Hot People Don't Shimmer (At Least...Not Like This)

The daytime high today in my little northern town was 31C and it's still something like 29C.

One wouldn't think that I'd be one to complain. You know, given the fact that this whole blog is about WANTING to be hot (get it? hot. har-de-har!). But it's not just that. Don't get me wrong. I like summer. Summer means that I can swim and eat vegetables that might have had less travel time than I've had in my life and that the days last longer so I'm not suffering from totally unexplainable depression in the middle of February...AND no raised eyebrows at cracking a cooler in the middle of the day BECAUSE IT'S EFFING HOT OUT AND I NEED TO COOL DOWN, DAMMIT. And, given the fact that northern winters boast a chill that literally has it out for you...like seriously, the weather is TRYING to kill you...it's very difficult not to appreciate a little excessive sizzle in your life.

But there's one thing about hot weather that really bothers me, and that is the fact that no matter how hard I try, I ALWAYS look like I'm suffering from debilitating, corpulence-induced meat sweats. Once upon a time, I thought it was because I was fat, but even during my leaner summers I still look like I've been generously greased with a pastry brush. I don't understand how other girls can go through summer looking like beach goddesses with their tans and their sun-bleached hair and their short shorts without the chafing...the awful, awful chafing.

And let's just be clear here, I don't want to spend hours in a tanning bed or bazillions of dollars on just the right amount of bleach (though I could do without the chafing). I'm ok with being pasty and mouse-brown. I'm not ok with looking like a pit-stained fishwife.

Surely there are products and tricks that can help me in this regard. Some kind of grease-removing face wipe? Some kind of maxi-pad for my armpits? Has anyone invented these yet?

Also...my hair has grown out since that picture was taken. What do I do with that? Theoretically, it should just sweep back and tendrils of my naturally curly hair should fall out in just the right places to make me look tousled but not messy, right? RIGHT? THEN WHY DOES IT ALWAYS LOOK MESSY AND GROSS AND PASTED TO THE BACK OF MY NECK ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS?

Dear Blogosphere. Please help. So I can think about what to barbecue.

Sincerely,

Miss T

Hot People Know the Score

Ok - so life in a small Northern Ontario town hasn't been COMPLETELY boring these days (don't get me wrong...it's still pretty boring...but I'll take it. For now).

The more faithful readers will be WELL aware of my angst about aging. This may have been exacerbated by my compulsion to be friends with people 6 years my junior. Maybe. While life as a diabetes educator has not cured me of that particular angst completely (it's more likely now that I'm even MORE scared of getting old when I see what kind of health crap these people have to deal with), I am at least assured that I am not as ancient as my previous, friend-of-twenty-year-olds self had believed.

Score 1 Miss T

To add to this reassurance, last weekend I was carded not once, but twice. The first time was the more hilarious of the two. I was at the LCBO when the lady at the counter asked me if I had ID to go with my purchase of a mid-priced sparkling wine. I laughed, hauled out my brand-spanking-new Ontario Drivers License (disgusting picture, btw...the province doesn't let you smile...one more reason I miss Nova Scotia), said it had been a while since I'd had that request, and handed it over. At this point, there were three people behind me waiting to purchase their weekend's mind-numbing solutions. The woman checked my birthdate, but no, that was not enough. She also felt it necessary to further delay the line-up of people waiting for the sweet relief at the end of their work-weeks to hold the license up to my face for comparison lest I be the kind of rapscallion who tries to use someone else's face at a BRIGHTLY LIT LIQUOR STORE AT 6 PM. This process took at least 120 seconds. I enjoyed every one of them.

Score 1 Miss T

The other id check happened when I joined one of the gyms in town. A twig-sized girl, obviously no older than 17, asked me if I was over 18 when I was filling out my PAR-Q. I'm pretty sure the force of my laughter mussed up her hair. But hey...when the kids think I'm one of them, that can't be bad, right?

Score 1 Miss T

I joined a choir two weeks ago. It a. is not completely (or even slightly) populated with blue-haired old warbling women, and b. a step in the right direction if I want to diversify my extra-curriculars so my life isn't just about failed debating. And I'm pretty good at it. One might say I'm an asset. Or at least, I might. Because I'm fly like that.

Score 1 Miss T

After the first choir practice, I had pizza with a guy in the choir. It was kind of spur of the moment, but he sprung for the pizza. We talked for about an hour and a half. We seem to have a lot in common. When we left and went our separate ways, we parted with an awkward hug.

Score...shit. I don't know.

Did I just have a date? There was food and good conversation and someone treating, but it wasn't pre-planned. Does that make a difference? If it WAS a date, how'd I do? I wasn't prepared. Can I have a re-test?

Also, what do I do with that awkward hug? The post-analysis has been shot to shit by that hug. Does it mean I'm in the friendzone (which would be fine...I'd just like to know), or what?

Here is what I know about the romance-calibre of date endings:

Kiss > Awkward Hug > Handshake > Watching him run away screaming

But THAT. IS. ALL.

Surely hot people know what dates are (I have several friends who have suggested to me that this is the case. They DO know).

Anyway, the limbo I'm feeling on the romantic front kind of echoes the limbo I'm feeling everywhere else. My life isn't super exciting right now, but hey, at least I look young and fresh, and to some people LIKE A CHILD. Huzzah?

Hot People Don't Have Crushed Souls or Phantom Appendages

Warning: the following is going to get pretty emo pretty quickly.

Ok - life is a disaster again. Complete and utter crap. While I could handle it if it was just one of the two, having both of the following problems at the same time is uber-painful. Uber.

A. I hate my job. It eats my soul.

I guess I haven't really talked much about my job here, except that I have one. I am a dietetic intern, which means that one day, I'll be a nutritionist. If you don't think I'm crazy enough to want a job telling people how to eat food they don't like, you might be convinced of my craziness when you learn that to qualify as a nutritionist, you must complete 40 weeks of unpaid internship. UNPAID. I'm on my last stint of this at the moment and things are starting to get a little bumpy.

Right now, my actual job description is to complete projects given to me by my supervisor which will increase the efficiency, profitability and social capital of the retail and patient food services at a local hospital. Or rather, find ways of squeezing money out of sick people, hardworking healthcare professionals and taxpayers while at the same time giving them an artificial warm and fuzzy feeling about us. Right now, my functional job description is to do whatever type of kitchen-bitch-work this hilariously understaffed department needs done. This means that instead of doing projects that make me feel like a bad person, I'm pushing trays covered with the food scraps of swine flu patients through a dishwashing machine. So fulfilling. And, of course, there's that hairnet I've grown so attached to.

None of this would be so bad if my boss actually made me feel like I'm doing a good job at any of it. She has two qualities that make me feel like a super-failure pretty much every day. First of all, she handily neglects to inform me of important information regarding the operations of the kitchen or the deadlines by which she would like things completed. The obvious answer to this is to ask a many questions as possible, but when you don't know what you don't know, this gets kind of difficult. It also often results in my being caught having left something out of my project reports because I didn't know that she was expecting its inclusion. Secondly, she provides me with NO feedback unless something is abhorrent to her. I'm sure I'm doing SOME things right, but I'll be damned if I know which things they are.

B. Love hurts.

Recent epiphany: I can't hack this whole "casual" thing. It just makes me so unbearably emo.

After meeting someone I kind of dig, my usual thought process is as follows:

"This is great! No commitments or expectations. This is just going to be casual and won't lead to anything. It'll totally be fun."

After saying goodbye to someone I kind of dig, the thought process has changed slightly:

"That was totally fun, but it was only casual and didn't lead to anything. Now there aren't any commitments or expectations...great."

Of course, I never tell HIM that's how I feel.

In conclusion, I'm totally crazy. And lame. I don't know how I do this to myself, but I form ridiculous emotional attachments to men that give NO indication of wanting to be attached to me (clarification: I mean ridiculous insofar as I've made an attachment. I do not mean ridiculous as in ridiculously emotional, read: stalkerish). This might have something to do with me expressing a desire for nothing more than casual from the outset. Possibly.

A solution-focused person would tell me that the easy mitigation of this problem IS to tell the dude how I feel...but it seems that, nearly every time, I've chosen perfectly to make this effort futile as well. They almost ALWAYS live in a city several hours away from me and (I find out AFTER all offending deeds have been completed) have possible (their words) or suspected (my words) wives or girlfriends, and sometimes fake phone numbers. Although nearly EVERY movie I've ever seen suggests to me that they leave their terrible (ok - probably not actually true) ladies for the star of the show (clearly, this is me), I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be some kind of fantasy created by the film industry to keep women like me unbalanced (see: above contention that perfectly innocent and likely quite lovely girlfriends are terrible) and docile (see: the fact that I do this to myself ALL THE EFFING TIME). They almost always seem to be musicians too, but I think that's another issue altogether.

The result is that I spend weeks (!) being sad about how this completely one-sided relationship doesn't have a B-side, vainly hoping for some kind of contact, because, you know, it might work out between us eventually...see? I don't even believe myself.

In conclusion, I am THIS close to setting up an online dating profile. While some might say this is the last refuge of the desperate and sad, at least everyone's looking for the same thing on those sites (right?), and anyway, I think I've more or less illustrated my desperate sadness in the last several paragraphs. And if those E-Harmony commercials are to be believed, ALL the subscribers are impossibly good-looking. Score! Also, I'm pretty sure venturing into the world of online dating opens up a whole crapload of opportunity for blog-worthy retardedness.

Hot People Don't Have Visa Limits

Based on my friends' horror at my lack of makeup skillz last week, I decided to call in a professional. I got my colours done. For those of you who don't know what this means (I told one friend and she thought I was getting my hair dyed), getting your colours done means you have a professional...colour-finder?...tell you what season you are, and then they tell you what colours look best on you. The season thing kind of makes it sound a little voodoo-y, for sure...but my friend had hers done last spring and since then she's been wearing clothes that make her skin look slamming (she wasn't exactly leftover lima beans before, but she looks extra-smokin' now).

So I had my appointment and the lady told me, with such excitement, that I'm an autumn. Apparently, they're very rare. Awesome, I thought. I'm an autumn! I'm a diamond in the rough! I felt really special when she told me that. It also explained why I looked like I was dying every time I wore foundation - I'd been wearing the wrong colour. Observe (faces blurred out to protect my friends):









I am neither drunk nor deathly ill in either of these pictures...I'm just wearing foundation.

So you can see why I was pleased to learn that I could cover up my redness without also looking like the undead (Hot people look like the living living). Then she told me that autumns are hard to find clothes for. And then I remembered something about my Mom telling me I was a winter, and buying me all kinds of hot pink and ice blue and I thought, shit...this means I'm going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe. Balls. I'm already treading water in a sea of student debt with Ursula the Octopus Queen yanking me down with one of her slimy tentacles. Then the lady told me how much the makeup I agreed to buy would cost. I threw up a little in my mouth before she took my credit card. On the other hand, makeup makes me look smashing!

Just to pile on the debtor's remorse, I went shopping for sexy work clothes (new job starts in less than three weeks!) today. I took along my little swatch book that came with my consultation, and a list of absolutely necessary items. I had a budget of $200, not including shoes - but who brings along a calculator when they're going shopping?

The upside of the shopping trip is that three strangers complimented me on my dress/jeans ensemble, which I thought was kind of iffy when I put it on (it was, actually, a clever way to economize the fact that I accidentally bought a shress and forgot to take it back). However, the colour lady was right - autumns are hard to buy clothes for. My friend and I went to every store in town (I am very nearly being literal here), pulling out my swatch wallet (they give you a wallet full of little bits of fabric with the right colours for you on it!) and holding it up against the fabric of the item I wanted to to buy. YARGH!!!! The things I wanted weren't the right colour, and when I found the right colour it was too expensive. My Visa is now racked up to its limit...again, and I didn't even buy everything on my list. Jeez...being hot is expensive!

Hot People Set and Achieve Goals

I just ended a five year relationship. It was my decision, and I think it was the right one, but I've just recently come to the horrifying realization that I'm single now.

I don't know how to be single. I've never known how to be single (this might explain a. why I was single for so long before my relationship, and b. why I stayed in the relationship for so long). But all these people keep telling me they love being single (you know...single and loving it?)...so maybe I should give it a try, right? Don't I look excited at this prospect?

Problem is, I'm painfully bad at meeting new people. I'm not good at making small talk, or being interesting. One might wonder, then, why I'm blogging. Well, here's why: I've noticed that hot people have no trouble meeting new people (mostly because new people are VERY interested in meeting them). So I've decided to become hot. I realize this is not a SMART goal...so I'm putting a deadline on it. I'm going to be hot in six months. For reals. I'm blogging about it because frankly, if there isn't anyone to keep me in line, I just won't do it (See: Miss T does the dishes every day) - and I also think that my misadventures (and they WILL be misadventures) in becoming hot will make for a delightful sense of schadenfreude (I can laugh at my own expense, right? That way it comes out even).

So, how am I going to do this. Well, I know I have piles of room for improvement. Par example (...sometimes I like to pretend I'm French), last night was my first night alone. I was very scared. Supper of champions: Pillsbury Pizza Pops, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Smirnoff Ice. Obviously, hot people don't have this for supper. Nor do they go for the leftover ice cream for breakfast, like I did this morning. That would just be too indulgent. I understand this is a bad start...but I was scared to be alone, and there's really nothing like alcohol and trans-fats to make you feel comfortable. Dancing my ass off at the club (instead of sitting alone on my couch and watching chick flicks all night, which is what I chose to do) might also be a potential change.

So here I begin my quest for hotness, and we'll see where we end up in six months. I'm pretty optimistic about how this is going to go (but I was just as optimistic when I tried to do the dishes every day). I think my determination is obvious, though. Just look at me staring off into the distance, envisioning my future hotness and the wonderful life it will bring me!