Just be yourself……….

Oh really? You sure about that?

Because frankly, I’m not all that likable.

I swear.

———————–

Um….. you know that shushhhhhhing thing that you do?  Yeah, the one you use on your 4-year old child? Well (and I’m just speaking for myself here) it’s a little annoying. Mostly because I’m neither 4, nor your child.

I recommend that all mothers should practice talking with other grownups, ESPECIALLY before inviting grownups over to their home.  In my world (grown-up world) adults actually let each other finish their sentences, or at least boldly talk over one another until one person shuts-up.

You just don’t get to say ‘Shushhhh.’

Saying shushhhhh to people makes them hate you.

But by all means, JUST BE YOURSELF!

Top 10 things I’m buying to punish my husband.

1. A lobster from his LEAST favorite restaurant. $20

2. A new purse. $395

3. A toaster. $380

4. The new David Sedaris Book. (Which Dr. Mean DIDN’T buy me the last time we were at Barnes and Nobel. TAKE THAT FUCKER!) $20

..And 6 puppies. PRICELESS

My husband smokes. It’s very looserish of him.

My husband claimed to have quit smoking last July. A pack of cigarettes just fell out of his pocket. Apparently he wants to have a whole lot in common with the poorest and least educated people in our country.

I shall now go shopping…and I mean SHOPPING. (I told him I quit that too…but funnily enough, something seems to have triggered a relapse.)

Please read the following paper to learn all about what a low class fucker my husband aspires to be.

Smoking

Socioeconomic status and smoking

Analysing inequalities with multiple indicators

Mikko Laaksonen¹, Ossi Rahkonen², Sakari Karvonen³ and Eero Lahelma¹

¹ Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
² Department of Social Policy, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
³ STAKES (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health), Helsinki, Finland

Correspondence: Mikko Laaksonen, PhD, Department of Public Health, PO Box 41, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, tel. +358 9 191 27569, fax +358 9 191 27570, Email: mikko.t.laaksonen@helsinki.fi<!–
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Received July 2, 2003, accepted January 20, 2004

	Abstract

Top Abstract Methods Results Discussion References

Background and aims: Socioeconomic differences in smoking have been well established. While previous studies have mostly relied on one socioeconomic indicator at a time, this study examined socioeconomic differences in smoking by using several indicators that reflect different dimensions of socioeconomic position. Data and methods: Data derive from Helsinki Health Study baseline surveys conducted among the employees of the City of Helsinki in 2000 and 2001. The data include 6243 respondents aged 40–60 years (response rate 68%). Six socioeconomic indicators were used: education, occupational status, household income per consumption unit, housing tenure, economic difficulties and economic satisfaction. Their associations with current smoking were examined by fitting sequential logistic regression models. Results: All socioeconomic indicators were strongly associated with smoking among both men and women. When the indicators were examined simultaneously their associations with smoking attenuated, especially when education and occupational status were considered together, and when income and housing tenure were introduced into the models already containing education and occupational status. After mutual adjustment for all socioeconomic indicators, housing tenure and economic satisfaction remained associated with smoking in men. In women, all indicators except income and economic difficulties were inversely associated with smoking after adjustments. Conclusions: Smoking was associated with structural, material as well as perceived dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage. Attempts to reduce smoking among the socioeconomically disadvantaged need to target several dimensions of socioeconomic position.

Keywords: education, income, occupational status, smoking, socioeconomic differences

Cigarette smoking is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in industrial societies. Over recent decades, the overall prevalence of smoking has decreased among men in many countries, whereas among women smoking has remained at the same level or even increased.¹ However, these changes have not happened equally across all population groups. In most industrial societies smoking has increasingly been concentrated among the socioeconomically disadvantaged. This is particularly true for northern European men, but also women and southern Europeans seem to be moving towards a similar pattern.^2,3

Various explanations for the socioeconomic differences in smoking have been put forward. These include lack of knowledge, scarce material resources and psychosocial stress due to an unfavourable social position and poor material conditions.^4,5 These explanations may relate differently to the various indicators that have been used to measure socioeconomic position. Education, occupational status and income as well as other measures of material living conditions have all been found to be inversely associated with smoking.^3,4,6 While each of these indicators is likely to reflect one’s position in socioeconomic hierarchy, they all also have specific characteristics that may be suggestive about the different explanations for the association between socioeconomic position and smoking.

***********You can read the complete paper here.

Sweet

I like to think of myself as a good cook.  I really love baking and deserts and challenging recipes and all that.  What I’m about to show you will probably intimidate the shit out of you…but read on.

That would be my Genoise layer cake with lemon curd   filling and French butter cream.  Pretty gorgeous no?

Here, Let me show you a detail shot.

Oh yeah, I sure did use a miniature rosebud to decorate it (a la Flying Monkey).

Right about now you are probably quaking in your inferior oven mitts.

Quake not.  It was a disaster.  You see, this cake was intended to be the dessert for a little dinner party friends were throwing. These particular friends live in Germantown…on Lincoln Drive.  If you know Philadelphia, you probably know Lincoln Drive as the fastest, curviest road in the city…and it is.  Let me break this down for you.  Jeep Cherokee + Lincoln Drive + lemon curd = seismic shift.

My charmingly rustic gateau slipped and slid all over the place.  It was not pretty. (There is no photographic evidence of the event…thank god.)

So there I was with one hell of an ugly cake at one hell of a terrific dinner party.  No matter, as long as it tastes good, who cares what it looks like.

I was able to comfort myself with this thought all the way through dinner.  Then I sliced the cake.  It was…stiff? Impenetrable?  Hmmm, what is the right word for a cake having the consistency of hardened foam rubber?

It was embarrassing.  My dear son said as kindly as possible that it tasted like a lemony eraser.

It hurts to laugh.

Sometimes when I get nervous or upset, I…well, this will sound weird….I laugh hysterically.  I mean uncontrollably.  Like, I can’t breathe.  No sound comes out.  My eyes tear.  It’s ugly and often, inappropriate.

Once I was overcome with a laughing fit at a business meeting.

Once, when I broke our house. (The first floor was in the process of flooding, but I couldn’t speak to tell my poor husband…I just pointed down…he figured it out eventually.)

Once I was overcome with the nervous giggles when the whole family was lost in western Maryland in the middle of the night due to a faulty GPS. (Happy Birthday Hubby.)

Tonight was the worst EVER!  You see, I just had my jaw dissected on Monday.  Yep, four impacted wisdom teeth.  Consequently, I cannot open my mouth more than a centimeter. I’m in pretty constant pain, bla bla bla, all that.

Then it happened.  I don’t know what exactly triggered it, but I’m sure it was my husband’s fault.  He must have made a funny face or a funny noise or SOMETHING. (It could have been that BREATHING thing he does.)

Whatever it was, I giggled.

But that hurt, so I panicked.

Which made me laugh nervously.

Which HURT.

Which made me cry.

Which made me laugh hysterically.

Which REALLY REALLY HURT.

Which made me even more anxious…

and so on and so on…

It was like some sort of demented feedback loop.  The husband had to leave the house because every time I looked at him it got worse.

I sent him to a bar around the corner.  Yes, I drove him to drink.

The poor man was trying to amuse his pathetic, swollen, recuperating wife, and she sent him away as she cried in agony.

It was like walking away from the speaker.  I calmed down and popped two extra painkillers. (I think I really damaged myself. OUCHIE!)

Hubster has since returned, but he won’t risk mentioning the episode until at least next week.  In my fragile state I could relapse at any time and I don’t think either one of us could take it.

Take it! Take another little piece…

Of my head, er…mouth more specifically.

Tomorrow I am having all of my wisdom teeth removed.  Blech.  I’m really not looking forward to it.  But who would be right?

I’ve stocked up on smooth foods: applesauce, yogurt, tapioca pudding and butternut squash soup.

Hopefully, in a few days I’ll be able to move onto eggs and tofu. Dream big!!!

Tonight is my last meal, so I had wild rice, Frenched lamb chops and green beans.

It was so good.  Good enough to tide me over for a week?  We’ll see.

I plan to spend the next 4 days as high as I can get on my painkillers.  I didn’t bother to buy magazines or rent videos.  I figure I’ll either be blind with pain or so hopped up on meds I won’t be able to open my eyes. Sweet!!!!!!!

(Hold me, I’m scared.)

Land Ho!

Last year, when hubby and I were feeling particularly flush, we bought land. I mean LAND. We stomped all over the woods, all over Pennsylvania. We brought the dog. she frolicked. After about 4 months we found THE SPOT.

18 acres, check.

Picturesque stream, check.

Pond, check.

Hills, boulders, forest, check, check, check.

One wild turkey, CHECK.

We put in an offer, eventually it was accepted and we spent a summer lolling around in hammocks and wading in the creek.  It was lovely.

There is just one teensey little challenge with said land.  That would be the afore mentioned stream.

Yesterday we met with the surveyor to talk about a driveway and a bridge.  We humped around the land and talked about wetlands delineations, and flood planes.  Bog turtle habitats ($800 survey right there.) and concrete footings.

Long-story-short, we cannot afford to drive onto the land, let alone build a cabin.  And even if we could afford it, we are bound to be tied up in local bureaucracy for the next six years.  Oh the humanity!

Next week, the surveyor is calling a meeting with all of the federal officials and township boards and conservationists.  Hubby is staying home and sending me.  I’m on the lookout for a Sierra Club visor or pen or something and I will spend the days leading up to the meeting perfecting my pound cake recipe.

If a little theater, combined with sugar and butter, can’t grease the wheels of progress, I don’t know what can.

Wear shoes, for the love of GOD.

I like to think of myself as non-judgemental, I also like to think of myself as fluent in French.  (We all have our dreams.)

I only saw one person on the street, wearing an outfit I wanted to rip off of them yesterday.  ONE.  Now, considering I live in a city with over 1.4 million residents, that’s not to shabby. (Large woman, 40’s, 70 degrees: stretchy lace-print shirt, black and maroon, floral-print tight skirt , tan pantyhose and uggs-inspired boots.)

But can I tell you about Wednesday?

Wednesday I was helping out a friend on a product launch by distributing Dropps laundry detergent (LOVE IT) at area Walmarts, specifically the Walmart on South Columbus Boulevard.

As Walmarts go, this particular box is just about as close to hell as I ever want to get.  There are pallets of discounted mass-produced junk left on the floor for the animals, sorry, customers, to just tear into with one hand while they drag and beat their toddlers with the other.  It’s filthy, slow, noisy and generally unsettling.

And people shop in their pajamas.  Yep.  They don’t bother to get dressed.  They wear slippers and pajamas and wander the aisles for hours.  I observed more than one family spend literally 30 minutes choosing laundry detergent.  30 MINUTES!  Could you imagine how many hours it must take them to fill a cart?

Oh and the sniffing.  How did I get through life without uncapping every chemical-aroma  bottle I’ve encountered.  Apparently it’s all the rage.

I even had one woman complain to me that she couldn’t get the safety seal off of a particular bottle to sniff it.  (I believe she ended up using her teeth to break the band.)

She scared me. But not as much as the conspiracy theorists.  You know, the ones that wouldn’t take any free-samples because of the whole 9-11 mortgage crisis. (WTF???? I was held verbally captive, by this genius who had connected all, and I mean ALL the dots.)

I left that Walmart shivering and pale and afraid for humanity.

I mean SLIPPERS IN PUBLIC?????

Oh my god!

Oh my god.

I just read this and I could throw up.   Is it ok for a flowergirl to get a “manicure” with all the other bridesmaids like a “big girl”? Sure.

But a bikini wax? On and 8 year old?

I’m shocked that the spas agree to perform these services.

(confession, my mother had my hair permed in like 3rd grade….I’m still traumatized by it.)

___________________________________________

Trend: Pretty Babies

Facials, bikini waxes, mani/pedis and blowouts have long been de rigueur Rittenhouse and Main Line beauty regimens — but nowadays, the “women” getting these luxe spa treatments have yet to reach puberty

By Carrie Denny

Page 1 of 6

T. Kruesselmann/zefa/Corbis

Melanie Engle was trying to just pluck the stray hairs here and there. She was trying to deliver an age-appropriate eyebrow wax to her client. It was hard, though, because there was a foot tapping next to her, and a voice shouting in her ear: “No! Not like that — like a supermodel’s. I want them arched.”

After years in the beauty biz, Engle had seen her share of crazy ladies demanding perfect, Glamour-cover-worthy brows. But this Crazy Lady wasn’t talking about her own brows. The brows in question belonged to Crazy Lady’s daughter. Who was eight.

After sweating through the kid’s eyebrow wax, Engle, today an aesthetician at the Adolf Biecker Salon/Spa outposts in the Rittenhouse Hotel and Strafford — and, it should be noted, one of the most sought-after eyebrow specialists in the region — was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax.

Engle was, predictably, extremely uncomfortable with the idea. But she sent the girl next door to the spa to have it done anyway. “It was clear that this girl was getting a bikini wax no matter what,” she says. “Better for her that we did it, instead of her mother dragging her off somewhere else to get it done.”

Engle is sharing this tale with me one afternoon over my own eyebrow session, after I’ve remarked on another young girl — no more than 10 or 11 years old — ­sitting nearby, thumbing through a magazine and obviously waiting for some sort of spa service. As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?”

“Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a tidal wave of this rising luxury-class culture — you’ve seen it in these pages, manifested in reports of $80,000 “push presents,” lavish condo buildings sprouting up like beanstalks, and weekends spent stockpiling couture with on-call personal ­shoppers. But just when we thought this consumerist takeover couldn’t get any worse, here comes the trend’s newest tributary: The kids of the pampered are being taken along for the ride, without a backward glance at the childhood left behind.

“I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?” Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. “It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Big Boobs

May I just say thank you brother in law?

Thanks for making it really REALLY obvious that I have a good set.

Yep, you’re right, I wore a v-neck dress to your house for Easter.  True it wasn’t a turtleneck.

You got me.

But was it really REALLY necessary to:

1. Compare me to the Eliot Spitzer scandal

2. Tell me that you thought I wanted you to take my picture because I was “pushing out my chest”?

You trouble me.

I’m blessed with two big girls.

You are a father of three.

Here’s a word of advice: overcome your bosom fixation before it embarrasses your progeny.  I bet my life that their blog entries will be way worse than this one.