Map to Frances

As I get older – and believe you me, it’s happening fast – I fret like everyone else about the aging process. More gray. More lines. More creeks when I stand up after a prolonged period of sitting still. You know, the whole deal. And as a woman in this society I’m also acutely aware of the pressure to continue looking forever 21. Given that, it’s unfair to pass summary judgment on women who give in to the relentless drumbeat for agelessness. How can you not when every single indicator in our society tells us youth is all that matters? But it’s also important to laud those to resist the temptation to tamper with our essential humanity. Life is just a continual process of getting older until the second we stop getting older altogether. That’s not being nihilistic, just honest about a process we all go through.

While it doesn’t baffle me how hard we fight it – because, duh, we all fear the end – it does perplex me why we don’t embrace all the good things our advancing years can represent. Wisdom. Love. Experience. Compassion. Look, babies are cute and all, but they don’t know shit. Same goes for most young adults. Yet somehow the most desirable human state is exactly that age. Yeah, yeah, I know about biological imperative and survival of the fittest and optimum child bearing ages and all that. But it’s 2015 and we have watches that send texts and phones that play movies. We’ve clearly evolved. Wouldn’t it be nice if our thinking about beauty did as well?

Right, so this is clearly a long-winded, rambling way for me to introduce this video of Frances McDormand taking about the aging process. I’ve always admired Frances and found her work to have a particular fearlessness about it. There’s an honesty and intelligence and intolerance for bullshit she imbues into every role. I’ve also always found her rather sexy, in an I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-you-think kind of way. And I still do now that she is 57 – gray hair, wrinkles, the whole deal. But then, I find a life well lived looks good on anyone.