the impatient gardener

[dragonlady7]

None of the seeds I started before leaving for Georgia have come up yet, and I am growing impatient and also despairing. What if I'm incompetent?! Wail!
I also took some cuttings of a houseplant and had left them in water to root so that I could plant them in dirt when I came back, and none of them have grown any roots at all. So that is also discouraging. I am determined to retain belief that I have a green thumb, however.

I'm sort of making up for the Pirates of the Caribbean cereal of yesterday by eating some godawful tasteless sharp pile of little oat rocks this morning, with notably less success than yesterday's breakfast. I bought it because it didn't have any corn syrup in it, because my mother pointed out (and rightfully) that an awful lot of the "healthy" cereals you buy are mostly made of corn syrup which has absolutely no nutritional value beyond making you hella fat. However, this Oat Crunch shit is rather loathesome. Not helped by my deciding to dump yogurt on it rather than milk: initially the yogurt left it too crunchy, but now it's soaked in and is a slightly horrifying paste.
Eh well. I suffer for my beauty. (edited to add: I finished it, too. Look! Clean plate. Horror!)

I am a bit self-conscious about my weight right at this particular moment because of the events of Valentine's Day Evening. I did successfully roast the duck, and was just finishing getting dressed (dinner nearly done) when Z arrived home. I dressed up really nice in new clothes, including a very low-cut green blouse with glittery beads on it. Z was appreciative. I took out my camera to photograph the roasted duck, and he took several pictures of me posing at the stove, and then for the rest of the evening kept taking pictures of me. Which was fun, and a playful role-reversal-- I am always dogging people with that camera, and never get photographed.

But of course, there's a reason I never get photographed, which I always forget about: I hate how I look in photographs. I look less bad than I used to, but still, there are a few little rolls of fat here and there about which I am decidedly unhappy. Z seems, to his credit, to be fond of them, judging by the way he chose to frame several of the photos. Apparently he rather likes the little roll of thigh-fat that spills over the top of my stockings when I sit with my skirt hitched carelessly. God knows it appears in enough photos. I'm trying to appreciate it from his point of view, but it's very difficult not to just say "God I look chubby" and leave in disgust.
Actually the worst bit, I think, is the fat on my upper arms-- one can argue that the soft flesh of a thigh is erotic, certainly, and in my day I have been known to appreciate a bit of soft girlthigh; likewise, my other problem fat deposits (hip, waist, uh boobs) are at least womanly-- but there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to recommend a flabby bit under an upper arm. Ain't nobody wants to rub their stubbly cheeks against that.

Photos are just a more concrete reinforcement of how one Really Looks than looking in the mirror.

I did a lot of work yesterday but still don't feel I got anything done. I didn't finish my bit of Valentine's Day porn, of course-- that was rather over-ambitious of me anyway. It may just be relegated to being generically Springish porn, at some point. Sometime perhaps soonish there will be something porny. Great.
I did do the laundry and do a bit of setup work for the garden, and do all the dishes in the kitchen-- but of course there are more dishes, and more laundry. Bah.

Comments

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the way women's upper arms (distinctively different from men's) are ignored in today's society is cultural. Older literature does mention women's 'soft round arms' and I know that in Kuwait wearing a sleeveless top was considered Bad because the arms could supposedly get men excited just like legs can.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Hm. Interesting to consider. Yes, I remember references to soft round arms...

Well, part of it also might be that this culture's ideal woman, for the better part of the last century, has been rather on the curveless side. Women who are very thin (especially if they are also a touch muscular, as has been sporadically fashionable) don't have very distinctively-shaped upper arms.

I think in all my het, henceforth, I am going to have to include references to women's soft round arms. ^.^ At the point I'm in in the original novel, the heroine is very thin (she's a dancer), but later in the novel she has a baby and gets pretty fat, so I'm definitely going to have to have the POV male character totally grooving on her chubby arms. Yeahhh...

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Yes, muscular women's arms look similar to some men's. But very thin women's arms are also pretty distinctive--even the thinnest guys tend to have *some* sign of delts etc.

I build arm muscle easily, and since I also have quite a lot of surfacefat my upper arms tend to be large but not very cut. I think the reason I do not care is that my college boyfriend seemed to be really into that. More specifically, into the way my arms looked when I was wearing a tanktop. He'd definitely drool a bit. Nobody since has commented on my arms either way. (Well, apart from my mother, who wailed when she realized that rockclimbing had given me arm muscle definition which would surely drive men away. That's gone now though.)

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yes-- I also remember when I was about 13, I had some friends that did a bit of historical re-enactment, and so I borrowed my mother's Bicentennial outfit (she met Dad when they were both doing Revolutionary War re-enactments), and as she was helping me get dressed she pointed out that while the bodice was almost scandalously low-cut to show off a rather shocking amount of cleavage (for my thirteen-year-old self, anyway, who still was in denial about already being a C-cup), it had elbow-length sleeves and a heavy lace ruff that hung down onto the forearm. Forearms were all right, she said, but it would be out of character for me to push the sleeves up above my elbows, as elbows were an Erogenous Zone that should not be publicly exposed. (Elbows and knees.) The upshot was that anything goes, in the tits area, but be careful about those arms! So, late eighteenth-century fashions: Mom in costume (http://www.bridget.kelly.name/Pictures/momanddadswedding/momanddadswedding-Pages/Image5.html). (My parents were such dorks. Interestingly, Dad's knees were exposed.)

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Your parents look extremely cute. But, yes, the whole erogenous zone thing is weird. We're rapidly running out of things to conceal, these days, which is rather a shame really.