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developed as a treatment for burn patients. Realizing that every woman is essentially a burn patient (insofar as our faces are constantly being scorched by the raging fire of time), some brilliant scientist smeared it all over a lady’s skin and now the smallest container of it costs $265. There is no more disgusting secret about my life than the fact that in the last few years I have bought into the idea that I need La Mer/am worth it. And now I buy a couple of jars a year. This despite the fact that I used to listen to Nirvana and Hole and still have trouble buying socks that don’t come in a bag because I just can’t believe a single pair costs more than six bucks.
    It is hard not to look to celebrities for confirmation that you can be old and still be a sexy woman. The bummer is that there are only about four such women in Hollywood who are seen this way, the chief example being Susan Sarandon. She’s been carrying the burden of being the hot “old” chick for about two decades now. It’s admirable, and I would absolutely have sex with her, but I feel like the pressure on both of us at this point is getting a bit intense. It’s hard to source all your emotional assurances about aging on the shoulders of just one especially bangable sixty-nine-year-old.
    And the magazines, the magazines. I don’t know why I read them and I feel guilty about it, but there’s nothing I can do, I want to look at the pictures even though they sometimes make me feel so bad about my stupid normal human appearance that my soul actually aches. Each of the fashion magazines— Bazaar , Vogue , Elle —does an annual issue called “Beautiful at Every Age” where their teams of editors really sweat it out to let their readers know that you can look and dress hot no matter how old you are. They dedicate various sections to women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, but there are two decimating things going on here:
    The models for every age category are always teenagers. For example, in the section for what sixty-year-old women can wear to look attractive, they’ll say, “Oh, you’d look amazing in a suede cape and a sailor shirt,” but the editorial photo is always of a teenage girl who looks like a fawn that is in its first minute of standing on its legs, essentially sending the message, “Here is how you can look beautiful in your sixties but we’re not totally sure it will work and maybe you’ll still look like a hag and we’re scared we’ve made a mistake so just in case here’s a photo of a nubile child and just use your imagination about the old part.”
The other terrifying thing is that no magazine ever offers any vision of beauty beyond the “seventies” section, even though shit tons of women are living well past that. So if you happen to have made it to eighty or beyond, according to Anna Wintour, you have fallen off the outermost edges of the attractiveness map into an old invisible sea where not even the wrinkle-erasing kelp of La Mer on the ocean floor will save your drooping shar-pei face.
    And so here I am at thirty-eight, staring into the mirror. And even though I do not look young anymore, I am now less concerned about my face (or, as Nora Ephron warned, my neck) than I am about my newest problem area, my hands. In the last two years, my hands have taken on a decidedly gnarled affect. I’m not sure how or when my knuckles got thicker, but now my hands look like wizard hands, like they should be clutching a crystal ball. And my fingers, always long and a tad askew, seem to have become even more crooked, like the branch fingers on a wise old tree in an animated children’s movie, who occasionally beckons to little kids and dispenses nuggets of truth like “Just be yourself, Toby.” The tree is voiced by Morgan Freeman.
    The thing is, taken part by part, I can handle my knotty paws and my sunken undereyes and all the little wilting tea leaves that foretell my future