Beautiful and...

I have a new celeb crush. After seeing Toni Collette in an interview and being extremely bored with all the TV series I rented the first season of United States of Tara. Finally entertained I breezed through each episode and at the end of the last episode I thought she was an actress goddess.

Recently, I was asked who my top five female hot celebs were and I really needed some time to think about it. There are tons of beautiful women are screen these days, but lately I have found my list evolving to accommodate women not in my age bracket, but older. Megan Fox is definitely hot and my age, but that is all she is. She, and a lot of twenty-something women are stuck in the “you’re beautiful..." and that's it box, which is a box exclusive to women.

Have you noticed that the women out of the twenties age bracket deal with the beauty box a lot less? And it is not because they are less beautiful (my top hot female celebs are all over the age of 30). I find that I often equate women older than myself with being beautiful and being interesting. I wonder if it is because women are somehow different once they reach their thirties or if there is something else going on that is quite unfair to women in their twenties? It can't be just me.

It might be time to start working on forcing a change in my thought pattern when I see a beautiful woman. Women are multi-dimensional and interesting, even in their twenties. It is time to start seeing and examining all of the other parts. That goes for myself as well; spend more time on examining and developing who I am and less time in any sort of box.

Thank you Dr. Haas

I know I have had a good workout if after I have warmed-up, lifted some weights, ran four miles, put my abs back into place and stretched, I am not flattened to the floor nor tired. Instead I feel light and airy. This is why I love my tampons.

While running I saw an advertisement for pads, feminine napkins, whatever. The woman was running and happy. Really? Is there any way that woman could be happy running with a diaper down there? Admittedly I have never tried. I have been immersed in the world of tampons from the get go. My mother was a tampon user, and my sister was the one who left me with tampons for when I started my very first period.

In my exercise high I would like to take the opportunity to thank the inventor of the modern tampon, Earle Haas.

Thank you tampon inventor for giving me the opportunity to run diaper and chaffed free. My ass, heart, and mind are especially appreciative.

Sunday Suppa: lemon bar dessert

I was feeling uninventive and indecisive before grocery shopping this morning so I decided that instead of boring you with my chicken parmigiano covered in gooey mozzarella cheese that I would try Ina Garten's lemon bar recipe. I am convinced that I cannot bake very well. My apple pies never turn out as beautiful as my mothers and always need to be a little bit firmer even though I follow my mother’s recipe as close to exactly as I can get. I am terrified of overcooking and undercooking dessert.

In my search for dinner ideas this week I came upon the lemon bar recipe and was reunited with a lemon sweet craving I have had since last summer. I had little faith in myself to pull of lemon cheese cake. This bar recipe looked simple enough and I had almost all the ingredients minus the lemons and eggs.

I need to watch someone bake and follow along. I made the crust first wondering if my problem is not that I cannot make the crust, but that I have little patience to make the crust look nice in the pan. I was pressing and spreading the crust out in the pan and I got anxious. Is this thick enough, high enough, smooth enough? I knew it tasted good after I sampled the buttery goodness.

The filling was super easy. I waited to add the eggs with the lemon juice until I was ready to mix. I wasn’t sure if the acid would affect the protein in the eggs in some weird way or not if I let them sit together while dumping in the other ingredients. Of course when I poured the filling on the crust, my crust was thick enough, not high enough, and the smoothness really did not matter. I felt glad that Mike is always thoughtful and thankful when trying anything I make.

I try my hardest to let bake things cool and I think I got pretty close this time when I cut into the warm lemon bars. I took the corner piece that I had made unpretty in my cutting and gave Mike the nice piece. They were good. I slowly ate my piece enjoying the mixture of tart and sweet. Mike hovered the bar.

Was it that bad or was it that good?

I might have to have another one.

Now if only I could make it perfectly delicious...

They're cold sores not...

I was unblessed with cold sores. You can call it herpes. I refuse. They are cold sores, which we all know are located on the lips…of the mouth. I get cold sores far less as an adult than when I was a teenager though getting them still sucks just as much. Yesterday I got a cold sore and my period. Yuck. This situation brings about a horrible memory and a guilty thought.

Memory: In college I took a sex class. It had more of an official title, but everyone knew it as sex class. It was where anal sex was discussed all of the time. In the first class everyone had to write down three questions and every class they would randomly be picked and answered. Well, apparently everyone had questions about the backdoor.

And then there was herpes, which really is not all that bad unless like me you have a whopping throbbing cold sore on the day you discuss herpes. In sex class it is nice to feel like you could be a potential sex partner, but this definitely gets shot down when you have a big STD on your lip. Thanks mom. I tried really hard to awkwardly position my hand over part of my mouth to avoid being asked to stand in front of the class as a demonstration of what a herpe might look like. It was the longest three hour class I have ever taken.

Thought: Poor Mike. Talk about a long weekend.

My slight guilt quickly went away this morning when I discovered that after clipping his most disgusting dirty foul creepy Gollum toe nails he did not pick up the ewwwww. Clearly, my stress induced cold sore occurred out of prescience.  As usual it’s his fault.

Hot mama dilemma

A friend saved a copy of the More magazine for me to peruse. While this magazine may be geared towards women in their forties at this point in my twenties it all seems relevant. Even the numerous anti-aging advertisements didn’t shock me. I recently read somewhere that women didn’t have to start worrying about aging until after the ripe age of 21. Apparently, my being almost 24 makes me older than younger.

In my perusing of More I happened to come across a feature addressing the “Stacey’s Mom Dilemma”. I am no mother yet of a teenage daughter, but I definitely remember my own mother’s passage through this phase and have observed many other mothers contending with this dilemma.

Karen Karbo writes “If my daughter had become the hottie in the house, then what was I, aside from her chauffeur?” Thankfully, instead of the usual fighting the new hottie with weight-loss, tanning, and buying too short skirts, Karbo concludes that she should “…err on the side of momishness.” I write thankfully because while women who are mothers have every right to be attractive and sexual in their other roles, teenage daughters just want their moms' momishness.

I admit this does not seem fair. Often we equate the shutdown of sexuality and beauty with aging therefore when it is encouraged for women who are mothers to turn the hot factor off it could mean they are getting old. And it does not take a genius to figure out (just flip through any magazine) that this culture is definitely anti-aging, especially for women.

I believe motherhood is just one role that women have among many roles, which should allow women to express their sexuality sans all the anti-aging bullshit. We, me in my twenties, you in your whatever, are not old or getting older.

Deer inspires self-righteousness

I admit I was driving to Walmart. We do not have a Target in Vermont that makes us feel better about buying cheap plastic products. It felt like it was time for some spring cleaning action at my house and in an attempt to try to save some money I willed myself in the direction of the devil store. Mother Earth saved me.

A deer was dead in the median of the interstate and I was immediately sad. Lately, road kill has been bothering me. Then, it came to me:

Fxxx Walmart! What am I doing? I have a planet to protect and save. So I’m using a little more gas now, but I drive a Honda Civic so that is better than tons of other people.

I drove right past Walmart towards Healthy Living, also known as Wealthy Living. While driving my thought tangents proceeded. Sometimes I get so annoyed with my parents generation or in general people between the ages of 40-65. I like to hold them responsible for the planet’s meltdown and continued meltdown because they keep on buying SUV’s, processed foods, and non-reusable frappe-mocha-somethings from Starbucks. I know us twenty-somethings do similar things, but I also know that most of us do not have the buying power that our parents do.

I left Wealthy Living, feeling less wealthy in cash, but better about my overall contribution. That deer had a lot of purposes on the planet, but I bet it did not have the instinct to know that it was going to inspire a twenty-something young woman to pass by the devil store and do the right thing. Fxxx Walmart!

Yup, I am a self-righteous bitch and proud of it.

Twice is nice

As a couple that has lived together for five years we have definitely figured out the unspoken bathroom rules. There is no getting around our body’s need to excrete…waste products.

1. Mike leaves a…
2. I just need to use the bathroom…for whatever reason.
3. It’s ok for Mike to pee with the door open or while I am trying to brush my teeth.
4. I just need to use the bathroom…for whatever reason.
5. If Mike is spending extra reading time I can ask him a question if needed.
6. I just need to use the bathroom…for whatever reason…no disturbances allowed.
7. Twice is nice no leftovers allowed.

While these rules may seem a little rigid they are not that uptight. Discussion about intestinal failure, sickness, etc., is perfectly fine. After all it is no fun to not being feeling good and then not be able to tell someone why.

However the rules are not supposed to be broken which is why I was quite alarmed when #6 was violated for the first time by Mike. It was not even violated because there was an emergency. He violated the rule while on the phone with his mother discussing our wedding dress code.

Knock

Him: Hey

Alarm. Is the door locked?

Me: Yea…

Him: S wearing a suit is fine right?

Seriously?

Me: Yea, yea. Fine.

Go away.

So much for my womanly attempt at bathroom mysteriousness; or maybe that is what our gendered bathroom rules are: weird, strange, and ridiculous. Still, I am not ready to give them up just yet…