top down topshop
I love this picture, even if I’m not sure about the belt. It’s top-to-bottom Topshop chic, there are no stirrup pants or pricy stripper heels (Louboutins) in it, and it is wonderfully composed. Stolen from Rommy Ghaly’s Flickr via Vancity Buzz.
Let’s review. Yes, I’m embarked on a body makeover quest, or in my case a “get back to what my body was like my whole life before the last five years” quest. I actually have run a marathon, and I’d like to do that again. If I can’t do it while being a freelance writer, I will never manage to find the time. I trained for the marathon while working 60-80 hours a week at Starbucks, for god’s sake, but that was back before Anonymous had become interesting and Wikileaks was only a twinkle in Assange’s eye, and now I have other things that keep me nailed to the desk 18 hours a day.
What I want is:
Mylene Farmer could never be called modest, but if YOU looked like that, would YOU be?
What I can actually achieve is:
Ginger Spice would be nice
and my timeline is two years. There’s an Anon running one of the major European accounts who ever now and again informs me that he cannot wait to see the results (although when I told him I’d just bought two damask corsets, he insisted there was no need to wait on taking pictures, and could I upload some immediately, please). Anonymous r srs bznz.
I just found a pretty cool motivational video, too, so forgive me if I edit it to autoplay when I hit a particularly bad plateau. I’m getting right back on that diet, too, just as soon as I finish this bottle of Johnny Walker. Funny how Johnny Walker is actually incompatible with walking…except to the liquor store.
Once, back when I was training for a marathon, I jogged six miles to the liquor store, bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, refused a bag because I’m all green and shit, and then had to run six miles home with a bottle of gin in my hand. I looked like the choosiest thief in town.
Ginger Spice
I’ll just leave this here …
ma thuggie, yo. straight up awesome. o g
So there I was with money in my pocket (or my backpack, or my bag, or maybe in my other pants, my debit card…somewhere; but there it was) for once.
There=Downtown Vancouver.
I’d gone downtown after two months of house-sitting in the leafy, unconfined confines of South Hill. It sure is peaceful there; the rowdiest the neighborhood got was when there was a dispute about a cricket game in the park out back. The biggest problem I experienced was deciding if the cat was rubbing up against me because she wanted food, or because she wanted me to clean the litterbox. I basically did nothing except cook (I ate the pasta puttanesca from this cookbook every meal for four days running, it was that good) develop a crush on Bobby Flay by watching Food Network 24/7, and hardly changed out of my Thuggie the whole time except to (very occasionally) shower.
Glamorous, it was not.
So, on payday I wander downtown to pick up my mail and get there a mere ten minutes after the main post office has closed, which is one-half hour earlier than ANY OTHER GODDAM POST OFFICE in the world, so. Fuck.
Now what do I do? Without my MooCards. Without my new Wikileaks tee shirt. Without my bills.
Oh. I guess I’ll find a way to go on.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a glam-deprived blogger in possession of a decent paycheque must be in want of a Chanel makeover, so that is what I got, along with a LARGE bottle of Chanel 19 for which I have been pining for years, and my very first truly grown up red lipstick. Yes, extravagant, but I hadn’t been paid in close to three months, so it qualifies as a necessary act of Salvation Armani. As I said to the makeup artist, if you can’t find a good red lipstick that suits you at Chanel, where can you? And good luck trying to find, let alone deal with, the bio-contaminated, sticky testers at the drug store.
But I still had some money left, so obviously I had to go, like the guy in the nursery rhyme, to Market. To Market. Where I ran into my friend Hez and the cadre of Hezbians who run the bar there. Jay Jones, bar superstar and officially Canada’s Best Bartender, bought us a round, which is something that happens all the time to people who have money and not frequently enough to those who do not. Spot prawn sashimi, three cocktails, and a small pizza took care of some more of the extra weight in my wallet, and then I staggered back to the DTES to catch the 12:30am bus to Casa Metro.
My pal Hummingbird604 came down to the bus station to hang out at McDonalds with me and see me off, and it’s a good thing he did, even though his first remark was, “What happened? You look like a girl!” I explained about the makeover and made the now-obligatory bus joke about being eaten by a mentally ill cannibal somewhere in Northern Manitoba, and obviously that angered the gods, for they had a surprise for me.
In the lineup an obviously mentally ill man took a liking…no, a loving…to me and decided I was the most glamorous creature he had ever seen.He would not leave my side, although it meant cutting off 30 people in the line. He would not stop standing too close, staring too hard, asking sincerely if I were a celebrity and coming thisclose to asking me to run away to Toronto with him.
Must have been the lipstick.
In any case, I was pretty sure it was going to be difficult to shake this new Klingon, so we subtly conspired to let him get ahead of me in line. That way he’d choose a seat and I’d choose another one, instead of me choosing one and him plopping down beside me, as he’d apparently decided the gods had decreed must happen.
Enter the bus driver.
I hadn’t particularly noticed him, but he did notice what was going on, and while he did his best to discourage this poor, rootless fellow about taking the bus all the way to Toronto (even though he got a ticket for less than $200 somehow) without any luggage or anywhere to go there, he eventually had to let him on. Then he turned to me and said, “Ma’am, can I ask you to do me a favour?”
“Sure,” I replied, thinking (with inner groanage of a severe nature) maybe it was to keep an eye on the guy so he didn’t wander off at some podunk gas station and get eaten by coyotes or something.
“Can you sit in the front seat? I like to pick and choose who I put there.”
Can I? Could I? You BET I could. Sure, it was a night run, and sure, the reading lights don’t work in the front seat, but just as surely I’d managed to pack my books all in the luggage that I’d checked, and not in my backpack, so it was all good; I wasn’t missing anything. I spent a Klingon-less five hours looking out the panoramic windows and looking forward to soaking out the road stress in the infamous hot tub, which I had put on Foursquare when I was up here in January.
And what’s new with you lately?
The view from Ruralopolis. The ACTUAL view.
Mylene Farmer could never be called modest, but if YOU looked like that, would YOU be?
Followers of the ol’ raincoastersphere, specifically Manolofood.com, will be aware that I recently did a 48-hour hunger strike, and only cheated once. During this fast, I gained three pounds. I do not recall any victims of waterboarding complaining about weight gain, and most hunger strikers of my acquaintance have been precisely the sort of ectomorphs who should be raising awareness by running across InNeedistan or something instead of indulging in calorie deprivation. When you’re fat, seeing skinny people go on hunger strikes is really under the aegis of the Department of Insult to Injury. As is the gaining of three pounds on a hunger strike.
Okay, okay, when I took off my Thuggie I discovered that I’d actually lost four pounds (and also that Thuggies weigh seven pounds!) but still!
Given that I spent all of last year obsessively tracking my calorie input and output with the LoseIt app and averaged 1100 calories a day and did not lose a single pound, it’s quite clear that if I’m ever to get to my ideal, or even a slightly improved, shape, it’ll take actually breaking a sweat. More than once a month, too.
Speaking if ideal shape…the one in the above photo is pretty much it. Mylene Farmer is older than me, and she still has that figure. This one.
Of course, she has those legs; that helps. Unless my pal Anthony Youn comes up with a clever, painless and cheap leg-lengthening procedure, I will never have legs anywhere near that good, but mine when in shape are not to be sneezed at. Especially if you don’t cover your nose. But hey, I got a start on the look: I bought the lipstick!
The current fashion for bowlegged rickets victims is not one which meets with my approval, in case you were wondering. I’d love to know which photographer we can blame for a generation of starlets who all pose as if they were about to lose bladder control. When in doubt, blame everything on Terry Richardson.
Knock kneed hipster girl
So Mylene’s shape is not achievable for me, which is too bad not only for me but for everyone who has to look at me. My current shape is quite perogy-like, and everybody likes perogies, so that’s something, but it’s not what I want.
This is what I want.
Ginger Spice would be nice
Believe it or not, for me, this is doable. Hell, I already had the hair! This will take, if I keep on schedule (which I will not and let’s be honest about it, you wouldn’t either) about a year. So I’m giving myself two years, because I’m like that with myself and you would be too, if you treasured me the way I do.
And if I looked like that, you would, wouldn’t you?
If Perez Hilton can do it, so can I.
UPDATE 2017: Down 50 lbs. I might just make this by early 2018. Today’s a run and weights day.
raincoaster 