What I Learned from Madonna

I find birthdays super-depressing. I love the lead-up. Never saw a gift I didn't like. But the actual day can be a little hard to take. It never helps that my birthday reliably falls on the day when San Francisco has a serious Arctic flashback and becomes even more foggy, windy and cold than I thought was possible from the year before.

Back when I was kid, the mournful day usually fell during finals week, so I spent my birthday having one of those exams that most of us re-visit in our nightmares and wake up in a cold sweat.

No matter. This year, one of the gifts my husband gave me was the new Madonna CD, Hard Candy. And immediately I got some perspective. Here's a woman who has made a career out of re-inventing herself, and for laughing at the idea that a rock star, especially a woman, has to be young and drug addled. She's certainly not young (50?) but she's got a body so cut it could break glass.

Madonna isn't just the woman whose music I rocked out to in the living room with my best friends in high school, or showed my voguing skills at the Madonna black bra parties in college. I have followed her career trajectory as I have muddled through mine. She's made a bigger splash, way, bigger, but way, way bigger mistakes than I'll ever come close to making, I hope (Sex book, anyone?). But at least she's out there, doing it. And, as she reminds me every time I go for a run to my Madonna play list, all I've got is four minutes.