Bugs Beauty

plus, is your face in transition?

Welcome readers, old and new!

Please hit the ❤️ button to institute Tuchus Tuesday, which follows Black Friday and Cyber Monday and during which you spend $0 and contemplate only the meaning of butts. (Read a related interview here.)

Coming back to New York City after visiting my family in Tokyo, as I do every several months, always reminds me of how much I dislike transitions. Which is unfortunate, as I am simultaneously reminded that life itself is one long transition.

I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m often weepy on the flight home, though I (like many people evidently) seem to have a natural propensity to cry on planes. I lost it recently when I watched Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, especially during the scenes between Margaret and her doting grandmother. My ambivalence about leaving Japan increases when my granddaughter asks, “But why do you have to go back to New York, Grammie?” My answer—that I have another life here—doesn’t feel satisfying.

Yet when I’m home, working at my table as I am now, looking out at the trees inflamed with autumn pageantry along the river, and making plans with friends, my life does feel right. It’s just that my heart also yearns to be reunited with the people I love so deeply on the other side of the world. It seems the older I get, the more urgent the yearning—knowing with increasing certainty that time is finite.

Having brought back a couple of pieces from my favorite Japanese clothing line, Pas de Calais, I wasn’t surprised to see a recent story in The New York Times about the trend of oversize clothes in Tokyo. I bought (thanks to the weak yen) what you could call a pantsuit on my most recent trip. It has a kind of goofy silhouette but I like it: the jacket large and the pants short. The jacket is a patchwork of black wool and navy pinstripe corduroy, and the trousers are wool with navy corduroy at the belt line. (I’m afraid you can’t see the details in the photo, below.) I’m used to wearing a more tailored profile, but as my body has transitioned with menopause—hello, tummy!—I’m now more comfortable in looser clothes. (Though not always that comfortable.)

Large jacket, short pants.

It occurs to me our faces are also constantly in transition. I was trying to come up with some wise or comforting philosophical comment about that, but all I can think is, well, sh*t. Forgive me: jet lag.

Speaking of trips, a reader anticipating a Caribbean cruise wonders how she should apply sunscreen when moisturizer and insect repellent are also on the program…

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