My Blog

On-Line Dating

Kathryn — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:08:25 GMT

Last year, at the urging of a slightly crazy girlfriend (thank YOU, Anita!), I joined a dating website and have seen and heard the weirdest, absolutely strangest things ever, ever. Let's start with the man who lists that he MUST have a woman who is fit and respects herself. He insists that she MUST send a photo or don't even bother responding. Does HE have a photo? No, of course not. Here's a news flash, Mr Hollywood. WE want a picture OR we won't even dream of responding! Sheesh. Or how about the guy with the one word responses to the questions listed on the site..... Isn't the logical conclusion that either (1) he has an extremely limited vocabulary and he is worried about using up his allocation of words for the day or (2) he is so damn lazy/conceited that he thinks that one word responses are enough to sell the average female on his virtues. Virtues? It's hard to say what they might be since we women know SO LITTLE about you. Get off your lazy backsides and put in a little effort to sell us, for Pete's sake! How about putting in some thought and answering a few questions so maybe, just maybe, some woman out there WILL KNOW how to ROCK YOUR WORLD. We are women, not mind readers. And while I'm at it. How about you take the time to actually read our profile and show some genuine interest in what turns our clocks? You might be surprised to find that a few moments of unselfish listening just might get you to your goal. HINT! HINT! Which leads me to the men with their shirts off in their photos. Guys, if you are over the age of, say, 30 or 35 MAX, this is as BAD an idea for YOU as it would be for the average female over 30. I mean, even I KNOW in my heart of hearts that the aged-sagged flesh of a 50 year old female OR MALE is not a winning idea in the mating game. Cover it ALL up. If you are proud of the bod, groovy. Go impress your guy friends with how much you can still bench at the age of 55. We women care that you take care of your health, but what about the brain? If your idea of literature is reading the back of the Fruit Loops box in the morning, my recommendation is that you really hope that one of those 20 year olds are taken in by the promise of your bank account, because no woman my age wants a brain-dead companion. So does anyone out there know if it is illegal/legal to yank a few of the more hi-larious pictures to post? I guess I could photo shop them to hide the eyes like they do in the magazines! More to follow as inspiration, irritation or whimsy overtakes me!

WiFi

Kathryn — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:52:08 GMT

Here I am sitting in an airport waiting for a flight and I have my work laptop with me. Gosh, what a fun toy! It's impossible to sleep in these awful chairs so instead I get to check my email and surf the net. Fun! Dick Tracey wudda been all over this new fangled stuff. <insert big evil grin> So I frantically finished an appraisal to the best of my ability today and about lost my sanity. How do people stay above the line when they are overwhelmed? Hmm. I think that's a good question to ask Judy. After I walked out of work, I felt SO much better. I went home and packed and organized and I felt SO much better! I think this class, while not my idea of a vacation, is going to be a fun break. Advanced Income Capitalization. Who would have thought? I always read the magazine articles that proclaim there is a way to chuck your job and live your dream job/life/career. But honestly, other than being a contributing member of society and making enough money to care for myself and my family, who cares? Yes, it might be cool to do something else, but what? really? Sometimes I think I'm cut off from my real self , so out of touch that I cannot even conjure a dream job, and then sometimes I think this dream job stuff is just a dream. My real dream would be to clean and organize my home and read books and travel. Basically I work so I can do all those things. But clean my own house (not other people's!) and read books and travel for a living? I'm not seeing it or maybe I have no vision? Well, someone enlighten me then! That would be one awesome job! <g>

Can this be true?

Kathryn — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 05:44:44 GMT

I bought a pair of pants last week and didn't try them on (Costco). They were 16's and I figured I'd be lucky to zip them up. Well, to make a long story short, they turned out to be 14's and they fit. Part of me is suspicious: the factory musta made a mistake and made a whole slew of pants too big. The other part of me wants to do a happy dance! A year ago I was a 20 and now I'm a 14! All I've done is eat more healthy food (basically no white crap) and I've been walking a minimum of 30 minutes every day and more usually 60 minutes. It seems too easy to be true since I've struggled with the whole dieting thing since I can remember. Could it really be that simple? My friend Diane says she noticed I was smaller and asked me about it so I guess it must be true. Weird. I am strangely unimpressed, where before on Weight Watchers (or any of the others) I would have been weighing every day and going nuts over a 1 pound loss. I have long since chucked the scale so???? I guess I'll keep on doing what I've been doing and when the pants I am now wearing fall off, then I'll have to deal. Hmm. Is this what naturally thin people do?

Hungry vs. Lonely

Kathryn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:47:27 GMT

I have had a recent revelation... sometimes I get this awful gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that feels like hunger but I can eat and it is still there. It just won't go away for the longest time. It finally dawned on me that the feeling is not hunger but loneliness! I know when I am sad and crying, my chest hurts right over/around my heart which is why I always understood why people described sadness as a "broken heart". It's because it really DOES feel like my heart has broken. Of course, it's not really and feelings are just feelings- they pass. But somehow I never connected that gnawing with loneliness. NOW I understand why I always tried to eat to make it go away. Duh! What brought on this revelation is that I work in an office of young people. Most are the age of my own kids, including my boss. I really like and enjoy where I work and who I work with but most times when they go out to lunch, they forget about me. I feel SO sad! I am literally around people all day but no one talks to each other because we are all so busy working on some kind of report/analysis. Plus, it really is normal to hang with people of your own age and I get that. But what really surprised me was how lonely I get at work and in the rest of my life, really. I used to think I liked being alone a great deal but maybe I need to rethink that. Also, Anita, my boss' mother who also works here, is in Costa Rica on vacation. I hardly talk to her when she is here because I am busy working, but we often go for some kind of walk each day, just to clear out the cobwebs from sitting in front of a computer all day. It isn't a huge amount of human connection but apparently enough to hold off the hungry/lonely's. I'm glad I figured this out. It also explains why I was spending time on the computer surfing my completely lame eHarmony page. (See related post!) This helped me realize that I don't necessarily want a boyfriend right now. I really just want to talk with someone more often than once every 2 or 3 days! So I called someone from my Solution group yesterday and made a community connection and BAM, I felt so much better. AND, it helped me to calm down because I was so freaking pissed off at my ex-husband and certain men like him who shall, for now, remain unnamed. Yes, it was my "compaasionate" ex who proclaimed that if I didn't stay married to him, then I'd be single forever. Gosh, thanks for the generous offer. Grrr. Winding down this blog, I have to thank my girlfriends who have shown me that I really am a funny, smart and kind woman who has just made some less than ideal choices when it came to men AND who have been there for me as a friend. My girl-friends are teaching me to be kind to myself and to be willing to only settle for the very best! Thanks gals!

Funny, funny bumper stickers!

Kathryn — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:33:35 GMT

These are ones I've seen myself or friends and family have passed them on. Let me know if you have any good ones! "Fasten your seatbelt. It makes it harder for the aliens to suck you out of your car." "Get a taste of magic... lick a witch!" "YOU! Out of the gene pool!" "Come to the dark side. We have cookies!" This one was accompanied by a smiley face! Seriously, I saw the following on a car in Portland. The worst part of it was my boss' boss, from the east Coast (think suit and tie) was in the passenger side of my car..... "I'm as smart as a horse and hung like Einstein." Now WHO would actually put that on their car??? Oh yeah, he's as smart as a horse.....

On living and dying

Kathryn — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 04:54:53 GMT

My friend, Jeanne, has been living with recurring breast cancer for 4 years and now there is nothing more the doctors can do to treat the disease. I have to hand it to her for insisting that she is going to live every moment until she dies. I mean, she even has a new boyfriend! But I go over to see her every other week (she lives 80 miles away) and she is getting visibly weaker. Yesterday I took her out to lunch and it just wore her out. She insisted on going to a store that she loves to buy a new candle and she fell outside the store. I saw her ankle wobble and she just didn't have the strength to stay up. Thank God she didn't break anything and that she is shaken but ok. I took her home and insisted she take a nap. She slept for 2 hours. I feel so sad. She has been like a mother/sister/friend to me and it just completely sucks that she will be gone by next year. I went though this when my sister/friend Carla died and I still, to this day, cannot get myself to erase her phone number from my phone because, it's like my one last tie to her will be gone. It is just so f*cking hard to lose close friends because, while I believe in the deepest part of my being that we go on to a new and better life after we die, the rest of us are STILL here struggling along without those loved ones. And, if I haven't already said it, it sucks! It sucks to not be able to call up and ask for advise or share a funny joke or send a cool article out of the paper. It just sucks to not have that person to laugh over a crazy situation from work or to share my deepest fears or joys with. It just sucks being left here alone. I know Jeanne will reach the day when she is just so tired that she will be ready to leave us and go on. I hope that when my time comes, I can be as funny and relaxed and inspired as she is on her way home. And I know I'll live through this just like I've lived through everything else but I can't say I'm going to like it.

On respecting my body~

Kathryn — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:06:00 GMT

After many years of painful struggles with my body, I think I have finally, finally learned what "they" mean by learning to love yourself where you are at. For my entire adult life I have criticized my body and wished it to be different... longer legs and hands, an oval face instead of round, a lanky boy-ish body instead of curvy, and so on... I really don't have any explanation except I finally woke up and noticed the skin on my arms was so pretty. These are the same arms I always loathed for being too big or jiggly or something negative. Yesterday as I was getting ready for work, I decided to wear a skirt, which in itself is shocking because before this change came over me, I always thought that only very thin girls looked good in skirts and I, of course, would never fit in THAT category. Well, I looked in the mirror and didn't recognize my own legs! I thought they belonged to someone else, they were so pretty! Oh, gosh! They're MY legs! So did my legs change overnight? Nope but something in my head switched and for the first time ever I think I am understanding why, why, why people care about taking car of their bodies. I am beginning to understand that for some people, they live primarily IN their bodies and they are acutely aware of how they feel inside their bodies and how they look inside their bodies. I have lived inside my head all these years and never ventured outside to see what it was like to be IN the world IN my body. OK, I know I sound just weird. But the up side is, now I really am thinking about what I eat and DOES MY BODY DESERVE to be treated badly by poor food choices or poor exercise or poor work habits or not enough sleep, etc. What an utter revelation! It is like the world is now on it's head and I have so much more energy and joy than before! I have a co-worker partly to thank for learning this lesson. She is a few years older and has ALWAYS lived in her body to the detriment of other aspects of her life OR to put it another way, she is the exact opposite of me with the opposite set of problems! Watching her and how she views the world has been fascinating and edifying. I also figured out that a great deal of my ambiguity about taking care of myself came NOT from men and how they responded to me, but actually from other women who COMPETE with women in a take-no-prisoners-type of manner. In my attempt to have a family growing up, I let myself be bullied into submission by 2 gorgeous sisters who didn't want any more competition. I spent my adult life on the sidelines because i wanted my sisters to like me. I'm grateful I finally have broken free and I feel sad it has taken so many years. Well, at least I can unleash my inner-girly-girl now! And, you know what, I think this is gonna be fun!

Here little blog, blog, blog...

Kathryn — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 03:44:04 GMT

My friends and I have decided that you can teach an old dog new tricks so we have all decided to get with the program and try out the "blog thing." The thing that freaks me out is that once something goes into the net, it's retrievable forever so WHO would really want to divulge things like what you reaaallly think of your co-workers and what did you reaaaallly think of your best friends new expensive pair of shoes, etc... Hmmm... so to honor the tradition of telling all to the world and completely embarrassing myself for all time, I'm going to make this first blog all about my hysterically horrible experiences on that most famous of all dating websites, eHarmony. Right off the bat you should know that they had decided I was a perfect, easy-going, wonderfully adapted human being. That should have been my first clue that these people have no clue what they are talking about! So what do they send me? People who can't spell even with the spell checker turned on. Guys with machine guns and one word mono-syllabic answers. A knuckle-draggers from a forgotten era who actually said he thought it was "nice" (AAACK!) that I had so many hobbies so when he was out of town, I wouldn't be bored! Ack! Ack! Ack! The unspoken assumption was that I had no life worth paying attention to anyway and that I would be ever so thrilled to dump whatever I was doing to attend to him when he decided to roll in to town! Did I laugh? Cry? Scream? All of the above? Correct answer: all of the above with heavy emphasis on the screaming. OMG!!! Does eHarmony really think I believe they match people? I think they have so few people subscribe that they just match everybody to everyone. Yes, everyone. Yes, I know what you must be thinking.... they got me to sign up so how smart must I be, right? Well, you got me there but I figure if I learn something from every miserable experience, then it isn't a total waste. What have I learned? I'm going to stick to meeting single men through friends. Ok, rant over. I will probably post more amazing experiences because I signed up for the super cheap summer special and have 2 more months to go. I will keep ya'll posted! Woo hoo!