Wow, I just realized it's been quite some time since I made a personal post.

Telling.

First let's just get this new Sarah Haskins' video out of the way.

Target Women: feeding your f**ing Family

This is the first Haskins thing that actually made me sad. Not just because the commercials are so stupid, and no, not because two nights ago I was making some random leftover-stew for Alison and I, and actually thought to myself - "I need to order in more". Mostly because I think sometimes when my personal moral order intersects with right-wing propaganda like family values, I get a bit antsy.

I do think family meals are important, so I get sad when I see marketing that places nasty things like the Stouffers microwave entree on par with decent healthy meals. And makes Plastic Families seem like something to be strived for, when special friends, houseguests, aunties, uncles, step-kids and the dog is a messier but ultimately more loving reality. Also, as a parent of either gender you have a responsibility to teach your family to make good food and also (since food and family is emotional) healthy emotional choices, that skill-building usually starts at dinnertime.

I know I sound like a freaking evangelist. But as a person raised by a someone with an eating disorder I can tell you - if parents don't model the value of eating good food, and loving themselves through self-care, the kids have to learn it themselves and it is slow-going. In my case, I was lucky enough to have a dad who was pretty handy in the kitchen and definitely liked his grub, so I am not a dead loss. But it was strange growing up and seeing my primary female role model take very little interest in her own sustenance. I am pretty sure that had she not been struggling with an eating disorder and trying to finish a phd her relation to the family hearth would have been lots different.

So yeah, be aware of the really insidious messages about femininity, motherhood and hetero-normative family structures in advertising. But cooking a big meal with your kids, and your lover and sitting down to eat together, that is about as revolutionary and progressive as you can get in my books.

So if you haven't guessed already, the personal is back in a big way

So yeah, I spent a couple of days reading Everyday Goddess and suddenly I am all fired up by the idea of writing about myself again, instead of saying that I have matured out of overly personal posts, maybe it's time to mature right back into them. Basically EverydayGoddess is going through a break-up and pretty much every post in her Sex & Relationships category spoke to my sad little love-starved heart.

So I thought I could just get away with saying " Yeah what she said" without actually going into any of my own trauma - no really can I do that? Basically the posts that I loved were the one about embracing expectations, and the one about how she tends to constantly like the emotionally unavailable ones. I fist-pumped when I read this quote- stolen from yet another post on Jezebel:

On the other hand, some of us keep doing it. Your life becomes an endless string of dudes that don't allow you to get too close or bail before you can get too invested or force your hand into bailing because you're just not going to take that shit from some guy. And you get to feel the butterflies, and you get to know you can still feel by being in just enough pain when it ends that you notice and maybe it will wring some tears out of you, but, really, when he's not letting you get that close, you're actually not that close. Since you can't get close to him, since you're spending your time trying to be so cool or not being upset about the aloofness and the lack of emotional intimacy, you're not letting him in anymore than he's letting you in.

YEAH! I DO THAT THAT'S ME! DO YOU SELL TEE-SHIRTS?

Anyways, moving right along. So I have this little tail of almost-rans I've collected over the past year or two, I love my almost-rans I really do, but I think sometimes I don't give them enough space to move on ( or I suppose conversely, to tell me they want more - truly this thought only just occurred to me), and I am sure that I expect them to provide intimacy I would get from a loving relationship with this 'you can call me up anytime, but that doesn't mean commitment' kind of vibe. All the uncertainty has been getting increasingly exhausting, the idea that having a visitors pass to several hearts should be enough is patently untrue.

And then my good friend who found the love of her life while I was out collecting sexy figurines and moaning about the lack of reciprocity (stifling urge to reassure the tail that I really do love it, and I won't leave it all by itself ever) so my friend tells me she's getting married, which you know, sucked, but was also really awesome, but sadly all I could do was focus on the suck. So I got angry/jealous at her, then I broke it off irrevocably with one tail-person who'd been keeping comet-me a little too close to the ground for a while now.

Then I went into therapy. Which I haven't told everyone I should have.

Another post of EG's that I really rocked to was this one: relationship resolutions. I am giving 1 - 5 a whirl, and I won't re-write them all here, but it's nice to know that someone else has been making similar choices to me, and maybe it will be easier to make changes if I know I am doing this with someone else. I know I have a history of making emotional resolutions on this blog and then backsliding, but this time I am paying someone 100 clams an hour to keep me honest dammit and I will not retreat into safe patterns.

Wow, I gotta go I am late.