Tag Archives: Guest Posts

Six Things a Woman Should Know About Herself

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I’d like to welcome Anastasia from The Gift as my second virtual dinner party guest poster. See my last guest post from Kacy if you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Anastasia started a blog this summer with a promise to heself to write every day. While she didn’t start out with a specific theme, her subjects have fallen into the category of women’s issues (I know – yesterday – handbags, today – women’s issues – the men in my life have decided to stop reading this blog altogether!) My friend Anastasia is at times kind of a nut, she isn’t afraid to be contraversial, she has no problem asking women to “clear the forrest” and keep their armpits to themselves, and she has even challenged the pharmeceutical world (if only on her own site) to justify their attitude that the blue pill is more important than the pink pill.

Oh! And she’s also writing a book. Thanks for visiting Anastasia!

Six Things a Woman Should Know About Herself

  1. What is your blood pressure and cholesterol? This is a no brainer. Heart disease is the NUMBER ONE killer of women in the United States (a woman dies every minute in the U.S. from a cardiovascular event) and high blood pressure and high bad cholesterol are two significant indicators of your risk of heart disease. We need to take these two elements seriously.

  2. What is your BMI? That’s Body Mass Index and it’s important to know where you are on the scale of underweight, normal, overweight or obese. I’m not one of those people that thinks women should be a certain size to be beautiful, sexy or happy (trust me, I don’t think I’ve been in the “normal” range since high school) but it’s critical to know where you are and how this score correlates with other possible risk factors for your health.

  3. How to feel your breasts. Yes, I said it. You need to feel yourself up correctly and often. It’s so important that you know how your breasts feel on a regular basis so that you can immediately spot an abnormal lump. Early detection can save your life!

  4. What you look like down there. The Virginia Monologues went a long way to try and dispel the taboo of using the V word but I still have a hard time using it or saying it out loud. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important for a woman to know what it looks like and feels like. I’m concerned about the health aspects more than anything (there are other reasons why you should be familiar with it but that’s for another list altogether!). If you know what it should look and feel like, you will immediately know if something is not right and will get it checked out by your doctor.

  5. Whether you have bad breath. OK, this is not life threatening but I still think it’s important. This is especially important when you first meet someone. It takes just a few minutes to make a first impression and sometimes years to dispel it. That person could have been an amazing force in your life but you’ll never know because your bad breath scared them away for good! You never forget someone with nasty breath. So I say that it’s absolutely appropriate to ask a close friend or sibling to “smell my breath” if it means avoiding the situation outlined above. Also, chronic bad breath could be an indicator of possible health issues.

  6. How you look naked from head to toe. Again, this may not save your life but it’s still important for your physical and mental well being. You have one body and one life and whatever shape or size you are, it’s good to own that body. To own that body, you should look at it, accept it and love it (OK that last one was even hard to type let alone DO but it’s something to strive for).


With that I leave you to be healthy and happy!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR: November 4 we’ll hear from Jozette from Regardez Moi who writes about pretty much everything from work and travel to fashion and being a single girl in the city (that means Philly all of you NY/NJ people who assume “the city” means Manahattan – you know who you are!)

The Way We Were

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Several weeks ago, I posted a list of bloggers that I would like to invite to a virtual dinner party. Then I came up with the genius idea of asking them all to guest post for me. I mean – great content that I don’t have to write myself? It’s a win win. Well maybe just for me since I win the good content and the not writing it part…but whatever.

My first guest post comes from Kacy, one of the funniest women I know (for those of you who would be impressed by this, Jenny The Bloggess invited Kacy to HER virtual dinner party as well). Kacy writes Every Day I Write the Book (but not actually every day). She also contributes to Light Refreshments Served, where I have actually guest posted – making me an honorary Mormon for the day (or at least that’s what Kacy said – and as a Mormon, she knows all of the rules and stuff).

Sometimes Kacy writes really clever posts like The Irish In Ikea, sometimes she writes really random posts like Wishful Thinking, and SOMETIMES she writes truly bizarre posts like This is How I Really Feel About Our Hamster (it’s like #1 on Kacy’s Greatest Hits – at least it is for me…)

So what do you think? Should I actually let her talk?? I know – I’m not very good at handing over the microphone…but here you go Kacy. Take it away:

The Way We Were

I just noticed that Kate and I were both born in 1972. This has got me feeling a little bit sentimental about the past. Don’t get me wrong, I think now is great—probably even better than then. And I am completely psyched about the future. Still. There are a few things I remember fondly.

I remember hand signals for turning. Weren’t those great? It fostered such an old-timey sense of community. It seemed really important to learn how to signal that you were turning left or right in case your blinkers didn’t work. Did cars have less reliable blinkers in the olden days? I remember my mom signaling to go right or left all the time, but I don’t know why. I’m sure she had blinkers. Maybe blinkers were cutting-edge technology back then and we didn’t really trust them yet. At any rate, you never see people signaling with their arms any more. And I miss it. I get the same sense of community now when everyone pulls over to the side of the road to let an ambulance or fire truck pass. I love that. It’s like we’re all in this together. I hope pulling to the side of the road never goes out of style.

Another thing I miss is collect calls. You could always make a collect call if you needed to, which was reassuring. But what I really liked was accepting collect calls. The call was probably coming from someone in crisis and it seemed so noble to accept the charges before you heard the person’s voice or knew how expensive it would be. It was an act of trust and intimacy. I need more moments of nobility, don’t you?

Something else I think about a lot but don’t necessarily miss is the Bandaids that you ripped open with a red thread. Wasn’t that a weird way to open a Bandaid? I guess it’s pretty sanitary. But if it’s so sanitary, why don’t they still open like that? That’s what I wonder.

Is it just me or do you remember Kentucky Fried Chicken being a really awesome treat? You could get burgers or KFC (of course we would never have called it “KFC”—we had no qualms with the word “fried”). I don’t know about you, but I never ate Mexican food until I was in college. And when I finally did, Taco Bell blew my mind! But I never went there with my family as a kid. We weren’t so much racist as we were suspicious. Anyway, I was born in Kentucky so eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken was special. I picked some up for dinner last week after the first day of school and my kids couldn’t even figure out how to eat it. I handed my daughter the coveted drumstick and she dangled it downward between two fingers and stared. Then my 11-year-old son exclaimed, “I’m going to sue KFC—Look at this bone I found in my chicken!” They picked off the skin. It was sad.

And finally, remember tucking shirts in? There was a real art to it. The right shirt and the right pants and the right amount of pulling it out after it had been tucked in could camouflage a lot. Of course, when I was tucking shirts in I had nothing to camouflage. I’m way too fat to tuck in now so I’m glad that we don’t have to anymore but I’ll always have just a twinge of nostalgia for tucking. You have to tuck in occasionally in order to enjoy the comfort of being untucked. And that’s a life lesson you can take to the bank.

But enough about the past! We all know it sucked because there were no blogs. Thanks for sharing The Big Piece of Cake, Kate. Have a good day and never look back.