Archive for the ‘bodies’ Category

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 »

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

Filed under bodies | 4 Comments »

on dieting

E is going on a diet. We keep trying to refer to it as “healthy living,” but really it’s a diet, because he thinks that he needs to lose weight. He went to the doctor, got a full physical work up, discussed his health and his options and his goals, and was prescribed the South Beach diet. We went through the cookbook, picked out some meals and went shopping, on Sunday, for many different kinds of meats and all the additional spices required, a whole sack of garlic and a whole bag of onions. We agreed that this whole healthy living thing is very expensive, when the cashier hit us in the face with the grand total.

This is a lifestyle change, and we have been cooking every night since, for a grand total of two nights.

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Posted by jen larsen on December 12th, 2008

Filed under bodies, eating and boozing, unhealth and weller-being | 1 Comment »