When The Pants Come Off

I should mention the things I'm reading more often, especially when I both like what I've read and I know the author. This morning it was an article by a college chum, Chris, on male and female body issues and a call for more nudity. Sign me up! Oh wait, as anyone who has ever had the (mis)fortune of living with or near me knows, I've already signed up.

Now, I may have an unfair advantage in that I grew up in a clothing-optional or, put a more accurate way, too-lazy-to-really-dress household. Some of this naturally arose from 4 people living in 650 square feet with one bathroom, but some of it was probably latent and subconscious hippiedom on the part of my not-that-hippie parents. We weren't full on nudists, we were just more of a "hey, is it ok if we wear our underwear to dinner?" kind of group. Other people tell me that's kind of gross.

Whatever long-lasting psychological damage I feel sure my more modest brother suffered from this, I do know that nudity and shame were never a thing we had in our house. It just wouldn't have occurred to us. Gym class? Not a problem. Those bizarre open changing rooms in some department stores? Ditto. I remember being shocked at the grown-up gym one time when I had been working out with a female coworker who went through all kinds of frightful contortions to cover herself after showering and wondering how that became her normal; similarly I may have inappropriately busted out laughing at college once upon discovering that a couple I knew slept in full-on clothing together. It's one of those things where what you grow up with really does become default normal. And just like the woman's side of the bed is the left side, the proper attire for sleep is nothing. It's just what I knew.

Now I can't claim all of the benefits Chris has discovered from an embracing of less clothing - I still weigh myself quite a bit (and can someone explain how the scale went up .2 pounds this morning from the time I woke up through the time I had finished my daily coffee and what comes after coffee?) and I still worry about how this or that part looks, but the root causes of my here-and-there body dissatisfactions don't come from a place of shame and for that I am eternally thankful to good old not-quite-dressed mom and dad.

It is, however, worth noting that the brain still edits. For example: would I be comfortable meeting up with Chris and his family at a clothing-optional mini-golf course? I honestly don't know. The stubborn, defensive part of me says, "of course! Naked mini-golf with open-minded friends is what all normal people should do!" But nudity in front of family or strangers is still far more comfortable than nudity in front of people one actually knows. However attired we were for family dinners, when we had friends for dinner, it wasn't like my dad actually showed up in his briefs, or encouraged his guests to do likewise.

So I'm going to think about this, Chris, because I like to be proven a hypocrite as often as possible (and lest anyone reading this gets the wrong idea, no naked mini-golf has been proposed). In the meantime, though, if any of you come over and want to take off your pants, we're chill with that!

Why I Shouldn't Be Allowed To Read The Internet

It starts, innocently enough, with a link on facebook. Then I read one article which links to another which links to another which gets me to this.

And then I get all aggro again.

"Real Bodies Unite is appealing to all those women fed up of being bombarded with unrealistic imagery in the fashion and beauty industry, by launching a global campaign to raise at least 10,000 signatures for the use of body diversity instead."

Flashback: the year is 1991. A certain young feminist author with a hot, new, provocative book comes to talk to our eighth grade class (yes, I just outed my age). She talks to just the girls in the class about how Vogue and, I don't know, Beverly Hills 90210 are forcing us to hate ourselves and how we look and how those are the reasons we have poor body image. A certain student in the class raises her hand and politely (ok, probably not that politely) asks the feminist author if she is smoking crack. How on earth can a magazine make us do or feel anything we don't want? Vogue doesn't make this young lady feel bad about weighing 150+ pounds at 14 - she feels bad about her weight because she looks bad. Objectively. Whether or not Anna Wintour exists. It is possible that said young student is forcibly escorted out of the room and counseled by a teacher to maybe stop with the talking because the feminist author's message will be important to some of the student's classmates and she shouldn't ruin it for everyone.

20 years later and this theory has become widely accepted and a cottage industry.

It is neither the anorexic model, nor the agency that employs her, nor the magazine that prints her, nor the designer who hires her, who is at fault in the tiresome lady-body-image debate. We, the ladies. We're the problem.

Yup, I said it. Wanna be taken seriously, ladies? Accept responsibility for your own complicity in this. Reading the Real Bodies Unite mission statement (which I sincerely hope was written by a teenager, otherwise I cannot excuse the poor grasp of the English language) would have you imagining that the media (capital-M, lowercase-M, whichever) puts thoughts into your head. Thoughts you can't un-put there. Like Son of Sam and his dog. She/we are powerless when the media speaks. The thoughts are unthinkable. Good thing it's only telling us to hurt ourselves emotionally and psychologically, otherwise the courts would be jam-packed with defendants saying "Glamour made me do it."

Even as the crusaders admit that they know the representations of women in the media are "not real," they seem powerless to separate fantasy from reality. Herein lies another gripe: designers don't design for "real women." (For real we should assume heavyish.) Sadly, there's a Freakonomics problem here: heavy women aren't wealthy. Only wealthy women buy designer clothing. Ergo, designers have slender women modelling their clothing. Take a look at the society pages and you'll notice that those women (possibly real, even) are similarly sized and shaped to the women in the fashion magazines. If you are 300 pounds, statistics suggest you do not have $7,000 for a dress. Why would the person selling a $7,000 dress care if you identify with his model if you're not the intended audience any way? The $7,000 dress is a fantasy just as the model is. Why isn't there a movement whose mission is to compel couture houses to make dresses that cost $70? After all, by the same logic, it's unfair to the rest of us that they don't. That we expect women to understand that ownership of a $7,000 dress is a fantasy, but ownership of the body modelling it shouldn't be, is a leap I am unwilling to make.

Women in fashion magazines, movies, television, are professionally beautiful. Being beautiful in an unattainable way is their job. They work every day to be that beautiful. Were that my job, I would lift more weights, clean my face on a regular basis, not consider exfoliation to be "a hassle," and never eat a carb. But since I don't get paid to be attractive, it's bread and sleeping in eyeliner for me. If you, personally, don't like their occasionally boyish figures or outsized busts, it shouldn't matter to you that you don't look like that. There is a serious disconnect between complaining about how unattractively thin models are and then complaining that the selfsame things you find unattractive about them, being unattainable for you, make you feel unattractive yourself.

Does anyone really, truly, honestly think that if there were women of all shapes and sizes in the media, that we women wouldn't find something else to be self-hateful about? Is it really that simplistic? Get a bunch of regular sized and lumpy chicks on the pages of InStyle and we'll all live in Utopian body satisfaction world? To quote the girl from 1991: are you smoking crack?

Want a great example? This photo. Oh, look, girls who also have rolls in their stomachs when they lean over. Bravo! But do you notice what these "real" women don't have? Here's a cursory list:

Cellulite
Scars from ingrown leg hairs
Any body hair whatsoever or the razor burn/waxing bumps to prove they ever had any
Thin hair
Split ends
Visible stretch marks
Wrinkles
Grey hair
Weird moles
Uneven skin tone
And so on, etc. etc.

Also these women may be non-thin, but none is fat. Also none is over 30. If you want to pay money to look at a non-thin-but-not-fat, over thirty woman with thin hair, stretch marks, scars on her knees from summer camp, broken blood vessels on her nose, and the remnants of a manicure from October, I'll start telling you where to send the checks. The women in that picture are no more representative of the rest of us than Kate Moss. They're merely 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss. Everything else remains the same (it should be noted that I have no idea if there are Supermodels anymore, and Kate Moss is the last one I remember who was very skinny - I realize Kate Moss is now well over 30).

So putting beautiful women 40 pounds heavier than Kate Moss, but whose skin, hair, etc. is equally airbrushed, who have spent the same number of hours in the stylist's chair prior to being photographed, in magazines, as opposed to only showing women as thin as Kate Moss will do absolutely nothing to improve women's self-image issues. And anyone who says otherwise is an imbecile.

A dangerous imbecile who is doing exactly the same thing to women as he/she claims the media is: reducing an entire gender to a group of mouthbreathers incapable of making decisions -good and bad- for itself. Oh, don't blame that woman for her poor self-image; the magazine made her do it. She couldn't possibly be expected to stand up for herself on her own. We need to change the magazines so that the poor thing can get out of bed in the morning without wanting to take a razor to her fat, hairy wrists.

These purported feminists are doing more to halt women's progress than any fashion magazine could ever claim to do. I don't want my raison d'etre as a woman to be perpetual victimhood, nor am I comfortable with the notion that until some third-party changes its ways, I will be unable to change my own.

There is a self-image problem that exists for women, but the hard truth is that in many cases it is created by women. We are the consumers and the judges of other consumers. Beauty as a status symbol is a tenet upheld by us all and no amount of media manipulation alone will change that. Belief that we are all equally beautiful negates the very idea of beauty. Admitting that beauty is both subjective and rare doesn't hurt the feminist cause. Attempting to deny subjective beauty makes us both naive and fatuous. The actual challenge is creating a hierarchy where beauty is not the only barometer of success for women. Ignoring beauty as a factor in how we evaluate others does nothing to broaden the scope of our evaluations; it reinforces a narrow view of worth in women. If we, as women, are only evaluating ourselves and others by their beauty, we're the problem. And we need to change. Otherwise, the magazines could print blank page upon blank page, and we'd still be no better off.

Life After Fat

The time has come to admit that I am no longer, in any way, shape or form, fat. I can no longer make self-deprecating comments about my fat. It is now unseemly as opposed to just undignified. I must now humbly join the ranks of the not-fat who still have body issues. As in, I know I am not fat, but that doesn't mean that there isn't room to improve the quality of my midsection.

I'm being flippant, natch, but this is actually a rather difficult transition. I have been legitimately and certainly medically fat my entire adolescent/adult life. It was a fallback defense and a daily reality. The number of times I used fat as an excuse for something entirely non-fat related? Too many times to comfortably admit. It turns out that my shortcomings will now have to be rationalized via other means.

And it's really not easy to get my head out of its fatspace. One great example: buffets. I used to worry that, in an environment where there was easy food access, people would notice when I decided to help myself: too early and they would judge the fat girl who couldn't keep her hands off the food; too late and I was tacitly admitting my fat and its control over me. Also clothing choices, as in, why is that fat girl wearing that form fitting outfit. Does she not know she is fat and should, therefore, be hiding that?

No one has much sympathy for the non-fat body dysmorphia. Glamour magazine no longer considers my body a protected class and all those cover articles promising the best jeans/dress/outfit for your body type, don't have my body type. And while I agonize over the perfect 12" measurement differential (possibly achievable) and the sad state of affairs that is my skin, I don't get to be all that vocal about it because after all, I'm not fat. I really shouldn't have anything to complain about - certainly not the fact that a pair of really tiny jeans I got 10 pounds ago are now loose.

Now I get the "you shouldn't lose any more weight" comments. Which, don't get me wrong, I understand come from a place of support, but don't do much for the lurking suspicion that there actually are some more pounds that wouldn't be missed should they suddenly go missing.

While on vacation, I ate foie gras twice without guilt. Also while on vacation we took some pictures. In all of them I can point out to you what still needs improvement, but as a farewell to the fat that was, I will share two with you.

You see when we went to Corsica in 2005 we took a lot of pictures as well. Including this one:


And while we didn't get the angle quite right, we went in search of the exact same location while on this trip to take the same photo:


Is the first picture rather embarrassing now? Absolutely! Have I delighted in looking at these two side by side ever since we got home? Yup!

So this will be among the last posts I write about my weight. I'll be losing a little more and toning what remains, but I can no longer pretend that this is a real issue that deserves attention. Please bear with me, in person and online, as I make the mental transition from fat to normal - if you've never been both, you might not understand that the brain takes some time to catch up with the body, but I assure you this is neither dissembling nor a pathetic compliment-fishing expedition. And if you hear me refer to my "fat" in the present tense, give me a couple of months before you yell at me. New body and I are still somewhat strangers to each other.

Resolving

As much as I like to feel immune from group-thought, I will admit that the new year inspires change in me. Some of the change is illogical - I know that no matter how many times the New Balance butt slimming sneakers are advertised on TV they won't actually slim my butt - and other is entered into in the spirit of renewal that a new year brings. 2011 will, of necessity, be momentous, and I have a lot of anxiety, both personal and logistical about that.

I think, though, that the idea of new year's resolutions is more about the thought process than the doing. I can certainly buy an elliptical machine and vow to use it daily, but the thoughts behind that possibility are more valuable. Identifying that exercise, though abhorrent to me, is something I should be doing, and identifying the reasons for the should is important.

Then there are the intangibles. Looking at who I am as a person and thinking about what changes will benefit me intellectually and emotionally. This is more challenging because the purchase of an elliptical can't get at the heart of these changes. Thinking about what makes me happy, what will make me happy, and what can make me happy, are thoughts that are often sabotaged by fear which in turn breeds inaction. Using the new year to jumpstart these thoughts is useful even if their fruit bears down the road.

I will do my best not to use this platform to babble too incoherently about wedding planning and weight loss, though both of those things will use some mental space this year, but I ask for some leeway when the musings hit me. For all the truth there is in how our lives have been married-like for some time, there is also truth in how actually marrying brings changes and challenges that we have, until now, been able to put aside. The less fleeting these thoughts are, the better I will be able to address them, and the less likely I will be to ignore them.

In the meantime, happy new year to you all.

Darwin Comprehension Fail

Much like my complete inability to understand the great car equation, I frequently misuse, either intentionally or accidentally, Darwinian theory of natural selection. Oft times my mistakes are simply Lamarckian in nature, but other times, they're just utter fabrication yanked from the depths of a clearly troubled mind.

Take this morning, for instance. I arrived at the 125th Street subway station and was greeted by an unusual sound: good music. I seem to have particularly bad luck when it comes to subway music - the really disturbed people are always at my stations. 125th street has some regulars: crazy can't rap guy who makes up lyrics on the spot about the people who go by; mariachi-esque band that only knows two songs; sad lady with karaoke machine clearly not able to sustain Gladys Knight. I do my best to ignore these people and frankly, if it's a choice between them and the guy who shouts: "Jeee-Sus loves you. Jeee-sus is the love," I'm pretty hard pressed to pick a winner. But the guys this morning, a keyboard and a sax, were playing some pretty upbeat, not-at-all-off-key, happy music.

So I did something I never do: I gave them a dollar.

In the moment after this, I thought about why I had given them a dollar and realized, to my horror and great amusement, that I did so for reasons of natural selection. My reasoning was that if people gave the good subway musicians money, more good subway musicians would spawn and the crap musicians would be unable to respawn. Yes. I know. Utter shite. But I liked the idea.

Imagine if it worked that way. Imagine if you could control the quality of subway music, cab drivers, Starbucks baristas, simply through tip theory. Those who didn't earn enough tips would fade from view, taking their ilk with them, while those who earned many tips would prosper and thrive, bringing more of their like into the world. I think this development in not-at-all-science would be revolutionary.

And I do so like that it would have been my idea in the first place.

Fellini It Isn't

For someone who has, in her life, taken great pains to appear smarter and more cultured than you, the evolution of taste takes its toll. The truth is, on any given evening, I would prefer to watch Dune than The Seventh Seal. In fact, on any given evening, I would prefer to watch Dune over most other things. I have a Dune problem. I'm going to attempt to not cast my lower-brow tastes in any kind of hipsterish rejection of the highbrow and merely say that after an adolescence of total modernist immersion with some Renaissance epic poetry thrown in for good measure, I'm ok with the fact that I can't stand the New Yorker and generally won't even read it on the toilet.

We saw the movie Red over the weekend and I loved it. Now my love of ensemble action-esque movies is nothing new. I have been a Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Murder on the Orient Express, etc. fan for many years. Little pleased me more than the original Ocean's Eleven simply because I hoped it was the start of more 70's-era ensembles of silliness. Red, which is decidedly lowbrow was a delightful romp with all the attendant irony I look for in such things. Also, Helen Mirren has a sick body. Sick.

But it dawned on me that maybe I have ever so little less to prove by my choice of media consumption. After all, as devoted partner notes, my humor tends towards the eight-year-olds never so apparently as when I'm watching Family Guy and laughing at doodie jokes. When I reach for a book to reread, it's true that it's frequently Foucault's Pendulum, but the others that get reread often are American Psycho and Tim Cahill's Road Fever. So it's not all semiotics and fancy words. I have tried, and disliked, many of the new guard of intellectuals, leading me to believe that what I'm looking for has changed, not merely that the new guard of intellectuals is a bloviating morass of mediocrity (see how I used really snooty words there?).

And, as is a case I have heard from other recovering, or semi-recovering, self-satisfied asshats, I'd rather read good non-fiction these days than mediocre fiction. Philip Roth, a shining example of self-satisfied asshattery, has become more of a punchline than a good read. After all, I know of no one other than Philip Roth as interested in Philip Roth's erectile dysfunction. Now, I'm not yet at the point where I salivate over the newest biography of a nineteenth century politician, but I don't discount the possibility that that time may come.

As for film, or shall I say movies, I never much went in for the idea of film as art and I'd much rather laugh at a movie than feel consternation at one. Again, a good documentary would serve me better than a mediocre thought experiment.

Now, I'm not over the hump yet. I will still disdain the bottom of the barrel with full voice. You need not worry about seeing me thumbing through Danielle Steele or any of the author's who have ads on the subways, nor will you catch me waiting in line for Jackass 3 or a Rob Schneider movie (were another to ever be made), but I'm just no longer interested in subjecting myself to what is cast as High Art for the sake of having experienced High Art. I've experienced a buttload of High Art and it's taught me that not all of it is actually good (I'm looking at you, D.H. Lawrence, you pitiable hack).

Devoted partner, on the other hand, is not off the hook for his choice of reading material, and frankly neither are you if I catch you reading a book about Vampires that wasn't written by Bram Stoker.

The Little Things That Prevent Me From Being An Adult

My aversion to showering is well-documented. This is a character failing I know. Most adults do not consider "took a shower" to be a milestone needing celebration. But I think it's important to note that it's not the shower qua shower that I object to, merely all the things showering implies: hair conditioning, exfoliation, combing of hair, application of various types of moisturizer - and that's on days when I don't suck it up and actually do my hair and makeup.

Our shower is perfectly sized, but short on storage. Since I have no special affection for the act of showering, I have done little to ameliorate this problem. As such, it is not unusual, especially during shared showers, for various wash items to fall to the floor: combs, body washes, conditioners, etc. And yet, as I attempt to embrace adulthood with all its hygiene requirements, I find that I would like to have more room for my stuff.

Oh who am I kidding? The entire bathroom could use some assistance. Neither of us is really all that keen on bathroom maintenance (see empty roll of toilet paper on the dispenser and active roll of toilet paper on the counter; towering stack of magazines; unused but unmoved cups; assorted daily items not replaced in medicine cabinet). I don't even grok this, which is what I found when I google imaged "Martha Stewart bathroom." Now, I also read the post that accompanied the picture of an impossibly groomed medicine cabinet (who does this?) in which the author admitted to being occasionally lazy, but her occasionally lazy and mine have two entirely different meanings.

I did, however, take solace in her 8-minute regimen. Take 8 and only 8 minutes to do something tidy. I like this in theory. Much like, "only eat until you're full," it makes a lot of intellectual sense. In reality, my full and other people's might be different, ergo I simply avoid eating altogether. I would very much like to become an 8-minute kind of person. Since the last cleaning of my kitchen (long long long long overdue) I have been wiping up when I see spots of stuff on counters and stovetops, so there might be hope, but amidst that hope is the stepstool with the stack of magazines that didn't fit in the bathroom perched precariously on the top step so...

I have been to many of your houses (I'm looking at you AMY) and I notice that they all seem well-kept. Do you have maids? Or do you actually take time to fix your own houses and how do you do this when the DVR beckons? Or the knitting site? Or, really, well, anything?

But this weekend we will pack ourselves off to the Container Store for 8 minutes of looking for bathroom organizers. And I will try very hard to spend 8 minutes actually unpacking and installing our purchases.

Willpower Fail

So I have a certain amount of disdain for those who complain about the weather namely because it's neither very interesting nor very original. And I like to be both. Yet this particular breath of summer does have side effects beyond discovering new places on your body with sweat glands.

My tan is suffering because it is simply too hot to go to the beach. Our cuisine is suffering because it is simply too hot to contemplate crafting a lovely meal - I now consider cold cuts to be dinner. We bought a grown-up sized kiddie pool for eff's sake and it's too hot to sit in it!

This is a concern as devoted partner and I have been throwing darts at a map trying to determine if we would like to move somewhere completely different. And since I seem to be a far bigger baby when it comes to snow, all the places our darts have landed, thus far, have been south of here. Which means this delightful, moist airlessness will last longer. I console myself with the knowledge that once removed from the most expensive real estate this side of the Atlantic, we could possibly have a pool (and a dog).

I find myself having unwholesome anthropomorphic thoughts about our central air conditioning - thank god I haven't gone so far as to name it. Intimacy is an idea best achieved in one's mind or after the central air conditioning has set the mood, so to speak. The idea of turning any of the glorious summer produce into preserves, which I love having the rest of the year, is a galling one: I simply don't want to stand over a boiling spluttering pot of fruit mush.

So I have failed my test of not talking (complaining) about the weather. On the bright side, listening to/checking the forecast is totally useless for the next 3-4 weeks - you know exactly what you'll be getting.

The Dream Was Sweet While It Lasted

For a couple glorious days I imagined training my Molosser to eat people on the train who spoke too loudly on their cellphones, playing frisbee in the surf, and snuggling by the tv, but it was not meant to be. At least not this year. While the landlady was enthusiastic about our paying her more in rent when we renew our lease, she was far less enthusiastic about our having a dog. In hindsight, she would have done better to ask for the increase before I asked for the dog. Knowing the dog was an impossibility did shut my pocketbook rather tightly. We said we'd give her rate of inflation rounded to the nearest $50.

So, for now, I will content myself as I have for years accosting other people's dogs. Case in point, when I got on the train this morning there was a rather large cocker spaniel that needed playing with. His owner said she welcomed my attentions since her household had just acquired a kitten which was getting the lion's share of petting. Happy to oblige, I pet the hell out of her dog. The dog was really into it too, going so far as to jump up and lick my face in gratitude (this is why I don't wear a lot of makeup).

Dogs really are wonderful creatures. While basking in the temporary unconditional love of the spaniel, I hardly noticed the train passengers who generally make my skin crawl (ok, I did note the woman who huffed exasperatedly at the train conductor when he asked for her ticket - didn't he see she was ON THE PHONE?). Dogs are transporting experiences.

And of all the misgivings, fears, anxieties, etc. I have about the possibility of starting a human family one day, precisely zero of them are felt vis a vis the raising of a dog. And I think I've located the cause: dogs are puppies for far less time than humans are puppies. Yes, raising a puppy is hard work - for 6-9 months. And even during those 6-9 months you can get the dog to use the bathroom where you want, feed itself from its bowl, and ambulate. During this time, you can also teach the dog to catch a frisbee - something your human puppy will need at least 6 years to achieve. Can I work up a little mistiness from time to time over the vision of devoted partner playing catch with our human spawn? Sure. I'm not a monster. But then I think of all the effort that goes into getting to the point where I can witness that movie of the week moment and I suddenly find myself exhausted and not a little bit resentful. Not so with the dog.

But for now, it seems, both playing catch daydreams will remain daydreams and poor Matt will be the recipient of my whimpering and longing glances as I molest his charming dogs with all my pent up love.

Still, much like our daydreams of winning the lottery, we had a good deal of fun planning for our future dog. Maybe next year.

Miami: Not About Cuban Food

I bought my first two-piece bathing suit the summer I graduated from high school. It was black and from J. Crew and made in that cottonish material that wasn't shiny. The top was a triangle and the bottom was a brief. The moment I made the decision to buy it was a big one. There's a picture of me from that summer in a pool in Massachusetts and you can see I'm still not quite comfortable without that piece of fabric covering my midsection, but I'm smiling, so at least I'm trying.

I have a picture in that same pool from two summers earlier. I am wearing a frankly ghastly royal blue one-piece with visible underwire cups for a variety of breast I still can't grok (the cups were spaced about two inches apart forcing the breasts to point out to the side, like Farrah Fawcett hair or the orange cones the guys on the ground use to direct planes).

I made the decision to go to two pieces after a long and frank (and frankly filled with self-loathing) accounting of me and my body. A diet here, a chocolate eclair binge there, I was going to have more or less the same shaped body for the rest of my life. I was never going to get any taller, nor was my waist going to get longer. And I would probably never have washboard abs. And, after thinking about those things I said, essentially: F it. I wanted a tan stomach. And I'm pretty positive I also wanted to send myself a message that two-piece bathing suits weren't only for Cindy Crawford (though I know she looks better in hers than I do in mine and that's ok too).

In the (number deleted) years since then, I have owned seven additional two-piece bathing suits and zero additional one-pieces. When I pack for the beach the only choice is what color. The tops are still triangles, but I've managed to wean myself off high waisted bottoms. Call it confidence or a deep misunderstanding of reality, the result is the same.

And do you know what I've noticed (when I am not, forgive me, noticing that women really do peak physically at about 16)? I'm not the only person on the beach or at the pool who "shouldn't" be in a bikini. Bathing suit season is the great equalizer. And people watching the parade of imperfections makes me feel a lot more generous to women whom, while dressed, I might harbor some unbecoming envy. I hope my personal parade of imperfections is cheering to others as well. The fact is very few people have perfect bodies. Choosing to walk around essentially naked while knowing we have imperfect bodies is both a courageous decision and one I know can be fraught with painful anxiety. Because we all think we're being judged.

And we are.

We point out to friends and lovers the good bodies and the bad, sizing ourselves up in their wakes. But it really comes to naught. Since while she might have cellulite, you have moles; while her ass is wide, your thighs shake too much; while her breasts are fake, your nose is too. I feel better about myself not because so many others have flaws, but because I feel part of a group of flawed people as opposed to the only flawed person looking in on perfection.

I know bathing suit season is a well-trod path of insipid Cosmopolitan magazine articles designed to traumatize and debase, and I know it's popular to jump on that bandwagon: "oh, I hate bathing suit shopping!" But I would like to suggest that this year, we ditch that cliche, buy something in a snappy color (I'm still looking for the perfect red), and simply resolve to eat ever so many fewer tortilla chips (which is good for us anyway). I've got an itsy bitsy magenta bottom I'm not quite ready for, but it sits in the drawer reminding me how much I'd like to be.

The Lies Women Tell

"My husband and I never fight."

"He can just look at me and I have multiples."

"Labor is the worst pain ever."

"My boyfriend's is enormous."

"I'd never want to be as skinny as she is."

"Every time is as magical as the first."

Thank god Amherst didn't have sororities or I would have been in trouble. I've not been fortunate in amassing a coterie of close female friends. There are a number of almosts, some halves, but I don't have that terrific group of women with whom I can take a week in Barbados. This makes me sad and the future prospects aren't great.

But, and rationalization this must be, some of the above statements have always given me pause when I am surrounded by an XX crowd. If you are a woman, you have heard other women you know, and occasionally like, utter one of the above ridiculous statements. Maybe you've ignored them, maybe you've pitied the speaker, or maybe, like me, you've seethed at the necessity for the utterance at all. Devoted partner has often said, and I have often been pissed at him for it, that while men measure their relative worth against other men on the power/income metric, women measure by relationships. And as we all know, no relationship can be good unless there is never friction and always huge member magical special time. Right?

I mentioned sororities up top because I always found this kind of chatter a form of hazing. I remember it especially when the topic of giving birth was brought up and those that had would launch into the most hyperbolic hysterics about how painful it was. But my mom told me it was no biggie. Sure, she wouldn't choose to do it every day, but her report of the experience was at complete odds with every other report I received. I chalked it up to a bit of one-upmanship. Of course when followed immediately by, "but it was worth it because my husband is gigantic and we had magical whoopie every night in an effort to conceive and I had a million little deaths each time," I felt less charitable.

Because isn't the goal of those statements, if only for a moment, to make the listener question her own life and choices? Wait a second, sometimes our special time isn't all that special, and last night I yelled about dirty dishes, and then there was that time when for a couple of months no one was reaching satisfying completion. F$%#%$K! Is my marriage/relationship/life doomed? Cause this bitch in front of me has it all!

Not nice, ladies, not nice.

I swear, and those who know me well know I am precisely this stubborn, I sometimes consider never marrying devoted partner simply in protest to all the people, most especially women who look at and speak towards me pityingly when they hear about my "situation." Or, should we birth, to film it and put it on YouTube showing me calmly reading a book during the whole process; or playing Parcheesi. For someone admittedly so good at lying, I seem to find insincerity and dishonesty at the top of my peeves list, and when I am around groups of women (no matter what kind of group), I hear it everywhere.

Now that we're older and people are, especially the coupled ones, having less sex, the bragging rights go to the couples that don't fight. Ever. I don't know why this is considered a good thing. To my mind, if you never fight, you're never really invested in something. Or you are so indifferent to one another that nothing seems worth getting heated up about. Or you've both already commenced your affairs, so why stir the pot?

Why this upsets me when, much like the television, I can choose to tune out or change channels, is that it simply perpetuates the wholly unrealistic picture of adult couplehood lapped up by young women. Which, when they discover how unrealistic it is, can spend much of their time feeling like they've failed. After all, if everyone else has X and I don't, there must be something wrong with me. And even among us liberated self-determinative, impervious types, there are a couple of moments of doubt we can all recall.

So why write about this? Well, I've been asking myself to identify things I'm passionate about and, as I look at what I've chosen to write about, I see a lot of women's issues creeping in. But not the traditional ones. Pay equity and reproductive rights, while certainly on my list, are issues there are more than enough people tackling. These other things, these insidious cultural things, these are never mentioned, and their ill effects are perpetuated. And we're all culpable. Any time we lied and instead of saying, "I'm really happy," we said, "it was perfect from the first moment," we contributed to the utter falsification of what a stable adult relationship is.

And we miss the opportunity to share the important information - how relationships aren't always easy, but when you know you want to work on them, you've probably found one worth staying in.

After

So I'll start off by saying it was way less scary than I thought it would be. It was delightfully informal. The first hour was mostly meet and greet. I met two of the hostess's lovely sisters, some of the moms from preschool and mommy group, and friends of friends of friends. I engaged in small talk - something I don't think I'm good at - and tried to keep track of names. Then the speaker took the floor and spoke about her experiences on the road to becoming a life coach for about 15 minutes.

She was cute, and definitely spunky, and certainly very invested in her experiences. She did assume a little more background knowledge in her audience about the sphere of personal improvement, but perhaps that's bias - I didn't really know the names of the people she referenced though it's possible I've seen one of the books she mentioned advertised on a bus shelter. She did not use a lot of hocus pocus words, nor did she speak like a drone or a robot - all good things. And, as I had expected, what she said was elemental; and she admitted as much while asserting that it's precisely the elemental things we find it so easy to overlook.

Then she opened the floor up for questions. I asked one. I even made it honest and truthful and not designed to trick her into admitting she was a massive fraud, or a thetan, or a seller of snake oil. She responded as best she could without giving away strategies best learned through purchasing her book. And she's a businesswoman above all else, so I don't blame her for that. After question time we returned to speaking to one another, only this time, we spoke about what we had just heard. I was gratified to hear more skepticism from the other women than I would have expected. The refrain I kept hearing was to the tune of, "that's all well and good in the abstract, but how do I improve my life starting now?"

The crux of the speaker's thesis, and her name is Marie Forleo if you are interested in learning more, was that we all need to live in the moment more. Now that's one of those catchphrases that twitches me almost immediately, but I attempted to translate it into something more palatable for my snobbish ears. What I came up with is that we all need to learn to be fully invested in our activities if we want them to succeed. That makes a lot of sense and I don't need to dig too deep to discover how rarely I'm fully invested in anything. I'm more of a dabbler, really, and my bank account and self-esteem show that. The how was the ingredient we didn't get for free.

But she said one thing that really resonated with me (see admission of dabbling above): she said that we are programmed to think that success comes, for the most part, in a single arena; that we have to commit wholly to one thing and one thing only and be a success in that; that attempting to be successful more than once and in more than one area is to set one's self up for failure. She called bullshit on that. She said that as long as you are able to be in the moment fully invested in each of the activities that drives you, you don't have to pigeonhole yourself. I can buy that.

But here's the rub: my personal problem, for all of you who are interested, is I'm completely devoid of that initial all-encompassing inspiration. There are a lot of things I could be interested in and could devote my time to, I just am so incredibly wishywashy, indecisive, and self-critical that instead I do nothing. The real development that took place on account of last night's event was the conversation, poorly timed, that devoted partner and I had this morning. And shocker of shockers he said something that is going to stick with me. He said there's a difference between a career and an avocation.

Well, shit, that's true. I started making and selling chocolates while I was unemployed and decided that instead of going to get a stable job, I would hack away at chocolates until it became a stable job. Thing is, it never became a stable job. Why didn't I go back and get another technology job and make chocolates at night and on the weekends? I can answer that question: because that would have been difficult and time consuming and not fun. Sitting around in my underwear and responding to intermittent orders was fun (if non-lucrative). I never made the chocolates my job, I just made the chocolates.

So here's my takeaway: for eff's sake stop quitting your jobs. You have ideas. They constantly percolate. Start following through. Stop thinking that all it takes is an idea and start attempting to make the ideas work. No one will pay me just for having neat ideas (although I always thought that's what working at a think tank was). In the meantime, start thinking about things I could do as a career - perhaps my ideas and my career will intersect, perhaps not, but I shouldn't think of it as a binary system: either I have a career or I have a thing I really like to do.

Oh, and to the one person who won the 258 million dollar jackpot in Missouri... I totally hate you.

Morbid Nostalgia: Two Vignettes

Inspired by high school reunion planning.

1.
Once upon a time there was a boy. A sweet, funny, smart, kind boy with the faults common to teenage boys who are sweet, funny, smart, and kind. His family life wasn't the greatest, the sad tale of a divorce gone very bad and a mother who wasn't quite able to hold up her end of the responsibility bargain in the aftermath. Luckily for the boy he found a mother figure who was more than willing and more than able to bestow upon him the attention that seemed somehow compromised when it came from his father's next wife, however earnest she was. Perhaps the mother figure could be a tad overbearing, but that was a small price to pay for the solid maternal attention.

There was a girl who liked the boy. Liked in a teenage kind of way. The boy and the girl were friendly and then friends. And then. In a teenage kind of way fumblings happened. But also conversation of a teenage sort. Embarrassment. Shyness. Refumbling.

The mother figure did not approve. She may have liked the girl, but she thought the boy could do better. And she wasn't afraid to say so. Someone prettier, perhaps, more deferential, less independent. It always seemed to the girl afterward that the mother figure thought she, the girl, was hitting above her pay grade when it came to associating with the boy.

The boy and the girl were only ever going to be a teenage thing. The mother figure had the potential to be more. So the boy stopped liking the girl. No more conversations. No more fumblings. Nothing, really.

The girl's friends did an excellent job of mocking the boy, mocking the mother figure, cutting ties. Maybe they thought the boy was hitting above his pay grade; maybe they were just being kind.

It was just a teenage thing.

2.
There was a girl who liked a boy. The boy was very very unavailable. But he didn't always act that way. Sometimes he seemed more available; sometimes he seemed very available. Obviously this was not fair to the girl, nor was it fair to the girlfriend, but these are teenagers after all. The girl knew, somewhere deep down, that the boy wanted the girlfriend but wasn't above wanting the girl's attention and sometimes more than that. But she really really really liked the boy.

The girl confided her sadness, her hopes, her mistakes to her friend, the other girl. The other girl tried to be a good friend and not point out the obvious, that the boy had and continued to make a choice and it wasn't the girl. But the other girl didn't have a long history of successful female friendships and didn't always know what to say. She tried to listen, at least for as long as she could simulate interest, and she turned a mostly blind eye when mistakes were made. After all, it was what the girl really really wanted.

One night, though, the boy made a move on the other girl. In front of the girl who liked him so much. It was a clumsy grab at a popular part of the other girl, and the other girl didn't know what to do. She had no interest in the boy, but she was also painfully embarrassed at the situation. Should she loudly call the boy out for untowardly grabbing at her? Should she do nothing? She tried, as best she could in the cramped quarters groups of teenagers can be fond of, to wiggle away. But the damage had been done. The girl knew the boy had tried something with her friend and the other girl, by action or inaction, had done the wrong thing.

Later, the other girl would wonder if she could have acted differently. If female competition was at fault, or if she was intentionally allowing the girl, her friend, to see what a fickle shit the boy was. The other girl couldn't honestly say she handled the situation in the best possible way, but she hoped, fervently hoped, she hadn't acted maliciously towards the girl, her friend.

But it wasn't ever going to be the same after that. The girl was very angry at the other girl. Perhaps she was very angry at the boy, but she liked him so so much that it was probably easier to be angry at the other girl. The anger lay dormant and on the surface things went on as usual. But something was different. When the other girl started a bad relationship on the sly, she didn't tell the girl, her friend. Even though the other girl probably could have used a friend during that time. But the trust had been broken. Later, the girl started a relationship with a new boy that the other girl really really liked. Whether it was payback or an unfortunate coincidence is something no one but the girl knew. And she wasn't talking. Later still, the girl was not nice to the new boy and then there was a new new boy. But by that time the girl and the other girl didn't really talk anymore. At all.

*
A classmate of mine recently wrote a book about the films of John Hughes. I always thought the movies were cute, but I could never really relate. The characters had a teenage experience so far more polarizing than mine. My angst was different and, in fact, bracketed my high school years but stayed mostly out of them. But as a reunion comes up, I think of the people I grew up with, which friendships persevered and which feel by the wayside, through atrophy or by intent. I remarked to one classmate as we sloshed through the rain to the subway station that there wasn't a single person from our class whom I didn't wish well. My pollyanna-ish feelings about high school make me really really want everyone to be happy. For me, time heals most grudges. And I'm in no way a saint, I'm just lazy. At the end of the day, holding a grudge for decades is just too much work.

I know the boys and girls of these stories probably won't read them. But I remember. I remember how important it all seemed at the time and how utterly unimportant it is now. It was high school. These boys and girls are married, starting families, being grown-ups. But I remember. And sometimes, sometimes when I allow myself to roam freely through the less rose-colored halls of history, it makes me sad.

Stuck on Planet Freud

I think I have discovered why I am so frequently at odds with others and it boils down to a basic misunderstanding of human motivation. I would like to know that the greatest possible number of people whom I encounter would like to have sex with me. I attempt to comport myself in ways (obviously the days when I don't shower or brush my hair are failures) that make the people around me think, "yes, that's the kind of person I'd have some sex with." I assumed you were doing the same.

This is why I am so flummoxed by picks-nose-in-public, puts-smelly-feet-on-seat, doesn't-say-bless-you-when-someone-sneezes, and doesn't-hold-doors-open among others. I had assumed that, like me, other people wanted to be seen as sexually desirable and would know that sexually desirable people don't pick their noses publicly.

But this makes me even more confused since pretty much every advertisement since time began was about making yourself more attractive in some way so that people would be desirous of sex with you. Have we stopped wanting to have sex? I can't imagine that is true. Mostly because I feel that advertising agencies would have cottoned on and developed different ways to encourage our spending. They're smart that way.

In fact even when I'm being dismissive of someone, it is generally dismissive with an undertone of, "you really ought not to think of relations with me as there is a zero percent chance that sort of thing will come to pass," which I guess presupposes that the person being dismissed was already on the sex-with-me train.

But I don't sense that level of involvement from other people when they act out towards me. For example: the 50-year-old suit who bodily pushes in front of me to get in or out of the train doesn't seem to be doing so to remind me that I don't have a chance of having sex with him; it doesn't seem that well thought out. He's pushing in front of me because it doesn't occur to him that it would be far more polite to let me go first - in fact, if he were smart, he would let me go first and say something like, "after you," so that I would reflect on him later as someone with whom sex would not be horrific.

Yet I do note that a number of these people, both men and women, are married, which presumes that, at some point, they wanted to be sexually attractive to someone. I find it acutely sad that, once paired up, this no longer mattered; at the same time it makes me wonder why they would spend so much on handbags and sunglasses.

I Love A Parade

No, that's not quite right. I hate parades. And unlike many of the things I hate for no good reason, this hate is easily traceable to a series of childhood traumas. I grew up in Manhattan in the 80s on the parade route. Parades in New York went across 86th Street and down 5th Avenue. I lived on 86th street. So approximately 10 times a year there would be many many many people on my doorstep and lots of sis boom bah. The parades, for the most part, all ran together in my mind, with two obvious exceptions. The loud ones. The scary ones. The not-good-for-children ones.

I speak, obviously, of the St. Patrick's Day parade and the Puerto Rican Day parade. And as much gets said about the Puerto Rican Day parade and its ills, as one who was there, year after year, it was the less bad of the two for one very important reason: climate. The Puerto Rican Day parade is in June, a month of sunshine and happiness and a desire for cookouts. Which can happily take place in Central Park. Many parade revelers would assemble in the park and in the parade viewing streets near the park so that they could revel in a sunshiny manner. St. Patrick's Day is in March. Today in fact (fancy that). People do not traditionally barbecue in March. Which is sad because the barbecued food could absorb a tremendous amount of the free-flowing alcohol.

So on years when the school holiday did not coincide with the parade, I walked home from school dodging green vomit in my earlier years, and friendly hands in my later ones. Something I was reminded of this morning on the train which was packed with the soon-to-be-handsy.

Now, the appearance of some comely lads, both fine and brave, in their dress blues mitigated my painful flashbacks some, and this picture sent by devoted partner helped some more, but I don't have a lot of fond parade memories (sorry to my dad who took me a number of times to see the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the only major parade that didn't come by our block).

But as part of my attempt at zen introspection, I tried to examine what it was about parades that set me off. I am a well-known avoider of crowds. I don't like them. They are highly inefficient. And they make me slightly (very) violent-like.

But that's not quite right either. I simply loved the souks in Morocco, and they were stuffed to the gills with people, many of whom were aggressively trying to sell me carpets. Similarly, my biggest regret of our trip to Egypt was not getting quality time in the Khan-el-Khalili market in Cairo, another place full up with people. And, truth be told, the ordered chaos of subway travel has always been my preferred method of transport, both here and abroad. I am deeply suspicious of metropolitan areas that don't have subways.

Yet the flip side of this is that when we look to travel in this hemisphere, I seek out the least traveled places; the we're-the-only-ones-here places. So now I think I might be a racist: American crowds (when not on subways) are ill-mannered, drunk, grabassy, loud talkers who inspire violence in me, whereas foreign crowds are ok because it's part of their culture? Crap, I don't want that to be me. That's very jingoistic (oh, forgive these poor people their crowds, they know not what they do). Still, I can't deny that foreign crowds irk me less than domestic ones.

So, I'll attempt to rationalize this ickiness away: I only encounter foreign crowds when on vacation, a period of time characterized by relaxitude and smiliness. Is that helping? Ok, how about this: Americans (again, excepting, for the most part riders of the NY subway) aren't really good at crowds. We're a country that kept expanding so that we would be less crowded. Aside from events or trips to Cancun, we don't congregate overmuch (see also MegaChurches, but those are self-selecting crowds). We're unaccustomed to sheer human volume and, as such, don't know the rules of engagement. It's why our crowds are ineffectually shove-y whereas the shoviness in a place like Mumbai (so I hear) is purposeful and generally without malice. We are a nation that shoves maliciously (I know I do). My experiences with foreign crowds have generally demonstrated a well-rehearsed algorithm of movement. A frenetic ballet, it you will. Anyone who has ever spent 60 seconds at the St. Patrick's Day Parade knows that the drunk jumble is anything but balletic.

Am I off the hook yet?

I know there's a stereotype of the American Abroad, but a lot of times it's not inaccurate. We do have a tendency to talk loudly and, probably given the paltry number of vacation days we get, we become exasperated quickly if the requisite amount of ease and relaxation we anticipated on our holiday isn't forthcoming. And yet, let's be fair, I'm not signing up for a trip to Oktoberfest or the World Cup anytime soon, so foreign country people, you're not in the clear either.

So, I'm going to feel bad about myself for a little bit while I try to make these rationalizations hold water. If you have anything that could help, please don't hesitate to contribute; as The Big Chill taught me: rationalizations are better than sex.

Now Here It Is, Your Moment of Zen

UPDATE: This might just be the answer. Thanks Tony! (Why did I never think to call you Tony before? You'll hate that!)

So, I've been angry recently. Really really
really really
really really really
angry.

At everything and nothing, at myself and other people, indiscriminately and pointedly. If you were to ask me to choose one word to describe myself, it would be angry.

This weekend The Boy and I went away to see our DC-area relatives. There was nothing particularly special about the trip except that it was a break in the routine. A chance to drive one of the least interesting parts of the I-95 corridor, and in between talking to one another, this gave me a chance to reflect. I didn't come up with a list of answers, but I may have given myself the challenge to structure my life so that I am less angry.

Because a lot of what I'm angry about (or that I identify myself being angry about) is stuff that I can change. The stuff I can't change? I might temporarily borrow from 12-step programs and just decide to be serene about it.

Cool.

Catherine Deneuve.

Step 1: When I am angry at you, if I think the anger can be ameliorated, I'm going to tell you. Not angrily. Just normally. Because you probably don't know I'm angry. And you'd probably like to have the opportunity to either tell me to shove it or to modify things. For situations I think are unfixable. I don't think I'm going to tell you. Much like I don't like when relationships end and you hear stories of the parties giving parting shots, "yeah, well I slept with your sister," I don't think there's any point in giving vent to anger within a relationship that isn't going anywhere anyway.

Step 2: I am going to give myself more to do in an effort to permit myself less time to brood (angrily). That table project from months ago? I'm starting it. I'm not commencing with any new knitting projects until the mostly finished ones strewn around the living room are finished. I'm signing us up to volunteer at Adopt-A-Dog like we discussed doing over a month ago. And maybe dance lessons. And maybe I'll find an organization I'd like to devote some time to.

Step 3: I am going to attempt to give less vent to my macro frustrations. Just because I have a Hobbesian view of humanity doesn't make it interesting conversation. Especially when many of my friends are a little more hopeful.

Step 4: I am going to be like Happy Gilmore and find a happy place. I will go to this happy place when other people's behavior bothers me. This place will be more beneficial than the stabby place I go to now. I tried it this morning. It was ok.

This does not signify a sea change in my snarkiness, as snark has a place and can be used for entertainment purposes. It works less well as a guiding life principle.

I don't want to be so angry and since it is less likely that all the things/people/situations that I am angry about/at/near will suddenly change, I'm going to have to change how I am.

But let me know if I become less funny (if you thought I was funny to begin with).

Rebuilding in the Off Season

I'm going to be optimistic for a moment and say that cold and flu season is over for the 09-10 winter. To help make the 10-11 season a healthy one, permit me to suggest that you use this time to work on your skills. Namely, cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough. Thank god we don't live in a time of cholera epidemic or we'd all be dead, given the number of people who hack away in crowded areas without covering up. Now, I know my mom was a stickler for proper manners, but she cannot possibly have been the only one.

Similarly, have you (and obviously I speak to my fellow commuters) noticed that I am the only person who says, "bless you" when someone sneezes? I don't understand why you, person who is sitting next to person who sneezed, doesn't. While we're at it, have you further noticed that I am the only person who says hello to the conductor? He said hello to you, not saying hello back is, well, rude. Even if he is socially beneath you, throw him the greeting crumbs from your table.

I don't want to project a false reality: I am certainly rude to people. But I am rude to people specific, not people general. Chances are if I was rude to you, I had a reason. I guess I should say that when rude I am intentionally rude. To be rude as just habit speaks to a far more sinister condition, and one I suspect has consequences far beyond my daily indignation.

And before I start sounding like Mother Theresa over here, in addition to not being a 24/7 polite person, I also don't much care about other people. Not that I wish them harm or have no concern for their well-being, but on a day to day basis, if I don't know you, I don't care about you. So blessing your sneezing isn't borne from some hippie-ass loving everyone nonsense. I just think that it takes more effort to ignore your sneeze than to acknowledge it.

I mean isn't it habit to say bless you when someone sneezes? To let the old lady have the seat? To wait your turn in line? These seem like societal baselines and to act otherwise takes effort. Because ALL of our mothers taught us these things. Willfully disregarding them is a willful act.

And yet you do it. Every day. Day after day. And I don't know where you learned it.

So take these, the gentler weather months, to consider how we came to be at this impasse, and see if you can't make a mental off-season trade so that when we get to this point next year, your team can be in contention for the playoffs.

Fear and (Self-) Loathing

I've got to hand it to Aidan, she got me thinking. A lot. About fears and the things worse than fears. Like being afraid. I think being afraid is a lot worse than individual fears. Being afraid implies something I can't quite define, but I know I don't like. Being afraid seems an indicator of future behavior. I don't like those kinds of limitations.

But let me step back for a moment. I think I used to be a lot more afraid. I also feel pretty certain that I didn't seem like an afraid person, mostly because I knew even as a child that I didn't want to be perceived as afraid. So I expended a lot of energy to seem unafraid. Also there was pride. There has always been pride. Possibly sociopathic pride.

I am reminded of two incidents, and sorry to those of you who have heard either one. When I was 16, I went with zionist summer camp to Israel for six weeks (let it be known that Israel, unlike, say, France or Australia, is a two-weeks top trip - there just ain't that much of interest), several days of which were spent roughing it (I must stop to mention that when you are on a trip with the 16-year olds of the nation's Temple Beth Shaloms, roughing it is a kind of laughable description of what you do - kind of like when you go on safari on CBS's dime: you're certainly outdoors a lot, but it isn't a rough kind of outdoors; which is not to say it isn't fun) in the desert. By this I mean we walked around during the day and then slept outside at night. For all I know, our guides could have had us walking in circles. Our particular guide was straight out of central casting for "former-IDF-tough-as-nails-misogynist-with-survivalist-instincts" also "speaks in halting English." I disliked him immediately as caricatures rarely capture my interest. So we're walking around with Zvi, or Yoni, or whoever, and he's trying to harden us up, talking about survival and the desert and oh god who knows, when he picks up a live snail, peels its shell off, and pops it in his mouth. He turns to the charming male youth from the Cherry Hill JCC and utters the cinematographic line, "which of you is man to eat snail?" It turned out the answer was no one. He asked again, "which of you is man to eat snail?" To the boys. From Cherry Hill. With the retainers. My 16-year old misguided feminism stepped in at that point. "Me. I am man to eat snail." And eat it I did. Or swallow is more like it. Because pride was way more important at that moment than the fear of eating a live snail.

Fast-forward five or so years. Devoted partner and I are driving to Maine by way of Vermont and New Hampshire for a little summer getaway. We have a full-sized canoe tied to the roof of the hand-me-down 1988 Mercedes (this should have been a warning sign of trips to come, now that I think of it - we're still this kind of crazy). Devoted partner stops at a swimming hole he remembers from summers' past, the kind with a rope swing so you can fling yourself into the water. I was petrified of this. I don't have a fear of heights; it's the fear of not clearing the jagged and/or shallow parts of things that stops me in my tracks. I climbed the tree to get to the rope and froze. And climbed down. Sheepishly. I did not take the leap off the rope swing.

And I have regretted that nearly every day since.

How could I have been defeated by a stupid rope swing? How could I have thought that though every other jumper made it safely to the water, I would be the one to misjudge the exit and bash my head open on something? But I did. And it pissed me off to no end. When I think about it now I'm super pissed off.

So something changed. I'm not going to say it changed immediately after the rope swing failure, though the next day I did take a twenty or so foot jump off a cliff into Emerald Pool, scared as shit the entire time. I was more afraid of being the kind of person who was afraid of things than I was of the things I was afraid of. Scuba diving, in principle, scared the crap out of me, but I jumped into that water those first few times with my teeth gritted and my brow furrowed in defiance. Just try to scare me, scary things. It's not gonna happen. When the French made me eat snails, and the Portuguese clams, I might have complained a bit, but I ate them. Because I was too proud to do otherwise.

And I discovered that the person I thought I was didn't fully exist. She was an invention cobbled together from fear and preconception. And she wasn't as much fun as the person I actually am. I don't know how much it matters that the change was borne of not wanting to be seen a certain way, and who's to say that the current incarnation of me isn't just as fabricated as the old one, I only know that being not afraid of sweetbreads and sharks has made me less afraid of other things. I don't have to grit my teeth and will myself to courage as much. And I like that immensely.

I'll be the first to admit that the mantra of, "what's the worst that can happen?" does have massive backfire potential, but you generally know the instances in which the backfire is likely. So you eat something that you don't like - the worst that can happen is that it comes back up. A very temporary inconvenience. For me, living in fear of unknowns and prejudged knowns was a far harder pill to swallow.

That's E for Exceeds Expectations

I know what you're thinking: oh she got her snow day, she's sitting around the house dirty in her robe and slippers with funky ratty hair and a peculiar smell trying to see how many simultaneous handfuls of granola she can cram down her throat.

It is true, I am in my robe and slippers, and you would be too if you owned my robe and slippers which are objectively the dopeness, and yes, I gave serious and careful consideration to being filthy today - after all to not take a shower is infinitely easier than to take a shower - but I resisted the urge to give myself totally over to sloth. I am clean, people, and what's more, underneath my robe, yeah, you heard it here first, I am wearing clean underwear. So there, haters!

I am even doing a mildly decent job of suppressing my indignation at the current crop of nancys we call today's youth who, in addition to needing to wear helmets during social studies class just in case the grandeur of ancient Greece is so overwhelming they become dizzy and fall out of their chairs, get preemptive snowdays for less than, I don't know, two feet of snow. No wonder we fall behind all other countries that can feed their populace when it comes to, well, all subjects, frankly. (I think we also get our collective asses handed to us by Cuba.)

Instead I am focusing on the positive: I will be able to clean out my DVR; enjoy a cup of tea while watching snow I will not have to shovel fall on the yard; dodge phone calls from my parents all day long (see also: Ed); wonder why I didn't go shopping in advance of the storm because all I have in the house is yogurt, granola, and low fat hot dogs. Ok, so maybe this snow day isn't all its cracked up to be. I'll still have to do some work, and devoted partner certainly has work to do so it's not like we can make a fire and enjoy being shut-ins (particularly as we have no fireplace).

But I might paint my nails, something that is a rare occurrence, with the silly color I'd been looking for these past months and finally found yesterday, and my nails are already clean because, remember, I showered. And in the end, I think that's the important thing to take from this day: I sacked it up enough to not smell like feet. I hope you can say the same.

The Kind of Person Who

Sometimes the people I know awe me. And often for relatively insignificant reasons. Clay seems to upload photos to flickr every day. I think he takes pictures every day. Which means while I am knitting on my couch watching HGTV (it's back, dear merciful lord, it's back), he's out somewhere taking pictures and uploading them (not to mention editing them). I'd like to be the kind of person who does that.

All the food blogs I read, those people make things every day. Then they photograph what they made, edit and upload the photos, etc. etc. I think several of them have day jobs. Yet they take the time to make Meyer lemon pots de creme with basil syrup (actually, I don't know if anyone made that, but I'd like to). It is true, with Defatification 2010 in full effect I wouldn't be able to eat more than a bite of my Meyer lemon pots de creme with basil syrup and then I'd be left with, presumably, eight ramekins of the stuff and do the neighbors really want it?, but in the end, I'd like to be the kind of person who makes pastry more.

Devoted partner and I have traveled a bit in our lives together. These have been some of our happiest times. And I always wanted to be the kind of person who kept beautiful, detailed travel journals. After all, I like writing, surely I could be bothered to keep travel journals. And I tried. Once. On our first trip together. I made it about three-four weeks, and then just got stopped. I was too concerned with how the writing sounded and less concerned with what the writing was about.

I'd hate to think I'm just lazy.

But wait. There is a silver lining. I vowed to stop buying packaged foods, especially of the cookie variety. I reasoned that if I wanted a cookie badly enough, I wanted it enough to make it myself. This has been a mostly successful enterprise. Not nearly as successful, though, as the ice cream thing. I upgraded my ice cream maker about four years ago to a prosumer model that doesn't require freezing a bowl. It's not that the machine was wildly expensive, in fact I got a great deal on a refurbished model, it was more that if I was going to commit to the machinery, I should commit to making the ice cream. In the time that I have owned the machine, I have not bought ice cream. I am the kind of person who makes her own ice cream

I am also the kind of person who gets, on average, five dinners a week on the table. They're not glorious meals a la Peter, who I secretly hope is lying about the amazing meals he cooks his family because otherwise the stir fry I plop in front of devoted partner is sadly lacking, but I cook and it's generally good for us.

And after years of abject failure, I recently became the kind of person who finishes knitting projects. Fearful though I was about how the pieces would look once assembled, I bit the bullet and now you may even see me wearing something I made (well of course I'm going to wear it, it was expensive and time consuming to make dammit!).

And, apologies to Martha, those are good things.