Monthly Archives: October 2011
A Book
There’s one. There are two really, one that is probably ridiculously unmarketable and includes stories of holding hands and singing Michael Row Your Boat Ashore while our friend killed himself. Well, not so much killed himself but beat AIDS to the punch. We didn’t help him. No one even touched his things, his legacy couldn’t be our prison sentences. In between the misery there were great love stories.
The other book shows you how to do this. I think people would buy it but I’m not sure why I’d write it.
I like you all enough to respect everyone’s time so I’ll just continue blogging.
It’s Okay to Want to be the Hot Chick
A post (it’s a meme really) has made it’s way around Facebook. It’s a viral sensation written by a woman of presumably healthy weight.
I understand that many of us aren’t at the weight we would like to be at. I further understand that at least one reader has a child with Prader Willi syndrome and that more than a few of us take steroids like Prednisone. If you’re in that category, bummer.
Here’s the reality, this fat lady on the chair you see below, she does have a pretty face. Beautiful even, what she doesn’t have is a healthy body. To say that she couldn’t have a better life and better health with some of that fat missing from her belly is to lie to everyone.
Right now we are fat. We are globally fat and our children have shorter life expectancies than we do. We are eating ourselves into a Wall E type existence.
If you’re my age (41) go look at your class pictures and find the fat kid. The ONE. There was always one fat kid, and I’m guessing when you see those pictures that fat kid is probably more typical looking today than you’d expect. Now take a look at any classroom in America and look at what we’ve done to our children.
Go look in a third grade classroom. Look at their pale skin and their doughy stomachs. Check for video games and cell phones. We want free range chickens, but gawd forbid our precious little princes should walk to school.
Ladies, I get that it’s hard to maintain a healthy weight. No one loves rich food more than I do. I know it’s hard to walk into the gym to try and become a mermaid. Let’s face it, I’m 41, my ass fell, but that doesn’t mean I get to sit on it all day.
Exercise more, eat a little less, spend more time naked and for the love of all things holy please stop pretending that fat is adorable. It’s killing you.
As much as I’m sure that Delphine Feiberg meant to tell everyone to love themselves, she’s doing you all a disservice. This model has a beautiful face, no doubt, and as wonderful as it is to open a magazine and have someone look like you, it’s deadly to pretend like we can’t do better.
Like Delphine I am not commenting on how anyone looks. This isn’t about fashion or being skinny. I’m not interested in discussions about anorexia. According to The American Anorexia and Bulimia Association 1,000 anorexics die each year. According to the surgeon general in 2003 (we’ve gotten bigger since then) more than 300,000 people died from their obesity.
In a dozen years we’ll look back on these fat affirming messages and wonder what people were thinking. These images are as life affirming as a Virginia Slims ad.
And now the meme:
Trusting Ourselves and the People Around Us
Sometime in the past few years a grifter entered my life. An honest to goodness con-artist with a story that would make the producers over at Dateline slobber. In the past three months there have been phone calls from a half dozen people owed money, law enforcement and ex spouses. In the past week it has come to my attention that the FBI is sniffing around, that law enforcement and judges are pissed that this person is on the streets.
There was an arrest followed by a few days in jail and then there was a large sum of cash produced which released this person from some of the fraud charges against them. Some people will get some of their money back, though surely not all. While our lovely neighborhood grifter was languishing in the LA County Jail the non custodial parent worked the phones in an attempt to locate their children. I passed along the phone numbers that I had available to me.
This makes me a villain.
I’m really frustrated and angry. I’m angry with myself for allowing someone into my life that my husband didn’t like. When we met this person he was suspicious of the stories, the houses and the cars. He stayed away, I ignored a few signs (and a bounced check to my favorite dog trainer ever) and proceeded to let this person into my life.
I would hear stories about the spouse and dutifully retell them to Mr. G. in an attempt to explain why there was only one parent. He would nod and say, “There are two sides to every story.”
Why don’t I listen to my husband?
A housekeeper wasn’t paid for several weeks. She showed up at my door weeping. I loaned her money but distanced myself ever so slightly from the friendship.
There were websites devoted to the frauds this person perpetrated online. This person was able to make them go away. New and similar complaints are popping up.
Two women I know and respect are collectively owed more than ten thousand dollars.
But still I’m the villain.
I’m sad that a few people will exit my life because of this. It’s clear that at least one person will no longer speak to me or to my husband. I’m not crushed by this because I fully expect that the full story will come out when more victims of the fraud come forward. I also expect that this person isn’t finished with stealing from people, from businesses and from marriages (yes there appears to be one spouse in his/her crosshairs that’s facilitating real estate scams, lending money and behaving rather flirtatiously).
Only the most sophisticated liar could find a way to convince a community that I was somehow responsible for their children ending up with the other parent. Logic tells us that the nine felonies pending and last year’s arrest for similar criminal activities are what made a judge think the children belonged somewhere else.
I’m not even sure why I feel compelled to blog about this. I’ve held this person’s secrets for a very long time. Bankruptcy, repossessed cars, bounced checks, swindled employees…. maybe my secret keeping is what allows a con like this to be successful? This person was so good in garnering my sympathy that I suspended all good sense for the better part of two years. I turned a blind eye to signs that no one else would have missed.
What infuriates me about this most isn’t that I’ll lose friends that I care about. I know I will and that’s a risk I took when I did the right thing for those children. I didn’t remove children from a house. I didn’t track anyone down. I gave a non custodial parent (who incidentally was the only parent not in jail and remains the only parent not on probation) a phone number to call. If the children were “taken away” it was by a judge AND by the felonious parent’s actions, not by anyone else’s.
The thing about losing these friends? I think they’re being taken for a ride as I was.
I’m stunned that something so otherworldly has entered my life. I feel like I opened my front door and laid out a welcome mat for evil. The most upsetting part of all is that I feel like I can’t trust my own instincts. That sucks.
