Mini-Ep 469: Return of the MAC
Doree and Elise share listener thoughts on Sephora finally carrying MAC products, senior care in America, and the prevalence of workplace burnout for women.
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Transcript
This episode transcript is AI generated.
Doree Shafrir (00:10):
Hello and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise Hu (00:17):
And I'm Elise Hu. And we're just two friends who like to talk a lot about serums,
Doree Shafrir (00:21):
And this is a mini episode where we hear from you, we share your comments and your thoughts, and we answer your questions to the best of our ability. But please remember, we are not experts. We're podcast hosts and we do always encourage you to seek support first and foremost from a medical and or mental health professional as needed.
Elise Hu (00:39):
Before we get to your comments and your calls, we typically just catch up for a bit. We are recording this before I have a trip to Hot Atlanta, hot Atlanta, Georgia, but I'm excited to do that. There's kind of two main teds and one is always in Vancouver. The other one tends to be in Atlanta now. It was previously in Palm Springs area, and this Atlanta one last year had this real dune feel to it because it was out at something called Pullman Yards, which those of you in Georgia will know, or in Atlanta will know. It's like, it seemed like it was out on horse stables or something. It was all dirt pathways, and then when it got windy, it really had kind of dune vibes and then you couldn't wear heels. So anybody who was a fashion plate and wanted to look cute for Ted couldn't walk around comfortably on the grounds.
(01:38)
So this year it is not there. This year it's in a more traditional kind of hotel convention center or performance center kind of setting, and you can wear whatever shoes you want. So I think that's going to be an improvement. I remember I brought Rob out there and he was like, I think we shot MacGyver here. Oh my God. It was one of those places where there were huge buildings, like airplane hanger type things that you could convert into anything you wanted. You could convert them into sound stages. And they probably are often converted into sound stages given so much of Hollywood has moved out there to Atlanta. But yeah, Rob was like, I think I've been here before and they had converted it into this big TED gathering. But yeah, it was kind of far out there. I spent a lot of time in Ubers with people who were telling me they didn't care who was elected president because it was right before the 2024 election. And all my Uber drivers are like, well, what difference does it make? They both are bad. And I was just like, okay, we're going to see about that.
(02:48)
We're going to see about
Doree Shafrir (02:49):
That.
Elise Hu (02:50):
Oh my goodness, I can't believe it's November already. Can you believe it?
Doree Shafrir (02:55):
What happens by the time when this airs? It'll be like mid-November.
Elise Hu (03:00):
So are you going to be with everyone, do you think? Or are you going to have kind of a small Thanksgiving? Is it going to be expansive with all of the siblings?
Doree Shafrir (03:09):
Yes. I will see my siblings for Thanksgiving.
Elise Hu (03:13):
Oh, that's good. Yeah. Do you have to cook or no? Usually Do you get out of it? No, I do not have to cook. What about you? I'm often just responsible for the Turkey because
(03:26)
I do the Alton Brown, I think that's that guy's name with the bucket brine overnight, the ice thing. But this, your work is just going to keep it really quiet and keep it chill because A, I'm on an austerity plan due to the aforementioned, I think on previous episodes I've mentioned I have to make sure I have enough saved for my taxes at the end of the year. I do it all at once. And I also don't like to travel or fly anywhere the week of Thanksgiving because there's a lot of folks who travel during Thanksgiving. It's often folks who maybe don't go through a TSA security line except for the week of Thanksgiving. And so it can be very frustrating. And then also we might still be in the middle of a government shutdown and already flights have been disrupted.
Doree Shafrir (04:17):
It's going to be a mess.
Elise Hu (04:19):
Yeah, I was coming back from Deadwood, South Dakota and had to fly through Denver, and the Denver airport was backed up. LAX didn't have enough air traffic controllers, and so our flight back to LAX was delayed. There's just a bunch of cascading issues. Oh man. The Houston airport has had big problems because they haven't been able to open enough security lines due to the lack of TSA workers.
Doree Shafrir (04:46):
I know it's going to be rough. Well, Elise, we got a text that said, can we just take a moment to rejoice that MAC cosmetics is now available at Sephora? Maybe it's nostalgia, but I've always loved Mac yet haven't bought any in literal years because I'm such a Sephora devotee, so, so thrilled about this.
Elise Hu (05:11):
Yay. I still wear a Mac concealer. I really like their under eye concealer. Do you? Yes, and I usually go to Ulta or an airport to buy it because I can't get it at Sephora. But yes, so they have Mac at Ulta, and so if you have Ultas nearby, that usually is my workaround. But they have a great, I can't remember, it's called something 24 hours in it. And I also like the Mac shades. I always have, we wore a lot of Mac makeup for TV when I started in TV news in the year 2004 because I think that was kind of the beginning of hd HD screens and HD cameras and Mac makeup was really good for stage and screen and things like that, at least back then Mac and then makeup forever. And I really like their shades because they tend to have a lot more yellow pigments in a lot of their shades, like one of the lines. And so it's good for people of color. So there were people, women. Oh, that's cool. My black colleagues liked Mac. The Asian girl liked Mac, so yeah, still devoted to a few of their products for sure.
Doree Shafrir (06:18):
Wow. Okay. All right. Well before we take a break, just a reminder that you can call or text us at (781) 591-0390. Email us at Forever35podcast@gmail.com. Our website is Forever35podcast.com. We have links there to everything we mentioned on the show. We're on Instagram at Forever35podcast. Our favorite products are at shopmy.us/forever35. And also our newsletter has moved to Patreon. It is still free. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/forever, 35, just sign up at the free tier and you'll get our newsletter. And then if you want to join us at any of the paid tiers, please do. There's a lot of bonus content that we do on Patreon, like our weekly casual chats, our monthly pop culture recommendation episodes, our ad free episodes discussions. There's just a lot. So check that out. patreon.com/forever. 35. Alright, after the break, vitamin E oil and Work Boundaries.
Elise Hu (07:23):
So is somebody doing something different with their vitamin vitamin E oil besides just cutting open a supplement and rubbing it on their lips as I do? We will find out. We'll find out after the break.
Doree Shafrir (07:44):
Alright, we are back. Elise, since you mentioned the vitamin E oil, do you want to read this?
Elise Hu (07:53):
Happy to. Alright. Hi, do Elise listening to Min up 4 67 and the caller using vitamin E oil and I also use it, I find it especially helpful in the winter when things get really dry or when I'm sick and the skin around my nose gets really dry from blowing my nose just a little dab twice a day in those areas and my skin feels better. I've had a small bottle of TJ's, trader Joe's vitamin E oil for years and that's still going strong. I didn't know Trader Joe's had vitamin E oil. I guess I haven't been paying attention.
Doree Shafrir (08:24):
Very interesting. Also, something that I forgot to mention is we got a text from the original listener who recommended Costco towels.
Elise Hu (08:38):
What did she
Doree Shafrir (08:38):
Say? And she said, day made hearing my wreck on the pod today. OMGA true pause the pod moment. So glad for this community and I just want to say that Matt went to Costco this morning and I was like, please buy some new towels. I was just like, our towels are so gross and I'm so done with them. We just need new towels. So we also got Costco towels today. Nice. Did you get the batch cheese? I haven't used them yet. Yes, I haven't used them yet because we just got them. But yes, we now also have Costco towels. So
Elise Hu (09:16):
This
Doree Shafrir (09:16):
Text was very timely,
Elise Hu (09:19):
As I mentioned with the socks and how I'm very tempted just to throw out all the socks in the house and get the same socks for everyone. I want to do it with the towels. I just want to replace all the towels at once en mass and get the exact same towels for all of the bathrooms so you can't mess it up.
Doree Shafrir (09:36):
Totally do it. We also got a text that said parachute towels are great.
Elise Hu (09:42):
Okay. I've never heard of it. I will check it out.
Doree Shafrir (09:45):
Parachute, I think they sponsored the podcast briefly. I don't remember, but they make sheets and towels and they had a bathrobe that was very popular for a while, so awesome. Check it out. Alright,
Elise Hu (10:00):
Worth checking
Doree Shafrir (10:00):
Out. We also got a text from a listener that said, good morning, congrats on the Dodgers win. I wanted to share this New York Times article that is super relevant to the discussions you've been having on the pod about work boundaries vis-a-vis burnout. I thought the example of the healthcare field as an industry to learn from was fascinating. If you're on call, you're on call. If you're not, you're not. Okay. And we will link to this New York Times article, but it was an opinion piece, an op-ed, and the headline was what Women really want to Not Answer Work emails at 10:00 PM and it is by someone named Corrine Lowe who is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, my alma mater. And yeah, it's an interesting piece.
Elise Hu (10:57):
So I'll read the relevant paragraph, which is about healthcare because while this is quoting the piece, while hours on a given shift can be grueling, they're also a known quantity. Even on call time. Common in the medical field is predictable. Your phone might ring on a Saturday night, but only if it's your assigned time to be on call. The effect is that people can set plans with childcare providers, partners, friends and family members. They can build a life outside work knowing that they won't be interrupted. As a moment's notice, it's not a matter of working remotely during which personal life and work life can seep into each other nor of simple flexibility. It's about a clear delineation between work and every other aspect of life. Other industries could learn from healthcare. The industry that I'm thinking of that could really learn from healthcare, though I'm sure there's many in advertising, which was the original callers industry is one of them is the legal field. I find lawyers work all the time at any time. It's so client service and it's wild to me how normalized it is for lawyers just to be like my lawyer friends in particular who we had front row tickets to the Hollywood Bowl this summer for example, and she was like, I can't go. I have to prepare something for my partner, an associate on some merger or something that didn't seem like that big of a deal to me. But I'm like, but what about our front row tickets at the Hollywood Bowl? Right.
(12:33)
No, I'm used to working all hours too. And I'm not saying it's healthy or normal, but it's because I've worked my entire life in news and as a result it's like if there's a tornado, there's a tornado. If there's a tsunami, there's a tsunami and you get, there's an earthquake in Nepal, you got to be in Nepal. And so it was very normalized for me and it was such a shift during the pandemic when I had left my job in daily news and also didn't go anywhere. But I feel like it was such a necessary shift too to establish some routine and then have some, that was the first time in my life where I was like, okay, I'm going to have three to four units of exercise per week and just make sure that I do it because otherwise you're just really at the whim of your industry, your field.
Doree Shafrir (13:25):
It's so true. Yeah, I mean there is something about the predictability, even if you're working long hours, just knowing that you will be working long hours, but then when you're off, I remember you're off when Matt was in a TV writer's room. I mean sometimes he never knew when he was coming home.
Elise Hu (13:50):
That's crazy.
Doree Shafrir (13:50):
It was like sometimes he would be home at midnight and sometimes he would be home at like six, but you never knew. So you could never make plans, you could never count on anything. So a very timely, very timely essay. Thank you listener for sharing this. Alright, shifting gears. We continue to get messages about aging parents and caring for aging parents and the finances of caring for aging parents and all the things. So clearly this is a topic that is resonating with a lot of you and I'm going to read one message that we got this week. Someone writes, I wanted to add a few albeit measly suggestions for senior care after hearing the aging parents episode. It's true that Medicare does not cover assisted living or homemaker services, but if your parent is a veteran or the spouse of a veteran, they may be eligible for benefits that cover similar services that Medicaid otherwise cover.
(14:52)
Another option is long-term care insurance, although unfortunately it is somewhat like pet insurance in that it's much more affordable if you sign up when you're young and healthy and depending on the plan you're offered, you might be paying giant premiums and you could also put that money aside to spend if the occasion arises. But long-term care benefits can also help cover the cost of memory care assisted living or caregiver services. One more potential option is if you can sign up for dependent care benefits as part of your insurance enrollment. I have worked as a social worker at a hospital and repeatedly shared and family members' frustrations when they're confronted with similar realizations Vanessa was describing. Sometimes patients qualify for short-term rehab after being in the hospital, but insurance companies are getting stingier and stingier approving shorter rehab stays or not approving rehab at all if they suspect what a patient needs is really long-term care. It's such a flawed system and the best advice I can give is starting these conversations earlier than you might think is necessary. And as Vanessa said, if your parents do have assets involving a financial advisor to help in navigating these challenges. Thanks for bringing these conversations to the forefront because I agree that so many people are struggling silently despite the growing number of Gen X slash millennials being impacted these days.
Elise Hu (16:10):
Thanks for writing. I think that we're going to continue to get texts and calls on this subject and it's great that we can be a place for everybody to share. So keep 'em coming.
Doree Shafrir (16:24):
Yeah, it does feel like the kind of thing where so much of this information is picked up from friends or podcasts or people are sort of piecing all of this stuff together. It feels very overwhelming I think. And I think it's also easy this listener said to feel like you're kind of alone in all of this when in actuality you're not. Right. Alright, and speaking of that, when we come back, we have a couple of voice memos, voicemails from a listener also on these topics. So we are going to take another short break and we'll be right back. Alright, we're back and I'm just going to play these voicemails.
Listener Voicemail (17:16):
Hey Doree and Elise. I was just listening to Minneapolis 4 67 and someone had asked about what to do with their parents if they have nothing to their names and whatnot. And Doree, we kind of went through something not similar, but we figured out how to prep for my grandmother's kind of demise and whatnot. My grandmother lived to be 96 and was very hellbent on not going into a nursing home because her mother ended up in a nursing home and the nursing home took everything. So if your assets are not protected in a trust and you'd have to speak to a lawyer for more details about what sort of trust to put your assets, including your house and any money that you have in for a nursing home not to take it.
(18:08)
And there is in certain states, in the state of Massachusetts, for example, there's a 15 year look back. So if you go into a nursing home within the 15 years that you put all your assets in a trust, it can be invalid and then the nursing home can still take all of the money they down. And then once you have you're below a certain threshold for your income, then Medicaid will in fact pay for the nursing home. We had to do it for my uncle who's up in Maine and my grandmother saw it happened with her mother. So she ended up speaking to a lawyer and put all of her assets into this trust. And so thankfully we weren't left with nothing. But that being said, it was a lot to get her into the nursing home, despite the fact that she had already done all of this work.
(19:02)
We had to apply for mass health because we live in Massachusetts and it took three of us, me, my sister and I, myself, my sister, and my mom to fill out the application. It was so incredibly complicated. My sister's an accountant, she was able to do that piece. And then I work in healthcare so I was able to do that piece. I'm talking hours and hours and hours of time spent on the phone and collecting bank statements and everything else like that. So even if you have unquote nothing, it's still a lot. Again, I know it's a lot of money for a lot of people to consider, but getting a lawyer who specializes in the elderly in transitioning to a nursing home is worth its weight in gold. They were super helpful, but it's still so much work and our country is just awful at this and you really need support.
(20:00)
Figuring out how to get aging parents to qualify for a lot of the programs that are available is not an easy or smooth task in any way, shape or form. And we did, my grandmother didn't actually even go into a nursing home. This was just to get her home care services and get her nursing support that she needed just to live because we physically couldn't do it. It's very physically, emotionally, and mentally taxing to care for an aging person. It's not caring for a baby. They were very aware that they once were independent and now no longer are, and sometimes it's not pleasant. My grandmother, unfortunately was not very pleasant in the last few years of her life and really struggled with losing her independence and also caregiving should never just fall upon one person. It's too much and she needed a lot of physical assistance.
(20:59)
She couldn't shower on her own and toilet herself and stuff like that. So it's not as simple as a solution as like, cool, let's just move everyone into one house and do one big happy family. There's a lot that kind of goes into people aging that a lot of people don't really realize and literally sometimes it comes down to physically wiping your mother, father, grandmother's butt. And that's not for a lot of people and that is okay. But again, there's just no support for that and I think a lot of conversations are just very shortsighted. They think that these people are just walking and talking and fully functional humans that can just continue to care for themselves until they die. And that's very much not the case with the aging population that we have right now as someone who works in healthcare and who is someone who's had a family member kind of go through it.
(21:58)
So it's just who for thought. And many of these conversations, it's not as simple as the general public sometimes makes it out to be. We were lucky enough that we were able to provide the care that my grandmother wanted and deserved at the end of her life, but it was a lot and it's something that I hoped to never have to do again to be perfectly honest. Even though it was something I respected her wishes and it was something that she was able to have. So again, just thank you so much for everything and I just needed to share my story because I understand how complicated this can be and it's a place that's very near and dear to my heart. Alright, thanks. Bye.
Elise Hu (22:41):
Just as there isn't enough affordable childcare for the very young, there is not enough affordable care for the very old. This society is really failing the youngest and the oldest, which is shame on us. I think shame on our society for being like and this country for being the richest country in the world by GDP and unable to help the most vulnerable ends of our population.
Doree Shafrir (23:10):
That's such a good point. Yes. You're so right. It's it's really, really bad.
Elise Hu (23:18):
And then as the caller points out, it's not just that the ends, right? The toddlers and these SEPs or octogenarians, nonagenarian are suffering. It's that everybody in the middle too, middle class, middle-aged people we're having to help care or stretch ourselves even thinner to help our parents and or our children or grandchildren. It's like everybody's out because we place way too much responsibility for structural or systemic problems on individuals.
Doree Shafrir (23:55):
Well, on that uplifting note,
Elise Hu (23:58):
Yes, but thank you for calling. We can continue. Thank be a place for these kinds of conversations and dialogue. And then if you want to help each other too, or if you have questions and want to kind of ask the Forever35 community, please do call in and text in and write in. We're happy to be a place for all of that and we aren't experts, but happy to try and take your questions too.
Doree Shafrir (24:22):
Yes, for sure. All right, thanks everyone. Talk to you next time. Bye.