Well low and behold we're getting older. Hmmm..wonder when some people will figure that out or learn how to accept it.

When the first 20 years of your life pass you by, what do people think...?...another 20 isn't going to come along....?

Sure, I didn't, I'll admit it, but that was when I was back in high school. I really didn't understand it, was never made to think about it. Now that I'm in my 40s I know though that another 40 years will pass...that being said that no car accident or medical problem arrives which cuts it short.

I have no problems with getting a hearing aid or a wheelchair or fake teeth. If those things come about in life then so be it..It's been going on for generations and it isn't like it's going to stop and not happen just for me.

The wrinkles are here. I'm becoming a good wrinkle factory here..lol...but I do like the saying "I've earned every one of them" and I'm not going to be all in a state of clamity over it. Here I am, I'll age according to my health, DNA, genes, what the family history passes to me, what my genetic make up gives me and that's just the way it is. 

It seems like a useless amount of energy to spend worrying about it and pretending it isn't happening or lieing about it.  Sure I use creams on my face for the 40s now, seems like common sense to do so really. My skin is very dry, always has been, so actually the heavier creams are really nice for me as it eases the feeling of dryness...some what anyways.  If it helps with some wrinkles here and there then that's cool..but really I don't see as they have.  Then again I can't afford the big name face creams...would it help if I paid $100 for a bottle of face cream instead of $20...I'm not sure, maybe, I kinda doubt it...but then again, it doesn't really matter. Life is the way it is and if I can't afford expensive creams, then it's a part of life how it is.

The only thing I fear, or dislike about the thought of growing older is the lack of movement.  I can feel how my body isn't as flexible as it use to be. It's harder to navigate around or over things. I sure can't just run along and leap over something like I could at 13 or 16 or even 20....like doing high jump in public school.

I did go on the Zipper at the carnival with my daughter and I still enjoyed it. Had a bit of a headache so I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have, but I wouldn't have missed it.

The stiffness in the joints does suck.  Sore back, getting out of bed in the morning is like lifting a bale of hay onto a wagon--which I did when I was young, but sure wouldn't want to try it now. I'd end up in traction...lol...

It's such a shallow world though, full of a lot of people who want to copy how the stars look...even though we all know they sit with a hair dresser and make up artist for hours, and then that hair dresser and make up artist follows them around, doing touch ups constantly with every move they make...like on a movie. There she is, the main character, going through the dessert, riding a camel, falling down a hill...but she looks good while doing it...lol..We all know how we'd look if it was real life and just one of  us....(I'd be in traction, again)

I was born in 1966, my boyfriend was born in 1959, my daughters, 1990and 1995, my brother in 1961...and on and on...come and go...born, grow, old, pass away..since the beginning of time.  I'm not going to spend the years I have left worrying about what this world thinks I should look like, or that so and so looks better, or that I look better then the other person, or the other person looks better then me. ...because if someone is going to spend their time doing that, then they have a few screws loose...and in the end, that person who is doing all that judging will end up the same place as me and all the others....and you know, it really didn't mean a thing now did it....!

Modern Times: The mane debate
Is the fear of short hair really a fear of women with power? Given the times, we're about to find out
By Katrina Onstad
Comments (7)
Last November, Winona Ryder showed up at the red-carpet premiere for the movie Milk self-referentially sporting the tousled early-’90s pixie hairstyle once known as “the Winona Ryder.” Thus followed a slew of style reporters making the official declaration, with the certainty of an army of Wiarton Willies, that short hair is back: Winona goes gamine again; Posh is cropped to new non-lengths; Rihanna swings her little acorn-cap triangle. As every journalist will tell you, three is a trend.

And yet, around the same time, short-hair anxiety began elbowing aside the fashion Nostradamuses. In The Guardian, a man wrote a much-blogged-about letter to an advice columnist asking, “Is it true that a woman with a short hairstyle is subconsciously indicating that she does not want sex? My wife had a drastic haircut four days before our wedding, and our sex life was a damp squib from the start.” If I were the Dear Abby in question, I would have answered with something like, “Dear Morony Moronison: Possibly, your wife may not want to have sex with someone who would ask as asinine a question as this, or use the phrase ‘damp squib.’’ The columnist was a little more delicate, but responded with the assertion that “reducing one’s attractiveness in a spouse’s eyes may well signal some desire to push them away.”

In other words, short hair is inherently unattractive, a sentiment echoed by a sex therapist named Aline Zoldbrod in the New York Daily News a few weeks later in a piece entitled “Edgy pixie haircuts are back, but do they kill your attraction?”

“If you cut your hair you might be making a statement that says, ‘I don’t want to be seen as a sex object,’ ” she told the reporter. Somehow, I can’t imagine any woman brushing her long hair in the morning and saying to herself, “Gee, I hope that today I get groped in an elevator, a guy at work will Twitter something pornographic about me and my character and ideas will run second to my hotness. Come on, long hair – let’s go be a sex object!”

It’s hardly news that hair is another battlefield in the gender wars. Women going short is often read as a rejection of conventional femininity, a rebellion against the long, blond, impossible Barbie-doll ideal (which may be why so many little girls, staring down the barrel of adolescence, take the nail scissors to Barbie’s head).

ChristinaS

great article

Long hair is certainly ingrained as a security blanket and short hair is seen as a risk, possibly as it's more challenging to look and feel feminine due to the ingrained culture from when we were young of "boys have short hair, girls have long hair". I've often thought that women with really beautiful faces like Halle Berry look best with short hair, as the face is shown off. I tried short hair one time but my significant other at that time preferred it long.

Posted Mon. 2 Feb., 2009 @ 1:26:30 PM

ElleBee

The long and short of it
When I was in my early 30's I had the misfortune of going to a male stylist who pegged me as too old for shoulder length hair and cut it into an unattractive, boxy thing that made me fade into the woodwork. Now more than a decade later I have longer, healthy hair that falls below my shoulders, mostly because it's easier to tie it up in a ponytail to tuck under my motorcycle helmet but also because it just makes me feel sexier and more youthful. If I thought for a second that it made me look like I was trying too hard to recapture my youth, I'd chop it off. But I'm not going to sacrifice the practicality of avoiding helmet head just because of someone else's ideal that short hair means power. Piffle!

Posted Tue. 3 Feb., 2009 @ 5:54:58 AM

Cari

Nature's Adornment
I think that combed-back short or tied-up long hair reflects a woman who is practical, with less time or money than a woman with stylish short or bouffant long hair. I keep my own hair cut evenly at shoulder length or longer so that I can fasten it up quickly to do a job, to cook, or simply to get through a hot flash.

Posted Wed. 18 Feb., 2009 @ 8:33:06 AM

Marlee D.

Short for Life

I read this article from the perspective of someone who has kept their hair short for nearly their entire life. While my life has not been particularily long (I am only seventeen), I can most definitely say that my hair length has affected who I have become. I never got a sense of empowerment or felt that I was better than others because I kept my hair cropped, but I definitely felt I was more free. I haven't had the safety blanket of my own hair since I was eight years old, leaving me with nothing to hide behind. I think that, in a way, being forced to stand out on my own has given me more confidence in my own abilities. I have nothing to hide behind. There's just me.

Posted Sat. 21 Feb., 2009 @ 2:25:08 PM

Trudy C

Other reasons for Short Hair

Hello Katrina,

You missed one important reason many of us wear short hair, and that is that it is the best style for our face shape and hair type. I have a narrow face and straight hair. A longer cut draws out my face and makes it look even narrower. I would love to wear it longer, but unless I perm it, which I would rather not, short hair suits my face the best - makes me longer younger :). PS my husband actually prefers me in short hair. Trudy

Posted Wed. 11 Mar., 2009 @ 4:26:50 PM

Leslie

For the love of short hair
I would just like to say that as a woman who LOVES short hair, I find the ideas of some non-modern minded females and sexist males appalling. The first time I went short, I was fourteen, my mom had just passed of cancer and I chopped my hair(which was bum-length)to create wigs for the cancer society. On a dare a few months later I shaved my head with a bic razor and loved it so much I did it two more times before my father got really upset and prohibited me from doing it again. I am now 25 and have had my hair at all different lengths but the look I like best is short. I think that as a society we are brainwashed into thinking that women must have long hair. The ones that don't are either proclaimed lesbians or are said to be trying to equal men. I say 'humbug' to that. Long live gutsy women with the courage and the fashion-forwardness to go ahead and go short!!

Posted Mon. 23 Mar., 2009 @ 1:34:35 PM

Lady

What do you think about this?

I 'had' a b/f who said that if a woman cuts her hair then she can't sit and whine if her man fools around on her. During this conversation I said that if I can't handle the work my long hair takes, shoulders get bad, health gets worse, that I may have to cut my hair. He shook his head back and forth and said, "women always let themselves go and cut their hair when they get older and then they cry the blues because us men go out and have an affair"

I said that love isn't based on the length of one's hair or their weight (as putting on weight with age had come up in this conversation too). He said that a woman should always look her best for her man. I said that a woman should always be loved for who she is no matter her hair length or weight. I said that when I'm at home I should be able to relax and if my hair and make up aren't done to perfection all the time it shouldn't make any difference. He persisted that that is why men have affairs and a woman should look her best for her man no matter what..

Which brought me to child birth and new babies and up all night. He said, 'well, I can see right after she has a baby and is in the hospital, but no matter what she should be looking good as her husband likes"

I was so livid with someone so shallow and...not even sure what word should be here for someone who could possibly think like this.

Be yourself and be loved for yourself...whether you want to have long, medium or short hair. Life is short. Enjoy it and don't try to live up to what someone should or thinks they should be thinking about you.

I'm not...the past is the past and there is too much going on right now and in the future to worry about it. Learn from it and move on. Some of the memories are nice and sure when I think about things, like my pets growing up or sitting down at the creek by myself as a child...I miss it. I can never go back the house I grew up in because other people live there now. I can't go back to my Grandma's house I spent almost every weekend at, and a lot of time in the summers...She is gone now, the house renovated and sold.  Sure it's a bitter sweet memory...but one can't stay stuck there.
I know some people that still dress like the 80s....I can't stand that. We aren't 16 anymore and it's not 1885...but one lady said to me "I'm a 80s child"....The pants were horrible...lol..leave them behind woman!...lol..

I'm not stuck in 80s music like a lot of people I know. Sure there is some songs from the 80s I like, there are songs from the 50s and 60s and 70s I like, but I like to keep up to date with what is out there. I like listening to what is NOW, what we are living in now, what groups are now. Some people I know listen to nothing but the 1980s and have no clue as to who the Pussycat Dolls are or Akon...and others.  I want to know what is happening now, as life is short and I want to move with the times as much as I can. I love digital cameras. I next to never use my old 35mm, though it is nice now and then, but I swap pictures on the computer now and make online photo albums and burn them to disk. No more 100s of photos albums around the house taking up space.  I keep them also on memory sticks..and I can take them to other's homes and stick it in their computer to bring them up.  My mom will put them on her computer and send them to Walmart if she wants a hard copy.

There is too much going on to stay in the past.  My dad was an abusive alcoholic...should I continuously let it bother me. I'm 42, I can't be bothered.  It's done, he is gone a long time ago now...over.

But sharing old times with family and looking at old photos is nice too
   

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