Friday Photo

The source of the smoke:

Filed under: crack of dawn, locations, Photos, up all night, Work, backlit, fog, movie smoke, smoker

The Visible Enemy

Work has been busy so I haven’t been paying much attention to the interwebs, but a few days ago something came to my attention via Facebook and it’s literally got my virtual panties in a bunch.

http://applesandbandaidsblog.com/2014/06/11/my-husband-doesnt-need-to-see-your-boobs/

The more I think about this, the more upset I get – not at the sad, frightened woman who posted it, but the people who made her this way.

Parents, teachers, friends, church elders, etc.. but mainly, I’m looking at you, media.

Women are bombarded with not-so subtle messages that we’re not worth the proverbial plugged nickel if we’re not perfect. Turning off the TV won’t help – it’s everywhere. Magazines, books, bus benches, billboards, hell, even the library, and look what it’s done to this poor woman.

Made her think she’s not beautiful just the way she is. Made her think she’s in danger of losing her husband if he looks at a photo of another woman – so he must ‘protect his eyes, protect his heart’ from Instagram.

This is beyond infuriating.

Women’s insecurities have been parlayed into a multi-billion dollar jackpot (Botox! Bleaching! Filler! Tummy tucks! Booty lifts! Plastic fun bags! Glop in a jar! Glop in a tube! Quack weight loss remedies! Enemas – oh, wait… wrong rant) that’s convincing women they’re ‘bound to the tankini with the granny skirt’ because they think they’re not perfect unless they pay dearly for crap in a jar or unnecessary surgery.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t have anything against tankinis with skirts. Some of them are adorable.

I’m super sad this is only available in plus size.

And this.

But ‘adorable’ is the reason to wear one, not ‘I have to cover up because I don’t measure up to an image’.

It’s not a sledgehammer, it’s a thousand tiny cuts.

Sister, I don’t know you or your husband, and your marital issues are none of my business, but life is too short to worry about things you can’t control.

I’d like to introduce you to Go Kaleo. Also known as Amber Rogers, she’s a personal trainer who is all about being strong and awesome and not giving a flying you-know-what about the scale or what you think others think of you. Give her site a gander. Trust me.

Let’s talk about regrets for a moment.

You know what I regret? I regret the years I spent being so insecure – that was most of my 20s – when I was young and much hotter than I am now.

I regret turning down an invitation to go cruise on a very, very nice yacht with a very nice, very single guy because I didn’t want him to see how fat I was.

Note: I have never been fat. Ever. Not once in my entire life. But the insecurity caused me to look in the mirror and see only my shortcomings.

I regret allowing myself to be eaten from the inside with the cancerous fear that I wasn’t measuring up to the heavily retouched photos of what a woman should be. That any small imperfection would ruin my life and make me the laughingstock of people whose names and faces I no longer remember.

I regret giving in to the fear that people were judging me all the time. More than once, I ran out of a party to my car, where I would change clothes to appease the madding crowd. Never mind the ignoble strife.

That terrible insecurity did, in fact, for a time, ruin my life, but one day something inside me snapped (which is a story for another post), and suddenly, I no longer cared about other people’s opinions.

For a while my Facebook photo was me, running down the beach in a bikini and a pirate hat, arms aloft in Nixon’s double peace sign, reveling in all my middle-aged glory.

I might not be super hot, but I’m free from bondage.

And that’s worth so, so very much.

I invite you to join me.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: life in LA, Non-Work, Off-Topic, rants, body image, Facebook, fear, health, media, way, way off topic, womens issues

It’s there, but I don’t have it

It’s been a very long time since I fell asleep at the wheel while driving home.

The first time, it was after a 16+ hour overnight in the high desert and I dozed off while stuck in rush hour gridlock. I woke up when my face hit the steering wheel, but luckily my foot never came off the brake.

There have been a few more times over the years – mostly just weaving on the road and having to roll down the windows or stomp the floor of the car with my left foot.

It just became a thing. Night work meant a fun drive home trying to out-weave the drunks, but I never felt concerned (if I should have is another post).

But I was really frightened Saturday morning when I dozed off while travelling southbound on the 405 at approximately 80 mph.

Luckily, I just weaved in my lane and then stomped the hell out of the floor of my car and made it home.

Wait.. let me back up.

This time of year work is thin, so when I got a call to work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I said yes before I asked any questions.

It was only after I was booked that the best boy told me it would be all nights on the other side of town.

Nights bother me a lot more now than they did when I was younger – I have a much harder time adjusting, and if I’m flipping between days and nights it’s even worse.

It would have been bad form for me to say ‘no’ after accepting the job, even with the construction in the unit above me (they say they’re remodeling it, but really I just think they’re chopping holes in the walls, patching them and cutting them out again just for practice), so I was stuck.

Lucky for me I was with a wonderful bunch of guys that I really like a lot – but that construction starts up at 7 am and I can’t sleep later, even with earplugs and a white noise machine, so even with the interim days off I spent an entire week on so little sleep I think it might have qualified as cruel and unusual.

As an added bonus, Friday’s pre-call ‘breakfast’ of a seemingly harmless turkey burger resulted in a three-day bout with rotavirus.

I got picked up for this week as well, which is great, but it’s been 7 am call times all week. Between the sleep loss and the power cleanse today was the first day I’ve felt even vaguely human.

Tomorrow, our call time is 6 am in west bumfuck, so I will have to get out of bed at 4:30. AM.

We have 9 pages to shoot, but it’s all day exterior and we don’t have enough lamps to make daylight*, so it can’t go all that late.

Since I didn’t post anything last week, please enjoy an apology photo of uplit trees and a condor with someone besides me in the basket:

 

*It is possible to shoot day exterior at night, but you need a lot of equipment. Like a 48 foot trailer full of HMIs. Then, when the sun goes down, we unload the truck and curse our poor life decisions.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: crack of dawn, cranky, locations, long long drives, movies, Photos, up all night, Work, dangerous, driving while tired, location, long hours, Los Angeles, movie, overnight, production, sleep deprivation