Author: Michelle

Rose Smith: Nice girls don’t let men kiss them until after they’re engaged. Men don’t want the bloom rubbed off.
Esther Smith: Personally, I think I have too much bloom. Maybe that’s the trouble with me.
–Meet Me In St. Louis

As a modern woman, the idea of a girl coming into bloom is off-putting. Typically it’s all about sexual maturity combined with external innocence and it’s just a little squicky. The theory,of course, being that men come into their prime and stay there for decades while young women bloom young and fade quickly. It’s an old fashioned idea. I don’t hear the term used anymore, but I’m not sure we’ve stopped using the theory. Models are “too old” when they’re barely in their twenties, but Brad Pitt and George Clooney are still considered among the sexiest men alive well into their forties.

I had much more in common with Esther than with Rose as a teen. An excess of bloom and no one to rub it off. I definitely was not waiting for a permanent relationship to kiss someone. I would have been more than willing to have some bloom erased. Where were all the horny young men that parents are always warning girls about? They must have been on another street. I hear Deer Horn Road was a seething cauldron of teen lust, but not my corner of Glacier Drive!

Maybe the street name had an ardor-cooling effect?

I’ve probably told enough tales of my teen years for someone to deduce that I was not exactly untouched, but at the time it felt like there was never anyone around once I really started getting my bloom on.

Luckily, I eventually found plenty of young men who were more than willing to help me rub off my excess bloom. It’s a wonder I have any left at all. Uh, do I? It’s probably not possible for a fifty year old to have bloom left, except artificially. I am sure I have many other fine qualities without a fine blooming whatever.

In literature, of course, a fine blooming young girl is often a target. Tess Durbeyfield being the perfect example of young woman as victim. In other books, events might cause a lovely young woman to loose her bloom prematurely and damage her prospects in life, like gentle Anne Elliot in Persuasion. She gets her bloom back, and her man. Yep. In that order. Tess…well…a couple of men rub all of her bloom way the hell off and she ends up at the gallows. I’m summarizing a bit. You should probably read the books.

My bloom isn’t ever coming back, I’m reconciled to it.

I still like boys to try and rub it off though.

Is that so wrong?

Why don’t you like me without making me try?
–Mika/Grace Kelly.

One of the benefits of increasing age is a decrease in caring about what people think. When I was a teenager, or in my early twenties, I tended to want people to like me. I needed them to like me. I worried about it if people didn’t like me. As I get older, that need has decreased. I still prefer it when people like me, but these days if people don’t like me I don’t worry too much about it. Some people don’t. Some people won’t, and it doesn’t matter what I do they never will.

What I find interesting is that a lot of people think I’m intimidating. Mostly people at work. Me. Intimidating. It’s hilarious. In most ways, I’m about as intimidating as a half-melted marshmallow.

If I am completely frank, though, I do have a little bit of an issue with people who are willfully ignorant. You know the ones–the ones who are completely unwilling to learn. They aren’t necessarily stupid. They just refuse to learn, because they think that other people should be responsible for them at all times. They are the ones who ask questions, don’t bother listening to the answers, and then ask the same question again. And again. And yet again. They keep asking until I tell them to write down what I say because I won’t be saying it again. Since they don’t listen, they don’t hear that tone in my voice. The tone that indicates that I am very serious.

Those people might think I am intimidating when they try to ask me the same question again after I’ve told them to write it down. They will find that I meant exactly what I said. If I have suggested to someone that they write something down, and they call me again, what they will probably hear is:
“What did I tell you when you asked me this yesterday?”

And then I wait for them to tell me.

The really odd thing is that usually what they say is something like “you told me that I need to do xyz and that I should write it down.”

When I ask why they are calling me if they know what they are supposed to do, they don’t usually have an answer. They mumble something about thanking me for my help, and get the hell off my phone.

I’m not unkind about it. I don’t raise my voice. I am very civil. I like to think that I am helping them learn to behave like adults by refusing to enable their infantile dependency. Can you be gentle, yet still intimidating? Maybe you can.

Why can’t I like them without making them try?
Because it’s not good for them. Or me.

See the lights of a neighbor’s house
Now she’s starting to rise
Take a minute to concentrate
And she opens up her eyes

The world was moving she was right there with it and she was
–Talking Heads/And She Was

When I was a very young teenager, I was convinced that we were all held to the Earth by invisible silver threads, and that if we tried both hard enough and not at all (simultaneously), we could break loose from the invisible threads and our souls would be free to leave our bodies and go wherever we wanted.

Sort of a self hypnosis trip into space.

Yes, I was a weird kid. I don’t remember where I got the idea. I’m sure I read it somewhere, or it’s possible that I extrapolated it from something I read. Or I suppose I could even have made it up. There’s no telling.

The end result is that for several months I spent a lot of time trying to leave my body. In the Summer I would spend hours laying in the grass in our front yard trying to leave my body by not trying to leave my body. It involved a lot of breathing deeply and not thinking. Concentrating but not. In retrospect, I was probably meditating.

RAJ would ride up the hill on his bike sometimes, sprawl out next to me and ask me what I was doing.

“Trying to leave my body.”

“Is it working?”
A hand would slide up my shirt and try to unhook my bra.

“I can feel that. I must still be here.” And I’d laugh and do something vaguely indecent. I was just as easily distracted then as I am now.

He never questioned the rationality of me trying to leave my body, but sometimes he’s ask why I wanted to. He is still like that. Curious and un- judgemental. Or maybe he was just more interested on getting in my blouse or pants than he was in my psychic experiments. He seemed genuinely interested in both. Granted, not equally interested.

I’ll have to ask him if he remembers.

These days I still occasionally wish I could leave my body, but I don’t spend any time working on it. Pity how a little thing like disbelief can ruin a fun activity. I wonder if it would still work even if I don’t actually believe it?

What’s the worst that could happen? I’d get to be still and relax.
If I’m lucky, some invisible silver threads that I don’t even believe in would snap and my soul (which I also don’t believe in) would get to go walkabout.

Win win.
I think I’ll give it another try.