The real vs. the ideal

Japanese girls are buying into the artificial beauty trend - in fact, the artificially beautiful compete in pageants where entry requires proof they've had plastic surgery.

Stick-thin models display the clothes girls think they're supposed to wear.

Dove tries to counteract fake-beautiful marketing with a campaign showing the bodies of real, unedited women. Women everywhere point at them in magazines and call them fat.

In reality, all it takes to make someone look beautiful in print is a happy proficiency in Photoshop or Gimp. I'm no expert, but I grabbed three photos of already beautiful women from Hotornot.com and enhanced them.













Women will never achieve the perfection we see on magazine covers. Models are not flawless; neither are celebrities. They have skin folds, zits, stubble in their armpits, flyaways, lines, wrinkles; they are human. We women cannot apply a Gaussian blur to our own faces. We cannot smudge the wrinkles away. And we shouldn't have to.

Here's to my undereye circles, and my perpetually dirty glasses. Here's to the wrinkles in my forehead and the lines around my mouth that will certainly get deeper the more I laugh. Here's to my face, which will never be perfect but will always be expressive and completely, utterly ME.

Care to toast to yours?

Screw flowers: WeatherGirl's Valentine's Day Wish List

• I wish nobody would buy their lovers inorganically grown roses for the big day. They're lovely and all - that is, to all of us who don't have to grow them and inhale pesticides.
• I wish that if someone were to buy me a stuffed animal, it would serve the dual purpose of being sickeningly cute and hiding drugs.
• I wish cigarettes didn't cause emphysema and cancer and stink so I could start smoking again. I'm 54 days strong.
  
• I wish someone would come up with chocolate that has no carbs, tastes like the real thing and doesn't cause diarrhea as a result of over-consumption.
• I wish the initials for Valentine's Day weren't the same as the initials for Venereal Disease.
• I wish more people would send cheesy Valentine's Day e-cards instead of tangible paper cards. Call me a treehugger if you please; I call it wasteful.
• I wish the marketing campaign for diamonds had never started, and men weren't expected to spend two months salary on engagement rings.
• I wish Big Business wasn't pressuring me to do something special for the man I love. What with the occasional blow job, the random (yet inexpensive) gifts I give him for no reason, the hours we stay up late laughing... Yeah, I think he's aware that I love him.
• I wish people would stop assuming that anti-Valentine's Day sentiments belong only to the singled, jilted or jaded.
  

Boston 2004

Overlooking the Boston Skyline from behind the Royal Sonesta hotel in Cambridge, she tells her friend, "Boston is surreal."

They'd taken an Elantra and a Suburban. They'd swung through DC, marveled at John Ashcroft's well-guarded abode, taken in a They Might Be Giants street concert, walked so many miles their feet were numb.

And now Boston, where the radio plays "Dirty Water" as soon as you cross the city limits, where standing by the Charles River in August is as chilly as a Texas November.

She leaves the river some, mingles with politicians who hold every office imaginable in the forgotten state she sometimes represents. In the hotel lobby they chit-chat, hold babies, pose for photographs. The mornings start with some importance; organized breakfasts where the failed Democratic nominee she'd fought for sits at the next table over.

The man she sits next to at one breakfast will go on to become the governor of the great state she represents. She wonders if he can detect her hangover.

It's hard for her to wrangle her way inside the convention center, so she takes a cab to a small church, where she dons a gray polo and learns about the volunteer duty she'll have to complete for access to the Fleet Center. She is to man the celebrity press entrance, she learns. It's warm out. She won't need a sweater.

But later she wishes she'd brought one. She shivers as she uses a strange piece of machinery to scan credentials - some for people she doesn't know, others for people like Larry King, Mo Rocca, Michael Moore, Tom Brokaw. Surreal. She converses with the Boston police, who tell her smoking's "bad fo'yah." After a few hours of work she sneaks inside the Fleet Center, finds an abandoned seat just in time to hear Barack Obama speak. He momentarily re-ignites her passion for politics.

She mingles with the future and current politicans of her state at an open bar party later. As her cohorts consume more and more alcohol, she watches her representatives degrade into dancing fools. She wishes she could dance.

A group of young people splay themselves on the floor of one of the Sonesta's ballrooms. They use Magic Markers to draw signs for their failed Democratic nominee - he is to speak at the convention. Later, the signs will be forgotten.

As she pushes her way through the credential-checks one night, she sees a group of anti-Bush protestors through the chain link fences that keep the Authorized separated from the Unauthorized. She locks eyes with an old woman who solemnly holds her fingers in a peace sign. The girl reciprocates, and the old woman smiles, laughs and curls her hand into a thumbs up sign.

Inside the convention center, Diddy and his entourage slink about, clad in black, cameras trained on them.

She stays in her seat throughout the long speeches - Lieberman, Pelosi, Albright. Willie Nelson. John Kerry. He'd lose. She knew it. But these things are all about hope, she told herself, and can't hope defy reason?

She watches the swaying nets full of red, white and blue balloons throughout the presentations. When they're over, the balloons start to fall, but lopsided - first one side, then the other. It always looked so elegant on TV, she thinks. But this is what it's really like. The balloons don't fall at the same time.

Who has to clean up all this confetti, she wonders, once our job here is done? After we're done cheering and yelling and pledging to do our best to help people get ahead in life, who comes in and cleans up our mess?

Her candidate doesn't win. She gives up. Maybe, she tells herself, someone will come along who will give me a reason to be passionate again. Just maybe.

Meet Anne.

Meet Anne. Her name isn't really Anne, of course. It's just a moniker I can use to refer to this eager, hard-working 23-year-old. Anne grew up and went off to college against the odds - she tells her friends stories about finding treasures in the dump near a camper trailer where she once lived. Her daddy dumpster-dived for any vegetables her mom could use to make soup, or create some kind of satiety for the children. Finding a case of expired Twinkies meant a feast. Sometimes all the daddy could find was lettuce - even then, her mother made it into something remotely edible.

Sometimes her dad would push her mother; kick her, knock her down the stairs. To this day her mother has a debilitating back injury. Drastic, expensive surgery just eased some of her pain. Back then, Anne's daddy would toss money into a bucket of cottonmouth snakes he'd seized from the roadside. If her mother wanted to go grocery shopping, she had to retrieve the money from the bucket.

Many years after the split, Anne's father turned to God. He still didn't remember her birthday.

Anne's little sister fell in love with an emotionally abusive illegal immigrant, quickly becoming pregnant with his child. When her lover's mother came to visit, he made her sleep on the floor. She was 7 months pregnant. Her mother dealt with it. Sometimes, when you love somebody, you have to put up with their shit, right?

Anne met a man one day. He said he was from Italy. He told her he wasn't married, and that he was Catholic. He ended up being Albanian, married and Muslim. Anne fell in love; two years later he left her. He could never marry her, he said, because she was of the wrong faith. Her mother had told her that women have to overlook some things about their men. Anne overlooked the man's lies and suffered.

Now Anne has to learn how to support herself again. She has her bachelor's degree and is attending a free graduate school program, but she doesn't know how she's supposed to live. Even with a decent income she can't afford the various necessities we all have: shelter, food, health insurance, a vehicle, car insurance, utilities, a telephone. The bills each month add up to more than Anne's paychecks. There is no cutting back; there is no saving money. There is no money to save. A second job isn't an option - she already has one. A third job would leave her with no time to sleep - not that she is able to fall asleep. Anne has taken to worrying so energetically at night that she lies awake in bed, paralyzed, wondering when something will happen that will magically make life just a little bit easier.

But she doesn't want to depend on someone just for the sake of a place to live. She doesn't want to shack up with a man, then start making excuses for him when he treats her badly, just like her mother did. She can't find a roommate. She refuses to seek a lover for the sole purpose of affording rent. She doesn't qualify for any government relief programs. She's not a single mother.

She's just Anne.

No wonder she battles insomnia.

The world: A lament

Nothing exacerbates my disgust with the world like a jaw problem.

Pop, click. Pain. A nice, searing headache that echoes through the layers of skin and bone on my right temple.

News networks that try to outdo each other covering the crazy astronaut lady, then Anna Nicole Smith's death. A system that forced taxpayers to pay more than $1 billion last year to keep "criminals" in jail due to marijuana-related charges. A president who thinks U.S. troops are an expendable, renewable resource.

The headache just grows.

A nation where you can trust comedy news-show parodies more than you can trust the major networks. A nation where the man behind the most "fair and balanced" network on TV admits his channel tried to shape Iraq war policy. A world where I can't figure out how I'm going to afford health insurance while the health insurance CEOs can't figure out which continent they'd like to visit for vacation.

Muscle relaxers stopped helping.

The people who think we ought to pray in schools to prevent violence are the same ones who advocate less strict gun laws. When I invoke the First Amendment, they balk and tell me I shouldn't say those kindsa things down South, if you know'amean. I'd burn their flags. I'd force one of them into a tiny room with a gay man and make them talk until it is painfully apparent that the gay man is as human as the straight. But it does no good.

I tried politics. It made my head positively THROB, the intensity of fighting so hard for something you believe and the complete disillusionment that's revealed when, for the umpteenth time, your voice hasn't been heard. I wished I could use up the votes of all the people who never did an iota of research, the people who just echoed the opinions of their mothers and fathers without the tiniest bit of logic or convincing reason.

I tried journalism, the watch dog of the government, and watched my beliefs sift themselves out of my forced objectivity. I couldn't sway anyone without being biased, and I respected the institution of journalism too much to allow myself to be biased. The last time I quoted a politician's lies, I rolled my eyes and gave up. Soundbites. It's so hard to see the Real.

So now I guess I'll just tell myself (as I assume I make up at least half the readership of Anything but the Weather) stories about what I see happening around me.

Hasn't helped that headache yet, though.

The man who killed and laughed

It had been longer than a year since he'd trudged in the sand, longer than a year since he had manned a gun. On the outside, the 50-year-old man with patches of winter gray popping up in his thick, wavy hair was merely happy to be home. "I never want to travel again," he told his daughters. "I've been all over the world. Now, I just want to sit on the couch and watch TV." They laughed at him, but they knew it was true. Germany, Korea, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Spain... he had seen much more than they probably ever would.

He'd retired from the military with a heavy shadowbox full of all the medals he'd won. He'd also received a flag, carefully folded into a fancy wooden case, and a certificate for his wife. The certificate was amply beautiful to make up for the year he'd been in Saudi Arabia while his girls were in kindergarten and fifth grade and his wife had struggled to keep the girls fed, clothed and properly transported.

On Christmas Eve, the family didn't mention the desert. Nobody said a thing about Tikrit, or the inhumanity of war. The shadowbox watched over the living room where they drank green margaritas and made jokes. He didn't drink a margarita. Instead, he retrieved a bottle of Crown from the freezer - he preferred it cold - and sipped on it.

His father was an alcoholic. After numerous operations, a colostomy and admonitions from doctors, his father still hadn't quit. The soldier had learned from his father and refused to touch a drop while he raised his girls. Now, they were old enough to drink with him, and he relaxed.

But after the first few sips, he started to remember the things he'd worked so hard for the past year to shove out of his mind. Distraction was necessary. He arranged a board game - Yahtzee, an old favorite of his - with his daughters. The girls sipped on their margaritas and tittered, shooting sarcastic remarks at each other across the dinner table. One rolled a Yahtzee, the other cursed. The man found himself in the midst of a peal of laughter when the reality hit him:

I've killed a man, he thought. And not just one. I don't even know how many I've killed.

He turned to his youngest daughter.

"What would you do," he asked, his speech slurring, "if you were on top of a building, and people were coming at you, trying to shoot you? What would you do?"

She didn't answer. She couldn't answer.

"Would you shoot them? I did," he said. His eyes looked damp and red. "All those men I shot... They probably died. I kept them from ever being able to be with their families again, like I am right now. They'll never see them again."

He began to cry silently. The girls didn't know what to say. Their father, a man who had gone directly from high school to the Army and then worked at an ammunition plant all his life, only cried when he was excessively proud of scholarships they'd won, accomplishments they'd managed despite the odds.

"I'm glad you're back and safe, Dad," the oldest said. He had worn his Air Force blues to her wedding, and she'd thought he was the most handsome man there.

"That's why I don't believe in war," the youngest said. "I don't think any human being should have to go through what you're dealing with. We're just glad you're here, with us."

The man shook his head, placed his score-keeping pen on the table carefully.

"There was a woman in our unit - she had a baby at home, and I just couldn't let them get her. And the guy manning the gun... He was fumbling, and I was so scared, I wanted to protect them all. I just pushed him out of the way. I just grabbed the gun and started shooting, and I was glad. I was glad! I laughed! I was happy it was them and not me!"

"You were doing the only thing you knew to do. You can't punish yourself for that," the youngest said.

"You don't understand," he said. He began to speak more quickly, more forcefully. "You can't understand. What would you do? Do you even know? What if someone is trying to kill you, and the people with you. Would you kill them? Would you?"

His wife approached him, wrapped her arms around him and urged him to the living room, where she spoke soft words in his ear. The girls looked at each other, shaken. There was really nothing to say, except that they'd never seen him as upset.

After that night, the man was embarrassed. He assured his wife he wouldn't drink anymore - no sense turning out like his father, whose pores oozed the pungent odor of alcohol and who was almost unbearable to hug anymore. He gave the rest of the tequila to his daughters.

But he still had trouble falling asleep. When he did, he traveled 7,000 miles from his home to the nauseating heat of Tikrit. He killed every night and tried to forget every day.