Here’s a picture that was taken on Friday:

I look like I’m missing one leg, but I don’t look pregnant. Mission starting to be accomplished. This was from a huge party at a friend’s house which included plenty of eating and drinking and I allowed myself to be un-self-conscious about my consumption for that one day. Of course I changed clothes four or five times before leaving, but that was just for comfort’s sake because I knew it was going to be an all-day gathering. True to form, I left the house at 9 a.m. and returned at 11:30 p.m.

The only negative moment I had regarding my body image was when a silly, drunken woman staggered up to me and my 30something friend, waggled her finger at both of us and said, “you’re both in your forties, right?” I am in my forties, but nobody ever guesses that. Ever. My friend corrected her, and rather than apologizing she then proceeded to slur out a boring tale of her boyfriend leaving his socks on the floor and how it’s hard to put up with that when you get to a certain age even though she looks so young and everyone thinks she’s 28.

That was the only unintentionally interesting part of the story, because she had that leathery hard bitten look that women get when they’ve been sitting in the sun and smoking cigarettes since the ’70s and no one could possibly have mistaken her for being under 50. It was both rude and sad at the same time; she never would have mentioned her alleged youthful appearance or her boyfriend if it wasn’t some way of trying to boost herself up at our expense, since to her eyes we were both old and (as far as she knew) sans boyfriends.

My only thought: as long as women are this petty to other women, and as long as women make the mistakes of basing their entire sense of value on a relationship with a man and a false idea of youthfulness, a woman will never be leader of the free world!

(N.B. that started out in a drunken unprocessed state as: “this is why Hillary didn’t win”.)