Personal Accounts

The Video Gaming Facial

Here is a great way to save money at the salon and spend quality time with your kids.

Bobbie Johnson in the Guardian writes that playing video games could help you look younger.  Some experts believe the exaggerated facial expressions made during a gaming session may help reduce the signs of aging. "The face has muscles which need to be exercised, just like any other part of your body", says Lynne Robinson, a Pilates expert who has worked with the likes of Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant.  "With good suncare, sensible skincare and facial exercises, players may keep looking young and stay away from the Botox".

Weather Rage

Jane Doe

Today is the first official day of Spring but up North, it is still grey and snowy with expectations for another month of the same.  I was listening to the news a few days ago which put a name to the feelings I have been having of late: weather rage.  Apparently I am not alone in being totally indignant with the weather conditions, but I guess I am not surprised. 

Weather rage is described as the frustration with the length of our Canadian winters and the longing for walking about without a coat, big boots, a snow shovel all the fun accessories of winter.  It was fun in December, but now it is getting pretty tired.  It is like politely watching the warm up band, but really wishing that the U2 would come out on stage already.

Now depending on how much rage you feel will depend on what happens between now and May.  For most people once the glimmer of warmer weather is upon us, we tend to forget about why we were so annoyed...great weather is just over the horizon.  For me, I am still stewing over the real estate ads in Hawaii which ask, "why would you live anywhere else", which is one reason I moved down south a few years ago...who needs this winter stuff anyway? 

The upside of the change of seasons is that with Spring in the air, there is always hope for new love for the single.  And there are plenty of good online sites to help you search for that love while it is still cold outside and much too hard to distinguish a male parka from a female one!

SOME SITES TO CHECK OUT
American Singles
Date.ca
Date.com
eharmony
Lavalife
Match.com
MatchMaker

Tickle.com

True.com

In Memory of My Uncle

Today marks the anniversary of the death of my favorite uncle.  He was intelligant, tall, handsome, charming...and single his whole life.  He is one of images I carry with me when I look for information of interest to single people.  Being single is much more than dating, although hormones do tend put it higher in priority.  While companionship is important and gives us well being, there are many other issues that single people deal with on a day to day basis.

Personal finance is particularly important for every single person to take ownership of.  Girls, if you are waiting for your knight in shining armour to come with piles of cash, you might want to rethink that premise.  When you consider the options--staying in amazing shape to compete with other gold diggers, or settling for the well off, but socially inept nerd, you are much better off looking after your own personal wealth.  In this manner you can choose to be with someone or not, or if you do chose to marry, have the financial package of your own to bring to the partnership.  Men, accummulation of assets is probably already in your DNA, but be sure to protect it.  If you do get hitched, the prenup is your guarantee to retaining your assets, or you may be in for a rude awakening should the marriage dissolve.  As the joke goes, "next time I am just going to give a woman a house and save all the trouble."

Some Paddy's Day Trivia

If you are looking at a way to impress the lassies standing in line for a Guiness today (and they really don't have as many calories as you might think!" here is some trivia to impress, according to to Wikipedia.org:

• Saint Patrick (died March 17, 462, 492, or 493) is the patron saint of Ireland.
• He was born around 385 in Caledonia (the Latin name of a region corresponding approximately to modern Scotland), probably at Kilpatrick.
• At the age of about fourteen, Patrick was captured and taken to Ireland as a slave. He escaped at the age of twenty and returned to Britain, reuniting with his parents and later becoming one of the first Christian missionaries to Ireland.
• He was one of the earliest writers to advocate the abolition of slavery.
• Patrick was not the first Christian missionary to Ireland, but he seems to have been the one who made the most
  impact.
• Mythology credits him with banishing snakes from the island of Ireland, though others suggest that for climatic reasons
  Ireland never actually had snakes; one suggestion is that "snakes" referred to the symbolism of the Pagan priests of that time and place, the Druids, possibly shown by their tattoos or that it could have referred to Pelagianism, symbolized as an Old-Testamental "serpent".
• Legend also credits Patrick with teaching the Irish about the concept of the Trinity by showing people the shamrock, a three leaved clover, using it to highlight the Christian dogma of "three divine persons in the one god" (as opposed to the Arian heresy that was popular in Patrick's time).
• It is unknown on what date he was born and died but it is believed that March 17 was his death date (according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica), and it is the date popularly associated with him as his Feast Day (known as St. Patrick's Day).
  
  THE LAST DROP: Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.

The Joey Syndrome

As millions of Friends fans know, Joey Tribbiani was left behind as his closest friends paired off to live happily ever after.  A clever set up for writers to work the spin off, but all too true in the real lives of singles.  And yes, right now I feel like a Joey in my own life.  So what does being a Joey mean?

We identified with Friends as a reflection of the same type of support network many of us develop as young single individuals living on our own away from our own families.  You become a close knit family, with the benefits of chosing your family members. But like all good things they must eventually come to an end.  We graduate from college/university, move away, date each other, and sometimes get married.  Group members come and go, and you try to keep in touch, but somehow it is not the same, especially when new families are formed, replacing the support group structure.

This weekend marked a end of an era in my life, and like Joey I am feeling a little left behind.  A good friend of mine is moving in with his fiance, and out of my neighborhood.  I recall when his condo being built and I would report back to him on as I passed the construction site on my morning daily run.  I am happy for him as he is marrying a great girl, whom he met online.  But I am sad that yet another of our core group has paired off and changing the dynamic.  And that is what the Joey syndrome is about, having to cope with the change in your social network and the support that is so important as a single.

But as the growing success of the new Joey series demonstrates, life goes on, now all I have to do is move to LA to become an actor.

The Bachelorette 3 gets Real

Jane Doe

I have never been a fan of the Bachelor or the Bachelorette series, primarily because it promotes the fairy tale image of beautiful people meeting and falling instantly in love, getting married in a princess wedding and living happily ever after.  What is billed as a "reality" series actually unfolds as one of the many childhood Barbie and Ken play dates we had so many years ago.   So far I think that only the Trista and Ryan coupling has survived (although the jury is out on that one that it will last), so the casting agents should be quite happy with the results.  But the point of the show is not "happily ever after", although a live wedding was the icing on the cake.  What America seems obsessed with is the fantasy of infatuation and romantic love and will endure weeks of watching strangers date, face rejection, ending with a marriage proposal.  This time however, as the three hour finale demonstrated, Jen disappointed the fans, but sure made a great statement for the lives of single women, finally bringing reality into the picture.

Just like in real life, she had been burned before and thankfully had learned her lesson.  I am a little jaded when it comes to really beautiful people, since they tend to have a distorted sense of how life should treat them, but this blonde actually seemed to get it--infatuaion and romantic love are not sound reasons to make life long decisions, a lesson learned by Thomas Hayden Church's character in the new movie Sideways, and frequently pointed out in Dr. Phil's arm chair counseling sessions.   When you consider the amount of time she actually spent with these men, I would also politely say, thanks for all the free stuff, but this is really not what I am looking for.

When it comes down to it, there is no need to rush into marriage and you are doing a service to yourself and a prospective partner to make sure you don't enter into this contractual obligation lightly.  What the show does demonstrate, though, is how much fun us single women can have out there in the real world in our search for companionship.