tricky

Yesterday I went to the DMV to get my drivers' license renewed.  My drivers' license, it turns out, has been expired since the beginning of March, making it nearly ten months since I have been a legal driver.  Fortunately this discovery was not made in any of the terrible possible ways it could have been.  It was made when I was renewing my car registration and the agent asked to see my license.  (I  only remembered to renew my registration because Shawn said so.  When I was single, the registration used to lapse too.)

The agent at the DMV was quite surprised to see how long I had been driving illegally and she reminded me how lucky I was not to have been caught.  I was halfway expecting her to demand I take another road test, but she didn't.

This probably has something to do with the fact that I rarely open my own mail;  like a fifties housewife, I assume all the official looking pieces of paper are for The Man of the House and don't trouble myself with them.  I suspect the DMV sent me some sort of reminder in the mail, but who knows.

(Note to self: renew passport in nine years.  Yeah right.)


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J has been with us over Christmas, which has been fun.  We went to high school with J, and he lived with us for about a year during his divorce.  He is our friend, but he is also our fledgling who we encourage to fly when he can.  (But we let him back in the nest when it gets too cold.)  Like me, J thinks himself in circles about his own behaviours and asks himself why he does everything he does.  He is both exasperating and charming (perhaps this is a self-reflection) and yesterday I was ready to strangle him until he told me I reminded him of Leslie Mann which startled me because lately I have been reminding myself of a Garfield cartoon... eating and sleeping and doing absolutely nothing.

J would like to be a photographer.  He takes pictures of everything we do, which is difficult for a self-conscious person like me, but over time I start to forget he's doing it.  A nice thing about J is that he makes me look better in his photographs of me than I do in real life.  And that must mean he is good at what he does.


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Which reminds me:

On Christmas Day we went to my sister-in-law's new place with all of Shawn's family.  His family is fun to spend time with - and drink with.  I drank a lot of wine.  Near the end of the evening, his beautiful twin sisters cornered me in the kitchen and demanded to know if I use Botox.  They seemed skeptical of my drunken denials, which is funny because I am always (only half-jokingly) telling Shawn I should use Botox (he thinks not).  They told me that they both do (they are only 30) and they thought I had been using it for years and they wanted to exchange information with me about where to go and blah blah blah.  I had nothing to contribute and they were disappointed.

I think this is a generational thing, the different views people take on Botox and things like it.  Or perhaps it is about how we have been raised.  Wherever it comes from, my sneaking feeling is that people who indulge in cosmetic alterations are shallow and vain - and therefore I try to pretend I don't think about these things, lest I be perceived that way.  The thirty-somethings don't feel that way.  They think they are brilliant for outsmarting the aging process and why shouldn't they share that information with anyone else who might benefit from learning about it.

So when I woke up the next morning feeling both hungover and vaguely insulted that my sister-in-laws thought I was a Botox user, I needed to remind myself that they thought it was a compliment.  Not only to my face but to my brain for figuring out how to be so clever.

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