Hodge Podge

Just a couple things on my mind this morning.

I cancelled Clay's doctor's appointment. His fever is gone this morning, and he says he feels "much better". That will probably change in the next few hours now that I've cancelled the appointment.

He's definitely got something, but county schools are out Monday anyway, so hopefully it'll work itself out on its own. My feeling is that it's the flu, but I would hesitate to give him Tamiflu anyway. I'm the only one who took Tamiflu last year and I can't say it really got me over it any faster.

Switching topics... I'm off to Subway. Not the underground transportation, but the restaurant that serves sub sandwiches. It's where we ate our Valentine's dinner. Nothing but the finest for our family on the holiday of love!

Our kids' appetites are growing, just as their little bodies do. We can no longer order the kid's meal and expect it to fill Clay. Plus, and you should know this is coming, we almost always order the kids water in restaurants. Partly because... we're cheap. Also because that's what they drink at home most of the time anyway. Water and milk. We very rarely do juice, and it's even less likely for us to give them a coke or other carbonated beverage.

So no kid's meals for Valentine's. Bruce and I decided to get the kids a footlong sandwich and have it split into thirds.

Who knew that the concept of thirds would be so hard to understand? I told the girl making the sandwich that I wanted it cut into thirds, and she said, "So you want me to cut it three times."

I said, "Actually, no. To get thirds, you cut it only two times. I'd like three portions, because we have three kids and to have any one portion be larger than another will create World War III in here."

I must note at this point that there were no other customers in the store while we were there. And my children were right in front of the girl behind the counter much of the time. One, two, three kids. A sandwich cut into thirds.

Now, I'm not a mathematics whiz, but even I understand what a third is. In a footlong sandwich, you'd have 12 inches of yummy. Three (because of the whole one-third thing!) divided into 12 is four, last time I checked. So you cut off a four-inch section at one end and then make one more slice halfway through the remaining uncut portion. For some reason, this idea was Greek to the employee.

She finished making the sandwich and her first slice across the bread was directly in the middle. I held my tongue. Before I knew it, she'd cut four more times, so that the sandwich was cut into six sections of about two inches each.

She was very perky when she said, "There you go. Will that work?"

I'm not sure what Bruce was thinking, but he cheerily answered her with, "Oh yeah, that'll be fine."

Little things don't bug him. They do bother me.

My kids ended up eating two sections each of a sixth of a sandwich, which was fine. I'm just left wondering what was so hard about what I originally requested. A third.

My conclusion is simply that people are stupid. I'm not being critical. Well, yes, I am. But I've been stupid enough to recognize it in others.

Now, on to something else stupid.

About a month ago, I got a call on the phone and the number on the caller ID was one I didn't recognize. (I love my caller ID!). Because Bruce is leading the Financial Peace class, though, we've been getting several calls from numbers I don't know, so I answered.

It was a phone survey about television viewing. The kids were being quiet at that time, and I was doing laundry, so I went ahead and played along. One of the questions was if I planned to watch "How To Look Good Naked". I said no.

I lied. Well, not technically, because I didn't plan to watch it, but I did see it last night. Two episodes in a row.

The premise is to teach a woman who isn't content with her figure to love her body after spending five days with Carson someone. I can't remember his last name. But I do know that he was one of the gay men who counseled straight men on fashion in "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy", which by the way I never watched.

We women are warped about our bodies. Is it any wonder? What's on the cover of most magazines is not an accurate portrayal of a real woman. Aside from the affinity that Hollywood types have for plastic surgery, we now have technology that will drastically change a person's printed image.

I wonder how many pictures of men are doctored in Photoshop? Men don't care. I don't mean they have no pride in their forms. But they generally don't spend as much time worrying about their looks as we women do. If Bruce decides to lose a few pounds, he's not doing it to please anyone but himself.

Women are always doing things to themselves to please others. Plucking, shaving, and lasering. Manicures, pedicures, and chemical peels. Lipstick, eye shadow, and foundation. Push-up bras, girdles, and wearing black for the illusion of being slim.

The show addresses those things. Kind of.

The woman in question is brought in her undergarments into a room where there stands a row of other women in their panties and bras. The women are standing in a row from largest to smallest, and the insecure woman is told to place herself in the line where she thinks she'd fit. Her image of herself is almost always wrong. She perceives that she is larger than she actually is.

Then the Carson guy has a headless, but quite large, image of the woman plastered on the side of a very public building, without the woman's permission. (I'd have to kill him for that!) Then he asks passers-by what they think of the woman's figure. They always point out the positives.

In the second show I watched, when Carson played back the nice comments, the woman actually said, "You know, it's nice to hear. But in the back of my head, I'm wondering if you've just deleted out the negative comments."

Uhhh, you think?? This is TV after all.

The woman gets tips on what clothes to wear to accentuate her positive attributes. She gets a little makeover. And then they do a photo shoot. In the nude. Yeah, right! All body parts normally kept private by a bathing suit are still hidden. But then they put her photo up on the side of a building again and she has to asks strangers walking around, "Do you think I look good naked?"

You'd have to threaten the lives of my kids to get me to do that.

All this is well and good. The message is clear: we should be more content with the body we have.

The stupid part is this: Why do we need a gay man to tell us this? I mean, really, what does he know about the female body? Hasn't he spent most of his time concentrating on the figures of other men?

On one show, he pointed out the collar bone of one woman and said, "Men find this area one of the sexiest parts of a woman's body."

I just wanted to climb through the screen and ask: HOW DO YOU KNOW? And besides, I thought the point was to convince a woman to love her figure... whether or not another person does. Who cares if men find the clavicle sexy?

Couldn't they find a woman to host the show? Someone who is content with her figure, even if she's not a size 2. Someone who hasn't had plastic surgery. There are at least a few Hollywood ladies who would fit the bill. Camryn Manheim. Nia Vardalos. Kathy Najimy.

It just baffles me.