See, I have this dress. It hangs unworn in my closet, flattened between more practical items. It doesn’t fit me well anymore — neither my body nor my lifestyle. It’s a little too short and show-offy.

But, man, there were a couple of years when it not only made me feel beautiful, stylish, and sexy, it made me become those things. That frickin’ frock was the crème de la closet.

There’s a foolishly optimistic part of me, a tiny gooey spot in my otherwise fully baked brain, that holds out hope I might someday rock that dress again and feel that good in it. And be that good in it.

And because that fantasy is so delicious — because the mere memory of wearing it guns my engine as I’m rifling through my wardrobe each day — I will never, ever give that dress away. It’ll hang there between my sensible skirts and other forgiving go-to garments until I’m too old even for those.

But I was surprised to learn recently that size-too-small dresses aren’t the only things that people keep simmering on the back burners of their lives. A study published in Computers in Human Behavior found that technology is making it easier than ever before for people to maintain a “backburner relationship,” or to stay in digital communication with someone they see as a potential future lover.

Here’s the surprising part: People in committed relationships have just as many “backburners” as single folks do. And these results jive with a recent Daily Mail survey revealing that half of married women have a “fall-back partner” in mind just in case their marriages go south.

Continue reading Plan B Partners

Apparently there’s a thing. When you turn 40, you’re supposed to get serious about an exercise regimen. No more making do with occasional hikes and swims, or riding your bike to the bakery and calling it cardio. It’s the do-or-die decade: Do commit to intense frequent fitness or die flabby. And maybe fairly soon.

When my peers began turning 40, I noticed with queasy alarm that they all dispersed to disparate and equally unappealing corners of the workout world. Some bought fishnets, made up a saucy/violent alias, and joined the roller derby, where they regularly earn bruises the size of personal pizzas. Others leapt from the barstools and pedicure chairs where they spent most of their time and became instant triathletes — as though they’d always been superheroes under their clothes and had just been pretending all this time to be wusses like me. Still others enlisted in the CrossFit corps, satisfying a long-latent urge to be shouted at and brought regularly to the brink of vomiting, while occasionally touching their sweaty faces to parking-lot asphalt.

No, thank you. I’ve tried lots of fitness fads for lots of years: Yoga. Pilates. Kickboxing. Power walking. Strength training. Something with stretchy bands. Something with Hula-Hoops. Meh. They’re all just … misery with props. The instructors say, “Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” but what I hear in my head is “Pain is me leaving this maliciously mirrored sweatbox and making love to a buttermilk donut in my jammies.”

Continue reading '80s Dancing Is the Only Tolerable Workout

Heads up: This may offend you because I’m hurting and I haven’t the composure for caution or the patience for sensitivity just now.

I’ve never understood prayer. Don’t know the point of it, how it’s accomplished, or what the word means exactly. I’m atheist, so it’s probably not important that I understand prayer; it’s rarely aimed at me or asked of me. And yet — it’s all around me.

For the past six months, a young man I adore hung in the ruthlessly unfair, utterly unexpected balance between life and death. He struggled. He suffered. He should have been driving to off-campus lunches and asking a date to homecoming, but instead he was tubed and tested, monitored and medicated. And trapped. He was trapped.

And so there was prayer — daily, concerted, multi-faith prayer on this boy’s behalf. Prayer from friends, family, kindhearted strangers, and entire congregations who’ve never met the kid. Enough prayer to stop a white rhinoceros in its tracks.

Yet the bastard rhino kept charging, so tell me: What good is your prayer? Did it mean he could send the crash cart home for the night? Or get his breathing tube removed? Did it mean this kind, smart, funny, strong boy could bound free from the Critical Care Unit and go on about his otherwise promising life?

Continue reading Pray Tell: The Hocus Pocus of Happy Thoughts

There I was at my keyboard, writing about something sensible and semi-important, when this news popped up on my screen: “Nearly Half of Young Women in the U.K. Don’t Know Where Their Vagina Is.” And because a headline like that can’t be ignored, you’ll just have to wait for a sensible, semi-important column another time.

My first reaction to this news, naturally, was shock. I hadn’t realized that so many British women share a vagina. And not a one of them could track the thing down? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for one woman to lose such a thing may be regarded as misfortune; for hundreds to lose it looks like carelessness.

I kept reading and learned that a survey of 1,000 British women revealed that only half of those aged 26-35 were able to correctly identify the vagina on a simple diagram of a woman’s reproductive system. And I mean simple. Like if there’d been a “You are here” icon, the survey participants could have spun 180 degrees and seen their vaginas is how simple it was.

The survey also showed that while young gals generally did not know which way was up, older women could tell an ovary from a uterus just fine and a cervix from a fallopian tube, thank you very much.

Continue reading Women's Bits

There’s a colorful old expression favored by cattish biddies. They let it fly when they spy a middle-aged woman sporting the flashy or revealing clothing you’d normally see on a much younger lass.

“Mutton dressed as lamb,” the harpies hiss, straightening the seams of their own sensible vestments and clomping away in their Easy Spirit mid-heel wedges.

I confess the phrase has been flitting, uninvited, through my head lately as I get dressed:

Hmm, the miniskirt today? Maybe, Ms. Mutton. Or the skinny jeans and pirate boots? Sounds great, Mutton Mama.

Mutton, if you didn’t know, is the meat of old sheep — although the sheep prefer to be called “mature.” It’s tougher than lamb. It’s cheaper. And according to one online cooking site, “Many find it distasteful.”

Since tough, cheap, and distasteful describe me and most of my girlfriends — and since, at 42, I just received a heck-yeah birthday gift card to Forever 21 — I have to wonder if I’ve skidded right over that lamb-to-mutton line without knowing it.

Continue reading Too Old for a Micro-Mini?