Still alive!

What can I say? We’re lazy bitches around here.

I have not forgotten about this blog, though it may certainly seem like it. I just find myself with very few things to say that don’t sound exactly like the last thing I said here. I mean, how many times can I talk about doggedly churning out my 5 daily pages, or the odd conversation about plot or character that I have with Christine or with my boyfriend? I think that stuff gets old pretty fast, and while I want this blog to be primarily about my life as a writer, it’s obvious that I need to come up with other stuff to talk about. Because right now? My life as a writer is pretty boring.

(Christine’s life is a bit more exciting in that regard, but she’s pretty sure y’all will find it boring, too. Different writer, same problem.)

So I’ll be trying to find a way to make this blog more of a daily part of my life from now on. I do have a few ideas percolating for posts. Some of them are book related (My Favorite Lines in My Favorite Books), some of them are life related (Why 6:00 AM Yoga Is Saving My Life), and some are sports related (The Shootout - NHL Experiment Gone Wrong, or Definitive Evidence of Evil on Earth?).

And I'm sure I'll get to those soon. Really, I promise!

the deepest cut

If you go to the bio page on my website and look at my photo, you will see that I have long hair. It’s good hair, healthy and strong, and there’s a lot of it, so it looks pretty good long. But it’s basically looked the same for half a dozen years now, and I’m bored with it. So this Saturday, I have an appointment to get it whacked off, and I’m a little nervous.

It’s not like I’ve never had short hair before, it's just been a while. It’s was pixie short right out of college, which didn’t suit my face at all, and in college it was been slightly-longer-than-chin-length short, which did suit my face. That’s what I’m going for this time. But you know, I find myself hesitating, for a couple of reasons.

First: I am not twenty anymore, and my face shape has changed a little bit. Not drastically – it’s not like my jawline is hanging down around my collarbone or anything – but the angles and planes that defined my face in my youth are a little softer now, a little more rounded. And sometimes when I hold my hair up to approximate the length I’m thinking of…well, I’m just not sure. I don’t want this hairstyle to make me look OLDER, for God’s sake, and I’m afraid it will.

So that’s the main reason. Another reason, which isn’t really a reason but more of a point to ponder is…my boyfriend hates the idea.

I know, I know – it’s my hair, and I can do with it what I want. And he is fully aware that any attempt to control my decisions in this area would result in some unfriendly conversation, so he doesn’t go there, and he’s not that guy anyway. But I can tell when I talk about it that he’s not thrilled with the idea. He says things like, “I will support you in this decision,” as though I’m talking about joining the Peace Corps and building roads in Botswana for two years instead of getting a new do.

I think part of it is that he can’t picture me without long hair. We’ve been dating just over a year, and the only picture he’s seen of me with it short is my old passport photo. Which, even without the bad pixie-do is a bad picture. He likes my hair, likes stroking or playing with it, and the idea of it not being there anymore bothers him.

I also think he has the idea that a lot of guys (and girls) have, which is long hair = female = sexy. And there’s something to that, but I don’t think it’s a hard and fast rule. We have a friend who used to have lovely long blond hair that she now wears in a tight little cap that feathers toward her face. She looks absolutely darling, and in some ways even more sexy as her look is more edgy this way. But of course, if I ask my guy if he thinks she looks nice he agrees that she does, then ads, “but her long hair was really pretty”.

In any case, I’m getting my hair cut. It might be a huge mistake, in which case I’ll just hate the way I look for six months while it grows out and my guy will say “I told you so” a lot. Which won’t be pleasant, but it won’t last forever. After all, it’s just hair – not two years in Botswana.

Carrie Fisher is my new hero

This morning I was looking at my Twitter page, catching up on all the goings on that I missed while I was asleep, and saw that one of my good friends had twittered: "Carrie Fisher should get mad more often" and he included a link to a blogpost in which Carrie responds, somewhat vehemently, to an anonymous comment she stumbled across on the web in which someone stated that she used to be hot, but now looks like Elton John.

Now, you have to wade through Carrie's sometimes confusing stream of consciousness writing style, but it's completely worth it. The widely held notion that a woman in her 50s should look exactly like she did in her 20s is, in my opinion, one of the things that defines the society we live in as "fucked up, yo".

I've struggled with my weight through most of my life, sure that what I weighed would define me as a person. The number on the scale would tell me if I was a good person or not, if I was worthy of love, if I could enjoy my lunch that day. This warped idea was reinforced every day by magazines, television shows, and society at large.

And it's bullshit. The number on the scale? It's just a number. It doesn't have a damn thing to do with my worth as a person, or as a woman. It's taken me too many years to realize that, wasted years. I wasn't enjoying life, I wasn't having fun - I was too busy worrying about the amount of dressing on my salad, or the fact that I didn't make it to the gym that day, to have any fun.

I don't do that to myself anymore. I go to the gym now because it makes me feel good. I watch what I eat because I have a family history of heart disease. But I enjoy my food, and I enjoy my life. And, like Carrie, if anyone has anything to say about that? They can blow me.

anti-gravity and feelin' good

Every Tuesday and Thursday I take an exercise class on my lunch hour - my company houses a gym in our office facility, so this is quite convenient. The class is called Triple G - Guns, Guts and Glutes. So you can surmise that we do a lot of arm exercises, a lot of ab exercises, and a lot of ass exercises (it was briefly called Triple A, for Arms, Abs and Ass, but the powers that be were worried someone might take offense. Yeah, I don't get it either).

Anyway, every Tuesday and Thursday I’m in the Triple G class sweating my curling, crunching, lunging self half to death. Really, I sweat more during this class then when I go horseback riding - hell, I sweat more than the horse! And in every class I do two things: 1) vow to catch our perky blond instructor in the parking lot unawares and show her just how much stronger this class has made me, and 2) I feel myself up.

I didn't set OUT to molest myself, you understand - it just sort of happened. See, during the crunching porting of class we're supposed to put our fingertips behind our ears, with elbows out, and crunch. Standard crunch position, right? Well, no matter how hard I try not to, I always end up yanking on my neck in that configuration. Which is not good, so rather than grab the back of my head I crunch with my hands down. And since the crunches are rendered less effective if one is reaching while crunching (and if I'm going to put myself through this hell I want the damn effect), I fold my hands across my upper chest to keep them from inadvertently adding momentum.

So there I am one day, hands folded across my chest, crunching away, and I noticed something - my boobs feel really...full. Like, awesomely full. I'm wearing a sports bra, of course, because gravity is wreaking enough havoc on the girls - I don't need to add to it by bouncing around like some kind of hippie. But instead of squishing everything flat, as most sports bras do, this bra seems to squish everything from the side. And this combined with the crunching motion – the muscles in my upper chest and abs tightening as I curl up - is doing something that all my other sports bras have never done; giving me both superior support and superior cleavage.

I just have to tell y'all...that makes me so happy. I hardly even notice the crunching anymore, I’m so busy marveling at how fantastic my boobs feel in this bra. They feel tight and firm and YOUNG and not at all like they feel when I’m lying on my back without this bra on (did I mention gravity is not kind?). And every once in a while I sneak a peek down at them while crunching away, because they look as awesome as they feel.

Yeah, it’s a little weird. But hey, nobody else is appreciating them in this state, so I might as well!