megfowler.com

I’m thinking through 8,000,000 things in my life right now, from big issues to tiny wonderings.

Your answers always give me a ton of perspective.

So!

1. Why do you live where you live?
2. Why do you do the job you do?
3. Why are you with the person you’re with?
4. If you could change one thing about your life today, what would it be?
5. What is the greatest source of happiness in your life?
6. What is the greatest source of discontent in your life?
7. If you were handed $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
8. What is your favourite quality in a friend?
9. What is an unforgivable mistake in a friendship?
10. What is a true relationship dealbreaker for you?

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. — C.S. Lewis

Someone once said to me that the morning the Towers went down is my generation’s Kennedy assassination.

I blanched a little upon hearing that, of course. Thousands of people died that day, not one, however powerful and symbolic he may have been.

I see it now, though.

As with Kennedy’s death, everyone remembers where they were when they heard. And I mean everyone. I don’t have a single friend who can’t tell you where they were standing, who told them, what they saw first on the news… all of it.

The more important commonality between those two events, however, is the shock people felt from outside the situation looking in… a surreal kind of horror that manifested itself in ways we didn’t expect. I couldn’t stop shaking with this fierce sensation of cold, which seemed crazy at the time.

After all, I wasn’t there.

I wasn’t even NEAR there. I didn’t know anyone who died. Who was I to feel a chill?

But a chill is what we feel when something is too horrible to comprehend. The loss of warmth, of good, of right, of sense, of peace.

Six years later, I still feel a chill when I think of the events of that day, and I try and imagine what people went through after waking up to a nightmare.

But I also feel an incredible warmth when I think of the sacrifices people made to care for one another. A warmth for the stories of courage and compassion, many of which will never be told. A warmth for the way families came together to mourn and begin to heal their losses.

I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t know how they do it.

But I honour all of them today.

Well, hello… and welcome.

I’ve been waiting for you.

I mean, I have a lot to do, and I needed you to come so I could make a few things happen.

The strange thing is, now that you’re here, I don’t feel like doing a single one of those things.

I’ve got a ton of writing to do, and I can’t procrastinate.

I’ve got a room to organize that is bringing new meaning to the term “cluttered.” Or perhaps I should say, “gong show.”

I’ve got errands on top of errands to run. With an extra helping of errands.

Too much, Weekend.

Now you just feel like a Weekday without the commute.

So here’s what I need you to do to make sure that you keep your reputation for being relaxing and restorative:

Stay sunny. I mean it. No automatic Saturday clouds, or I’m going to shake my fist at the sky again.

Make sure the coffee is good. No bad coffee on the weekends… it’s a life rule.

At least an hour of deck time, please.

I’ll require enough laughter to leave me breathless at least twice.

Singing would be amazing. Top of my lungs.

Oooh… and I’d love to sleep in.

I don’t think any of that is too much to ask, do you?

SO!

Happy weekend, Weekend.

Show me what you got.

Love,

Meg

There is a study that says Vancouver is the most livable city in the world. Well, lots of studies, actually.

Everyone likes to tell us how livable we are.

And it’s true — when I drive along the coastline in West Vancouver or stand on bustling, vibrant Commercial Street or walk through the Sun Yat-Sen gardens or sit on a sunny patio on W. 4th or stare up at the iron-willed trees that still grow tall in Stanley Park, I feel like I live somewhere good. There’s beauty here.

But I’m supposing that where and how you live in the most livable city matters more than anyone’s rating of the city overall. The people lying in doorways downtown might say the temperate weather is good, but the endless rain is bad. The people living in slum-condition housing on the Eastside might tell you that they’re glad they found a spot that they can afford to live, but that they wish they had more locks on the door and a landlord that didn’t try to collect the rent twice.

I’m also supposing that it matters who you are, and what you expect. If you expect nothing, every city is livable. If you expect the world, any city is bound to disappoint.

Situation and perspective.

There’s a lot you can do about them… sometimes. And then sometimes you can’t.

Thousands of people move through this city every day and I wonder how livable their lives are.

Did they wake up this morning with excitement or dread?

Do their bones ache when they walk, or do they run for miles with wind in their hair?

Are they ruled by habits and needs and vices, or do they make choices based on reason?

Is there someone else directing their days, or are they in control?

If they could be somewhere else, would they be? Or are they passing me on the street with full confidence that where they are is where they belong?

I suppose a little of both, depending on the day.

When I got off the bus this morning and flipflopped down the hill to my office, I was cut off by a variety of different people heading in different directions, crosshatching the pavement in a hundred different hurries. I walk past most of them every morning, and they’re no better at navigating the bodies around them now than the first day I walked this path.

There is the woman in her awkward, clompy shoes who nearly trips on the curb, and hopes no one sees.

There is the man walking his dog who just looks angry. I don’t think there’s another way to describe him.

There is the man in his suit with loose pants, clutching a briefcase as old as me, sighing at the weather.

There is the obliviously slow set of girls always discussing someone named Brandon — sometimes kindly, sometimes not.

I watch them carefully and weave when I need to, avoiding collisions.

But I know I’m in my own world, too.

Or I was, until a bird got into it.

In the World’s Most Livable City, a tiny yellow and green bird was lying dead on the sidewalk and I nearly stepped on him, as did the man after me, who shuffled him to the side with an oddly horrified face.

“Dammit, nice way to start my day!”

The body looked perfect and unreal, as though someone had dropped a toy out of their hand. He was so small… so easy to miss.

Because I am a minister’s daughter with an encyclopedic memory of hymns, I remembered these lines as I walked on:

Though by the path He leadeth, but one step I may see,
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me

Then I was standing in Starbucks, and there was a man with an obvious mental illness berating the girl at the till for overcharging him — though she hadn’t — and generally making a spectacle of himself in the midst of tired, just-waking-up people.

Everyone avoided eye contact, lest they be drawn into the drama. But you couldn’t miss him, no way.

He finally realized he hadn’t been “fleeced”, and went to struggle loudly with coffee lids, dumping them on the floor and swearing at the cream jug. I met him again at the crosswalk down the street, where he stepped boldly into oncoming traffic before the light had a chance to change.

Fortunately, the Audi had good brakes, or I would have seen another body on the pavement this morning.

But I think this man fell from the sky a long time before today.

Does anyone see him? Really see him?

Does anyone see me?

I wonder if anyone knows that there is a song that I have to skip on my iPod when I’m riding the bus because I will surely cry if I let it play. I wonder if anyone knows I am craving cherries. I wonder if anyone knows that I feel sick from a new run of pills or from an old set of problems. I wonder if anyone knows that my smile is from a crush or a joke or a deep breath of salt air coming up from the harbour. I wonder if anyone can tell what I’m thinking when I smile at babies in their mothers’ arms. I wonder if that man sees me looking at him, and knows how I’ve already memorized the line of his jaw. I wonder if anyone can tell I’m struggling.

They can’t, though.

Just like I can’t. Or don’t. Or don’t want to.

We move through and that’s that.

We only notice the things that throw themselves into our path, and even then, we try and avoid them or put them to the side. We’re just trying to survive ourselves, after all. We don’t need the complication.

But something in me says that the only way I’m going to make my city — or my life — truly livable is to open my eyes and turn my heart outward and actually see things around me, rather than just watching them go by.

After all, the best way to not feel alone is to remember that you aren’t.

I am too much of a cynic to:

love greeting cards; trust people who quote song lyrics very often; believe in love at first sight; do cleanses; call the complaint department; use more than one exclamation point at the end of a sentence; drink red wine on a white couch; buy into compliments; write the same way I did three years ago; cry at television ads; think I’ve actually gotten the last spider; read advice columns; go on blind dates; put people into my cell phone address book after one call; trust the phrase “no problem”; or believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or Lloyd Dobler.

But I am still too much of an optimist not to:

scrap the recipe; buy the latest eye cream; quote lines from old romantic movies; develop crushes; sing country music too loud with my eyes closed; apologize first; own a jump rope; dance with abandon; believe he’ll still email; pick snails off the sidewalk and put them in the grass; ask the freaky question; think soaking the pan will help; blow dry my hair on rainy days; think babies are astounding; write my heart, even when I know it will sound stupid as hell; or press “publish” right now.

My friend Eric and I have a running joke about his status as a “noncon” — a non-confrontational person. It’s not that he’s reluctant to speak his mind or stand up for himself. He’s just not raring for a fight, or eager to push things where they wouldn’t go naturally. It’s a virtue — but that doesn’t mean I can’t hassle him about it.

The other half of the joke, of course, is that I’m a “con.” I’ll push the discussion into difficult places, or ask the awkward question, or seize on a fledgling debate. I’ll even start an argument, if I think that’s what needs to happen to resolve things. Or not resolve them. Either way.

It makes for a good balance: I dig into his thoughts, and he keeps me from flailing when flailing isn’t necessary.

I was thinking yesterday, however, that the funniest thing about the whole joke is that it’s just not true. Not even a little bit.

Sure, I can be blunt.

And yes, sometimes I’ll start pushing on some issue when most people would just let it lie.

But if there is a term for an extreme level of non-confrontational behaviour — the kind of behaviour that places you in a separate time zone from challenges and conflict — that’s far closer to the reality of who I am.

Not that I can avoid everything that would cause me pain. Not that I would even know how.

If I can, though?

I will literally put difficulty and risk so far out of my consciousness that it ceases to exist.

Especially when facing it head on is exactly what I should do.

It never actually ceases to exist, anyway. It just sits like a signal fire at the edge of my peripheral vision, telling me something is needed from me… some sort of action or response or commitment. Letting me know it’s not going out just because I ignore it. Letting me know it continues to burn. Still, I won’t turn to look because then I’d have to put it out, and I have no idea how.

I hate it.

I do it all the time.

In fact, more than anything else, “avoidance” has been the watchword of my life for nearly four years now… maybe more.

I went through my early and mid-twenties as the girl who would do or be anything for anyone who needed me. Nothing made me happier than spending 25 hours a day pushing myself to see everyone and talk to everyone and help everyone and do what they asked me to do. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to do something, or if it made me uncomfortable. It didn’t even matter if it hurt me.

What mattered was my willingness, my availability, my capacity to step into the waves and keep things together when the water went over my head.

For a long time, I defined myself as a friend and a daughter and a worker before I was anything else. My entire identity was subject to relationships and tasks — the classic Honours student approach to life. If I got things wrong, if I showed reluctance, if I disappointed someone… well, that was anathema to me. There was no greater virtue than self-sacrifice, even if I was actually doing it to make myself feel valuable.

Selfishness cropped up now and then, usually with the people closest to me, because I felt safe to push back a little. The need for approval would win out in the end, though, and my fear of not living up to expectations. If I was an asshole, I could beat myself up far longer and far better than anyone else could.

“Trying hard” didn’t mean I got everything right all the time, though… not even most of the time. I made just as many mistakes then as I do now. I would irritate people and “drop the ball” with great facility. Everyone does, right?

But I would store up all my misfires and obsess over them until I started to believe in advance that people would view me as a failure. Until the list of things I’d screwed up had grown so long it started to colour how I saw the world around me.

If a man rejected me, I believed the next one would, too. It didn’t matter why any of them let me go or if they were, in reality, the worst matches for me on the planet. What mattered was my inability to be what they needed me to be.

I’d mysteriously started gaining weight in my teens after being a tiny underweight sprite of an athlete, and I couldn’t make it go away. I’d find out later why, but the whys made no difference.

And the more those kinds of rejection happened, the more I’d see it as a pattern and not just a series of random, cruel experiences. I made jokes about it when I would emcee my friends’ weddings. I think back to those speeches now, and I want to cry.

Also, if a friend was angry at me, it meant she would stay that way. It wouldn’t matter if her anger was undeserved or short-term or even real… after all, I could easily invent frustrations for people that they weren’t experiencing. I simply expected them to be disappointed in me.

I certainly was.

I don’t know where all of it came from. Perfectionism? A serious mistrust in the concept of grace? A few wrong relationships at moments where my vulnerability was high? Oh yes… I’d had some seriously shitty friendships over the years that had chipped away at my confidence like nothing else ever will again. But I let them do it, so I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.

I know my parents don’t understand it, because they went out of their way to love me and give me the things I needed and wanted when I was growing up. They still do. I cannot tie a moment of my idiocy back to them. Even when they didn’t get it right, I knew I could go home. I actually had a home… something many, many people lack.

But I would still run headlong into even the most dysfunctional relationships, determined to make them work. I would exist in impossible situations, even when the circumstances were clearly inappropriate and irrational. I did what it took to cancel out my disappointment in who I was. To sleep at night.

When I slept at night, that is.

Then everything changed.

I can remember when things started to turn, but after that, everything is a blur. The catalyst was a mistake I made that a few people in my life reacted to quite negatively — but all things considered, quite rationally. I’d essentially lied about doing something I’d said I was going to do for myself, which is nothing to be proud of. I’d failed to apply to a university program I’d expressed serious interest in.

I had recommendation letters and everything. I had huge amounts of support. It seemed like a great fit.

Then I let people down. I apologized, of course, because I always do, but it wouldn’t go away.

This mistake became representative of so much more than one thing I hadn’t done, or a short period of dishonesty. It became the “final straw” in breaking bonds I hadn’t even known were at risk. Suddenly, I was hearing lists of other things I’d failed to do, things I’d promised, things I’d put up as personal goals.

The funny thing is, they were all things I’d said I was going to do for ME.

My choices. My wants.

For whatever reason, I’d shoved them aside, either because I was terrified of failing or because I wasn’t willing to put the work in to make them happen or because I’d become obsessively focused on something else. And in not doing them, I’d somehow managed to radically disappoint people I loved… disappoint them to such a level that I can remember one of my friends telling me I would need to work to “get back her trust.”

Looking back, I know she said that because she couldn’t stand watching me put my life off anymore to devote time to my screwed-up priorities. She said it because she loved me. She said it because she had faith I would see that this was not the end of the road, but just a bump along the way.

Long story short? I didn’t see it that way.

I could barely see a thing, really.

And that’s right about when I stopped trying.

I took how I believed people saw me — a non-starter — and I embraced it. I could crack jokes for hours about all the guys who’d wanted only to be my “friend.” I could recall ad infinitum all the things I’d said I was going to do that I didn’t do. I could remember every friend who’d ever told me I’d somehow missed meeting their needs. I could call up every single time I screwed up anything, even if I’d put in more heart and effort into the process than anyone could possibly require.

I took all the positive qualities people told me I had — hard worker, solid writer, devoted friend, “life of the party”, “big potential” — and I decided that my mistakes defined me far more.

The leap of logic it took to go from making a mistake to developing a whole persona around mistakes looks just as crazy to me as it does to anyone else I know. But I embraced it with gusto. If people were going to be angry at me for not doing things for myself — even when I’d worked hard to do things for them — I would live down to their expectations.

What I was forgetting is that friendship is not based on how much you do for people. No one who really cares about me has a checklist waiting to be worked through, and if they do, well… those are people I would do well to leave behind.

At that point, however, I figured if my actions weren’t earning me the love and trust I wanted, then nothing would. I was also completely missing the point.

I was trying to earn affection with self-sacrifice, when people were actually begging me to take care of myself– not them. I’d used all the energy and strength I’d put into my friendships to completely sidestep responsibility for my OWN life.

Again, I’m not sure why. Oh, I wish I knew why.

The saddest thing is that it took years of abandoned relationships and feeling self-pity and shame and regret before I realized this was the case.

I had avoided things I’d loved, people I’d loved, opportunities I should have tried for, risks I should have taken, plans I should have made, tests I should have submitted to, problems I should have solved… you name it. Even the moves I did make were somehow tainted with fear.

I left a job behind that nearly broke me in half. But instead of accepting the instability that followed as collateral damage, I saw it as evidence of my own lack of potential.

I took a job to delve into a whole new area of writing and challenge myself. But instead of bracing myself for a learning curve, I would let the wind get knocked out of me every time I had to go back to the drawing board.

I let myself fall for someone. But instead of being honest with him and me and seeing that it wasn’t going to work for eight thousand reasons, I blamed how I looked above all else.

I finally made a series of choices to face up to my health concerns. But instead of realizing that this was the first step to actually feeling good, I was shell-shocked by the news of my infertility and backed way off the process.

I let some friendships go that had been utterly toxic for me. But instead of digging deeper into the ones that fed me, I put up absurd amounts of walls to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

I became accustomed to disappointment. I grew things I called “boundaries”, but they were really just long books of excuses not to try.

And that brings us to now.

Not quite the coffee-swilling optimist I try for. Not quite the natural product of my own potential. Not quite the woman or daughter or friend I intended to be.

Just… not quite.

And I cannot tell you how sick the ten year-old girl who got all A’s and starred in the school play and won the soccer championship and ran track and passed notes to “boyfriends” and had a thousand dreams of a thousand different lives is of this 33 year-old woman who has made the effort to do approximately .001% of what is possible in her life.

Because she’s still in there. She knows what her plans were. She has no idea how they got derailed so badly.

She wants them to get back on track.

So.

My name is Meg. I’m overweight, I have crooked teeth that make me not want to smile, and I have lots of health concerns. I loathe these things about myself.

I am disorganized, I am a procrastinator, and I have not lived up to my potential.

I am a somewhat shoddy friend to many people I love, and I have been selfish with my time and my emotions. To know what this has done to them breaks my heart.

I am a wicked, wicked girl to try and get to know if you’re a guy — I’m waiting for you to hurt me before I even lay eyes on you.

I make excuses like most people breathe.

And I have let these things be “me” for a long time now, with few other additions to the picture.

I’m done with all of it.

I am setting myself up for a hell of a road back to the real Meaghan Cassie Fowler, the one my parents named and loved and raised, the one that I can see waving at me from the stupid pit I put her in, and the one that all my friends miraculously still manage to care about.

I’m completely terrified.

But you see that girl up there? The one smiling WITH TEETH for the first time ever on her blog?

Yeah. Keep watching.

Because this is going to be good.

I woke up this morning to a wooly gray sky and a humid, heavy breeze tumbling through my bedroom window.

For once, the dubious weather has saved itself for a Tuesday (rather than a Sunday), and the sunshine lasted through our entire three-day weekend. That’s impressive, for Vancouver. It’s not that we don’t get sunshine, mind you, but we don’t always get it on the days when anyone has time or opportunity to use it.

You get used to it, after a while… laughing at the weather forecast because the timing is so absurd.

I’ve been feeling a bit cloudy myself lately, but it really seems as though I shouldn’t be. Why am I through a low pressure system at the wrong time. Shouldn’t I be more shiny? More thankful? More positive?

But I’m so Vancouver right now: reliably unreliable. The only constant is that I feel things at the exact time I’d really rather not.

Whenever I look back at the last couple years of my life and classify them as ‘difficult’, I rush to remind myself of all the good things that have happened in that time. The move I’ve made to a better home. A job that is stretching me. The friendships that have developed in odd and perfect ways. The discoveries I’ve made about my health that enable me to move in a direction, rather than wonder, wonder, wonder.

It has been difficult, though. I can’t pretend otherwise. The things I have to be thankful for are huge doses of comfort along the way, but they don’t always buffer the experiences that have etched lines into my face and scars onto my body.

I’ve been scared. I’ve been lonely. I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been angry. At myself, at other people, at intangible entities like ‘life’ and ‘love’ and ‘happiness’.

I’ve wanted things to miraculously change or evolve or work out in some direction that appears sunny and good and easy… but every time I think I’m going to get a break?

Overcast.

I do feel good a lot of the time, mind you.

I sing and dance like the random freak I always was. I can see the humour in everything from a weird boomerang ladybug I was trying to knock off my arm yesterday to pretty much everything Catherine and I do together. I wake up in the morning ready to run, and go to bed at night most of the time with a head full of thoughts that are not negative at all (mostly just random.)

I just have some questions and empty spaces that I am learning to live with.

I have some regrets that I am trying not to use like a brick wall against my head.

I have some unrequited desires I am managing as best I can.

I have some lists from which I have yet to scratch a single item.

I have some serious bumps in the road that I’m not going to be able to steer around.

I’ve screwed up a few things I can’t fix.

But.

As cloudy as it is now, or as cloudy as it might be in the future, the sun always shows up again eventually.

I have faith in more things than not.

And like a true Vancouverite, I’ve learned that the weather can’t change how you live your life, anyway.

It’s just a good excuse to buy boots.

When I was a kid, you were the second most thrilling time of year. Wintertime always came out on top, of course, because… SNOW!

But summertime meant no school! And homemade popsicles! And staying up later! And bike rides to the Red Rooster! And a month in Vancouver with Poppa and Nonna and everyone else on this side of the Rockies!

I could be barefoot more often than not.

I could wear shorts more often than not.

I could be outside more often than not.

I remember my favourite outfit of all time: a pink seersucker one-piece ensemble with straps that tied at my shoulders. I felt so glamourous and sophisticated in that little pantsuit, even as the seersucker was scratching the life out of my fresh Crescent Beach sunburn.

Beauty is pain. I knew it even then.

But.

Summertime was the apple tree in bloom in the backyard on Waverley.

Summertime was the blue plastic pool on Tutshi, sending tiny ants out to sea on the BatBoat.

Summertime was barrel rolls down the toboggan hill with Shelley, grass stains on our knees and elbows.

Summertime was white sandals on Sunday mornings.

Summertime was Baskin Robbins on 49th, eating Golden Delicious Sherbet out of a small, polka-dot cup.

Summertime was pre-bedtime walks on Cannon Beach, whispering secrets to Margie.

Summertime was a week at camp, avoiding giant spiders and crashing windsurfers into old, faded docks.

Then summertime was camp for three months… for 15 years.

Did I really do it that long?

Whole staff-fulls of friendships.

Hundreds of pairs of flip flops.

Thousands of hours spent on boats circumnavigating the island, and on ferries to and fro.

So many cans of Coke consumed trying to stay awake that I fear my tan was really an overdose of “caramel colour.”

More crushes than I can recall, some of which only existed in memory until they existed again on my Facebook (huzzah!)

And most importantly, thousands and thousands of kids that I loved, and laughed with, and listened to, and saved from certain peril with Dean in a Whaler because they — like me, years before — could not tack to save their lives.

Now summertime is work of a different sort, at a job indoors where I do not have to convince 9 year-old boys that sunscreen won’t melt their skin off.

Now summertime is a warm apartment at the end of the day, offset by the most gorgeous sunsets on our deck.

Now summertime is friends visiting from far away.

Now summertime is our crazy Aussie bellowing from the deck upstairs, or Karen’s tan rocking harder than ours, or Presley in sundresses.

Now summertime is no one questioning my Havaiana habit.

Now summertime is dining on patios, whenever possible.

And now summertime is actually September, when we head off for our vacation on a real, live airplane.

But most of all?

It’s perfect. And freckly. And shining. And crisp and sweet and fresh like watermelon. And not over yet.

I love you, Summer.

Thanks for coming out.

Love,

Meg

1. Staying up for four nights straight and still finding too many fun things to do on Night Five that didn’t involve resting.

2. I had never seen a gray hair. On my head, that is.

3. I hadn’t been in love yet. The idea still seemed perfect at that point, too.

4. Being five feet tall. My arms were still “to scale.”

5. Limo rides with Margaret, Gregg, Jeff and Glenn (Well, just the one. But it was sweetness incarnate.)

6. I still had four years to believe I would be married with a fabulous job at a newspaper by 25.

7. Counseling gaggles of girls at summer camp (some of which are 29 now! What?)

8. My two front teeth (later to be demolished repeatedly in freak karaoke microphone incidents)

9. About 90% less mistakes made (21-33 has been a rich time… )

10. The everyday pleasures: cheap wings; HUB coffee; 48 variations on fettuccine; playing Oilman until 4 am; sitting in laundromats for hours; getting stuck in snowbanks in giant old cars; wearing snow boots with dresses and not even knowing how Fundamentalist Mormon I likely looked; pre-internet existence; meeting paper deadlines on sheer force of will; and my whole big gorgeous future, totally untouched.

Someone asked me today if I would go back and do things differently. Something tells me, though, that I’d make all the same mistakes, because I’m still the same girl.

If I knew what to avoid, though?

What do you think? Anything you miss?

A month or so ago, Catherine and I were driving along in her car when a song came on the radio that gave us both pause. Not because it was extraordinarily awesome, and not because it was extraordinarily bad, but because it was just so… typical.

So typical that it stood out.

See, I’ve long been of the opinion that girls today are being screwed over by popular music just like the girls in my generation were… except MUCH, MUCH MORE SO.

The lyrics aren’t getting any worse per se, and the women aren’t any more tarty than they once were (though you could argue that, at which point I’d offer you the full Samantha Fox discography, plus a reel of Tawny Kitaen rolling across the hood of a car in a Whitesnake video and Loni Anderson on KWRP) but now the messages are being couched in self-empowerment.

We’ve been Madonna-ized. Without the cone bra.

But.

The song in question:

There’s more to me than meets the eye
so come and look inside
Go deep…
‘Cause beauty’s more than skin deep

Okay, try and ignore for a second there that they rhymed “deep” with “deep”, and that there are two full cliches in the space of four lines.

When you read those lines, you think, “Well, that’s good! There is more to me than meets the eye! And beauty is more than skin deep! Yeah! Boys! Check me out — I have substance, even if I don’t own a thesaurus!”

Then you get a little more understanding of the kind of girl we’re talking here:

Don’t need to know the kind of guy
who’s quick to drop the fly
Wham bam!
That ain’t who I am…

Ah! So you’re not planning to date within the NBA? Good for you.

Then it kinda falls apart.

Don’t a-let my booty beauty
be the only reason you wanna ride
Don’t a-let my hottie body
jack the fact that I got a lot more in mind

It sounds good — I mean, you want people to look past your hotness to your internal awesomeness, right?

But was anyone really paying attention after you said “booty beauty”?

This is the dilemma of late teens/early twenties/(oh, who am I kidding) early thirties women today.

We’ve turned into nudists screaming at people not to stare at our bits.

“I am proud of my body! I love my body! Look at my sexual empowerment! Do you see my ass? It rocks! HEY! STOP LOOKING AT MY ASS! BEAUTY IS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP! BUT I DON’T BLAME YOU, THESE JEANS MAKE MY ASS LOOK AWESOME!”

It’s a little confusing.

Then we get to the chorus:

If it’s just the physical
It would be sensational
But if you really got into me
You know you’d be insatiable

I get the whole point: I’m pretty freakin’ hot and you’d be lucky to have me but DID YOU KNOW I ALSO CAN DISCUSS CAMUS AND HAVE A CERTIFICATE IN THAI COOKERY?

Why do we always need to make such a point of our sexual identity in the first place, though? Why do we have to be so bluntly, obviously, blatantly hot as hell and THEN, once we are SUPER SEXY WHOA, be something else, too?

I suppose it comes down to this:

The culture we’ve developed for young women has made blunt-force sexuality synonymous with empowerment, and THEN asked those same girls with the visible thong and two-foot cleavage to make sure that men notice their hearts, too.

(Well, I guess it IS sticking right out there…)

How about we don’t dress them up like Paris Hilton, and then ask them to tuck a copy of the Iliad in their hobo bag?

How about we keep Joe Francis away from institutions of higher education?

How about we tell them to ignore any man who needs reminding that they have a brain?

Don’t get me wrong — I LOVE a good wallop of chemistry to get things going, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that chemistry and sexuality in general. Girls can like that physical spark as much (or more!) than guys. And perhaps I own one or two shirts that don’t come all the way to, say, my chin.

Sex is not a bad thing. (Unless Joe Francis is involved.)

But I’m tired of watching young girls try and be everything at once, and only succeeding at communicating one aspect of who they are because we’ve taught them nothing about subtlety or true self-respect (or how to put on clothing that covers their drafty parts).

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Or distracted by my own hotness.

It’s hard to say.

LOOK AT MY NAVEL! I KNOW DEAD LANGUAGES!