As part of my quest to cut down on empty HFCS calories, I've greatly reduced my reliance on Starbucks over the last few months. In fact, yesterday was the first coffee I've had in two weeks, and I only had some because my BFF brought it to me the morning after some spectacular BlogHer debauchery. In the cool morning, standing on Geary Street, worried about being late to the airport, saying adieu to my BlogHer cohorts, it was a little cup of zen. Even though I may stray with caffeinated waters and iced teas, I would miss this feeling, the warmth enveloping your gut, making everything in the world okay.

Don't forget that our next book club selection will be Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. Start reading it this weekend, and we'll start controlling our destiny next Wednesday.


Endangered Pleasures has inspired me to consider my own everyday pleasures--not just the things we ought to be saving for special, indulgent occasions, but the things that I ought to be sitting down and taking happiness from, instead of rushing through. For instance: I eat too many meals on the couch, with a napkin on my knee--not even a plate!--and a book in my hand. I forget how nice it is to sit at a table, with a plate and a pretty glass and not be drinking out of a can or a bottle. For instance: I rush through getting ready every morning, I don't bother to put on makeup or worry about my hair. But it is a pleasure to take care of yourself, to groom and lotion carefully, to even just put on lipgloss to protect your lips from the sun, to make sure your hair is so cute it makes you smile every time you catch a glimpse of yourself.

Esteban always laughs at my utter fascination with the holiday stop-action specials, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the one with the Heat Miser. I'll even watch the miserable Little Drummer Boy special that I think only runs once a year on a public access channel in Nome, Alaska. I love them so much that high on my list of girl names (should we ever reproduce) is the name Clarice and also Fireball. I think it's the OCD quality that I admire so much about them, the absolute creative vision that is involved with moving these little puppets micromillimeters, snapping a picture, then moving a tiny bit more, snapping another picture, later, rinse, repeat.

The hottest man on the planet took a break from his job manning the Nutrition Data.com answer hotline and sent me this video and once again, I am enthralled. And kind of craving some technicolor spaghetti.

Hey, everyone! Our next book club selection will be Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. Which sounds like a damn fine idea to me. We'll start talking next Wednesday.


But this week, we're talking about the book with the best title ever: Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences. It is a great read--tiny, jewel-like, lyrical essays, sensual and witty and funny. You want to have Barbara Holland come over to your house and sip martinis with you, smoke long black cigarettes and loll about indolently while you scarf down your life's savings in the form of gold-flecked caviar on tiny oyster crackers. The book is lush and sexy and it makes me happy, her ode to the pleasures in life.

Hoo doggie, nothing better than starting a week with a brand-spanking-new culprit in the war against obesity. The villain of the moment is vitamin D, that important little fat-soluble vitamin that gets sucked up into your body via your skin. That's right, unlike the rest of the vitamin alphabet that you have to stick in your mouth somehow, you can get vitamin D without swallowing a thing. When your skin is exposed to ultraviolet B rays, it starts cranking out the D juice.

What does that have to do with obesity? Well, it seems that larger people tend to have less vitamin D in their systems. We all know that correlation does not imply causation, but the smarties at the Daily Mail have jumped on this as a chance to say that England's weather is making them fat. Okay then! Let's not pay attention to the fact that England has had the same weather since...well...ever, and the rate of obesity in England have been going up over the last 50 years. But sure, blame the fog! Denial is a happy state.

Welcome back to the Elastic Waist Book Club, the book club for smart and discerning people who now have plenty of time to have bought the book, we hope! This go-round, we're talking about Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences.

Moderation, I think, is the watchword of Sensible Modern Thinking--enjoy just a square of good dark chocolate, have a glass of wine a night because it's heart-healthy, exercise but not to exhaustion because you'll just hurt yourself, get enough sleep--but not too much, because you're just screwing up your body's rhythms and ruining it for everyone. Moderation is healthy, and pleasurable, even--who feels ready and wide-awake and bouncy after a 12-course meal and a bottle of wine, or an entire box of cookies? But it can be exhausting, having to be good all the time--having to assign good or bad labels to your behaviors, your choices, having to control yourself, stay in the straight-and-narrow, behave.

It's been a tough week and it's only Tuesday. While I was picking on Sandra Lee, two other bloggers apparently got drunk and went on Lizz Winstead's show Thinking and Drinking, bound and determined to get their feminist cards revoked for life when they expounded on their thoughts regarding rape. Here's some of the tidbits that Lizz shared over at HuffPo:

Moe on sexual regret:

"I guess, I like, regret being date raped."

"It seems like in terms of bad sexual experiences, that you have, the worst ones are in, always seem to be in countries where sex is not accepted. That is the good thing about New York, I've never had any problems with anyone here."

Moe: "I guess third guy, I ever had sex with, date raped me, and I got very mad at him, but I wasn't gonna fucking like turn him in to the police and fucking go through shit..."
Lizz: "Why not, you see that's the problem, why not, I am just curious?"
Moe: "Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more."

Tracie on why she has not been raped
"I think it has to do with the fact that I am like, smart."

"I don't hang around with frat guys."

We've all seen the commercials for Activia yogurt, which contains a bunch of probiotics and supposedly helps you avoid constipation, as well as SNL's hilarious Kristen Wiig crapping her pants as Jamie Lee Curtis. But author Jean Kilbourne, author of Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women, points out that the nipped waist and trim feminine stomach shown on the illustration, along with a golden arrow pointing downward, seems to be hinting at a promise of thinness. From Slate:

"I see that as a weight-loss implication," she tells me. "It's meant to evoke the idea, 'This is the kind of tummy you can end up with.' The arrow is code for 'This will go right through you.' It's a dieting subtheme that plays on the whole idea of women being much more focused to do whatever it takes to make our bodies feel thin."

Anyone who has worked in advertising knows that every single little element of a product's branding is carefully analyzed and selected with the sole intent of tweaking the brains of the intended demographic. Activia's package is green for a reason: it implies a health and organic benefit, even though there's nothing organic about it. The fact that the stomach looks like it belongs on a 20-something--not the 50-something that is probably buying that yogurt--is no mistake. As for a subtheme of immediate expulsion of calories, that's up for debate, but it definitely reminds me how insidious the advertising and packaging has become. I have some Activia yogurt in my fridge right now and I don't have IBS or anything that a little fiber couldn't handle. In fact, I don't even know why I bought it, and yet, there it is, sitting on my shelf, trim stomach and all. Scary.

In my house, my hippie mother felt that it was more natural for me to see movies with naked people making love (that's the term 8 out of 10 hippie mothers preferred) than movies where people were trying to kill each other. As it was, I was totally accustomed to seeing breasts on our early '80s cable channels, nipples of various sizes bouncing around across our 19-inch screen, and I knew that men liked to look at boobs and hips and butts and the dark thickets in a girl's "area" but it wasn't until we had a rummage sale one summer afternoon and her live-in boyfriend Larry pulled out a moldering box of vintage Playboys that I really understood. It wasn't just looking at naked boobs on the television. It was somehow more private than that. Sure, this naked girl might have been replicated in 500,000 copies, but somehow, at that moment, it was just her and the viewer. These pages, slick as beetle skins, the eyes wearing impossible amounts of mascara, looking up at the viewer, imploring somehow, begging to be looked at. That's when I really got a sense of how powerful a girl's body could be when displayed on the glossy pages of a magazine.

So the book club selection, this go-around, is Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences. I've flipped through it, and have fallen into an essay or two--they are brief and lovely and luscious and make me long for the days when smoking was glamorous and exercise wasn't heart-healthy and chocolate wasn't full of antioxidants but just a pure, absolute pleasure.

Anonymous commenter says: Give us more time to buy the book! We say: No! Just kidding. We say: of course! You've got a week, now, to grab this from your local library, order it online or find it at your local bookstore--it's worth looking for, I think. And then next Wednesday, we'll talk in earnest about your renewed sense of pleasure in the little indulgences of life.