Self-image

Happy Birthday Madonna! The New Poster Kid for 50


Madonna is fifty years old today. Which is still older than me.

I have been reading about her iconicness and what a great example she is to all we women of a “certain age”*. She is our holy grail. 

If only.

I don’t want to look like a fifty year old who looks like she could pass for forty with the proper lighting and a bit of distance (and a good photo-shopping). And I certainly don’t want to look like someone who works too hard to maintain a passing resemblence to youth because here is where the over forty female cliches come in.

  • being thin is youthful (a thin twenty something and a thin forty something look NOTHING alike)
  • concealer actually conceals (nothing really it just makes one look older sans proper lighting)
  • dressing age appropriate (what does that mean anymore?)

I recently saw a photo of her in a tabloid at the grocery. She was being admired for her hardbody, and I will give her that. The woman is tight but in a scary cadaverous sort of way like Kelly Ripa or Sarah Jessica Parker.

If I am going to emulate something, why would it be her? She talks a good game about health and such but if you look at her face closely – the eyes – you see someone who is haunted. Running to keep pace and knowing all the while she isn’t.

A Bucket List is the Monday Meme


Ran across this while tag surfing WordPress from my sick bed last week. Apparently a bucket list is a list of all the things you want to do or achieve before you “kick the bucket” and was the basic story line for a Jack Nicholson movie.

A fairly straight forward plan really. One simply makes a list and presumably puts time and effort into checking each item off.

So what would my bucket list include? Well, I think like most things it would be a living list/work in progress sort of thing that would be subject to revision over time.

My Bucket List

  • publish a novel
  • live in a house I helped build
  • visit Vancouver
  • learn to speak French
  • be published in Analog and Apex
  • write an op/ed piece for Time or Newsweek
  • be able to run 5 miles daily again
  • teach at the university level
  • take a summer writing seminar at Iowa
  • be interviewed about my writing
  • make a living that will allow my husband to be a kept man

Okay for a start, I guess.

I am reading an ebook about owning and operating your own book store and it talks a lot about the importance of planning. Interestingly, I read an article on mapping career goals in a writing magazine on the drive back from the States just prior to the ebook. There is something for writing it down. Wishes. Dreams. Goals. Call them whatever you like, but there is power in naming.

Although one would not recognize me these days, I used to be the teacher who had her year plotted out and the first quarter’s lesson plans done on the first day back. My organizing methods were strictly my own, but I was organized. All this talk of bucket lists and mapping and planning in general has put me in the mood to recapture a bit of my inner school marm and harness my life a bit. Taking things day by day is not a bad way to go about life but it will not take one too far from the point he/she begins at either.

And so what is your bucket list? As always, write it in the comment or blog it and link back.

When a Man Loves his Woman (thin)


For a while I was reading Overheard in New York, a blog that asks people to send in the inane, amusing and scary conversations they overhear as they go about their own business in the New York City area. Although the novelty of it has worn off and I listen to Rob read it to me more than I read it myself now.

On our recent holiday in B.C. we had to stop at the Wal-mart in Kelowna. We’d left Katy’s swimsuit at her Grandmother’s in Penticton and because the resort we were heading to was literally in the mountains with not much for retail around, and had a pool, traveling on without replacing the suit was not an option. If you’ve ever stayed at a hotel or resort that possessed a pool with your kids, you know why.

Kelowna is a boom town built mainly on tourism. I have been through it only once and really could avoid it for the rest of my life without trouble, but we needed to use the TransCanada to get to Three Valley Gap, and it took us right through it. 

Rob waited with Katy in the truck while I ran in to grab a suit (and blister stick that Band-aid makes that I swear by when running or hiking). It was a good thing. Rob is a non-shopper and Wal-mart on a Sunday afternoon is like mecca for the consumer-set.

Back in the States, I would cruise the Target on a Sunday morning after reading the flyer. It was a ritual born of my pre-widowed days when a dying husband and toddler prevented me from having much contact with the world at large. Aside from the grocery, my only real outings every week was to Target and occasionally taking my daughter to the indoor play area at the mall. I have noticed that shopping seems to have replaced church for many people on Sundays or is their post-church, pre-lunch ritual. I always knew the church goers. They were the ones all dressed up as if they were going to a wedding. The boys in collared shirts and the girls in skirts or dresses. Conversely I always appeared to be on my way to the gym and Katy looked as if I would be dropping her off at a costume party along the way. This was in her “Halloween costumes as every day clothing phase”.

While this Sunday mass consumption thing has enriched the Walmart family, I am not sure it has been an enriching thing for people in general.

As I wound my way through the women’s clothing section in search of the girl’s section, I made a pass of the dressing rooms, scooting around a tall man who was standing directly outside the entrance to the women’s changing room.

As I passed I heard him say to someone who was in the change area,

“The suit looks great, honey, just gotta get on that diet now.”

Not certain I heard that correctly, I actually stopped and looked back at the fellow. He was beaming and nodding – encouragement? – at someone unseen. His arms were folded at his chest and he was clutching a couple of hangers with swim attire dangling. He was not one to give diet either. Obviously athletic at some point in his youth, or at the vary least involved in manual labor of some kind, he had that early thirtyish look of someone not quite unfit but definitely going to seed. Faint traces of a jowly future and the start of what will likely be sturdy love handles.

With praise of the kind this man offered his significant other, should low self-esteem, distorted body image and the eating disorder rise among middle aged women really come as a surprise?