I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter

Some people’s lifetime goal is to change the world. Mine has been to fit into a pair of jeans size 28.

Though I can almost physically feel the burden of people judging me as shallow, superficial and body obsessed, the fact remains. Lucky enough one of the advantages of being in your thirties is that you stop caring about what people think about you. Call me whatever you want. I had a dream.

This dream must have been pretty time consuming according to various entries documented in my diaries over and over again through out the years. Looking at pictures from back then, I can see why. I was never really thin but also never big until I turned 18. Then I just blew up and slowly started resembling my fat Alter-Ego. Everything about me was big for that one summer: big hair, big butt, huge cleavage (a small consolation price at least). Unfortunately, it was that summer that I had to have a portrait picture taken for my driver’s license and history was sealed in an ugly headshot. I still have that license and can entertain a crowd of ten easily with that picture for 90 minutes. Easily.

It is such a shame that I was never skinny till I got to my twenties. When you are thin, denim just looks better on you. You don’t have to lay flat on the bed to be able to zip them up, they don’t rip between the legs and you don’t have to balance out your too big butt with your cleavage. I came close to being skinny a couple of times over the years, but those Levi’s 501’s size 28 bought in Amsterdam, my life time dream, never came close to my thighs. I just couldn’t get them past my knee caps. Being a bit chubby in my teens didn’t prevent me from going along with the “show your belly” trend though according to some pictures I found. In order to compensate for the unsuccessful jeans fitting, I was showing my fat belly. And to be honest, I didn’t feel insecure. At least I don’t remember it that way. Of course I was a little upset to see the miniature jeans my thin friends were wearing versus the tents I was climbing into. Yet, I was having fun. I was self confident. I was dating.

I stare at those pictures. All my friends do too and then they ask "so where in this picture are you?".

My body was not so much a wonderland, was it? Where did I have that self confidence that you need to show of an untoned belly? I look at some more pictures and realize that not once was I close to be skinny or dare I say, toned, all these years. Suddenly it hits me: I was young. When you are young, you don’t care and you don’t know what it takes to keep in shape as your body burns the midnight French Fries at McDonalds in record time. I ate way more back then then I would even dare to look at today and when I think about it, my belly looks amazing for all that fat that I consumed those days. But no more, people….nope, nada. Today, the beauty of young, shiny, glowing skin is gone and my body barely burns 40 calories per day it seems. I also now know the cruel discipline it takes to stay in shape. I am not going back to fat camp.

Truth is: All it takes are 90 minutes of work out and generous 1000 calories per day. It is super simple: You just stop living, start dieting and devote yourself to working out. Then you pretend that you are not constantly adding up the calories or looking for no fat, no sugar, no nothing food. Spraying some artificial butter spray into a pan to fry the single tomato you are allowed to have for lunch is just the beginning. Furthermore you convince yourself that this is a healthy lifestyle and not a diet that you have adapted. 200 ml of soup are more than enough for dinner. You wish. The difference between the two can’t be bridged without In and Out Burgers, Haribos, French Fries and Pizza which I constantly long for. The healthy life sucks.

As sad as it is, I now even own a pair of skinny jeans. They fit. I could have had a totally different high school experience if that had happened when I turned 17. I could have been a gorgeous skinny actress, a prima ballerina or a top model. Instead I remember squeezing myself into those historic pair of Levi’s 501 size 28 when I was a solid 33. Good lord. Size 33? Guys wear that size nowadays. How fat was I?

I can’t go back there. No way, I am going back there. Unfortunately, I can’t live without wine gum, chocolate, pizza, penne, pretty much all the fatteners out there and never have been the type who could eat anything she wanted. I gain weight smelling food which means I have to run at least 10 km each day to burn the calories off. Small price to pay for being able to wear those jeans.


Call me shallow. Call me superficial. I am a mighty fine size 28 and like it.

Big Girls Don't Cry...

Big girls don't cry often...but if they do, they expect guys to pick them up. Strong or not.

Truth is: Just because we are strong (not of all us are THAT big) doesn't mean we are never touched by chick flicks and kittens, never lose our cool when we burn the slice of toast or we never get sad. We do get sad…especially when we realize George Clooney is about to get married.

And yet the strong woman seems to be a new species men have trouble getting adjusted to. A friend recently told me: "She is so unpredictable. One day she closes a deal, runs the household and does our tax returns which makes me feel like I am disposable at any time. The next, she is so sensitive and vulnerable she can't even cross the street without me. How am I supposed to ever get it right?"

I get it. The Alpha Female Challenge. So guys, listen up. This is quite simple. Strong women are people too. In fact, they are almost like other women. There are just some important details to remember:

1. She wants you to open the door for her. Even if she walks in front of you most of the time. Just be quick. She talks fast and she walks fast.

2. No, she doesn’t think it is OK for you to wear dirty sweat pants to her lovingly cooked dinner unless you are actually IN training or a professional athlete. If she cooks for you, she really likes you and puts a real effort into it. Have the courtesy to do the same and keep the athlete fantasy alive. She loves you in sweatpants. Just not after a full day of trying to get the dish right to impress you. Acknowledge this ground braking step she took with a decent outfit and a good bottle of wine. Tell her how amazing everything tastes. Some of it might not. Don't you ever touch the salt and pepper or you might never get to touch her again.

3. Yes, she needs you to be polite yet not ass kissing. Self mocking and yet self confident. Honest and funny. Strong but sensitive. Determined, ambitious and yet with a big heart. Her heart is soft, contrary to what men think. Oh yeah, and it does exist. Trust me.

4. No, you cannot complain she has too many single girlfriends and tells them everything. One can never have too many girlfriends, shoes or bags. Strong women are strong, not lonely or without a fashion sense. Bag to differ.

5. Yes, it is OK to dream to become a magician/pilot/wrestler as long as you are getting on with your life while dreaming. She supports your dreams. Please support your family and kids in return.

6. Do not let the alpha female do any handy work around the house. They really want you to do all of that. Deep down, they are praying that you will get it right. If you see your strong better half hammering, grab the hammer and reprimand her. Really, don't let her take this one away from you. The strong woman gene will take over forever if you let her handle male tasks. After all, this raises questions such as: What is left, if we do THAT too?

7. Most strong women constantly have to keep their cool...day in day out....at work...in a strongly male environment. Surrounded by their families, they get to be who they really are. Hence the herd of the Alpha female, her family, is sacred. Don't you ever, ever, imply you don't like anybody in her family. Worship them. You will eat whatever her mother serves you. At all times. Hungry or not. Period. You will take her nerdy brother out for a guys night even if he himself doesn’t want to. And you will enjoy it.

8. Now this is a tricky one: If she gets lost driving, you cannot offer guidance or advice until her strong shell is cracking and she is begging you. Asking for help doesn't come naturally to her and she would rather drive in circles for 45min than admit she was wrong and needs you.

9. If you don't tip or give gifts to others generously, the alpha female will instead and then ban any body contact for two weeks. If you don't tip at all and add "well, after all it is voluntary...", you will find yourself out on the street before you can say voluntary. Nothing is a bigger turn off for an Alpha female than an Omega male. Omega means cheap.

10. Last but not least: If a girl is cold and you are wearing more than one layer, strip goddammit. Put that layer on her. She might keep you around. Even strong women get cold.

(Oh, and a slight reminder that if she keeps you on the down low all the time, she might not be that in to you. Get over it. You guys have invented that.)

(To the friend who beta-read this blog post for me and made me want to jump the next bridge (just kidding): some of this is me, some isn’t. Once you know me well enough, you will know exactly where I am talking about myself. :-) Thank you for your candid feedback. It meant a lot to me!)

Drop it like it's hot

I used to enjoy pain. Kind of.

When I was young, my dad would always blow hot breath towards my knees, fingers, broken arms etc. and pet my head while my mom would start cooking my favorite meals to make the pain go away. I was the center of the universe and was willing to trade a little pain here and there for my parent’s undivided attention.

But things change. I just burnt my finger trying to iron. It hurts. It will scar. And I don't like it. Also, I noticed that I am not so smart after all. As we all know, smart people learn from their mistakes. Evidently I don’t.

I will get to the details a minute and but first you need to understand why I am so concerned with the slow but undeniable deterioration of my body without such an effective safety net out of love, food and air to make it go away: My body just does not heal as easy as it used to anymore! There it is.

So it is with pain (and with some sidetracking as I am googling potential plastic surgery specialists) that I write this: I burn easily. Lighters, boiling water, irons. You name it, I burn myself with it.

The last time I had burnt myself badly again, my best friend had politely laid out to me the sad truth: “Sila, you and irons do NOT go well with each other. Why don’t you acknowledge this? We know this since primary school.” I have no clue why I was ironing in primary school but I guess I was going somewhere important.

Anyway, now let me take you back to the incident in 2007 which should have thought me a lesson:

I was in a rented apartment in South France trying to get ready for a business meeting on a Sunday. My shirt was wrinkled. I am stressing that it was a rented apartment so that you know that:

a) I was young, naïve and unfamiliar with the fact that the iron was apparently left over from the 18th century and got immediately HOT HOT HOT.

b) As a Super Frequent Traveller, I love…I ADORE hotel’s dry cleaning services but it was a Sunday, this was a rented apartment and I was unable to call anyone to do the job.

c) I was in a rush. As always back then.

So I started ironing.

Due to the collective interpretation of the events that occurred that evening in the presence of a friend and witness, it must have been a chain reaction of some very unfortunate (and of course dumb) moves that ended up leaving me with two big losses: My favorite silk shirt which is still lacking some cloth right in the front middle to date whereas my right upper arm was lacking some skin on it back then and carries a fancy scar instead nowadays.

I will save you the visual details of the next events which happened in lovely Cannes and which included me putting toothpaste on the wound (if my grandmother was still alive, she could and would tell you that she thinks it is a good idea…I swear she told me that), then trying to rub it off as it started to burn…..which resulted in….aaaargh,yes…pain and the skin being ripped…aaaaaappppaaaarrrrt…! I can’t write it. It is too painful, even after 2 years. I had just effectively removed a layer of skin.

So, for the next week, I was the woman with the arm bandage.

The white bandage went surprisingly well with my early autumn dress outfits for sunny France, I have to say. It just bothered me a tiny little bit that the wound which a very gifted wannabe doctor (namely a young pharmacist) had cleaned and bandaged wouldn’t really heal. The daily spraying sessions with the disinfection spray weren’t showing the results intended either and I finally decided to see a real doctor. As I had proceeded to Monte Carlo at that time (where one doesn’t walk to the doctor I was told), this meant he would have come to see me at my hotel room…for the humble price of 270 Euros. I was going to be broke and skinless. Great.

And right here my memory (which is not what it used to be anymore either) is blurry.

Why again was the doctor speaking in a mix of French and Italian to me? Why was I nodding and mumbling absolutely wrong French sentences back giving the impression I was actually understanding what the hell he was saying? Why was I getting the feeling that he wanted me to COOK my own crème??? Seriously? I had no time to wonder as the doctor kept firing instructions at me: “Et maintenant, vous brulee…comme si”. He was waving his arm in the air. Hold on a minute. Should I first use the brown and then the white cream or the other way round? I had so many questions. He had so little time and had left the building before I could say “Ecoutez moi. Listen to me. Je ne comprend pas. I don’t get it. “ He was gone.

Not sure at all if I had understood anything after this incident, I asked the concierge to get the supplies (white cream, brown cream, tissue bandage, weird transparent patches) and the instruments I needed (pan, small bowl, teaspoon) which were luckily written down. What can I say? Self is a woman. If nowadays doctors expected you to brew your own pharmacies, damn me if I was going to fail in that. I might have been incapable of true cooking, but I always had had an A in physics. I went to work.

For the next 3 days, the kitchen staff boiled the bowl and the spoon in a pan of hot water for 30 minutes, brought it up and watched the witch in room 1308 mix herself some ugly smelling brownish cream and then wrap her upper arm with layers and layers of bandages. The looks on their faces somehow led me to believe this was unusual. Oh really? I tried to ignore the images of their grinning faces and focus on the task at hand. Every day, the procedure repeated itself and I smeared my arm with the magic crème. We will never know if it was the right mixture that I was mixing. And I will always wonder how my skin ever used to heal with using band-aids only.

After a week, the healing finally started. But despite all the magical crèmes I brewed, a scar was still left over and will prevent me forever from being an upper-arm-body-model.

That’s it. Summer and sleeveless dresses are not here yet, but moral of the story is:

Prevent getting any wounds which will scar after you turned 30. They take forever to heal…and then they leave ugly scars. And the last thing we need when we age is some ugly scar that reminds us that our skin doesn’t heal as quickly anymore.

Last but not least: Do not iron yourself. Period. I am putting that damn thing down right now. Pain just isn't what it's used to be.

Goodbye, 2009

Looking back at the past year, I wonder what I have learned and what still remains a mystery to me.

Here is my shortlist:

Learned:
+Patience is a virtue overrated.
+Red paint on walls can totally work.
+Having time is the biggest of all luxuries. Nothing compares to it.
+You can run 18km after 6 months of training. Without fainting.
+Some people just don't stay in touch.
+You can watch Friends for the 50th time and still laugh.
+I take being healthy for granted way too often.
+You can make very close friends after the age of 17.
+Pleasing everyone is boring.
+You do need a home. Two are even better.
+It is never too late to go after what you want. Or who you want to be with.
+Writing isn't just a hobby. It is a passion.
+I love Ugly Betty.

Unfortunately, some things still remain a mystery to me:

+Where did I leave my beige ankle boots now that they are finally in style?
+Why does my boiler always brake down?
+How can you be sent a washing machine in Turkey without ordering one if the guy thought you "looked credible"?
+Why do my gadgets breakdown right before their new models get there?
+Who took my beloved watch?
+Why is it always freezing on airplanes? I can barely type this.
+Why am I incapable of resisting fashion?
+Why can movie characters realize their mistakes, go back to the person to apologize and that person never has a girlfriend/boyfriend, wife/husband, kids, alcohol problems or some other major issue to prevent the happy end?
+What happened to SADE?
+How is Twitter going to make money?

The Girls Guide to Imaginary Boyfriends

The internet has changed human behavior patterns. Great subject, but we women are not worried about that. What bothers us is that nothing FEELS the same anymore, not even having a crush.

During my teens and twenties, having a crush was a challenge. You had to be creative to be able to run into your object of desire again. The options ranged from stalking him to asking everyone if they know him to frequenting the place that you saw him for the first time until the bouncer thought you had a crush on him and the down payment for your first home turned into an involuntary but significant down payment of a shabby bar.

Nowadays however, we have the opportunity to search him the second we find out his name. Thanks to technology, sometimes we don’t even need a name. If we know that he is the friend of a friend, we can easily consider ourselves pretty close to getting engaged as we just need to go through our friend’s friends accounts. All it takes to round up his background check, to confirm his social patterns and to get that damn ring on our finger are the three musketeers: Facebook, Google and Twitter.

While some of us have been saving all our love as Whitney Houston told us to, the majority of the population today first googles, then facebooks. As we all know, Google is the answer to all our problems and provides basic information on popularity as well as intelligence. If he has many results to his name, good start. There is room for research. If he has left some "Yo bro, did you see that chick in..." kind of comments in forums...run, sister, run.

So, 500,000 results to his name can either mean:

A. He is a professional athlete or a musician (in which case you probably are one of the 3000 women who are googling him as we speak)

B. He is someone with a career, important enough to get quoted...like the CEO of something (he couldn't have made it without a wife, which means he is married.)

Devastating. This is just the warm up. So pray, there are only a few results to his name.

Nothing is as exciting as pictures, so we will need to search for an account with pictures. Is he active in social networks, business networks and dating sites? Even if we find a picture on the net, we don’t want to be judging a book by its cover, so we need to click on his Facebook account. And everybody knows: If he is not on Facebook, something is wrong with him.

Knowing nothing about the stranger who could be serial killer for all we don’t know, we will see that he looks cute in jeans and the green sweater like the one he was wearing on his vacations in Peru as showcased in his Facebook album. That girl standing left from him must be the ex because he is single as we know from his relationship status. We will think he should wear that green sweater more often and can make a note to ourselves that we will tell him the next time we see him (never). Scrolling through his comments on Facebook threads, we can then find out he was partying last weekend with the guys, likes to quote rap songs and puts a smiley next to almost each sentence he writes. This alone should be a little alarming unless you are both 12, then it is OK. But remember children: One day he might send you a “Sorry it didn’t work out :-)” or “I met someone else :-)” and THAT makes you want to slap that sweet little Smiley hard, real hard. Just warning you.

Connecting online is a different ball game altogether so once we find out he is on Twitter. Ka-Ching! We can basically now start having a relationship without him even knowing about it. We can obsess about each step he makes, how he feels, what he likes and dislikes. We can analyze each Tweet as if our life was depending on it. And if he doesn’t twitter for a couple of days...hey, not all men call their girlfriends every day.

Soon enough it can become our morning routine and we can celebrate each new tweet as a sign that he is taking our relationship seriously and opening up. Even if our fingertips are itching to comment back on his tweets, we can and will never do so as we know that this will destroy the magic of having a non-existing boyfriend. We will simply pretend that he is addressing each tweet to us personally, even those saying “I somehow like the weather like this”. It’s a sign. So do we! So do we! We are soul mates! During those hours filled with jealousy awaiting his next tweet, we can count the number of his followers rising by the day as he tweets without protection. Who is this Jessica who is barely dressed on her profile pic and wants to follow him from Texas? Does she even know him? Can she make him as happy as we?

At night, when we fall into your bed exhausted from obsessing about the unknown man, we can then dream about him meeting our parents. When we wake up in the morning, we can run to your Iphone to see if he has tweeted and the circle of disaster can repeat itself. Lovely. Who needs a full time job?

If we don’t have a new crush we can stalk, we can simply research the names of people from the past. What happened to that cute guy from 9th grade who used to curl his curls with his left index finger? Think about it: if he was cute, he most likely turned out to be gay is the answer. You don't think so? Whatever, but is he still cute or does he have a receding hairline like all the men we know? Is he married? Kids?

One of my friends went out with her high school sweetheart after re-discovering him on Facebook. Barely 30 awkward minutes later, they went their separate ways again. They just didn’t click, she says. Uhm, I am thinking more like no attraction. His profile picture suggested he had gained 50 pounds and as a poor trade off, had lost 20 cm of his height somewhere between high school and 2009. 20 seconds are more than enough to know if he is still hot or not. He wasn’t. As if they cared after 20 years what the other one thought about Obama. Puh-lease.

So girlfriend, if by any chance you ever leave your laptop or look up from your IPhone for a minute and happen to run into your made-up-boyfriend in person, don’t panic because he doesn’t recognize you. It doesn’t mean he is not into you or wants to break up. It just means he doesn’t KNOW you.

I personally now need to get back to my boyfriend. He is a musician: hot, smart, funny and he twitters the most hilarious tweets. Our relationship has moved up a whole new level since I dreamt about him for the third night in a row. As one could expect from a self-respecting woman, I tolerate his 156,000 followers with style and grace. We will have to have a serious talk at his next concert though – I just need to get him to recognize me first.

I am, after all, destined to be the love of his life. Tweet. Tweet.

Reminds me, baby, of you

This picture reminded me of the next generation (Ira, David, Delya and Nika) who I miss very much since our vacation. I miss the H5 sessions.

People give me this weird look and don't want to "HiFive" with me since I am back from babyland. I wonder why they think I am crazy? I mean, if the babies loved it...there has to be some magic in it, no? Maybe I should HiFive in everyday life more often.


(PS to my girls: Yes, I am trying to locate these gloves for the babies and will be teaching advanced classes, introducing the "Celik double high five", this winter. )

Love is in the Air

And sometimes love doesn't live there anymore. Yesterday, I probably experienced a flight that deserves a spot in my personal Top 10 of flights from and to hell. Let me describe the Number 1 flight to lead that list to set the right benchmark.

Route:
Moscow-Sofia

Carrier:
Couldn't read the name on the plane, paint was coming off everywhere. Looked like I was flying with "rflt".

Seat:
Middle

Co-Flyers:
Two very hairy, very smelly and extremely scary men, "I'll blow you away, bitch" kind-of-way. You sort of get that feeling when one of them keeps twirling his moustache with his dirty fingers looking at you intensely while the other one tells his beads, whispering the Koran.

Memories:
Luckily not many but this much - As I don't speak a word Russian and wasn't booked on the flight, they ended up chasing me across the airport from one yelling airport employee to the other before I could even board for Elm Street. I dragged my belongings (what people back then concidered Sila's moving homes: two 40kg rolling bags) from desk to desk, desperately trying to explain that I needed to leave the country after 3 horrible days of IPO preparations and months of unslept nights. These Russian chicks were not having it.

They kept saying: "HeT, heT" ("Nyet, nyet") and threw more unnaturally harsh sentences my way, emptying their verbal machine guns on me with no mercy. I wondered how words like "здравствуйте = hello" could be possibly pronounced and watched verbal slaps emerge from their thin throaths (and tiny necks... when I think about it, just like Olivia from Popeye). Let me tell you: Eastern European women are not so beautiful any more when they are angry. Anyhow, all this yelling can break down the toughest cookie, so I cracked and almost started crying, which made them at least be so kind to show me the bathrooms, where I sobbed for 10 minutes out of gratefulness.

Did you know that signs at the Moscow airport are all in Kyrillic? No English translations were visible. Exhausted as I was I hadn't known where to go for the toilet for the past 30 minutes and no one had cared. So I sobbed some more in front of the sink to let out the helplessness, tiredness and sheer panic of another night trapped in Moscow. Then I got myself together, went back and offered to pay in cash (500$, oh yeah) and finally the magic happened and I was holding my boarding card in my hands. If I only had known that I was going to be trapped between Freddy Krueger's Muslim cousin and Chuckie the Killer Doll's twin brother...

Defining moment of the trip:
Waking up from falling asleep to turbulence banging my head unvoluntarily Iron-Maiden-style from front to back. Checking my seat belt to notice it just ripped and almost getting catapulted out off the seat during landing with the two next to me freaking out. One praying louder than natural for the human ear in Arabic and repeating "allahu hekber, allahu hekber" while the other one is holding so tightly to his arm seats that one comes off. The wings of the plane shaking it like Beyonce in "Put a Ring on it". For a split second I thought, this is it. I was disappointed that my destiny had chosen such a cheap airline and such a crappy route. Then we came to a stop.

Beautiful memory. Top 1 flight.

Compared to this experience, the Amsterdam flight and the two women I was sitting next to yesterday were heaven. So what if one was coughing her lungs out and close to throwing up every 2 minutes? So what if her mother took of her shoes and I was blinded? What is so aweful about the kid in front of you crying its heart out in response to the coughing, the flight attendant knocking you on the head by mistake and your luggage getting lost when you finally get to your final destination? It came in today at 2.30 am and shows me I have got to stick to my resolutions of hand luggage only (and business flights, but with a minimum of 10 flights per month, rather unlikely).

There are also some good moments of a life at the airport. While they were looking yesterday for my lost luggage, I randomly walked by the Lost and Found office and remembered to ask them about a brandnew clutch I had bought and forgot at the same gate some weeks ago. Imagine my joy when they found it! You lose some, you win some, I guess.

But tak...tak...tak, let me get this one right (tak is a word used to buy time or give the impression you are thinking deeply in Russian. Russians often pause and say tak…tak…tak and then respond. It is the equivalent of hmmm in English):

I am not flying with Aereflot (had it googled) again. Ever. Nyet. And double nyet.

Why shoulder pads should not come back...

Must I say anything?

Just take it all in.

Such a beautiful sight.

I am not sure what's up with the lady in the centre front though:
How happy can a person be? And is she really wearing blue (!) nylon stockings?

Beautiful picture. Simply beautiful.

Can't Buy Me Love

I am a fashionable entrepreneur in the digital media world, aka an Internetista. There are two exceptions to what you think that might entail:

1. I don’t do online dating.

2. I don’t do shoulder pads.

The first one for obvious reasons: Pride. The second one for also obvious reasons: more pride and the picture above.

In fact, online dating is to me like wearing shoulder pads: You are convinced you would never ever consider doing it until you see everyone else trying it out. Now you hesitate and wonder if the only way to happiness leads through shoulder pads and online dating maybe? Could it be that you are the only one missing out on that experience?

A close friend of mine is now considering it. Online dating, not wearing shoulder pads. I am still torn. It doesn’t really help that I work for dating sites. I mean why should they listen to me, what do I know after all? I have never really used any of these sites out there and probably annoy men with my boring profiles and nicknames. Princess998. Lolitamiyo. That’s the kind of name I can come up with for those fake accounts I create, so that I understand what the fuss is about. See what I mean? As everybody can tell, I have zero humor or wit when it comes to creating profiles and these names. Even my fake ones are plain boring. No wonder my single imaginary personas remain messageless and single. Let me tell you that it is pretty devastating to NOT get any messages...even when the profile, i.e. Sandy, 27, from Amsterdam doesn't really exist. She is everything I am not: Blond, tall, blue eyed, loves Samba. Yet, she is single. It is such a tough world out there. Poor Sandy.

I really believe you shouldn’t have to search online for The One. The search shouldn’t entail creating fake names and even faker profiles. Finding the one should not depend on what your favorite movie is. Yeah, I know. You can't sit on your couch and wait for love to find you. Whatever. I refuse to believe you have to look for it in 1200 x 780 resolution either. But I do love working for them. I really do. The amount of hope that washes over my face every time I open one of these sites simply cheers me up tremendously.

Anyhow, as the May issue of VOGUE pushes me to re-evaluate my fashion values and Victoria Beckham brings back the Joan Collins 80'ies look, I am still very confused about something impossible happening inside my head. I am willing to consider it. The shoulder pads, not online dating.

I wonder if there is a way that I could I pull off that 80’ies look? Neon leggings, blazer and maybe a Madonna T-thirt? The other alternative is to pull a Madonna "Like a virgin" look and add shoulder pads. Let me think about it for a second: There is nothing sadder than a woman in her thirties trying to pull off the twenty something style. The short skirts don’t have enough fabric to cover up the cellulite that has been creeping up your once perfectly shaped butt and sleeveless tops simply don’t help the sight of the aged skin underneath your armpits flatter around like Dumbo’s ears. So why bring back shoulder pads which automatically trigger the 80ies hair cut, the perm and the colored stockings to go with it and will only make you look like Crystal, aka Linda Evans in Dynasty? Please. Idea dismissed.

No, and no again. I am sticking to what I know. Dating real men, not fake profiles. Wearing pencil skirts and Audrey Hepburn style etui dresses, not fake shoulders.

Call me a boring Internetista. I would much rather be that than look like Paula Abdul in the video to "Opposites attract". You see her and then you see two shoulder pads. The three of them are dancing together. Great video. Huge shoulder pads. Huuuuuge.

PS: Paula is single as we all know. No wonder. I am just saying.