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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.

Why am I still Blogging?


Yesterday’s piece prompted a conversation with my husband on its tone and then ultimately on what the continued purpose of blogging is for me. It’s a legitimate and timely question. I began blogging in July of 2006 as a means of self-therapy about six months into my widowhood. Blogging eventually became a way to build up my writing muscles and a way for me to share my journey from widowhood to a new life. Somewhere along the way this last year, it became more about the writing than the sharing though as I would veer away from self-exposition to the merely topical. Thursday I fell backwards with my views on alcohol. Harsh views. Views colored by my own experiences and my own family and my own choices. As my husband, correctly, pointed out, I was not taking culture into account and what I view as not the norm and unhealthy is probably quite the norm and in the eyes of the practioners not unhealthy at all. But the thing is, blogging is the most “I” centered form of first person narrative there around. In a blog, the narrater is character, commentator and as omniscient as it gets. Because a blog is an all about me thing. Whether I am topical – with the Obama piece the other day – or color commentating on society and culture or just sharing odds and ends from my life, this blogging thing is all about me.Which begs the question then, why am I blogging still? Do I have therapy left? Do I need to develop more writing discipline? Do I have aspirations of finding some vast audience and selling them to the highest advertising bidder? The answer is not simple. I don’t really know why I am still blogging. More and more I feel as though I am the central character in a soap opera. People come and they read and they leave without comment much the way they would watch a serial on HBO. I am entertainment at best or at worst some sort of Truman Show. They say that blogging is one of those ultimate forms of narcissism. Maybe. I did say earlier after all that blogging was a me thing. But if most bloggers are like I was when I began this (an insanely presumptious leap) then it is more a case of someone for whom giving and care-taking is the norm of their real world and the virtual universe is where the worm turns and evens up the score. But, I can’t say that my life today is all about others. There is tremondous balance for me now. Moreso than at any other point of my life. Still I hang onto the blogging. It’s just not enough to journal – to write for myself anymore. Maybe as I find more of my voice as an author, I will need my blogging voice less or not at all. Who knows. I just know that blogging is all about me really and that some people like to read about what I think, do and feel. I guess that I am lucky because unlike poor Truman. I am at least writing my own scripts. 

Funeral After Parties


I have written and rewritten this piece several times in an attempt to clarify, for myself really, why I was so disturbed by the drinking that accompanied the funerals I have attended up in Grande Prairie since last September. A Sunday evening phone chat with my best friends pulled some of it together for me. It bothered me because its not healthy or normal. When I told Vicki about the excess of drinking that goes on at the gatherings in people’s homes after the funeral and dinner, she was as perplexed by it as I was. She’d never encountered or even heard of such a thing. And maybe it is because we are Iowans born and raised and this type of reaction to death is not typical of people from such a stoic background. Or maybe not. Sometimes I am too quick to assume that the difference lies within me and that it is others who are the true majority and I am the freak. But, even my hard-partying cousins on my mom’s side didn’t rent a keg for a funeral – a baptism or First Communion maybe but not a funeral.

 

I grew up around drinkers. Both sides of my family have alcoholics. My dad was an alcoholic up until going on three years ago. My younger brother also had a drinking problem and quit drinking last spring. Like many people my age, I did my share of paryting – the majority back in my college days though as being a grown-up with a full-time job and responsibilities, as most people find, isn’t compatible with late nights and consuming of alcohol. And too, at some point you ask yourself – what is the point of this? Today, I am practically a tee-totaler. I can’t drink more than a glass of wine over the course of an evening and I honestly never acquired a taste for it. It was always something I did to fit in. I don’t feel the need to please people in that way anymore and resent anyone who pressures me to “just have one – it won’t hurt you”.

 

In my family of mostly beer drinkers, which I have always found disgusting to the taste, I was made to feel a prude. I still resent that, but I could never fathom the incentive to get a little tipsy with one’s relatives. It seemed, and still does, a asinine idea and a good way to stir up bad feelings and smoldering resentments. Now, drinking among friends and strangers, as many do when they are out in public establishments, seems a dumber idea than drinking with one’s family even.

 

So, Tuesday night as I lay awake until close to 4AM listening to the conversations and arguments downstairs, it brought back a lot of memories for me. My father drunk and mean-spirited. My brother back in his druggie days when he was threatening to kill us all in our sleep and I would push the dresser in front of the bedroom door just a bit so it would wake me if someone came in after I had fallen asleep. It reminded me of Will who like many men with his illness turned to alcohol in the beginning to try and quell the angry he couldn’t explain but was in reality cause by his immune system attacking his nerve endings and brain. And I realized. I don’t find drunk people as amusing as I do scary. They are unpredictable in word and deed. They cannot be trusted and even though it is widely thought that alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions and allows their true selves to come out, I believe that it allows them the imagined freedom to do and say all the hateful things they truly know better than to do when they are sober. It is not their true self but their selfish self. It allows them to not give a damn. To be hurtful and then excuse themselves of it later on with “I didn’t mean it. I was drunk.”

 

In May the family is planning a big gathering on the farm. I am thinking that I would rather not go. There is going to be a huge bonfire from the out-buildings they are planning to raze and plenty of alcohol. It is my opinion that a huge pit of fire and drunken people are not a good combination, but I am not a native so perhaps I don’t know best.

 

I do know however that excessive alcohol consumption and wildly erratic personality changes that it causes in some people – is not normal. I won’t be cowed into submission on this point ever again.