. . . I am linking to this article in Jezebel, which discusses, um, relations (Hi, Mom!) during a woman’s monthly visit from Aunt Flo. (I would like to note for the record here that whoever coined the term “monthly visit from Aunt Flo” should be shot.) Anyway, not to pass judgment and all, but seriously, there are women out there who don’t mind this? Because quite frankly, GUH-ROSS.

I realize this lands squarely in the category of disgusting, right up there with Dooce’s poop posts and The Bloggess’ weirdo trip to Japan, but I gotta know: am I alone in my thinking?

So I started to write a list yesterday. I was calling it “9 Clues I’m Southern” until I realized that if you don’t already know I’m from North Carolina then you’re not reading between the lines very well. But then I got distracted. (Stupid work. I swear if it weren’t for the paychecks I would SO not show up here.) And then it dawned on me that my lists haven’t been very funny lately, and that you obviously are not enjoying True That? Tuesdays. What is it, Internet? My embarrassing moments aren’t good enough for you? FINE.

Today is Tuesday, and you will note that I am not telling a story today. You’re welcome. Well, actually, I am going to tell a story, but it’s true and you didn’t even have to guess that! Again, you’re welcome. This story is about – WHOA. I just remembered one of the dreams I had last night, and LBD if you’re reading this – DUDE. You came over for a visit with your little girl, Grace, and she looks JUST LIKE YOU. I mean, seriously. I’ve never met your kid, but in my dream she looked like you did when we were 10. Except she’s only 2. Or 3. I can’t remember which, but it doesn’t matter because she could talk in WHOLE sentences, which frankly is something I haven’t accomplished at 31. So good job on your kid, she’s a genius.

Anyway, back to my story.

Once upon a time there was a small town in North Carolina that prided itself on its gentility, manners, beautiful people, overall wealth and ability to throw good parties. This town – around since the 1770’s – boasted large houses and even a river. Seriously, we have a river that runs right through town. Except that Brad Pitt hasn’t ever lived here, and if he did, he probably wouldn’t wear those fly fishing outfits like he did in that movie about the river and how it runs through something. That would be really cool if he did live here, though. Anyway, so in the 60’s (the 19-ones, not the 17-ones), a bunch of people that lived in this genteel small town decided to start up a little dance club. They wanted to take lessons, become fabulous dancers, and invent more reasons to drink martinis and bourbon. So they formed a club, invited people to join them and – 40 some-odd years later – they invited BB and me, as well. It’s called Cotillion, we no longer take dance lessons, and we had our first function of the year on Friday night.

That's BB and Anne. They're drinking. We had a pre-party in case they ran out of booze at the actual party.

After our pre-party, we headed over to the country club for the dinner and the dance. There was some eating, a lot of drinking, and some really bad white people dancing. See?

That's BB dancing with my mom. It looks painful and somewhat tortuous, which is why I'm behind the camera.

After a while, we stopped caring what we looked like:

BB, HC, me and Crazy Joe pose for...something.

And we started thinking about a) our besties and b) how tired we really were:

Anne and me

Daddy-O on the couch outside the ladies room. Who says my family doesn't have class?

There are more incriminating pictures out there, but I kind of like the people in them, and I don’t want to make enemies just yet. That’s for later down the road. We won’t have another Cotillion party until the spring, which is probably a good idea, since my liver held up a white flag Saturday morning and begged for mercy.

In other news, if you haven’t been over to More Women yet, you are seriously missing out. There’s a new product review blog, where I am planning a few posts about things I use that either a) make my life a hell of a lot easier or b) should be pulled from store shelves immediately. All in my opinion, of course. Check it out, have fun, meet some new people.

Finally, I haven’t watched the Gossip Girl threesome OR the Mad Men finale, so kindly hold your horses for my TV roundup until later in the week.

PS – Did you notice that I didn’t talk NOT ONCE about anxiety?

PPS – Did you also notice that I didn’t tag this post “Anxiety?”

PPPS – You SERIOUSLY need to start paying better attention.

There’s a great discussion going on over at BlogHer today about Glamour magazine’s plus-sized photo shoot. I highly suggest you check out the discussion, because not only is it informative, it also really gives a woman some food for thought (no pun intended?). Since I read Susan Wagner’s post, I’ve been thinking about designers and stylists in general, and what they are doing to our self images.

Media is flooded with talk about the fashion industry, and what it means for society. Little girls are obsessed with their bodies, and who do we blame? Do we blame magazines? Television? Mothers? I say we blame none of the above. What I noted in the BlogHer discussion, and will note here, is that the designers we all love are being supported by both the model-thin and the plus-sized and the everything-in-between. Don’t we buy Marc Jacobs handbags no matter what size we are? Don’t Jimmy Choos fit most every girl (regardless of whether we can afford them)? Haven’t we bought the “frugalista” lines of Anya Hindmarch and Anna Sui and Isaac Mizrahi? When the economy tanked, high-end designers found a new niche: Target shoppers. You can’t tell me that only the model-thin shop at Target, because I shop there and to think of me as anything but larger than the average girl is laughable.

It’s no secret that very few women are sample size, much less smaller than a 12 (I believe that’s still the national “average”).  Certainly we should all strive to be healthy, but as Oprah, Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli and I know all too well, it takes a while to get where you’re going. And sometimes you go there and come back – several times. I’m not saying here that I think more or less of someone because of their size (except YOU, Blake Lively, I do hate you and your tall skinny self) but I do think less of designers that limit their products to the very rich and the very skinny.

Rachel Zoe

I love fashion magazines. I watch Project Runway and The Rachel Zoe Project. I see Rachel’s collar bones and spine sticking out like a sharp coffee table edge, and I see the models the Runway hopefuls design for. We support their shows and their work; it’s time for designers – and the magazines and shows that feature them – to support everysized women by designing for ALL of us. Haute couture will never be within my financial reach, and to be honest, I wouldn’t wear half the crap that goes down the runway each fall and spring. BUT – and this is a big BUT – Americans are bigger now than they were last year, and I don’t see that trend changing much. We’re not all getting gastric bypass for Christmas, so until the national “average” turns around, design some decent-looking clothes for the rest of us, would ya?

…You crawl in my lap to get a little love, throw your paw up on my arm and start sniffing it like it’s glue. And then, when I look down to see what’s going on, I noticed that your perfectly white paw is not so much white, but more like BLOODY PINK, and then I realize that you are not the domesticated creature I thought you were. Also, thanks for leaving your murder victim in the driveway for me to run over this morning. You rock, you dirty hunter, you.

True or false? Post your guesses below.

I loved my Honda Accord. The day I got it was the day I received a surprise phone call from my parents. They had been looking and looking for something to replace my 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass, the one with the burgundy interior and the luggage rack on the back. The one I had wrecked in a snowstorm on my way to Chapel Hill for a Friday night frat party. Finally they’d found the replacement, but I needed to drive from my college down to NC to trade the old one for the new one. I was dying to find out the color. What did the inside look like? Did it have a sunroof? More importantly, did it have the capability to play both tapes AND CDs? Was it leather? (Also important because leather, you see, doesn’t clutch the stench of cigarette smoke quite like upholstery.)

An hour and a half after that phone call, I pulled up in the parking lot of a BBQ joint in a small town off Highway 86. I didn’t see my parents, but I did see a sparkling green Honda, four shiny doors, no tacky spoiler, was that a sunroof?, parked in the second row, away from the BBQ drive-thru. I squealed out loud, jumped out of the car and ran to meet my new beloved piece of machinery. The love I had – will always have – for that car cannot be measured with words or even pictures. The love I feel for every inch of that Honda can only be measured by the buckets of tears I cried the day I – a married woman with a job and a mortgage – sold it to illegal aliens for under-the-table cash.

We went through a lot together, that car and I. There were the many road trips back and forth from state to state, moving boxes of my belongings from dorm to house to apartment and finally, into my permanent home. There were carpet stains from someone else’s children, dings from parking too close to my neighbors, scratches from fallen branches covered in snow. But the biggest dent, located just under the left headlight, came from what started out as a well-intentioned errand.

No one washes their car as much as they probably should, and when you find yourself too busy to breathe, much less get your chores and errands done, important things inevitably fall between the cracks. My Honda always had its check-ups on time, but not so much with the washes. Out on the main drag in my town, there is an automatic car wash that is convenient to a lot of places. On the one particular Sunday afternoon I decided to stop by there, I was lucky – and surprised – to not wait in line for my turn, especially after I did what I did. You know the timers on the outside of the car wash that tell you how long you have to sit under those giant dryers? The big tall digital ones with the red glowing numbers? The ones you can’t possibly miss if you tried?

Turns out, it IS possible to miss them. In fact, it’s entirely possibly to finish your car wash, turn to the left, KNOCK OVER THE TIMER and not realize what you’ve done until you look behind you and see the evidence, collapsed on the concrete with its tangled wire guts sprawled out for all to see. It’s also possible that no one saw you or your car, which is why this particular Sunday afternoon I raced out of that car wash as fast I could, called 13 different friends in panic and waited for the police to come arrest me for property damage.

Oddly enough – security cameras and all – they never came.

So in all the hubbub of this past month and it’s, um, SHIT, I have not gotten around to telling you about what we did during October – and Internet, I hope you find this as hysterical as I did. First of all, BB was on vacation (thank you Pepsi for taking him back) for 10 days. On some of the days, if he hadn’t been around, well, I don’t want to know what life would’ve been like. Other days, I’m like DUDE. MOVE YOUR FACE.

Anyway, so one Saturday morning BB got up at the crack of dawn and wanted to ride a few hours towards the coast to his hometown. His father is buried there and his grandparents’ house is still there and his high school and the Peanut Festival and his aunt and uncle and WHAT? Did I say, PEANUT FESTIVAL?

Oh yes, Internet. Yes I did.

Today’s list will introduce to you to the 34th Annual Peanut Festival Parade (and surrounding attractions), featuring tractors, Mr. Peanut, high school bands, the Peanut Queen, some horses and more people crowding the streets of Small Town USA than we thought actually lived there.

1.  Some old tractors. Seriously, the first part of the Peanut Festival Parade was just a line of old tractors, driven by mostly teenagers – I use the term loosely because they were maybe 13 – and some old men.

2. I’m not sure if this chick is Miss Chowan County, or Miss Edenton, or Miss Peanut Festival, but she was in the parade and was mighty proud of it.

3. The rest of the parade was super boring – a couple of high school bands, some old cars, a few horses. Then we get to the good part – the county, which is (out there) pronounced “cown-y” with some really round o’s. And in the county, guess what you can see?

Cotton!

4. And . . .

More cotton!

5. And . . . wait for it . . . the whole reason for the Festivus . . .

Peanuts!

Seriously y’all, those are peanuts tangled up in all those weeds. Whole clusters of them. And that dust in the background is from the peanut picking machine (I’m sure it has an official name but I haven’t bothered to learn it) that turns over the peanut plants to expose the nuts.

6. Then we went out to the river, where BB did some thinking:

7. And I played around with the camera:

Check out those mad skillz.

8. Then we caught a glimpse of the Chowan County Fair (not to be confused with the Peanut Festival, occurring simultaneously) from the car:

And then we came home, because that was a little too much fun for one day.

Conversation between Kathy and me this week:

Me: Dude, this year has sucked some major balls.

Kathy: Um, yes.

Me: I mean, really. Think about all the shitty stuff that’s happened. I am SO over 2009. I should make a list.

Kathy: I don’t think we need a list to remember all the bad stuff.

Me: Maybe not. But that’s not the point. The point is, 2009 needs to be done.

Kathy: Yeah, I am with you on telling 2009 to peace the fuck out already.

And so this, Internet, is my new mission. Get through the end of the year, get through the messy holidays, the impending bad stuff, the doctor’s appointments, the final exams, the WHATEVER, and get to New Year’s Eve. This year, New Year’s Eve will be known as “Peace the fuck out already, 2009″ Night.

You think if I sent out invitations to a party celebrating “Peace the fuck out already, 2009″ people would come?

…You are so good that I want to marry you. Your cookies, mixed with your cream, form the perfect bowl of ice cream. You make me think about you every day, lonely in the freezer, all by yourself. Let’s be together, always. Whaddaya say?

Sadly, the three of you (seriously? just three of you? WHERE ARE YOU, PEOPLE?) did not agree. However, Rebecca wins for being the first one to guess – correctly – that my True That? story for Tuesday was, in fact, TRUE.

Names were changed to protect the douchebags, but yes, it happened. Oh, did it happen. Maybe that should go on next week’s list of “250 Things That Scarred Me for Life.” Hmmm…

More tomorrow, friends. And lots of changes in store for Half Baked, Twice as Good. Stay tuned! (All three of you…)