Size 4 Jeans

My husband and I attended his company’s Christmas party in December. It was one of those parties in a nice hotel that started with a cocktail hour and went on with a buffet dinner, and dancing afterwards. The “dress” for the evening was suit and tie for the men, and evening wear for the women, so it was a fine excuse for me to purchase a new dress, have my hair done, and generally be frivolous.

Aside from my own frivolity, I find parties like this to be completely stupid and pointless, and the only reason I go is because my husband is high enough in the company hierarchy that he feels we need to be there, for some completely mysterious reason that I, not having a management degree, don’t understand. Every year, he calls me from the office in mid-November and says “Do you want to go to the Christmas party?” and I say “Why are you asking me this?” Since he feels we need to be there, it’s pretty silly to ask me if I want to go, especially when he knows the answer is a resounding “no!”

What’s wrong with parties like this? Here comes my soapbox recitation: Firstly, every one that I’ve ever been to is “buffet style.” Yuck! Just…YUCK! Even if the food is marginally good, by the time you stand around in the buffet line at least once and haul your plate(s) full of food back to your table it’s more than likely cold, and really, is the food ever better than “marginally good” to begin with? And if the food isn’t marginally good at serving temperature, it’s going to be downright awful cold. And then there’s the issue of touching the same serving utensils that 100 other people have touched whilst filling your plate, and then sitting down to eat your food. Sure, you could head for the restroom to wash your hands between filling your plate and sitting down to eat, but that provides even more time for the food on your plate to chill.

Secondly, assuming you’re lucky enough to be seated with people who have anything interesting to say, the tables at parties of this nature are too large for comfortable conversation with your tablemates, since the tables tend to be round and seat 10-12 people. Even with everyone rubbing elbows like they usually are when cutting their meat, a round table that seats 10-12 in any comfort at all is large enough that talking to anyone not sitting right next to you is a chore, and usually requires raising your voice or even (dare I say) shouting to be heard. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Getting married. Don’t get me wrong. Getting married is fine, but once is enough. To get married again I’d have to do the “big D” and if I do that, I sure won’t get married again anyway, so there you have it!
2. Having kids. Again, don’t get me wrong here, but two is enough! If I manage to survive the two I have with my sanity intact, I’ll be doing well.
3. Joining a group of women to do anything. Think quilt or craft guilds, reading groups, PTAs, whatever. Women in groups of more than two are a PITA.
4. Buying a couch that doesn’t have the back cushions attached. I HATE the couch and loveseat in my living room. The back cushions are just pillows, and it never looks neat after someone sits on them. No one in the house but me can figure out how to arrange them properly either, so I either have to blow it off and deal with it looking like crap or fix it myself constantly. Grrrr.
5. Working outside the home in a “real job.” So yeah, I’m spoiled. With any luck I’ll continue to be spoiled so that I don’t have to put up with all the politics and social jockeying that goes along with working in an office or something like that. With a little more luck, I won’t have to be “spoiled” too much longer because the work I do at home will start buying more than Starbucks daily…
6. Buying vampire books by Anne Rice. I liked them until the fourth or fifth one, and then she just got toooo weird. I’m not even sure I can stomach reading the first ones anymore. Isn’t it funny how our taste changes as we get older?

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It’s rare that I pick up a fashion/beauty magazine these days. I just don’t have the time for it, and don’t get much out of them anymore anyway. Once in a while (like once a year) I’ll pick up something like Elle if I’m traveling by plane and just want some fluff to read on the way. I used to read them all the time; Seventeen, Cosmo, Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair. They all found their way into my mailbox at one time or another when I was younger.

I remember feeling like I wasn’t pretty when I was younger, and I had really poor self esteem from the time I was a teenager until I was in my early thirties. I have to say that I think the media and magazines contributed to the problem. Looking at all those perpetually beautiful people in magazines and movies and on TV, I thought I’d never measure up. My mother never understood what the problem was, and never tried to as far as I could tell then or now.

I don’t remember ever having the kind of conversations with my mother that I have with my own daughter about why the magazines and movies and TV aren’t real, and how those people don’t really look like that off the camera, because the photos are all airbrushed and Photoshopped to make perfection seem real. Frankly, I think my mother was jealous of me because I was thin and she wasn’t, and she never wanted to have children anyway (so she’s repeatedly told me), so maybe that was part of the reason for her attitude.

I never thought I was fat when I was younger though, not even when I looked at all the models in the magazines. I was at least sensible enough to realize that “fat” just wasn’t anything close to what I was. In fact, I wished for more curves, because “sexy” to me was a Victoria’s Secret model, and I had bones, not curves and no breasts to speak of at all. I was a stick until I had kids, and I didn’t have any breasts until I could afford to fix that problem with a trip to the plastic surgeon when I was 30. Read the rest of this entry »