After my shower, I use body lotion, and I cream my feet with a foot cream (Love Curel Foot Therapy) I file my toenails weekly, paint my nails and file my two calluses twice a month. I pumice every shower, so I don't have to soak forever and rub and scrub forever. That soaks my feet as I shower, and then I pumice. When I shower, I close the drain, so the tub fills with water. And the one thing I know from doing janitorial, it's much easier to maintain something in a particular condition rather than waiting till it's a mess and start over. Fortunately, I spend a lot of that salon time exercising, and I sort of think being in great shape makes up for some of the other appearance faults. My clothes are not great and my hair is gray, my nails are a disaster, you don't want to see my toes, but I'm learning to live with it so that I can enjoy the other parts of my life. I do hate the necessity of pedicures and manicures and hairstyling just to look "professional," but I made a conscious choice to look unacceptable so that I could pursue other interests. This essay has been a topic of discussion on some people's FB feeds this morning: Now women are expected to be hot, all the time and women are even more pressured to diet and sculpt and tan and whatever, because look at Jennifer Lopez! And Jennifer Aniston! They're in their 40s!. I read an interview with Tina Fey a while back where she said something similar: when she was a kid, if a woman wasn't sexy she just focused on her family and her job and her hobbies and wore a one-piece to the beach, no big deal. Some of it is knowing what could happen online to me, or any woman, who doesn’t. There have been entire afternoons that I could have spent with my daughters where I’ve been in the salon instead, getting my gray covered up and my calluses scrubbed, because I was going on TV, or because I was going on book tour, or because it was Tuesday. It’s sexist, and depressing, and expensive, costly in terms of both money and time. And for every news story about Spanx giving up its grip (only to be replaced by slightly more forgiving yoga pants), or every real-size heroine like Mindy Kaling on the cover of InStyle or Rebel Wilson topping the box-office charts, it seems that here in the real world, the beauty culture has only gotten more demanding. Everyone, from your eighth-grade classmates to the wife of the guy you worked with 10 years ago, can see. Every picture, or video, ends up on the Internet.
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