I know everyone is consumed with debating the surprise outcome of American Idol last night. I however find myself somewhere else. I woke to the realization that it is growing warmer out, the days are longer, my gardens are full of great looking things, my kids are losing their winter pallor, freckles springing out on their perfect noses. And this can mean only one thing. (Cue theme to “Jaws”). Bathing suit season is upon us. Now I will confess to having had a relatively easy life in bathing suits. With the exception of my college years where, like a child who had been raised as a captive in a basement and fed only gruel and broth, minus the truly scary part where you bear your fathers children, I decided that I could and should eat all meals plus a third of a case of beer a day accompanied by things like whole bags of sour cream and onion chips and maple candy, sharing all gorging equally with my beloved previously thin roommates Holly and CC. We’d snack on turkey subs, hitchhike to another VT city for freshly made Ben and Jerrys BY THE PINT and indulge in bags of M&M’s to help us cram. Cram brains and faces with those large bags of M&M’s created for cake decorating or birthday parties, not for single person consumption. We’d think nothing of eating a full meal in the cafeteria and then going out for a second meal an hour later. It wasn’t pretty and I came home at the end of freshman year having put on what one person phrased “The Freshman Fifty”. This was the same person who sweetly asked if we’d each had a whole turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I think we were sort of legendary on campus because we’d arrived as cute girls that the boys liked. By the time we left at the end of the freshman year, I’m sure there was a parental debate about the need to strap either us or the bags to the roof of the car. I had always been a thin person and my family seemed stunned at my new proportions not to mention how closely they had to guard their plates from me. Luckily this phase passed and I returned to a less debauched and more figure flattering style of life. So, except for that period, I never really minded the advent of summer. But in the last few years I’ve noticed something. I’ve noticed that the thought of bathing suit season makes me a bit nervous. It makes me a bit cranky. And, to tell the truth, it makes me downright frightened. In the most superficial way.
During the other months I don my jeans and t-shirts, my dresses, my sweaters, my boots and my heels and I feel happy most of the time. But as each year passes, when push comes to shove and it’s time to get naked and go out in the world midst the judgemental suburban mommies and appraising, lecherous daddies, the gravitational pull of life makes the unveiling just plain tough. It started a few years ago. Little things. The droop in the belly button. I’ve mentioned that before. The butt cheeks that when you lifted them had a lot more give than you remembered. And when you clenched them, the naked rear view caused a quick confused rush of blood to the head. Even my tiny boobs seemed a little depressed as they veered toward the ground, just the teensiest bit. Something around my knees…a little pouch that was never there before. The pocket of flesh I lovingly refer to as The Apartment, left over from two pregnancies that produced two fabulous boys even if I did border on college proportions at the end of each nine month festival. I don’t know why that fleshy pocket won’t leave. Perhaps it mistakes me for a kangaroo and thinks there will be a future need to carry things in it. And let’s not even go into age spots. I refuse to even utter or imagine the words LIVER SPOT. Surely if they were LIVER spots, mine would be full of holes from alcohol consumption. We’ll call them age spots. The phrase “age spots” is not a nice one but it’s far better than referring to a slight natural sun based shift in pigmentation by naming it after an organ responsible for filtering waste. The skin on your neck and under arms, what do they call it, crepey. A Crepey Neck. That’s just wrong. My neck does not look like an edible crepe? Nor does it look like the fabric Crepe. It does, however, look like crap, compared to what it used to look like. I think that whole thing was a typo. Ah, this disoulution of the body is, in some ways, harder than the face. Your face is out there for all to see, all the time. You just get used to it. Your naked or near naked body is like a fresh, mean surprise every Memorial Day. Somehow you hope that winter has been kind and that you’ll get naked and people will gasp with delight. Or at least not shudder. That all those vitamins and jogs and cutting back on drinking during the week will have made a big difference. That things will be as they once were, when the only time you truly looked horrid in a bathing suit was when you were buying it due to the horrifying lighting at most department stores. Well, the truth is, now you’ll always be sort of horrid. At least substantially more horrid than you were at 16. Or 21. Or, goddamnit, 30. It is just the deal. It’s as if your body is saying, in an insidious whispery little voice “Happy spring, sorry to disappoint but you look much worse than last year and you will continue to decline. ” I suppose the good news is you don’t need to cut back on the drinking during the week. Nothing will help. And I am sure there is a slight upside to all of this. These changes will, I promise, result in a long marriage. Seems crazy but I believe, though I have no scientific data to back me up, that these tiny physical changes are the leading cause in marriages surviving until death. Because I know that all of my friends live in deathly fear of EVER having to remove their clothing in close proximity to any male who doesn’t ignore them when they’re naked. If someone actually gazed at them naked, I think my friends would all die of fright. And an affair isn’t an affair without getting good and naked and gazing. ”Remember that?” she sighs. So, trust me on this one…no affair, married until death. The upside of a droopy body. Sort of Marriage counselors need to push this point more frequently.
Despite my resignation, I’m still trying to keep the underarm jiggle at bay but little works. I do my sit ups. I’m trying to keep my calories down but my body doesn’t seem to care. I eat tons of salad. I’m trying to drink less and meditate more but, truthfully, drinking is more fun. I’m trying to figure out how to love myself as I am and wear each jiggle and drip of flesh proudly. To know that my crappy neck is the product of years of fun living, The Apartment gave me kids and that I can’t resent my husband because he doesn’t have a crappy neck, a droopy butt or even wrinkles. To understand that people will always love me for who I AM not how I look in a bikini. Or a one piece. Or one of those skirt bathing suits. Or a burqa. Where do you get a burqa?
Happy Memorial Day!
I ran into my friend Danny at the drugstore the other day. He was buying nosehair clippers. I was buying super strength nighttime anti-aging cream. Pretty much sums it up.
PS. Just a quick product endorsement, I was buying ROC, the strongest amount of retinol you can buy without a prescription. It’s good. and it’s only 19.95. I have no idea what kind of nose hair clippers he settled on but let me know if you want me to pursue that information.
Okay, so here’s a blog about something I hope you never have to deal with. The Salem Witch Trial aspect of the Swine flu. And you thought those nice Puritans in Salem were hysterical. Swine Flu. The potential pandemic or as I like to call it THE PIGDEMIC. Or the Pig Panic. Or how bout, It’s Just A Slow News Week? Here’s the deal. My sister and her baby went to Mexico for a conference. You know where this is going. Had fun. Drank cool drinks on the beach, ate okay Mexican food and thought they had really dodged a Mexican bullet when they experienced no gastrointestinal distress. Wrong. Big time. Came home. Got respiratory infections. Spent lots of time with us because my sister is a single parent, while baby spewed boogers and received love. Read hysterical newspapers on Sunday. Called doctor. And life as we knew it ended. All of us, healthy or not, and, trust me, we were all really, really healthy except my mild case of PMS and the jury is still out on whether that counts as illness, ended up in the vortex of swine flu. Haz-mat teams, being forbidden from attending school due to contact with possibly infected person and the hysteria that might result should other parents discover that we had handled a baby who’d been to Mexico and had a cold. So my sister and I have spent the last few days trying to entertain three healthy boys and a baby recovering from a cold without having any other human contact or going to any other public place. It’s been great. I’m thinking of asking the Haz-mat teams to come back just to mediate fights.
Here’s what I think. I was a longtime member of “The Media”. I was pretty successful in my day. I worked with fine journalists like Charles Kuralt and Connie Chung and then I ended up on TV trying to continue their tradition. I’m not blaming folks like them. But I do think the hysteria starts with the newsfolk and has much to do with what else is going on in the world. For instance, remember West Nile Virus. Probably just barely. Every year we would hear about the deadly West Nile Virus and there would be spraying of toxic chemicals, predicted horrible death possibilities and terror when you found a dead bird in your gutter. No more flinging of dead birds into the trash after closely examining them just out of macabre interest and fascination with being up close to such a pretty thing, even dead, when they are usually in the sky. No, suddenly every dead bird was an issue for the health department, even those with cat fang marks in their heads. You just never know, people would say. And do YOU want to die of West Nile? And then 9/11 happened. Now September Eleventhwas real news. Deeply tragic real news. News that required all news people work long hours on a REAL story that, like all REAL news stories, was terrifying and full of actual grief. And you know what’s funny? Since 9/11 we have never heard another story about West Nile. Or at least I haven’t. My friend Gina’s son is a teenager and like all teenaged boys, he had a really naughty idea one day. He and some friends discovered a dead opossum while walking home from school. Like any teenage boy I can think of, they decided it would be hysterically funny to hang the dead possum by it’s tail from an overpass onto the roadway below. I know. Stupid. But not surprising from a demographic who’s only goal in life is to have some sort of skin to skin contact with a teenaged girl, fart the loudest in their posse, preferably not in front of the teenaged girl, and eat as much as can possibly be consumed by any human, ideally from a mixing bowl. Yes, a few cars hit the poor departed possum frozen in full rigor mortis, screeched to a stop, one broke a side mirror. Chaos, but no one was hurt. The kids were stunned at the pandemonium they caused and ran but because they were decent kids, came back to make sure everything was okay. Got arrested. Cops laughed. They were headed for a slap on the hand BUT the woman who’s side mirror they had lopped off was a reporter for a local news station and it was a VEEERRRRYYYY slow news period. So what do you think happened? Well, by the next morning, news organizations AROUND THE WORLD were reporting a roving band of teenage boys who had executed an innocent(if anything that bizarre looking can ever truly be innocent)opossum and thrown it, like the now infamous frozen turkey incident, at unsuspecting cars, hoping to do grievous harm to both the drivers and the poor possum. The family got hate mail, animal rights people demanded death for the teens, the judge, succumbing to public pressure hit the kids with a felony. That they will have for the rest of their lives.
Slow news days are going to ruin our lives. And hysteria will kill you faster than swine flu or West Nile. Last year I had an unsettling event in my life. After a series of routine tests, a very young and somewhat hysterical doctor diagnosed me with a heart condition that would kill me quickly and ruin my life before it did. Let’s just say I became somewhat hysterical, the doctors were somewhat hysterical, my normally level headed spouse became hysterical, my sister and her angrily divorcing spouse became, for just my period of near death, remarkably civil and hysterical, my friends, hysterical, my parents, hysterical. Even the pets seemed off. There was so much hysteria every where that I looked that I filled a prescription for Xanax and never actually took one. Just carried it with my in case the hysteria threatened to overwhelm. But in the midst of it all, two of my friends, both gifted doctors, didn’t display one bit of hysteria and spent a lot of time on the phone with me talking me off ledges until we could find the right doctor to help me. We did find her (just so you know, her name is Evelyn Horn and she is a spectacular cardiologist at Weill Cornell). She sat me down in her office and spent half an hour on my chest with her stethescope after which she looked up and said something like this…”Okay, you are not dying. You’ve got a problem but I think as long as we take care of you properly, you can live to be 102.” And I was no longer hysterical. I think that period of time shaved years off my 102 life span and I’ll probably only make it to 95 but it also taught me a really important lesson. Hysteria is never helpful. It’s just hysterical.
We need to all calm down. Deep breaths. Be practical but not fearful. Perhaps always on alert for opossums hanging from overpasses and never drinking the water in Mexico (c’mon, it’s just common sense) but other than that, go back to looking at dead birds in your yard, eat all the pork you feel like and don’t be afraid just because the media tells you to. My friend Alanna Levine, a lovely, smart and most importantly CALM, doctor who is all over TV all the time (www.alannalevinemd
.com) came up with a few pointers for getting through this all with practicality. Here they are:
From: Alanna Levine <alannalevine@me.com>
Date: May 1, 2009 11:17:02 AM EDT
To: Jen White <jen1515@verizon.net>
Subject: Swine Story-let me know if you want more or different info…xox
General Swine Flu Facts:
1. The information is changing hour to hour so what is true now, may not be true tomorrow-check www.cdc.gov for the latest information.
2. There is a big difference between a virus that is very contagious (spreads easily) and a virulent (causes severe disease) one. On a personal level, I would be more concerned with virulence.
3. Even if you received a flu shot/mist this year, you will not be protected against swine flu-the CDC is developing a different vaccine for H1N1 virus.
4. H1N1 virus is responsive to antiviral drugs like Tamiflu and Relenza.
What should we as individuals do?
1. Use common sense! Think of it like seasonal flu and act in the same way you would during flu season.
2. Wash you hands frequently-hand sanitizer is okay if you don’t have access to water.
3. Eat well and get enough sleep.
4. Encourage people who don’t feel well to stay home.
5. Sneeze or cough into a tissue and wash hands afterwards.
6. In work and school environments, clean frequently touched surfaces (like you ordinarily should)-viruses can live for 2 hours or longer on surfaces.
7. Do NOT take anti-viral medication prophylactically unless you have a special circumstance and it’s after consultation with your physician.
8. Avoid non-essential travel to Mexico.
I’m going to add that I’m unclear what any essential travel to Mexico might be. But Alanna forgot the most important tip of all. DO NOT READ A NEWSPAPER OR WATCH TV UNTIL I TELL YOU THAT THE SWINE FLU TERRORIZING IS OVER. And I read the papers this morning. I think they’re getting bored and by next week we’ll be on to something else.
