You know as well as I do that your bra is the wrong size. I’m not going to go into the specifics of how to measure yourself for the right size (but I will direct you here, here and definitely here), but I will tell you that chances are you’re wearing too big a band size and too small a cup size (the two measurements are, contrary to popular bra-lief, related). We’ll talk more about this later when I exhort you to get thee to a tape-measure-’round-the-neck lady down at the corset shop and get yerself measured, as I recently did my friend J. She emerges from the trenches with the news that it is not scary nor is it awful to get your bosom measured for new bras. Just as I suspected, J. went down two band sizes and up a cup size and furnished me with this inspiring report:

“One could make a movie in the bra fitting room. It is full of women who don’t feel quite right and these very sweet counselors who lovingly help them get themselves pulled back together. Or just a smooth-fitting bra, but the world seems right coming out of there.  The woman next to me had just had a mastectomy and was very vulnerable and her bra specialist told her that she also had her breasts removed after a lumpectomy.  Can you believe that?  All in the booth next to me.”

I can believe it. Do not underestimate the power of a well-fitting bra.

This illustration is by Juliette Borda.
She’s doing the artwork for my book and I have such a deep crush on her
paintings that I sometimes can’t look at them because I get overwhelmed
by their amazingness that I get vertigo. Or something akin to vertigo. I
get north by northwest. I get notorious.

How long, you have probably been asking yourself and your loved ones, will I continue to suffer abuse at the hands of my eyebrow aesthetician? It will not surprise you that I have been asking myself this very question. For maybe three long years.

This particular eyebrow aesthetician, whom I will call Meany McHates-Me-Pants, because she’s mean and she mc-hates-me, has a reputation in eyebrow circles as a cruel taskmaster. She’s something of a celebrity, which is saying very little (we’re talking the eyebrow crowd here) and quite a lot (we’re talking about a very serious if frivolously-agonized-over pair of hairstrips that can greatly improve/destroy one’s visage). She prides herself on being brusque and taking no guff from the likes of me. The likes of me have been known to commit such capital crimes of tweezing their own brows, going to other perfectly qualified aestheticians whose rates are not on par with a bank loan for a vacation home on the Riviera, or simply just existing. Which is what I have continued to do since last month, when Meany McHMP asked me “Who butchered these????” pointing her scissors accusingly and triumphantly at my poor brows as if just having discovered evidence of a second gunman on the grassy knoll.

Today, however, was beyond the pale. I have been so good for so long. I arrived early, sweaty and all gross from having taken my life in my hands on my bike in traffic, I waited a good five minutes past my appointment time while Meany McHMP leisurely sucked back a bottled cappuccino drink through a straw (somehow this made me feel a little sad for Meany…not even a real Starbux iced latte? A pre-packaged bottled coffee drink?).

My restraint with my brows over the past six weeks, however, did nothing to appease the wrath of Meany. She banged around the treatment room like a Meany in a china shop, she again pointed to the lacunae in my brows, she clucked and tsked and threw me on the table like a (sweaty) ragdoll, and cruelly plucked, waxed, trimmed and tsked her way through what I can only describe as a violent shaping of the brows. Then I paid her for it.

I deeply want eyebrows like Rachel Weisz’s.

It should also be noted that this is the same McHates-Me-Pants who then squealed with delight at the news that a wealthy client had forgotten to cancel $500 worth of treatments during the allotted cancellation period and would therefore be putting that $500 in Meany’s pocket for no work done. It was, needless to say, a sort of terrifying display of mercenary glee, and it did not–surprise, surprise!–make me feel any more charitable toward her. It made me feel filthy. And I was, as has already been established, already feeling not-so-very-fresh.

I have gone on record as not condoning abuse from people with whom one does business (let me now go on record as being against abuse in any and all forms). I am also not very down with overpaying for beauty treatments, especially when one is on a restricted budget. Yet something keeps me going back to Meany McHates-Me-Pants. I feel a bit like a battered woman. I feel like a kicked puppy who comes humbly back for a snuggle, only to be kicked again. Why do we suffer for beauty? Why do we put up with jackasses like McHMP when there are indeed kind, chatty, sympathetic aestheticians on the planet?

Confidential to you, prattling on about how you hate your job to your pal in the next stall of the ladies’ lav: people are listening.

In a meeting recently at my extremely glamourous freelance copywriting job, the executive in charge regaled a conference-tableful of colleagues with an overheard conversation between two new twentysomething hires in the bathroom. They had no idea she was in there (and probably wouldn’t have recognized her if they had). They proceeded to complain and gossip about how horrific their jobs were, how they were bored of the department, their responsibilities etc. etc.–all very jaded as if they’d been working at this place for thirty years and were just hanging in there for the pension and gold watch.

The executive, who has in fact been at the place for eons and takes her job quite seriously, found the girls somewhat droll, but it was clear she also found their audacity a bit galling. Witness the other young women in the room, who were clearly not amused that their new peers were denigrating the jobs where they’ve been toiling since college. The Girls in the Bathroom managed to insult their boss (the woman who’ll have final say on promotions, raises, recommendations, references, etc.) as well as the other, more tenured girls with whom they’ll work most closely and who, for better or worse, are the queen bees of the breakroom lunchtable.

Can we please agree it is never okay to gossip in the bathroom? Or within a mile of the workplace? Can we also agree that humility is your most valuable charm, especially when you’re in a new situation? I will keep you posted on which one of these misguided lasses starts an indiscreet workplace blog and gets herself in some serious hot water–it can’t be far off.

Anne Lamott is my short-term personal savior. She would probably object to being called anyone’s personal savior (saviour? saveur?) since she takes the term far more seriously than I do (I have been known to call Mark Kozelek, Rold Gold Honey Wheat pretzels, Alan Partridge and the narrator from Mating my personal saviors) but there it is. Late to the party, I just picked up last year’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith at the super-swell Books Inc. in Burlingame, California. Anne Lamott is from Marin, I was in the Bay Area, I felt karmically ebullient about my whole trip out West, it made sense. I feel that using terms like “karmically ebullient” this early on in my blogging endeavor, or ever, may be dangerous. I think I’ll let the wisdom of my actions be determined by karma.

OK, so what I really want to say is I’m jealous. Not of Anne Lamott, although if I worked hard I could probably find a way to morph my admiration of her into jealousy. I’ve done some thinking (and writing, and oh let’s face it therapy-izing) about benevolent versus malignant envy.

Benevolent=”I’m jealous of him, I’m inspired to work hard to be successful, to accomplish, to get the good things I deserve and am capable of achieving.”
Malignant=”I’m jealous of him, why doesn’t anything good ever happen to me, maybe I’ll go to bed for the rest of the day, maybe I’ll be petty and destructive and take other people’s success as a personal affront and proof that I’m a failure and will die penniless and alone.”

It is not a zero-sum game. One person’s good news does not mean the world is running low on goodness (as it is on gas–if one more newscaster tells me there is going to be “pain at the pump” this summer, well, I guess I find it sort of funny whenever I hear that expression, but after a weekend in California, I may have to admit there’s absolutely nothing hilarious about $3.50 a gallon. There is something hilarious about a rental car that is a Chevy Cobalt, however. I told the parking lot attendant I had been given the wrong car because my receipt said “cobalt” and the car I was driving was definitely white. Some remedial car model education ensued. Also driving a rented Chevy Cobalt down a street called “El Camino Real” is a teensy bit hilarious, right?). I have been taking Anne Lamott’s advice (see title above) for dealing with crappy feelings. I think I’m mostly on the benevolent end of things, but I do think I’ve been delivered a pantload of Other People’s Good News lately. Perhaps I’m being tested.

Secretly, I don’t think smart people are ever satisfied. I don’t think we ever lose our proclivity for envy, and I don’t think we’d be ambitious if we just blithely happy every time someone else got what we wanted.  I think, no matter how spiritually evolved I become, I will always feel a pang–an unproductive, self-defeating, slightly malicious pang–at others’ successes, then I will hopefully transcend the grossness of that and be happy for the people I love, be excited for all the good things yet to happen to me.

In the meantime, I’m reading Anne Lamott when I feel jealous. It’s working. It makes me want to go to church. It makes me want to be better. I highly recommend Plan B, I highly recommend AL’s other books, especially Bird by Bird.

PS I am wondering if it is enlightened or especially useful to recognize when someone might be jealous of you. I think it is, but what do you do with that knowledge? And does anyone feel like they have a life that others should envy? If I had any readers, I’d ask them to comment.

The question really is who doesn’t want soup. Because there is nothing less than a very good time to be had with a bowl of chicken soup that happens to have some meatballs involved that happen to made of chicken. It happens to also involve some vegetables and god what is soup without barley? Barley is like corduroy: irresistible texture. And it’s all in a can. Who came up with it? Who cares? It’s an everything soup. It’s bound to get people talking. Chickarina is virtually impossible not to love. Or hate. Or be casually indifferent to.