Lifestyle choices

My Dinner with David Duchovny


Okay, I am not really having dinner with David Duchovny. Calm down. But if I had several thousand dollars to drop on an eBay auction bid, I could have dinner with David. And Nicholas Lea. And Chris Carter. How cool would that be. The best part would be that my husband would be totally psyched for me because he is an X-files fan himself; although he would probably want to know where he could bid on a Gillian Andersen dinner date, and he is very handsome, with a great ass and she is single – so I would be less cool. Women look way too much at my husband’s rear view. Despite the fact that he doesn’t notice, and I am too wonderful for him to consider upgrading to another model, I know Gillian would find him hot.

But getting back to the original topic, David and company are being auctioned to raise money for a Canadian actress who’s had a cancer recurrence. I am not familiar with Canadian TV or theater, so I didn’t recognize her name, but she is important within the industry and it’s really nice to see people give so generously of their time to help someone who is ill. 

When I mentioned this to Rob, he was surprisingly not cool about it. “I learned everything I know about sharing from you,” he told me and that made me laugh. I wouldn’t go to dinner with David without Rob anyway. It wouldn’t be as much fun without him to share the experience with and I am not the type to star worship or enter bidding wars or contests to meet them. Although meeting David Duchovny might be fun and interesting, I can’t think of too many famous people I would go out of my way to encounter. They are just people after all and just because they seem funny or smart or even attractive in the far away surreal kind of way they do in magazines or on the screen, big or small, that doesn’t mean they are that way at all. I am reminded of the often run feature in celebrity tabloids of actresses without make up. Scary. And just like anyone you run into at the grocery really.

Dinner with David Duchovny? Who would you want to dine with?

East of Eden


“So”, my husband asks, “do all American towns and cities have an east side where they keep all the trashy people?”

 

This came on our return drive from southern Illinois and our honeymoon. We had been though East Peoria and East Galesburg. The first place was a pee break at a 66 station near the airport where people had no sense of personal space while queuing up and couldn’t seem to walk off without lotto tickets or smokes. The latter was home to one of the largest mobile home parks I had yet to see on the trip, and at one point I was beginning to wonder if everyone south of Springfield lived in easily transportable abodes. Illinois appears to have been settled by people who believe highly combustible funnel cloud magnets should always gather in large numbers out on the open prairie.

 

Rob’s Iowan experiences include an eastside of Des Moines and an East Dubuque, have colored his perceptions. But honestly, east is not often prime real estate. Why do you think God sent Adam and Ever to live there? It’s home to American Idol voters and the idea that everything one will ever need out of life can be found within a 2 mile radius of Grandma’s house because she is the only one with a permanent address. It’s that bit of ground that we all want to flee as teens but that too many of us end up being buried under.

 

I have been reading Journey of Souls by Michael Newton, a book about the multiple lives of our souls (aka reincarnation). It says that we choose our lives in order to learn and grow. But who would choose to be the mullet do’d cashier at the corner gas mart or the guy purchasing two 12 packs of Milwaukee’s Best with a couple cans of Copenhagen at 10:30 on a Friday morning? Are these learning opportunities? Or destinies gone horribly wrong?

 

Much of what we saw, outside the national park, was poverty. The neighborhoods on the east side of Murphysboro were filled with worn homes often blockaded from the rest of the street by the kind of junk that even Oprah intervention people throw away. In a lot of ways these streets were like the old Walmart joke – a little piece of Arkansas every where you go – because if I hadn’t known I was in Illinois I would have thought I was back in the area surrounding Devils Den State Park near Fayetteville. Murphysboro, Carbondale, Marion. Towns that bled into each other, held together by strip malls and car lots. The differences between classes of the people who lived there plainly evident in the vehicles and the clothes and the conditions of the homes. Makes you wonder what kind of  assignments God was handing out that could have resulted in any of this or what makes us chose such lessons.

Angelina Jolie was Once a Chunky Young Woman


Rob and I decided to snuggle up with the computer Thursday night and watch a dvd in bed, as is our wont. We have four selections from the bookmobile currently in queue. Nothing upbeat however, which earlier events of the evening screamed out the need for, so we chose the least evil – Playing God with David Duchovney, Timothy Hutton and Angelina Jolie.

To say this was a B movie would be a great injustice to B movies. Bad acting abounded. Hutton’s channeling of Jack Nicholson couldn’t even save it, and I personally found it oddly distracting to hear Jack and see Tim.

I love Hutton. Have since I first saw him in Taps when I was junior in high school. Being a Catholic school kid, I naturally loved movies where kids outthink and and outclever preening, officious adults, and Taps is the ultimate private school kid’s fantasy of takeover and take no prisoners while doing so. My soft spot for Duchovney stems from The X-Files. I loved Fox Mulder. Misfit. Misunderstood. Fighting a nebulous authoritarian entity bent on maintaining a population numbing status quo for the benefit of the elite and the powerful. It appealed to the peon public school teacher that I was at the time. That and I just love tv and movies with well-written, snappy and intelligent dialogue. Give me character depth over mindless action any day. Nuff said.

The movie dates itself though with Jolie. It had to have been one of her earliest roles because the girl had meat on her bones. Not fat however. By normal people standards – even accounting for the slightest of imaginative stretches – the woman was still thin. A form fitting red silken pants suit she wears in the final scenes, that would have made any real person look like a raw sausage,  and showed clearly that Jolie was in fine shape. Still, it was odd not to see the collarbones, sternum/ribs and emaiciated cheekbones that make her lips even larger and scarier.

The visible ribs and sternum are de rigor for “older” actresses these days. I was noticing it yet again last weekend when Rob and I were watching The Inside Man. Jodie Foster couldn’t have looked more like a female Skeletor if she’d set out to do just that. The Dachau survivor look is partly a female over-reaction to middle-age (and I do know firsthand of what I speak) and in the case of women in the spotlight like Hollywood actresses, it is the only way they can stay ahead of the pretty young things who are allowed to be a bit rounded when they first start out and still considered beautiful. The reason for this abbreation in my opinion seems a bit pedophilic on the part of the old men who run the movie business, but that is just my opinion.

Round and middle-aged just spells f-a-t to most men past twenty-five, and who sets the beauty standards? They do. Brandon over at WWTDD had a piece this past week on male preferred female body types (okay – his preferred but I am thinking that he is not the minority on this issue), and he states that skinny with big breasts is best. (Just as an aside – my body type – is not preferred except by my husband who is not a dirty old man or a silly twenty-something boy).

Sad what the pressure to conform does to most actresses, and ordinary women, eventually. I was thinking about Angelina and writing this piece when I was getting ready for my workout at the gym this morning. Today was weights, abs, stretching and then walking. A full work-out. An abbrievated one, like yesterday, because I had to hustle up to get to my daughter’s school to help with the field trip into the museum in the city, is abs, stretching and shorter walk.

So, as I was tying up my shoelaces and setting the iPod score for the morning activities – because mood is important – I notice two women getting ready, without much enthusiasm, for the exercise class that meets in the gym.

I don’t take those pseudo-aerobic post Jane Fonda classes. Took only one class like that in my life when I was in college. I needed a final P.E. credit for graduation, and it was the only class left with openings. I have never loathed exercise so much as I did those 9 weeks.

One of the women was complaining that despite not eating (it sounded as though they were both doing some sort of fast) and coming to work out, she felt bloated and sick and was sure she had gained weight. The other woman questioned her a bit  but could only offer sympathy and as I was leaving I overheard the first woman say she was tempted to just start using a laxative. Now, I didn’t catch all the conversation. They looked over at me quite a bit while they were talking and whispered a bit – afraid I was listening (I was) and waiting for me to leave. I could have interjected and offered some advice based on my own experience, but I didn’t. Both women were very overweight. I would say if not morbidly obese than darn close on the BMI scale. And I remembered when I was very heavy. I didn’t want to hear anything from thinner women about how they did it.

I assumed that all thin women were genetic lottery winners anyway, and I know now that many thinner women lie like rugs about how they got or stay thin. My own sister was the Dexatrim Princess in her teens in her fight against weight, and a lot of women simply don’t eat or use excessively amounts of exercise to maintain their “I’m just naturally thin” appearances.

Celebrities in particular are notorious for questionable weight loss and maintenance methods. The majority of the population is not gifted with thinness that requires nothing to achieve.

I walked upstairs to the weight room thinking about those women. I remembered when I was first starting to jog back in college. I was chunky. The excess flesh on my legs and belly jiggled when I ran though I couldn’t feel that movement as keenly as I do today. I didn’t have the spatial sense of myself then that I have earned through years of running and other activities. It was not easy to put on shorts and go down to the field across from the Student Union and run everyday. The Union was a lunch mecca and my P.E. class was at 12:30 in the afternoon. There were people everywhere. But running was like teaching would later turn out to be for me – in my blood. A combination of running and having to walk everywhere during my college days eventually thinned me, and I continued to tone up and thin as I added a variety of activities to my repetoire as I got older.  

Aside from pregnancy, I have really never been overweight since then, but I remember those days and I feel deeply for heavy and overweight women when I see them at the gym or out jogging or walking. Their effort is more than a physical one. While some people cannot fathom the idea that celebrities can be learned from in any way, my Jolie encounter Thursday night reminded me once again that it is all women who are damaged by the inane and arbitrary beauty standards of our society. No one is immune.