sharolyn's Journal

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Ontario
Am in glamorous Elliot Lake, Ontario, for the first family gathering in B's family in like, 9 years. (I've got such an easy in-law situation.) Utterly hilarious watching him and the uncles together, but that's all I'll say, because you need to be tactful about what you put on the internet.

I did, however, drive in Toronto for the first time ever, and I have to say? So civilized compared to Vancouver. People drive fast, yes, but they don't seem to do all the stupid shit that Van drivers do. I quite enjoyed the experience, especially considering I was trying to read Mapquest directions at the same time.

More later. Back home Tuesday. Also, am seriously, seriously pregnent. More on that later.

ALSO.
This is why I love my husband so much.

This morning I read the Madonna news around 7am. About 45 seconds later, he called me from Toronto. "FINALLY," he said, sounding exasperated. "I've been waiting for 3 hours for it to be late enough to call you and tell you Madonna's touring."

He then listened to me gleefully try to figure out how to deal with a newborn and go to the concert at the same time, and agreed that obviously I had to try to get the best seats possible. All this despite the fact that he really doesn't like Madge all that much, and he's been a bit worried about money lately with baby on the way.

**Love**

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MADONNA IS PLAYING VANCOUVER OCT 30!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mommies: How stupid am I to try to do this 2-3 weeks after I give birth???

Also: I DON'T CARE I'M DOING IT ANYWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Music recommendations?
Hey kids - point me at the MySpace, Facebook, etc pages of independent musicians you like. Bonus if they're local to Vancouver!

Nibbles
From Lainey Gossip this morning...

We had dinner last night in the Village like 3 feet away from Cindy Crawford. Up close she is as perfect as it gets. Tall and lean and gorgeous and disciplined. Nursed a glass of red wine forever, nibbled (as in 4 small bites) at her salad, and taste-tested her pasta, leaving most of it behind. I guess that’s what it takes.

I dunno man... the more awake I become about body acceptance issues, and about what's required to maintain this "ideal," the more ridiculous it seems. You know? Increasingly it feels like you can live your life fully, enjoying your wine and your food and revelling in everything life has to offer, or you can be super skinny. You choose.

And Cindy Crawford isn't even one of the ridiculously skinny ones!

Project: Baby Week 18
There's this strange thing happening right now... I can feel my center of gravity shifting. Like, I'll get out of bed in the morning, and I'm conscious of this extreme WEIRDNESS about how I'm standing... like it's just wrong in some way. And then I get on with my day and mostly forget about it.

I also notice it in bed when I'm lying on one side, and want to flip over -- my first thought before flipping over is that I sort of have to "prepare" myself to do it. Almost like it's a strain in some way, although it's not really. It's just... different. And it's throwing me for a bit of a loop.

There's also this strange "strained" feeling happening in my abs... I can feel them stretching, I think, or being pushed out. It feels exactly like I can imagine it would feel if someone put both hands against your abdominal wall and pushed out. So strange, and not very comfortable.

I had a midwives appointment today, and got to hear the heartrate again... 150 BPM. I also talked to her about this weird pain I've been getting sporadically in my ribcage. She said it was unusual to get it this early, but it could be costal condritis, or it may just have to do with organs and whatnot being pushed around in there. We agreed that it seems muscular in nature, and she mentioned that someone had been in there the week previously with exactly the same symptoms. That particular woman tried the chiropractor, massage, and everything else and basically was eventually told that all that would help it was delivering the baby. Awesome. *eye roll*

Facebook.
I have seriously never encountered anything more addictive in the world than Facebook's Scrabulous application.

That is all.

Visitng the past
Went to the online forum populated by ex-members of my mother's church for the first time in a few years this morning. Still much the same... a few bright spots of people who've moved on to a better place, but mainly a lot of miserable people... still mired in their rage and pain (and somewhat understandably so, considering what's been done to some of these people), hating themselves, having Holdemans, hating gays, hating the world. Just trying to carve out some tiny little safe place for themselves.

I find it sad that so few have moved past their roots, and disappointing... but at the same time I have a lot of compassion for where they are. I think if I hadn't been lucky enough to meet the people I did in life, I might be there too.

I found this thread a little interesting, specifically Grace's answer:

My Dad used to say put someone where you can love them, I didn't get it then, but I do now.
I am able to love you holdemans when I put you in a category in my mind where my expectations of you are nil. No expectations. period.
May I share how I view them so that I can accept them? -as a bunch of crabs in bucket.
Did you know if you put one crab in a bucket it will crawl out and escape, if you put two crabs in a bucket, they will never get out, because one will always drag the other down.

I was thinking something like this yesterday after a talk I had with B. There's no point in continuing to be shocked and outraged and hurt when someone acts exactly like they've acted a million time before. You can accept them and love them anyway, or reject them and put them out of your life. Any other course of action is wasted energy on your part.

I need to practise this more.

Scene from our bedroom, this morning.
The dog has decided she doesn't hate us, and is engaged in some seriously cute cuddling with me, or as we like to call it, "shnorgling."

B pauses in the doorway to talk to me about something. I interrupt him to say, "Seriously, babe? How can you not look at this dog, and my cleavage, and not think that your life is the best thing ever?"

He nods, as if I've just said that the earth is round and gravity works and May follows April. "Yup. Totally best thing ever."

I'm pretty sure it's his matter-of-factness that really made that moment for me.

Hard Candy
Just finishing up my first listen to Hard Candy.

Love. Love. Love.

But I ESPECIALLY love the last song on the album, Voices.

LOVE.

Madge bliss
I'm watching Madge's live concert on MSN.

SO HAPPY.

Ripe, full oranges.
At around 20 seconds, completely blatant comparison of oranges to breasts.

I can't tell if I'm amused or disgusted.

Is orange juice a product that's being marketed exclusively to straight men now? And if not, is there an equivalent advertisement comparing oranges to, say, testicles?

I'm guessing not.

Public Service Announcement
Pulled (no pun intended) from Karina's blog.

You can watch this at work, but only if you have headphones.

Soul still intact. Booty, too.
Appropriately enough after my rant about Madonna's trainer a few days ago, I came across her starvation diet online a few minutes ago.

You are TOTALLY guaranteed to lose weight if you follow this diet. I can promise you that with no qualms whatsoever.

However, no one will want to be around you because you will be a raging, homicidal psychopath. Also you won't be able to function because your brain will stop working properly after approximately hour three. And you won't want to move, because you'll have no energy... which is probably a good thing, since you won't be able to follow through on the aforementioned homicidal tendencies.

But you WILL be thin and beautiful, so personality, brains and ability to function aren't really so important.

Random morning thoughts...
B and I have discussed at length about what to do about our kid's last name. I use my "maiden" name (hate that term), and he has his original name. So what to name the kid?

A hyphenated name would be a terrible combination for our particular names. We'd discussed splitting them... girls take my name, boys take his name... but that idea feels problematic to me. I like the idea of the kids having a unified family name. At the same time, it makes me feel a bit strange to think of my kid having a completely different name from me. I think we've settled on my last name as kind of a second, second name, so it will be (first name)(second name)(my last name)(B's last name). It's a bit of a token gesture, and my last name will be utterly ignored, but at least it's there, y'know?

Anyway, in context of this discussion, I found this thread about men taking their partner's names quite interesting. And no, I'm not asking B to change his last name to mine -- it's just interesting to see the wide variety of creative ways people have dealt with this issue.

Shame
Oh man, I so hate to be the person who gets knocked up and suddenly can't talk about anything but babies, but seriously the cuteness of my niece just about kills me.

Cut for those of you who could care less, and really I don't blame you.

( Read more... )

The most random of places...
My aunt and uncle are out from Manitoba, so we had a big "family day"... my bro took time off of work, and my mom, aunt, uncle, brother, sis-in-law, niece (6 months) and two cousins (17 and 19 years old, respectively) came over for lunch. My dog was reasonably well-behaved, which was nice.

After that we drove out to Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver, which was actually pretty cool, and went on an hour long hike or so to the bottom of the dam. The women in the group mentioned an interest in checking out Dressew (huge fabric store on East Hastings) and the men went along with it, so that was the next stop. We had to park 2-3 blocks away, and walked to the store.

So picture this. A large-ish group of Mennonite women, plus me, walking through the downtown eastside. The men have stayed behind to deal with the car parking situation. Needless to say, because of the way they're dressed, we are a fairly conspicuous group, and lots of people take a second look. Fair enough, I'm used to that with these situations, and that's fine... but I'm slightly on edge and waiting for some crackhead to think it would be funny to take a shot at someone.

Sure enough, at the corner of Hastings and somewhere, a cracked out homeless dude, REALLY rough looking, yells out, "Hey! Where you ladies from?"

There's a pause as no one knows what to say, but that's okay, because he continues, "You're from the Church of God in Christ... Holdemans!"

Sis-in-law grins and says, "Yup!"

Cracked Out Dude sways a little, steadies himself on his shopping cart, point at himself and says, "Kleefeld, Manitoba!" (For reference: Kleefeld is a town of maybe 300 people, and the COG has a church there... one of about four churches in the town.)

Fortunately the light changed then, so he didn't try to hug us or anything... but how totally random. I giggled all the way across the street.

WEIRDNESS.
Yesterday I felt real, honest-to-god movement. Fluttery!

At the time, I was having a fight with my husband, so I have to assume it was related to adrenaline, maybe.

Utterly freakin' weird.

I want it to happen again!

Madge's trainer makes more money than I do, but I've still got my soul.
So, because I'm one of "those" fans, I read Madonnalicious a few times a week, and today they had an interview with her personal trainer, who's pushing some dance aerobics program she's developed. In the interview, she says this:

"My exercise philosophy is based on ten years of research I conducted to develop my own fitness method, which involves re-engineering the muscular structure to be tighter and then getting the skin as tight to the muscle as possible. The main principle of my method is the strategic sequences of choreography that I have designed to constantly target the accessory muscles and not overdevelop the large muscles."

In case anyone's wondering, when she says she's "re-engineering the muscle structure to be tighter" (I'm sure she spent some time developing that phrase) she wants you to hear that you're going to get super-defined muscles, but you WON'T, you definitely WON'T, get "big" and (gasp) unfeminine.

When she talks about "getting the skin as tight to the muscle as possible", she means doing cardio and decreasing your calorie intake until you have lost every ounce of body fat possible.

And the line about not overdeveloping the large muscles is another reassurance that there will be no growing or getting larger of any kind. No, your body will stay "thin and feminine." (Her phrase from another part of the interview.)

There are also several reassurances throughout the interview that she disagrees with a lot of what other trainers are pushing, that her system is new and different and the best, and it will make you look like Madonna.

Bullshit, I say.

What she's pushing are the same reassurances that (almost) every other trainer pushes. You must fit into this ideal to be desirable, to be perfect, to be feminine. THIS is what feminine looks like, and if you pay me I'll teach you how to get there. It is totally within your grasp, as long as you are dedicated enough/strong enough/rich enough/focused enough.

Don't get me wrong. From what I can see about what she's saying about her techniques, there's nothing wrong with them. She's talking about cross-training (doing varied types of exercise to hit different muscle groups) and this is a good thing and helps people get a more well-rounded workout, hitting different muscle groups and decreasing the chance of injury. What pisses me off is the language she's using to sell those techniques, and I get why she does it -- it works. I've done it too, in the past, although I think I'd choke on my own tongue before I did it now.

Also? Madonna exercises three hours a day. Maybe some call that dedication, but in real person terms, it's called obsession. She doesn't let herself have a day off, ever, and I suspect there's something inside driving her that that most of us wouldn't want to live with. As much as I more or less consider Madonna to be my lord and saviour, and I will buy her albums with the last penny in my bank account, I would not ever want to be her. In this one way, at least, I think I'm more evolved than she is -- I can live with myself the way I am, and not only like it, but be thrilled about it.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm off to the gym -- because it's good for me, because it's good for the baby, and because my body feels better when I move.