HOW TO BE A MODERN-DAY FICTIONAL HEROINE

It used to be so easy. All you needed was a thick mane of tousled auburn locks, high cheekbones and a determined little chin; add an ounce of determination and an event from your past that haunts you still. Then, wham! You were the perfect fictional heroine.

But now it’s not so simple. With television shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Ally McBeal, books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Good in Bed, and movies like Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde, we’re getting all sorts of mixed messages over how the ideal woman is supposed to be. What’s a modern girl who wants to hold herself up to impossible standards to do?

Simple! Just follow these guidelines, and you’ll be as witty, complex and neurotic as the rest of them. In other words you will be the perfect, modern-day fictional heroine.

Step 1: Be Flawed

This step is super easy, because come on, we’re all already flawed anyway, right?
Right!

Except for one little catch. It is necessary to adopt the correct flaws, and these three are non-negotiable.

1.)You must be self-involved. This includes comparing your own petty personal problems to things like death, war, and injustice, and finding some sort of unique parallel no matter what the situation may be. It also includes having a constant inner dialogue with yourself where you point out these parallels with witty commentary. For example: “Even the news reminded me of him. Yesterday I saw this report that said routine circumcision in Africa could prevent 300,000 deaths in the next ten years. What a shocker! Chopping away at a guy’s penis could help eliminate pain, loss, and heart-ache. What will they think of next?”

2.)You must have issues with food. If you plan to be a television or movie heroine, this means that you cannot eat. Period. If you plan to be a book heroine, this means that you must eat all the time, except when you’re not eating, and then you should be thinking about eating. I strongly recommend the second option.

3.)You must become preoccupied with an unhealthy relationship. This includes but is not limited to, relationships with boyfriends, friends, mothers, fathers, roommates, and exes. Especially exes.(And make sure that your ex is dreamy, preferably with a new girlfriend who is in no way as good for him as you were.)

Step 2: Practice Retail Therapy

Today’s modern day fictional heroine realizes one fundamental truth, that there is no problem too big or too small that cannot be remedied with shopping. Again, there is a catch; you need to be careful of what you go shopping for. Hard and fast rule, anything that’s practical or cheap is out. Other than that, I have provided you a list of approved shopping items, with the most highly recommended items on top, and continued in descending order:

Designer shoes
Designer beauty products
Designer chocolate
Designer purses
Designer lingerie
Anything else designer
Clothes (This is listed as the very last option because although clothes shopping can be a lot of fun, if you happen to have gone up a size, the blow to your ego will be so enormous that it will negate the therapeutic aspect of said retail therapy.)

Step 3: Have a purpose, deeply question it, then either accept it or abandon it to find a new purpose.

Rather than go into unnecessary detail, I have created a handy-dandy chart. Just pick an option from each column and you’ll be good to go.

Column A
1.You’re a (lawyer, publisher, or banker) and you love the power and money.
2.You’re a (doctor, policewoman, or writer) and you love changing lives.
3.You’re a stay-at-home mom and you love your family.
4.You’re all of the above, and you’ve never been so fulfilled!

Column B
1.It’s all getting to be too much and nobody understands you.
2.None of it means anything anymore and nobody understands you.
3.You wish you could have some time for yourself, and why doesn’t anyone understand you?
4.Is this really what you set out to do? You did major in art history after all.

Column C
1. After meeting the right guy, you decide to chuck it all and live overseas.
2. After falling back in love with the guy you’ve been with for years, you decide to start your own home-based greeting card company.
3. After realizing that the nerdy guy is actually the one for you, you return to your career with a new sense of purpose.
4. Who needs health insurance anyway? You decide to take some time off just to focus on you.

Conclusion:

So you see; it’s really not that hard for truth to imitate fiction. Gone are the days of walking moors, wearing corsets, and dying of consumption. Nowadays all you need is a little attitude thrown in with a barely noticeable social complex. So get your credit cards ready, preheat the oven for those brownies, and start living your life as if everyone can (and wants to) hear what you have to say. A new age has arrived!

About the Author: Laurel Osterkamp is the author of Following My Toes, a novel published by PMI books. She also teaches and performs comedy. You can visit her on the web at http://www.laurelosterkamp.com or http://www.bookinitmyway.blogspot.com. Copyright: Laurel Osterkamp. All rights reserved

Source: Free Blog Articles

MUSLIM WOMEN PREPARE UNDERCOVER REBELLION; USE INTERNET TO ORDER BIKINIS

Muslim women, condemned to wear, even when sandy temps soar, clothes that curiously resemble what nuns usually wore before they lightened up their outfits, are rumored to be preparing a rebellion that is scheduled for a date that is being kept under wraps until it breaks out, to the horror of Muslim men, in scant bikinis.

Order takers at online bikini retailers note an unprecedented surge in orders for the scanty attire from Muslim nations.

Interviewed in a secret location, while keeping her name hidden even from her own family, for fear of being stoned in the traditional way, a Muslim woman who already has her bikini hidden away for the great day, commented, "The men want to hide our beauty in the closet and the clerics want us to take responsibility for the design of the human body, but, the truth is, we didn't have anything to do with it. Our job is just to live with the design. In fact, to love it and be proud of it as the way Allah made us."

Then, pulling out her colorful little thing from under her uncomfortably hot black burka, she added, "I can't wait to put it on. If I don't get stoned first, I'm going swimming, too."

Rumor of the undercover rebellion has ordinary Muslim men and imams nervously practicing putting their hands over their eyes, lest the eternal beauty of the female form excite their natural attraction to women and, worse yet, incite them to allow their secluded but lovely women to update their heavy medieval garb.

As one imam confided, "To tell you the truth, I hope the women lead the way. Some days my head gets awfully hot under my turban. I'd sure like to let the breeze blow in my hair for once. I just know Mohammed had days in the desert like that, too."

About the Author: Tom Attea, humorist and creator of http://NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "great humor and ebullience" and "good, genuine laughs."

Source: Free Blog Articles

MYTH OF THE HORNY DIVORCEE

SWEEPING statements can sometimes contain grains of truth, but fortunately not this time.

When the Pas MP for Rantau Panjang, a district in the northeastern state of Peninsula Malaysia, Kelantan, passed the comment that “golongan janda adalah gatal” or that “divorced women are sluts” here, if ever there was one, is an instance of unadulterated unthinking. That he carries the honorific “Yang Berhormat” or Right Honourable is obviously misplaced and inappropriate. Are not divorcees among his constituents, one wonders? Or, has he quite forgotten that he represents the constituency and all its voters and their family?

The Malay Mail of 27^th April 2006 quoted Abdul Fatah Harun as saying, “Most of these divorced women go to parties and are gatal. It is quite obvious why they ended up divorced or why their husbands left them. They are gatal.” Gatal, of course, means horny.

Firstly, there is this obviously false assumption that most divorced women spend their time partying. Where does this man get his statistics from? Has he done a survey of women who party? Or, has he been intelligence gathering? Which, pray tell, that can lend credence to the assumption that ‘most divorced women go to parties’. Don’t share unfounded opinions with the public, please, especially when you are an MP!

Secondly, why is it assumed that when women go to parties they are sluts? Have the man not heard of innocent fun when people of both sexes gather to network, to exchange ideas and information across industries and intellectual disciplines and/or to relax at gatherings classified as parties. In a world where more and more women are working, being in the public space is no longer taboo. Even in a conservative, patriarchal society it is not always considered scandalous for women to partake of the pleasures of socializing at parties, albeit within a very structured environment.

Parties are occasions where humans learn to socialize. Socialising is an essential part of character-building. A society that is peopled by strong, confident individuals with a capacity to interact without open friction, to communicate well and are mindful of others is much needed in multi-ethnic, multi-religious Malaysia. Under these circumstances, are not women too required to be properly socialized? Or, is there here a prejudice on the part of the man to keep women tightly within the domestic confines of child-bearing, child-rearing, husband-caring and such other banal activities that women, as chattels, do as in pre-Islam jahilliyah?

It is not that household chores are necessarily bad. The contribution of the mainly-women domestic workforce, including unpaid housewives, is not to be sneezed at. They it is that make certain the reproduction of society and in what image. Which, in turn, makes it important that the domestic sphere, too, is liberally laced with mental stimulation.

Thirdly, the questionable presumption that women divorcees are always divorced by the husbands. While it is true that the Islamic establishment make few provisions for women to divorce their husband, oftentimes Muslim wives are given their freedom because a husband has his eye on another woman, that is, when he does not intend to be polygamous. There are also enough examples of women abused within the marital home who want a divorce badly.

Within the Malay-Muslim milieu there is a far greater tendency for women to be divorced because the husbands are gatal. There have been many high profile cases where mature women are divorced by husbands bent on marrying sweet-young-things. So, I ask you, who is the gatal one?

Women are free agents like men, more so when they are divorcees. Furthermore, these are women who have been through the mill, taken the hard knocks of life head-on and been through the school of life in unhappy marriages. It is hard to imagine that after such travails most of them are raring to entangle themselves in sexual webs that could go very wrong again. If there are prudent humans, they are it.

In today’s world of self-supporting women who are economically independent, divorced working women have no need to burden themselves with men. Yes, we all, women and men, are looking for our soul mate to share our life with in an until-death-do-us-part relationship. We want enduring and loving companionship. This is a very human pining. And so we go with our gut and marry the person we love (or maybe lust after). If our gut feel was spot on in the first place we will be living happily ever after as in a fairy tale.

However, reality is far from perfect. Divorces are on the increase and broken homes are no longer a novelty in most societies. Who takes care of the children? Usually its mum and you think mum can go out partying on a regular basis and be a slut!

Think again man or start thinking, whichever applies. Divorcees are not sluts. In fact, few women ever are. Men, it is, whose fantasies take them into realms where real women do not exist: women who work hard to help support the family and are given little recognition; single mothers abandoned by philandering husbands left to cope with their children; abused wives under pressure to keep the violence under wraps for the sake of the children. To these women divorce is probably seen as a blessing. These are real women who, when push comes to shove, may insist on becoming divorcees. Are they deserving of such abusive tongue-lashing? THINK MAN!

A version of this article was published by Madam Chair