tant mieux | part of sotto voce

For more articles and advice, please visit us at tant mieux simply click here. tant mieux is part of sotto voce worldwide, copyright sadi ranson-polizzotti. Photo image by sadi ranson-polizzotti. "les levres"

There is a great deal of information on all of the Tant Mieux sites, so browse around. If you go to the main Tant Mieux page, you'll find articles and commentary about Bob Dylan , poetry, cultural comment and so much more (hence the name of the site).

We have excellent content, we feel, and run a literary journal and do accept submissions. They must be sent through the tant mieux contact link and all submissions must appear as INLINE TEXT within the body of an email. Submissions with attachments will be disgarded. We also take questions for Auntie Sadi and they will be answered here, and you need not include your name. Again, just use the Contact Link at tant mieux. Serious submissons only and you must include a bio of publications or bio of yourself.

Thanks for visiting here. We try to keep the sites updated and hope you find information here that is universal enough that any woman can identify and respond in some small or large way.

Whichever the case, we're glad you stopped by.

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
Winter, 2005-2006

dishevelled elegence | on being a woman.

I hate to admit to being vain at all because it has so many and only negative qualities that one thinks of that song by Carly Simon, supposedly about Warren Beatty but hey, ancient history and water under the bridge and so on. The song that, whenever it came on over the radio my mother would turn the volume way up and say, "Listen to the words, Sarah. This song is about your father. " click to read more on tant mieux >>>More.

dark days of winter

I spent two hours today, after stupidly insisting I would go for "a drive" in a blizzard to take some photographs, I found myself stuck in various snow banks, spinning my the tough but small wheels of my beloved Mini Cooper and almost smashing into various poles and trees and other vehicles. I thank god I’m a good driver, for were it not for this simple fact, I am convinced that I or someone else would have been seriously injured... and no, I’m not exaggerating or making this up. It's been that bad and with lightning too: who ever heard of lightning in a blizzard? In all my years, I’ve never heard of such a thing, but then, maybe I’m limited to my own area and we just don't get that here. Also, I confess, I’m not American so what do I know about blizzards and thunder? The answer, quite simply, is nil.Winter is full on and with it come the dark days and we find ourselves growing more depressed, hibernating and turning inward, becoming harder to reach, more reclusive (why go out when we can hide behind the computer and we have all the nourishment we need). In fact, the only reason I can think of to go out is for cigarettes if you smoke and even then, I’m not sure I would bother. Perhaps I would leave the house for ice-cream, but even that I’m no longer sure of.

To be clear, I have become a recluse and people have started to worry. Am I turning into a female Howard Hughes? Will I soon be saving my hair and fingernail clippings? I’m already germaphobic, rubbing my hands with Purrell after every door I touch. Just a tad too neurotic in this regard for anyone to leave me alone in this, and frankly, they are good friends not to. One cannot truly live in this state.I recently acquired a light box (oh, laugh all you want) - one of those things for people with Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I do not have, but I have other issues which various and sundry doctors conferred that indeed, such a box might help. And why not, I thought, just stare into it or have it touch my eyes while I’m working on the computer and it will be fine. The doctor warned me though, and quite seriously, But be careful, dear. People have been known to have high manic swings using light boxes. High manic swings, I heard! He sees this as a bad thing? Could he mean, of course he meant, periods of great productivity and work when I can spit out article after article without nary a thought or trouble? This hardly seemed to me a bad if we had to judge it at all - not to me anyway. It struck me as a rather good thing. It would ward off all of the crap that keeps us down in the winter. It would ward off my bad memories of last winter (she says with a shiver, both to the weather and the people involved at the time) and don't ask because it's a long and boring story. But really, who would or could in their right mind complain about a feeling of euphoria, even if it is or would be manic, productivity is still productivity and lord knows we all need more time and more energy.

Sure, there are aspects of this that would be undesirable; mainly the lack of focus but hell, I could deal with that, couldn't you? It beats sitting around listening to obscure Moby songs, who I otherwise love, but in the winter, believe me, he can be depressing as all hell. Wouldn't it be nice to have all of our friend's around to play instead of listening to too much Elliott Smith, who again, I adore, just not when I’m in this winter-depressed and reclusive state. Even in this state of mind, I know it's not good for me. Even in my worst moments, I know better than to stay this way. Even Elliott killed himself and I loved him but his music was never what I would call “cheery.”So with that, I encourage everyone to get a light box, and short of that, make your own by buying a light bulb for plants (I’m assured that it is just as good) at any hardware store and it supposedly does the same thing la meme chose, and get out there.

Don't go driving in blizzards like I did, but not allow yourself to become a Howard Hughes recluse. It's gotten to the point where although I am not saving my own piss in bottles, I am using way too much hand-sanitizer whenever I go out and I keep forgetting to cut my toenails and I am in desperate need of something with my hair. How long can it be before I stop shaving my legs and go the full route and turn into a complete weirdo; I mean, I’m halfway there already with this recluse stuff and though I work extremely hard on external projects, that is not the same as genuine human contact which, truth to tell, I miss. I don't want to sit around watching the film Sylvia and reading her goddamn poetry, good as it may be at times. I don't want to think of what it would be like to tape your children in a room and stick your head in the oven on a tea-towel because although it's not something I’d ever do, it is something she did and it's something that I know far too much about from the death of one of my own siblings (in Winter, as it happens).

More, I live in her home town and can drive by her house (a block or so away, pretty much every day if I so choose.) I am surrounded by Plath’s early childhood and it is as if the land itself were infused with such grief and darkness. Her poems of the sea that is at the end of my block ring true. Like my own poems of the same sea, they are rough and tough and he sea is a “bitch” – wicked in her way, and never, ever kind. She is long-fingered and grey. And so, it's a dark season. My prescription: listen to French pop. Download some Charlelie Couture, Carla Bruni, MC Solaar, Daniel Levi, and others. Get into a different grove and get creative. You don't need a light box for a real upswing, though it helps (this much is true) but a lot of it is state of mind. Fight the good fight, and I’ll fight with you.

Thanks for listening, and have terrific and happy holidays,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

what a peach

all you ever needed to know about your rear. read What a Peach! and find out that you are not alone...
what a peach

sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - why wax me Barbie!

read all about bikini waxing and the general disappearance of bodily hair from young women all over the world. select link below and find out if you are a Barbie, and hey, who knew the variety of shapes and designs for that special area! not i, to be sure, so reasd on.
sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - why wax me Barbie!

sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - not everyone's a Napoleon - some just try

It's always disturbing to see someone harassed at work; to hear the snide gossip, the nasty comments, etc, and always it is awful to see a woman, or for that matter a man, sexually harassed by a co-worker or worse a superior. But today I speak of these things, but more, I write again of bullying, as I have in the past (see Meet the New American Bully on Blogcritics.org).

A friend tells me of leaving a job for a place where once, I too worked but had left for reasons that shall remain vague but suffice to say were deeply political and had nothing to do with the quality of my work; they had to do with a person or persons who were deeply and profoundly insecure and had long ago set a precedent of driving out (ridiculously and surely to the detriment f the company as a whole) those women, especially women, who were talented or in any way a threat to the woman who was and for now, who remains as one would say "in charge" (though this is a tenuous power at best, for it is built not on hard work or accomplishment but on insecurity and bullying, which causes others who do not wish to fight this nasty political fight to leave the company or be fired. I saw this again and again, and watched as one talented and often, beautiful or attractive woman was driven out of her job. (select link to read more...)
sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - not everyone's a Napoleon - some just try

sotto voce | being there - sadi ranson-polizzotti

Every day I see messages that tell me and other women who we should be. This includes everything from what we look like and the clothes we wear, to what our inner-most desires should be. As of late, I suppose I should be growing my hair long and straight and giving it a slight wave, a la Gwyneth, Charlize, and the rest of that gang. I should join the Kabbalah center because right now, it’s fashionable. I should wear mousse make-up and a center part and a red thread around my wrist (this last I sometimes do because I happen to believe, though I suspect for some it ahs become little more than a fashion statement, alas – faith as fashion.
sotto voce being there
return home:

sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - Hush! Sons and Mothers

If you are have ever been the a young girl taken home to meet the mother of your boyfriend for the first time, then Hush is a film that in very many ways, many of you will likely identify with. Hush is not a new film, and is in fact one of the first films in which Gwyneth Paltrow starred when she was younger and just starting out, and though I sense it is likely a film she regrets for it is not a stellar performance, in my view it is a film she should be proud of, for she finally stands up and speaks for the throngs of girlfriends and wives everywhere who have ever suffered at the sarcastic and snippy
sadi ranson-polizzotti - tant mieux articles - Hush! Sons and Mothers

to be...

Eat. I want to tell all girls to eat, although i must first confess that i do not abide by this rule myself and i'm not even sure why. I do not believe that auntie sadi has been brainwashed by hollywood ding-dongs into thinking i need to be a stick figure like Jennifer Aniston, who looks unnaturally thin to me, it is more that i am not hungry, i lack hunger for some reason and i'm not sure why, though if i am completely honest i must say that it likely because i spend a great deal of time thinking and working and when one is in such a Zen frame of mind, there is little thought of food.

My dear husband wants to feed me, but doens't he understand that it is far more important that i get my message out on my website than eat anything? Gosh, it may well be eleven pm, but so what; somewhere in the world it is daylight and somewhere someone is logging in and they must read. Of course, nobody really cares what i have to say, likely, but on the off chance that they do, i will give a few thoughts here and hope that they reach you, whoever you are, and that you take heed because auntie sadi is very wise and has been through all manner of crises and can offer many good articles of advice but only if you are willing to pay attention and listen.

Here are your rules, and my friend JoJo who loves herself to no end and revels in her beauty and sensuality (and she is all these things, yet i am told i am too, and i do not believe it. How is it that JoJo can believe all these good things about herself and i am stuck in a quaqmire of insecurity and stupidity? It's ridiculous.) We all need to get over being insecure. Here are a few rules.

1. Always eat dessert if it is offered, unless it is something you absolutely hate, eat it.

You won't get fat and all those endorphins you have been missing or have beenotherwise acquiring artificially through Prozac can be fixed by a simple chocolate fix, so go for it. Some people have noted that eating chocolate and other sweets releases the same chemicals in the brain that are released during orgasm. Now, if there was ever a reason to eat dessert, i'd say that's it. Plus, eating makes you gain weight, it's true, but it also helps your boobs grow; don't eat, lose 'em. Eat and gain a cup size. The choice is yours. Do you really think any normal man wants a woman who looks and feels like a twig, or with whom when he has intercourse or whatever he is bruised from her boniness? No. I answer authoratively because i have polled many men and they all seem to prefer us with a bit of meat on our bones, which means that a size 8 or 6 or even 10 or above is not the end of the world, but rather the beginning of your new dating life in which you are truly sexually fulfilled because you with a real man, not Brad Pitt who is an alien or piece of perspex of some kind.

2. Love thyself.
Yes, Love your hair, your skin, the things about you that make you different and quirky like your crooked teeth or bigger nose or wideset eyes or whatever they are, embrace them as your differences; thank god we have them because i 'd hate to look like everyone else, which is happening !! All these girls with long, super straight blonde hair. it's getting a bit nerve wracking. a bit Stepford Wife. I can't tell who is who anymore. Is it Ashley or Ashley? For chrissakes ladies, isn't it better to stand out in a crowd? The answer is yes, and i don't care if you disagree, because deep down you want to be loved for the you that you really are, not some illusion or some dyed version. So be yourself and start loving it. You are only young for a short while and you are going to waste your formative and young years on shortselling yourself when really, you should be out there strutting your stuff like you mean it and believe in it. Think of J. Lo and what she has done for booty. Imagine what you could do for crooked teeth or whatver. If David Bowie can have croooked teeth and still be one of the sexiest men alive, then by God, it can work for us too.

3. Get over your ex.
It's over. I doubt he's still worrying about it, so why the hell are you? There are zillions of great men in th world and by God, i bet even some are better than he was for you and would be kinder, better looking and possibly a better lay - heavens to betsey! but you cannot moan about him anymore. Your friends are bored and if you are being honest with yourself, so are you. You are bored and you want to move on. So do it already.

4. Listen to loud music
Yes, do this and listen along and sing along and dance around in your bra and panties miming Madonna. It's a good thing to do and lets out a ton of aggression and nerves and its good for the soul - i'm convinced. So do it and have a great time. Dancing in the kitchen while wearing a push up bra and leaning over your wonderful italian sauce is a great way to live. Have fun in life and get over yourself.

There is a great deal more, but for now, i leave you with these few. As always, there will be more forthcoming...

be good out there, and be careful among the english,

auntie sadi

be young

I'm trying to remember what it was to be just young, just beginning to understand the ways of the heart and the body, more to the point. the first stirrings of desire that one feels as an early teen, if not sooner, and you find yourself reaching for classmates and finding yourself in cut-class sticky fumblings and sweet summer fields and those landscapes that lay beyond the closed doors of your parent's house, because it's all you've got and you'll take it because what you feel is hunger.

I tend to be a cynic here, and firmly believe that what we feel at such a young age is rarely the real thing, if the "real" thing exists at all, even as we age. This, of course, begs the question right away, what is the "real" thing and how does anyone define love for someone else. You can't. it's that simple. Love is what we feel. It is that thing that connects us to some other on a level that hits deeper than a desire for some other. It's about want and need and lust and yearning and a soft of weird mutual and much maligned codependence. At it's core, there is nothing wrong with co-dependence. It can be a beautifully working thing, a mechanism that keeps two people spinning in the same orbit.

Too often I hear that we all need to be these islands of people, so okay and together on our own and with no need of others. That we can exist all by ourselves and with no support system whatsoever, yet I don't really know anybody like this in reality. To a greater or lesser extent, we all can achieve this sort of mad independence and be righteous and proud of it. And why not. Being independent is good and needing other people, or even wanting other people, is often dangerous territory. Feelings can go unreturned, love is not always mutual, rejections abound, even dislikes or worse, the complete noncommittal stance of one who could care one way or the other about you and hardly knows of your existence. These are the dangers of what we call love, or more appropriately perhaps, desire. The heart wants what it wants and seeks it out.

I watch as those younger go about arm in arm, awkward in their newfound adulthood, finding their way along the corridor of being sexually comfortable with each other as they reach to each other with complete inexperience and ignorance. The land of what is not known. We've all been there, and somehow, most of us find our way through it and to the other side. I even know people who are now married to that first girl they met in junior high school and had their first experience of love, of sex, and remained in that place forever, and happily so. It's always somewhat bewildered me. How is it possible, I thought, to just know in that way that you need to know, to never want to experience another person, to just be so solid in that love that this is the One, the Only, the person who will always be there.

Perhaps it's not so simple. Perhaps you just hook up and the years tick by one by one and the next thing you know you are fifty and still with that girl or boy from junior high that you took to the prom and who found you in the backseat of his or her dad's sedan and you knew then that nothing would ever be this pure, this good, this visceral. After all, let's face it; there is little in life that we allow ourselves that is as absolutely visceral as those first, early experiences of sex and love. After as we get older, we enter the world of should and ought (sadly) and desire becomes a mixed bag. We shouldn't want another because we are pre-engaged or because our faith tells us so, or because we are taught that promiscuity is wrong, or because social roles tell is a girl should have X number of partners and a boy Y number and that number will vary from generation to generation, town to town, country to country, and so on... it's always shifting, moving, like youth itself, so changeable. But no matter where you are or who you are, there is that meter that clicks over at just around thirteen or fourteen, or for some, a bit earlier, that says that the moment is Now. That it is now that we must go out and seek that person and that our classmates or third cousin who the boy at the beach etc is the person with whom we will venture into this unknown land. In short, a person who is at the same age and stage and who is willing and ready to go on the voyage with us.

I remember those early experiences, and I remember that for me, they were perhaps a bit too innocent. That my girlfriends were doing things that for me, didn't yet feel right and I waited a few years longer, but I remember vividly the desire and the yearning that I felt for one boy in particular, and feeling in that summer that no one, anywhere, would ever measure up in the way that Thomas did. That Thomas with his tennis racket and his sandy blonde hair and his lavender-blue eyes was the only boy I would ever "love." and I do mean love. I felt that I was deeply in love with Thomas and when he left to go off to college to Yale, and away from the more reachable Philips Andover, I felt that a piece of me had been taken away. It didn't help that the popular radio song at the time was "Every Time You Go Away" and "Missing You" and the like. I listened to them with great pain. Went out of my way to avoid them, and yet I would be sitting in the backseat of the car and suddenly, there it was, all the old pain (and it was pain) and that fucking huge blackness that I felt was left behind when Thomas left. All I could think about was the way he kissed me and I knew in my heart, I thought, that nobody, anywhere, would ever kiss me that way again and I would never want to be kissed like that again because a desire like that was impossible.

I was fifteen and deeply moved. I was fifteen and in love and my parents made fun of me, laughing at my pubescent tears and my long, boring letters to Thomas's father (since Thomas himself did not seem to retain the same depth of feeling that I did and had, after several months of heart-wrenching letters, finally admitted that he had since fallen in love with some dark-haired girl named Meredith who looked an awful lot like Tatum O'Neal, who, at the time, I thought was at the pinnacle of beauty and desire by preppie boys everywhere. I was no Tatum O'Neal. I was more like a bad version of nobody. There was no equal actress with whom I could compare, except perhaps Bette Davis, who had similar eyes in some ways (or so I was told a few times, which caused me great distress because she seemed so old, until Kim Carnes wrote the song and made it somewhat cooler to have Bette Davis eyes -- then I was proud.) So Thomas moved on, and I never heard from him again. I did stay in touch with has father, who I'm sure thought me a real nut, but humored me nonetheless and wrote me lengthy letters about his life and about his experience in the Korean war.

For months, I pined. I went to the old Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and sat high up on the hill reading Marcus Aurelius Meditations and preparing myself to start college in a few months. I was still a kid. Barely sixteen, and being thrust too soon into the world by some accident of differences in the European and American educational systems and pushed ahead by too many grades, too soon, and while I was tested intellectually prepared for this leap into society, I was in no way prepared for it emotionally. College girls had already learned the rough lessons of first love and had moved on. By now, they were on their third or fourth boyfriend, serious or not, and few, I found, still held onto their virginity. IT was not, at the time, a hip thing to do (as it became for Generation Next -- who seemed to hold onto it for many years longer than previous generations had). I was sorry that I had read so much freaking philosophy and philosophized my way out of what likely would have been one of the best experiences of my life, which would have been to lose my virginity to Thomas who at least, if he wouldn't be the forever guy, was certainly the right guy for the right now, and it would have been good and sweet and all the things I think it should be for a young person just venturing out.

To be clear: I didn't want to get fucked, not at that age. Not literally, not metaphorically. I wanted to be made love to, or my idea of what making love was anyway, and although I had fantasies in which we did it, I had been reading Plato and his ideas that sex drained the mind of its creative energy and Aurealius who was a real Stoic (as we know) and so I stuck by my "only over the bra" rule (much to Thomas's frustration and my own, for that matter.) Yes, I wanted to know what that hardness in his tennis shorts was all about; often when we kissed, I straddled him and felt him beneath me, moving gently in the summer grass, the mosquitoes nipping the bare backs of my leg and my ass under my tennis skirt. The truth is, I was afraid. Whatever it was that he had there felt strong and firm and good but at the same time, it felt grown up and foreign and slightly terrifying to a young girl my age, my size, a little petite at the time, and he was a bit tall. The confluence of such factors made this a no go, and we left it at relatively heavy petting, and I'm deeply sorry about it.

The point is, as I watch my own family now go through these same stages, I want them not to be as locked up as I was at their age, and although they are not starting work at college at fifteen as I was -- which was certainly too much -- in a way, their place reserved in high school for a few more years is the best thing. I watch as our own children reach out to those others; the pretty girl with the long hair and soft features and legs as lean as poplars. I look at her and I can see the sweetness that no doubt, our own boy can see. What's more, I can see, I believe, what it is that he finds desirable there, because I know that once, I was her, or like her. And once, I knew a boy who was as good and as honorable as he is and that I loved him.

Forget about whether that love was real, because that is a bogus argument anyway. One could say that of any love and question a love at forty as being real or not real. It is real if you say it is. IF you feel it is. It is real if it feels that way to you, and despite emotional maturity and the rest of the argument, the heart still aches, breaks, and yearns and it wants what it wants and that is good enough for me. If that is not love, then I don't know what love is. Yes, I simplify, but perhaps we overcomplicate this stuff anyway, and that was my great mistake.

Marcus Aurelius and Plato and Aristotle and all of my other excuses not to venture into the good ngiht with Thomas are just that -- excuses. They were a quick and convenient defense for a thing that I feared and clearly was not ready for. I was fifteen to his eighteen, and so perhaps that is understandable, but in many ways, the experience could be a metaphor to other ways in which I have lived and sometimes, still find myself living -- or not living as the case may be. Its' fine to intellectualize things and talk about them, but life is in the doing. It's in the getting out there and living it, not in the thinking about it. I could agree with Plato and Aurelius all afternoon, but at the end of the day when night set in or when the sun rose the next day, I still wanted Thomas and by God, I wanted him with me, right then, as Sinead O Connor sang, I wanted his hands on me. Whatever and however that was or would be, it was what I wanted, and though we had made great great strides in that direction, our love was never fully consummated. He left and went off into the sunset with Meredith, who, for all I know, perhaps he married and had little preppie and cute babies with, and I, well, I left and went to work for a huge publishing conglomerate at a job that I was absolutely not ready for, and to a college where I, appropriately, studied all those great men who had managed to keep me so chaste for so long only to throw it away eventually because I got tired of waiting for another Thomas. Instead, i gave all of this thinking and over --thinking. I should have been having searching and fumbling first love or sex or fucking or whatever you want to call it. I should have been dying of heat and of heat in the mid-summer sun and learning what it means to truly give in to desire, over and over and over again, and the fuck with what anyone said, including my family, including his family, including teachers and by God, especially including Plato and fucking Marcus Aurelius.

Their wishes and thoughts and philosophies are all well and fine and have served me well later in life, but youth is meant to be lived and lived fully. Not to be sat out on the periphery, on the edge or the stands looking down on those friends who were having all the fun and wondering what gumption what it was that they had that you didn't that made them, in your eyes, so brave and grown up. In my case, it was truly simple youth and matter of age; my classmates were older, and though Thomas was only three years older, there is a world of difference between fifteen and eighteen, especially a stringent Anglican by way of North London Episcopal-schooled girl and an American boy who played tennis all summerlong and got to hang out by the beach parking lot making sure no trespassers parked at the private beach (talk about a dream job). Our worlds were completely different, and though they collided, they could also have overlapped, had I only been able to get past the smack of -- or the thought of the smack of -- a nun's sharp ruler smacking hard on my knuckle.

I tell our children, live now. I see them with their great loves, they tell me, and I admire their unyielding drive to one end goal, which seems to be to explore as much as possible both physically and metaphorically. I allow them to close the door fully, even though many other relatives would chide me for this, for children of the opposite sex at "that age" should "never be left alone in a bedroom." By God, they must just do what nature had intended!

All I can say in closing is this: let our children not make the same mistakes I did. What a waste that would be. I pull the door shut with a quick wink; hope it lands in the right place.

be depressed

I hate to advise anyone to be depressed or to wallow, because as a general rule, walling is for the self-indulgent among us and those who go about creating their own drama. So, this post warrants some clarification. I am not suggested that one work or aim for being depressed. This is not a goal to which one strives. But, nonetheless, we often find ourselves due to circumstances in life that are well beyond our control, in a very depressed and listless state, unable to even get up out of bed and wash our glowing locks or brush even our teeth.

First, it's always a good idea to brush your teeth, no matter how desperate you are. Apart from that, however, I don't know that there is anything wrong with allowing yourself to wallow for one day in your own much. What I am saying is that one day of Stadium Self-Pity is allowed, even advisable. The Day of Stadium Self-Pity was developed by Ian and Sadi, so don't go about trying to steal our copyrighted day. You can, however, allow yourself to participate in this day and in what I am quite sure will soon be a worldwide movement and certified as actually good for the public's health. After all, we all have those days, those moments, and to fight against them and get up and go to work on such a day might actually be the worst possible thing you could do: you're not going to be yourself, you are likely to screw up more, more likely to get into a car accident or argument. In short, you are sort of at war with the world on this day and so it's best to take my advice and stay in. Close the doors, pile on the blankets or the air-conditioner (season depending), get your favorite teddy bears with you, inhale the soft and fuzzy smell of your bear's head which is comforting and soothing (remember how your stuff-animals comforted you as a child? same principal applies, oh an don't tell me you're too old for stuffed animals! If you are, then you are no fun and need to loosen up a little bit; stuffed animals are often the cure for what ails ya.)

Okay: For this day you will need: blankets or an afghan, a soft bed or couch, several films, preferably the mushy, romantic tear-jerker variety, though note that The Matrix does fit into this category because of Trinity and Neo, a cup of hot tea or cocoa (some hot beverage), the TV or DVD remote at hand (you can tie this to your wrist with a ribbon on this day because this is what you are going to do). Now that you have gathered all of the things that will cushion this depression, there are some extras that can apply, depending on your personality. For me, I like to get a few volumes of poetry (Plath's Ariel is an excellent choice if your current state of mind relates back to a man), though Sandra Cisneros is a good choice to for the tougher chicks among us.

Now that you have everything you need, you can lay about in your pajamas, because getting dressed would be pointless; we all know the world is coming or has come to an end on this day, right? You're depressed, so you just know that your eventual demise is imminent. Cuddle up and pop in the film or cuddle up and read. Get completely into the characters and moan to a friend about how much your life is like theirs, or likewise, read your book and cry for all of the women throughout time who have had a difficult life or have been labeled "difficult" and "emotional" and "needy." What the hell is wrong with that, you think. You're all of those things. Right! So read Bitch by Elizabeth Wurtzel (highly recommended reading for so-called difficult women everywhere.

Start seeing that whatever it is that has you this upset is probably not worth it. You can't see it with your own situation, but you can see it in the works of others. Look at our Sylvia Plath, who grew up just around the corner from where Auntie Sadi is presently living, her childhood home facing the same cold Atlantic as my home, just a half-block from the gray ocean. Read "The Rival" and "The Rabbit Catcher" poems that deal with Plath's Husband, Ted Hughes' infidelity with a woman whose name was Assia Weevill. Imagine being brilliant and blonde and being dumped for a woman who has a name like some kind of insect! Talk about Bridget Jones being dumped for the American Stick Insect! Our Sivvy had to endure losing her husband, her Colossus, the One she thought, of her life to a stick insect who worked in yes, advertising and public relations. Oh, I have nothing against the field myself. I've worked in both, but come on, let's be honest; we know that to work in this field means to force yourself to be one of the publicity clones that I see every day on the train and in the mall.

They are the sad and searching girls who put on the happy and perfect face. They are never wallowing in depression like you are right now. Oh no. Not the publicity girl. Her name is something like Felicity or Caitlin or something weird and modern and she always has perfect make up and perfect skin. She never breaks out, even at that time of the month (one wonders if this even happens to this woman, for she is so controlled that I reckon she could will herself not to menstruate if she so wanted.)

This publicity girl is dressed in head to toe Lily Pulitzer or Anne Taylor or Banana Republic. Her make up is all from Nars and she wears Orgasm blush because it's better to fake it than to actually do it, since that would take some time and likely mess up her highlights, and hey, who has time for sex when you could be getting your roots done at Sax Fifth Avenue or by some hairstylist who goes by his or her first initial only, like J. She is never more than a six four or six at most. She is Jennifer Aniston at her thinnest, bordering on Mary Kate Olsen who went the way of the anorexic and fell victim to this ridiculous social standard that women should weigh no more than a small bird, or at most, a Thanksgiving turkey, which is to say that you should hardly tip the scale if you want to be loved; Which means you'll have virtually no breasts because breasts - really good and ample C-cup breasts do not come of fasting but of health and food and are made mostly of fat, which is what makes them so lovely and creamy and full. Don't eat, and watch your breasts dry into small prunes. Who wants that?

Apparently many people want this because anorexia and bulimia are now more common in both young and older women, so the disease is spreading and small wonder. This may even be part of why you are depressed because, poor you, you are a size eight and are in a world of Twiggys who run about like young newly born deer on their super-skinny legs that collapse under them should they pick up a heavy file. It's tres elegant and tres gamine, but really, is that what you want to be? Do you want to be the delicate little flower so that a certain type of man will desire you? (To note, this type of man makes me nervous. Not all men want a waif, though I agree there is something attractive about certain waifs, but by and large, the man who wants only the waif, regardless of who she is, is a bit of a perv.

He reminds me of Humbert Humbert of Lolita fame, pursuing small women to show his own bigness and strength. The smaller you are, the more powerful he feels. The more you are his little girl or his baby. Really, unless you are naturally this small, which I understand, being rather frail myself despite any effort to pack on the pounds. But if you are not naturally this way, do you really want to be like some frail and fainting Victorian woman, dying of consumption with your body literally eating itself, your breasts turning into two empty pastry bags? Ugh. Then go read Idols of Perversity which is all about the cult of the feminine at the turn of the century and have at it. But if you want to be healthy and strong, which I know deep down you do, then get up and have that cream puff or donut right now!

Yes, I said Eat! I know, being depressed often takes away the appetitive but I think we should force ourselves to eat because when your day of Stadium Self Pity is over, you will realize that it is actually a good thing that you don't look like an Advertising insect, that you love your C-cup breasts and that you don't want a man who calls you his little girl, and you certainly don't want to call anyone Daddy other than Daddy himself, who by now, is probably Dad, which is more suitable and grown-up sounding than a grown woman called Dad "Daddy" - which I had never heard a grown woman say anywhere except in the states. There is a whole cult of the thin and poor little girl contriving to keep you weightless and defying gravity and orbiting around your Daddy figure. To fall prey to this is to allow yourself to be a victim; to work so hard at being thin and frail and morose that you are a threat to nobody and nobody is a threat to you because it would be too easy to beat you at anything and you're just too darn fragile to fight. Instead, you evoke feelings of pity.

Let me be clear: no matter what you think, you never ever ever want to be pitied. To be pitied is to have sunk so low that you no longer are a threat to anyone in any way. A strong woman is always a threat to somebody, either because of the way she looks or her intelligence or her charm or sense of humor or her beauty or a combination of all these and much more. This is not to say that you should strive to be a threat. Absolutely not. But you cannot live your life so that you are always backing off less you threaten anybody or upset them. That is no way to live! You must live your life fully and wholly! If your je ne sais quoi happens to be a threat to someone, then direct them to this article and they too can learn how to strengthen and validate themselves.

Secure people are not threatened by something that is good. Only the absurdly insecure (which you may be yourself but you can learn how to change this) are threatened by other people to such a degree that they lash out. I have met these people and they have targeted even me because I threatened various things that they felt they themselves lacked. This made me prime bully meat and it wasn't fun. Read more about bullies here. The experience was hard and hurtful and awful. But I am and was aware that as a general rule, bullies only pick the best among us. There is a reason the bully picks you and it's because you are something s/he is not: you are light, bright, and typically unaware of your effect on people, meaning you are humble, not vain, and you just go about your life. To a bully, this is huge threat. Think of other bully targets: Snow White, Cinderella, Lady Diana, and many many more. Start your own list. But note that bullies always pick the incandescent beauties and they do so because of their own fear or realization that they are the ugly step-sister to be forever relegated to a life of second best in every other aspect. Should this person have some seniority over you at work or even if not, they will make it their business to get you fired or to screw up (I’ve experienced both.)

There is little comfort for these types of nasty political situations, yet the one thing I do know is that even if you lose your job or leave, just remember that you will and can move on. The person who helped hurry your exit is likely to never be more than they are at this moment. You can move on and up; the bully, by contrast, is forever relegated to the backroom or the bowels of the corporation, and rarely to the top. At the top, we often see those we had thought were weak - the manic depressives and epileptics of the world are those most likely to achieve greatness and/or run companies. This is because they are so incredibly driven by these nutty ideals and this higher moral vision that is so whacked that nobody else understands it but whatever the motor, it works. As an epileptic, I can attest to this incredible drive: it is at once our downfall and our saving grace. Embrace who you are, doing so will get you to the top of any situation, work or otherwise, eventually. Any degree of madness is liable to help in terms of greatness, and I don’t say “mad” here as derogatory. I think to be mad is often to be brilliant, that the two are not mutually exclusive as so many believe. Epilepsy is a neurological condition, yet many, mostly ignorant people, want to categorize it as a mental illness with the likes of Borderline Personality Disorder and Manic Depression, both of which are completely different and totally unrelated to either each other and epilepsy. I’m not say to be one is to be ashamed and the other is not; what I am saying is that people are ignorant. First, in thinking the two are related and second, in thinking that if you have any condition that affects the brain, including a brain tumor, that you are coo coo for Cocoa Puffs. I’ve had it with that shit. Let’s get this straight: these are often the people who run the world! Enough. Just do yer damn research; I’m tired of giving the names of world leaders past and present, great writers, great scientists, Nobel Prize winners etc etc. to ignorant people. Just know you are great and believe in your own greatness. If you are convinced of it, no one else will be.

Feeling better? Feel like you have some research to do? It’s time to rest now, because tomorrow is a brand new day and Stadium Self Pity only lasts for one day. After that, you must get back on your feet, wipe away the tears and face the world. You are not a fragile thing that will break, even though you may feel that way at times. You are tough enough to face this, and as our Bruce Springstein would say, “Baby, I’m tougher than the rest.”

celebrate your birthday | letters home

i never understood how my grandparents could forget their age. i would ask and they would actually argue about the correct number of years. now, years later, i find that i too cannot easily remember my age; that i know i am old enough, but can't quite land on the correct number. depending on the day you ask, i may be older or younger, which also may be dependent on how i feel on that day.

today, i was told so long ago, is my birthday. On this date, i was born. All those years ago. I even have the London Times from the day i was born, and born, appropriately, into a fierce gale - the kind of tropical depression that never hits London. i believed this for many years, until very recently when i had to use my birth-certificate for some official business. the document actually said i was born two days later than i had been told. in short, the day i had been told was my birthday was wrong; officially anyway, i was born two days later - making me a bit younger, and if you believe in astrology and that sort of thing, then all of my charts and the like would be essentially wrong. this may account for the inaccuracy of my star-signs, as they are called. they seemed close enough, but not quite on the mark. perhaps my moon was not in mercury or whatever. perhaps it was really somewhere else and my whole life i have lived by this sort of predetermined what i thought i shoud be crap and it was all wrong. this gives me the unique opportunity of, somewhat later in life, changing my entire destiny by revisiting all of the qualities that i had been taught i should be based on a birth date that was inaccurate. now, i plan to take life anew and revise who i am, because i don't believe in pre-determination anyway - you make your own luck, just as you make your destiny.

the questions; must i determine who i want to be and then strive for that? or, is it wiser to just BE and then determine who you are based on your and other's experience of who you are and what you stand for. i suppose you don't really know until you are in the moment. all of this "i would never..." crap that people say is stupid. it's hard to say what one would do if you haven't already lived it. i would like to think there are things i would never do - that my moral compass is set in the right and good direction - but i am not vain enough to say with complete authority that i know a thing for certain. god knows i have done things that have surprised even me, including those who love me best. not necessariy bad things, just things that seemed "out of character" they had said. but if you do a thing, isn't that by definition within you character? isn't the very nature and accuracy of your having done a thing, something you would do? i can't say yet. i suppose i will wait and see what the future holds. i will live by my own, very strong, moral code and try to live a life that is right and good.

tonight, on what is not my birthday, i will walk along the stony beach with my husband. i will take in his eyes and see them for the first time because i haven't been born yet - i am still a hungry ghost looking for a place to land. that soft place to fall that i've written about before.

don't wish me happy birthday yet. i like that i am here and yet still not - it gives me something to look forward to, as if i could witness my own violent birth into the world, on which i was said to have been born in the middle of a strong gale in London - the worst still in British history; this much is true. We know that on that day, the rain and wind were strong. that the catholic hospital turned us away and that i was born elsewhere. all this i know, yet i am not here.

i could reach down from some heaven and touch you - a soft wind on your cheek.

tonight i celebrate not knowing. i celebrate human error, those things that make us who we are; all the subtle details. Does it matter what day i was born? Does it matter that, for all these years, we had it wrong, or is it in some small way a gift ~~ that i have lived a life two days before i lived in some ways. how is it my family didn't notice this before now? Today, i received a birthday card from my mother. she had written firmly on the back in her curly script September 5, as if to say the matter is decided and that is that. I hadn't mentioned the birthday dates not quite aligning, or the accuracy that we all seem to have overlooked for such a very long time.

A friend said, Doesn't it bother you that your own family didn't know??? Does it show you that they checked out somewhere, that they didn't care enough to get the actual date you were born right?? As if that were all that mattered in this life. I said, No. It didn't matter. It just told me they wished i had been here sooner than i actually was - who else could feel so wanted, i ask...

i still do not know my age - it seems that nobody really does i once had a boyfriend who used to tell me that Neil Young's "You are like a hurricane" song was about me. There's storm in my eyes - i could blow anyone away on this day.



- sadi ranson-polizzotti

be radical

When i was younger (and i know it's hard to imagine your Auntie Sadie as a young woman but you'll have to take my word for it for i cut quite the figure and was quite the It girl of the time), i was not the serious matronly aunt you know today. In fact, by the age of fifteen, i had joined the Young Socialist Alliance and wore too much black, dyed my naturally light hair jet blue-black and sore one of those funny terrorist scarves around my neck (you know the type - black and white and looking like they were picked up in some baazar, not Harvard Square). I even had a card that said i was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance.

We young socialists felt it our mission to spread the good word of socialism and attend public rallies for middle-ground politicans and the like and be generally as disruptive as possible. We stood up and protested in the middle of candidates speeches, we sold our own newspaper by hand, we hung out only with other socialists and we made it our business to get arrested, or close to it, by staging peaceful demonstrations that we often co-hosted with other groups, such as PETA and local anti-vivisection organizations like NEAVS. It was, of course, Auntie Sadi's fate to join the animal rights movement, and i did so with a vengeance. Oh yes, i wore a bunny suit to protests, i picketed General Motors when they were still crashtesting pigs in cars and Gillette when they were still, fetishistically, applying make up to rabbits. I would have none of it. And i would be there every time, prompt and sporting my bunny costume and ready for business.

You see, if you saw me now, you would think me a rather staid and dull lady of a certain age, but a caring auntie nonetheless. But what i have found is that to be this way when one is young proves that you have a heart. The French said, and this i translate very loosely, that if a man is liberal as a child he has a heart, if he is a liberal when he grows older, he has no brain. Something like that.

I think when you are young you should follow the surge and uprise of movements. Any movement will do provided it is outside of your normal range of activity and though so much the better if it is a movement you actually believe in. This means not sitting around and watching TV with your friends on Saturday, but getting up, zipping up your bunny costume in the dead of winter, driving out to remote locations where they house such things as nuclear power plants, and seeing how close you can get with you picket sign before you are arrested. Or, you could do what i did, which is to protest hunting in areas that are enclosed (a canned hunt, because where the mcfuck are the deer going to go? it's shooting fish in a barrel. You could join the Red Cross and be like Joan of Arc. You could join the USO, your local library - heck, there are a hundred such causes just waiting for you to come a knockin' . You could help a lot of people and yes, you could even change the world, but it will not happen if you hide inside your shell and see only the same friends every day. Broaden your horizons!

You see, when you are young, you can get away with this stuff and more, it lends a certain vitality to the soul and the spirit to know that on this day you did something for someone or some animal or cause, and broke free of your emotive shell. Instead of sitting around and moping because Billy Bob didn't call, you could be out there protesting circuses and elephant abuse and what not. You could tell the world that rabbits do not need any more eye make-up and that they looked better before. You can start reading all the great classics by Peter Singer and Rachel Carlson. If you are lucky (or unlucky, depending on your circumstance) you could even wind up like Auntie Sadi dressed in her bunny garb with the head under her arm and be have your picture splattered all over the UPI Newswire. Imagine that! Now, you're family may not be so pleased with your newfound fervor for bunnies or deer or socialism or Ayn Rand, but no matter. As long as you stay within some sort of regulated and normal structure (READ: joining the Krishnas is not what i advocate here, nor is joining a Manson-esque cult or moving off to some weird rural ranch with some charismatic loser like the late David Koresh. He is exactly the type of man you are moving away from, charisma or no charisma, he's bad news.

So, i encourage you to be radical within reason. I don't want to see you getting dragged out of the screen on the evening news by a cop weilding a billy club to your wilted flower. But get involved, put your passion to a cause and all of that vitality you have into a group or a cause or a person(s) that could benefit from it. Stop wasting it on which color OPI nail varnish you will use this evening. Instead, yu might look into the Free Tibet movements etc. You could even take up meditation, learn what your dosha is, take up yoga, anything - but get involved, be dynamic, dare to be silly and dress up like a rabbit. I still have that photo of me from the newswire, and though i now work for many large corporations, that photograph will always keep me grounded and tell me who i am at my core.

Onward! Be brave, be bold, stay curious, never settle.

see this article at the famous Cleveland blogcritics>>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/30/235428.php

they're playing our song!

Ever have a song that was "your" song in a relationship and now you can't bear to hear it, or you find yourself changing the lyrics t into bitter, nasty words? if so, this article is for you. Maybe you'll find a new song. more>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/30/185351.php

being there

Every day I see messages that tell me and other women who we should be. This includes everything from what we look like and the clothes we wear, to what our inner-most desires should be. As of late, I suppose I should be growing my hair long and straight and giving it a slight wave, a la Gwyneth, Charlize, and the rest of that gang. I should join the Kabbalah center because right now, it’s fashionable. I should wear mousse make-up and a center part and a red thread around my wrist (this last I sometimes do because I happen to believe, though I suspect for some it ahs become little more than a fashion statement, alas – Lfaith as fashion. more>>>> http://svbeingthere.blogspot.com/

scents & sense

Smell is the basis for everything, and if you’ve read my work before then you know what a strongly held principle this is for me – really. Smell can link us back to the past in a flash, faster than any photograph or words can. more>>>>http://senseandscents.blogspot.com/2004/08/smell-is-basis-for-everything-and-if.html

love & lust on film

Love and lust on film. Are you one of these girls mentioned here. Pray no. Read how Scarface and Bridget Jones may be more connected than you think. more>>>>http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/05/27/124625.php

bitchery in the workplace | meet the new American bully

All over the world, and most especially, in corporate America, a terrible war is being waged, one that seems so unlikely and preposterous. It is woman against woman, and it is a systematic and conscious marginalizing of smart, talented, women of all looks, race and shape who face a daily work-place assault by the least likely of oppressors– their female supervisor – one who subjects her underlings to such extreme and inappropriate behavior that if a man did it (and with today’s laws, he wouldn’t, not if he were smart anyway), would be facing a sexual harassment suit faster than you could say “Anita Hill.” more>>> http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/06/02/135848.php

be courageous

photo: "after immigration" s.r.p.
I’ve debated writing this article for months, or maybe even a year now, and yet… and yet… when it comes to the truth, and by truth I mean ultimate Truth, there is nothing written here that is not true and so with that said, let me begin to tell you of my tales of working with, or trying to work cooperatively with INS ~ that is the immigration & naturalization service and USCIS ~ United States Customs & Immigration Services. >>>more.

food & sex

I see this a lot and it really bothers me. Women of all ages eating food as if they were in some kind of orgasmic state, licking their fingers and sucking on strawberries and asparagus and other so-called “finger foods” – a definition that has become, if you ask me, far too broad – and making loud ooo-ing and aah sounds. Really, they look more like they have Turrets Syndrome, with all this unfocused and unnecessary (and unwanted) noise and slurping. What they think is that this is sexy somehow, and they have taken our Dr. Freud just a little too far.

Eating like a pig, though you make think yourself a young filly, is not sexy; it is stupid and you look stupid doing it. Eat properly, eat with manners, and never ever ever lick your fingers or “sop” (another disgusting term) gravy or any other gooey substance off your plate with bread, unless it is olive oil and you’re eating bread, in which case, it is acceptable.

Dessert is good, and you should always have it. But the food you get for dessert is not sex. Nor is it a precursor to sex in any literal way. It may be the thing you consume before sex, before you consume a boyfriend, but they are two different things entirely; one vegetable, the other, I hope, more mineral or rock. Eat like a lady. If you need to, buy Tiffany’s Table Manners For Teens (I don’t care if your forty, if you eat like this, you need to read this book.) Sexual noises are to be made when having actual, real sex, not with food.

Sex is sex, food is food.

Amen.

Herr Doctor!

Oh the things we hate to think about and talk about and do. Dealing with doctors, especially the gyn is about the most dreaded exam. We shave, we pouff ourselves with powder, some of us even go out and buy ridiculous feminine sprays because we've been brainwashed into thinking that we smell bad "down there" which is to say your privates dear, which don't smell at all really and if anything, i recently read that a healthy woman should smell like good wine - a bit winey, a bit sweet. Maybe this is why it is rumored the French love to go oh so often to our own private Rio. Who knows. But I digress....

What I mean to talk about, briefly, is male doctors, or female for that matter, who have this job and with whom you feel uncomfortable. Whatever the reason, i'm sure it's a good one. You didn't just set out to not like this person, right? You went to your appointment in good faith, you showed up on time, thighs shaved, all scented and lovely, and they either said or did something that made you feel uncomfortable. Hey, i once had a guy who told me if it hurt, that's how i knew i had good sex. He also never had a nurse in the room, never asked me if i wanted one (i did) , and when we talked about my problem told me better to try "other things." This is hardly a solution to a real medical problem. To simply drive around the issue is not a resolution: it's simple avoidance. Yet i listened to his advice as if it some meaning because i was trained to be polite while people, especially men, are speaking. And if they are doctors, all the more so.

Now, maybe Auntie Sadi is just too freakin' Episcopalian and dull and rigid and maybe she even has some body issues, but knowing when a doctor is on the wrong track is not an issue about which i have any question. I know that i can judge this fairly, and i know that what he said was wrong for me. Now, maybe some of you more with it girls would go to a doctor with tearing there etc. and be tickled by his comment and even laugh, though i doubt it. And even if we laugh, it is, let's face it, out of our socially trained politeness that has told us to be this way and laugh at men's jokes even if they are dismissive (in this case) or even degrading.

Here's the, uh, long and short of it: if you feel uncomfortable for any reason, get out. Leave immediately. Have a friend call on your cell phone or pretend that it vibrated and you have a sudden emergency. You could also say you feel uncomfortable and get out - but here again we face our ingrained and trained feminine ways of wanting to please so it's unlikely that you'll do that. But, whatever you have to do, get out, find a new doctor, and that's that. And, if they crossed a line with you, report them. For advice on this, email me directly or put a note in comments and i'll guide you to the right path.

Okay? Knees together, onward!

bleaching a broken heart

It’s a glorious summer day, not too hot, and breezy. The sort of day tailor-made for lovers. The guy i adore is probably making love with some nothing woman he met at work even as i type this.

I, on the other hand, have just returned from the drugstore. Not that I need anything. I just like drugstore items. I like the flourescent lights and the racks of make-up. They make me feel young again; they remind me of being sixteen and buying Bonne Bell lipgloss. And, this particular drugstore is my favorite because it has aisles of household items, specifically, cleaning products. Dust mitts with electro-charged attractants, ready-made mops that squirt Clorox bleach on the floor, orange oil for cleaning up goo, Murphy’s wood soap (a smell I find incredibly comforting), glass cleaners, bathroom wipes and toilet bowl deodorizers. They also have plug-in air fresheners and I have outfitted the whole house with them, but since I only like one of the fragrances they offer, I throw out the “tropical mist” scent they come with and replace all of them with lilac. I have also polished all of the silver, re-arranged the furniture, fixed three antique clocks, wound every clock in the house except He’s which I have left unwound because it records the actual tangible end of love. At least, I think it does.

On my nightstand I have four clocks, all of them loud tickers and all of them wind-up. I hate electric clocks. I have also purchased at least four different facial cleansers, all of them with acids that peel away dead skin cells. Then I have three night creams, all of them a version of Retin A and on antibiotic acne cream. Then there’s the black tube which I use on deep furrows like the one between my eyes that comes from crying. And let’s not forget the Vitamin C cream and the Palmers Fade Cream which, even though I never go in the sun and am literally white as sheet, I use to bleach my skin. I want to turn, bleach, clean, dissolve myself away. My teeth are not exempt and are bleached twice each day with Crest White Strips (which really do work) to achieve maximum whiteness. I also have highlights in my hair, so parts of my hair are white too, and then there are the gray parts.

I take drugs to help me not feel. In my already altered state of consciousness I wish to alter my conscience *yes, they are prescription and i take them as prescribed, don't worry). In between rare free moments of not bleaching and cleaning I read books about adultery and think about what my husband is doing at that moment. Now, at three-thirty-five on a Friday afternoon, I imagine he has already kissed her. Probably already ejaculated and said, “Your orgasms are amazing,”, performed oral sex “no one tastes as good as you.” That he feels very grown-up because, as we all know, only grown-ups have affairs.. Honesty, fear, sorrow – we equate these emotions with children, but I can tell you, I think these emotions are far more adult than deceit and weakness.

I imagine they are in a brownstone somewhere in the city. I can see the city from the beach near our house and I know that he is somewhere in that city, somewhere with her. The sun has gone in and it has become dark, like before a big storm. If I could just zero-in I could see them. But I can. They have the shades pulled and the window cracked. The brownstone she shares with her husband is grand and beautiful and old. Her husband is seeing patients in another part of the city and won’t be home yet for hours. Her hair is tousled. They are talking and laughing and laying on the bed. Sometimes, she asks him about me and he tells her things that are private, that she has no business knowing. He tells her how sad he is about my cancer and this makes her feel bad.

She cries a little bit because she knows this is wrong. He says, “Come here, let me hold you,” like he used to say to me. He strokes her hair and offers her his handkerchief. They make-love again and they don’t use condoms. Condoms are too real and they must keep the fantasy alive. Condoms say “premeditation”. The only demand is reasonably good sex, which is easy because, with all of the anticipation, it is easily released.

You see - there's nothing magical about it. Really, it's as banal as all this bleaching that's gone on lately. Just sort of faded back and lacking in any real substance or color. If you're in this situation, never fret, sweets, we can help get you out of it. Christ, if i can get myself through such miseries, then perhaps i can help out a fellow female or two.

first times

I think our first experience of love shapes us, prepares us and sets us on a course for the lovers that follow. Remember being a teenager and being ‘in love’? Looking back, do you think that what you felt was real love, or was it a strong infatuation? I think in most cases, if we are honest, what we felt when we were young was infatuation. And it was strong. I know that I spent endless hours wondering whether Thomas really cared for me or not, whether he was kissing that wretched other girl, Meredith, at prep school, who was more like him and probably better suited, but that wasn’t the point. Thomas became the embodiment of all that was desirable. He was the yellow golden apple that just begged to be picked. So over the course of a warm, sandy summer, I kissed him on the beach, I kissed him in the nearby cemetery, because it was private and beautiful there, and from there we could sit and talk and look out at the sea, which was beautiful and wild. We never did more than kiss, but those kisses lasted for hours, and when we were worn out, both of us would be covered in large welts of mosquito bites, lured to our sweet-sweaty skin.

Thomas had sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and a strong tennis body with blonde hairs on his arms and legs. And he had hair that flopped over his eye, which at sixteen, was a very sexy thing because it was sort of Duran-Duran and Hungry Like A Wolf and all that, because those were the days. We kissed near Teddy Roosevelt’s grave, but we did so with reverence. You don’t think so, but it’s true. And if you had known me then and asked me, “Do you love him?” Surely I would have said ‘Yes”. In truth, I don’t think any sixteen year old knows what love is; I think at that age we are still learning about ourselves, and learning to love ourselves, and I think that we project an awful lot onto other people, and we become infatuated not so much with who they are, but who we think they are. Who they are to us. If this sounds emotive, it is. It is because at that age we are all about self and just beginning to test the limits of not self.

Thomas kissing me was the first real contact i had felt that carried this kind of raw emotion. He was the first person who had touched me, and his touch, his kiss, was searching and full of yearning and wist. It was evocative, mysterious, frightening, thrilling. And I’m glad that we stopped at kissing – well, okay, I let him touch me over the bra once or twice. But that we never forced the issue, that we never pushed the limits, but instead let them wear themselves down is really quite wonderful.

By not expecting, by not placing demands, Thomas and I found something sweeter than our friends who were already having intercourse. In a way, what we did was more real, because we weren’t faking anything. We had no idea of what we were doing, no sense of should or should not. Quiet afternoons that dissolved into kisses that led us to dusk, these things were enough to sustain us. And this is why if I knew him today (I don’t), Thomas and I could be friends. There are no broken promises, no betrayals, just good memories. And I don’t have the need to say that I loved him to make these memories valid and meaningful.

A friend had a similar circumstance – I think most of us do – and his was with a foreign girl who he believes he was totally in love with. And while they dated, sort of, for years, wrote love letters that crossed oceans, they blew it. This girl was like Thomas is to me, or she could have been. But my husband has told me for years that this was love, and I keep telling him that it is not love – that it feels like love but at sixteen, believe me, I don’t think anyone knows real love, because love is complex. So as the story goes, she returned to her exotic homeland, they wrote to each other for years, and then one day, years later when he is in his twenties an teaching in France (as I have already mentioned), she came to visit him.

This was a mistake. I can tell you that she was no longer the same girl she was at fourteen, that like all of us, she had lost her innocence, which is okay. But some things – some people – are better left where they belong; in the recess of memory. But He has been using her, let’s call her Nicole, as a template. I think every woman that came after her was compared to her, including me. As his ex-wife put it, “Oh God, I’m so sick of Nicole and her little red scarf!” and we both laughed.

So when Nicole came to Paris and needed a place to stay, he offered his apartment. And here is where it all starts to fall apart; they’ve felt this ‘love’ or whatever for so long, and they’ve really only kissed, and here they are now as adults – both with partners – but in Paris and alone, the formerly unrequited love can be consummated. So at age twenty-six or so, he fucks this woman. And she is, for all intents and purposes, a woman he does not know; she is not the sweet girl he once knew.

Did the sex live up to what either had imagined it would be? I don’t know, but I doubt it. In my dreams of long ago, I made love to Thomas in the grass near Teddy Roosevelt’s grave and it was beautiful. In real life, it would have been a fumbling, awkward mess. Sometimes it is better to keep things under the bell jar, to tuck them away in a corner, a destination that you visit when life lets you down.

Reality is no match for good memory, awash in afternoon light, all soft-focus and sparkle, better, in fact, than it ever was in actuality, but we’re grateful for them nonetheless.

scent & seduction

I’m no fool, and I think it is no accident that a woman who has a crush on my great love has started chatting with me and that we soon are talking about scent. Scent is primal, visceral, and I have always felt that, for me anyway, it plays a crucial role in attraction. But I am going to have fun with this. Look; she’s calling my house, I’m not pursuing her. When I tell her that my perfume comes from Paris I am telling her something about myself – something, in a way, very base, very animal. I’m telling her that I have an intoxicating smell. So this man is marked. For while, though I am embarrassed to admit, I sniffed his clothes when he returned home from work. Held the broadcloth to my nose and inhaled, searching for traces of perfume. Sometimes, I think I’ve found smells there in the weave, but now that I know the fragrance she wears, I know that it is virtually indistinguishable from his. I stopped doing this and I stopped wanting to know what he does or where he is because not only did it not help me, it was degrading. I don’t want to be a shirt-sniffing housewife searching for the scent of sex on her husband’s clothes; it’s just too typical, too cliched.

But scent is a good topic, for scent is part of love, and I believe, it is the basis for all sexual attraction. That while we can not consciously perceive other people’s scent, our brain picks it up and it registers. I know this happened when I met my husband, that his smell, which is like firewood and spice and sage cast a spell on me. He remembers that one day, back when we worked together and were not yet involved, I made him smell the drawer of my desk. It was an old wooden desk, solid, and had clearly spent its life in publishing houses, books has skipped over its surface and into popular culture. But the drawer had this great smell of old wood, mahogany, English paper, and rosin. He says it was ‘heady, hypnotic, entrancing’. He also says this is the first time he realized that he wanted me. That he connected that smell with me and knew that if he could get close enough, I would smell the same. He did and I do.

Scent has always played a crucial role in my life. Like most young girls, I loved my father, but more than this, I love his girlfriends, and I loved the way they smelled. The time I spent with my father was limited and sparse, and as I remember, he always brought a girlfriend with him. I never really got to know any of them, the turnaround was pretty fast, but they were of a type. Usually, she was blonde, with a shaggy, wavy bob. She wore silk blouses that captured the curve of her breasts, she had white-white teeth and a bright smile. She was Rod Stewart’s Maggie Mae – wearing it well, a little out of time. Old fashioned blouses of lace and gauze, high-heels with ankle straps, breasts that smelled like Chanel No. 5 or Mitsouko. My father was an almost mythological character; as I’ve said, he had incredible charisma, which he knew how to use, and whenever he picked me up, I would inevitably see a sleek, hip car rounding the corner and stopping in front of my grandparent’s modest house in Tottenham. I remember the Jaguar, which he let me steer while sitting on his lap and which smelled like new leather. I remember the feel of the leather wrap on the steering wheel, and the dark musty smell it left on my hands. I remember the smell of new cars. The gorgeous haze of his lover of the moment – someone vital, clear-skinned, luminous, tousled, radiant and gliding around on a soft cloud of incense and powder. The smell of her powder compact, which was so grown up, and to this day I carry a powder compact, mostly just for the smell.

My mother too had a wonderful fragrance, all chypre and sex and her favorite perfume (Caleche)
combined with the smell of her skin and the subway, and bus-transfer tickets, which combined to form a dark, mysterious smell. . And my grandmother and grandfather who I spent most time with, the air in the house heavy with cigar and cigarettes, so although most people hate the smell of cigars, I love it because it reminds me of good times. Times that were hard, when we had little money, but when life held promise. The smell of the ailanthus tree in the backyard that hung over the wall. A tree I used to climb, rest in, leaning on strong branches and dipping the branches into the faces and hair of passers-by (a game that my friend and I found amusing but the targets did not). The smell of Brut for men and the green bottle it came in and the little silver chain and plate that decorate the bottle. And a strong memory of my grandmother’s smell; the scent of her moisturizer which was Nivea and the pink-mauve smell of her make-up. I can open a bottle of Nivea, inhale deeply, and tell you long, detailed stories about her, about watching her put on her make-up every morning and the suits she wore to work. That I hated leaving her, leaving that smell, to go to school, which didn’t smell like much of anything. I think of these as scent snapshots, and perhaps they don’t make sense to you, because I know that for me smell is the most important sense.

Over the years I have changed how I smell, how I want to smell. For a long time I wore powdery soft perfumes, my friends would always tell me that I smelled like their grandmother. I wore old-fashioned fragrances, musky and soft, like cashmere. Then as I matured and changed, I didn’t feel soft and powdery any more; I felt strong, sensuous, sublime, and so I found a perfumer named Dawn and she created a fragrance made of over sixty essential oils and that I wear every day. She and I spent hours discussing what I wanted the smell to convey. I don’t think most people are this involved with smell – they find a perfume and like it and don’t think much about it or what I says about them. Or perhaps they do but I just haven’t met them yet – and I’d like to.

This is what I told Dawn I wanted to smell like, what I wanted to evoke. This is our brainstorm.
The film the English Patient and the way Kristen Scott Thomas smells in it. The dryness of the sand, the sandstorms of red earth. A night flight to a far away country. Confidence. Sexiness, but subtlety. Honey colored hair and jasmine skin. Making love in the afternoon. Gin and tonics and laughter. Dance and flirtation. He and I in Morocco. Camel bells. Low tide.

These are just few of the things I said to her, but there was one thing that clinched the deal; I wanted a smell that would make me fall in love with myself. I wanted to radiate the confidence and gaiety of my father’s lovers, of Bond girls. I wanted something addictive, something that once you’ve smelled it, you just have to do it again. Why did I want this? I wanted this because I am tired or being the child in the backseat of her father’s car. That I am a grown woman, not just a patient. That even though I am serious, I am also light. It was a new fragrance for a new phase of my life, the one I am in now, in which I tango and wear powder. It is the scent of how I want to be remembered – and that I want no one else to smell like. That this is mine, that I must first learn to love myself before I can move forward. And when Dawn’s package arrived and I opened the cobalt blue bottle it was there. As soon as I smelled it my mind flipped a thousand images, a thousand smiles, laughs, pints in pubs, confidence and love, lust and attraction, mystery. This fragrance, which we have named “Habibi” which is Arabic and translates loosely as ‘honey’ is the subtle aura that I believe protects me. That, no matter what happens in my marriage or how cruel and catty people can be, it won’t matter because now I am in the front-seat of a sexy, fast car and I do not know where I’m going, but I know that I will enjoy the trip.

Cancer has given me perspective here, and I’m sure this is not unique to me – I would wager this is most people with cancer – and it is that you don’t want to waste your time anymore. That you didn’t know it before now, but you’ve squandered years and shed tears over things or people who basically, aren’t worth it. I have been waiting for so long for life to come to me. Not entitlement, but you know, not liking things as they were and really truly not knowing how to change them. But now, now in this new life, I see that it isn’t so important to see where I am going, but it is important to see where I am now. To like where I am now, this moment, this day. And this seemingly minor thing, even stupid damn thing, like fragrance, has given me the confidence to go out and meet life. Because now I know that you have to find your life, that it is all around you, but if you stay still you will never see it. So life is about now, which reminds me of what I had taped to my office telephone for years; “the time is now.” Even if you’re shit broke, make a point of buying a good bottle of perfume. It’s a cheap trick and maybe a band aid, but I’m convinced it makes all the difference. That when you feel better about yourself, good things happen to you. When you feel bad, likewise, bad things. Hey, it’s worth a shot.
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It is fine for another woman or even, and I hate this, my lover to sometimes be so cruel, for her to push in my face that she will be away on the same days as he, but the truth is they wouldn’t be able to hurt me if I didn’t let them. He said he was bored – and I’m thinking now about how boring it must be to wake up every morning and put on Eau Sauvage and smell like everyone else. I’m thinking that for all the times he told me never to settle, that he is settling. Settling for something ordinary when the extraordinary is all around him. And I don’t mean with me, necessarily. I would be happy if he is happy, even if that means we separate and he finds someone else. But God, I want to tell him, make sure she’s good enough for you. Let her be someone who is not satisfied with the mass-produced perfumes and slick images they sell. Let her be someone more textured, more complex. Make sure she’s extraordinary because even though I hate what you have done I understand it and I know that you are extraordinary.