Women’s Issues

The Day of Living Dangerously

Kathy StevensonLeave a comment

(Originally published in Main Line Life on 1/9/08)

The first week of the New Year. I wake up and feel a pang of nostalgia for the last century – those halcyon days before I discovered that everything I liked to do was either bad for me or destructive to the environment. I am so tired of being good.

Maybe what I need is a day of being completely decadent – an entire day where I will do as I please and feel no guilt about it. I will eat no bran, and nothing with the words “lite” or “heart healthy” on it.

I start out with a huge breakfast. Bacon and fried eggs. A piece of white bread toast with real butter. Coffee with the caffeine still in it. Altogether, I am getting a warm, fuzzy feeling.

I will not go to the gym today. No step class or yoga, no pulse monitoring as I try to reach my aerobic plateau. The most exercise I will get is lifting the remote to change the channels on the television.

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Looking for Love on the Boob Tube

Kathy StevensonLeave a comment

(Originally published in Main Line Life on 2/6/08)

Ain’t love grand?! Or it would be if only you could find your perfect soul mate. The one person who would love you and all your little idiosyncrasies. He or she has to be out there somewhere, right?

If you haven’t met your true love yet on any of the internet dating sites or at “It’s Only Lunch,” why not go on a television show, act like a complete idiot, and compete with other complete idiots for the privilege of marrying a stranger (dare I say the phrase complete idiot again?) Under the guise of journalistic curiosity I have occasionally been forced to watch television shows like The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? and The Bachelorette just to see how far American culture has slipped down the scale of tackiness. I excuse many of my weird viewing habits this way.

The premise of most of these shows: Lonely bachelor or bachelorette looking for love, can’t find it. Enlists the aid of the Fox network (isn’t that what you’d do?), goes on prime-time television to select a spouse out of dozens of contestants, and proposes on the spot. As I mentioned earlier, love is a many-splendored thing.

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Soul Business

Kathy StevensonLeave a comment

(Originally published in the Chicago Tribune on 12/6/99)

Every decade seems to have a buzzword that captures the essence of the state of American culture at that point in time. The 60’s were about change, the 70’s were about peace, the 80’s were about greed. And the 90’s were about soul.

I’m not talking about soul in the religious sense. I’ve always thought of that kind of soul as a sort of invisible armor that surrounds the body and floats up to heaven as soon as your body has done its job on earth.

The soul of the 90’s is of the chicken soup variety. The Mars and Venus variety. The meditations for daily life variety. The Oprah-inspired Change Your Life variety. We can live our lives in simple abundance but have something more.

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