Monthly Archives: September 2012

Men are much smarter when it comes to shoes.

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19

It wasn’t my intention to write about my younger self vs my current self this week, but it’s worked out that way.

I bought a dress for the wedding we’re attending this weekend a while back. It’s lovely, but I lack suitable shoes to wear with it. My foot attire consists of sandals, tennies, and boots (and seriously, I love Pasadena, but summer lasts until the end of October. I’ve had it with the scorching heat. It’s boot time for Pete’s sake!). I donated all my pumps along with my old work wardrobe a few months back, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because they were all black, and none of them would go with the dress. So this week I’ve been on the hunt for a pair of heels.

Have I ever told you guys I managed to convince myself for a number of years that I was five foot five? I’m not, I’m 5’3”, and that’s standing up as straight as possible. I always wanted to be tall. My sister is four inches taller than me, with long legs, and she never lets me forget it. Height just wasn’t in the cards for me, and I suppose I should be grateful for making it this far, because my mom is only five feet.

I’m not sure why I wanted to be tall, but it was something I longed for desperately. You know how some girls wished for a nose job, or bigger boobs, or straight hair? I wished for extra inches, and over the years I fudged enough times when asked about my height that eventually I began to believe the lie. Even my driver’s license said I was 5’5” (the ability to deny the truth about height came from my mom. To this day she will indignantly say that she is five foot one and a half, when she most certainly is not. She does not like it when we kid her about the white lie either. In fact, if she reads this post she’ll probably be highly annoyed with me – sorry Mom).

My love affair with high heels began somewhere around the age of twenty, and lasted for nearly a decade. I felt naked without them. Remember those super high platform shoes from the late 90s? I was all over those babies. All the height without the pain, I could run marathons in them, and heinous though they were I was a little sad when they went out of style. After that I moved to stilettos, and while I never mastered running in them, I could certainly walk long distances without cringing.

Not any more. Sure, I can still do boots, because your foot is completely supported. But balancing on heels that come to a tiny point is apparently no longer one of my superhero abilities. I wore the shoes I bought around the house today (with a pair of grungy shorts and a tank top, it was quite the look) to break them in a bit, and to make sure I don’t trip and fall tomorrow. No dice. My feet are plotting the rest of my body’s demise as we speak. They’re sitting only shoes, any movement is going to have to be accomplished by my husband pushing me around on a dolly, or something. He actually went with me on one of my shoe finding missions, and seemed puzzled as to why I couldn’t just wear flats with the dress.

Note to husband – please don’t bring that up tomorrow when I am whining about my feet. Yes, you were right.

Suck it up, Pouty Pants

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We have to attend a wedding this weekend. There are actually all sorts of post-worthy things involved, but I haven’t written about any of it on the off chance any of the attendees might read this blog. I don’t want to spend Saturday afternoon explaining myself to anyone. Perhaps I’ll post about it next week, because I figure we won’t see any of the people for at least a year or so, and by that time they’ll have forgotten. Anyway, my husband is in the wedding party, and he just informed me today we have to go to the rehearsal dinner on Friday evening. I assumed we wouldn’t go since he has to work and hadn’t mentioned it. Typically his days are very long, but apparently Friday he’ll be home by 7-ish, and that means we can be there around eight.

Eight o’clock? I don’t wanna! By the time it’s all said and done we won’t home until 11 or 12, and that’s past my bedtime.

I really have no idea when I became such a homebody. I don’t mind going out, so long as it’s during the day or early evening. From the ages of 17 to 27, however, I went out every night of the week. Every. Single. Night. Rain, cold, whatever – I was out partying like my life depended on it. Even when I worked the late shift bartending I’d go out. Hell, the after hours spot didn’t even open the doors until midnight. And then there was the after-after hours, luckily I usually threw in the towel by that point, mostly because I had to go home and sleep an hour or two before getting up to go to work again. I cannot even begin to imagine doing that nowadays. I can hardly believe I did it then. It’s a miracle I don’t look as torn up as Lindsay Lohan.

Even in my later 20s I still did a significant amount of whooping it up. When my husband and I were dating, he used to show up at my apartment around 8 or 9, and we’d hang out a bit and wait for it to be late enough to go out, hitting up our favorite haunts around ten. Just writing that sounds absurd, but it’s what we did. Why did we have to wait until late evening to begin the night? I have no idea.

So part of me believes I’m still catching up on sleep, and therefore the thought of losing any makes me grumpy. Sure, growing up and out of the perpetual party phase is a very good thing. Lord knows you can only live that life for so long before it catches up to you. But having a pouty pants fit about leaving the house around the time I’m usually in my jammies, snuggled up with my man and dogs? It’s like I’ve done a 180 and ended up the exact opposite of my younger self. Huh – it’s time to suck it up. Tomorrow, I will rise to the occasion, put on my game face, and not whine about the late hour. However, in the event my husband should find himself stuck at work, thereby forcing us to cancel the evening, I will rejoice in my pajamas. Fingers crossed.

Home

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Well hellfire and little fishes y’all, I am back from Texas. Actually I returned Monday. It was a very short trip, but just long enough to completely screw me up, and so I spent yesterday in a haze. I have a severely restricted diet, which means there are about ten things on the planet that I can eat and not feel ill, and I have to eat those things at the same time, every day, as well as go to sleep and wake up at the same time, and so long as I do that I’m fine. Any deviation, however, and it takes me a while to get back to normal. It’s totally sucky, as I love to travel, but it’s difficult for me. Anyway, as a result I was brain dead yesterday and didn’t write a post, which is fine because I spent that time catching up on all my favorite blogs.

My visit was a wonderful whirlwind of family, and I’m already homesick. Monkey Girl made it, no thanks to American Airlines. She made a two day drive to Texas from her temporary home state, for which I am thankful. And we had a lovely visit with my grandparents. They’ve been married well over 60 years, and I adore them both.

The fabulous Vesta, she made all her own clothes too!

In the 40s my grandmother, the original Vesta,  moved from Texas to work in Washington DC. It was there she met my grandfather, who was a Marine. I know quite a bit about my grandmother’s life prior to meeting my grandpa, she was unbelievably fabulous. Vesta worked for the government in Texas, and was told they were transferring her to DC, the only catch was that she had to leave the following week. So my grandma got on a train and arrived in the dead of winter, without a coat. I have always been enthralled with stories from her time there. Over the weekend I realized I don’t know nearly as much about my grandfather.

When we arrived at my grandparents, there was an old photo album in the living room. My dad picked it up, and then exclaimed it contained photos he had never seen before. It was a pictorial representation of my grandpa’s youth as a Marine – pictures of him in uniform with his buddies, photos of them sunbathing on mattresses they dragged from their bunks out onto the patio off the mess hall, all sorts of stuff. Pages and pages of photos, and then, to our surprise, pages and pages of my grandpa with various lady friends.

Whoa.

Obviously I know each of my grandparents had a life before they met each other. I’ve heard stories from their childhood, and asked my grandma all about her early 20s, but most of the stories about my grandpa from that same time are military tales. It never occurred to me he had multiple girlfriends before settling down.

Apparently there was a place called Casablanca he frequented, as there were several pictures of him there, each with a different woman (I say woman, but they were all more than a decade younger than I am now, including my grandpa). My grandma said that when she arrived in DC she was warned by other girls not to go to Casablanca, which sounds like it was a hangout for military guys and women that loved a man in uniform. My grandpa never did answer any of our inquiries about the women in the photos, and many of them had inscriptions to him. He just grinned and said he finally found the best one of them all, and gestured to my grandmother. She is a very no nonsense woman, and gave him a sideways glance and a hint of a grin. I know she was wholly unimpressed with him when they met, because she told me so. I need to give her a call this week and find out what he did to change her mind.

Itsy bitsy bikini

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Did you guys read about Elizabeth Hurley’s line of sexy kiddie bikinis?

Mini ChaCha Bikini, pic from elizabethhurley.com

 

Much like the author of the article, for me, the problem is a combination of two things – the bikini itself and the child model’s pose (or, I should say, the pose she was instructed to do by someone). If she had floaties on her arms and was building a sandcastle, I might not have focused as much on the pint-sized string bikini. What really bothered me, however, was the wording that apparently went along with the pictures on Hurley’s site, such as a caption next to a bikini for the 8-13 age range, which said “great for girls who want to look grown up”. I checked out her site, elizabethhurley.com, to see for myself, and received an error message. I can only assume her reps are doing some damage control with regards to either the pictures or the descriptions.

I read two separate articles about Hurley’s children’s line, and while both featured quotes of caution from experts, neither addressed the fact that little girls don’t have funds to purchase their own swimsuits. For several years now, it seems clothing for young girls has become more ‘grownup’ and revealing. In my old blog I posted about the topic a number of times, and I’ve read countless blogs, articles, papers, and books from people warning against the oversexualization of young girls. I haven’t written about the topic in a long time, because quite frankly, one trip to the children’s department of a clothing store tells me this line of thinking is the minority – the clothing wouldn’t be made if it wasn’t being purchased.

What do you guys think? Is it a problem or no big deal?