Thought some of my introverted friends, (like me), might appreciate the above post from Introvert Dear. 🙂 I have often had that sinking feeling with the phrase about everyone introducing themselves. I was chuckling through most of the list in the post. Another one that stood out for me was having guests show up unexpectedly. I always like being forewarned. I can remember a particular instance when I had just gotten off work and was walking up my driveway when I noticed a couple of people walking up at the same time. My husband had invited them for dinner. It took me a while but that doesn’t happen anymore. 🙂
And here’s some humor:
Featured image ‘The Witch on Her Broom Stick’ by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite 1921 via Wikipedia.org
We are often told these days that we must exercise. I have tried to duck the questions about exercise I get anytime I have contact with a doctor’s office, ‘ Do you exercise? or How often do you exercise? or What type of exercise do you do? I do try to be creative in my answers but then my honesty gets in the way. I used to be able to say, ‘I do yoga.’ My warrior and cat poses were pretty good. But I quit doing that too. I’ve wasted a lot of money paying for gym and yoga studio memberships and then did not go to the classes after a while. I have decided to try some exercise classes at my local city recreation center in the Fall. They are closer to my house, are scheduled at a decent time, and are not overly expensive. And I don’t have to sign a contract. I am looking for gentle limbering up not high impact, weight-bearing, hot chakra yoga or some such thing. Not looking for a triathlon or Iditarod. Not even interested in Zumba Gold. Maybe a nice Qui Gong.
Stream of Consciousness Saturday is hosted by the ever limber Linda G Hill. The prompt for today is ‘limb.’ Featured image of Contortionist via wikimedia.
“Laughter is to the soul what sunshine is to a flower.”-Peggy Toney Horton
Reading funny commentary has been a real stress reliever for me lately. Being able to laugh at something is truly healing. Laughter is one of great pleasures of life. Maybe comedians are truly healers.
“Laughter is a powerful weapon for it carries the light. To laugh is to defy the darkness.” -Isobelle Carmody
It began when I woke up the morning after the recent presidential election, after watching the election returns late into the night with a sense of shock, disbelief, unreality, and increasing premonitions of impending doom, and said something like this to my husband, “This is when it begins, the end of the world.”
I have gradually calmed down and regained some equilibrium until I read about The Russians hacking into our election and watched the president-elect appoint a man for Secretary of State who was awarded a “Friend of Russia” trophy by Putin.
The saving grace for me has been reading satire and humor about the whole situation. At least we can have a good laugh while we march off to our destruction. So I want to include a few funny posts for your enjoyment, which would probably be anything by Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker Magazine, Dave Barry, and David Horsey.
I consider myself a hopeful, optimistic person most times and I feel I must work hard to remain this way for the sake of my kids and new grandson. So I think it will all come out all right in the end.
This post is for Stream of Consciousness Saturday hosted by Linda G Hill who said, Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “first/last.” Use one or both words, or find words that mean the same. Bonus points if you start your post with “first/beginning/start” etc. and end with “last/end” etc. Enjoy!
Wishing you a Happy New Year! And hoping 2017 will be a better year for us all.
Gifs via Giphy.com and Happy New Year image via Pixabay.com
This photo is from a Senior Planet post The Mythical World of Eyes as Big as Plates a project of photographer Karoline Hjorth. Woolly Thyme image by Patrick Standish on Flickr.
There’s a Conference in the U.K. All About Werewolves Next Month. This from the Smithsonian on my Facebook page kind of tickled my funny bone. I want to go. It stimulates the imagination too. OK story, mild mannered older woman goes to UK for Werewolf Conference and is really enjoying it when one night when the moon is full she feels “some pricking in her thumbs”……….Or mild mannered older woman attending Werewolf Conference and having a great time by the way and one night when the moon is full she feels a strange urge and looks in the mirror and thinks oh my I need some new moisture cream because look at my skin and I think I need to tweeze out a few hairs here!
What is considered to be beautiful is always changing, over the years and across cultures. I think the young woman in the above image may have a “wheat belly.” ( a reference to a popular book about gluten free diets). She is a little soft and pudgy according to current beauty standards. Her belly is bulging out a bit.
Opinions about diet are always changing as well. There are so many changes in just the past 20 years. Remember all the talk about low fat diets and heart health. I stayed away from butter and ate margarine for years to find that now we know margarine is actually very bad for you. And then no red meat. I followed that advice as well and did not eat red meat. Now I hear that the low fat diet caused many people to eat too much sugar, which is worse, and that some fats are good for us. And it was artificial sweeteners are good and then they were bad. Now sugar is bad again. Then coffee is good, coffee is bad, or wine is good, wine is bad. White wine is not as good as red. No white wine is ok. Now red is better as long as its organic. Confusing isn’t it.
It is amazing how there are so many books and posts telling us how to be better at everything. How to eat, have sex, be mindful, find purpose and exercise in just the right ways.
This got me thinking about body image in general and women’s body image in particular. I want to be comfortable with my body and it’s image even if it is not the ideal. Women spend a good part of their lives worried about their appearance and weight, scrutinizing their bodies in the mirror to see how they measure up to the latest popular image.
I have read many articles on this topic and this lead to a website called Beauty Redefined. I am sure there are others out there that are as good but I do like a lot of what this one has to say. It belongs to Lexie and Lindsay Kite, who have PhDs in media and body image. In there own words, We have a passion for helping girls and women recognize, reject and resist harmful messages about their bodies and what “beauty” means and lookslike. I am learning there is a lot of resistance against all the dieting and the popular media images of beauty. This is a positive thing.
This a great little short film by Em Ford, a very courageous young woman, who demonstrates how women are judged by their appearance. And how some commenters on social media are sociopaths.
There is resistance to dieting as well. In her book Body of Truth, Harriet Brown talks about how she learned to become comfortable with her body at a weight that felt comfortable to her. She makes a convincing argument about the futility of dieting and how all the hype about obesity is overblown. She talks about her own daughter’s struggle with anorexia and how this experience helped her and her family change their attitudes toward food. She includes some of her own process that she developed through therapy to be able to relax about eating and not be obsessed about diet.
Another website I have discovered is Refinery 29 that has some good posts about positive body image and anti-dieting. There is great blog on there called The Anti-Diet Project by Kelsey Miller. She did a recent post about intuitive eating. This has been around for awhile. It is learning to make food neutral and get in touch with your natural appetite and get off the diet merry-go-round. Another post by Kate Harding as part of Refinery 29 Take Back the Beach exposes many of the myths about the virtues of dieting.
I find the posts about positive body image and anti-dieting encouraging. Maybe there is hope that people’s attitudes will change and we can learn self-acceptance.
In the meantime, it is good to keep a sense of humor. There is one health practice that I really believe in, laughter. When we laugh we lower our stress hormones, improve our circulation, increase our endorphins, exercise our lungs and even exercise our core muscles. I believe the part about the core muscles because my daughter pointed out to me, and I confirmed it by looking in the mirror, that my belly moves up and down when I laugh. Besides laughter makes us feel great don’t you think?
I loved watching Laurel and Hardy when I was little. Still do. The ability to make people laugh is such a gift. And comedians are a gift to the world. Sharing a couple of laughs with you today.
Thanks to Dave Barry. I spotted this on his blog this morning sent in by one of his readers:
I found my bliss. Ollie Hofnoodle’s Haven of Bliss that is. If you have seen A Christmas Story by Jean Shepard this is another film written by him that is very funny. What I love about it is that is epitomizes an era in American life of the middle class family. This is about Ralphie and his family when he is a teenager looking for his first job. His father still has his nose to the grindstone and wants nothing more than to get away for his annual 2 week summer vacation at a resort on Clear Lake. There are hilarious parts about Ralph’s first job, how the family dog “Fuzzhead” runs away, and the “epic car trip” on the way to the lake. Their family car is loaded up to the roof with all the comforts of home they want to bring to the vacation cabin. This was when a family typically had one family car. Shepard describes the mother’s lot in life, quite accurately I thought, when he says she never got to taste her food warm because she was constantly waiting on the rest of the family during mealtime.
There is one scene where the family is on the road and they recall how when then got to a certain place there was this bee that would come into the car and harass them. They wonder if the bee could still be there. The father says that’s ridiculous. Well, you guessed it, the bee shows up and the next scene is the whole family running down the road.
Notes Tied On The Sagebrush 