Keeping Up with The Upkeep

That pink dog is mine bitch

I need that bitch's wardrobe

I've decided I'm really going to embrace life here and change my yok name for something more appropriate.  Something that really makes me blend in as a local.  I was thinking to go for Bat or Dafna.  Thoughts, anyone?  I definitely wasn't thinking Yael though.  It seems to be a far too popular name for all Australians who have emigrated to Israel.  Pretty much every foreign mother at the girls' kindergarten is called Yael.  The thing is, I have never met a Yael in Australia, so I am suss - they have definitely done the name switch-a-roo.  It means "mountain goat" though.....so, interesting choice. If it's all about meaning though, I would personally go for "Chemda" which means desirable and charming......need I say more?  But I have since decided that I'm in fact pushing the boundaries and going for Pinkus.  Unfortunately after I made my decision, my husband informed me that it was a man's name.  That's ok - I was planning on shortening it to Pinky anyhows.  What do you think?.  I could dress only in pink and eat only pink foods - get some kind of theme going on.  Become the Crazy Pink Lady of Tel Aviv.  But as I recently noticed it's been done before.  You just can't even be mental and original these days.  Again, sadly enough, when perusing the most unpopular names for girls - Pinky appeared loud and clear as one of the most hated names over the last 100 years.  Frankly I was a little crushed - Pinky is awesome.  Well it's certainly better than Icy which also made the cut.  So did Chestina and Buelah - which are not the greatest either.  Yes, as you can possibly tell, I have a little too much time on my hands with the girls in kindergarten.  I've got to get myself a hobby.  A job is out of the question - employers don't like pink much.

Now here's something less wholesome I can work with - bless that sweet flower Angelyne 

At least I know what to do with all that time after yesterday's conversation.  I was chatting with a man approaching his 60s, and he admitted to me that his entire life is pretty much devoted to self maintenance.  I was concerned, mainly for myself  - it only get's worse????  How much more fucking time do you have to spend ensuring that you don't descend into nothing but a pile of split ends, flaky skin and cellulite.  I know I've mentioned this issue on several occasions before - but what can I say?  I've been writing so much bullshit about nothing at all, that I'm bound to rotate the crap already once (or twice) discussed.  I have no apologies.  It's time to face facts - I'm the kind of person that retells the same tired jokes at social events with fingers crossed that the lucky soul who ended up chatting with good old "Pinky" hasn't heard my repertoire before.  It's touch and go - Do you trot out the old faithfuls that get a guaranteed laugh and take the risk that it's actually a virgin listener?  Or do you try out some of your latest raw material and pray that it's a painless journey to Laughsville?  It's unclear to me which is the bigger risk.  And with the blog and everything - I'm just running out of in-the-flesh tales to impress with.  Sometimes mid-story I notice my audience glancing over the top of my head for someone better to talk to.  Or another bored prick may actually feign a weak laugh and say, "Yeah, actually I read that one on your blog" - meaning basically "Shut Up Please".   But honestly, care factor = zip. It has to be, as it's only going to get worse.

Soooooooooo......thus it strikes me as ironic that the older you get, the more amount of time you put into self maintenance, yet the shitter you look.  What, for the love of god, is going on there?  The hours spent purely on basic maintenance is mind blowing. Plucking various bits of hair out of new zones of your face (the car rear vision mirror works best for this I find), waxing vast areas of your entire body -which is still excruciating and needs to be done all the time.  Unless of course you are one of those lasering people.  You still have to do it, but apparently less, but apparently it is much more painful so it's unclear on whether it is a better option to me.  I have an epilator piece of crap.  I'm unsure if it even works, but it hurts like fuck, makes my legs all spotty, and I have to do it all the god dam time.  Shits me (if you can't tell).

Not mine - yet pretty grossly familiar

Then there the bloody finger nails which if you start doing you have to keep up - and if you use that gel/shellac stuff you destroy your nails and then have to cover them with more crap.  I pulled some gel polish off my index finger a couple of months ago to reveal a giant distorted yellow claw.  It was hideous.  Thinking I was in some alternate reality nightmare where your body starts to rot before your eyes, I quickly peeled off all the rest in a panic and pretty much took large sections of the rest of my fingernails with it.  It was pretty uncool.  And just when you you think you're on top of your hands, you roll over in bed and open up a major artery on your husbands leg with a flick of your big toe(nail).  And while you're dealing with filing back that monstrosity, you realise that your feet and heels resemble those of a zombie that had been pounding the tarmac for a decade in search of brains.  And pedicures are never cheap.  And they are kind of scary.  I had one done 2 days ago here in Tel Aviv and they used a razor blade - a razor blade - on my flesh!  And then followed that up by sawing at me with some kind of mini angle grinder.  I was terrified.  But more terrified of the Russian woman operating the thing, so I chose to keep quiet.  What is it about older Russian women?  The young ones resemble angels, but when they get older they look like they want to stab you in the eye with a pen.

Then there's the hair.  Never has a collection of shit looking locks had so much bucks spent on it.  I am as grey as a geriatrics's pubes and it's not a good look. But the annoying thing about being old and haggard before my time, is that I have to get my hair dyed constantly.  The regrowth is relentless.  Doing it myself ends so badly on every occasion, so it's just not worth the savings.  If the non attendance to these issues stretches on longer than a month, it's just embarrassing for all involved.  People start asking me if I'm the girl's Nanna when I pick them up from school.  By the way I did that myself to one of the Yael's recently.  Jesus - bitch must have birthed that baby at 55.  So, eager to avoid more of those kind of awkward Nanna mistaking social interactions, I played eenie meenie meini mo and picked some salon down the road called Benjamin's early this week.

That's what I'm talking about

Benjamin was another old scary looking Russian, I think they all must be in the beauty industry, which is once again ironic.  Plus, I suspect Benjamin himself may have been a member of the Russian mafia judging by his clientele and his mates that dropped in for a a few cheek kisses.  His hands stunk of cigarettes and he got extremely offended when I didn't want a coffee.  He just kept offering, and saying "Why WHY???" until I finally accepted the chipped cup of weak Nescafe with somebody else's lipstick all over it.  I chose to keep quiet on the matter.  I am not ending up in a body bag over a cup of instant coffee.

Old Benji may not have been able to wash a cup, or make a caffeinated beverage to save himself, but actually he didn't do a bad job on my hair.  It was far, far better than one Tel Aviv hairdresser who actually gave me a bowl cut on top of shoulder length hair.  It was a confusing style - and one which has taken me 2 years to come out of - I'm almost there.  But, none of that compared to the Japanese dude who tried to bleach my hair and eyebrows in Tokyo at the end of 2006.  I ended up with spotty and stripy red and black hair, and fire engine red eyebrows.  Talk about lost in translation.  Maybe he thought I said "Make me look like a sick freak" when I actually said "I want something slick and chic".  It was the first and only time I actually burst into tears in the salon chair (usually I wait until I get home - like the unfortunate time I looked like lesbianic Danni Minogue circa 1989).  But apart from hair upkeep, which is costly and dangerous in non- English speaking countries, there's also moisturising your entire body daily so it doesn't go scaly, hair styling, trying to eat healthy nothing so you don't become a blimp, constant exercising or feeling guilty because you're not exercising, getting at least 8 hours of sleep, drinking 2 litres of water, constantly pissing from drinking 2 litres of water, applying 3 different types of face cream and sunscreen, and then make-up on top of that until your entire face is 2cm thicker than it's true size.  Top it off with selecting some sort of half decent outfit amongst  mountains of crappy, out of dated badly fitting junk, and you realise that the entire day has passed and it's time to put your pyjamas back on on go back to bed.

Oh Danni, Danni, Danni

I'm exhausted just thinking about this.  And I haven't even ventured into the zone of investing much more money and time on my appearance.  Part of me really wants to try Botox, but I just can't bear the thought of yet another thing I have to maintain.  I'd have to trade it in for something else - like brushing my teeth - and lord knows, we all hate gingivitis.  I did however get a laser job on the unfortunate pigmentation residue that arrived during pregnancy, and hung around for a long time after the melon heads were born.  But that was a once off.  I'm not sure if it was meant to be so, but I can't go back, I just can't.  That procedure is the worst.  So so bad.  It is excruciatingly painful.  Some people say it's like someone flicking you with an rubber band.  I would agree - but only if that rubber band is covered in red hot needles and they are flicking it straight into an open infected sore.  The smell isn't good either.  I'm not sure if it was my actual flesh or the tiny facial hairs that were smouldering - but let me tell you, that aroma does not fade from the sensory memory in a hurry. My face was so red and burning that I looked like I had taken my last vacation to the surface of the sun.  I then had dark brown scabs on my face for 10 days.  Pretty as a picture.  A picture of someone with a combination of leprosy and the bubonic plague however.   It eventually worked though.  But then again, it would fucking want to.

 So much could be done with that glorious mane of hair

And it's not easy for men these days either.  Times have changed - I was next to a man having a pedicure the other day.  Once I would have thought "You bloody Sissy - why don't you just go home and watch Beaches and have a little cry when Barbara Hershey snuffs it?" But I was actually considering asking him to have a word to my husband and recommending his favourite treatment.  Nowadays, the man maintenance goes way beyond twice weekly shaving, coating yourself in Old Spice, and gargling Listerine when you can't be arsed brushing your teeth.  It all about the upkeep dudes.  This can mean slapping on a red clay face pack while you watch an episode of Girls with your flatmates and drink some kind of green sludge designed to help you do a hemorrhoid-free bog.  Today I saw some dude asleep on a park bench.  He was all hairy and wearing rags, covered in his own shit.  I knew at once what was going on here.  Once he discovered all his mates were getting their balls and crack waxed he couldn't take it anymore.  He just surrendered to the overwhelming forces of nature and let the filth take over.  When faced with the choice between waxing his bum and being a bum, he went with the latter.  It's an understandable decision.

This definitely shouldn't be done with that glorious mass of Mel Gibson looking hair

Nor should this

And most definitely not this

The cuteness almost sickens

Kids have got it easy.  They don't even have to run a comb through their locks to look adorable. I've written an explicit description about the time my kids decorated their bedroom and bodies in their own feces.  They still looked cute.  They are possibly the only humans who could pull off the "I'm covered in my own shit" look and work it.  Thank goodness my bench snoozing homeless friend had no knowledge of this fact.  That fashion statement just wasn't happening for him, and to know others could get away with it would have been the final straw. Talking of covering your body in crap, my daughter wore a large leopard print scarf on her head the other day.  She was Ima Shabbat at her kindergarten - it wasn't a fashion choice.  But everyone was taking photos of her saying how gorgeous she looked.  I attempted to cover up my greys with a head scarf last week and my husband asked what happened to my forehead.  Granted, it is pretty small at the best of times.  I shouldn't wear head ornaments.  Nor should Lara Bingle (as evidenced below).  But back to Cordi as Ima Shabbat (Mother of The Sabbath).  It was so incredibly sweet that I got all emotional and the tears were welling - almost as much as when "Wind Beneath My Wings" broke out just as Bette Midler was reminiscing about her best chum, and possibly regretting those years when their friendship waned for just a while.  Although that fall-out could have been avoided with honest communication, and C.C Bloom has only herself to blame....

I just don't like it Lara

Stupid

Unnecessary

Did she make this one herself?

GO Ima Shabbat - hand out that wine grape juice!

Anyway, she took her staring role so seriously (Cordi not Bette....or Lara for that matter) - that was the cutest thing.  And was incredibly excited about her special duties.  She handed out all the "wine" to her little class chums and bread too.  She tried to sing-a-long with all the others to the songs, but seeing as it was all new for her (and Valli), so she couldn't quite manage to keep pace.  But the look on her face was amazing.  A sort of happy contentment - like she was exactly where she wanted to be. How many of us ever truly feel like that?  I know I rarely do, and especially not when my legs are spread and a stranger is looking into places my mother hasn't dared to look since I was about 5,  and they're asking me if I want the "Ring of Fire" - and that is a direct quote.   I wonder how long it will be before I can hold off my two little lambs from being overwhelmed by the beauty industry that pounds all our brains at any given opportunity.  I try to shelter them from seeing me smother myself in this crap and that, but seeing as it's full time occupation, it's kind of a challenge.  They are already obsessed with outfits, and Valli has been wearing my heels since she was 1.  But innocence lost at a future date or not, right now they are sweetly happy about going to school, making friends, and wearing headscarves on a Friday.

Bring on the challah Cordi

In fact they like it so much there, that we have decided to let them stay on longer at school in the afternoons like most of their classmates.  Now there's something to celebrate.  No offence kids, but we have seriously got a lot to take care off this week.  We have to buy, and transport an entire house of junk (read furniture and personal belongings) into our new apartment.  Plus the brows are unruly again.  It's going to be an exhausting week.......