September 13, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Anyhow, wait for the announcement, any day now, that Elizabeth Gilbert has signed a juicy contract to write a new book about this latest chapter in her life (although I suspect she”ll have the good taste not to shove the word “eat” into the title this time).
Alas, I”m doomed once again to be excluded from all this zeitgeistyness.
If, as we”re constantly being informed, sexuality is fluid, then mine most resembles a stagnant swamp. As a raving heterosexual, becoming a lesbian seems the midlife-crisis moral equivalent of selling a sports car you already own, rather than buying a new one. Intimate female friendships, even those morbidly so, are no mystery to me; I was a teenage girl once, and a weird one at that. Look, I own Heavenly Creatures on Blu-ray, okay?
However, the appeal of girl/girl sex escapes me, either as a spectator or a participant. It seems too much like drinking chamomile tea, except naked.
Being five years older than Gilbert, I can now say that the prospect of menopause turned out to be far more distressing than the thing itself. I”m still not entirely sure what a “hot flash” even is, so I guess that means I haven”t had one yet. I”m no more (or less) prone to the fits that female flesh is heir to than I was before. Thanks to the tender mercies of “vanity sizing,” I can still call myself a size 6 even though that no longer means what it did twenty years ago. I have yet to acquire a sudden taste for loud animal prints or chunky “statement” jewelry, or that long-promised “comfort with my own body” that (I can”t help but notice in those women of a certain age who boast of it) seems like a fancy way of saying “fat.”
The closest I”ve come to any of the stereotypical symptoms of The Change is to find myself occasionally wondering, “Is that smell me…?”
When I turned 50, my “bucket list” ambitions were to finally figure out music theory and cryptic crosswords. Two years later, a busier-than-ever professional life has left even those thimble-size to-dos undone.
So no need to worry that, one Tuesday soon, you”ll be presented here with my declaration that I have “rented a U-Haul,” as we used to call it back in the “gay until graduation” 1990s.
But now I”m beginning to wonder:
Has anybody heard from the broad who wrote Under the Tuscan Sun lately…?
