i hate the term "body issues" almost as much as i hate this quote from jessica alba.

"Because obviously, if you have a womanly figure, you're not allowed to have a brain or any idea of the world whatsoever. You just have to be hot and use your body to get ahead." ~ from this month's In Style magazine

yes, jess, your intellect was so apparent as you were slaying comic book demons wrapped in lycra.

girl goes on to describe herself as "curvy" and having had "womanly curves at a young age". maybe so, if by "curves" you mean "tits and ass on an otherwise stick-thin, clavicle-jutting frame".

i have much dislike for this sort of hyperbole from twenty-something actresses. it isn't the thinness that bothers me. so maybe your metabolism is naturally quick. so what? skinny girls have body image problems too! girls who weigh one hundred pounds can hate the way they look in a bikini just as easily as a one hundred and forty pound girl can. bodies come in many shapes and sizes, and none of them are perfect.

what bothers me about this ridiculous attempt at depth is the misappropriation of the word "curvy". scarlett is curvy. kate winslet is curvy. selma hayek is curvy. j-lo is curvy. beyonce is curvy. shakira is curvy.

jessica alba is not curvy.

unless, of course, "curvy" -- which used to mean a woman with healthy hips, a soft belly and a rack that men wanted to curl up to sleep on like babies (a'la mae west and marilyn monroe) -- now means something else entirely. and if what "curvy" means is what jessica alba is, well then...what does that make women who fall under the old definition of "curvy", which is now larger than curvy? (kind of like what is a large at wendy's now that a large is a medium.) if we're taking cues from the fast food industry, that makes them supersized. and that is pure insanity.

sometimes, i have to thank whatever powers may be that i was raised by a woman who frowned heavily upon self-denial of chocolate. (a woman who, at forty-five still can fit into a juniors nine, still looks young enough to shop in that department, and readily admits that while pregnant with me she would bake a double chocolate cake, cut a slice for my father, and eat the rest at two o'clock in the morning with a half-gallon of milk). i'm also glad that i was raised to protect myself from the evils of other women by thinking "she's just jealous because i'm cuter than she is" whether that's the case or not (a tactic i still use to this day, and share with all my friends who had mothers that weren't as snarkily cool as mine). i'd hate to be a little girl today.

but i'm of the age where in the near future i may have a little girl of my own to raise. i hope my mother's self-confidence and acceptance -- passed on to me in a time when the media was dominated by cindy crawford, kathy ireland, julia roberts, janet jackson and other athletic, healthy female role models -- will survive the nicole ritchie makeover era. what's happening now is just quite fucking sad...as the general public gets meatier, the ideal of feminine beauty gets whittled down to a mere slip of a girl. how's that for a conflicting message? supersize it all, little ones, just remember not to get fat while you're at it. kind of like jessica simpson in daisy dukes hawking pizza hut. because she totally looks like she's scarfing those cheesy bites between takes.

i really don't know where to peg the responsibility for this malarky. it would be quite easy to blame jessicas alba and simpson, but i won't. because they are twenty-something girls, and so am i -- so i know how stupid and easily influenced by the big, bad world even twenty-somethings can be (and i was ready to make that statement before i got to the part in the article about the sanskrit lotus tattoo).

but goddamnit...curvy?! pizza bites and defined abs?! show some self-respect. at the very least, think of the children...make it your next charity event. i hear that gets almost as much press as dating musicians.

absence makes the heart grow fonder.

does that translate into the realm of my poor, forgotten, neglected blog?

i have good excuses, really i do. the last few weeks have gone like this:

finals, graduation, lots of lunch dates with people i'd like to stay in touch with but probably won't because everyone always says "let's stay in touch" without following through, much overtime, quitting my old job, starting to pack...

...which segues into next week's double whammy of finish packing, start new job with twelve hour days plus travel time, and move into new place.

all of which means it's ten-thirty on a monday morning, i have no place to be, and am hanging out unwashed (but not stinky) and pj-clad in my sun-drenched and comfy bed typing away to no one in particular. although this is a good follow-up to last night's project, which included drinking an entire bottle of yellow tail cabernet-sauvignon while uploading the rest of my large and eclectic cd collection for transfer to my ipod.

there's much to be done today as well, but for now, i really don't feel like it.

is it too easy...

...to throw out a bush joke here?

http://http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070319/ap_on_re_us/adult_literacy

nobody ever said shit was going to be easy.

i'm totally aware of this. and i'm aware that i run the risk of pushing the "blistering" thing a little too far, portraying myself as some sort of whining emo beast who thinks the world owes her something. (not the case. i don't own a pair of chucks, i don't have assymetrical hair and i'm not so sure i even like death cab.) i hate that sort of thing.

really all i want out of adult life is a little bit of respect.

i'm twenty-five now, and i've done my time. i've played the precocious, wise-cracking vessel of potential role. i was a corner store rebel for awhile. then i threw that aside to be the weathered college droput almost but not quite hipster enough to be in the middle of the scene, though i played on the fringes for a few years. i drank too much, tried some things that would have been better left untouched, frittered away the days and still managed to escape without having made too many major mistakes (and the ones i did make have since been fixed, easily at that.)

none of those shoes really fit well, and i had a hard time seeing in the dark and smokey clubs.

i've never felt so much like myself as i do at this moment -- a college degree in hand, umpteen professional and semi-professional projects, volunteer opportunities and such. more importantly, i'm happy more than seventy-five percent of the time.

so why is it that i feel sometimes that i still haven't completely delivered? and why the hell do i care if i've let people down anyhow?

it's possible i'm hardwired to consider the larger implications and the oh-so-important other people's feelings factor. that personality tendency is one of the reasons i chose my career, and why i'm good at it. it's also possible that i'm impossible to please and am destined to replay every choice i make on the jumbotron in my head, fretting over the unchosen pages of my choose your own adventure story. i'm relentlessly anal retentive like that.

somehow i still feel that on a certain level i'm expected to be frivilous, despite my own distaste for being that way. that gets me respect from my friends close to forty, my friends my own age not so much. and i have enough flavor of immaturity to feel like i'm missing something even though i'm fairly certain i'm not, because when i show up i wind up being irritated by some drunkard or attracting a herd of inappropriate mini-morrisseys.

it's walking a fine line between responsibility and pleasure in life; i'm not always convinced i'm doing so well.

So it ends.

just as it should, with the penguins in pittsburgh. and thus begins the most beautiful of mornings.

i'm aching for tickets to tonight's game. however, being that the next game i'm going to is this friday, i'll probably still get my share of the carnival atmosphere. i sense some serious arena tailgating in my future...

let's go pens!

you're a pain in my ass.

other people, as a rule, are pains in the ass. let's not play it down in some sort of face-saving gesture -- it's a fact of life.

not only that, but it's a fact of life that grows in truth as i slay the dragons of the few remnants of idealistic youth i have left. (though i think they're mostly gone now as i rarely have time to shave my legs let alone deal with asinine, unrealistic crap that will only cloud my judgement.)

whether it be people on an exit ramp who stop at the stop sign and accelerate only to slam on their brakes fifteen feet later where the lanes merge, or the drunken and screaming fool i have to share an armrest with at every sporting event i've ever been to in my life, or the guy in front of me who orders a triple whopper with large fries, an oreo pie and a bucket of diet coke...it's all the same. they are all lesser beings in my secret self-centered world, and definite pains in my ass.

pretty frequently my family and friends do things that combat my efforts to spare them from this designation. it may shock you to know that calling me three times in one day without leaving a voicemail garners you an ass pain rank (how am i supposed to screen my calls if you force me call you back?!). as does making me repeat everything i say in a single conversation. and arguing with me over my choice of pizza toppings until i bite the bullet and get my own damn pie which then disappears overnight despite my only eating a mere two slices.

ass pains, all of you.

i can only hope that in some small part my habits of stopping to read nutrition information on the back of everything i touch in the grocery store before i put it in my cart and dog-earing my library books are repaying the favor.

to be or not to be

so i don't know what to make of the latest "impasse" of the pittsburgh arena talks (aka governor ed rendell and mario lemieux: who's dick is bigger? round three). no matter how i twist it, scrapping this and starting over somewhere else at this late point in the game doesn't make a damn lick of sense. the fact that it's been three months of "we're close, we're close" negotiating and yet nothing's been put in ink doesn't make much sense either.

despite being a lifelong penguins fan, the only emotion i can come up with is that i'm disgusted and bored with the whole thing. it's a riproaring shame that what could have been one of the most enjoyable hockey seasons of the last decade has been forever tainted with business powerplays.

and it's a shame that a private corporation and a government striving to reach the same goals for the benefit of the city and fans can't check their egos at the door long enough to reach an agreement. shame on you all.

i propose handcuffing all parties involved to chairs in the conference room in philadelphia tomorrow, with an armed brigade of concerned citizens outside to ensure the deal gets done. we could always enlist the help of the state police, since that's the number that our pennsylvania governor has rerouted his calls to as of yesterday, when the constituent masses began phoning about the situation. i don't know, fast eddie, but that seems to me to be a major part of this problem.

and it's only one of the lengthy list of reasons that i didn't vote for you.