more thoughts on beauty and utility

[dchenes]

I’m perfectly fine with the idea that I will never be beautiful according to the way beauty is presented to the masses. What I’m not fine with is how long it’s been since I felt beautiful.

According to popular culture these days, making myself beautiful would require a lot of plastic surgery and liposuction and eyebrow wax (in short, physical pain), not to mention new clothes, wrinkle cream (sorry, “age-defying lotion”), makeup, hair dye and shoes I can’t walk any distance in (in short, financial pain). And under all the trappings of a silk purse would still be a sow’s ear.

So when do I feel beautiful? Usually when I’m happy with who I am at the moment. Clothes do help sometimes; when the dress with the glitter on it still fit me, I felt beautiful in it. That’s not the only thing, though. The last time I remember feeling beautiful was several springs ago, after I had walked down to Chinatown and was enjoying the weather, and also happened to be hot and sweaty and tired and dressed like a college student on laundry day. I was enjoying being me on a nice day when I didn’t have anything urgent or worrisome to deal with.

Which brings me to being useful. “Useful” is harder to define, but the way I seem to be thinking about it, it means I do what needs doing, when or before it needs it. My brain, when not full of work-related things, is usually full of what I’m going to cook/what I’m running out of/what needs cleaning/whether the bills need to be paid yet/how much time it will take to get to any particular location from my current one. Most of my being useful comes from living by myself, which means I have to do all of my own shopping and cooking and bill-paying and budget-balancing and transporting. Being useful also means I’m good at what I’m paid to do, and I’m paid a lot to do it because they need me.

The problem with being useful is, it’s tiring and time-consuming. When I have at least one Thing That Needs Doing (TTND, to save typing) staring me in the face every time I come home, I either get stuck in the cycle of work-home-TTND-sleep-work, or I develop selective blindness and get stuck in the cycle of work-home-determinedly do nothing in order to ignore TTND-sleep-work. In the latter case, it feels like not going straight home from work only makes the TTND more annoying when I get home, because the elves haven’t done it while I was out.

If I want the TsTND to get done without doing them myself, that means I have to hire somebody else to do them. That’s financially worse for me, but it may be psychologically better. If I get J to come and clean once in a while, it means I don’t have to feel guilty because it hasn’t been cleaned as often as I’d like. (And it feels like the elves did it while I was out.)

What all of the preceding blather boils down to is this: I should call J and set up a recurring cleaning appointment. That will give me more time to enjoy being me and less time to have to spend on Things That Need Doing (whether actually doing them or actively avoiding doing them).