My love for Barack's love

Do you want to know why I love Barack Obama?
Yes, of course, he handily defeated Sarah Palin, who's the worst kind of woman since she thinks she has a right to speak for every single woman in the United States with her pro-life nuttery, but that's not why I love him.
I love him because he loves his wife.
Way, way more than I should, I hear boyfriends/partners/husbands make disparaging remarks about girlfriends/partners/wives. They tell intimate secrets that I would be mortified to know is out in the public domain and they make inappropriate comments to other women.
I don't ever want to hear again that it's OK for men to look as long as they don't touch. Yes, fine, look, but don't tell me you're looking.
What I rarely hear and see from men are public declarations of love and PDAs. Think about it: When's the last time you were out with a group of friends, and one of the couples just spontaneously kissed? Grabbed? Hugged? Gave the bum a little squeeze?
I think Obama's warm marriage makes him appealling to women. He looks like he wants to kiss Michelle, unlike the staged Al and Tipper Gore face smushings we had to deal with in 2000.
On Tuesday, a beaming Obama brought Michelle and his two daughters out on stage in Chicago to make his acceptance speech and within a minute or two, he was professing his love for all the world to see and hear: "... I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart, and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on the train home to Delaware, the vice president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden. And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady Michelle Obama."
Now, if Obama can get up in front of the world – the world – and declare that his wife is "the love of my life" can't you send your honey some flowers at work? Grab her as she's leaving the office for lunch and plant one on her? Send her a card in the mail, just because? Take out an ad on your local newspaper to say her short hair looks nice. Blog about her? And then, most importantly, boast about it to your buddies?
As Barack Obama would say: Yes, You Can!

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Sex and the City and refried beans

I remember five years ago when my best friend popped by my apartment for a visit.
I’ve always been messy – (but it’s an organized mess) and I never know where anything is (I would, my husband and my mother tell me, if I’d just put things back in their proper place) - but I’d sunk to a new low.
I’d become a prisoner on my own couch. In a semicircle surrounding me were 10, 15, maybe 20 cans of opened refried beans with a fork stuck in them. Yes, I’d been eating the beans out of the cans. I’d washed the beans back with a case or two of Diet Coke. I’d eaten myself into a corner.
“Oh, Sarah,” my friend said, surprised, shocked, saddened at what my life had become.
A few weeks earlier, my live-in boyfriend had left our “love nest” and me. About half a day later he had a new girlfriend. The one-two punch gutted me. The days that followed were about survival. Wake up. Shower. Go to work. Come home from work. Cry. Eat dinner. (The only thing I could eat that didn’t make me throw up was refried beans and Diet Coke.) Cry. Go to sleep.
My friend lovingly scolded me and told me it was time to pick myself up and get outside and do something.
“Yes!” I told her.
“I’m going to go do something!”
After she left my home, I had an epiphany: I had nowhere to go and nothing to do.
I lost myself in that relationship. I did what too many girls do: I made myself all about my relationship and I’d become one-dimensional.
I did really need something to do – but what? When I wasn’t working, I’d been a girlfriend and now that I wasn’t a girlfriend, I had nothing to do when I wasn’t working.
I stood on my apartment balcony and looked out at Kingston. The sky was licorice black that night and the stars were sparkling. And in that night sky, I saw it. I saw a sign. It was a sign from the heavens.
OK, it was actually a sign from Blockbuster.
I lived just a few steps from the downtown video store on Queen Street. It was there I found something to pick myself up. It was there I found four new friends. It was there I found Sex and the City on DVD.
I didn’t get HBO so I’d only seen bits and pieces of the cable show when I was visiting my parents’ house but every time I turned it on there, one of the show’s star’s breasts were on display and I didn’t want my parents to think I was into porn, so I always quickly turned the show off.
Here, in the comfort of my own pigsty, I could watch the sordid adventures/affairs of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte without feeling guilty. In fact, I could watch the episodes over and over and over again.
Soon, my routine changed. For the better. Wake up. Shower. Go to work. Come home from work. Watch Sex and the City. Eat dinner. (I started buying my dinners at Blockbuster when I picked up the DVDs – convenient or what? – so I was now on to nacho chips and the bright orange plastic cheese nacho cheese dip and Diet Coke.) Watch Sex and the City. Go to sleep.
Truly, I credit the show for pulling me out of my slump.
These four friends did cool things: Charlotte hung out in art galleries. Miranda ran a marathon. Samantha did yoga. Carrie wrote newspaper columns – for a living.
Like millions of women, I’m dying to reunite with my girls now that Sex and the City: The Movie is in theatres.
Carrie and company always celebrated with Cosmopolitans.
I’ll have a Diet Coke and maybe some nachos.
For old times’ sake.

(This column appeared in the May 31 edition of The Ticket, inside The Kingston Whig-Standard)

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I now pronounce you ... who?

It's a wonderful thing to be a teenager and a 20-something and know everything.

I vowed as a young girl that I would never, ever have a baby. I was a career woman.

My mother would tell me that one day, when I was older, when I met the right man, I would change my mind.

"Never!" I swore.

Well, OK, she won that one. I do have a babe now. I think it's a good way to tell if you're with the right man or not. If you meet him and instantly want his baby, it's a good sign. I have lots of girlfriends who said they weren't sure they could call their honeys their soulmates, or they weren't sure they wanted to marry them, but they were sure, 100 per cent, that they wanted these men to father their children.

But now comes yet another dilemma that one reaches when you're 30 and engaged.

To change your name or not to change your name. That is the question.

The feminist in me wants to keep my name.
The romantic in me wants to change my name. There's something wonderfully romantic, sweet and dedicated about having the same name as your man.

So, what to do?

I know women who changed their maiden names to their husband's name and then, years later, after spending a lifetime regretting it, changed it back.

I also know a couple of women who decided not to change their names when they got married and then, years after being married, decided they wanted the same name as their husband and children and so they took their husband's name years into their marriage.

Hyphenation seems to be the hot style these days but I'm just not into it, purely for aesthetic reasons. If I had the kind of last name that rolled off the tongue when paired with another, then maybe, but I don't. So that option is out.

Of course, I could take his name and have a professional name and a personal name.

At work, I'd go by Sarah Crosbie.
In the grocery store, I'd go by Sarah MacBarah.*

Oh, decisions, decisions.

What to do?

* Name has been changed to a silly name that rhymes with "Sarah" mostly for fun, but also not to out the Fiance totally. :)

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Don't Cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me

I've used it as a rainjacket. So has the BF.
Once, it was a picnic blanket.
I think I used it to wrap breakables once when I was moving after I ran out of wrapping paper, Kleenex, toilet paper, bubble wrap and towels.
Once during a big fight with the BF, I got all defiant and refused to sleep in our room with him. Thinking, 'I'll show him,' I took the couch. (The first and last time that's happened, I'll tell you.) I was so stubborn that I refused to go back in our bedroom for blankets so I just pulled out all my jackets from the closet. It may have been in that pile.
But yesterday, something miraculous happened.
At exactly 9:45 a.m., I used my running jacket as, wait for it, a running jacket.
Well, a power walking jacket is more like it but it was the first time I've ever used it for exercise.

I got it for Christmas in 2002.

As part of Operation Smokin' Body, I have joined a power walking/conditioning class.
If you're pregnant or you've just had a baby, you should check out a group I found called Body Now 4 Mums run by a lovely drill sergeant named Tracie Smith-Beyak.

I didn't even know Kingston had a training group that focuses on pre and post-natal workouts until I saw a picture of some women (rock on, girls) working out in my very own paper.

Every Wednesday, we lunge, squat (damn you squat! - hey, doesn't that sound very Lady Macbeth-ish?) power walk, walk stairs, stretch and have some gab time.
And it kicks the crap out of me. Just cause ya pop out a babe eight weeks ago doesn't mean Tracie - who, by the way, did 2,000 crunches last week, which is double the amount Former Abs Queen Britney Spears used to do in a week - is going to be kind.
She kicks our butts and let me tell you ... mine spread out during pregnancy so I need some serious butt kicking and toning.

So, why go through the torture of working out just weeks after giving birth:
1. You have a responsibility to yourself to look and feel good;
2. You have a responsibility to your child/children to look and feel good;
3. You have a responsibility to your man/woman to look and feel good. This one actually may be the most important because - stay with me, folks - if you don't look and feel good, your man/woman won't dig you, want you, do you, which means, you won't feel good - so what's the point of working out halfheartedly and not seeing any results? Nothing really. That's why I like the thought of Tracie going all G.I. Jane on my butt over the next few months and going full throttle.

No man says "Hey! I've got a great idea. I want to be with a frumpy hag, who only wears pink flowered track pants, which hopefully hug her mommy belly and are so tight, her underwear is cutting each bum cheek in two. Maybe, if I'm lucky, she'll never do anything with her hair. She'll only wear it in a ponytail in a big scrunchie. (A shoutout here to Carrie Bradshaw.) And, if there is a God, she'll buy and wear Crocs in every single colour. But most of all, please let her be 17 pounds overweight and totally out of shape. A guy could only be so lucky ...")

You were hot when you met him/her and so you have a responsibility to keep your hotness. Forget aging gracefully. It's all about the god damn lunges.

Don't you think fewer people would have affairs if their lovers didn't let themselves go?

I do. Maybe that stings, but it's a cruel, cruel world, people.

Next week, I'll be back in my running jacket, hoofing it up the stairs and lunging my heart out.

It's survival of the fittest.
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