10086 Sunset Boulevard

Or at the very least, bi-sexual. Really, that’s what most guys seem to believe. It’s that testosterone thing at work again messing with their brains. That’s why movies like Lesbian Cheerleaders and the like are such hits. Some men really think that women are such sexual creatures that if the circumstances arise, they’ll go for it - in other words when they aren’t doing it with men, they must be doing it with each other. I find that particular male quirk peculiar and amusing.

My ex was certain I was a latent lesbian. I made the mistake of telling him a few things, often only to get a rise out him. I told him of a dream I had about Ellen Degeneres. In my dream we were at an amusement park and we went on the Ferris wheel together. The dream made me happy - it was childlike and innocent. I think it was because Ellen struck me as someone who would be fun to be around and I was very lonely and needed a girlfriend. Oh settle down! NOT that kind of a girlfriend. Of course my ex just got that satisfied look on his face and said, “how can you not know you are a lesbian? You dreamt of Ellen and you were on a Ferris wheel together, the symbolism is over the top obvious”.

When my ex became my ex he wrote me an email telling me that he felt I would continue having problems until I came to terms with the fact that I was a lesbian. He blamed our lacking sex life partially on that. Give me a break!

I’m not necessarily a girly girl. I don’t like frills, I’m more at home in the drill section of a hardware store than I am in a home decor shop and if you put a pair of suede cowboy boots in front of me, I’ll fail to notice the Italian pumps next to them, but I am a man loving woman. When it comes to sex, I know exactly what I’m looking for when I slide my hand down the front of his unzipped pants.

The only thing better than seeing the scales respond favorably on a Monday morning, is standing naked in front of the mirror and finally feeling impressed instead of depressed. I weigh 156 pounds today, two pounds down from last week. I can’t move house every week, nor would I want to, but looking at the muscle tone that is starting to show and the loss of a good deal of my midriff, I’d better find something to duplicate the activity. Now I’m inspired.

I’m in the middle of helping my mother move house. Have a good weekend and I’ll see you on Monday.

I was eating my breakfast of egg beaters and bologna a la Will and I turned on the television to see what was going on in the world. The View was on and I was about to change the channel when someone caught my eye. It was Star Jones, but it took me a minute to be sure of that. What the hell happened to her? I know from experience that weight loss can alter a person’s face, but this is just strange. I used to think Star Jones was an attractive woman, but she’s anything but that now. Scary stuff. If you want to know what I’m talking about go and check out the pictures over at Gallery of the Absurd.

I weigh 158 this morning. I think I’ve got a handle on the blood sugar roller coaster. I’m not out of the woods yet, but I managed to get all tempting treats out of the house and not buy anything to sabotage myself with. This was a stressful week, so I consider losing a pound an accomplishment. I’m getting better at working through emotions naturally, rather than medicating myself with food to feel better.

I’ve yet to start on Will’s breakfast suggestion, as I have not had much of an appetite in the mornings and have gone for lighter fare. I plan to start the egg beater breakfast this morning, because I know that it will put my blood sugars in order for the day and I am less likely to be hungry with a good breakfast to start things off.

I don’t watch much television, but when I do I avoid the commercials. The ones in the evening seem to center around food. Big food. Main courses, side dishes and decadent deserts. I’m guaranteed to go to bed hungry if I sit there and watch the commercials. It’s not even subliminal advertising. I don’t know why someone just doesn’t go with the slogan “Wanna eat like a pig? Our restaurant is your trough”. It’s no mystery to me why America has a weight problem. Food is big money and so is bad health.

I’ve been helping my mother move into her new home and things have been hectic. We were over at the new place recently, getting things in order. I had just watched “Under the Tuscan Sun” and was under the influence of the movie’s charm. I was viewing everything in my world in an Italian light.

There was a knock at the door and I heard my mother talking, so I went to see what was going on. An Italian man, one of my mother’s new neighbors, was looking for someone named Fred. Okay, he wasn’t an Italian, but an old man with a tracheotomy. The raspy voiced, Godfather thing he had going on worked for me at that moment, so just go with me here. We had a hard time convincing him that there was no Fred, he kept peering inside, as though we might have Fred hidden in a back room.

I finally said to him “It’s just the two of us here”. He looked at me in horror and said, as loud as he could with his impaired voice “You have no men?!”

“No” I said “we have no men”. He quickly backed away, hands raised to his face, an expression of horror “oh, I am SO sorry”. And he made a hasty retreat as if he had just glimpsed the death cronies and he had discovered they were right across the street from him.

My mother and I looked at each other, shrugged and went back to the tasks at hand. And then I started to laugh. One of those laughs that borders on hysteria. In our case it’s not so funny not having men because they died. Well, only my Dad literally, but in any case, they are gone.

So Mum comes in to find out what’s going on and I’m trying to explain how funny it seems, the look on this guys face and how he must have viewed us as poor old spinsters, the end of any life we may have had as real women because we have no men!

And then everything changed. We had men, lots of them. They arrived in pick up trucks. They painted the house, cleaned the carpet and fixed a plumbing problem. We had men for two weeks and as soon as we had men, we had problems. But they were all resolved and then all the men left and just like Frances Mayes did in “Under the Tuscan Sun”, I said goodbye to the workmen and was sad for a moment, but glad to have the place back to myself for a while.

And in my little dreamy Tuscan state of mind, I wandered out to the back yard. I plan to make it into a secret garden for my mother, a nice little Italian courtyard. I stood there visualizing the whole thing and then I had another moment from the movie. A bird crapped on my shoulder, just let loose a big old load. I smiled, because that was just how it happened in Under the Tuscan Sun. It’s the moment when everything changes for Frances. In Italy it is an omen of good luck. The men may gone, but everything is going to be alright.

I truly thought that I could remain friends with Dan. We have such a history together, we knew each other when we were young, when our lives were ahead of us. The Pollyanna in me worked overtime this past year to ensure that happy ending. Alas, just as Rona worried, I didn’t put enough time and space between the initial injury and trying to be friends. My bad.

I’ve made some changes. I quit cyberstalking last year and, more significantly, I forgave Sheila, formerly known by other names such as The Interloper, The Squatter and Bitch. We have no contact, we’ll never become friends or allies and I doubt my forgiveness would mean anything to her. But it means a lot to me. The blinders have been removed and I see it more clearly now. Certain truths have come to light that lead me to believe she may not have known the true situation when she rushed in to a live-in relationship with Dan. She is by no means an innocent here, but I think “Bunny Boiler” might have been a tad harsh.

My efforts to overcome my anger and be a better friend to Dan must have been interpreted as weakness, or perhaps the forgiveness was too soon and it trivialized something that was extremely painful for me. I’d like to have been able to talk to Dan about this, but he’s moved on. I’ve been busy helping my mother with her move and slow in responding to Dan’s recent emails. When I reminded him of this he replied that with all the crap going on in his life, he had completely forgotten. He always has crap going on and he’ll always forget. That’s not enough for me any more.

Thinking of Dan makes me weary, so I have taken steps that may help. I’m removing anything that is likely to remind me of him. Throwing it away, giving it away, or packing it in a box to be opened when I’ve better come to terms with how the man who once loved me so much, could come to think of hurting me as some kind of routine.

Dan, is still going through the journey he began a year ago and I probably should not have interrupted it by trying to include him in the forgiveness phase of my healing. He has let me know that he’s moving in different circles now, he has new friends and there are possible new romances. It’s his world now, not mine. Unless I want to hang around for emergency backup, I’ve pretty much been ostracized from his life. No thanks. I’ve recently located my spine.

So one year after the initial event, I have said goodbye to Dan. No shredded heart this time, no railing at the Gods. Just the dull ache of disappointment. As you may guess, there was something else and it did factor heavily into my decision. I found out that Fido crapped in my slippers again.

That was the subject line of an e-mail I received from Dan recently. Since there had been little to no communication for some time, I thought he probably had some final words to say about us. I took a deep breath and clicked on the email.

It wasn’t about us. It was about his old RCA stereo T.V. It had died and he had a few words to say about it; he bought it in 1989 in Hollywood and he explained why he bought that particular model and how surprised he was that it had survived for so long.

Maeve e-mailed me that evening and asked if I had heard from Dan recently. I sent her the email, to see what she made of it.

Her response was “I think that he’s telling you he had a longer and happier relationship with that television”.

Apparently February is a popular time to get dumped. Did you dump someone on or around Valentine’s Day? Or did you just dump them in an unkind way? Maybe you feel bad about it? Well, here’s your chance to try and reap a little good karma.

There’s a website called soyouvebeendumped.com - go there and make a donation to the site. They take PayPal. Just go to this link, scroll down and click the PayPal button. Give what you can. You don’t have to stick around and read anything, just donate to a worthwhile cause and feel a little better about something really crappy that you did to another human being. Besides, one day you may be the dumpee and in need of the benefits of this website yourself.

If you are the one that got dumped and need some help getting through a rough time then go check out the whole website. You’ll find different forums for various stages of the healing process. If you are on the mend and can offer hope or share a positive outcome from your experience, then so much the better. The important thing is that you will find out you are not alone and life will eventually get a whole lot better.

soyouvebeendumped.com is the brain child of Thea Newcomb. Having acquired extensive personal and professional experience in being “dumped” - Newcomb was looking for a positive use to her experiences. Since its inception in July of 2000, Thea has been able to offer advice and support to thousands of visitors around the globe.

An often quoted break-up expert, Thea has twice found herself on a list of Scotland’s “Top 50 Most Eligible” women - and even on a “Top 50 Businesswomen in Scotland” list (Unlimited magazine 2001) - which are both ironic and a tremendous ego boost.

Read the rest of it here or just go to soyouvebeendumped and take a look around.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Here are some tips for getting better results from your scales:

1. Weigh yourself fully clothed after dinner and again the next morning without clothes and before breakfast, because it’s nice to see how much weight you’ve lost overnight!

2. Never weigh yourself with wet hair.

3. When weighing, remove everything, including eyeglasses. In this case, blurred vision is an asset. Don’t forget to remove jewellery as it could weigh as much as a pound!

4. Buy only cheap scales, never the medical kind. Accuracy is the enemy and high quality scales are very accurate.

Those tips came from Diet Jokes where you can find more ways to manipulate your scales. This morning smashing them into the wall seemed like a really good idea.