Momma's house

It's in the desert, momma's house.

I love the starkness of the desert and the initial shock of no lush deciduous-ness, purple mountains against a vast, cloudness sky, and the scorching heat that dries your skin two steps out of the pool. We flee the airport quickly, because Momma's got a lead foot, and fly down the highway where the walls leading to the off ramps are decorated with indegenous art. We bypass vast fields of dirt and sand, squared off for future development and residential areas of white and cream and light caramel adobe with man-made lakes and fountains because there is something about man's ability to make water spring from the desert, something about man's ability to significantly change the natural environment...we call it "civilization," but I wonder.

Momma's house is cream, with gorgeous cactii and lizards in the front and a grapefruit and an orange tree in the back. It's in an "active senior" area where oft coiffed matrons zoom down the streets in their mercedes golf carts to the club and the store and each other's homes. We enter the comforting lightness, the familiarity of our old family piano, and the dining room furniture that was purchased when I was 7 or 8, and pictures of us as kids, and some of our childhood art, and elephants, the symbol of mom's sorority, and computers and iPads, tech savvy Momma, and heavy antiques gathered over a lifetime, and potions and ungents, and patios to be spray washed and boxes to be moved, and 4000 TV channels in almost every room. I loll on the leather couch, I loll on the pool side chaise lounges, I loll in Momma's car and care, I loll about on the impossibly soft bed in the guest room under the modern ceiling fan that I can control remotely. I read with the TV on until I fall asleep and Momma comes in and turns off the TV and the lights, turns down the fan.

We always go to the "Urban Tea Loft," a great little restaurant that one of Momma's friends owns, where we have hibiscus tea and salmon and impossible slices of red velvet cake and the chef looks like Ibrahim from the "Old Spice" commercials. We swim in the early mornings before the heat of the day, and eat Greek yogurt and as much fruit as we can hold, shop, go to museums or friend's houses, and talk and talk and talk.

When I return through the sky to green trees and black soil, I am browner, and calmer, touched by the familiar and the stark.

A Thousand Third Dates

I forgot to mention:
   I live in my mother's basement
   I live with my ex-wife and her girlfriend
   I live at the YMCA
   I have 16 children by a plural marriage
   I'm a crackhead
   I'm a Republican running for office in my small town and can't be seen dating a woman of color
   so we have to keep it on the DL
   I'm still married and living with my wife and kids, but we're technically separated and she said it's
   ok for me to date
   I only date Black girls because they tend to be more appreciative
   I run a monthly orgy
   I have Hep C
   I expect any woman I'm dating to make good money and have or have plans to get her MBA
   I don't like kissing
   I used to be gay but a church program made me see it was a sin
   I have to have a liver transplant and am looking for a donor

I hope you are comfortable with:
   Adult breast feeding
   Unprotected sex
   Paying for everything from now on
   Smokin' the Chronic
   Atonal monk music
   My lack of teeth
   Converting to my religion
   Giving up your love of Prince and drag queens once we are married
    Raising my kids
    Me using the "n" word from time to time
   Absconding with me after they process my warrant
   My latex/foot/breast/bondage/master and slave/fingernail polish/ear lobe/blood letting fetish
  

I thought you'd be:
   At least a DD
   Fatter/thinner/Blacker/lighter/religious/more talkative/less loquacious/ghetto fabulous/a sex kitten
   
If we continue dating, you must:
    Let your hair grow
    Go to the gym
    Gain 100 pounds
    Tone down the liberal rhetoric
    Defer to my superiority
    Cook for me every night
    Drink more
    Get rid of your cat
    Let me store some stuff at your house so that my soon to be ex-wife doesn't get it
    Give up any white/Black/friends you have
    Start studying Islam/zoroastrianism/Tantra/to become a Jehovah's Witness/how to shoot a rifle

I'm disappointed because:
    You won't sleep with me by the third date
    You objected to me drinking from a bottle of vodka as I drove you home
    You asked for AIDs  and STD tests
    You aren't comfortable with my Rottweilers
    You unmanned me by paying for dinner
    You won't walk the 7 miles to my rural cabin from the bus stop in town
    You won't fly with me to Bermuda for the weekend because we've known each other less than
     three weeks
     You think you are smarter than me
     You gave me a breath mint when I tried to kiss you
     You told me you didn't want to go out with me anymore, and wouldn't take my word for it that
      you'd change your mind
     You don't buy that I'm in love with you already
     You expect me to call when I say I will
      You wouldn't go with me to the monster truck rally
      You won't respond to each of the 30 daily texts/emails/calls I make to you demanding to know
       where you are, who you are with, and exactly what you're doing     


We can't date anymore because:
      I can't handle your weight (I know it's shallow, but...)
      My adult children forbid it
      You're too artsy
      You don't enjoy sitting around all day watching rugby
      You probably voted for Obama
      You seem too wrapped up in your own life to have a boyfriend
      You don't seem interested in the bi-friendly lifestyle
      You like yourself too much 
      
      



 
     
    
    

Too beautiful for Spanx

 First, I am not judging anyone who chooses to wear Spanx, especially if they make you feel good about how you look and feel.

Big Ole Butt....

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/08/opinion-do-powerful-women-need-to-tame-their-unsightly-bulges/?iref=allsearch


I'm fat by society's standards. My weight fluctuates for a variety of reasons, some of which are out of my control. And there are times when I eat too much, or badly, and I certainly subject myself to harsh criticism. It's a struggle. From my earliest days, I was put on diets, told by my dad that he'd buy me a whole new wardrobe if only I lost weight, maligned by boyfriends who sampled my charms and then told me I had to get to the gym, teased like we all are when we don't conform to certain standards. I'm convinced that most of these people weren't concerned about my health.

But even though many people find my bulges unsightly, or subject their opinions to the narrowness of American standards of beauty, I mainly try to hold my head high as a big, beautiful woman who glows from without and within. And this glow includes being as comfortable as possible in my clothes.

When Spanx first came out, several friends and a relative advised me to try them. I perused the website and was a bit horrified to see what amounted to a spandex version of a girdle. I went to my favorite ample woman store and looked at them through their packaging.  Spandex galore from breastbone to knee. I could feel the heat it would generate through a second layer of clothes. My favorite sales associate told me that she'd tried them and almost fell out in church. The manager of the store extolled their virtues, saying that she finally had the hourglass figure she'd always wanted. But I knew they weren't for me.

Recently, the enormously talented singer, Adele, said that she'd worn 4 pairs of Spanx at the Grammy Awards. It saddens me to know that this wonderful, beautiful young woman tortured herself like that to look a certain way based on an impossible standard.

So, I troll the internet for good looking, plus sized clothes, which are hard to find. I wear make-up most of the time to enhance the natural. I enjoy being able to take a full breath. And I endeavor to not mind too much when my jiggle makes others uncomfortable--oh the stares at the beach! I delete the  emails from "Big Beautiful Women" personal websites, where dating a fat woman is a "fetish." And I await the day when my illness remits and I can resume my gentle, but effective exercise regime to be healthier, and not necessarily thinner.

The article in the link at the top of this post gladdens my heart.  Maybe, just maybe, it'll touch a few women and make them think about a little more freedom in terms of who they are and widen their sense of what is beautiful. Maybe it'll make some of us think about the implications of our narrow standard of what is attractive. Perhaps we can rethink the political implications of subjecting the majority of people to an impossible norm.

I don't think Karl Rove binds his man breasts so he'll be more "effective" and "acceptable."  I'm pretty sure the Weinstein brothers who are enormously successful movie producers don't wear man Spanx to enhance their credibility. And I'll bet Michael Moore doesn't encase himself in a full body swimsuit with a skirt when he goes to the beach. Think on it. I welcome your comments.

un life

Of course we can't imagine how astronauts do space walks. It's beyond imagination--hanging out in the void. The closest we can come is the first few minutes of sky diving or floating in a warm sea. I'm sure that plane ride they do to approximate weightlessness doesn't even compare to floating in space. Weightlessness is an attractive concept to me being not as light as air. It would be a great equalizer, wouldn't it, if we could, regardless of weight, float around each other? And we could avoid the embarrassment of sweaty thigh on thigh contact on the bus.

Cuz I'm about over riding the bus, I tell you what.

Many nights staring at the ceiling and at the night outside my garret window convince me that floating through inner space is as exhilarating, terrifying and empowering as swimming through the cosmos. I made up my mind to continue to have a rich life even when I'm bed and couch ridden. There is poetry to be read and written, sights to be seen, and a complicated psyche and history to explore. Even the experience of pain can be studied, and thus disassociated from to the point where it's almost bearable.

If it has to be this way sometimes, let it be colorful, interesting, and a learning experience.

If I have to give up chocolate, let me float free.