Dear Armor-All,

Let me start by saying thank you. Thank you for restoring my faith in my own ability to maintain a vehicle, as up until I discovered your wonderful line of products I had no idea what the big deal was.

Recently I felt the urge to try and make our year-old Mazda look spanky new. I've never had a new car before and I thought, well, OK - it needs to be done. I had actually been kind of depressed by how shabby our under-20,000kms car was looking, despite my attempts to keep it at least *sort of* tidy. Of course, part of my resistance to spending a lot of time keeping the car looking pretty has to do with a) the environment (such a waste of water, and all those nasty chemicals!) and b) the whole weirdness of lots of men (and a few women) I've met who take a little *too* much pride in their vehicle's appearance. Like some sort of strange religious sect, they emerge from their homes to spend Sunday afternoon (and probably a few nights a week, too) hanging out in the back alley, dripping sweat while they lustily take after their car/truck/van/motorbike piece by piece to make it shine, shimmer, and glisten. They do this with the kind of cult-like dedication and zeal most women wished their husbands would reserve for important things like foreplay and helping with the dishes.

We're pretty 'green' at our house - we reduce, reuse, and recycle as much as we can. We buy second-hand and accept hand-me-downs. We're bicycle commuters and avoid using the car during the week at all if possible. We use a push mower and insist that you only flush it down when it's brown. I am personally the lights-off Nazi, spending countless minutes following people around and shutting off lights behind them. I know we have room for improvement but we *do* try and do our part to limit the size of our carbon footprint. So when I took on washing the Mazda a few weeks ago, I tried to approach it from an environmentally-friendly perspective, reminding myself that a well-maintained car will last longer and that this had nothing to do whatsoever with vanity.

Off to the car wash I went to clean the exterior. I selected the little green tree dial at the carwash for the foaming brush that uses biodegradable soap (which only runs for about half as long as the other planet-destroying soap) and vacuum (quickly, so as to not waste energy) the ever-loving snot out of the floor mats and between the seats, then return home to use water and old rags, newspaper and vinegar, and 50% post-consumer waste paper toweling to clean the interior. But after suffering through hours of wiping, wiping, wiping that damned plastic moulded crap inside my car I started thinking, "Why? Why do they make cars out of this shit? Is there really no other material they could use that wouldn't look like I had a family of 18 billy goats tramping about on it after just a couple of days? And why does this particular plastic dashboard attract all this cosmic fuzz?" By the time the sun started slipping down behind the tree-line I was practically in hysterics, thinking somehow it was my own inadequacy or maybe part of the Universe's plan that I don't deserve to have anything nice and oh boo hoo hoo meeeee~~~~~~

So, in a fit of late-night rage and frustration I decide to do what I often do when my elbow-grease tree-hugging labour isn't fruitful - I turn to chemicals, rebellious and ashamed. Yeah, you wanna make something of it? Yeah, I'm the one who buys the 'green' products and when they don't work make a beeline for the caustic stuff that makes your nose hairs curl and your eyes water, with the 'poison' and 'will probably blow up' and 'may cause blindness and sterility and spontaneous amputations' icons on them. Laundry detergents, stain removers, mildew killers, grout cleaners, scrubbing bubbles with bleach, soap scum remover, the oven cleaner that asks you to leave your home for no less than 48 hours or suffer a collapsed lung - LOVE them, LOVE THEM ALL. In shame. So yes, I admit, I caved and headed straight for the aisle of tree-killing, water contaminating, environmentally unfriendly toxic products that would, frankly, make my car look all shiny and pretty and new again.

Off to WalMart I go (who else is open this late on a Sunday night?) I return just as dusk is creeping, a storm brewing nicely in the distance, mosquitoes swarming out to greet me, and I'm armed with a comprehensive collection of Armor-All auto-care products. Shammies. Gloves. Stuff to get grease and tar off the rims. Stuff to make the tires shiny. Stuff to keep the leather upholstery supple and creamy like butta. And stuff for wiping down the plastic - a rather innocent looking black bottle that simply says, "Original Formula" in yellow letters. I am on a mission now, dammit.

I started with the wheels. I was feeling guilty about the satisfaction I felt as I watched the tar on the rims practically evaporate mere seconds after being sprayed. I was ashamed to feel such glee over my slick wet-look low-profile tires. When I slid open the doors to polish the seats, I was horrified to rub against the leather upholstery, all smelling nice while feeling supple and perhaps even creamier than butta. And I swear I did not mean that orgasmic whoop of ecstasy (or the dance of joy, or the tears and rocking on my heels repeating, "Praise be!") when I wiped down the plastic with Original Formula. Blessed, amazing, transforming Original Formula. As I stepped back and admired with deep sorrow the beauty that was the Mazda, I became Armor-All's biggest fan. (For those of you who already knew about this Armor-All thing, shut up - it was a life-changing thing for me, a revelation, maybe even an epiphany, really. I even spent a week afterwards being a one-man advertising machine for the company... "Hey, man, did you know what Armor-All can do for YOUR car?")

Now if only Armor-All would create a line of environmentally-friendly products that work as well as their regular products, I too could be convinced to spend many Sunday afternoons attending the church of car care without so much as an ounce of remorse. (I hear they have engine shampoo - whoohoo!) For now, I'll consider my new obsession with Armor-All a guilty pleasure, and if you see me at a red light whipping out a convenient Original Formula handy wipe and simonizing my steering wheel like Gollum fingering his ring, look away...

Dear Empress,

Just a reminder that you are still walking around naked, despite the shroud of lies and half-truths you've attempted to weave for yourself. If only you could see how utterly ridiculous you look, prancing around and screaming at people as if somehow you can will them to see the beautiful cloak you cannot even see yourself.

To Whom it May Concern:

Summer. Hate it. Hate hot weather, hate crowded beaches, hate sticking to my leather-upholstered car seats. Especially hate bathing suit season. Loathe it, with the kind of unwavering hatred reserved for things like mice and ants who seem to think my house is a bloody hotel and people who are too lazy to flush or wipe the seat after they pee and popsicles that fall off the stick and into the dirt.

I spent the day at the beach yesterday with my family. My mother-in-law and I spent much of our time admiring the water from a safe distance, tucked up under the umbrella, her alternately napping and gazing out at the water, me reading a book and wading through the sludge periodically to splash with the children, Kaelan in trunks, the girls in their same-style-different-fabric suits and me in a bikini. And a flowing cotton summer dress; a short muumuu you might say.

Yes, I spent the day frolicking on the beach covered in some floral-print pink sundress type of thing I picked up several months ago on a whim, thinking *I* could pull off a floral-print pink sundress, but have never before yesterday taken out of the laundry basket since the first time I actually wore it in public, spent the entire time fretting about the parachute-like quality of my sundress's hemline and what the wind was doing with it, and swore never to do that to myself again. But in the heat of yesterday, owning only two black one-piece suits and not wanting to wear black and a pair of shorts or two layers over my torso by covering up the one-piece with the floral-print pink dress (which looked silly with the high neckline of the suit anyways) I opted for the bikini I purchased in Prince George last year when we were staying in a hotel with a pool and I forgot my black one-piece in Edmonton, worn under the floral-print pink sundress.

Please know this - I only grabbed a bikini because there was not a single one-piece to be found in the entire city (or at least the three different department stores I dragged my graciously accommodating husband and whining impatient children to.) I was glad to have it, nonetheless, as a cooler option to a one-piece, that would cleverly resemble a pair of panties if the wind grabbed hold of my dress and flipped it up I would be OK saying, "Whoops!" and move on. But even then, I don't think once I let go of the hemline. I held onto it and willed it to stay down, tucking it in when I sat and gathering it up in front when walking. What if someone sees my fat?

My weight has fluctuated about 30lbs annually since the birth of my daughter. Down 30 lbs, up 30lbs, down 30lbs, up 30lbs... we're currently on the 'up' part and I'm not really feeling all that sexy or beach-bikini ready. Insert my wise mother-in-law, in a wakeful moment, expressing delight and not an ounce of malice or envy for all the different bodies on the beach - short ones, fat ones, tall ones, skinny ones, "and look at her cute bum!" I personally don't "delight" in looking at other people's bodies. I thought, hrmm - she must have that ability because of her age... no point in being judgmental of beach bodies when you're on the brink of retirement. I tend to find it a) depressing or b) repulsive. I am envious of the ones you can look at and say, "Cute bum!" and horrified by the lack of either common-sense or modesty that would compel someone to purchase a two-piece off the XXXL rack at WalMart.

After coming home from the lake I finally decided that I'd had enough of this sinus horsepoop (that's a story for another day) and went to the MediCentre for (hopefully) some really potent extra-strength ass-kicking antibiotics. While in the waiting room (for almost 3 hours) I pick up a copy of Chatelaine. In my head I'm hearing k.d. lang singing and, being the type who usually prefers the brainless pleasure of indulging in celebrity magazines over the kinds of tripe found in most women's magazines (lose 2olbs in 20days, 327 tips for having a better orgasm, how to make your husband jealous, shabby chic on a shoestring budget, etc.) was not really hoping to find anything worth reading much less remembering.

After flipping through countless pages of Photoshopped ads, articles about tricks for making kids eat vegetables and being a better hostess, and several recipes that I'm sure made me gain weight just by reading them, I happened across an article on... women and bathing suits. Now, I'm not going to say that it was anything that brought me a revelation, and I won't harp on too much about how the entire article was cheapened by the bikini manufacturer plugs (how much do you think they paid her to mention them in the ad, oops, article?) and the customary summarization of getting over your body images and feeling sexy on the beach in a bikini in Just 10 Easy Steps (yeah, right...) but it did reinforce for me the fact that I, like millions of other women around the planet, don't EVER feel bikini ready, no matter how great a suit we find, no matter how fit we feel, no matter how far away from every person we know we may be traveling to sit on a beach covered in what amounts to a bra and panties, and no matter how many times we give ourselves a pep-talk in Just 10 Easy Steps.

Let's face it. You go to a beach, you look at the people on the beach, and you notice their bodies, and how much of them are exposed. And we know someone is looking at us, too. In our minds we say things that we wouldn't dare say to other people without sounding just plain rude or superficial. But we think them. "Oh-Em-Gee, like THAT lady needs another trip to the concession..." "Gawd, that one must be a kept woman - who else would have the time to work out THAT much..." "Jesus, that woman's skin looks like leather - maybe she should have considered a little more SPF earlier in life..." So we have to assume at least some people are saying the same things about us, right?

I'm no better than the average Jill. In fact, I'm probably one of the worst people on the planet for it. I've been known to stalk people on resorts and at the local lake waiting for just the right moment to immortalize their particularly fantastic/sexy/hideous/weird body by snapping a photograph (anonymously - stalking involves careful planning to get the person while they are facing away from you or shot through palm fronds that carefully preserve the person from being identified.) Men in banana hammocks with their enormous bellies hanging down so far that from the front they look naked. Women who resemble oatmeal poured into nylons and sprouting what look like back-breasts from their shoulder blades squeezed into tankinis that look like they were manufactured to fit on actual tankers. Little retired old men with knobby knees and the muscles and sinew visibly working in slow-motion just beneath their deeply-tanned and paper-thin skin. Foreign men with long wiry hairs sprouting from their ears and nostrils and cascading down their faces into chest and back hair so thick mosquitoes are afraid to enter. Skeletal women who look like they just walked off the set of "The Mummy Goes to Jamaica."

Women and men who have spent their lives taking very good care of their bodies are, frankly, pretty boring. Enviable, yes, but boring. They are nice to look at, sure, but really - we look at perfect people in magazines morning noon and night - made up, dressed, and photoshopped to some kind of 'perfection' that a ridiculously small portion of the population will ever achieve without tens of thousands of dollars of surgery, a personal chef, and some kind of trainer who hails from a small European country where the children will all grow up to be champion athletes. No, women don't come away from the beach imbibed with a newfound desire to take up veganism, master yoga and run a marathon. At least I don't. The beautiful beach bodies depress me, and are at best forgettable - we've been shown nothing but this sliver of the population in the media for decades. But the weird bodies, they're always memorable.

I'm not a shallow person - I swear I'm not. I'm a lover - I love people, period, even if the only thing I love about them is the fact they remind me of a person I never want to grow up to be. I've never been (outwardly) cruel nor ignorant to anyone based on their physical appearance alone, but I have been (inwardly) at times sympathetic and at others empathetic. Sympathy is a form of arrogance, in my books. It's a means of making yourself feel better by saying, 'tut, tut' when someone's worse off than you. I find myself feeling sorry for the ones who boldly strut their stuff - even when it's a LOT of stuff, who surely must know that they don't look good.

I recall one pair of ladies on a small beach a couple of years ago, spilling out the sides of their folding canvas chairs, set miles from the water, wearing lycra tarpaulins and washing down family sized bags of Lay's with 2L bottles of Coke. From the back, they looked like spectators at the beach - they might just as easily have have been planted in front of the TV to watch Survivor - and clearly had no intentions of moving from their comfy armchairs for anything silly like taking a dip in the water or playing beach volleyball. From the front, with their enormous thighs being unable to meet at the knees, their legs couldn't help but splay out in such a fashion that you could see lumps of dimply fat extruding from their inner thighs, cascading rolls that made their way up to what looked like rotting hamburger. (nb - I once knew a lady who worked in the extended care obesity unit at a US hospital - one of her jobs was to roll obese people over and treat the dead/dying flesh on their backs and buttocks, and until that point I had always thought her reference to their skin being like hamburger as a reference to the texture, not the colour as well... and I'll leave to your imagination what she described the smell as.) Not a lick of modesty there, and yet they seemed completely unashamed and unapologetic for sitting there like cellulite monoliths dedicated to the junkfood industry. And I ~insert something resembling envy but not quite~ envied them for being bold and brave. Really, that has to take balls - kudos, ladies.

Now, I am empathetic to the women who sit on the beach like me - cowards, each of us, terrified to be this exposed in public, alternately pulling at and readjusting a swimsuit that never (and I mean NEVER EVER) has enough fabric to be 'comfortable' and the others, like me, dressed in tents and feigning modesty, which is only a stone's throw from shame. Yep, shame - there it is. I am ashamed of my body. I am 5'5" and have weighed anywhere from 130 to 192lbs when not pregnant, and usually hover somewhere in the middle. Not grotesquely obese but certainly not within the BMI range 'normal' for my height. Notwithstanding the fact I know I have body dysmorphic disorder, there is a deeper thing here, for me anyways. After years and years of struggling with my weight and my body issues, what it all boils down to for me is summed up nicely in that one little word: shame. I have not been a good camper about taking care of my body, not since I can remember. Food and I have always had a terrible relationship - I'm in a constant struggle with food. Food is my enemy, one who has a two-headed coin and I always calls tails on whether I'm going to succumb to the second helping, the chocolate almonds, the bagel with oh-so-yummy cream cheese.

When I eat I flip flop between hating it (curse you, despicable creamy and delicious curry sauce!) and making love to it (oh, sweet Mary, Joseph, and Jesus - I think I'm going to die if I don't wrap my tongue amorously around just one more piece of French bread slathered with warm brie...) I rebel against food, dare it to make me fat (Oh yeah? You're just a little bag of chocolate almonds. You're sweet and tasty, and I'm going to devour you and I'm going to get fat and be happy about it and there's nothing you can do about it...) But normal people without hang-ups about food eat, so to be normal, sometimes I have to eat just to fit in - like when I go to a party and everyone is eating hamburgers and potato salad, which aren't even my favourite, even if I've just ate, even if I've behaved myself like a saint for the last week eating salads and drinking 8 glasses of water a day, I don't want anyone to comment or notice. I don't want anyone to ask, "Oh, you're on a diet?" So, I eat to blend in. Then I am mad at myself and swear I'm back on the wagon. Until my husband comes in the door with a six-pack of coolers and a bag of M&Ms...

Oh, the glorious shame. I call myself a recovering Catholic only partly in jest - I'm no stranger to shame, and all that I ought to be ashamed of. I feel like everyone seeing me on a beach (or anywhere, really) is looking at me and saying, "Wow - bet she sits on a beach washing down family-sized bags of Lay's with a 2L of Coke. And doesn't set foot in the water even once. Tsk. Tsk. Lazy cow - she did this to herself... for shame, for shame..." I am mentally and emotionally trapped by my body, and despite the fact I don't judge others by their own, feel like I not only am but deserve being judged, harshly, on what my body looks like. Being overweight for me is a public admission of failure. The shame of knowing I have yet to conquer that frontier, the one where I obtain an ideal weight and stay there for more than a couple of months. Soon as I get there, it's party time! Bring out the burritos and beers, serve up the chocolate and cheese, hand me another ice cream cone... shame shame shame. Shame on me for having no self-control. Shame on me for being a pig. Shame on me for being lazy. Shame on me for being a poor role model for my kids. Shame on me for mentally barking at my husband, "Don't touch my fat!" and squirming away when he lifts up my shirt to caress my skin. Shame shame shame.

I'm not going to end this by saying I'm off to the gym nor am I going to slam the people who invented Photoshop for letting it fall into the Evil Lords of the fashion (and child photography) industry and brainwashing entire continents into thinking that people don't even have pores let alone dimply thighs. No, wouldn't it be lovely if we could all just look at each others' bodies and not think about them? How about being able to enjoy a day at the beach without doing comparisons? Observe them like we would other works of art and nature, in all their glorious forms - Picasso to Rubens, quivering aspens to ancient redwoods, puddles to oceans - and just be... delighted? I'm also not going to end this by saying that my new mission in life is to brazenly parade around in my bikini, daring people to think what they will (because, you know, with or without my permission, they invariably will.) No, I think what I'm going to meditate on (and I do mean that literally) is instead of HOW to fix this, but IF and WHY it should be fixed. I mean, really, today we see women wearing bikini tops with less fabric than it takes to make a handkerchief, but just 100 years ago it was considered offensive to show your ankles - only brazen women wore boots with fabric tongues so it would appear you could see their stockings, so I'm sure this will be an interesting meditation...

Back to the magazine article, which really was a lot of tripe, but there was one line written in it, in fact, the very last line in the very last paragraph that went something like, "Women don't need to change their bodies to feel good on the beach - they need to change their minds." Well said. So, I want to just be delighted by my own body without an ounce of malice or envy before I'm a mother-in-law - is that so much to ask?

Dear Bill,

Knowing intimately what has been on the threshold of my day, and knowing intimately what you are on the threshold of in your life, I was a bit wistful dropping our youngest off this morning.  Ever notice how her hand kind of instinctively floats up into yours while you're walking beside her?  I remember that about Wil & Kaelan too, and Mads is already showing signs of independence, being the receiver rather than the seeker of a hand when crossing the street.  But Serejane, she still holds your hand willingly, sidling up beside you and just raising her hand until she grazes your fingertips enough to grab on.  

When it's stupid hot like last night, it's always nice settling in for sleep, you and I not touching except for our fingertips or our toes - cool yet connected.

I (heart) holding hands.  (And I'm OK about us touching toes.  Just don't ever try and paint them - that would make me squeamish.)  Too bad Art can't hold hands.

What do you have to say about bugs?

Love, your wife.

Dearest Hope,

You asked for a post about why I LOVE Bread so much. First off there is nothing creepy going on . No spooning with frozen loaves on a hot night. No pet names. No cutting out cute shapes...

I think a major factor is the fact that I was spoiled as a child. Spoiled every weekend by parents who baked. Waking up to the smell of fresh baked bread, cinnamon buns and Aunt Ellies scones is a fond memory to say the least. The love comes from sitting down to a dinning room table so full of baked goodies there is only room a quarter pound of butter and a glass of milk.

My parents were not out to spoil us, Keith was on a mission. He was trying to recreate the bread that his Grandmother made for him. this entailed many vary variations on a base recipe much to our delight. Now when you have someone baking a dozen loaves of bread a weekend you have to find a variety of ways to eat it. Enter the humbly delicious Toad in the hole. A favorite among every one in my family. Quick, simple you almost always have all the ingredients . If you use cookie cutters to cut out shapes in the bread, the only thing you have to watch for is egg to hole proportions. Gramma Jane now brings Scones over to our house now and I have to hide some or they will all be eaten before i get chance to have one. The boys chose the microwave over the Toaster oven as a heating method. Something I will never understand.

that is all you get for now.

Love Bill

Dear Empress,

With sincere sympathy, I regretfully inform you that you are not wearing any clothes. Not a stitch. I'm indeed sorry to have to inform you that in spite of reassurances by others who do not wish to suffer your wrath and eternal sniping for not telling you what you want to hear, please let me be the first to tell you that, in fact, everything is just hanging out on display for all the world to see - birthmarks and body hairs, dimpled pits and droopy parts - the works.

I suppose had you not been quite so deluded in the first place, unable (or more accurately unwilling) to see what we've all known all along you could have saved yourself no small amount of expense (and embarrassment). Unfortunately, what in your arrogance and self-service you chose to believe became your ultimate undoing, and you have damaged not only your own credibility and reputation, but lost the respect of those who love you, and have now those who will continue to love you only out of blindness, loyalty, or obligation.

I wish you no ill, but urge you, swiftly, to fetch your robes in the hopes that you will preserve enough dignity to not only learn from but laugh at your mistake in reminiscence, forgiven and forgiving. In this, there is growth and evolution and peace. However, if you choose to hide in shame, harbouring your hurt and anger, you will surely die alone, old, lonely, your heart shriveled with bitterness, heavy with the burden of guilt, and black for all your unforgiving.

Oh, Sweet Empress, heed my advice - start afresh and all will be renewed.

Dear Bill,

I love you, how was your day? I'll do the dishes - please write something for me. About bread. You love bread. Tell me a bread story. And I would like a picture of toad-in-the-(bread)hole to accompany please.

Love, yer wife.

diarrhea, type: verbal

Welcome to bilsedopesed.blogspot.com. This is the collaborative mental vomit, emotional mucous, and verbal diarrhea spewed out and served up fresh'n'hot for your reading entertainment by Hope of www.HopeWallsPhotography.com and pictureLOVE and her clever but neglected husband, Bill.