My single New Year’s resolution this year (still not fulfilled) is to buy a new bathroom scale, and, perhaps, one day, use it. I flirted with the notion of bypassing the entire New Year’s resolution charade altogether, but I have been haunted by the drumbeat of news articles and advertisements reminding me that this is the year I can slim down, tone up, and reduce my chronological age to that of Scarlett Johansson.
When my friend Eden invited me to join her book club, I was thrilled. After all, securing a slot in a desirable book club had become more competitive than gaining acceptance to Harvard. Now I had proof that I was no mental midget. The next time my neighbor invited me to come over and watch “American Idol,” I would sigh, “I wish I could, but I’ve got to polish off the last three hundred pages of ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization’ for my book club meeting tonight.”
These days I am on my very best behavior whenever I leave the house. If I am wearing pantyhose, I double check to ensure there is no laughable bagging at the ankles. I drive as thoughtfully as if I’m being tested for a license, a DMV official sitting in the passenger seat. I won’t even allow myself to grimace or honk when another driver is blocking my path, taking ten minutes to parallel park single-handedly because her other hand has a death-grip on a cell phone, which she is using to make a manicure appointment. If I must sneeze, I hide in a secure location before honking into a tissue.
The world of science often goes to great lengths to prove the obvious. The latest example is the American Psychological Association (APA), which released a report on Sunday that links hyper-sexualized images of girls and young women in the media with damage to girls’ healthy psychological development. The incessant drumbeat of these images of women in advertising, merchandising, movies and music videos can lead to depression, eating disorders, and poor self-esteem among girls, the researchers concluded.
At the risk of betraying my sex, I’d like to put a big heart-shaped kibosh on the vast Valentine’s Day industrial complex. I like romance as much as the next gal, but in my sometimes humiliating experience, Valentine’s Day is more likely to sink a love boat than float it.
In case you missed the recent Super Bowl match-up between the Chicago Bears and the Indianapolis Colts, here is a recap of the game by Fox Sports analysts Daryl (”Moose”) Johnston, former starter for the Dallas Cowboys, and Judy (”Mom”) Gruen, who is chronically late for Pilates class.
We who live in sunny, star-studded Los Angeles are often envied by people who live in less glamorous, climactically inhospitable places, such as Embarrass, Minnesota. But I say to residents of Embarrass, Minnesota and other towns and hamlets across this vast nation: Don’t envy us till you’ve walked a mile in our Birkenstocks. We have plenty of problems of our own.
We are now in the midst of that madcap season where everywhere we turn, we confront spooks, goblins, diabolical attempts to frighten us to death, skeletons jumping out of closets, and masked short people ringing bells and demanding treats on pain of extortion.
Since I installed a powerful spam-blocker, most spam email headed my way finds an ignominious end in the electronic trash. Yet danger still lurks in my in-box. Several times a week I receive emails — from people calling themselves friends, no less — containing threats and hints of extortion if I fail to do what the sender requires.
