Here are some thoughts I’ve had:

• Given all the men flying to Turkey for hair transplants, you’ve got to assume that in fifty years assisted-living homes will be filled with old men who have a thick fringe of hair above their foreheads and in the very center of their crown and nowhere else.

• If you claim to have imposter syndrome but you don’t, not REALLY, then you’re an actual imposter. Well done!

• Would a modern day J. Alfred Prufrock measure out his life in Keurig pods?*

• How do you know when blue cheese has gone bad? Can it go bad?

• Dingos don't eat babies as much as I was led to believe. Although I guess one or two is still more than I find comforting.

• Can you think of a single part of a woman’s body that ads and articles haven’t tried to make us insecure about? I mean . . . even our labia and assholes aren’t safe from criticism and cosmetic procedures. Is there a single inch of us that we aren’t supposed to be spending time worrying about and trying to fix?

• Other people are annoyingly picky. You and me? We just happen not to like a few things here and there.

• There are few things happier in life than a bundt cake that comes out of the pan in one intact piece.

• Why are men and women’s clothing separated? Shouldn’t clothing just be sorted by size and style, and anyone who wants to wear anything should because why shouldn’t they?

• You can spend hundreds of dollars at the grocery store and fill the pantry to bursting and you still won’t have the one thing you need to make dinner.

• Middle-aged women all over the world are staring into mirrors, agitatedly painting their gray roots brown, but even as they’re doing that, the gray is growing, moving, pushing up, promising to reappear soon. Sisyphus could never.

• Water cleans things, but if you leave things in water, they get stagnant, moldy, and toxic. Water is the source of life, but standing water can easily destroy an entire house. Kind of weird when you think about it.

• People become stagnant, moldy, and toxic if they don’t keep questioning their own beliefs as they age and find ways to learn and grow.

• Nothing has ever tasted as good as the little cakes I made in my Easy Bake Oven when I was a kid.

  

• You could light up an entire city with the energy generated by middle-aged women walking together in circles on any given morning in west LA.

• People who use air conditioning during the day are wasteful and people who don’t use it at night are crazy.

• My pets don’t appreciate how hard it is to be human. They think we have it easy because we have opposable thumbs and can open up food cans but they don’t know how difficult it is to go to social events.

• How do you know whether you’re middle-aged or old? What’s the cut-off?

• When you’re a kid, it sucks to be different, but if you double down on the things that make you weird, you have a shot at being exceptional.

• Women don’t dreamily massage soap into their breasts as much as 90’s movies suggested.

• If you always eat the overripe avocado because you want to use it before it goes bad, then you never get to eat the perfectly ripe avocado.**

• After 60, you have to choose whether you’re going to fight tooth and nail to stay looking young (well, young-ish) or just give into looking old. There’s no right or wrong answer, but famous women will be told they’re wrong whichever they choose.

• If you let your hair go gray, people in LA will assume you’re over 70.

• Whenever I’ve had any kind of an operation or medical procedure, I’ve been prescribed opioids, which I never take.*** I look at the full bottle of Oxycodone and I kind of want to give it away to someone who it would give joy to. But I also know that would be very bad for them, so I can’t. And it makes me sad.

• Eating dinner late is sophisticated; eating it early is smart (you sleep better, trust me).

• A bullet point list is the new essay.

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*true story: when I wanted new furniture for my childhood bedroom, my father insisted I memorize all of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” before he would agree to it. I did. That poem played a formative role in turning me into the wreckage you see before you now.

**Thanks to Johnny for reminding me that I once said this to him. The smartest thing I’ve ever said and I forgot it the second it left my lips. Fortunately he didn’t. Also, read his Substack. It’s great.

***You may wonder why I don’t just refuse the prescriptions. I find I often don’t have a choice—the doctor just calls in a bunch of scrips and the meds are all bundled together. The other reason is I think maybe I will need them and I’ll regret not having them. That hasn’t happened yet but you never know.