I remember one time when I was a teenager wailing to my mother that I was sooooo ugly. And she told me, "it's more important to be smart than pretty." Which I understood, with the kind of self absorption that only a 15 year old with acne and a big nose can command: Even my own mother thinks I am ugly.

I think I was in my early thirties before I understood that she meant: beauty will not serve you as well as thinking will. Before I understood that she meant that I was smart.

In the meantime, in my teens and twenties, I vacillated so hard in my perception of my looks that I was probably a little crazy. I know I've talked about this before but it's just so weird to look at pictures and remember how awful I felt, so much of the time. On the one hand, people, particularly men, seemed to like to look at me. I watched a man at the gas station turn around to look at me and crash into a wall, pure slapstick. On the other hand, I had boyfriends who regularly told me that I was fat, that my face was weirdly lopsided, that I wasn't pretty enough to love. A woman stopped me on the street to tell me I could be attractive if I would just make a little effort. I got to a point where anything that might have been positive felt negative, like I felt even if someone said I looked nice it was from pity. I thought that anybody who looked at me would have looked at Joseph Merrick in the same way, I felt like anybody who touched me did so the way they might pet a snake. Some days I couldn't leave the house because I felt so guilty about inflicting myself on people. When I did get out, I apologized to people for my Cyrano nose, my horse teeth, my peasant's ankles, for freckles, until I had made perfectly sure that was all they saw. 

In my thirties, I had Squire, and a few things happened. One, I had a person in my daily life who did not care a bit how I looked. Two, I was way too tired to be thinking about my looks so damn much. Three, I got a job on the internet that meant nobody was looking at me and they truly only cared about how well I did my job.

This is when I came to understand my mother's words, finally.

And when I hit my forties, I noticed that some of my friends, friends who were deeply pretty in high school, were taking the aging process really hard. I was in my prime, mentally, and the fact that I was in decline physically was comparatively nothing to me. Wrinkles? Mostly laugh lines. Grey hair? I couldn't wait. I had the intellect now to avoid mirrors too well lit or people who negged me; I even had the word neg in my vocabulary. Sure, there were still moments, like the time someone came up to me on the beach and told me I was so brave for wearing a bathing suit in public. And sometimes I had my moments of self-doubt that I made all by myself. But for the most part I was busy figuring out what I could do with my brain and having a much better time of it. In the course of this I came to realize how incredibly boring talking about being ugly is. Oh, it's so so so boring, it's worse than talking about the weather. 

So now I'm fifty. To be honest I'm sometimes surprised at the extent to which vanity creeps in — I got permanent eyeliner, and that's really the least of it. Tattoos are transformative. It's like most other things, I guess — it's a lot easier to play in the water once you've learned how to swim. It still comes back, this wave of horror, and even just a month ago I had a minute where I couldn't breathe for fear of being pulled under it. But it's a receding wave, it's no longer likely to drown me. Also when I got enough white hair to justify it I bleached the rest of my hair to match it, all platinum, and listen to what wikipedia says about that: It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Indeed it is. We are. 

So I've been moderating this facebook page for people living in my town. Mostly it seems to be expats looking for hairdressers and doctors who speak English. It's also businesses offering services (an insufficiently corollary number of hairdressers and doctors, obviously), people who are lonely and want to meet up for a beer, periodic ranting about how when you move away from home the things you liked about home don't always happen to be in the place you left home to get to.

Sometimes the questions and the advice are smart and helpful and kind; sometimes they are … not. I have been working on picturing people who are not particularly clever as being like baby kittens. Like, a baby kitten is so dumb it will fall over its own feet onto its puffy little head. And that is ADORABLE! It is sweet and endearing and not annoying at all. Awwww, look! It's trying to blink and eat and it has tipped over! Look at the basket of kittens who have managed to create facebook accounts so as to look for a barber on the internet and yet can't figure out how to use google! I mean can you blame them? No, they are small and silly kittens! 

I have found this method moderately to highly effective depending on how well I slept the night before. 

Today there was a bit of a dustup in the newsfeeds that I follow because the translation of a book by Alan Hollinghurst was discussed on a radio program and in the course of this some text was quoted that mentioned that boys have penises and somebody heard it and went on a tirade about how the author is a gay Islamicist or something, I don't know, I couldn't pay attention, I was visualizing kittens as hard as possible. 

And the translator has come back with a perfectly reasoned and thorough response. I admit it makes me admire her, because her response was well written and thorough and you know how much I like that, when someone who is getting shit thrown in their direction just stays clear and focused and remembers who they are. Awesome. But I couldn't help on the other hand thinking that it was a lot like when I tried to teach my cat using flashcards.

I mean: I did that to be funny. I did not really think the cat would look at the flashcards and be like "Oh, you want me to communicate with you! Yes, I shall do these things!" You know? And I think that people who get all sputtery angry and WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN when they are talking about, say, the word penis being said on the radio and not, say, children in cages… I mean, they're not harmless like kittens. They're not cute like kittens. They're more like kittens who destroy the furniture with their claws that they're too dumb to retract and then pee on the rug or something. I mean you can't really ignore it, that kind of behavior. But I'm not sure you can reason with it, either. 

Kittens kittens kittens. Batting about little bits of yarn. Pouncing on their own shadows. Working on their novels when you're not home. 

I go to see Petra in the afternoon and we have a smoke outside while her dog tries unsuccessfully to herd the children playing a pickup game of soccer in the square. Inside, we talk about opera and get stuck at Carmen ("Habenera" is a total earworm but I don't know the words) until it's killing us so she turns on Spotify, and it's Satie which is better. We talk about vanity and travel and memory and boys, but not so much that it gets boring. In the late afternoon, I walk home by the store and stop in. It's a  madhouse of people coming home, children screaming, a couple of drunk possibly homeless guys who are clearly taking the unpredictable weather quite hard. And me. I know it's the worst time to be there and also that I shouldn't be, since I can shop any time, and I apologize silently to the shopping cart that someone has abandoned in probable frustration and think about David Foster Wallace and transcendence. I get home and make dinner, noodles and vegetables, and work for another hour. It's still light out though it feels like rain's coming. When I can't focus on the screen, I decide to do something else, accomplish at least something. I take apart the broken shower head, managing to drop a nut down the drain despite (I thought) blocking it. In the end I use tools to fix one minor problem but not the main one, and I find a replacement for the bolt, which is a miracle, and I actually repair the main problem with a toothpick wedge, which won't last forever but a little while is longer than nothing. Wash the dishes, bring in the laundry in case it rains, water the basil in case it doesn't. Small necessary tasks. I'm thinking about the universal nature of chores, maybe Louise Erdrich. Answer email, read the news, try not to cry; cry anyway. I fall asleep reading in bed and wake up at 1 to turn off the light. In the morning I finish the project I was working on, check my tickets and head to the station early to beat the summer storm that starts just as I get there. I left my umbrella at Dee's so I buy a new one from the market under the station, where there's a string quartet playing something, I don't know, it's nice. The umbrella might last less than a week if it keeps raining like it is now, with gusts of wind. On the train I get a coffee and make small talk with the two guys in the compartment, who are from Congo and have spent the day in Prague admiring the architecture. One of them has the pimpest shoes I have ever seen, covered in gold studs. In Vienna I buy my ticket for the subway like a pro and get to the Museumquartier in time to watch people milling in the open passageways, trying to find cover from the rain. Now I am thinking about Isherwood. It's colder than I planned for and I am damply miserable but a woman looks sadder than me so I point out the one tiny patch of blue in the sky and say "hope" and she smiles at it with me under the eaves for a minute, rain pooling in our shoes. At the venue I find the only bathroom in Europe that has not replaced paper towels with the power air dryers that turn my hands into my grandmother's. I squelch into my seat and then everything disappears into percussion and light and now and nostalgia. Share the same space for a minute or two. When I get to the station for the last bus out, the sky has cleared. I'm the only one waiting. We pull into town 30 minutes early and I walk home under a full moon. 

I started writing something and then I realized that I really only had two points:

1. If you believe that your thoughts or your taste or your experience is intrinsically better because fewer people share it, you are wasting your time talking to me. 
2. This does not apply to facts, which are not generally categorized as better or worse and also do not change in relation to the number of people who share them. 

 I mean, I can go into details? I've probably got a thousand words rattling around in here, as usual. Sometimes I realize that I'm building up to a whole rant and that probably you agree with me anyway so I just thought I'd make a note of it. 

1. Men are filthy pigs, hahaha.
2. Women are cuh-razeee, hahaha.
3. Poop is funny, hahaha.
4. Catch phrase, catch phrase.
5. Cursing is edgy! hahaha.
6. I went on an internet date!!!
7. I'm single. Hahaha.

I don't have cancer. Just before Christmas I felt a lump in my breast. I have been getting lumps since forever, and they always turn out to be nothing, so I wasn't too worried about it. When the holidays were over, I made an appointment to see the doctor for a general checkup. I didn't mention the lump because of magical thinking. He was able to see me in February and I got a referral to get a mammogram because it had been two years since my last one and I have a family history. The nicest facility in Brno has DBT machines, very modern, and is up on a hill around some pretty posh houses, and it's a nice little walk from my place, so I booked an appointment there. I put the whole question of whether I had a lump or a LUMPlump out of my mind: just getting a checkup. I managed to not talk about it and not think about it for basically two months, until the actual day that I had scheduled the mammogram.

In standard Czech waiting room shenanigans, there was nobody to announce myself to when I got to the clinic. Nurses popped in and out of various doors and I tried to say I had an appointment but they waved me away or looked right through me. At one point I actually got up and stood in front of one of them and she snapped that they would call me and to sit back down, so I did. About 30 minutes later, my phone rang, and it was the nurse, who scolded me for being late. "But I'm… I'm right here! In the waiting room!"

So finally she came out and actually looked at me and we went into the room with the super modern machinery and she said that since I was late the doctor wouldn't have time to see me. I scheduled an appointment for the following week, went back out to the waiting room, put on my coat and hat and gloves and Lost. My. Mind.

I just collapsed on a plastic chair in front of the entrance and bawled my eyes out. This is the thing about magical thinking; it only takes you so far. You can convince yourself that worrying won't change anything, which is true, and that you're probably fine, which is true, but somehow the closer you get to reality the more wavery those truths become. I was not worried and I was sure I was totally fine until I was in range of a possible fact, and when that knowledge was snatched from my grasp, it was like someone had disintegrated my skeleton. I kept trying to pull it together and leave and then having another wave of weeping hit me. When I finally got out, I'd cried off all the cold cream on my face, which was red and raw, and my tears turned into little icy crystals while I waited for the bus instead of looking at pretty houses because I didn't have the energy to walk home anymore.

Also, as a side effect of which I am not remotely proud, I wanted very much to find out I had cancer and then go scream myself hoarse at that nurse.

Anyway, so I finally went to the appointment. I was mentally preparing to be kind of snooty with the nurse but it was a different shift and the one who came out of the mammogram door, about 10 seconds after I got my coat off, was perfectly lovely. The whole thing went pretty fast. I told her I'd found a lump, making her the third person I told, and she said "We'll take care of you" in a way that was super brusque and efficient and perfect. Then the doctor called me and said that the mammogram showed nothing but she wanted to do an ultrasound too just to check. She told me I was right to be cautious and concerned, but there was absolutely nothing to on that scan either. So, that's that for two more years.

I passed the plastic chair on the way out and it seemed like it had been years ago. I had been so incredibly frightened — not of having cancer, honestly, but of not knowing something. I don't know what lesson to take from that — I almost never let fear keep me from doing what I want to do, even though I'm often very scared I just keep pushing through until I can get to a place where I'm not scared. It felt in that moment like I stood still and it caught me. But walking out of the clinic back into the cold blue felt like victory. Once I'm through it, even if it was awful, it's not a mystery anymore; I think it's the mystery that scares me. I guess that's why I keep doing stuff, because of that feeling, of having the facts, of knowing what the other side of my inexperience feels like.

Anyway everyone knows I'm going to get plowed over in a crosswalk and this whole thing is just to be sure I'm right on that.