The Care and Feeding of Habits: Goals 80 & 81

80. Develop 5 virtuous habits

Five habits may be way ambitious. Whatever, the one I’m currently working on (and to understand why this is a virtuous habit you may have to be a Southern Belle) is to get all my makeup on before I leave the house.

All my life, up until I moved to the NYC area, I have never left the house without being as ready as I was going to be for where I was going. I’ve always had an aversion even to applying lipstick and powder in public.

I do think it’s a little odd to haul out your lipstick at a restaurant table and swab some on. For one thing, I don’t like putting on lipstick unless I’ve brushed my teeth. (I know, I sound OCD, but I’m really not.) For another, I have narrow lips and a not-very-defined lipline, so if I were to apply lipstick blind like that, I’d run the risk of looking like a crazy person afterwards. Putting on lipstick is a complicated matter for me, requiring liner pencil, up to two tubes of lip color, and, of course, a mirror. I’d sure hate to haul all that out in front of God and everybody at a dinner-date. It requires a trip to the powder room.

However, one’s standards tend to relax in the face of New York City's challenges. Time is at a premium here; that’s why everybody looks so stressed and why tourists get dirty looks on the sidewalk. It takes me an hour and fifteen minutes to get to my day job. One way. (Longer if tourists are ambling along four abreast and I have to jump off into the gutter to go around, risking life and limb.) Fifteen minutes that I don’t have to spend making up before I leave the house is fifteen more minutes of sleep.

I have to confess that I once found myself flagging down a bus with my mascara wand. Lately, though, I’ve been confining my cosmetic sessions to the rear of the bus—my concession to Southern Belle propriety. It doesn’t do much for my execution, though. Those buses are not smooth rides.

(I didn’t do so well today—but I did get foundation and eyeshadow on at home. I had to be at work early.)

Okay, it probably is not that virtuous a habit, but I think I need to start small.

81. Get rid of one bad habit.

I had a hard time thinking of bad habits that I hadn’t already covered with the positive goals—like overdoing the Chardonnay—but eventually I settled on not leaving my shoes all over the house. This is actually a good habit for me to break, because I have been really accident-prone the last year or so, and I need to Melissa-proof the house. Stumbling over shoes all the time I do NOT need. Also do not need to be wasting time looking for the pair of shoes I want.

So I forgot one time this week and left my bum-around shoes in front of the couch, but I’m still motivated.