Happy Birthday to Me

This is 40.


10:52 am. Without a stitch of makeup but with a stitch of clothes because my birthday suit is a little drastic.

At 40 I have 7 freckles, three on my face and 4 on my hands that are suspiciously large and light and could quite possibly be called age spots by someone who is mean.

I am 97% in love with myself and 143% in love with my family.

Inside I feel 17, 25 on a mature day. I do not ever feel 40, or 39 even.

At 40 I watch my children get older and it both scares me and makes me happy. I watch my parents grow old and it just scares me.

I am who I always hoped I would be, save a few fiscal milestones and a book or two.

This is 40, and I am fine with that. Lucky even.

Hello 40.

xo,
S

p.s. This is also 40. They stole my title but I still can't wait to see it.

Totally Not Photoshopped, BTW. I Was Just Having An Off-Day With My Foundation. Also Apparently the Size of My Face.

Seems I forgot to tell you about that one time I was in a hotel room canoodling with Joseph Gordon-Levitt whilst wearing a sheer negligee and über-big hair. (Me, not him.) It was adorable how preoccupied with the remote control he was, flipping between Real Housewives of New York and Breaking Bad so that I wouldn't ruin my manicure. If you must know, he smells like books and lemon-flavored bubbly water.

Seems I also forgot to tell you that I work with the raddest bunch of people ever to assemble beneath fluorescent lighting. Five days a week they laugh at my jokes and tell me I have good hair or look tired, listen to me talk about my family, my weekend, smile as I sing 'Til Tuesday off-key. They know how cougar-y I feel about JG-L, how much I love nutella, and that if I were ever on Death Row I would request insalata caprese even though apparently people on Death Row don't get to dictate their last meal anymore. Which is to say that I absolutely love the people I work with for everything Monday through Friday and sometimes beyond Sunday, but also for making me this card for my birthday and showering me with hazelnut spread and mozzarella. You sure know how to make a girl feel special.

I will be on vacation for the next week, busy squeezing out the last of the suntan lotion from the summer and turning 40 while I'm at it. Though I might check in from somewhere on the road.

xo,
S

The Book of More Me

Sometimes I wish I was Mormon. It's just that they have such nice skin and their community is so tight-knit. They seem so crafty and happy and pleased. Pleased is not a word I would use to describe myself, and my skin is not always so nice either. Too often I feel mean inside.

Not me or my pic as evidenced by the typos. See? I'm mean.

Not exactly one on the cutting edge of news, I just finished reading Stephanie Nielson's book, Heaven is Here and I admit to feeling almost jealous. (If you don't know her story here it is in 43 words: Beautiful young Mormon blogger with 4 kids gets in a terrible plane crash with husband. Pilot dies, they survive, she is burned over 80% of her body and with the help of her faith and family, learns to live a very different life.) Of course I wasn't jealous of her accident or ensuing pain, but I was a wee bit jealous of her faith. It's just...if something like that were to happen to me? I don't know what I would have to fall back on. I mean certainly my family and friends. But something bigger? I don't have faith in anything remotely god-like. The very term Heavenly Father makes me smirk (don't even get me started on caffeine or the undergarments, the Mormon stance on homosexuality or Prop 8, race, Elders, the priesthood, oy-to-the-golden-plates-vey). There are times I think I am too smart for religion and other times wonder if I'm too dumb for it.

If pressed I will tell you that I believe in something. A shared humanity, something that ties us all together in our joy and suffering. I feel something like this, but I don't have a name for it or a way to speak about it let alone to it. Certainly it is not a god uppercase or otherwise; there is no meaning there. Just a feeling, and not one that I entertain often.

It's just that sometimes I wish I knew.
(Which is exactly why I will never understand faith.)

Surely Mormons have mean days, too. Days when they don't let someone ease into their lane of traffic, days when they see their neighbor and walk quickly into their house to get away. I don't mean to generalize or simplify, condescend to anybody, but they do seem to have really shiny hair, no?

Look for Zoey at Burning Man in 2025

Her preferred method of transportation these days is the hula hoop. Which is not exactly a transportational method per se, but this does not bother her. She hula hoops around the house kicking a ball, picking up toys, dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller and eating blueberries, though she has yet to master the narrow width of the hallway.

It's friction, of course. The force of friction between her small body and the hoop equal to the pull of gravity. Easy to understand if you have a mind that swallows the small subset symbol of an f or doesn't stop to even question it, or both, but mine does not and the hula hoop jumps away from my hips because it knows. Gravity takes over.

On another note: what would you do with that fugly stone facade fireplace if you were me? The long-term plan is to either blast it off completely or build a wood fascia over it, though we can't afford to do either one right now. Thing is, I can't help but feel like 1974 is staring at me while licking at the corners of its mustache every time I sit in our living room. I vote to paint the stone white as a quick fix, but Bryan says that would be even uglier. So super non-efficient and probably worthless poll: what would you do?

p.s. Dude.

And Then This Happened

Oh yeah, you will look at pictures of my rashy baby...mmm, hackneyed internet nom nom. Kid's got Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease, which is just a not-so-fancy way of saying he looks like a pizza-faced teenage boy complete with Captain America shirt and gas. And yet? When he presses his binky into my mouth all slobbery and wet I say yum because he is my pimply little boy who learned how to cuddle from the cat, pushing his head into my lap with a sigh.

See also: Calling every friend you saw over the weekend to tell them to watch their children for fever and subsequent blistery rash is the humiliating toddler equivalent of having to call everyone you've ever had sex with to tell them you have Chlamydia. Not that I would know what that's like. Seriously. I have never had Chlamydia.

Also see also: Is it just me, or would Chlamydia be a pretty name for a girl if it weren't for the pathogenic bacteria?

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I kept waiting for something to happen. Instead nothing happened but this: Ozzy started walking. We went camping. Zoey got carsick. Bryan turned 40. Zoey walked in on us having sex. Totally unrelated, although I'm pretty sure it did happen in that order. And now it is a nondescript day in early August and I am back, because the trouble with waiting for something to happen is that so many little life things happen you cannot decipher what exactly you were waiting for in the first place. Was that it? The sign?

Did you see it? Not a sign, but my redesign. I redesigned my blog because I figured I needed to be refreshed. Like when I feel blah and a new shirt makes me feel sharp again. What do you think? Here's the thing: I don't think I'm done yet. The fonts on the right side nav bar are all wonky, nothing matches, some of it is way out of date. But I'm starting again anyway. This is the new and improved Petunia Face. The one that has slid backward, because once upon a time I started this blog for myself. To write what I wanted when I wanted without a thought in the world to you reading it. And along the way I met some fabulous people, my page views went up, I made a teeny bit of money and wanted more. More money, more of you, more comments, more links, more metrics, more more, and it became less about me just writing. Which is totally my fault, of course, caring when the amount of comments went down. But they did and I do, only I have realized that sometimes backward is the right direction to go. This blog is never going to make me money. Or famous, or published, or fill-in-the-blank. It is only going to make me me.

So hello. I'm back. Without a story this time, but a quote:

“The more you document your own life, the more you check in, you tweet, the more you post photos of what you did last night, the more you do all of this stuff, or even in my case, the more you listen for little lines of dialogue that can make their way into stories, the more you photograph moments, in a way, the more you start to step out of those moments, and if you do that too much, you become a spectator to your own life.”
- Jonathan Harris

I realize I am jumping all over the place. I am a writer, a blogger, social media murders the moment, blah blah, my daughter walked right up to the side of the bed, thank god we were under the covers. But this is it. I'm figuring it out as I go along. But I'm back.

love,
S