Archive for December, 2008

i firmly resolve

Every year I make resolutions, because I like the idea of a fresh start, a definitive place to start, a moment you can point to and say yes, there. That is the starting line, and here is where we’ll begin. Every year about this time, I look back at the resolutions I had made (because I have a memory like a drunken sieve) and I think oh, those were good ideas! Too bad I didn’t actually, you know, work on any of that stuff. Too bad this year was exactly like last year which was exactly like the year before, in terms of Self-Improvement.

In terms of everything else, this year, and last year, and the year before have been amazing rollery coaster kinds of adventures, during which, if we have to be honest and fair, I haven’t had much time to think about esoteric improvement schemes.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 31st, 2008

Filed under happiness and craziness, unhealth and weller-being | 3 Comments »

apologizing for your body

He reaches up, his fingers curling around my hips as we move, along my waist, up my sides. His fingers close over my breasts, and in the middle of everything, after he has maybe told me that I am beautiful, after he has demonstrated with his hands and his mouth and his lips that everything about my body may very well be everything he has ever wanted in a woman, after he has shown me that all he has wanted these long moments in bed is my body, that all my skin and flesh does is bring him happiness, and satisfaction, in the middle of all this, I want to apologize. I want to say I’m sorry about my breasts. I don’t think they’re good enough–large enough, really–and how can you think they’re good enough?

Sometimes I can shake it off, usually by shaking off his hands in some ingenious way.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 31st, 2008

Filed under bodies, happiness and craziness, love, sex, relationships | 4 Comments »

holiday post-mortem

Did it feel like the holiday season came crashing on top of you like a tinsel-covered wave? Have you emerged gasping yet, back into real life, or are you still floating face-down in the surf where it is so peaceful and serene in the dark as you bob along? I am bracing myself to break the surface and suck in some fresh, un-nog-scented air, to blink and look around and up at the sky and down at my three page to-do list and and start remembering how this responsibility thing works. At some point in the past week or so, I said okay, holiday! Take me away! and I plumb forgot to do anything but sit around in lounge pants and pet dogs and not think about things that were not happy or alcoholic (sometimes both!) at all in the least. It was a really good holiday.

We stayed here in Utah, where E’s family all is.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 30th, 2008

Filed under happiness and craziness, love, sex, relationships | 2 Comments »

personal history

At the gym, there is an older lady who takes the morning water aerobics class. I’d say that she is in her late fifties, at the very latest. She looks ordinary in her street clothes, and then when she takes them off, she looks as if someone reached out and gently let all the air out of her. Her skin is very white, and drapes down from her shoulders and elbows, the tops and sides of her thighs, in soft folds. She is covered, all over, in sheets of loose and striated skin. And she is absolutely at ease in her body, comfortable with how she looks and happy with who she is, I think–her chin is up, her bearing is straight, she moves confidently across the pool room and through the locker room wearing less than I would ever want to be seen in, in public. I’ve never talked to her, but I kind of love her.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 24th, 2008

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the truthiness of science–revealed

My boyfriend calls me gullible, and he is not wrong. He has me believing things so very, very easily–a list of things that is, in fact, too embarrassing to reveal, because it is true that I am so very gullible. I prefer to think of it as “trusting,” and “filled with the belief that the people around me who love me would not ever lie to me for the sake of comedy because that would just be cold-hearted and cruel,” but he weirdly just will not buy into that world view and I think it’s because of that chip in his head that he told me about.

There are some beliefs I hold that I have never considered myself gullible for believing, though. Stuff like “A poinsettia will kill your cat dead, so do not have one,” and “All the heat goes out the top of your head, so wear a hat!” and “Drinking a lot of water and eating McDonald’s breakfast will fix the night after a whole barrel full of eggnog.” As it turns out, these things are not true, and neither are the truths that so many people had previously held to be so self-evident, that sugar will make you crazy-nutball banging off the walls, and if you eat after, say, 7:00 p.m., you will get very fat and then die, possibly of suicide around the holidays, which is when everyone rushes to knock themselves off, you know.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 24th, 2008

Filed under the wide world, unhealth and weller-being | No Comments »

just what i needed

Since I moved to Utah, I have been inviting people to come visit Utah. Come visit Utah! I say. It has got fry sauce and mountains! Mormons and me! You will love Utah! You will come because of a sense of obligation and because you feel a little bit sorry for me, the way that I live in Utah, but you will want to stay for the “scones” (deep-fried sugary bread) and how cute I look in my giant white down jacket that looks more like a comforter and less like an article of clothing.

Weirdly, I wasn’t really taken up on my offer, and I can’t imagine why. When Mo Pie and I talked about seeing Twilight–we share a sick fascination for its magnificent awfulness and balls-to-the-wall determination to be thoroughly offensive in every possible way–we said how cool it would be, if she came to visit and we saw the movie and we had a weekend where I could go look, here is my town and my house and my life and how things are for me. I spend a lot of time talking and writing and telling about how it is and where I live and what I do, but I have had the urge and the desire and the need–I don’t even know why, and I wish I did–to take someone around and show them and say look, this is what I am talking about, do you see?

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Posted by jen larsen on December 24th, 2008

Filed under friendshippiness, happiness and craziness | 2 Comments »

well-moisturized

In the past few years, I have become a person who moisturizes. For years I would spring from the shower and into my clothes and dive out the door, because sleeping until the last moment and spending little to no time on grooming or maintenence seemed to me to be a waste of valuable time and non-renewable resources. Why slather up my body with expensive lotions when my skin was perfectly adequate, making moisture all on its own? Who cared about my delicate under-eye area, and if my oil-slick face ever required any kind of extra lubrication, then it was the end of the world or nigh unto it, and I ought to start coming up with some way to redeem my immortal soul.

But then I aged. I am thirty-mumble, which is just a handful of years away from mumble, and while my skin has not shown any signs of kindly reducing oil production and spots, it has simultaneously become cranky, crepe-y and lined.  At the same time, I have lost a lot weight rapidly, and skin that is not thoroughly moisturized bounces back less well than skin that is well-oiled daily.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 24th, 2008

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resolved

I’m lucky if I’ve resolved to get out of bed every day, and stick to it. But there’s something about this time of year that makes me think that Things Are Possible and Hope Is In The Air and All Wishes Can Come True, so I am going to make some resolutions for the month of December that are more kind of like wishes and hopes and beautiful dreams that maybe will be realized if Santa pays me a visit, or if maybe I put down my figgy pudding and get on it.

Plus, it’s a busy season, full of busy-ness and many things to do, so probably making an actual list of the doing that needs to be done (instead of having a vague and amorphous Plan in my head that amounts, in the end, to me drinking a lot of eggnog and wondering if there’s some place I was supposed to have been right now) would be a smart and useful thing to do, am I right?

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Posted by jen larsen on December 12th, 2008

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