actually more expensive by the case at Sam’s club than they are individually at Whole Foods.

I got my one thing, wandered, and then I saw it: a home hair cutting kit for $29.97. My hair is really short now, I thought. Maybe I could cut my own hair. That would save me [math math math] dollars a year. See, I could probably get the hang of where to use the longest setting and I could get a pair of thinning shears like Adriana uses on the sides and NO NO NO NO NO NO. FOR THE LOVE OF MAN BACK AWAY FROM THE CLIPPERS. You will give yourself a crew cut and then you will cry and need to find another hair stylist because you’ll be too embarrassed to go back to Adrianna, and then you’ll run into her and have to explain yourself and it will be awkward and you’ll look like Sinead O’Connor but with a big nose- no, you’ll look like Britney Spears all crazy- NO, actually, you’ll look like Bert. BERT. It will be like the time when you were in sixth grade and had to wear a bathing cap during the mandatory swimming unit in gym class, and remember how it made you look like Bert? This idea is brought to you by the letter NO.

Happily, I did back away and I went home. And there I had bad ideas about:

• How to get a gallon jug of soap out of my car. It fell, the lid cracked, and now part of my driveway is lathered.
• How to get the rest of the old soap into the new container. Hint: it involved turning the old container upside down on top of the new container and walking away. Guess what happened?
• How to make some brown rice crispy treats. They’re delicious, but after a few moments I actually ran out of ingredients to spill all over my hands and the counter. The recipe is a riff on a macrobiotic version of regular rice crispy treats. They don’t taste exactly like rice crispy treats, but it is the same idea. It’s like they are the hippie cousin of the rice crispy treat, who comes to visit from Portland and gets along with everyone, and all your male friends trip over themselves to hang out with her -including your preppy roommate whose greatest regret is being too young to have voted for Reagan- even though she doesn’t shave her armpits and kind of smells like vinegar sometimes.
• How much calcium to take. When the bottle says take ONE with a meal, twice daily, it’s not kidding. I tried two, and felt like I was going to pass out until I ate everything.

And with that, I still have over two hours left to come up with some more bad ideas before this Misbehaving Tuesday is out. Hmmm…

To my surprise, I was out of there in fifteen minutes with a thoroughly cute license picture. With the exception of my last one, the cult one, I have been fairly lucky with license pictures over the years. Of course, I did have a non-photo ID for a really long time. Now I have five years ahead of me to enjoy my pretty picture, until this new license expires WHEN I TURN FORTY.

I am one driver’s license away from FORTY. Well, damn if that doesn’t put things in perspective.

FORTY.

You know how thirty-five is one of those ages that real adults are, and I am that age and that doesn’t entirely make sense to me sometimes, what with the underpants and big bronze ass pictures and all? Well, FORTY is even more that. It’s that plus five.

Since the license renewal went quickly -the same way that everything goes quickly and soon I will be FORTY- I decided to give myself an hour off and stop into Ross. This was a good choice. I haven’t had a Misbehaving Tuesday Shoesday in a while, and I was delighted to find the perfect thing: eleven dollar sandals that are colorful, comfortable, and just a little gaudy. Also challenging to capture in a picture.

And, yes, as a matter of fact, that is a trail of flip-flops behind me. This is the last really brutal week of the semester, and my house is a disaster. No, it’s a fucking disaster. Not only are there trails, but there are piles.

I am looking forward to lots of things about wrapping up all of this mayhem, but mostly I am looking forward to a cleaner house. There are trails and piles everywhere, I am in denial about the bathroom floor, and it is making me a little bonkers.

Even in the afterglow of cheap, fun sandals, the usual Tuesday errands had me out of sorts. I was driving home and feeling undone, so I just kept driving, up Falls Road past the McMansions and private schools, looking for a little park where I could turn the music up and sit in the car and just cry my guts out for a few minutes. I couldn’t find a park, so I hung a right when I saw Shawan Road, figuring if I couldn’t find a park, than a parking lot would have to do. As it was, the last time I had a big drive and sob it was on my not-so-fun thirty-fourth birthday, when I ended up in the parking lot of the Wegmans at Hunt Valley Town Center, eating a pint of ice cream (technically, Rice Dream, but the same idea) and calming myself down in the most stereotypically female fashion I could manage.

Today I went to the far edge of one of the back parking lots, turned the music up as loud as it would go, and waited for the release. It didn’t happen. So I sat for a bit in hormone hell, staring out at the trees. I considered ice cream, but talked myself out of it, and realized that if I was able to talk myself out of ice cream it wasn’t really hormone hell. More like hormone heck. I chose noise, surrender, and trees. There is something about the trees around Hunt Valley that look exactly right to me, and it helps. It’s how I knew I would end up living around here, even when we were looking at houses in the city. After twenty minutes or so, I headed home.

I thought about making cookies, but got down to homework instead. All things pass. One last brutal week, then more yoga, lots more yoga, and a little less chaos on the inside and the outside.

I have lots more to say about this, but I can’t quite seem to arrange the words properly tonight. I am a tired wiener.

But, I did celebrate my birthday month today with purple flip-flops. There was just one pair of purple flip-flops left at Target, buried in a bin with kids’ and men’s stuff, and they just happen to be $2.50 and my size. I like it when the universe says, “Here, Lauren. Have some purple flip-flops.” Thanks, universe!

I did, however, flagrantly disregard some responsibilities today, all of which will be extra flagrantly regarded tomorrow, and I did it while wearing over the knee socks – blue argyle this time.

My flagrant disregard included stepping out this afternoon for a haircut, during which I may have fallen asleep. Since going short a year and a half ago I have developed a mild addiction to haircuts. They feel extra good with short hair – in part the reason why I loved shaving the bottom couple of inches of the back of my head in high school – and what can I say, the woman who cuts my hair has good hands. I decided to close my eyes to keep any little hairs out of the way and some one was talking about a Seder and then I was thinking about something having to do with standing outside of my car and how meaning is attached to words and what happens to the assignment of meaning when red has a conversation with blue and yes, I think I probably fell asleep.

Man, that felt good. Does anyone want to come over and rub my head for an hour or two?

The stuff I exchanged for the ill-fitting bras I received last week arrived today. Included in the package was, as I mentioned earlier, one of the best pairs of sandals ever:

… and along with that, a very real, very spatial reminder that it is time to clean out my closets. Regardless, I cannot wait to wear these.

So, that’s it. Also, I had some chocolate covered matzoh, which I need to not make again until next Passover, because it will take that long to be liberated from my craving for it. Sweet, salty. Let my people go, indeed.

I think wearing shiny, cobalt blue sandals with four-inch heels to Whole Foods counts as a good bit of misbehaving. At least, it does in Baltimore, in March.

Oh, and I got a bunch of bras in the mail, nearly all of which are going back. Regardless of fit, horizontal lines on a bra are a really bad design choice. In one quick wardrobe change I went from bombshell to two fat guys wearing rugby shirts sitting on my chest. Unpleasant.

I can imagine the conversation afterward. I was distracted, officer. Would you be able to focus if you were behind a Dodge Anal? Or a Chrysler DP? What about a Ford Blowjob? See?

It is a silly name for a vehicle, first because of the dirty implications (an FJ Cruiser sounds like a character who is going to show up in my smut sometime), and also because it always makes me think of FootJoy sneakers, which I remember having an FJ stamped on the sides, and being a big deal in the seventies and eighties. A quick googling reveals that FootJoy is still around and now mostly makes golf shoes. A quick googling also reveals that it takes me three or four tries to type “footjoy” instead of “footjob.” You know, because the b and the y are close on the keyboard.

Nonetheless, it was a beautiful day for a drive, and a walk, and a run, and getting the laundry outside to dry. So many firsts today:

1. Running outside: I haven’t done this in almost a year and I completely forgot about hills. Ouch. I did, however, learn that I am in much better shape than I was this time last year, and it is very cool to be coming up on thirty-five and know that I am in better shape than I was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that…

2. Laundry hanging out to dry: First time this year. Hanging laundry outside is one of those small joys, made even sweeter when I walk out to the yard in the morning and can smell nutmeg from the McCormick plant.

3. Sandals: Debut of the pair bought back in January (ok, except for the time I wore them for ten minutes to take that picture in the snow).

4. New conditioner: Again, it’s the small joys. After spending an hour or two behind a girl who smelled like Pantene and farts at the TMBG show, my generic Pantene knock-off conditioner from Target was making me cross. Whole Foods’ generic body care products are a dream: cheap, vegan (as far as I can tell), no animal testing, and smell nice in a non-chemical way.

Among all of these firsts, I did finish my homework and some other pressing tasks, but it is possible that Jamie was far more productive than me while I was out enjoying the run, the sun, and the clothesline.

I am sort of kidding about this, but the more I think about it, the more I think there is something to it. The doshas are one of a zillion different frameworks out there for making sense of the play between mind, body, and the rest of the world. And now I know: Vata is my dosha of misbehaving, and also the dosha of underpants.

As for my actual misbehaving today, I took a nice long time getting myself moving this morning, sleeping in with wonderful, gorgeous dreams that have no business on a reputable blog, or this one either. But, oh, there were… things. Dream things. My vata garments for the misbehaving day were purple, as were my seasonally inappropriate open-toe shoes. I shirked the mountain of work before me this afternoon in favor of painting my toenails and talking with an old friend for an hour and six minutes. (Hi, Josh!) I tried very hard to buy some festive underthings, but it just didn’t work out. I stopped at Target for sanitizing wipes, and spent some time perusing the undie bins, but alas the stash was somewhat disappointing. For one thing, many of the funkier styles are either thongs or have seams up the back, and I just cannot bring myself to wear anything engineered to give me a wedgie. Call me old fashioned, but as far as I am concerned, wearing a thong is like putting a middle school bully in my pants.

I write about underwear a lot. Well, I like it. And shoes. In fact, with fabulous things on beneath and below, I think I could very happily wear the same jeans and shirt every day (Ok, throw in a vintage sundress from time to time. With fabulous underthings and shoes. That, too. Is it summer yet?)

And so another Misbehaving Tuesday draws to a close. Vata is balanced, and it is time to dig into some of that work before I go back to those gorgeous dreams.