Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.

"95 percent of women suffer from cellulite, including me."~ Jillian Micheals.

If that's all you suffer from in life, can't you count yourself fairly lucky??

Can we do a pole on how many MEN suffer from cellulite?? I'm going to guess maybe 10-15%

Is that because they have a different genetic make up?? Is it because they have thicker skins?? or thicker brains...

Maybe 95% of men HAVE cellulite, but only 20% actually even notice, and it's only 5% that think it's something worth SUFFERING over.

Kids in Africa are suffering from the aids virus.

You suffer from Malaria.

People with leprosy suffer with a LOSS OF LIMBS!!

Are we really that effected by a few little dimples.... or even a lot of little dimples...

I'm not saying I'm not vain by any means, or that my body is perfect the way it is, or that I would never change anything.

But I can't say the I'm actually suffering from my cellulite... in fact I can think of a few things I am suffering more from.

Curly hair... that is something I suffer with, especially this year with the humidity factor being somewhere between 95% to "I think hell is boiling over and I'm in it"

What makes me think I "suffer" from curly hair?

Maybe the billions of dollars and hours I have spent either trying to make it strait.... or trying to make the curls look better.

I am a master with a bobby pin.

I have actually used my clothes iron on my hair more than I have ever used it on any article of clothing.

I have learnt that just about anything creamy will help in a pinch. ( Cosmo just offered the advice of using your new beau's shaving cream to smooth out your ponytail.)

Yea sure- what do you think is going to weird the guy out more the morning after??? Knowing that your hair is a little messy, or knowing that you have already entered crazy stalker girl mode by going through his bathroom and using his products?

Come to think of it.. I actually just suffer from hair... when I was younger my hair was fairly strait and I paid the price ( in money, and the damage to my hair, not to mention my nostrils) to get a perm!!!

I have spent far more time trying to change my hair, the colour, the texture, the length.

And now I'm realizing it's not just the hair on my head..

I pencil in my brows every day.

I dye my lashes, then I coat them with mascara, each and every application thinking about how I should splurge on an eyelash curler.

And I have used every method known to man to remove it from other parts of my body.... in fact I have made a career out of removing it from women AND men.

We're ALL suffering from hair!!!!

Even celebrities have a problem with it!!! They are paying thousands to have it sew in, lasered off, curled, teased, straitened, thinned, implanted.

Remember Britney's big meltdown?? The worst of it was when she shaved her head...

( Sinead O'conner's been doing it for years and no one really notices, but when a mouseketeer decides to finally rid herself of something we are ALL suffering from, we hospitalize her! )

And they say the road of life can get a little bumpy... I say it's much worse when life gets hairy.

A Learning Curve

You can't teach and old dog new tricks, and you can't teach a young dog to stay home.

There are some things in life you may have been taught but you never actually learned.

Some things like walking, talking, looking both ways before you cross the street and even times tables are perpetually drilled into us until we can accomplish the task with an 80% success rate.

Other things are brought to our attention ... "Here's a skill that could be useful in life" and then left up to us if we ever really figure it out properly

I wish I had of actually learned how to iron from my mother... I still can't do it.. maybe that's because it's one of those things that comes with practice.

Since I'm not very good at it, and I don't like to buy new clothes, I'm not willing to sacrifice the ones that I have to practise until I'm good.

There for I am 26 years old and still bring my cotton blouses to my mother and ask her to iron them for me.

It was my dad who was always trying to teaching us weird random skills that I now wish I could actually do.

It may have been great parenting, or it may have just been boredom, but Dad taught us many things as kids.

He taught me how to play hockey, and golf, and that's why I am right handed but always hold my sticks lefty.

He also taught us all to walk on stilts once. He had every kid in the neighbourhood outfitted with two by fours with foot rests at varying lengths.

The older kids had to stand on back of the pick up truck in order to get on the stilts. Actually I'm amazed no one died... this was back in the day before they made you wear a helmet to brush you teeth or walk downstairs.

Being the youngest, my stilts were only about 4 inches off the ground. So I didn't really learn any circus credibility, but I think I can credit Dad to this day for the fact that I can walk two miles in 3 1/4 inch heals without flinching.

He also taught me a valuable rollerblading lesson. Don't go down a paved hill when there is only gravel at the bottom to stop you. That was a lesson he taught me by example. I didn't need to try it myself.

But the one skill that I think would be really useful these days was back when I was about 7 or 8 years old and he decided we should all learn to use a lasso.

This is a skill I actually practiced with a certain amount of dedication. (Mainly because at the time I still believed that a horse for my birthday was a real possibility. Being able to use a lasso, and looking good in a cowboy hat seemed to get me one step closer to this dream.)

But alas, having no real training, and only the tiniest concept of how a lasso actually works, eventually that skill was given up as well ( actually, I think that was when he moved us onto the stilts).

Every time my dog heads out the yard, and I stand there useless, screaming my head off, fifty feet of rope all around me, I have a tiny smidgen of remorse that I never mastered the art of slinging a perfect circle of rope around a moving object.

12 steps from channel 142

Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. ~Lily Tomlin

I have a confession to make... I have been doing something I am not proud of... and I'm pretty sure this is something harder to kick than cocaine

(actually I swear there's a survey on that somewhere "one hundred and one things that are harder to kick than a coke habit"... but sometimes I think that's just propaganda spread by the coke dealers themselves, or maybe something smokers have made up to make them selves feel better)

They say the first step to kicking a bad habit is admitting you have a problem, so that's what I'm here for... to confess

I think I'm addicted to "The Hills".

Yea I know, the show has been on for four or five years, and I've hated it for every second.

Well every second up to about four or five weeks ago. When regular TV programming stopped playing, and MTV started doing the all day marathons of the insanely annoying and pointless show.

Since I've seen every episode of SATC multiple times, and Yard Crashers wasn't on, I started watching them.

Just like a drug addict that only wanted to try smoking it once, to see what all the fuss is about, I only tried to watch it to understand what was so great about it.

And honestly the first time, it was just as stupid and pointless as I remembered.

Then the next weekend the marathon played again. And I saw a show that had aired previous to the one I had "experimented" with before. And it started to draw me in.

But I still wasn't hooked yet... It was just something I could do occasionally, turn it on as background noise while I did the dishes.

I could turn that dial off anytime I wanted to.

I just didn't really want to.

I broke down and told a cousin of mine about this small dabble in to the world of bad reality TV. She not only admitted to watching as well, but informed me that "The Hills" was really just a starter show.

There is this other show called "The City". A spin off of "The Hills". Just as staged and lame and pointless to the point where it becomes mind numbing. Yet it was about the fashion industry.

One hit of "The City" and I was hooked. Of course, when "The City" wasn't playing, I had to settle for whatever form of reality TV I could get my hands on.

I then became obsessed. I was watching episodes over again to see what I had missed.

(That's the beauty of becoming obsessed with a show after it's been cancelled, you can always watch another episode.
You people who get hooked on shows right away mean you have to wait an entire week to get your next fix. )

I was considering the box set of entire seasons.....

I was watching "The After Show", an actual show about what just happened on the episodes that just aired.....

(Bad enough you say?? Throw in two obnoxious hosts and some staged interviews and you have something that makes the cat clawing your eyes out sound like a peaceful retreat. )

And I was justifying it....

.....Grey's isn't on.... I don't get home in time to watch Oprah.... at least I'm not watching Jerry Springer.

I really wasn't ready to admit I had a problem. But I did have a turning point last weekend.

I turned on MTV and began watching "Jersey Shore". When I started to know them by name instead of "that chubby one with the pouffy hair" I realized I was out of control.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.... now that I've put down the remote, and confessed my reality downward spiral, I need to go on to the next step and get help.

Move over Ms. Lohan, I'm next in line for Dr Drew.

Would You Rather....

Would you rather

A) earn 50,000 a year while others make 25,000

 or

B) earn 100,000 a year while others make 250,000?

When Readers Digest posed this question I picked A, much like everybody else so they say.

 I have to admit that when I first chose, I thought I was being frugal.

Actually in all honesty I think what happened is given the choice of the two I believed I wouldn't even need 100,000 to be happy.

Someone with less than 20,000 yearly thinks that making an extra 30,000 sounds like a pretty sweet deal.

Then I kept reading, trying to see if the article had a point..... it did!!!!

(this is surprising only because I rarely seem to have a point when I ramble about random things... although that may be why I'm not published and Mr Stewart Foxman is.)

The point was we all suffer a little bit from the "Keeping up with the Joneses"  syndrome.

 (nobody apparently is trying to keep up with the Kardashians anymore.. the Joneses must be slightly more attainable...)

 Actually to paraphrase the article, people are willing to forsake a doubling of salary just so they can outspend their neighbours.  We all just want more more stuff than the next person.

psshhhaw I said... I'm not that shallow... I don't need other people to gauge how happy I am... and then I thought about it... I have a lot of time to sit and think about things like this, as I have an hour drive to work every morning.

 So during this mornings drive I convinced myself that I chose A because I believed 50,000 was enough to make me happy.... especially since if no one else made that much the cost of living would have to go down and I'd be able to get everything I'd ever dreamed of.....

... it had nothing to do with at least I'd have more money than everyone else.

 At this moment of self-celebrating-clarity the Turbine Truck passes me. This is a long-haul truck that is carrying HUGE steel cylinders through the narrow roadways. I've met him every workday for the past month.

 There is always a string of cars behind these trucks, as there is a half hour stretch where you simply can not pass. Driving behind these massive trucks probably turns that half hour stretch into something more like 45 minutes to an hour.

 (I'm not rambling here.. I promise I do have a point)

 This morning I decided to count how many vehicles were subject to this torment.

Eight...... as I counted them I thought to myself, "well I may have a long drive to work but at least I'm not one of those cars....."

... uh.... wait a minute.... did the sight of someone less fortunate than I just make me happier about my own situation??

 no, I'm not that shallow... remember, I just figured that out. Just a flukey coincidence That I hate being stuck behind trucks and I decided to be happy that this morning I wasn't.

 As Karma would have it...I promptly turned the next corner and found myself squarely in behind a large slow moving log truck..... Today of all days.

 Now not only was I stuck behind something on the Port Motoun Road, which in itself drives me absolutely bonkers.  But I also had the weight of a guilty conscience for not being as much of a "love thy neighbor" type Christian as I thought I was.

 I decided not to bother thinking about either thing and started wishing for the zillionth time this summer that I had a car with air conditioning (see, the $50,000 would actually be quite useful to me)

 And on the next turn I see a gaggle of cyclist straining with their orange vests and high flying tail flags to get up the steep hill that I was easily coasting down in my non-air-conditioned car.

Then without a chance for me to tell it to zip it's lips, my subconscious  managed to mummer "Well, you don't have air-conditioning but you're sure as hell not as hot as those poor people"

Any self riotousness I had left, flew out my open window.....

So now I choose to accept it....

 I may buy my sunglasses from the dollars store instead of the Gucci web-site.

 I may have purchase my Steve maddens from Frenchies for $4 instead of $400 from a boutique downtown New York,

 I may not want to go $400, 000 into debt just so I can have the biggest, bestest house on the block.

 But dammit I can't help but gain a little peace to my mind to hear someone, somewhere has it a little worse off than me.

 According to Foxman, that makes me human, which in turn makes it impossible for me to be frugal.

According to my conscience, at least I'm not as bad as so-and-so down the road.....