Frankel’s memoir is filled with sass. She uses her battle with her weight to frame a hiliarious honest romp through her youth and young adulthood, describing the ways in which her weight impacted things like her relationship with her mother and her burgeoning sexuality. This is actually a memoir within a memoir — Frankel uses her reflections on her weight to guide her grown-up self on a journey towards body acceptance. This fun, quick read includes cameos by Stacy from What Not To Wear and other awesome folks Frankel met while working at Mademoiselle.

Frankel honestly reflects on the ways in which her mother’s fatphobia, her desire for male approval, and her own self-hate all molded her into a neurotic yo-yo dieter. The steps she takes to resist this, and to gain more body acceptance, all vary, and include using a clicker to count the number of times she indulges her “Inner Bitch” as well as her embarking on a not-diet, where no food is off limits. While these are not necessarily the most enthralling parts of her memoir (I was personally LOLLERSKATING over her youth as a punk rocker and her days of “slutitude” (we’ve all been there, amirite? no? just me? well then!)) they might be the most useful for a reader looking for some tools against self-hate.

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Stewart’s amazingly fun advice book offers advice for those of us fabulously committed to remaining single until it’s no longer amusing. She covers topics ranging from the fine art of the one-night-stand to budgeting to maintaining friendships across distance and time. What’s even more fun is that she’s offering all this while talking about experiencing singleness from a variety of age ranges and social locations — this is NOT just a fit for your twenty-something BFF who’s a future cat-lady, y’all.* The singles she interviews are both male and female, and are all ages, ranging from the VERY early twenties to their happy happy 80s. In covering this range, she also finds an opportunity to cover all kinds of other lifestyle issues, including stuff related to life insurance, self-TLC, and the love of solitude so many of us fabulously single people have down pat. Some of the suggestions are a little “hmm,” like when she suggests that you try taking a champagne bath to get the feel of the bubbles all over your skin… To me, this suggests that her understanding of single-dom is very much based around being able to AFFORD particularly awesome signifiers of singledom. Plus, the LG identified subjects she mentions are, I think, all gay men. Because of this, the object of lusty naughty thoughts remains male, which to me enforces a certain kind of implied heteronormativity into her discussion of single-dom. Besides these (not so minor, but maybe not so huge? I think that’d depend on who you’re giving the book to, huh?) issues, this was a fun, fast read that heaps tons of praises on to a lifestyle that gets regularly lambasted during the holiday season.

VIVA LA SINGLES!

*tho, if you WANT to buy Mr. FuzzyButt a pressie, I will graciously accept on his behalf.

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Study: Channeling Unhappiness, In Good and Bad Economic Times

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as “very happy” spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.

Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers’ happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.

“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,” says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time use studies. “It’s more passive and may provide escape - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.”

More here!

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