Forehead Wrinkles & Living in the Moment

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

My forehead feels wrinkled from frowning into my computer screen too much. If people were not so demanding, I would not have to frown as much, and my forehead would not get so wrinkly. I wonder if men ever worry about their foreheads wrinkling, or if they even notice. Probably, forehead wrinkles make men seem thoughtful and distinguished. My lightly wrinkled forehead reminds me both of a bulldog puppy and Babagesh.

It’s raining again, and rain reminds me of summer afternoons when I was young, when clouds would roll over the horizon and dump water into thick, black earth. The whole world opens up and drinks when it rains. The whole world is green and dewy and blossoming now. California poppies and bluebells are popping up everywhere, bringing color to hillsides that are normally brown and choking for water. Rain reminds me that it’s never too late to blossom, never too hopeless. We have waited a long time for rain, but sometimes waiting makes water that much more sweet.

What isn’t sweet is that the nearby mountains are getting record amounts of snow. There are people dying in their homes, and it has taken days, weeks, just to dig out the mountain towns. Some people who live where there is no snow have begun traveling up mountain roads just to see it, frustrating the people who live up there. And why not? Nobody would visit a town devastated by a hurricane, “just to see” what flooding looks like.

I lay in bed last night and felt my forehead twitch. I tried to relax my brow, to remove all expression from my face. I thought about Madonna, how plastic and hard her face looks now, like an antique doll. I thought about one of my friends, who received Botox injections from her dentist because it is apparently not that hard to get a license to administer Botox. I thought about my other friend, who requested laser hair removal as a Christmas gift from her mother. Women are up against impossible beauty standards. We can smooth and stretch our faces, remove our hair, sculpt our bodies, and there is always someone just around the corner trying to sell us something, trying to capitalize on our deepest insecurities and fears.

I recently bought vitamins that promise to prevent hormonal acne and decrease other symptoms that…