Hey Gang, happy Tax Day!

Posting is going to be a teensy slow this week as Lappy 6000 is finally going into the shop to have her keyboard replaced after last December’s unfortunate scorpion incident.

If you recall,  an unwelcome barb-tailed beastie presented itself in my bed, scaring what can only be medically described as the bejeezus out of me and causing me to knock over a glass of water onto my laptop, an act for which several of my keyboard keys have not yet forgiven  me.

After last week’s terrific conversation about feminism, I just didn’t want to plop us back down to shiny shoes and pretty clothes (although I do love shiny shoes and pretty clothes, and have some very exciting news about jeans for my long-waisted curvy sisters later this week) so I thought I’d open up today’s comments as a sort of catch-all forum for what’s been on your mind.

Recently I’ve been thinking about cravings.

I’m still convalescing from the stupid cholera (I know! That is, as my friend said, some “straight up Oregon Trail bulls**t”) that laid me low almost two weeks ago and although in an act of pure bravery I ate some very thin cauliflower soup yesterday, solid food is probably another day or two away.

Yet I am craving potato chips the way crack addicts crave, well…crack.

I tend to crave salty over sweet anyway, I have low sodium so I guess that makes sense, but potato chips –Grandma Utz’s being the superior variety– are always #1 with a kettle-fried bullet on my list of constant cravings.

Other recurring characters are:

• Seaweed Salad: probably my #3 craving after Coca Cola and potato chips
• Mexican Coca Cola: made with cane sugar, served in a freezing bottle
• Buttered Toast: Buttered before toasting, of course, with a sprinkling of (you guessed it) salt
• Utz’s Cheese Balls: the zenith of cheezy poof achievement
• Mango: I do myself a gastrointestinal disservice at least once a year gorging on delicious ripe mangoes. A dusting of curry is nice, too.

Do you have cravings, constant or otherwise? Put it –or anything else you’ve got on your beautiful mind– in the comments.

I’ll do my best to respond to any comment directed at me, so if you have a question you’d like me to answer specifically, be sure to direct it to @MissPlumcake.

Oof, your pal Miss Plumcake has been under the weather in a big way, and the novelty of being sick as an entire kennel worth of big dogs has seriously worn off.

My fascination with your Eureka responses, however, hasn’t.

I find it interesting some people –and I don’t mean anyone specifically, it’s just a general observation– who are by thought and deed feminists are still hesitant to saddle themselves with the label.

I can’t really judge them though, I was the same way…when I was twelve.

Whenever I brought up a bit of social injustice, my beloved, brilliant, Harvard-educated grandfather who truly did want me to be a huge success and thought I could do anything in the world, would sneeringly ask “Oh, are you a feminist now?”

The implication being that feminism was the same as man-hating. I didn’t hate men so I’d say “Of course not Dada!”

To many men of my grandfather’s generation, “feminist” became ill-informed shorthand for the type of woman who wanted a world where it was acceptable to treat men the way men were used to treating women. A horrifying thought, and as is so often the case, fear turned into disdain.

Feminism became a dirty word.

I’d like to think as a society we’re past the idea of feminists as braless bogeywomen coming to steal hardworking men’s titles and testicles. We just want equal treatment with our brothers, and the right to make decisions about our own bodies.

What’s so scary about that?

Also, and this is one of those things I care about that apparently no one else on the planet does, women who fought for the vote weren’t suffragettes: They were suffragists.

The word suffragette was originally used as an insult.

The newspapers –a boys club to this day– removed the gender-neutral -ist suffix and replaced it with the cutesy, diminutive, feminine-thus-powerless -ette to be dismissive of those “hysterical” women with all those silly ideas floating around in their tiny female brains who probably just needed a rest cure, ideally in a room with yellow wallpaper.

I know many of us learned the word either through Disney’s Mary Poppins and the sweet but daffy Mrs. Banks

…or through David Bowie’s 1972 scorcher, Suffragette City.

Both great songs, but let’s just agree they are not the most thoughtful exegeses of the suffrage movement.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for today. Next week it’ll be back to fun, frills and fatness, but feel free to keep commenting on these posts. I love the discussion.

(Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma’am!)

Last month on Twitter, reader Leah Gates asked me to share my Feminist Eureka moment on the tumblr blog The Eureka Moment.

I didn’t have a eureka moment per se.

I never had that cinematic money shot where I jumped on my desk in the middle of my social studies exam and suddenly declared “This is patriarchal hegemonic bulls**t of the most rank and venomous order and, as God as my witness, this misogynistic outrage shall not stand!”

After all, I was popular and being Popular While Fat, especially in high school was radical enough. I didn’t want to ruin my chances at Prom Queen.

The truth was, and still is,  I’m a pretty girly girl on the outside and my highly-polished candy shell has served me well.

It’s not fake.

I point that out because  we’ve all run into sugar-coated vipers from time to time — in the South their distinctive hiss is, of course, blessherheart– but I believe for every poisonous powder puff there are a dozen women just like me, whose almost cartoonish femininity is just one letter in their persona’s alphabet soup.

It has always been thus.

I loved classic movies as a kid.

I still do, but as pretty as Audrey Hepburn looked in all her Givenchy frocks, I never related to the easily-digestible non-threatening Professional Naif. Where were the female rugged individualists with opinions and guns to back them up? Except Annie Oakley from Annie Get Your Gun. Screw that trick-shooting traitor.

Sure, I wanted to DRESS like Holly Golightly but I wanted to BE The Duke.

And as much as I wanted it, I knew it was out of reach and it was out of reach because the Rules were Different For Girls.

I didn’t even know what the rules were.

I knew they didn’t involve  pushing for the front of the line or trying out a new and exciting dirty words only to have it excused away with the mysterious “boys will be boys“.

I knew it involved being a Nice Girl, since the worst thing in the world –with repercussions so terrible I never exactly found out what they were– was to have your name whispered along with the pointedly capitalized phrase “Not a Nice Girl”.

Nice girls did (or more often didn’t) do this, that or the other thing and the finishing school finish line always kept moving.

I was walking a moving tightrope just to make sure I didn’t fall into perdition before the training wheels fell off my bra and yet somehow when my brother acted up it was –say it with me now– “Boys will be boys“.

Sure he got punished –I still can’t believe he thought making pornographic calls to 911 from a payphone and then hanging around the phone after was a good idea– but for he was punished his actions, not as a judgment against his character.

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Whether it’s macaroons and Manischewitz for my Jewish friends,

Hot cross buns and Hendrick’s for the Western Churchgoers,

Or black jelly beans and bourbon for the festive yet unaffiliated;

May your Passover, Holy Week, Easter or Half-Price Cadbury Eggs Day be meaningful, joyful and full of love.

(But seriously, save me some black jelly beans. You cannot find them here.)

Greetings and salutations my plus-size pals. How is every little thing?

I’m okay. I made the mistake of watching the Real Madrid vs Apoel match which featured an Apoel player slamming his face into his teammate’s shoulder so hard his teeth came flying out of his head like calcified confetti.

*shudder*

I have Serious Teeth Issues and cannot handle any sort of destructive dental doin’s, so naturally I spent the next 20 hours curled in the fetal position watching Fantasia and drinking Thorazine milkshakes with a very-nearly-lifesize stuffed tiger.

You know, like a normal person.

It was in that delicate state I judged the winners of last week’s Whisky Tango Foxtrot competition, wherein I asked you fine folks to give me a situation appropriate for the donning of these doozies:

As usual, there are several awards to bestow before the grand prize.

By popular demand, long-time commenter TeleriB wins the sparkly Circlet of Cthulhu, made with real imitation Swarovski crystals and glitter-encrusted tentacles suitable for all your nerdgirl needs for her comment:

“A gallery opening in R’lyeh.”

With honorable mention going to Andrea for:

“I think they just might add a touch of whimsy that your silver minidress needs when you are running from the Carousel with Michael York.”

Even though that confused me because when I think minidress + Michael York, I think Liza and Cabaret so I was all “was there a carousel scene in Cabaret? I don’t think there was a carousel scene in Cabaret…wait, was there a carousel scene in Cabaret?”

Took me a while to get the Logan’s Run reference.

Sidenote: The Hunger Games = Logan’s Run with less in the way of futuristic chiffon caftans, right? Just checking.

First commenter Melissa has earned her induction into the Crystal Order of the Chubby Conch for setting the literary standards high with

“I’m pretty sure the only acceptable situation for these shoes is if I’m stuck on the island in Lord of the Flies and they’ve given up on Piggy and are coming after me, and I need to stab some little pre-pubescent punks with a stiletto.”

But it is latecomer Jenny who wins this week’s contest (plus a lifetime supply of stain remover) for her variation on the witches’ prophecy for the doomed thane in Act 4, scene 1 of Macbeth:

“When Birnam Wood hath come to Dunsinane. And invites you to tea with the Macbeths, and the Kardashians.”

Fun fact: Your pal Plumcake is pretty well directly descended from Gruoch MacDuff, Queen of Alba, more popularly known as Lady Macbeth. That goes a long way to explain the general likeability of the women in my family and also spells a guaranteed win for anyone who brings up The Scottish Play.

Congratulations Jenny and everyone who played. Join us next time for more adventures in Whisky Tango Foxtrot!

There aren’t many situations where I’m grateful for my fat.

Other than when I’m clothes shopping or that brief moment of anxiety approaching an unusually narrow turnstile or arm chair, I don’t really think about my fat much at all.

For example:

I’m grateful for my Big Girl status now that I live in Mexico because it makes me potentially harder to kidnap.

Before you get all up on my magical-thinking Kool-Aid, I know there’s a whole mess of flawed logic that goes into this, not the least which is kidnapping isn’t a problem in my state.

Still, I imagine potential abductors seeing me –almost certainly bigger than they are in every regard and clearly able to cause some damage, not to mention the difficulty of transporting me– and opting for some smaller victim, at least until the day they can ransom by the kilo.

I’m also grateful for being fat when it comes to dating.

No, seriously.

I read Kate at Eat the Damn Cake’s hackle-raising article  The Chunky/Gorgeous Woman on the Subway and was flooded with borrowed anxiety and personal relief.

At one point Kate, a woman who was once quite thin and is now merely slender with the most adorable hint of belly, butt and boobs pointed out a gorgeous woman on the subway.

Her husband dismissed the woman as “chunky”.

Kate told him:

“It’s just hard. I am a lot heavier now. And the whole world is full of people who say ‘chunky.’ I am chunky. I am chunky and beautiful. And even if you don’t think I’m chunky—I want to be able to be chunky. I want to be able to gain more weight without having to feel ugly. And I don’t want it to be because I have a pretty face.”

Anxiety because I cannot imagine being in a relationship where my partner’s attraction to me would balance so precariously on body size with a relatively small margin of error, and relief because, for the most part, my larger-than-life size kicks those unacceptable applicants from the Get-Inside-My-Jeans pool before they’ve even inflated their floatie wings.

I’m sure Kate’s husband Bear would love and be attracted to her regardless of size, but I know of so many relationships where I’d be willing to bet my life savings (which you know means giving up my dreams of a bionic liver) that a woman’s weight gain of 30 pounds would spell splitsville for the couple.

Meanwhile, it’s been my experience men who are attracted to bigger bodies have a wider appreciation for variation and a swing of 30 pounds in either direction might not even register as long as she still packs an extra scoop in her sundae and her hourglass –provided she had one in the first place– still tells time.

Case in point:

When I went back to Austin in July to tell my stunned friends and family I was selling the Cadillac and moving to live on the beach in Mexico, there was a lot of cake.

There was International Move Stress Cake, Too Sick To Eat Anything Else Cake, Better Eat This Because They Don’t Have Real Texas Sheet Cake in Baja Cake, Goodbye We’ll Miss You Cake, Are You Really Sure You Want To Do This Cake, Vague Racist References to White Slave Trade Cake, New Birth Control Makes Me Want To Eat Everything Cake, Wake Up in the Middle of the Night Wondering If They Really Do Have Donkey Shows in Tijuana* Cake…I think you get the picture.

The upshot was, I gained 30 pounds from July to January.

I knew this wouldn’t bother Hot Latin Boy, my body has done crazy things since we met (and not just in the dirty way, though also totally in the dirty way) but since my vanity knows no limits, I was concerned the small stable of admirers I’d collected during my previous stay wouldn’t find me as attractive.

I still wasn’t going to give ‘em any, but I still wanted them to want it.

And they did, so the Duchess of Neediness-Two-Bourbons was satisfied for another day.

Which isn’t to say my dating history as Professional Fat Girl has been all Ativan-covered roses.

Just like the FDA allows a certain number of grasshopper parts in your peanut butter, any romantic career spanning over a decade has to allow its share of freaks, pervs, fetishists and nogoodniks who spread rumors about you and several members of the Episcopal clergy having  such loud and enthusiastic orgies (clorgies?) at conventions that a bishop had to pass a resolution to make you bite the pillow. Fantastic had it been true –you can’t buy that sort of press– but more than a little worrisome when made up by someone whose five year plan includes the hope of ever seeing you topless.

I’d like to think most healthy relationships allow room for both partners to change both emotionally and physically, and that most of the men who  can’t find beauty in anything but the narrowest of spectrums end up broadening their horizons or weeding themselves out of the DNA buffet, but I know my size has let me dodge that bullet many times and for that…plus the whole kidnapping thing (hey, it’s worked so far)…I am grateful.

*They don’t. It’s a scam invented by enterprising taxi drivers in Tijuana’s red light district to take advantage of drunk tourists. They drive around racking up the fare, pretending they’re looking for the illegal event that is forever on the move, finally dropping the boozy pervs off at a barnyard animal-free strip club/brothel with which the drivers have an arrangement, but not before lightening their wallets considerably.

Aside from Catherine Zit-a Jones, my monthly pimple pal, I’ve had relatively unearned luck when it comes to the body’s largest organ.

It seems along with her pointy chin and penchant for morning martinis, my grandmother –who subscribes to the Keith Richards school of nicotine and alcohol consumption and looks a full twenty years younger than she is (which is forty years younger than she has the right to)– bestowed upon me her preternaturally good skin.

Unfortunately, stress and a complete environmental change have let slip the dogs of clogged pores and your previously porcelain pal Plummy has found herself in need of some serious skin care.

So too has Hot Latin Boy, whose flawless smoldering face has gone all Vesuvius.

He insists he never had so much as a blemish before he met me.

I assured him it was probably a result of his hormones going into hyperdrive from all the sweet, sweet lovin’ he’s been getting and the best course of action would be to cut way back on the international relations. He backpaddled so hard he nearly tripped over my dog.

Despite evidence to the contrary –last night I plucked an unusual yellow fruit the size of a jumbo olive from a neighbor’s tree and blithely popped it in my mouth before realizing I had no idea what that particular morsel was or whether in fact it was edible– I’m not much of a risk-taker when it comes to my health so I opted to order from drugstore.com where I knew my potions would be approved under the boring-but-important FD&C and FPLA (Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act and Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, respectively).

For all I know, Mexico could be just as strict as the US when it comes to their equivalent of the FDA, but I don’t especially want to take that risk quite yet.

Nivea Creme Travel Tin

I think I’ve mentioned these pocket-sized wonders before, but they deserve all the praise my freshly moisturized hands can throw at them.

I buy them by the dozen and stash them everywhere.

There’s at least one in every handbag, in all of my coats, a few in the car and one by my bed. What makes them so brilliant is their portability. They’re slim enough to keep in your pocket or bag without taking up much room, and since it’s a tin and not a tube, it’s virtually leak proof.

Recently I’ve been using it when I go to the beach to protect my face against chapping in the wind and to replenish the moisture lost in my hands from all the salt air. They’re also dead handy to have around when I want to partake in street food and either have to use my own disinfectant wipes (harsh) or the combination powdered hand and dish soap (harsher) provided by the taco joint in question.

That way I can have clean hands and still enjoy my taco without my cuticles painfully turning into papyrus. Plus they’re dead cheap and seemingly last forever. What’s not to love?

Desert Essence Tea Tree Oil Facial Cleansing Pads

I’m a little sensitive to both salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide, two of the most common active ingredients in OTC acne treatments. Nothing especially terrible happens, I don’t develop leprosy or break out in hives, just a little peeling, but I still try to avoid them when possible.

Tea tree oil has always been good to me as has witch hazel; these little astringent pads contain both.

They are outstanding.

What they’re not, however, are cleansing pads. I always think of cleansing pads as something to replace your face wash. These are more like Oxy pads for grown ups, and I’d use them in place of a toner or astringent.

I really like the pads themselves, which are just scratchy enough to feel like you’re getting a good rigorous bit of exfoliation, and although the witch hazel/denatured alcohol/tea tree oil does tingle, it feels reassuringly strident without making my skin peel or go red, even if I forget to moisturize after.

It’s pretty good bang for your buck too, 50 pads will set you back just over five smackeroos and they can be used as middle-of-the-day skin refreshers too.

Alpha Hydrox AHA Enhanced Anti-Wrinkle Creme

Man this is great stuff.

I remember back in the day you could go to Walgreen’s for your middle-of-the-night PMS run (spice drops, Coca Cola and beef jerky) and get a nice-sized vat of Alpha Hydrox creme for like six bucks on sale.

I would slather it all over my body and then do a dry brush/salt scrub whenever I was feeling particularly crusty and gross.

It worked like gangbusters and I’d emerge from my bath looking just as fresh and pink as a pig in buttermilk.

They’ve either discontinued or reformulated that particular product, but this moisturizer with 10% pure Glycolic Acid –an alpha hydroxy acid naturally found in sugar cane– holds its own when it comes to gently reducing fine lines, spots and improving the tone and texture of your skin, even on delicate petals like me.

HLB has been using this in combination with the tea tree wipes for two weeks and his complexion has almost completely cleared, plus the dark spots blemishes leave behind for a month after a breakout have faded considerably.

I’ve mostly noticed an improvement of tone in my skin and the few fine lines that appear in my forehead whenever I’m particularly stressed or dehydrated have vanished.

I’ve put these last two products behind the jump because they’re a bit intimate in nature, but I get a surprising number of emails about products like these, so here we go.
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