a word on Bea Arthur

"Golden Girls" is one of my all-time favorite shows. I spent many an afternoon during college watching hours of reruns. Not only was the show hilarious, it was one-of-a-kind. Where else in pop culture do you see women of a certain age portrayed as anything but loony cat ladies or sexless grandmas? Dorothy and company lived it up well past the age most television characters even make it to.

And if you yourself are of a certain age, or are a television historian, you know that Ms. Arthur played Maude on the series of the same name. Killing two taboos with one stone, Maude got pregnant late in life AND decided to have an abortion. If you think that's controversial now, imagine how it played in the mid-seventies.


Truly irreplaceable.

coming soon

I'm going to write and post something here very very soon. I've been spending all my writing energy working on a convincing essay for grad school. It's being sent out Monday, so I hope I did a satisfactory job.

Oh, and I've been working on a couple new things for First Friday. A small step toward infecting the world with my writing. Recent compliments from well-respected (by me, anyway) cohorts have inspired me. Also, I got a lot of shit for convincing writer friends to read and not ever reading myself. So, here I go.

I'm pretty sure people have been looking at this since my photo got posted on Sexy People. Sort of weird, but worth. That blog is my favorite thing in the entire world, I couldn't be happier to be a Sexy Person. Seriously. That's how sad things are for me right now.

god loves ugly

I'm not beautiful.

Despite however many times I've told you I am, or walked into a room like I think I'm the female Tyra Banks or something, I know I am not beautiful.

A partial list of things I'd need to change to be beautiful:
whiter teeth, smaller boobs, longer legs, no beer gut, skin that tans and doesn't break out when touched by anything, bluer eyes, straighter hair, a straighter nose, no bags under my eyes, skinnier thighs, no freckles.

But, so what? Who cares? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is just a social construct. Beauty is only skin deep. I am smart and sassy and beautiful on the inside. The right man will love me not only in spite of my flaws, but because of them. He'll be like, "naw, baby, that spare tire 'round your waist is sexy."

But see, I've been hearing all this stuff about science 'n shit and how that's how attraction really happens. Like, pheromones that you don't even realize are attractive are attracting you. And there are other weird things, like how there are certain scents women release during ovulation that make you extra attractive, and the testosterone levels go up, so you are extra hot at the same time you are extra hot-to-trot. Seriously, it was on Oprah.

So if sexual attraction is science, and love supposedly occurs in the land of the heart beyond all logic, where do the two meet? And if it's a genetic crapshoot, what's the point of the mascara and the hair dye and a the calf implants and the hours in the gym?

Sort of.

Our dumbass human will, that romantic self-defeat I wrote about before, it's powerful shit. It'll over come all the science. It has to. How do hot bimbos end up with ugly rich dudes? A person's will for money or status or sex or compatibility or stability will outweigh pheromones every single time.

What does that mean for me with the asymmetrical face and the questionable pheromones? I guess keep pretending to be clever and wearing control top underwear.