How to Look Great at 73

It all started when I was watching Big Bang Theory and I saw Sheldon in his 73 shirt.

I was born in 1973, so I ordered myself a copy of Sheldon’s, just for fun. It is reminiscent of Dr, Seuss’s Thing 1 and Thing 2 shirts, so when I wear it to a gig, the bass player calls me Thing 73.

Well, last week was my mom’s 73rd birthday. I thought it would be cute if I was wearing the 73 shirt when I picked her up for brunch. She chuckled. When I got home I snapped a selfie of just me. Now I don’t wear makeup, but I took one look at that thing, slapped some concealer on the dark circles under my eyes, and retook the selfie.

I posted the selfie on Facebook with the following text: “Went to Acre with Mom for her 73rd birthday.”

I thought all my Facebook friends knew me well enough to recognize me, but there’s one woman I’ve never met in real life who commented, “Wow I never would’ve guessed her age! Hope I look that good at 73!”

Okay, folks, I’m FORTY-FIVE.

There’s a reason I don’t use a picture of myself for my Facebook profile pic, and the reason is that when I did use my photo, and when I posted my feminist comments on public pages, I’d sometimes receive a disparaging remark about my looks from a man-troll.

So I already struggled with my self-esteem, I mean what woman doesn’t in our society just a little? I mean, I don’t mind being 45 and I don’t mind looking 45, but it doesn’t feel great to be asked if I qualify for the senior discount. But no! I was going to be part of informing people! I was going to be the change!

So I went to Twitter. Twitter, for those who don’t know, is where you can fix society with one tweet.

I wisely posted my picture again with the following text. “Took this of me for my mom’s 73rd. Someone said she looked great for 73. I want to hide away, but no. This is what 45 looks like. #NoMakeup #NoDye #NoBotox.”

I realized the #NoMakeup part wasn’t strictly true, but with only so many characters allowed on Twitter, why quibble?

There. Fixed society.

Logged in the next morning. Someone retweeted me! Here we go! I clicked to watch society changing! I clicked to see history in the making! I clicked for real women everywhere!

There was my tweet. There was my picture. There was the retweeter’s quote. “This is what a no-makeup person looks like at 73!”

I give up. I’m just going to tell people I’m 73. Don’t I look amazing?

What to Worry About A to Z

There’s always something to worry about. I’m an expert. But how can I use my expertise to help others? I know! Here’s a list for those times you feel disconcertingly at ease. One of these things is sure to strike a chord and get you back to your usual panicky self.

Allergies 

Did you know that you can develop life-threatening allergies at any time? I had a friend who wasn’t allergic to bees, and then she was. She almost died. Next time you get stung, you probably will, too.

Branches

Falling trees kill a hundred Americans a year. Okay, that’s not as many as I thought it would be, but still, one of those hundred could be you. Tread carefully.

Cancer

But if you don’t use those trees for shade, thereby avoiding the branches, you’ll probably get melanoma and die.

Car Accidents 

So you probably won’t get stung by a bee today, and you might not walk under trees, and melanoma won’t get you immediately, but chances are you’ll get in a car very soon. And you’ll probably die.

E. Coli

Did you eat today? Anything at all? It probably had E. coli on it. You’ll probably die.

Fires

Did you unplug the toaster? Are you sure? Did your neighbors unplug their toasters?

Global Climate Change

Hope you can swim.

Guns

You don’t even have to be near one. A stray bullet could come through your living room wall right now.

Hantavirus

Breathe near the wrong mouse’s poop, and bam.

Infection

Is it supposed to turn that color around a cut? You know, some infections are resistant to antibiotics. This one probably is.

Jazz

”Lisa, stay away from that jazz man!” When was Marge Simpson ever wrong?

Kryptonite

I see you smirking at this list, Superman. Not so funny now, is it?

Legionnaires’ Disease 

Breathe while digging in the wrong soil or standing near the wrong water mister, and bam.

Leukemia

If you don’t get melanoma, there are plenty of other kinds of cancer. Do you feel fatigued a lot? You probably have leukemia. You’ll probably die.

Medication

Have you SEEN the list of side effects? If you take a medication, you’re probably going to die.

No One Likes You

You’ll probably die from one of the things on this list, and you’ll probably die alone.

Otters

The one animal you thought would never attack you, right? Think again. (Seriously. Google it.)

Paranoia

Is it true that no one likes you? When you tried to think of something to worry about that starts with “P,” all you could think of was “pee.” Are you paranoid to worry about what people would think of that? Will people think this blog is funny? Are you paranoid because you don’t want to go inner tubing on the river anymore because of that otter thing? There’s also that dangerous bacteria in the river sometimes. You should definitely worry about whether or not people think you are paranoid.

Rivers

See above.

Strangers

This is a handy one because strangers are almost everywhere. If you can’t find something to worry about, you’ve always got strangers. One seems to attack someone about every week in my town. And don’t think you can stay in your house with your doors locked to avoid worry, because you’re more likely to fall in your bathroom than be hit by a falling tree branch.

Tubs

See above.

Tubas

Obvi.

Worry

Still worrying about whether people think you’re paranoid? If worry doesn’t make everyone not like you, it will at least give you a heart attack or something. You should be worried about your worry.

Zoos

I put this because I said it was A to Z. But now that I think about it…

 

 

 

 

Mary Did You Know? Why Yes, I Did

Long before I heard the word “mansplaining,” I had a vague dislike of the song “Mary Did You Know.”

I can’t be the first to point out to the song’s (male) composer what the angel said to Mary in Luke chapter one:

²⁶ In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, ²⁷ to a virgin betrothed^[a] to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.²⁸ And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”^[b] 29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰ And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. ³¹ And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

³⁴ And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”^[c]

³⁵ And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born^[d] will be called holy—the Son of God. ³⁶ And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. ³⁷ For nothing will be impossible with God.” ³⁸ And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant^[e] of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.

I can hear the conversation between Mary and songwriter Mark Lowry now.

“Mary did you know that your baby boy would one day rule the nations?”

“Yes, that’s almost exactly what an angel told me. So, yes.”

“Mary did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trod?”

“Well since he’s the ‘son of the Most High’ it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that. Also, angels have trodden the earth, so, you  know, haven’t we all.”

“Well, did you know that he’s come to make you new?”

“Listen, have you ever had a baby? Have you ever known a woman who had a baby? It changes your life even if you have a run-of-the-mill baby. Women don’t tell men this because we don’t want you to be envious and because you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. So, yes, I knew. Yes.”

“Well did you know—”

“An. Angel. Talked. To. Me.”

“Okay, okay, forget about the song. Hey Mary?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know you were blessed.”

“Yes. Also, I knew you were going to say that.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Read Luke 1:48.”

 

Comment Awaiting Moderation

So you have a comment awaiting moderation on your blog. Are you a controlling, censoring, narrow-minded pig if you don’t approve it?

This morning I awoke to an email telling me that I had a comment awaiting moderation on my blog about writing. On that blog, I had spent many painstaking hours transferring all 61 days of my Bible devotional (not to mention the painstaking hours to write the book version before that, finding every mention of God’s kingdom in the Bible and spreading them out in digestible-sized daily readings), and now I saw that I had a comment on Day 61. Yippee! Someone had read the whole thing (for free, you’re welcome) and they were commenting to thank me for doing all that work!

Alas, the comment didn’t seem to be thanking me. I’d had a short night of sleep, so as I lay in bed looking groggily at the email on my phone, it took me a while to figure out what I was reading. At first, I thought the comment was telling me that I had it wrong about Jesus’s command to love others. The comment said something about how loving others without worshiping God was wrong, and I scrolled up through my blog post to see if I had said any such thing.

I hadn’t said any such thing, of course. And how easy am I to gaslight if I had to reread my own writing to make sure?

At this point, my thought was to tell this guy where he could put his comment. Don’t be crass. I meant in his own blog.

ANYWAY, then I realized that the whole comment was an unattributed poem. Did the commenter write the poem? I copied and pasted it into a Google search to see what came up. What came up was this same poem in the comments of ANOTHER Christian blog post. “Hey,” I thought. “This guy goes around commenting his poem on everyone’s blogs.”

I considered hitting “approve.” He wasn’t rudely arguing with my writing, after all.

But wait! What if I copied and pasted my work indiscriminately in the comments of someone else’s blog without commenting on their work at all. Would I even think about doing that? Of course not!

So if you are as neurotic as me, I’d like to remind you that there are some kinds of comments you don’t have to approve.

Comments That Are Unrelated to Your Post

Especially if they advertise their own stuff. This is my blog, and I’ll advertise my own stuff and other people’s stuff that I truly admire. For instance, I think you should read my fairy tale comedy Littlefoot Part One. You’re here on a humor blog, so I think you might like it. 99 cents on Kindle. A Kindle app is free, BTW. And if that Bible devotional piqued your interest, it’s over on my blog mlmillard.wordpress.com and it’s called Seeking First His Kingdom (61 days of worry-free devotions).

Rude Comments

Come on, people! It’s YOUR blog. You do not have to put up with that. And don’t be tempted to approve just so you can reply with that amazing comeback you thought of. They’ll reply back, and it will be a whole big mess.

Whatever Comments You Want

It. Is. Your. Blog.

 

M.L. Millard

Ants: A Triumph of the Soul

They say Albert Schweitzer fed the ants in his house because he had a reverence for life. I say he had Stockholm Syndrome. Still, as a graduate of Schweitzer Elementary, it’s always with a vague sense of guilt that I wipe away those first few ants of the rainy season.

For some reason, every year I think those first few will be the only ones. Then the next day I think, “No big deal, I can wipe up ten every morning. At least they’re not getting to the food.”

But this year, as with every year, soon there were fifty each morning. We bought traps for outside and pet safe orange peel spray* for inside. Our house smelled orangey fresh. It was almost a good thing we had ants. It smelled like we were riding Soarin’ Over California in Disneyland. Yes. Except for the time the spray ricocheted off a doorframe and into my eye, it was exactly like going to Disneyland.

Gradually everything we owned made its way to the refrigerator. Do ants like coffee beans? I don’t know, but the beans went into the fridge just in case. We started to have avalanches every time we tried to get something to eat, but at least the ants weren’t getting to the food.

One morning I took an open bag of Reese’s Pieces out of the fridge, shoved the avalanche back in (was that a baseball glove?) and set my candy on the counter to thaw while I got ready for work. Twenty minutes later I threw the bag on the passenger seat and munched on peanut buttery goodness all the way down Stony Point Road. Then, sitting at a red light, I saw it. One single ant crawling its way out of the bag and across the seat. Slowly, I brought the bag closer and peered in.

How to describe the feeling you get when you see movement among your Reese’s Pieces. Repulsion? Horror? Anger? When I got home eight hours later, the kitchen was as bad as I feared. They were everywhere.

And that’s when I lost it. “What if I build you a little fairy house outside and put sugar cubes in it? No, the neighbors would be mad if I invited every ant in town.” Yes, I was talking to the ants. Nothing was ever going to stop them. I was a captive in my own house.

No! Not a captive! A humanitarian. I was like Albert Schweitzer. “I suppose you may as well make yourselves comfortable,” I told them. I wasn’t crazy. It was a triumph of the soul.

* Still wipe this spray up as the bottle instructs. I didn’t and I think it gave my cat seizures.

Your Own Little Political Party

How many political parties would there be if we took all the most divisive topics and founded a political party for every possible combination of beliefs? Even if we narrowed it down to A/B choices about foreign policy/military, gun control, gay marriage, abortion, education, business oversight, and welfare, we’d have dozens of political parties. And each of those topics could have several points of view. We’d really have to have at least A/B/C/D choices for each one. John wants an Old West gun-slingin’ free-for-all. Liam might be pro gun control, but Jen wants every gun confiscated and sent into space. David wants abortion totally illegal, while Carmen thinks it should be legal in certain circumstances, Su thinks it should be legal in different certain circumstances, and Logan thinks it should always be the woman’s choice.

How many political parties would we have? They would be so specific that we’d each have our own little, and I mean little, political party. I am a near pacifist, tight gun control, let people marry who they want (some people are born with male and female genitalia, for goodness* sake, are you going to check?) more money for education, heavy business regulation lefty who thinks government should help the poor, BUT, I’m in a little group of lefties who are pro-life except in the direst of situations. And I was soooo close to getting a bunch of lefty votes.**

We all have our own little political party. If you don’t have your own, you might want to think a little bit harder. There are a lot of variables here, and my list is nowhere near complete. What are the chances that you would agree with one of the major parties on every issue? Statistically, it’s unlikely in the extreme. Some issues you might not even (gasp) be able to come to a conclusion on. It’s okay. Enjoy your little party. Don’t be afraid to say how your views differ from the mainstream. Not that you shouldn’t vote for one of the big two, (I do) but at least think for yourself before making that important decision.

With love from the Marie party.

*goodness’s?

**since writing this I’ve learned a lot about abortion rates coming down to pre Roe v Wade numbers due to education and birth control availability, and I’ve thought more about the impossibility of policing abortions for certain reasons and moved to the left on this, too. Time to run for office? Millard 2020!

Were You Always This Funny?

No, I was not always this funny. Well, I was in my head, but before the days of Facebook, by the time I had thought of my witty reply the moment had passed. Now I entertain my friends ten seconds after I read their status and no one’s the wiser. Finally, thanks to the speed of technology, I seem quick-witted!

All the ‘likes’ and ‘LOLs’ have inspired me to hire my slow-but-witty-witted self out as a writer and editor. My hope is that I will sometimes entertain you, my friends, and as for potential clients, I hope that you will come here and see that I know how to use a semicolon; please hire me.