Things you might not know about me because they are not generally known because they are not true:

• I am a fitness fanatic.
• I live for college football.
• I take personal hygiene very seriously.
• I love cats and all small furry animals.
• I am trilingual.
• I am in Paris doing research for my fourth novel.
• I am allergic to nuts.
• I unicycle everywhere I go year-round.

She called me a what?

A writer! But I haven't posted in over 2 months...because I haven't written ANYTHING in that time.

What have I been up to in that time? Not studying. Hanging out with a boy. Riding bikes with friends. A good bit of yoga. Cooking and eating. Lots of cooking and lots of eating. And then pooping.

I recently deactivated my facebook account. I deactivated on "Black Friday" because I was seeing too many shopping and sales related status updates. Facebook made me realize that most people are much less interesting than they appear from a distance and that an alarming number of people with whom I interact on a daily basis do not distinguish between "your" and "you're" or "there" and "their."

I've tried to deactivate before but then I reactivate 5 minutes later just to see if anyone posted a photo of me or wrote a lame comment about someone else's lame status update. This time though, I announced that I was going off and that announcement has kept me true to my word (for the most part). And so I will make an announcement here to set a little goal for myself. During my upcoming winter break (December 16th to January 8th), I will post something everyday.

Here is something from earlier today.

Do I have to reproduce? Will I get bored if I don’t? Is there someone who would be with me and not reproduce with me? What will I do when my dinner mates start talking about soccer games and picking colleges? I will do the same thing I do now when they start talking about football. I will avert my eyes and wait it out. My eyes will be averted for forever.

Dear Cat,

The thing that I said I was going to write about has already been written about too much.

Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20dowd.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=dowd&st=cse

And here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html

The reason I thought this might be something worth writing about is that I keep having the same conversation with all of the smart, self-aware women I know. The topic: why is it so much work to be happy?

It’s whiney, anyway. And I think the explanation is simple. In this day in age, only stupid people are happy. There are fewer stupid women than stupid men, so there are fewer happy women than happy men.

To the women before me

Thank you
for clearing the branches off the trail,
for wiping down the table before I sat down to eat,
for flushing the floater down the toilet even though it wasn’t yours,
for speaking up when something wasn’t right,
for thinking of others without sacrificing any part of yourself,
for showing them all that you could do so that the same would be expected of me.

Screw you
for playing into stereotypes because then they were projected onto me,
for acting less intelligent than you are,
for just going along with things,
for settling,
for always buying what they are selling,
for making thinness your greatest achievement.

For the women after me

I remember the first time I heard her say she hates her body. It was in a dream. She said she hated her webbed feet. Even though she doesn’t have webbed feed, I woke up with a feeling of dread because of the inevitability of my six-year old niece one day coming to disdain a part or parts or the entirety of her body and then carrying that disdain around for the rest of her life. Can it be prevented? Currently, she spends hours looking in the mirror, loves her naked body, and flashes and shakes her little butt because doing so makes her happy. How can we prolong this celebration? We (you, me, my sisters and mother) must be models of self-love. We must celebrate ourselves every day and feel nothing but gratitude for our functioning, funny-looking, abundant, flat, hairy, smelly, beautiful bodies.

What does it take

A beautiful woman’s body is attacked by breast cancer. She and the doctors get the cancer out of her body and she regains her strength. I tell her she looks great, and she says she feels great. But then she says she needs to lose ten more pounds. I want to shake her: But you are alive! Is it not enough that after attack and then radiation your body is now dancing to the music and laying in the grass? If surviving cancer is not enough to quiet the incessant voice in a woman’s head that tells her that there is too much of her, is there any hope for me to quiet the voice in my head?

Taxman

Some people go through life keenly aware of how fucking trivial it all is.
Others give a shit about graduations and goodbyes.

I spent an hour or so today reading letters that my mother wrote to my father in the year or so leading up to their marriage. My mother has always lived life.

I was surprised by many things in those letters.
My mother was a romantic. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pleasure of reading the letters that he wrote to her.

My mother and I are more similar than I thought.

Life is not that hard. I need more love in my life. Those letters made me feel like all of the things I care about and all of the things that I am angry about don’t matter. Just find someone to love.

In eighth grade my mother said she wanted to be a dental hygienist and that is what she still does today.

I saw pictures of my dad with another girl feeding him hardboiled eggs at some college frat event. My mother went on dates with many boys.

I feel like I could be plucked from the earth and it would make no difference.

Life is a journey, I know, but when will the sucky part be over.

My mother said she would die if she lost my father’s respect. She said it made her unhappy that he didn’t go to communion, but she didn’t want him to go for her. What were they up to?

My mother was a terrible student.

My dad’s friends called him Beans.

My mother and father were confused sometimes. They had conversations that made her feel “icky.” This is such a relief to me.

My mother looked forward to being a good lover and she said she was thinking about their new home and thinking about what to cook for dinner and then she marveled, “I don’t even get angry thinking about it.”

She said “I trust you, but not with directions.”

Fucking tragic that his heart stopped beating twenty-seven years later.

And in the background for me is this nagging feeling that what I should really be doing is studying the Internal Revenue Code for my tax class.