Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem

by Laurie Notaro

I reiterate, we are badasses. We are the generation who didn’t give a shit, remember? We invented punk rock, then grunge. None of the Kardashians belong in our group, not even the mother. That alone makes us the fairest generation of them all. We didn’t invent the internet, but we had the first email addresses, and we remember Netscape and Ask Jeeves. We were the last people to make smoking cool. (I quit more than twenty years ago and still miss it.) We “got” This Is Spinal Tap, Raising Arizona, and The Big Lebowski. We know what is funny. We aren’t offended easily. And best of all, we’re from the ’90s, which makes us the coolest generation of the last century. It was the last good time.

So maybe we’re not young. Do you really want to be? There’s nothing wrong with being ourselves, and not the following generation, which still has as much to learn as we already know now. I still rock combat boots with dresses. I still wear whore-red lipstick. I still call everyone “dude.”

Yet, the entire population of middle-aged women are showing up to work

on three hours of sleep (some with their night meds still coursing through

running meetings, making ...

the rest of the world has no idea. Why? Because we are superwomen.

People act poorly because other people have let them act poorly, and

they have been able to get away with it for a lifetime.

I can’t trust anybody who hasn’t had a boob pressed so flat that it’s like the center of a plexiglass panini.

“A scratched TV tray is a sad TV tray. What does that say to people?”

“It says you are serving people dinner like it was Meals on Wheels,”

“This is not a midlife crisis car,” I corrected him. “This is a midlife memory car!”