Makeup Fail.

The other day Sir UncMo said to me the seven words that no woman wants to hear.

"What did you put on your face?"

He asked this question in the exceedingly neutral, "just curious," practiced tone of a man who is accustomed to treading lightly in certain territory.

I knew immediately that mistakes had been made.

"Oh, no." I said. "I put on a sample cream that was too light and I tried to fix it." The tinted cream from my monthly "beauty" box claimed to make pores disappear. I think it actually did make my skin look smoother. It's just that in the process, it happened to make me look like a cross between a mime and a geisha.

Instead of taking it off, which would have been the correct choice, I layered on a darker all-over cream and then touched up with bronzer and blush.

"Does it look weird?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"It looks kind of purple," he said, as I winced. "With some spots of brown and pink..."

I started cracking up at this point. "Should I continue?" he said, smiling.

"No!" I shouted, and ran to the bathroom sink to wash everything off, laughing.

The scary thing is, I had looked at myself in the mirror just five minutes ago and thought I had gotten away with it. It was not the first time my bathroom lighting and eyesight had failed me. I shudder to contemplate how many times I've gone to the office thinking I looked fine.

One of the nice things about being with someone for a little while: A few years ago, he wouldn't have said anything, and I would have spent the day looking weird. And a few years ago, if he had dared to venture a comment, it probably wouldn't have ended in laughter.

But back to the topic of emotional minefields, here are my general rules on matters regarding physical appearance. Complete honesty is not always the best policy.

- If you happen to notice that your person looks nice, you should say so. Early and often.

- If you have not noticed, or do not care one way or the other, about your person's appearance or what they are wearing that day and they* ask you about it, you should tell them they look great. Beautiful, even. Because they do.

- If you feel that some kind of look they are rocking lately is, let's say, not your favorite, but they do not ask you about it, you keep your mouth shut. That, for any sensitive person, is plenty of input.

- If they ask you about the look they are rocking lately and you don't really care for it but acknowledge that it is a valid choice that you can live with, you should tell them they look great. Or at least, fine.

- If they ask you about a look that you genuinely despise, you are allowed to say, "It's not my favorite" or "If you like it..." Any other ideas for how to say this?

- If there is an underwear or see-through situation, or food in the teeth, or bats in the cave, or you genuinely believe that they look cray (see above), you are allowed to say something, but you must pretend as if it just occurred to you and it's no big deal, even if you've been staring at the same issue multiple times now and have finally accepted that it is time to intervene.

I realize that 90 percent of these scenarios are going to apply to women. But they can happen with men too. I am going to leave it there.

Sometimes I'll be out with my mom and we will see an older lady who colored outside the lines on her face, or made some other terrible surface error. "If you ever see me do that..." we say to each other. "Shoot me." Or, better yet, tell me. We all need backup out here, and bad lighting happens.

Music: "Just Fine"

*I know that technically "they" should be "he or she" here. Screw it.

Letting It All Go.

It's 11:30 p.m. on a Monday in the Metro, and the digital screen that says when the next train is coming is frozen forever, and so I find myself thankful yet again for the smartphone. I still do not take for granted the countless waits that would have been so much more painful without the smartphone. You damned kids have no idea what waiting was like before smartphones.

As I'm looking at the various fun things on my phone, a person to my right comes up and stands not close, but just a little too close for such an uncrowded platform, invading my periphery. My eyeballs lock even more ferociously onto the iPhone. "Hi," this person says, but then he wanders away, and I am glad.

Not 30 minutes before, I'd been talking with my high school friends about getting older, your looks changing. "At what point do you just let it go?" my friend asks. I say, never. My mom has not let it go. She has not had plastic surgery, and she has not let it go. She is fit and does the same things that she has always done to put her public self on. She is nearly 67 and beautiful. But my friend is undeterred from the grim scenario she is posing. "What if you are losing your hair for genetic reasons?" she asks. Is that the point where you let it go? Just give up the caring?

"That's when you say, it's time to go wig shopping," I say. My friend is more in favor of going completely bald. Different strokes. I do not share that my interest in shoes lately skews toward the comfortable.

I said that while sometimes it feels, well, not great to get noticed by men less than I used to be, it is also kind of freeing. That doesn't mean I want to let myself go, but a) I am very happy with Sir UncMo and I do not want anyone but him checking me out and b) even without Sir UncMo, that's just not a kind of attention that I need or want to have any longer from strangers.

No sooner do I say this than I am at the Metro and the space-invading person, who I'm guessing is somewhere between 19 and 22 years of age, is back at my side. "Hi! Were you watching the USA game?" He is drunk and wearing some kind of USA paraphernalia pertaining to the World Cup game that took place earlier.

"No," I say. I was not watching the game. Nothing about me—not my firm dedication to my phone or my refusal to remotely turn in his direction—says hey, let's chat.

He says, "Where are you from?"

I give him a look that says, "Really? Are we going to do this right now? Are you so inebriated that you fail to discern the fact that I could be your mother?"

But USA Boy chooses not to understand my look. "What! I don't know where you're from," he says, defending  himself in the imaginary scenario where I actually care how much he knows about me. "Are you from Montgomery County?"

Yes I am from Montgomery County, but at this point I can't just dispense with this efficiently. I have to draw it out and make it awkward, because that's what I do, and that's why this blog exists.

"No," I say.  I'm not so much answering his question as speaking my truth. "Oh," he says. "Then where are you from?"

I shrug. "Around here."

"What high school did you go to?" Remember, friends, when this question had relevance?

I sigh. "Churchill." His eyes widen. "Oh! Churchill is in Montgomery County!"

"I know, but I don't feel like chatting right now, I'm sorry," I say. Part of me feels like I'm being this really bitchy person when in fact I am just standing my ground against a drunk fool.

USA Boy makes an "aw shucks" motion with his head, pauses a moment in case I want to change my mind, and then moves away. But he doesn't stray far. He manages to pass behind me at least twice and make a comment about how Churchill sucks. I guess he thought that would be the comment that really puts him over the edge, in my estimation. "Whoops USA Boy, I thought I didn't want to have anything to do with you until you started saying that my high school sucked. Now I'm realizing I want you right this very minute."

He gets on a most-welcome train in the opposite direction, muttering about my high school. I am texting my Churchill friend and telling her the irony of our conversation preceding this very rare yet unwanted bit of attention.

"I think I would prefer to go unnoticed," I texted her.

She replied, "Just let it all go downhill from here and it won't be a problem anymore."

Music: "Voices"