No dorm, no roommates -- my own place.

So I'm talking on the phone with my younger sister (which we both have to schedule, because I HATE THE PHONE and it's really hard to make myself call someone), and she's telling me about the new place she lives, which is sort of a dorm-like building for grown-ups, subsidized by her job teaching a foreign language at a small private high school -- it's a great setup for her because although there are no private bathrooms or kitchens (all facilities are shared), she's single and doesn't need much space, plus it's waaaaaay below market rent in NYC, and an easy commute to her job, and her BFF lives in the same complex.

And then she tells me that one thing she loves about it is that "you never get lonely -- there are always people around, you can always find someone to hang out with any time of day or night."

The hem on my brain fell out, y'all. "There are always people around" is one of the pillars of the room in hell in which I will end up spending eternity. It's why I hated dorm life by the end (as exciting as I found it in the beginning), and why if I were a single person, there is almost literally nothing I wouldn't do to have MY. OWN. PLACE. all to myself. I believe Mr. Gleemonex feels the same way, which is one of the many reasons we are sofa king awesome together.

But like I remember that my sister used to dread summers and look forward to going back to school in the fall -- she wanted her friends around her! Every day! On the regular! Me, I was so glad to be alone (in between shrieking excursions to the mall or the movies or swimming with mine). I love my extended family, I love my friends -- I just ... I can't have them in my LIVING SPACE, you dig?

And she's known in the darkest clubs for pushing ahead of the dames

Apropos of my most recent post, this is the only shirt I'm gonna wear from now on, and I mean every single day and night, forever and ever and ever because I love it SO HARD:

Hat tip to Adrien at the forever-wonderful Looks Good From the Back for finding it -- they do good work over there, and not just on the days they post pics of Idris Elba. Although that is really nice, when they do that; it's a public service provided at no cost to the viewer, like that bat-signal thing the networks run at noon on Tuesdays to make sure you know when we are or are not in a nuclear war.

The 25th Hour, starring Ned and Maude Flanders

MY BOOKS ARE OUT OF BOOK JAIL!!!

I had a happy day a couple of months ago, organizing them. I don't alphabetize, I don't have a real system, but I know the kind of things I want next to each other. Here are a couple of pics of some of the subsections: 

THE APOCALYPSE/DYSTOPIAN/GENERALLY FUCKED-UP SECTION

I mean, Jesus -- global thermonuclear war, 9/11, serial killers, religious fanatics, fucking Tiger Eyes ...

THE NEW YORK SECTION

There's other NY stuff in the Biography and Food/Cooking sections. This ain't all, y'all. 

THE SOMEBODY WENT TO SCHOOLY-SCHOOL, DIDN'T THEY? SECTION

These are on a wayback shelf, I promise. Only an insufferable twat would put this stuff where it would be easily accessible. 

A SHELF OF SOME OF THE GLEEMONEX HOUSEHOLD FAVORITES

Just realized it's missing both To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice;  those are on my bedside table. Must get extras for public shelf, here. 

It's ok. Last year I got saved so I could go on the ski trip.

Here Is A Thing Which You Probably Did Not Know About Me, and Which Will Likely Make You Laugh the Freckles Right Off Your Face If You Also Know Me IRL

I was in the church choir for a not-small unit of time, back in the seventh and eighth grades.

(Might've been sixth-seventh? My mind is like swiss cheez.) ANYway. It wasn't my fault -- me the non-singer with the weak pipes who had a rabid case of performance anxiety despite being a loudmouth in general (maybe I thought nobody was listening?). It was the fault of a person who ... well, I don't know if you could properly call this person a friend; more like -- a person who was in the same class as me, and hung out with me, and did all the usual friend-y shit with me, but who mostly used me as a prop, an extra, in her life. And SHE wanted -- for reasons ever opaque to me -- to be in the church choir. She press-ganged me into doing it with her; the only thing I remember besides her extreme persuasiveness in the matter was that I did like the notion that I'd be seen as a super-extra-Christian if I did it. So.

We auditioned for the music director -- it was an all-volunteer thing, they took all comers; he just needed to see which section to put us in. We were placed, and told to show up Wednesdays at 6:00 or whatever for rehearsal, and 15 minutes early for church on Sundays for a refresher and to get our robes and whatnot. I must say, I adored being welcomed as a "fresh new young voice" by the real choristers, and treated like the Exemplary Christian Teen -- that precise stripe of vanity, rather than a genuine Love Of The Lord or desire to Know His Grace or whatever -- drove about 97% of my churchin' overall. (Sorry, Ma. Truth.)

And we ... well, we did about 60 percent of what was asked. We often showed up to rehearsals, sometimes even on time. We mostly sang what was in the hymnal. We sat quietly during the sermon and whatnot, and you probably couldn't even tell from the pews that we were playing hangman with golf pencils on the backs of our programs the entire time.

Friend-ish Person X got bored of whatever reason she'd had for doing this in the first place and bailed after a few months; I kept going for awhile longer, but then sort of drifted off and finally officially quit when I got a paying gig keeping the church nursery during services instead. And thus ended my gospel singing career.

That, and: Don't work the perfume counter at Horne's department store if you don't want to end up pimped out at One-Eyed Jack's.

Two of the Many Things Teenage Me Actually Learned from Twin Peaks

1) Older people -- like, way over 22 -- could and did have sex. Even with each other. I realize this makes me sound like an idiot, but I was a very sheltered kid with typical unexamined childish ideas about sexuality, such as that, for example, one's parents had had sex exactly the same number of times as the number of children they produced together, and no longer had sexual thoughts, much less acted on them. But here were Ben Horne and Catherine Martell, gettin' it on all afternoon; here were Norma Jennings and Ed Hurley, unable to keep their hands off of each other; here were Donna's parents clearly still sexual even through they were old and the mom was in a wheelchair (that actress, btw? is Zooey Deschanel's mom). MIND BLOWN. Worlds expanding.

2) Even pretty people can be in abusive relationships. Again: Idiot. But I was accustomed, by some cultural osmosis or other, to domestic violence being seen as sort of a trailer-park thing that happened to the ugly and generally unfortunate. Twin Peaks went right for it, though -- Donna's BF at the beginning of the show (lovely young Donna, whose family life is as warm and supportive and loving as TV families ever get) is a major dick who orders her around and even lays hands on her (though he doesn't hit her), and then of course you see Shelly Johnson's incredibly awful marriage and home life -- they never go into it exactly how she hooked up with Leo, but she's this breathtakingly beautiful, capable girl who no doubt married a guy she thought was good-looking and had money, and then some months or years later, you end up cowering in his unfinished house while he prepares to beat the shit out of you with a piece of soap stuffed into the toe of a tube sock.

Also I almost never pass a day without at least one Mitch Hedberg assay flickering across the old brain pan.

Two Unrelated Things

1) It is a rare day that I do not think to myself, "Settle down, Beavis!" Some days I say it out loud, but about 93 percent of the time it stays in my head.

2) When *I* go to BevMo, I come back with the thing or things which I intended to buy there (e.g. a handle of Stolichnaya, an xmas-gift-level bottle of sipping tequila, a sixer of wine for a party, what have you). But when *Mr. Gleemonex* goes there to pick up some Glenlivet, which for some reason has turned both rare and expensive around here (?huh?), he comes back with three bottles of Glenlivet, a twelver of Spaten, a bottle of sake (Wandering Poet label -- which of course, dear Twelve, made me think of the Troubador -- wonder how many times he's been nut-punched over these many years?), some Knob Creek, and a plastic "travel flask." He ... already has a very nice leather-bound flask. So ... I don't know. I like all this stuff, but -- for why is it here?

A-W-E! S-O-M-E! We're awesome! We're awesome! Like to-tal-ly!

So after Kid Gleemonex's first day of first grade yesterday (she LOVED it and is thrilled to death with her classroom, her teacher, and the one friend from last year who's in the same class, yaaaaaaaaaay!), we are driving past her future high school on the way to get some ice cream for a first-day treat. There's a large knot of San Dimas High School cheerleaders ambling up the road, in uniform (which of course is how we know what their deal is). Kid Gleemonex has a slight interest in cheerleaders, I think because she likes costumes. She says to me, "I think those are cheerleaders."

I say, "Yeah, looks like it."

She says, "Huh." Considering. "Were you a cheerleader?"

"Noooooo! My mom and sister were, though. I never wanted to -- well, no, in 6th grade, I tried out for 7th grade cheerleader [ten-minute digression on tryouts, which are like auditions, but in front of the whole school in this case] -- anyway, I tried out, mostly because everybody else seemed to be doing it, and then I didn't make the team, and I was disappointed for like that one day, but then after I was SO GLAD I didn't -- my gosh, it takes up SO MUCH TIME. And besides, it's -- at least these days, it's a legit sport, it's very very athletic, but I still don't like that it's mostly girls cheering on a bunch of boys who actually play the sports."

Kid G. nods, thoughtful. (The traffic is horrendous, we've gone like a hundred yards in 15 minutes, remind me never to go past a high school at 3:30 in the p.m.)

"I don't want to do it, either."

Me, doing what I always do, qualifying and overexplaining everything, in this instance mostly because I fear her, ten years from now, doing a thing I loathe just to rebel against me: "Well -- you know, if it's something you really, really want to do when you're older, we'll talk about it then ..."

Definitively: "No, I don't want to. It's OK."

That's my girl, y'all. That's my girl.

At the beach, at the beach, it's a great day under the sun

So there was this pair of gal pals on the beach, ladies in their ... probably mid-60s, and not the yoga-at-sunrise, charity-board-meeting-at-one, cocktails-at-Muffy-and-Biff's type of mid-60s; regular ladies, like your mom or mine, with all the original physical equipment and whatnot. They were both out and about in fun swimsuits -- I particularly liked Madge's screamin-orange one-piece with the creative cutouts, but Debbie's blue swirly thing was great too. Neither one wore those apologetic, don't-look-at-me old-lady dark suits. And these gals were having FUN, man -- Debbie flat-out lied to Madge to get her into the water to snorkel ("Oh, it's warmer than bathwater -- just come ON!") and Madge yelled at Debbie ("Debbie! You liar! You know I can't stand it when it's cold!" "I know, that's why I said that!" [ancient-pals laughter]) and they both enjoyed some cocktails in plastic cups from the beach club, soaked up the sun, went into the water whenever they felt like it (it WAS warm and lovely, I must say; Madge is even more of a wuss than I am, w/r/t water temp, and that's saying something), just generally had a blast. THAT is the kind of older lady I want to be.

Oh, yew've had PLENNY a honeymoons -- ya have one every time ya meet a boy!

Men I Have, at Various Points of My Life, Been Certain I Would Marry: A Partial List

--Kevin Bacon (1984-85)
--Matthew Sweet (1990-93)
--Andre Agassi (1988-91)
--Charlie Sheen (1989-92)
--Christian Slater (1989-91*)
--Michael Jackson (1983-86)
--George Harrison (1987-89)
--David Bowie (1986-88)
--this guy Tim that was my mom's friend and almost certainly gay as a tangerine (1980-90)

-----------------------------------------
*Entry appears solely because of stuff people wrote in my yearbooks. I do not remember feeling this way about him at all. But apparently I did, for awhile? 

It's like our Sergeant said before one trip into the jungle: "MEN! Fifty of ya are leavin on a mission. Twenty-five of ya ain't comin back."

38/40

Last Days of School, Ranked From Most Awesomest to Worst Crappiest

3rd grade: Party at Miss B.'s actual house! Rolling down that crazy-steep sloped lawn! Lemonaaade!
11th grade: We are officially the kings of the world! SENIORS 1992!!!! Also I leave for D.C. in a few days to spend the summer as a Congressional Page, so hand me a wine cooler and let's tear this place UP!
8th grade: I'm in Washington, D.C., gettin' my National Spelling Bee on. Fuck yeah! Also: I never have to play that fucking flute again, boyeeeeee! I'm free!
4th grade: Feels like summer, the circus is in town, and we have a trampoline at my house!
10th grade: No more geometry! Pile in my car, we're gonna drive around this town till the gas runs out, y'all!
1st grade: Popsicles and air-conditioning over at our grandmother's house! Yay!
2nd grade: Everything is awesome!
9th grade: Woo hoooooo! Only one more summer without a car! Quick, get your sister to drive us to the mall so we can see Major League again (and again, and again).
5th grade: Ucch. This was a weird year, socially, and a relatively tough one, academically (particularly math-wise -- I've begun to struggle). Glad it's done.
12th grade: Zinging back and forth between euphoria, cheap nostalgia, dramatic sentiment, terror, elation, and super-weirdness, everything feels Important and both too big and too small all at once.
7th grade: Oh thank CHRIST this year is over.
6th grade: Holy shit we have to hide! We have to hide from the 7th and 8th graders! They're gonna get us with shaving cream and flour! Run, goddammit, RUN!

My preferred flavor at this time was still Red Sangria. I hadn't puked hard enough from it yet to be put off it. O those golden years.

32/40

So this is the next year, 1992, my senior year at Cowburg High School. This time, a group of us rented a room at the Sandbagger (not its real name), for years the unofficial official after-party venue just a few miles from the TacoJocko prom site. We used my friend D's mom's credit card, with her knowledge and permission; D was a junior, and her mom was kind of out of the loop on this sort of thing, so she was easier to cajole than, say, my own mom, whom NO ONE ever successfully managed to put ANYTHING over on (my mom is and was a fucking Ninja Master at ferreting out sneaky teenage ratfuckery).

ANyway. So we drove ourselves, like six to a car (as you did in those days), did all of our getting-ready at the Sandbagger, had a lovely prom, then went back to the motel for the mayhem. And my god, mayhem it was. There was pool furniture in the indoor pool, Funyuns ground into the carpet, Bud Light and Bartles & Jaymes bottles all over the fucking place, a mix of kids from our school still in promwear, changed into after-prom slutwear, already in pajamas, etc., and kids from all over the county who were invited to the after-party -- and not a person over 21 in the whole goddamn place. I can't imagine what the hotel booking office thought was going on -- our school did this every year. Nobody even called the police, that I'm aware of, which is the most amazing part of this whole stupid story. It was the funnest, except for I kept running into my ex-BF and his new GF and it made me sad so I just drank more (good plan!). Next morning was all about the Funyun cleanup, finding people's fancy prom undergarments (there were at least two lacy bras in the pool), fighting nausea and headaches, finding someplace besides your own room's trash cans to stash the empties, and trying to talk D down off the ledge of a freakout over her mom's Amex getting charged for the "damages" (Funyuns. Those fucking things are from the DEVIL.).

And but so here's me, antes de la fiesta. Woooooooooooo!

Look away, Mr. Gleemonex. Just ... look away. You don't wanna see this.

31/40

So yesterday, because I am a grown-ass woman who can eat whatever I want, I had for my lunch a room-temperature (and thus properly-textured) half-round of the Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, which is the most delicious cheese in the entire universe. I smeared big honkin' scoops of it on these mini croccanti crackers from Whole Foods (which by the bye is where I got the cheese, I could crawl into that cheese case and live the rest of my life in it quite happily), and in between I ate slices of the most delicious honeycrisp apple for a palate cleanser plus also it (the apple) was, as I said, delicious, and alongside it all I drank two cups of fantastic super-dark extra-strong coffee with all of the sugars and all of the half-and-halfs. It was wonderful, and I was not hungry again until my actual dinnertime -- which is to say that, lunchwise, though probably not snackwise on account of logistics, also it beats eating Pirate's Booty straight out the bag over the sink. I'd sell a patella for a round of that fucking Mt. Tam. Who needs a patella, really? Just cut an air-hockey puck to the right size and stitch it up.

So many decisions: Real flower or artificial? Long or extra-long streamers? Lights or no lights? Over-the-shoulder or traditional corsage style?

30/40

I can't remember why this is in black-and-white; color would have revealed the full, garish spectacle of this item pinned to my clothing so much better. It's a mum, which is a Thing in Texass for the Homecoming football game. The town's young men go to one of the florists, fill out a lengthy order form, and pay all their Pizza Hut moneys for these monstrosities, which they then give to their girlfriends. It's not a casual undertaking; it's for Serious Couples only. And of course, the size and weight of your mum is indicative of your boyfriend's love for you (just like with engagement rings!). The only year I actually had a boyfriend at Homecoming was the fall of my senior year. I thought mums were hilaaaaaarious, and I thought he did too, but apparently he felt obligated to get me one, and make it big (I realized much later that this situation might have been engineered entirely via the ratfuckery of this one alleged friend of mine, who went with my boyfriend to order the fucking thing, but alas). I felt like a prize heifer taking a stroll down the midway with her minder, the whole time we were at the game. And when the boyfriend broke up with me a few weeks later, in a fit of teenage revenge-thirst I chucked it out into the very busy road in front of my house, where it met the fate of several of our favorite household pets over the years (but in a funny and satisfying way, instead of gruesome and sad, eh wot).

change the world! hahahahahaaa oh shit lollllllll

29/40

Stolen from -- I mean, inspired by -- the brilliant Me At 13: This is the room, c. 1989, of someone who might be a bit confused about things, the room of a person who is still at the stage of accumulating all of the influences and has yet to even begin the process of culling, of figuring out who she really is and swimming up out of the enormous pile of Maybe I Am.

And also: LAMBORGHINI DIABLO.

It was while we were putting up the decorations for this that Berwie explained to me that the Extreme song "More Than Words" was about BJs.

26/40

Y'all, I'm pretty sure you think you had a prom, but if you look at this, you'll understand: *I* had a prom.

This is the bunch I went with to the junior prom. We had one of the moms* drive us to Ft. Worth in her minivan, and then had pooled our babysitting/Dairy Queen cash to hire a limo to take us from our motel rooms to the event site (a "ballroom" at Tarrant County Junior College, aka TacoJocko). The theme, which was selected by me and pretty much strong-armed into place over any thoughts anyone else might have had in the selection process, as was my wont in those days: City Lights. The dress I wore** is one of the most awesome garments I have ever known, including the 24 years since this photo was taken. Lab Partner and Berwie would have and should have been in this pic, but they went separately with a wild crew from a neighboring town (only juniors and seniors from our school were allowed to attend, so the boys they brought spent the actual prom time getting shitcanned at the Sandbagger, if I recall correctly). Ahh, kids. Good times.

--------------------------------------------
* I think it was the blonde girl right next to me in purple, whose mom, a couple of months prior, also let a bunch of us drive that minivan, alone, the TEN HOURS overland to Lubbock to the state finals basketball tournament to watch our HS boys' varsity team get fucking crushed by a real HS boys' basketball team. 
**It was a clingy black sequined sheath with spaghetti straps, under a 3-foot-long black fringe that hung from the very top. Hard to describe, but OH I LOVED IT. 

I am pretty sure we're discussing who's going to the Bon Jovi concert.

21/40

So, there's a lot going on in this casual snapshot of the gals of the class of 1992 lounging about by their lockers before school on a ... spring? day of ... 1989? Possibly fall '88? Anyway. That's me, second from left, on just about the worst hair day of my high school career. And I'm not kidding about the Bon Jovi concert. That really was what we were probably babbling about.

"It was just as if everyone had swelled."

20/40

Your Aging Body at Forty: An Occupant's Manual

--If you are going to drink alcohol, then you need to drink a lot of water. Yes, it's going to make you have to go to the can like five hundred times, but trust me, it's the only way to get ahead of hangovers now. Pound a glass of water for every two beers. It won't fix how tired you'll be tomorrow, but come sunrise, it'll keep your brain relatively well-tethered to its moorings inside your skull instead of banging around in there like monkeys in an Ebola ward whose keeper has already crashed and bled out.

--Plan to get those wee patches of eensy little red spidery old-lady veins lasered in the fall or winter. It's painless and relatively inexpensive, but the bruising is comically vivid and surprisingly long-lasting, and shorts are really out of the question for a fairly long time.

--Spend money on the right undergarments. Athletic bras & underwears, everyday pantalones, bras that fit right and make your chestal region comfortable and happy-looking. Don't settle for ill-fitting crap anymore; bodily youth and elasticity can no longer make up the difference, and besides, you're old enough to do this for yourself now.

--Rejoice at how much easier it is to accept your own body than it was when you were younger. We all have our issues -- some new, some lifelong -- but it is now time to revel in the feeling that most of the issues you have, you can be all " ... [sigh] ... oh well," (or "Shit yeah, lasers for my birthday present to meeee!") instead of "OHMAHGAAAAH I HATETHISSOMUCH FFFFFFFFFFFFFF GODDAMMIT!!!" It's nice, isn't it?

"Don't ever call me a have-not."

19/40

So among the things I learned in college is that there is, in fact, an us and a them. I am speaking specifically of the us/them of the moneyed and the non-moneyed.

Growing up, I thought that rich people just ... had more money than my family did. I had rich cousins (oil company); we happily took their hand-me-downs, which since they came from Neiman-Marcus usually and in great quantity, were awesome, and swam in their pool all summer long. There was the "Smith" family, whose daughter was in my class and whom I was pretty tight with, off and on, throughout school; they owned a few dozen fast-food restaurants, and therefore had a huge property north of town with what I now recognize as stupid new-money Texas kind of gewgaws on it like semi-exotic animals (ostriches, emus, a kangaroo), a video game room with full-size game parlor stand-up consoles (I remember Galaga, Q-Bert and a Ms. Pac-Man, but there were at least 8 in there),  fugly gold-plated fixtures in all the bathrooms, etc. This family is responsible for a lot of my Rich Knowledge, e.g. how to ski (they took five of us girls to New Mexico on a private jet in fifth grade, and paid for ski rentals and a week of private lessons) and what the inside of Dallas' Petroleum Club looks like.

But until college -- specifically, Columbia, an Ivy which is in the middle of New York Fucking City -- I didn't really get that there were entire WORLDS of money and family and privilege that I would never ever be a part of. I recall this one party, about two weeks into freshman year, at which things became crystal clear. My friend Tom and I decided to go to a "frat" party at this coed place -- St. Someonescock, I think, which was open to new membership -- for the free booze (rumored to be champagne). Tom is a middle-class Korean-American kid from suburban New Jersey; I am a scholarship hick from Hickburg. We dress up -- him in whatever he wore to, like, bar mitzvahs and such, me in a party dress of some sort from Dillards -- and hit the scene. It's slightly off-campus, like two blocks over, near the river, and once we find it, there is in fact Champagne (real stuff, Franch), which we drink some of, quickly, before someone detects a disturbance in the Force and comes to take it out of our rough, common hands. We never even had to speak the words aloud -- we both just somehow came to know that these were not our people, nor were we theirs. These kids -- Christ, they looked like adults, and had these beautiful well-made understated clothes on, with perfect imperfect hair, and the loveliest teeth and shoes -- they had great manners, they welcomed us warmly, they invited us to look around, asked us what we were studying and where we'd gone to school and so forth, and I can't speak for Tom's internal process, but I was inwardly panicking and feeling like a giant, giant asshole, ever larger, hicky-er and poorer by the moment. You can't say "Cowburg High School, in Cowburg, Texass" in response to "Where did you go to school?" when it comes out of that kind of person's mouth, you know? It was in those moments, that shattering half-hour, that I began to understand what lay behind a question like that, and why someone would ask it, and how an event like this, which was technically "open" because they wanted to maintain good standing with the college, was in reality as closed a circle as ever there could be in human interaction. It was deeply weird and unnerving -- not shaming, I've never been all that shame-able in terms of, like, one's story of origin -- but a real wowzer of an eye-opener, the type we experience maybe a handful of times in life.

If it happened today -- and various loops of my personal social Venn diagrammatics could put me in a place like that again, theoretically -- I'd be fine with it. I understand that our worlds are different, and that's all right, which I think is a great boon of my age and experience. So, long way of saying: Being 40 is not a bad thing.

You can wear my clothes!

18/40

So the actual date is past, I am 40 now, and it is: Completely OK. I always have liked the round numbers better than the nines, and the sevens better than the fives. In fact, here are some of my favorite age numbers, JUST as numbers, regardless of the state of my or anyone else's life at that time: 33, 17, 42, 6, 54, 92, 71, 88, 40, 32, 77, 27, 60, 104.

Anyway. I had a great, great, GREAT party (one of our band weekends, a one-nighter actually, with Mr. Gleemonex and a small handful of our oldest, dearest friends and all of our kids around somewhere, mostly staring at Apple devices; early-90s theme for costumes and setlist), was not dreadfully hung over the next day (just tired, since we rocked until almost 2:30 a.m.), and have spent a whole lot of time appreciating just how full and blessed my life really is and how undeservedly but terrifically lucky I am. This is a pretty goddamn good way to enter one's fifth decade on planet Earth, and I am so, so grateful for it all.

Well, get on with it, motherf*****!

16/40

Another thing is, you are generally way past the years of infatuation with what my Analysis of Film Language professor James Schamus once called the "piece-of-chicken teenage hunk" -- although of course as a Grown-Ass Woman you will forever own your right to ogle inappropriately-aged youthful beauty, it's just that the really young ones look like unformed little baby proto-human otters or something, and furthermore unlike what I gather 40-year-old men get out of ogling very very young women, a 40-year-old woman ogling a very very young man would probably just ... feel old by comparison. Anyway, that's my reaction -- you go right ahead being you, as ever, dig?

And but so, my point: You've moved on, crushwise, and you can have all of the feelings about Idris Elba, instead.