PussycatMagazine

Love in the Wireless Age

By the lovely Ms. Amelia Wasserman

What defines love in a modern-day relationship? Making dinner unexpectedly or bringing home some when the fridge is empty? Maybe it’s assembling your IKEA desk without even having to be asked? Letting the bathroom garbage overflow with stained menstrual paraphernalia without as much as a snide remark? All these signs can point to love, and would net my recommendation if not admiration. But none of these items has come close, not even remotely close, to what I recently experienced.

It started off as your average Sunday. My boyfriend, Nick, and I had just moved into a new apartment and we were painting the bedroom. It was a nice midnight blue that I picked out. We had just taken a break and Nick had my phone, my, ahem, iPhone in his shirt pocket after briefly borrowing it to look up the hours of operation of Home Depot.

“Closed. Too bad.”  We’d have to go in the morning.

“Got to get back to work.” He announced reluctantly. “I want to finish the wall before 10.”

As he leaned over to pick up the paint roller my eyes fixed on the beautiful shiny silver technological wonder in his shirt pocket. The same little wonder that I had come to love in a way that I had never experienced with an inanimate object before. My iPhone, my baby, was slipping. It was slipping out of Nick’s shirt pocket heading directly towards the can of midnight blue paint.

The horror! The absolute midnight blue horror!

Time seemed to slow down, the adrenaline started to flow, my fight-or-flight reflexes kicked into overdrive. But alas not even Super Woman reflexes could have prevented what happened next. Gravity won. My precious baby fell straight from Nick’s shirt pocket into the can of midnight blue paint with a sound mimicking my sinking heart.

“Plop, plop, plop.”

What happened next is blurry. But when I came to, what I saw was so beautiful, such an honest act of love and devotion, that I almost cried.

My boyfriend was performing CPR on my iPhone.  Initially, I was horror struck, as any sane, non-paint sucker would be. But my shock and concern quickly turned to acceptance and from acceptance came a stranger feeling. We don’t have kids or dogs or even fish, I thought. Instead we have our iPhones and our Blackberries, and our mp3 players. Call it shallow, call it obnoxious, call it what you will, but  these are the things that we love the most so it would only make sense that when my iPhone fell into the paint he would do all he could to reverse the damage.

So instead of yelling, “Stop, what are you doing! Don’t eat the paint, its poison!” I opted for “Suck!” “Keep sucking! Suck it all out!” “Suck until there’s nothing left!”

“I’m trying!” he gasped back between breaths. “I’m trying the best I can!” 

It was too soon to tell if it was all for nothing. But it didn’t matter. His act of bravery and loyalty under fire was what mattered. And even if my iPhone didn’t survive I knew that our love in the wireless age would.  #


 

Why I had an abortion

A true story by Guata Girl

I was 26, living in Seattle with a musician. Sounds like fun, right? Like a little indie-girl dream. And it was, in a way-- complete with tiny, funky apartment downtown, near all the too-cool-for-you bars where the bartenders knew us by name. I would read in the bedroom while he gave classical-guitar lessons in the "living" room (really, it was just the "other" room). We smoked loads of pot and watched amazing films from the '70s like The Deer Hunter and The Shining. He was smart and pretentious and my friends hated him, so I saw less and less of them. We fought constantly --he was a double Scorpio, after all, and I'm a triple Aquarius-- and, therefore, had lots and lots and LOTS of exciting makeup sex.

Without a condom.

What? We pulled out. It was all good. It was, really. Until he didn't make it out in time-- but he was pretty sure he had. I'd been using the pull-out method for years, so I let it go. And go it did. That little swimmer went and went, all the way to the Mothership Connection and then one day, Aunt Flo --who'd made a faithful, punctual house call every twenty-eight days without fail since I was nine-- didn't show. I knew immediately.

I was poor. So was he. He was mercurial, diffident, prone to delusions of grandeur, and frequently downright mean to me (I apparently smacked him in the eye in my sleep once, which I don't remember but for which he never forgave me). I didn't want to have his baby, but I wanted to be loved. I figured we'd work it out together, make our decision as a couple...whatever happened, I felt certain my new vulnerability would bring out the best in him. I thought, "If nothing else, he'll hold me in his arms and tell me he'll love and support me no matter what I decide." (Never mind that we had yet to even utter the "L" word.)

We watched the little strip turn blue, and after a moment's silence, he said, "So I'll help you get rid of it.

"There wasn't any question on his part, for one second, about what I might want, and that sealed the deal. I decided to go home to California, to the loving arms of my mom, for the procedure: I figured, if I was going to do something so potentially traumatic, I'd rather be where I knew I was unconditionally loved. Where it was at least sunny, and I could go to the beach for self-therapy. I invited him to come along; he refused, citing work conflicts (he was self-employed). Rather, to my utter shock and consternation, he actually took this decision of mine as a personal affront! You see, by leaving, I was depriving him of the opportunity to "be there for me" while I enacted one of the most painful, confusing decisions a young woman can make. His unbelievable self-centeredness overwhelmed me, engulfed me like a wave, and I rode it all the way home to Cali.

By then I was several weeks along, and I looked beautiful-- my skin glowed and hair shone, and incredibly, in spite of the emotional turmoil I was experiencing, I felt great. Pregnancy agreed with me. When my mom saw my swollen breasts, magnified nipples and thickening waistline, she started to cry-- but stopped herself. She hated him, too.

After falsifying a local address in order to qualify for MediCal, I went to the nicest Planned Parenthood in our area. They lubed up something that looked like big white plastic dildo and stuck it deep inside,taking an ultrasound to determine the --gulp!-- age of the fetus. They wanted me to look at the screen but I refused to look. Based on the size of the speck, they told me I was five weeks along... too early for either a medical or surgical abortion. I would have to wait another week --let it grow some more!-- before anything could be done with guaranteed results.

I was horrified at the prospect of letting something grow so that I could kill it easier. Like I said, I was finding the physical experience of pregnancy quite enjoyable (to the extent that I could allow myself to experience it as such, anyway), and the thought of prolonging the experience made me wonder if I would lose out to biology and be compelled by Mother Nature to change my mind.

Meanwhile, as I sat at home mulling these things over, I called the voicemail I shared with the musician to, well, check my messages. I was (and am) an actor by trade, and these were the days before we all had cell phones. I hadn't told my agent I would be out-of-town, much less why, and I feared the worst: an audition.

Once again, I was shocked by my insignificant other's actions: he had changed the password so that I would be unable to check messages.

His logic was staggering: he felt "violated" (we lived together!), his privacy compromised. Dumbfounded, I considered the incredible, perverse irony of my situation: I was given one course of acceptable action by the babydaddy, with no other alternatives even open to discussion, and when I made the choice to exercise this option, albeit elsewhere (where I would receive the best care)-- I was punished for not "including" him! Him! My mind reeled; all he could think about, as I was being probed with space-age dildoes while a collection of cells rapidly becoming a love child multiplied within me and my ex-Catholic self waited for a lightning bolt to strike, was himself. My mother paced the hallway, drinking white wine and calling him every nasty word in Spanish ever invented.

And then, in that moment, the lightning struck-- my abdomen. I doubled over in the worst monstrous incarnation of a menstrual cramp imaginable. I was miscarrying. My mom began to cry, and this time she didn't stop herself. I did, too... tears of gratitude. The decision had been made for me. I went back to PP just to make sure, and they confirmed it: spontaneous abortion (which I've since thought would make a good name for a particularly hard-core and un-PC ladies punk band). They seemed unsurprised at the clinic; and even rather pleased for me, which made me secretly wonder if they hadn't mercifully done something to induce it. (I baked and sent them cookies just in case.)

I bled profusely and cramped horribly for two more days, durinng which my body miraculously returned to its pre-preggers condition. My mom and I stared in wonder at the mirror, unable to believe the speed with which my body had restored itself. We then did what any two women would have done in our situation: hit the thrift stores!

I didn't tell the musician right away; I told him the day after it began. By then, he had restored my voicemail access in an act of contrition. When I got back to Seattle, and packed my things to move into my own studio across town, he told me of a dream he'd had, a dream from which he'd awoken with tears on his pillow: he had found an infant girl by a riverbank, a newborn with black hair and eyes, like mine. I still don't know how I feel about that.

I'm 33 now, and actually had a medical abortion a year after that happened (that time I got pregnant using BOTH a condom and a diaphragm with spermicide). Somehow, the experience I detailed above, of that reprieve my 26th summer, stands out much more strongly in my heart and mind than the "real thing" I was to experience a year later. •

My sofa, my self

By the lovely Ms. Denise

It was time. Even my mother knew it. On a Saturday visit last September, she sat down on the sofa next to me, put her hand over mine and in a serious voice said "Honey. It's about time you bought some grown up furniture."

Gasp. She was right. I'm 33. I have a 10 month old baby and have been married for 7 years. I own my house and have a good job. I love painting and home improvement, and yet my living room was a wreck. I had the blue futon, the only piece of furniture my husband brought into the marriage, the green pull out sofabed that was in the guest room when we bought the house, and old blue. Sigh. Blue, my l-shaped 1950s sofa and ottoman, the first piece of furniture I bought as an adult. It was 1998. I was just back from a summer backpacking around Europe and I found that sofa. It came from the City Furniture on Magazine Street in New Orleans. It was my first piece of furniture that couldn't be broken down and thrown in the back of a car for easy moving. It was the sofa that said "I am laying down roots, building a life. I intend to stay."

Maybe that's why I cried when the people from Craigslist came to pick it up. It was more than a beat up sofa with the stuffing falling out, it was the symbol of a major turning point in my young adult life.

But mom was right. When the baby started pulling the stuffing out of the sofa and trying to eat it, it became clear that a grown up life required a grown-up sofa. It was hard to admit that I was, indeed, grown up, even though I had all the accoutrements: husband, baby, homeowner, college degree, career. Yep, grown up. Officially. Like it or not.

I guess I just never realized that being a grown up came with matching furniture. It took me months to find a sofa. I poured over magazines, IKEA catalogs, you name it. Many were just too expensive. My old live like a college student cheapskate ways were not totally thrown to the side simply because I was in my mid-30s. No way. Sofas overall, are a significant purchase. Even the cheap ones are north of $500, easily north of $1,000. And you only buy one once every how many years? Once you get it, unless you want to shell out more dough, you are stuck with it.

I don't make those kind of life-changing major decisions without deliberation. Then, in February, I found the sofa. And to make me feel even more old, lame and responsible, I was at Macy's. And I first saw it in a sale flyer I got from my home-delivered Sunday paper. My 24-year-old self wouldn't even recognize me now.

The brightly-lit Macy's showroom was calculatedly cheerful. The piped-in music and the room montages were craftily engineered to make you spend money, to make $300 nonfunctional dining room table displays seem like an investment. Donna waited on me.

I don't do well under pressure, or in social situations, so I had a list of three sofa model names scribbled on my sale flyer. I wasn't going to stray from the too good to be true sale, no sireee, not on the first day out. I was easy prey. After sitting on all three sofas, we bought two of the first one. They were delivered three weeks later. The color made me laugh: Hampton Pear. It reaks of faux sophistication. No one in the Hamptons has this $600 sofa, they've got the real deal $12,000 models I drooled over in the magazines. I chuckled, realizing I am not the demographic that is impressed by silly color names that smack of class.

Last night, I had some friends over. One, a librarian, 32 years old, married three years, asked about the sofa. I told her I bought it at Macy's, and in hushed tones, she told me that she too had purchased a sofa at Macy's recently.

"Doesn't it make you feel old?", she whispered.

Midnight Cinderellas at Malley’s Chocolate Factory

By the lovely Ms. Sarah E Tascone

     Last Valentine’s Day I told friends and family I was going to temp in a chocolate factory. They laughed of course. The immediate image in their minds - and yours, probably -  was from I Love Lucy.  Frantic over a runaway train of chocolates on an assembly line, Lucy and Ethel stuff candy into their mouths and chew like bewildered squirrels, until Mrs. Ricardo finally lets loose her famous wail. 

     I’m a life-long chocoholic, so I saw myself turning instead into Norma Rae.  Jumping on the switched-off conveyer belt at the end of the shift, I would shout defiantly, “It’s gonna take you…the police department, the fire department… and the NATIONAL GUARD to get me outta here!”

    But that isn’t what brought me to Malley’s Chocolates. When you haven’t found work in six months, or a boyfriend in six years; you have no money, no car, you’re on food stamps, you’re 36, and Valentine’s day is coming up, and there is an ad in the newspaper that said: CANDY MAKING, THURS & FRIDAY 4am-4pm NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY, it's a no-brainer.

Malley’s, Cleveland’s own Willie Wonka, makes chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine’s Day only – and sells them fresh.  Four 12-hour shifts crank out the boxes and people buy them as soon as they’re made.

     At 4pm Thursday I’m crowded in with a long line of hair-netted women of all races and ages.   The packing room is enormous, cold, pink, and brightly lit.  I am paired up with “Katya”, who was a draftsperson in the Ukraine but has trouble finding work here.

Our job is simply to place a piece of corrugated wax paper on top of the chocolate boxes and cover each with a red gingham-patterned lid, emblazoned with a strawberry.  Over and over and over again. Katya’s husband has cancer and medical bills. When she goes home, she has to start cooking a big meal for her family, with no sleep.   Suddenly being single doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. 

     A Puerto Rican woman, “Athena”, who leads the crew one conveyer belt over, seems to enjoy being single - raunchy mouths are inevitable in rooms full of working women with no men around.  Her voice rings out over the rumbling machines: “Pick it up, come on now, keep the line going.”  I glance over and see she has a jaunty grin on her face, and it stays most of the night.  She trades good-hearted mock barbs with “Donna”, another crew leader.  Donna is Appalachian; Athena calls her “hillbilly”.  Donna gets her back by calling her a Mexican. 

     I  learn to focus on the “bambambam” of the shrink-wrapper to keep awake. The shrink-wrap girl is about 6 feet tall and looks like a supermodel.  She pulls the bar up and down with jaw-dropping speed. Who needs to get signed with Revlon when you have a talent like that?

     Male employees come and go, to pour more chocolate or load filled boxes on a dolly.  I begin to see this as the ultimate Cinderella experience for a woman on Valentine’s Day: wearing a hairnet and gloves and stuffing chocolates in boxes for the princes to buy for their princesses. A woman laughs hysterically when the PA system announces lunch at midnight.

  By the middle of the second night there are deserters. I stick it out, but my brain doesn’t.  By now I must have put lids on 5,000 boxes. “Foxy Lady” by Jimi Hendrix is on the radio – or is it? Terrified, I stop for a second and prick up my ears, concentrate real hard.  Am I hallucinating music? Oh well, Jimi hallucinated all the time.

     By 4:15 am Saturday, I have not become Norma Rae or Lucy: I have become Papillon, coming out of solitary confinement. Time moves veerrrrrry sloooooowwly. 

     Something strange has happened to my legs: It never made sense to me when people told me to put my legs up during my break when I’ve been standing a long time. Blood goes down the legs, right? Now it hits me that it has to go up too, and can have a hard time of it. The sensation is like being frozen alive. There are unexpected shooting pains, like a fork jabbing. Perhaps those unfortunate folks of the Donner party, the first to drop into the snow as dinner, experienced something like this. 

    Numb, I wait for my pumpkin carriage – the Rapid Transit. Then there’s a long icy road, and then, somehow, I’m in my bed. The four Ibuprofen I  have taken make the pains vanish in no time. Ibuprofen is my new chocolate – and my handsome prince.

Tell us about your unusual, temp, or other jobs! send us an email at Pussycatmagazine@yahoo.com

Wanted: Warm fuzzy companion that doesn't fart

By Ms. Ann Leisure
Valentine’s Day is coming up and we will soon be bombarded with pink and red gushy stuff everywhere we turn. Fortunately I’m a newlywed, but even I refuse to give in to all the commercial hype instead settling for a quiet home BBQ with hubby.

However, not too long ago I was dumped, brokenhearted, SEVERELY depressed and in desperate need of affection. The last thing you need at a time like that is to have love shoved in your face. Or so I thought.

The answer to all my loneliness had been right in my house for five years: her name was Abby and boy did she love me! My sweet and grateful Lab mutt that I bought right out of the animal control truck didn’t care that she had become second fiddle in my six year quest to please this stupid boy. She was here for me now with more love than ever before—waiting for me every morning at my bedside when I didn’t want to get out of it and face the world newly-single.

If I wanted to stay in bed with the blinds closed all day, she was next to me dreaming and snoring. When I took up walking to "think", or made a quick drive to the corner store, she was my ready and willing partner .

Girls, I can speak from experience: the best medicine for a broken heart this Valentine’s Day is the unconditional love of a furry four- legged creature. They can’t speak, but they are great listeners. They won’t buy you flowers, but they give great hugs, kisses and ALWAYS want to cuddle. They’ll hang in there longer than any cry-baby boy, with patience and understanding. Best of all, no matter how mad you get, a critter will always be at the door when they hear that key or car pull up. Even now with my cats Freddy and Vanessa, they just can’t snuggle enough and one of them is always waiting for me in the window.

Abby and I have seen men come and go. Looking back, her adoption fee was the best 45 dollars I've ever spent.

The ass who ran off with my cash: A love story

Love is Blind, Bank Statements Don't Lie,
by Miss Behavin

Dating and money don't mix. I was 23 when I figured it out. I had been dating a boy I worked with for a few months and I decided to move to New Orleans. We liked each other, so he decided to come with me.

We got an apartment, we moved in. I got a job. He didn't. My new job was fabulous. I made much dinero-- a whole bunch more than I made before I moved.

Two months later, he still didn't have a job. He was sitting on my couch (that I paid for), eating pizza (that I paid for) and smoking weed ( that I paid for).

Now this boy had worked up to the last day we moved. My parents even liked him. Everyone thought of him as a 'winner.' But now he was a loser sitting on my couch belly-aching about not wanting to work "any old job." He wanted to find his calling-- and I was stuck footing the bill.

Strangely, I noticed that he never got any mail. He used credit cards and gas cards, but no bill ever came in the mail. I got mail all the time-- even junk mail that had been forwarded from 1000 miles away. He also never got any phone calls from old roommates or friends. It's like he just dropped off the face of the earth and landed on my futon.

I didn't realize how hard it is to dump someone you live with, and extra because they are completely dependent on your for their well-being. I had visions of throwing him out and then I'd see him in a cardboard box and couldn't live with myself.

Then it happened. I went on vacation for 2 months. I gave him money orders to pay the rent and the bills. I arrived home to an eviction notice, no electricity and a disconnected phone. He had cashed the money orders and spent them , and he wasn't even in the house like he was supposed to be. He was living with his parents, blowing through my money. He ruined my credit in one hit. I had to pay penalty fees and sweet talk my landlord into letting me stay.

Then he had the nerve to show up like nothing happened. But that was it. He took a nap and I took his key off his key ring. I gathered up all of his things and threw them on the sidewalk. Then I woke him up and threw him out. He just didn't get it. He didn't understand why.

He said he loved me. I say love doesn't screw people over. After he was gone I found a box of papers. He never got any bills because he really was running. Ex-room mates were suing him for back rent and phone bills. He'd missed court dates for stupid little misdemeanors, so now he was really in trouble. His credit card bills went to daddy.

Daddy. Turns out Daddy was a millionaire and he'd been riding on his coattails for all of his adult life. I'm guessing he never knew what money meant to everyone else-- to those of us who have to earn it, live paycheck to paycheck, and have the real threat of being without it.

He never knew how hard I worked for his pizza.

Poor Girl in the Ivy League

Money really is relative
By Ms. Rachel

I do want to share with you one thing I've observed about money: IT IS ALL RELATIVE.

This was freshly borne home to me recently by a remembered incident from my college days. Yes, even this many years after graduation, old campus slights still rankle.

I was planning a party and my suite-mate insisted on moving the couch in front of her bedroom door so none of my "poor" friends would go into her closet and steal her Joan & David shoes.

The Joke was on her. And believe me, I spread this story around. Since I , unlike her, didn't discriminate based on one's parents' income,and there were several kids from wealthy families in attendance.

The punch line is that this little parable took place at Yale.

Yeah, so I was on financial aid and I had a job on campus, but I was hardly raised on government cheese.

In what universe is a student at an Ivy League university considered poor? And who would be wrong-headed enough to say it to her face?

In that venue, I, with my private school education and summers in Europe, was considered poor.

And for a long time I believed it, but then I remembered that money is a relative thing.

Friends for the Hot Mom?

  By Marsha Maung

One of the biggest challenges of motherhood is how to remain the kind of hot mom that you used to be without turning your friends away – friends who are not yet moms, friends who are still single looking for a man to fit into their lives. Let’s admit this, the moment we become moms, our lives become different and sometimes in the eyes of our friends, WE become different no matter how hard we try to remain the same. We could be doing the same kind of shopping and yakking and drinking the same kind of coffee after we’ve become mom, it’s just not the same.

Why?

Well, hot mom, here’s news for you

One of the biggest difference as a mom is that it’s hard to remain hot when you’ve got jello-like extra skin hanging out in front of your belly at least for some months to come after the birth. When your friends are wearing hot outfits and extra sexy (midrift revealing) outfits, we get a little HOT under the collar because we can’t wear the same clothes. In fact, this hot mom had to trade her smaller-than-small outfits for hubby’s tracks and shirts for 3 months. It’s hard to be a hot mom when you know you’re wearing a man’s outfit.

No matter how you try to be and act hot with that outfit, it’s not COMPLETELY possible.

Hot mom and hot friends will grow apart for a while

After giving birth to your new baby, the first thing you will want to do is to bond with your new bundle of joy. This newborn baby will rule your waking hours and sleeping hours for some time. So, hot mom, here’s news. You will not be hot with your friends for at least a couple of months.

After a couple of months, if they’re really your friends, they’ll stick around…that’s for sure.

How to get back to being a hot mom

Getting back to your feet as a hot mom is not an overnight thing. You don’t just force yourself to fit into your old clothes, act the way you used to act, go to places you used to go, and work the way you used to work without thinking about the new human being that you’re now responsible for. It’s different – but it’s almost the same kind of hot-ness, if there aren’t any other ways to say this.

First, understand and accept the fact that you’re a mom. You’re still hot but you’re mom now.

Secondly, try your best to separate between time with your family and time with your friends. As much as your newborn needs you, you need you and your friends need you. they need the mom they used to know to be back in the clique with them. I am sure they are sad too that you’re no longer the kind of hot mom that you used to be. And it will take very little effort on your part to bridge the differences.

Thirdly, a hot mom will know that friends are very important pillars of support. When times are down and you need a shoulder to cry on, you should have friends you can count on to answer your calls in the middle of the night. Your relationship and friendship with other hot moms is just as important but…the fact is, maintaining your friendship from pre-baby days is JUST AS IMPORTANT.

Non hot moms (as in hot ladies??) is crucial to a mom’s sanity.
Just trust me on this one.

Marsha Maung is a freelance graphic designer and copy writer who works from home. She designs apparel and premium items at http://www.allmomstuff.com and is the author of "Raising little magicians", and the popular "The Lance in freelancing". More information can be found at http://www.marshamaung.com

The Dressing Room Blues

By the lovely Ms. Karen

Okay, these are my stats. I’m forty years old. Divorced. Stay-at-home mom. Two boys, 12 & 2. My boys are my life, and my devotion to providing them with everything they need started the minute they were born. Kids are expensive these days and because of that my discretionary income is, well, pretty pathetic.

Therefore, my own needs are simple. They have to be. I don’t wear the latest fashions, I don’t have any bling, and I don’t drive a cool car (how superficial I was when those things actually mattered to me, I keep reminding myself). But on one particular day when I was feeling a little down, I needed a little boost and decided to go to the mall and actually splurge on some new clothes for myself.

I took my hundred dollars … (okay, stop laughing!… I actually believed I could get 3 or 4 items with this money. Shows how long its been since I’ve been clothes shopping) Anyway, I took my money and walked into ‘the monster of a mall’.

I felt downright prehistoric walking from store to store looking for something that would a.) fit me… b.) cover my private parts… and c.) not make me the object of people staring at me and commenting under their breath “Who does she think she’s kidding, she’s too old to wear THAT!”.

I finally found a few items that I could live with. Ugh! Here it comes. The dressing room. That little house of horrors that ALL women dread. Well, anyone over thirty, that is. It had been so long since my last clothes shopping trip, that I had forgotten how traumatic that five little minutes in a dressing room can be for a woman already struggling with self-esteem issues.

Now, just for the record, I highly doubt any woman looks great in her undies under fluorescent lights, although I am the only person I have ‘personally’ seen under these conditions. Why don’t these retailers know this? If you want me to buy your clothes, help a girl out a little bit by putting some soft, diffused lighting in there. Or candles, maybe. All women look good in candlelight. Damn that Thomas Edison and that whole ‘lightbulb’ thing!

And why not use some carnival mirrors? You know, the ones that they manipulate to make you look tall and thin like a supermodel? Has no retail marketing executive ever thought of this?

I think I speak for most of the female population when I state that we don’t care if you trick us into believing we look better in your clothes than we do. Us women are the masters of ‘trickery’ ourselves. We just want to look good. We want to appear to be the goddesses that we once were. But all the hair dye, fake fingernails, make-up, botox, fake tans go out the window the minute we step into your little cubicle from hell.

How about this? Exclusive dressing rooms for women ‘over forty’. Maybe a little wine and cheese in each dressing room. I always look better after a glass or two of wine (so do the men I date, but that’s a WHOLE other issue…) Maybe some young, buff ‘escort’ to help bring our “I’ll never get my ass into these jeans” pants into the dressing room. Divert us. That’s what we NEED!

God bless these young, skinny-assed girls who don’t know or care about ‘lighting’ yet. Youth is definitely wasted on the young. Whoever said that was a genius!

So, did I buy any clothes that day? Yes. I bought a pair of pants and a shirt. And the next day I went on a diet. It’s been a week, and so far I’ve lost a couple of pounds. A little ‘dressing room reality’ will do that to a girl. I’ll never be Giselle, Claudia or Kate Moss. But I’m trying.

Hey, how about Fabio on a TV monitor in the dressing room telling me how fabulous I look?…… Ladies, the ideas keep coming…..

Taking the leap into self-employment

Taking the leap into self employment: one gal's tale

by Stephanie Williams

I loved my old job, but I had to go.

Working for a family-owned business is always a challenge, even if you're a member of the family. But as long as the challenges and rewards add up at the end of the day, everybody's happy. It is often the case, however, that idiosyncratic management style, personal squabbles and lack of true leadership opportunities can make employees miserable.

That was me.

Almost six years ago, I decided it was time for a real job. When I was offered a position - as a promotion assistant for an independent publishing company - I was thrilled. Here at last was my big opportunity to contribute to the world of books and ideas I so care about. I was convnced this would be the first building block to my new and exciting career.

The glitter soon wore off. It became clear early on this company was so atypical in its management of everything from people to processes, that I began to wonder how well the experience would actually translate. But I stayed -there was always one more mountain to climb; one more thing I wanted to accomplish; one more author I wanted to work with; one more project I wanted to see to fruition.

Ambivalent, but optimistic about the impact my track record would have at larger publishing house in New York or elsewhere, I began sending out resumes in my second year. At first, I thought the reason I wasn't getting interviews was because I hadn't done enough, so I set new goals for myself and achieved them.

Then it slowly began to dawn on me that the eclectic book list of a publisher unconcerned with what general readers want meant a glamorous New York publishing job was a long shot; I would never have the long list of best-sellers and national media appearances the big companies are looking for.

I was well thought of within the company I worked for, but I was also getting tired of all of the minutiae tied to the work: the daily reports, the supervisor, the tremendous work load and the resistance to adding new staff to improve results.

I was suffering battle fatigue from the daily struggle. Everything was a challenge, even when company officers agreed with what was being said. I understand rigorous questioning, but it began to feel less like an effort to discover what was true or what was best; rather, it was the unpleasant reality of the ruling family's mode of communication.

What it boiled down to was that I wanted to work with people who cared about their careers. I wanted to work with people who shared my desire to build a fulfilling, engaging livelihood rather than just be happy to go to a job every day.

A meeting with the CEO was the final straw. He said he needed another three months before my long-promised promotion - supplanting his daughter as head of the department - would go into effect, pending the job performance of another (admittedly excellent, as it turns out) employee whom I had no input on hiring. Then, he made comments in the meeting about the appropriateness of choices in my personal life which verged on a violation of workplace law. My mind was made up. It was time to take the plunge.

I exited the meeting with more composure than I anticipated, vowing to think for the weekend before I resigned, but knowing I would.

I knew when I left - since I didn't have savings to rely on - I would have to hustle and scrape. It wasn't going to be easy. But now that the first - and most difficult- month is over, the horizon is much brighter.

It may sound silly, but every time I pay a bill or buy gasoline or groceries, I celebrate the fact that I can do this. I am now on my own, officially a self-employed public relations freelancer, and some lucrative contracts are already in the offing.

And strangely, when I let people know about my resignation the following Monday, a funny thing happened. All of the people who knew how unhappy I had been were excited for me! They offered to give recommendations; they inquired about obtaining my services; they referred clients; they sent cards. Never in my life have I felt so well respected or supported. And I was stunned by the realization that a lot of what I had done in my time at this job was establish an excellent network for my own business.

I'm not saying that there aren't more tough days ahead - once a week or so I still wonder what I have done and whether I've made a big mistake with something important-but I got back bits of myself I had almost forgotten about and know I did the right thing for me.

Stephanie Williams is a freelance writer, agent, and public relations/marketing specialist for the book industry and small business. She can be reached at swillinola@yahoo.com.