Spoiled

Tomorrow is my birthday but I got my present early! My husband ( whom I in no way deserve) waited on line for 3 yes THREE hours to get me the new iPhone!

Ahh I love it. I’m posting in a bar right now.

Earlier today I used the GPS to achieve the single most traumatic accomplishment of my life this far… sending my son to camp.

I was so not ready for that. The seperation anxiety is KILLING me!

The poor kid is on his own for the next three weeks. He’s never even been to a sleepover before.

The only funny part was that the kids we viewed as a serious geekfest, dear old son thought were way too cool to even approach, let alone talk to.

Tell me he’ll be ok.

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.

How Cliché

Hi.

I’m a 32 year old white woman with shoulder-length, subtly-highlighted, hair.

I’m married to a doctor. (Well, a Ph.D.)

I have one (step) son. (It’s like motherhood light, sans stretch marks.)

On occasion, we all wear matching polo shirts embroidered with our last name (and yes, I ‘pop the collar.’)

I have a purebred Irish Setter. (She is neither stupid nor crazy…she is adorable, and that’s final.)

I live in the most expensive zip code in my state. (Granted, my house is the size of your closet.)

I’m writing a novel (based loosely on my life in my twenties.  WEEE!!!!)

We are members of a private club.

I work out with a personal trainer.

We are remodeling our kitchen this summer and debating which gourmet range to purchase.

And we just bought a BMW.

A BM-Freakin-W.

Do we want to be walking clichés?  Apparently, we do.  Reading the above summary of the current state of my life sure as hell makes me look soulless doesn’t it?

Fuck.

You see, it’s because of all of this STUFF, that I sometimes fall into a deep soul-rendering panic.  This is what happens when you have everything you want.

Want to hear another cliché?  I’m worried about loosing touch with gritty reality.

So I just signed up to run with Back on my Feet.  They are an organization that brings together runners from different social statuses i.e. homeless and non-homeless runners.

I’m hoping it will at least lend me a little depth, before it’s too late.

There is a lot of singing at funerals.

I went to a funeral on Tuesday. I never met the deceased or his widow.

We went because it was a family death, my husband’s cousin’s husband.

He was 46. That is too young to die, especially of a coronary embolism.

Everything I now know about the man, I learned at his funeral. He was born in Nairobi, his father owns a hotel in Mombasa, he went to Oxford. He used to be an alcoholic, but was sober for 16 years before he died.

He was married, had a son, was divorced and then moved to America where he got married again. He worked at a church.

People loved him.

Oh, and his name was Max.

I don’t know what he looked like (I don’t view the dead if I didn’t know them in life…it’s too voyeuristic.)

I enjoyed the funeral (is that bad to say?)

It was transcendently beautiful. The church was a gigantic stone edifice on 5th Ave in Manhattan. The choir wore ruffled collars, and they sang. Beautifully.

I was struck by how much the singing human voice marks our passages through time.

Babies are sung to at their baptisms.

We are sung to at every anniversary of our birth.

Weddings are full of beautiful music.

And certainly, funerals; there is a lot of singing at funerals.

It’s like our voices were trying to reach him, or accompany him, or at the very least, mark that this happened…that HE happened.

A wrinkle in time…

You know those days when you really should be able to get your life totally and completely organized, once and for all?  You woke up at the crack of dawn, ate breakfast and marched the pupster out the door by 8:00 for her daily romp around the dog park.  Everything else should fall into line right? RIGHT?

Like you should have stayed at said dog park for a modest 45 minutes instead of an hour and a half.  Then you should have gotten down on your hands and knees and prepped and painted that stairway.  Of course, you were filthy when you got home from the dog park, not to mention the grit that was encapsulating said pupster, so maybe you showered with the dog.

I mean, who paints right after they are all freshly showered and moisturized? No one! That’s who.

Moving on to cleaner pursuits, you fire up the ole’ laptop to finish the next great American novel…but, normal people check their email.  Well, sometimes when checking said email you get a few intriguing messages from long lost friends that simply must be forwarded onto your contemporaries….suddenly it’s lunchtime, and you are STARVING.

So you cook.  I mean, it’s not like you can write on an empty stomach.  One bowl of steamed dumplings, and some soybeans later, another hour has passed.  The only logical step is to remove yourself from the time vacuum that is your home, so you head over to your friendly neighborhood cafe.

Damn that cafe and their free wifi. At least you updated your blog.

Going Yellow, the Convienant Truth

IHO Chris.

Do you know about this??? Apparently the single biggest environmental impact one can effect on a personal level is related to water consumption. On average, people urinate 10 times a day. A typical toilet used 10 gallons of water to flush. That is a total of 100 gallons of water a day, 36,500 gallons of water a year!!!!!!!

Multiply that by the 6.60 billion people on earth (according to wikipedia, as of March 2008) and you can see the problem we would have if all of those people actually had toilets!

Environmentalist insiders are reporting a trend that is sweeping the nation.

Sink Peeing!

Those ‘in the know’ pee in their sinks to save on flushing. Urine is practically sterile when it leaves your body. The real crazies even drink it! Think of it as your in-home urinal.

There is an unfortunate social stigma attached to sink peeing.

“I was out on a date with this gal I really liked. I told her about sink peeing, but she freaked out. I tried to convince her that I was just joking, but now she won’t return my phone calls” – anonymous

Ladies, as a woman I urge you to be open-minded with these environmental pee-o-neers. Better Yet, join them! With the purchase of the discrete and affordable lady j, you too can be a part of the biggest environmental movement since recycling!!!!

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.

Hello world!

Lets start with dinner!

Tonight we had “clean out the fridge chicken.” Which, in this case had: asparagus, carrots, one lonely portabello, an onion and obviously, chicken. I cooked it in a little champagne, and finished it off with the rest of my half and half. It was garnished with toasted pine nuts and fresh parsley.

Not too shabby huh? (My produce situation was greatly aided this week by the 2 dinner parties I hosted last weekend.)