Beauty Tips for Real Women

October 30, 2008 at 1:40 am (love & relationships, politics, sexuality)
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What happened to the idea that dressing up is fun?

I’m calling for a full-out revolt here, against the revolting brainwashing that has made so many otherwise sane women believe that clothes, shoes, makeup, jewellery, and handbags are anywhere on the list of the important things in life.

Please, god, there must be a place in this world for people who don’t need a hour of lead-time to leave the house, who don’t rate their success as an attractive human being on the evenness of their skin-tone, who don’t spend more on footwear than on promoting their own career.

I remember my first makeup kit, a Christmas present received as a miniature rug-rat with a definite yen for getting got-up as something else. My dad’s only caveat was that I was not allowed to wear the stuff out of the house. I can still remember the horror dropping down on my over-made face as I realized I’d run out into the street after the ice cream man.

Ah, the good old days!

Now, it’s painful to imagine the number of hours persons of my gender spend prepping like a chef before the dinner rush: wash, tone, moisturize, foundation, eyes, cheeks, lips… Not to mention the money.

Not to mention the underlying thesis, that there is something wrong with us that requires all the resources of the cosmetics industry to solve. And even then, it’s clearly framed as a losing battle.

Well, I say, screw it all. Not the hair and makeup and fun clothes. But the attached concept that dress-up is anything more than fun, that should go down in a bonfire of night creams and hair gel and tweezers and diet pills.

Put your looks before your insides, and you’re asking for more than trouble and less than a worthwhile life. It’s time to get a little perspective on vanity, because while yes, being overweight can cause you health problems, it won’t kill you.

The sad part is that we’ve come to believe that being anything other than a perfectly polished and turned-out 10 means that we are failures. We are unlovable and in all probability worthless.

I can’t say I’m even particularly impressed with the Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty,” although it’s a teeny step in the right direction. Really, how seriously can you take a self-esteem campaign launched by the very guys who’ve been selling you the shit for years? It’s like a drug lord spouting, “Just say no!”

There’s nothing stopping you from flipping off the fear-merchants who need you to obsess about what’s wrong with you to make their cash. What you need to do is look in the mirror and say, what do I want to look like, today and now, not “what’s intrinsically wrong with my appearance that I may be able to minimize with the latest beauty product?”

So join me in a little bit of social disobedience. Dress for yourself, not to be loved or lusted after, not to be admired or bitched about by the girl who didn’t get the latest Gucci whatever. Dress up, dress down. Go out without a scrap of makeup because you can’t be bothered. Laugh at anyone who suggests that your uneven skin tone is going to cost you any potential happiness that otherwise might have entered your life.

Who knows? Maybe you can take the time you’d have spent shopping and primping, and get to know something more substantial about yourself.

Of course, maybe you think I’m some kind of weirdo, like the chick who ridiculed me for not knowing what kind of handbag she was carrying. I have to admit to being rather disinterested in most things commercial, including any product name emerging from the mouths of Sex and the City women with the possible exception of “Stoli.”

Maybe you think I’m just being a bitch to suggest that your wardrobe does not in fact make a big impact on the world, and contribute vastly to your self-esteem.

So be it. I’m not out to demean what you love. All I want to do is give you a bit of perspective on two things: what the time you spend working on your looks might say about you, and what you might otherwise be able to accomplish in that time.

And put the primping in its proper place – make it fun and flirty, and an expression of your mood and yourself, instead of a societal imperative. And have a LOT of fun this Halloween!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

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Spelling Doesn’t Count, But Denotation Does

October 24, 2008 at 6:40 pm (politics, writing)
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When I think of how much time is spent by bloggers and professors alike obsessing over the accuracy of spelling and grammar, it gets my goat that a similar discussion on the meanings of words is all but non-existent.

While u probly hv no trubl undrstndin dis sentance despit me havin tttly f!$*ed up the use of the gerund…. our true problem with communication seems to have far more to do with the fact that not only do we not agree on what words MEAN, the idea that we might NOT agree is not even in the line of fire.

Consider, for example, the obvious confusion resulting when any two people don’t, for example, agree to the same rules for a game. Not only does it make for unsatisfying play, but you could never build something as complex as the National Football League if teams refused to discuss, and accept, a common set of parameters.

Define your terms and use those to build more complicated ideas. This is basic to success, and basic to understanding.

It’s like our obsession with the concept of “freedom” has extended to the belief that you can use a word however you want, and through sheer force of will or personality make it mean what you want.

For a solipsist, maybe this is a fine idea. But communication is about mutual understanding, and that understanding requires that at least the building blocks of discourse are agreed upon.

My fascination with language results primarily from the observation that everyone communicates slightly differently, even given the same basic tools. Add to that a world culture constantly in flux, with new words drifting between languages, new words being coined to address new situations, and you have a dynamic system with the complexity and subtlety with the potential to facilitate any number of brilliant new descriptions and synergies.

But if you decide that the tools don’t matter, you halt exploration and growth at its most primative level.

Is it ignorance or deliberate deception that causes people to redefine language to mean what suits their purpose instead of what would make their intentions plain?

The blatant misuse of simple terms has made the current American Presidential race into less of a discourse and more of a marketing campaign. After all, what the hell does “Family Values” even mean? It’s a slogan, not a concept. It may carry a certain emotional connotation, but the words themselves are empty.

You have to wonder every time a politician is caught in an adulterous relationship after espousing those phantom “values.” Without definition, a word or phrase can mean whatever someone wants it to, and can change its definition on a whim. What’s to say that adultery wasn’t considered part and parcel with Family Values if no one said it wasn’t? Who’s to say that asking for forgiveness after an affair doesn’t make it all go away?

If you refuse to agree on your terms, nothing is a lie. Your words were merely misinterpreted by someone who didn’t know how you were using them.

If “freedom” can include giving up the rights that the American founding fathers considered unalienable, we’re in big trouble. If words cannot be redefined by common consent so that “All men are created equal” can be understood to include blacks and women, we are similarly, in a word that has managed to never really be misunderstood, fucked.

You don’t have to go as far back as Orwell to watch people redefining language at will, calling Freedom Slavery or War Peace. You don’t even have to look at the greater, more sinister uses of misdefined language.

Communication problems exist everywhere in everyday life. If you and your spouse don’t have a definition of “sharing the housework,” you’re going to have problems. If you and your spouse don’t have a solid understanding of “infidelity,” you’ll probably have more.

Bad spelling and grammar are a combination of laziness, lack of standard education, fluid communication techniques like texting and blogging, and of course a sense that they really don’t matter that much.

But please, let’s try to decide that the meanings of the words we use are important, no matter how we choose to spell them or what language we say them in. After all, my freedom includes the dictionary definition.

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XX Bang Bang…

October 12, 2008 at 3:39 pm (communication)

From the Archive, January 22, 2007. Just in the interest of reusing the Yoda smiley. Believe it or not, I don’t have a lot of call for it in my life. Progress in emoticon world since I first wrote this? Well, my blog automatically replaces colon-bracket with an actual emoticon, which is why I needed to add a space between them in the post in order to demonstrate how we used to do it “old school. . . “

Emoticons have become so much a part of our email / Messenger culture there’s hardly anyone who doesn’t recognize them anymore – with the exception of my word processor spell checker.

For those of you not in the know, here are a few examples of the “old school” standard character type:

: ) – happy face smiley
; ) – wink, or “I forgot to hit the “shift” key”
: (#@*^#) – my mother’s about to wash my mouth out with soap

There’s also a whole range of pictoral emoticons from the purely classic smiley face:
(*smile!*)

to the more esoteric:
(…uh, *Do or do not do. There is no try?*  *Smiling, I am?*)

There’s animated emoticons, emoticons with sound effects, talking emoticons… A literally virtual embarrassment of Cyrano de Bergerac proxy communicators, in fact.

I notice, though, that I’m apparently not a big user. I only stick an emoticon in as a reply to someone who’s emoticoned me – which sounds a little like they’re fooling me somehow, huh?

I’m much more prone to an older kind of sign-off, which could probably be called the classic Kiss Off, if that didn’t have a negative connotation.

It’s what we all put on our Valentines in grade school, or ended cards for our Mom made out of doilies. Maybe it’s a little old fashioned, but I like the kiss-hug “xo.”

The best part is that although you only have two symbols to work with – “x” and “o” – the possibilities are endless for a creative soul. With a little imagination, it could be the binary code of goodbyes.

Here’s some ideas of how to get the most from yours:

xo — my friend, I love you!
xox – going back in for a second smooch
x! – peck on the cheek!

And my fave –

xxxxooxoooxooxooxoooxooxoooxo etc… – I LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER WITH TONS OF MUSH I CAN’T POSSIBLY PUT DOWN WITHOUT EITHER YOU GETTING PHYSICALLY ILL OR THE CENSORS DESCENDING WITH BLACK PENS IN HAND…

See? Saves a lot of time, and really gets the point across, if you know how to read ‘em.

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Getting It Out There

October 8, 2008 at 8:43 pm (writing)
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Art, in my opinion, is not really finished until it goes out into the world. It’s always a great and admirable thing to express yourself creatively, but the last step, the one that solidifies a piece of your personal output, is to release it into the cold light of day.

For many people, that’s also the hardest thing. Truth is though, it’s both the best and worst part of doing art:

. . .art is fifty percent what the artist puts in it, and fifty percent what the observer brings when viewing it. . .this is wonderful, when you decide you want to be an artist or a writer or something, and then find that showing anybody anything is like cutting off an arm, giving it to someone, then every time you go over to that person’s house, you find they’re using it for something completely wrong, like they’ve got it stuck in an umbrella stand or holding up a bunch of peas in the garden or something. I mean, when I do something, I want it to say what I want it to say. I don’t want to be mistaken, misused, mishandled. I want you to understand, from my point of view, what I meant when I meant it. Even if I don’t mean it now.

— from Talking Drum (stage play, Jen Frankel)

Self-promotion is also a bitch. Seriously a bitch. We spent all that time writing our book; why should we be responsible for telling people about it too?

Unfortunately, two hard truths apply here. First, is that no one is as capable as you of believing in your own creation. Second, no one understands it like you.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably need that input from your audience for more than just proof of end-use. You’ll need to share your work just to get how to sell it to the world. You need that outside perspective to solidify your own impressions of what you’ve created.

The greatest blocks to success for an artist are, strangely and apparently contradictorily, lack of self-confidence and overblown ego. The first stops us from showing our work to others, and the second discounts their impressions when we do. You have to find the middle place with ego, to listen effectively to feedback, no matter how critical, then evaluate it based on what you truly know about your own work.

All right, enough of the philosophy. What I’m really here for today is to bring you into my favorite world, or at least to get you to bring it temporarily into yours.

I started writing “The Last Rite” after a particularly vivid dream when I was 13, the same age as the novel’s heroine, Maggie Stuart. Maggie is Everygirl, only maybe a little more so. She’s having a hell of a time at elementary school: crushing on an unapproachable classmate, dealing badly with her single mom and homelife, and trying hard to deny she’d ever want to fit in.

Enter Mr. Hunt, Maggie’s science teacher, who uses the cover of a lesson on blood typing to run some tests of his own. What he discovers about Maggie launches her into a world she could never have dreamed of, an underground of magic, blood, death, deceit, and self-discovery where it may be her own deep insecurity that provide her only way home.

“I have been waiting for this book to come out for like 4 or 5 years.. i need more!!!”

“The characters kept me up all night until I was done!”

“When will there be MORE??!?!?!
Still one of the best books i have EVER read!”

“Awesome story, so complex and intricate. I love it!”

–Some of the feedback from Maggie Fans

Read “The Last Rite,” available through www.wildsound.ca and Amazon.com.

More of Jen’s essays on writing on The Writer’s Way.

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Hail to the Procrastinator

October 6, 2008 at 11:48 pm (writing)

This will be the. . . I’m embarrassed to even begin to guess at the number of years I’ve been promising the sequel to my novel.

Truly embarrassing, because the first one was very well-received. I know I hit a chord, especially with young female readers, and that’s a demographic I was a part of so long I really like the idea that someone’s catering to them. Purely selfish, but there it is.

Why do I procrastinate? Yeah, it’s hard work, but when I do it, it’s energizing. Getting my ass to a chair is the hardest part of the day by far. As soon as I’m faced with a blank page or screen, I get edgy, not anxious, and I want to fill up that tabula rasa as fast as possible.

Maggie Stuart

Maggie Stuart, heroine of "The Last Rite"

I am a total binge writer; I go until the coffee’s gone and I’m a puddle of intellectual slobber. But getting to that lovely state of discombobulated bliss requires getting the fingers solidly connected to the keyboard.

There’s a part of me that I fight every single day, just for the privilege of doing what I was born to do. It’s a deeply ingrained sense of my own potential for failure.

It’s the little voice that says, “Why bother?” that somehow, quiet and tiny as it is, manages to make itself heard over all the bluster of my best intentions.

It also manages to criticize when I’ve done a great day’s work, whispering, “But is it enough?”

It’s like being in lust, and having your thoughts circling, circling constantly to the adored, derailing all your attempts to think of something else.

I know the technique to get the train of thought rolling again. It’s all about self-distraction. Get myself intrigued by some aspect of a character, or rediscover a plot point hidden in a scrawled note, and before you know it, the sound of the clacking keys is drowning that little voice out completely.

But until I get myself distracted, and turn the circling focus of my attention to good use instead of running in neutral, it’s with me always.

I love to believe there’s a permanent cure for the little voice. It’s part of an artist’s life for certain. It’s necessary, in a way, because it keeps a good rein on the ego and stops you from believing whatever your own press may become.

Why is it so easy to remember your insecurities, and so hard to remember the things you love? I figure it’s only a matter of training, of forming the habit of making the trip through the circling thoughts to the blank page.

Check out “The Last Rite” on www.wildsound.ca – a new e-book download is available for just $7, full of new illustrations.

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The Mistate of the Union

October 6, 2008 at 11:26 pm (politics)
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This comes from January 25th, 2007. Now here we are in the “end times,” the last few weeks of the double-whammy Bush regime, and I realize — I still haven’t got used to the idea that they’d put this guy in charge of a WalMart, much less a whole country.

All this time has gone by and it still sounds so wrong:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

And he walks out, and all that goes through my head is – you’ve got to be kidding.

I’ve really tried to warm to George. He’s supposedly a very likable guy. I’m sure I would have fun with him at a barbecue, if I could get over the fact I’m almost certain he would mostly ignore me.

He’d want to talk baseball, one of his favourite subjects. I think he’d assume I knew nothing about sports, so would tacitly exclude me.

Or maybe when I spoke up, if I found something to say that caught his attention, he would do what some guys have done before if I surprise them, cock his head and suddenly give me a disproportionate amount of attention.

Maybe he’d even call attention to me, around the grill, handing me a beer.

“Here you go, Jenny, I guess you’re drinking with the boys!”

I might even be charmed by it.

That’s how I see George W. Bush’s likability working, on a very down-home, casual conversational level. He’s the kind of guy you want to hang out with, to tailgate with. The kind of guy you want running your son’s little league.

I don’t quite get why anyone would want him for President. How far can likable get you in the tangled world of politics, semantics, religion… How far is it supposed to get you, in other words, when you can’t just invite everyone out to a barbecue to charm them with brewskies and good old-fashioned common sense?

My partner has a theory, and I’d probably put money on it. I wonder if Vegas already has odds.

Matt met Bush once a long time ago, at a ball game, when he was just a good old boy who happened to be wealthy enough to have his own team. He knew every stat; he understood every nuance of the game.

I’ve seen nothing like that kind of attention paid to his current job, nothing like that paid to the intricacies of domestic policy, or the minefield of world affairs.

So yes, I’d put money on it.

Just like people often take jobs they don’t really want as a stepping stone to their true ambitions, so I believe Matt when he says he thinks it’s true of Bush:

He’s only President so that someday, he might get to be Commissioner of Baseball.

Comforting thought.


Footnote:
Forgive me, but I can never tell during his speeches if Bush is saying “tourists” or “terrorists.” And they say we Canadians talk funny.

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