I Need a Lifeguard Everywhere but the Pool

by Lisa Scottoline

  The stage captured in this passport photo can best be described as Gene Wilder.

  I could only go up from here.

  I’m not particularly photogenic to begin with, but I seem to strike out with every government ID.

  Just once, I’d like to have a bar bouncer look at my ID without giving me that look, a disbelieving frown, like, really?

  Yes, really, it’s me, okay? Makeup is magic.

  I watch YouTube makeup tutorials to help me fall asleep. You don’t know contouring until you watch a drag queen do it.

  The only compliment I’ve ever gotten on my license was a long-past one, when the woman who took it at the DMV handed it to me, and said, “You’ve got a face for the soaps.”

  Looking like a D-list daytime TV actress was my peak.

  Unless she meant regular soap.

  We’re spoiled now with so many photo-filtering apps. Blemishes and lines get smoothed out, color adjusted, add a flower crown for panache.

  I haven’t had to post a photo of what I actually look like in some time.

  All ID photos use the Mug-shot filter.

  Not to be confused with the equally horrifying, Ladies Room at Work and Bathing Suit Dressing Room filters.

  Around the same time I realized I needed to renew my passport, the late, great Prince came out with his, which looked like an Annie Leibovitz portrait.

  I felt inspired—this was my year to step it up.

  Passports are valid for ten years. This photo is going to stick with me for a while.

  I don’t want to pull my passport out for my romantic honeymoon and have my new husband give me the bar bouncer look:

  Really?

  Yes, really, ’til death do us part, REALLY.

  The Department of State doesn’t make it easy on you. They have weird new rules for passport photos, like you can’t smile with teeth.

  Although they have a point; my resting bitch face is the most true-to-life.

  They also suggest that you not wear your glasses to avoid your photo being rejected.

  This might make me look better in my photo.

  Customs agents don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.

  But as luck would have it, when the day came for me to have my new passport photo taken at the local shipping center, I was suffering from the worst winter cold I’d had all year. My nose was cherry red, my face splotchy, my eyes watery.

  Am I doomed to look like a drunk in every form of government ID?

  But I couldn’t delay if I wanted my new passport to arrive in time for my trip. So I used every makeup trick I knew to make myself look less like an extra on The Walking Dead.

  Somehow, I made it to the store without having to blow my nose and wipe off my pancake makeup.

  Actually, I do know how—I stuffed tissues up my nose like a prizefighter and covered my face with a scarf, so I wouldn’t scare the neighborhood kids.

  When I told the clerk I needed a passport photo taken, I thought they would take me in a little room. Instead, he just came out from behind the front counter with a bulky old digital camera, and had me stand against the wall of pens and pencils for sale, facing everyone else in line.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Yeah, oh wait—” He pulled a dingy, white projection screen down from the ceiling behind me to serve as backdrop. “Ready?”

  I gave a final sniffle before closing my mouth and trying to think neutral-yet-smoldering thoughts.

  Mona Lisa Blue Steel.

  One second later: “Okay,” he said.

  “That’s it?”

  He nodded and showed me the back of the digital camera, where I saw a brief flash of my tiny image. “Good?”

  It wasn’t the best photo of me, but it wasn’t the worst. No one is ever going to look at an ID photo and be wowed. If it gets me across the border, that’s good enough. I just wanted to blow my nose.

  “It’ll do.”

  I waited at the counter while he went to print two copies of the standard-issue two-inch-square photos.

  The clerk reappeared. “That’ll be twenty-four dollars.”

  “For two little photos?” Finally, it was my turn to shoot the look: “Really?”

  iPhonatic

  Lisa

  William Wordsworth said the world is too much with us.

  I bet he was talking about his smartphone.

  Because I have an iPhone and I’m iObsessed.

  In the past, I never approved of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, but now I have become one of Those People Who Are Always Looking at Their Phones, which is another lesson:

  Judge not, lest ye be caught looking at your phone.

  And what am I looking at on my phone? Not an app, or a game, but social media. Which is a euphemism, because if you’re spending all of your time looking at social media, you’re the most antisocial person in the tristate area.

  And which social media am I looking at?

  You would think it’s Facebook, but it’s not, if only because of the laws of Facebook. I have an author page on Facebook, on which I can post, read comments, and reply to them, but I don’t get a regular feed, which might be a blessing in disguise.

  Because every time I look at Facebook, everybody is smarter, better-looking, and more remarried than I am.

  Facebook can be a Depression Machine.

  The social media I’m looking at on my phone, almost all the time, is Twitter.

  Somebody said that Facebook is the place where you lie to your friends, and Twitter is the place where you tell the truth to strangers.

  Word.

  But not many of them.

  If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a running feed of short comments, the notorious 140 characters that can make news, offer compelling articles, or make you laugh.

  And it can also misinform, enrage, and make you cry.

  It can bring people together when a celebrity dies, or it can pull them apart, like when they stand up for something they believe in that others disagree with.

  Not a hypothetical.

  Last summer, I tweeted at Golf Digest Magazine because it had tweeted a photo of a golfer hitting a ball into the ocean. It struck me as a terrible thing for a publication to sanction, given the amount of trash already in our seas, which kills marine life. So I tweeted as much, politely—and in an amazing turn of events, the golfer in the photo was an up-and-coming professional who went on to make a hole-in-one the very next day, in a major tournament.

  Which would be my luck.

  Because the golfer’s fan base exploded in just one day, and every single fan saw my tweet and tweeted back at me, ignoring my point about the environment and calling me names, which for women always begin with B, C, and W.

  Of course, they’re wrong.

  Anybody who knows me will tell you that I am a B and a C, but totally not a W.

  You might be guessing that this incident cured me of my Twitter addiction, but you would be wrong.

  If anything, it made me stronger.

  B stands for Bulletproof.

  C stands for Confident, Capable, and Cute.

  Twitter is a free way for geniuses and knuckleheads alike to express themselves, a constantly refreshing comments section, for good or ill.

  Which is a recipe for complete and total addiction, if you’re me.

  And if you’re a lot of other people, too, especially in election season. Candidates and their followers are tweeting like crazy, and as I’ve already confessed, I’m the Woman in the Philadelphia Suburbs who is obsessed with the election.

  So I’m on Twitter.

  Fairly constantly.

  The irony is that as addictive as Twitter is, no other company wants to buy it. Disney, Google, and Salesforce decided not to make a bid on it, which I don’t understand.

  I would buy Twitter in a minute.

  Except that it cost $10 billion.

  And all of my money is invested in a garden room.

  Home Is Where
the Bra Comes Off, Part 2

  Lisa

  Daughter Francesca once said, Home is where the bra comes off.

  I have never been prouder of my daughter.

  Those of you who read me regularly know that I have been hating bras forever. And those of you who see me regularly know that I put my money where my mouth is.

  In other words, Mommy is running around free!

  Normally this isn’t a problem because I never leave the house, and now that cold weather is here, even better. Because I wear so much fleece that Francesca calls my outfits “teddy-bear clothes.”

  Maybe I’m not that proud of her.

  In any event, when you’re wearing teddy-bear clothes, nobody can tell whether you have a bra on, especially if you’re middle-aged, if you follow.

  And generally, a braless middle-aged woman is not being followed.

  Anywhere.

  So my only bra-wearing days are if I have some sort of athletic activity, which is rarely—and sometimes not even then, depending on the bounce factor. For example, I don’t wear a bra when I’m bicycle-riding anymore. There’s no bouncing except when you crash, which loyal readers will know I have done on occasion.

  Like, seven occasions.

  But lately I’ve remained remarkably upright, and even the disgusting sight of me riding a bicycle braless is one that nobody has to take in for too long, as we race past each other.

  They’re doing the racing, not me.

  I’m just riding around without a bra.

  Woo hoo!

  I like to feel the wind in my nipple hair.

  Otherwise I’m wearing a helmet.

  Just not on my breasts.

  Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about bras lately is that, as you may recall, I started taking yoga. And despite my earlier whining, I’m really starting to enjoy it. Of course I haven’t lost a single pound, but my back doesn’t hurt anymore, so I’ve stopped wearing my Thermacare patches, always a lovely fashion accessory.

  I know, you’re probably thinking that I should wear Thermacare patches on my breasts.

  Wait, what?

  You weren’t thinking that?

  Sorry.

  Anyway, to stay on point, I’ve been wearing my old white sports bra to yoga but I’m starting to wonder why. Every time I reach up to start our Sun Salutations, my bra salutes the sun before I do. Same thing happens when we do Goddess Pose, more Godawful than Goddess. So the last time we went into Full Cobra, I went full cobra on my bra—and managed to slip it off underneath my shirt when everybody else was in Downward Dog.

  Arf!

  Yay!

  It’s all women in the class, and nobody noticed. Or if they did, they wanted to do the same thing.

  So then, just when I had my no-bra-in-yoga breakthrough, I read online that the VP of Design at Under Armour said that, “Gone are those ugly, shapeless sports bras that are the feminine version of jockstraps.”

  Which is exactly what I own, but never mind.

  When I first read the sentence I was excited, because I thought that she was going to say that we should all take our bras off.

  But I was wrong.

  Instead she said, “Women want fashion elements like fun colors, prints and detailing.”

  We do?

  I’d love detailing on my car, but on a sports bra, I’m okay with girl jockstrap.

  But again, I was wrong.

  The VP continued, “That’s where the back detailing comes in. You need the front to be relatively around the same form so that it does its job and doesn’t expose the girls…”

  Okay, can we just stop there a moment? Breasts aren’t girls. Girls have breasts. I took AP Bio, so I know.

  The VP continued, “… so the back is really the only spot on the bra where you can have a little fun. It’s all about the back!”

  Which would explain why all of the new sports bras have more back straps than a parachute. But to me it seems more restrictive, not less, and it makes no sense to have straps in back, where your breasts are not.

  Again, AP bio.

  Ask me anything.

  Fallopian tubes look like moose antlers.

  I’m a font of reproductive wisdom.

  Plus, who wants a sports bra with back straps that divide your back fat like a pizza?

  Also quoted in the article was the chief retail analyst at the NPD Group, who said: “What you used to do was hide your underwear. Now it’s no longer underwear, it’s outerwear and you’re being judged by it.”

  So for that, I have a solution.

  No underwear.

  On Guyatus

  Francesca

  I’m on a hiatus from men, a guyatus, if you will.

  I’m taking a break from the man-hunt to focus on my writing and certain professional goals, maybe three to six months to finish revisions to my novel.

  I was single before I decided to make it official, but the intentionality of it was so freeing.

  It meant giving myself a break from feeling guilty for turning down a party invite just because some single guys might be there.

  It meant taking the daunting task of making an OK Cupid, Hinge, and Match.com profile off my plate.

  It meant giving myself over to the universe. If a great man fell into my lap in some stroke of Rom-Com serendipity, I’d be open to it.

  But until then, I have work to do.

  No biggie, right?

  That’s what I thought.

  But I can tell I’m freaking people out. It’s as if I’m swearing off men for life.

  A family friend learned I was single and asked, “So, you’re seeking male companionship?”

  Such quaint, pre-Craigslist skeeziness in that phrase.

  “I’m single, but I’m not actively looking at the moment.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And how old are you?”

  “Thirty.” Thirty years younger than you.

  She flared her eyes at me.

  I tried not to roll mine.

  Sometimes it gets to me. An older woman whose career I really admired admonished me, “You girls need to apply the same ambition and focus to finding a husband as you do to your careers. Otherwise, you wake up at thirty-five, and it’s too late.”

  It broke my heart a little. Not that I was blowing my husband chances, but that a woman who built a successful career and family over decades thought thirty-five was too late for anything.

  I suppose I understand this perspective from older women—they grew up in a different time! But when women my age do it to me, it bums me out.

  I was at a childhood friend’s bridal shower, seated with her law-school friends, nearly all of whom were engaged or married. Somehow it came up that I was single, and the very next question was:

  “What are you on?”

  I frowned in confusion, not realizing the correct answer was: not enough drugs to get this party going.

  She clarified. “I mean, what apps?”

  They have an app for drugs?

  When I told her I wasn’t on any dating websites or apps, she looked appalled.

  “You’re not doing anything?”

  I lost my nerve. They succeeded in making me feel embarrassed about it, so I defaulted to my usual defense mechanism: humor. I launched into a one-woman show about all the terrible first dates I’ve been on, embellished here and there.

  I killed. Had ’em rolling in the aisles.

  Catching her breath, one girl exclaimed, “God, I’m so glad I’m not dating anymore. I mean, no offense.”

  I smiled.

  Turns out you can feel cheap even without a bad date!

  I was mad at myself. I’m not ashamed of being single, I have a lot of great things going on in my life without a man, why couldn’t I own it?

  Being single is a status, it’s not an urgent problem in need of remediation.

  I say “I’m single,” and it’s like people hear, “I have a broken faucet.”

  What are you going to do about it?

  H
ave you looked online?

  Can you call someone?

  Sticking with my home analogy, being single should be like, “I have green shutters.”

  Do you want green shutters forever?

  Maybe, maybe not, but they’re all right for now.

  When did finding love become a homework assignment?

  Whatever happened to “You Can’t Hurry Love”?

  I thought it was good not to try too hard.

  Is it only bad because I’m not trying on purpose?

  Men put their love lives on hold for professional ambition all the time.

  Is it because I’m a woman?

  I genuinely wonder if men get this sort of reaction for being too busy to date. To a certain degree, I’m sure all benevolent-auntie types pressure young single people of both sexes to settle down.

  They’re equal-opportunity single-shamers.

  But there’s a degree of alarm when we talk to women about finding a partner that is totally unwarranted.

  All single women are not miserable, or even in danger of being miserable.

  Big dreams are not the exclusive province of men. Women too have great curiosity, and passion, and ambition that demand to be explored.

  Go into any law school, medical school, or art school, and see the notably not-sad young women there. They’re busy training themselves for the life of their dreams.

  Think it’s only the young women with time to spare? Stop by a small business, a research lab, the kitchen in a fine restaurant, and see women of all ages engrossed with work that means something to them.

  Look in my window on a Saturday night and see me at my desk, lit by the glow of the computer screen.

  I’m not in my bathrobe, weeping into a pint of ice cream, wishing a boy would call.

  I’m thinking. Considering the emotions of a character I created, puzzling out a plot point in a world of my own making, perfecting the rhythm of the words in a sentence.

  I’m not getting paid for it. I’m there because I want to be.

  And there’s nothing radical about it.

  I’m just a person working hard on something I care deeply about.

  That’s love.

  Suburban Story

  Lisa

  I used to live in the city, but I’ve become completely suburban

  You know how I know?

  I’m obsessed with my driveway.

  And I blame it all on Downton Abbey.

  Which is not exactly suburban, but I’m getting ahead of myself.