women

I recently tried out a new machine at the gym: it’s made by Life Fitness and called the Summit Trainer. As you can see from the picture, it’s a lot like if an elliptical trainer and a stair climber got it on and had a baby. It mimics a hiking motion and is really pretty hard but rewarding.

I liked it a lot - it’s one of those in-between machines that tones your muscles while you get a cardio workout at the same time. And after I added it to my weekly grab bag of gym activities, I started noticing how well the machine worked out my butt. I’m talking about a noticeable physical difference as well as general mental ass-esteem. As someone who despises squats and lunges and as someone who has beat up knees, it was totally awesome to find an ideal glute exercise.

I also noticed that the other people who used the Summit Trainer also had nice asses - sure, their asses were of all shapes and sizes, but every last ass of the regular Summit users was, in their own way, generally looking gooood.

Here’s the thing, though: why is it called the Summit Trainer? To me, the word summit brings to mind Everest, crampons, crags, and possibly getting lost until you are dead or at least until you are hungry. If I really wanted to summit something, maybe I wouldn’t be a half-block from my house at the gym, I’d be somewhere in the wilderness, getting to the top of things for no reason.

It is at these moments that I once again lament not being an advertising big wig in charge of everything. It took me over a year before I even tried the Summit Trainer. But what if it had been named something a little closer to my actual experience? Closer to its greatest feature? What if it were called the Ass Machine?

I can see the commercial now - a woman sitting at her kitchen table, hands curled around a steaming cup of coffee, talking candidly to the camera. “The Ass Machine really effected my ass,” she would explain, as if she were talking to her close friend. “It’s fun to do, it’s challenging, and you feel and see results.” She would smile, take a sip from her mug, and say, “I don’t give a crap about climbing things. I just want a powerful, slap-worthy caboose.”

Sometimes I really wonder how I could possibly be unemployed.

Again, as if there was indeed a force greater than just us humans, life tried to speak to me for the second time today. I applied for a freelance job today and heard back from the guy in literally under five minutes.

We met after work today at his offices and I’m hired. And here’s the force-greater-than-just-us-humans part: this one little project pays almost exactly to the dollar what my regular office job paycheck is.

It made me think, as I sat on the couch this evening and got to work on my new freelance assignment, what’s the difference between these two checks (other than the fact that one is for 80 hours of work and the other is for roughly 10 hours of work)?

The answer is that I truly dig it. I enjoy even the most boring of the creative non-fiction writing genres. I enjoy sitting on my couch with my lap top and cat and Ben typing away in the other room. I enjoy that with each new project I get to learn about a whole new subject and world. Oh, and I enjoy choosing which hours I work and whether or not to wear pants while I work.

And here’s the thing: even though I never ever, ever hear back from real full-time jobs that I apply to, I’ve gotten the last five out of five freelance gigs I’ve applied for. Again, capital-L Life is probably banging his head against his desk right now. (Life has his own desk, right?)

The tiny hitch lies in the fact that freelance work doesn’t come regularly. It’s risky. But I might be ready to take some risks after a year and a half of no surprises. Even if it means getting a second job as a clown or stripper or, if push comes to shove, the dreaded clown stripper.

I know this blog has gotten a little more journal-y than usual in the last few days, but this is all I can really think about. Tomorrow I promise I’ll write about something else. At least for one entry.

I watched snippets of Superman Returns tonight on HBO, after having seen it in the theater last summer. I’m not going to waste your time by pointing out the terrible special effects, the gaping plot holes, and the baffling ending that I am sure cannot be explained to me logically by anyone.

But I do want to talk about this one thing, because I’ve seen it a lot lately and it is driving me crazy: why are female love interests today getting younger and younger while the male leads stay the same age?

I think Superman Returns is the best example of this phenomenon, since this movie supposedly takes place five years after the original Superman movie (which was released in 1978. Now, in the original movie, Lois Lane is painted as a no-nonsense career women - a reporter high up on the ladder at a big city paper. Margot Kidder (below left), who plays the original Lois Lane, was 30 when the movie was made and might even look a bit older than that in the movie. It might be a stretch, but it’s somewhat believable that she could be writing big articles for the paper at that time.

Now let’s fast forward to Kate Bosworth (above right), who plays Lois Lane in Superman Returns thirty years later. She was around 23 when the movie was made, and she looks around that age in the movie. But she’s got a five-year-old kid and it’s been five years since Superman was around - this should land her in her mid-thirties, at least. Instead, she looks a solid ten or fifteen years younger than she should.

I might be able to suspend my disbelief that some 23-year-old has landed a huge job at a city paper, but now I’m supposed to believe that she got five years younger instead of five years older during a five-year span of time? Is she also from a different planet? And am I also supposed to believe that, if she’s 23 now, that she was 18 when she got the job at the paper and originally met Superman? That’s harder for me to accept than a guy who wears a cape and blue tights and carries around commercial jets.

Even more than that, am I supposed to believe that she’s gotten more glamorous, less charmingly odd, and less practical after the birth of her bastard child and as time passed?

Who knows, maybe this has to do with the fact that I’m a brunette. Who tends to photograph weird. Or that I am not nearly as skinny as either Bosworth or Kidder. But seriously, I think it might be a scary sign of our times. For a long time we’ve know that actresses tend to “lose their value” as they age much faster than their male counterparts, but this is getting ridiculous.

I mean, we’re getting a strong, quirky, smart, career-minded character in Lois Lane, but in today’s standards we have to also make her barely legal? What do we tell the girls in this country, who are going to think that they and their aspirations expire right before they’re old enough to rent a car? That they should hurry up and get married before they become invisible at 25? That they should skip college and get to man-finding?

And don’t be that one guy who mentions that Juliet was 12, because I don’t want to hear it. Juliet might have been 12, but she was also dumb and immature enough to kill herself over a dude when she should have been pursuing her own dreams, taking guitar lessons and gossiping on the phone, had phones been invented.

After an almost week-long absence, my annoying cubemate is back in full force. It seems even worse this morning because I think I lost some of the tolerance I had built up for her while she was gone. It feels like rolling around in the snow naked after being in a hot tub as opposed to simply rolling around in the snow naked.

The problem is that she talks on the phone ALL DAY - she literally picks up the phone and dials someone before she sits down in the morning. She doesn’t get coffee or turn her computer on first, she is on that phone like it is crack and she is a crack addict. A crack addict who also loves talking on the phone.

Mostly, when she is not on the phone treating her fiancé like he is a toddler incapable of the simplest tasks or understanding of the most basic emotions, she is talking to her girlfriends about how fuuuuun things are and how cooooool and aweeeesoooooome things sound. She is also getting married soon, and the incessant wedding talk somehow permeates even my loudest and most rocking iPod defensive strategies.

Her second favorite topic, aside from the minutiae of her lame Valentine’s Day wedding, is how much work she has to do. It makes me wonder how much she could theoretically get done if she, I don’t know, hung up and worked on a project or two. We may perhaps never know.

And it isn’t just me that’s bothered. The only other two people in her vicinity have already written me emails this morning with similarly hopeless-yet-caustic comments about the deterioration of the quality of our workspaces.

This morning in particular, I am overwhelmed with an idea I had in which I would spend the whole day on the phone myself, not hanging up between calls but merely tapping the receiver in between dials. I would talk to everyone I knew, telling them how much fuuuuuuun I was having and how aweeeeeesome and cooooool and niiiiiiiice their weekend plans sounded. I would hold the mirror up to her face, and she could partake of her ugly, ceaselessly chatty reflection!

The calls would get more and more obviously annoying, as I said things like, “Ohmygawd I just have so much work to do - sometimes it feels as if I don’t even work at work, but merely regurgitate the cloying details of my 30-something social life! Details that often only consist of drinking a responsible amount of white wine and being nitpicky about my fiancé!”

Or, when I started feeling especially evil, ”You know what’s a really interesting topic to talk about exhaustively? My cubemate’s totally clichéd Valentine’s Day wedding! Let me tell you more about the flower-ordering process in such a drawn-out manner that you will get nauseous the next time you even smell flowers.”

And I would go on and on, all day, until my cubemate got the message that maybe - just maybe - it was neither aweeeeeeesome or cooooooooool to ruin everyone else’s work environment.

Or maybe I should just get some work done. Talk to you laaaaaaaaaaater, sweeeetie!

Many of you have written asking me why I haven’t been writing my Sarah vs. Spears installments during a time of such rich deposits of Britney Spears-related celebrity news. How could I have missed out on commenting on Brit leaving her kids in a locked car while she went on a chandelier shopping spree? How could I have resisted writing a scathing blog about Brit’s sister being preggers what with her mother having just finished up that book about parenting?

And now, in these prosperous Britney-Spears-Acting-Crazy-Again times, how could I not cover her dramatic mental breakdown and custody loss?

The answer is two-pronged. First off, it’s just too easy. Too many people are doing it and as soon as I come up with a clever stretcher joke, I read about it with slightly different phrasing on TMZ or somewhere. Secondly (and this may shock you) I’m kind of starting to feel bad. It’s one thing to make fun of someone chandelier shopping and it’s another thing to make fun of someone landing themselves in a mental hospital for the weekend. This might go back to my earlier point of things being just too easy.

I mean, I don’t want to be the bully who makes fun of the fat kid or the kid with acne or the poor kid whose parents are divorced. I want to make fun of the popular girl or the guy who thinks he’s hot shit when in reality his shit is only lukewarm. Britney used to be that popular girl, but I’m not sure if she really qualifies anymore.

These recent reports that she’s not even hooked on any foreign substances are even a little scary to me - if she’s not on something, she might seriously be in trouble. I mean, she slept with a member of the paparazzi, people. And now you’re telling us she was sober during it? (And you’re also telling me he didn’t get any pictures?)  

 I might have to find myself a new youthful diva to hate on - I think Ben thinks Lindsay Lohan is hot, maybe I could fabricate an intricate fantasy in which I am locked in a life-long competition with her. Or Paris Hilton? Or is she too skinny for me?

In any case, until Britney Spears gets her act together to the point in which her life is only as screwed up and sad as mine, I’m going to lay off a bit. If I dig down deep enough, even I can start to see some difference between being dumb and wanton and socially irresponsible and being in need of some mental counsel and professional help.

But - mark my words - if we are to find out that this is a stunt, and that Britney is merely SO dumb and SO wanton that she physically needed a stretcher, I will come back with full force and full vengeance. Or, if we find out she’s merely on a smorgasbord of illicit and prescription drugs, all washed down with alcoholic beverages and fried chicken, I will not be kind. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Read the last installment of Sarah vs. Spears

This weekend, if nothing goes terribly wrong, I’ll break the 100,000-hit mark. And somewhat neatly, today is the exact four-month anniversary of the birth of this thing. What I’m trying to say is, thanks for sticking around, people.

What does the future hold? I’m currently working on a new site with a new look and URL. I’ve hired a person with style and computer know-how (two things I’m sadly deficient in) to help me out and soon-ish (I have no idea how long these things take) it should be up and running.

In lame celebration of the big day, here are a few earlier posts that I had fun writing that you might have missed. As you might guess, these are not necessarily the most popular ones.

• Eagle Scientist
• Kinds of Missing
• Time
• Monarch Butterfly Migration From My Office
• Cougar Daydreams

Reading your comments yesterday about my less-than-awesome New Year’s Eve party got me thinking about what bothers me (and perhaps many of us) about the holiday and about general trends in how people perceive fun.

Based on your comments, it seems like most people have a better time staying in with a few friends, eating food and watching movies. And my night definitely improved upon ordering a pizza and sitting on the couch.  So here’s the question: are all people like this, or just people like us? Does anyone have fun in a crowded bar where you can’t move or hear anyone say anything?

I think part of the problem is with the holiday in particular. There’s too much pressure to have fun. You have to have plans, you have to drink champagne, you have to find someone - anyone! - to kiss at midnight. If you’re not having the best night ever, then it’s the worst night ever.

But - back to Anchor Bar in New York City, the worst place ever. It seemed to me that people were trying very, very hard to look like things were going well for them.

The first, most obvious example of this is what women wear out on New Years - out come the mini-dresses, sequins, strapless things, strappy things, short things, sheer things, high-heeled things. And I suppose I would be fine with that if it weren’t the dead of winter and if you weren’t expected to stand and dance all night. I don’t know - maybe I’m just making myself feel better about having a sweater on instead of my A-game when everyone else did, but I can’t see how being freezing and constantly adjusting the three yards of fabric that you are wearing so that it covers your ass and your boobs at the same time could actually contribute to your having a good time.

The second thing I noticed was the number of pictures being taken by the girls at the bar. Of each other. It’s happened at many of the parties I’ve been to recently - pictures of the girls with their tongues out, pictures of the girls sexily sipping their drinks, pictures of the girls kissing in front of their boyfriends. Then, inevitably, when I shamefully log into Facebook the next day, I get to wade through dozens of pictures of my friends and my friends’ friends and read about how much fun they had the night before. Don’t worry, these pictures seem to say, we weren’t sitting and eating pizza and drinking beer with a few friends last night! We were living! With our tongues out!

Talking about the phenomenon with Ben the next day, we came up with some interesting ideas about the rise in and strangeness of “fun documentation”. Ben compared it to the modern-day wish to become a celebrity, even if you aren’t famous for anything good. Facebook, in this instance, becomes a sort of US Weekly among a circle of friends - you get to see who was out with whom doing what - with your friends acting as the fake paparazzi. All the pictures are “tagged” with the names of who was there - and everyone is dressed up and having a great time!

I think fun documentation can also be linked to reality television - the pictures the girls were taking in the bar actually happened and they are documents of that moment in time, much like the footage shot for reality shows. However, looking at how the pictures are taken and presented, they are often staged and posed. The small fact that everyone knows pictures are being taken changes what is happening. Although the pictures are meant to be action shots, they are taken deliberately, like portraits.

For example, very early in the night on NYE, these three girls were about to take a totally cute picture of themselves grinding on each other on the dance floor. They weren’t drunk (yet) and the place wasn’t crowded (yet) but they were dancing close and, right before the pictures were taken, each girl froze in the sexiest of positions. After a few were taken, one of the girls stopped the “shoot” to run over and get NYE crowns for everyone in the take to wear. After the crowns were put on (and their hair fixed) the dancing and picture taking continued. It was basically a fabricated moment of fun that would look totally great on the social networking sites in the morning. Look how much fun we had! We didn’t even notice the camera!

I’m not against taking pictures when you are out or documenting an event - but it seems like digital cameras and the internet have not only given us the chance to easily record our day-to-day lives, but it has given us the opportunity to mold our lives into a social fantasy world. If women today want to be like celebrities, and if all we know about celebrities is what we see in pictures in magazines and on the internet, shouldn’t it follow that women create these fabricated moments to shoot of themselves?

Ugh, I suddenly feel very old. I’m going to reread this and make sure I never say the phrase “kids these days.” I suppose that to make up for my stuffiness and inability to embrace modern culture, I’ll post my favorite fun documentation picture, of me, Ben, and some friends at a posh party… with a celebrity! I am SO living the life!