Hello again!
After many months of travel to exotic and wonderful places, like Australia and South Africa and Roberts Redford's paradise in Sundance, Patti has landed safely back in Pennsylvania Dutch Country and I look forward to sharing all of those adventures with you.
We made the decision to leave our former Blog site to join the Google family of wordsmiths, and we are delighted that you have found us here. We appreciate the sensibilities of the Google corporation, and are delighted that it is now not only a company but a verb.
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
Happiness is right under your nose
It seems like the simplest little thing in the world. Unscrew the cap of a pretty little rollette, breathe in a delightful fragrance and within minutes start to feel like you are on top of the world. And the world begins to treat you like you are All That and a bag of chips too. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is actually based on the mind-numbing complexities of chemistry that are responsible for the very existence of the human race.
I have to tell you my story about using the high-science pheromone blend developed as a remedy for menopausal symptoms of night sweats, mood swings and other unpleasantries of mid-life raging hormones. I was one of the early guinea pigs. I have become a global spokesperson for pherAdore, because I have seen it change lives, including my own.
I know there have been a thousand products thrown into the backs of magazines and seedy little internet sites, but there are pheromones and there are pheromones, and everything from the lowly moth to the perfect husband are affected by them. But nobody benefits more than that most magnificent of creatures, the mid-life woman. Let me tell you how.
The application is important, as pheromones are introduced through inhaling. Just use the rollette to run a little stripe right under your nose and breathe. You can apply as often as you like during the day—in the morning, for a mid-day lift, before going out at night. It is impossible to overdose, and will not interfere with your own fragrance.
The bit of initial fragrance is ylang-ylang, aromatherapy for reducing anxiety and elevating mood, and very pleasant. Once that essential oil dissipates, the pheromones do their thing, creating the most interesting cascade of biological events, safely and with no side effects.
Women have reported everything from selling more cars to marrying a millionaire! Husbands may behave strangely—bringing home flowers and asking about her day! Married women seem to feel re-kindled and it’s just a beautiful thing.
The developer of pherAdore, Peter T. Pugliese, MD has a unique view of pheromones, as he does on many things. Dr. Pugliese is the aging experts’ expert. He is the one the celebrity doctors call when they need answers. During an interview on 20/20, he explained that pherAdore empowers women to be themselves—and moreso with every passing year.
Pheromones are the chemical messages that a woman sends to let a man know she is interested, available, and here’s the key—that she is desirable. This is pertinent because as any woman consumer will tell you, all the ads we see are designed to make us feel that we are totally undesirable, unless we use whatever they are selling us.
That is what makes Dr. Pugliese so unique. His products all begin with the notion of helping to protect something that is valuable, rather than to correct an inadequacy. The difference between these two mindsets is huge, and has made all the difference to a great many women. With pheromones, being sold all over the place, from questionable sources, the hype is usually focused on men getting the girl to do his bidding. Wrong!! The overall effect of this product is that the woman using pherAdore has a heightened sense of her own attractiveness. Break loose a woman’s sense of her own power, and amazing things begin to happen—to her, for her, and the people around her. And happily, much of what we do is directly under the control of our own biochemistry.
The biology of reproduction stops, usually, somewhere in the early 50’s. The biology of attraction goes on as long as there are two people with a pulse. Men are always “on”, and always seeking a nesting place for their charms. Women, of course, are completely in control, and if the woman doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. What has plagued us for the last thirty years or so is this youth culture that makes mature women feel like they are past the age of acceptability in this dance of attraction between men and women. And we know now that when a woman feels inadequate, she begins to send off a message of “stay away from me”. It is a lot like the common wisdom that says that a dog knows when you are afraid of it, and therefore he becomes more aggressive, because he senses your vulnerability.
People can be the same way. Ever been in a business presentation where you can see the speaker sweating bullets? What happens to the room? The group shuffles papers, coughs, doodles, interrupts, does everything but pay attention. It’s because the message of vulnerability is coming from somewhere in that speaker’s soaked underarm and everybody knows this person is not formidable or worth listening to. The same thing happens when people are socially ill-at-ease. You see them in bars, clusters of women—or men—peering out over their drinks, looking around with a practiced non-chalance, like they want you to think they don’t care if anybody approaches them or not.
Pheromones are chemical messages too, and for some reason we do not quite yet understand, the messages of availability and desirability tend to diminish in women when they are no longer regularly in the company of men. This is societal by circumstance, but biology is destiny, and we know now that we can give biology that little extra push by introducing pheromones to the woman and letting nature resume doing its thing. And neither a fashion magazine nor Dr. Phil needs to enter the picture. Just a little whiff of pherAdore and the world becomes a pretty wonderful place.
This isn’t a stretch for the 90 million baby boomers who spent most of the 80’s putting something up their noses anyway!
But let me tell you what pherAdore did for me. I had been divorced for some time by the time the clinical trials on this pheromone blend came about. I was crazy mad in love with a handsome, handsome man who looked exactly like Sam Elliot and who had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of marrying, ever, because women take your stuff, boss you around, make you have dinner at her mothers every weekend, and usually will produce a baby which will cry, throw up and poop all day every day for years and years.
He wanted no parts of any of this. I had been married more than once prior to becoming involved with this man, who at 43 was a confirmed and very happy bachelor. I wasn’t all that concerned about marriage and had been out of the baby business since a hysterectomy at age 31. This is why I was in the pheromone study, since I was exhibiting early menopausal symptoms as a result of that surgery a decade earlier. We were having a good time dating and found great joy in each other’s company, mostly because of the freedom it afforded both of us.
Once I started using pherAdore, all my symptoms were gone. Hot flashes, night sweats, cranky moods, stopped immediately. And for some reason, I just couldn’t get enough of this guy. I had never really had much trouble in that department anyway, but this was downright undeniably a boost in my libido. And that wasn’t all.
A little while later, I had to take a job out of town for a few months. On one visit home, I was minding my own business at his place, whereupon he suddenly and without prior conversation about it, proposed! With a diamond ring, and an expression of willingness to marry me anywhere or any way I chose, even the Catholic Church, my now-49-year- old bachelor boyfriend became my fiancé!
We celebrated our seventh anniversary this March.
So the question you have to ask yourself is not just “How’s your love life?” but also “How are you lovin’ life?”
I have to tell you my story about using the high-science pheromone blend developed as a remedy for menopausal symptoms of night sweats, mood swings and other unpleasantries of mid-life raging hormones. I was one of the early guinea pigs. I have become a global spokesperson for pherAdore, because I have seen it change lives, including my own.
I know there have been a thousand products thrown into the backs of magazines and seedy little internet sites, but there are pheromones and there are pheromones, and everything from the lowly moth to the perfect husband are affected by them. But nobody benefits more than that most magnificent of creatures, the mid-life woman. Let me tell you how.
The application is important, as pheromones are introduced through inhaling. Just use the rollette to run a little stripe right under your nose and breathe. You can apply as often as you like during the day—in the morning, for a mid-day lift, before going out at night. It is impossible to overdose, and will not interfere with your own fragrance.
The bit of initial fragrance is ylang-ylang, aromatherapy for reducing anxiety and elevating mood, and very pleasant. Once that essential oil dissipates, the pheromones do their thing, creating the most interesting cascade of biological events, safely and with no side effects.
Women have reported everything from selling more cars to marrying a millionaire! Husbands may behave strangely—bringing home flowers and asking about her day! Married women seem to feel re-kindled and it’s just a beautiful thing.
The developer of pherAdore, Peter T. Pugliese, MD has a unique view of pheromones, as he does on many things. Dr. Pugliese is the aging experts’ expert. He is the one the celebrity doctors call when they need answers. During an interview on 20/20, he explained that pherAdore empowers women to be themselves—and moreso with every passing year.
Pheromones are the chemical messages that a woman sends to let a man know she is interested, available, and here’s the key—that she is desirable. This is pertinent because as any woman consumer will tell you, all the ads we see are designed to make us feel that we are totally undesirable, unless we use whatever they are selling us.
That is what makes Dr. Pugliese so unique. His products all begin with the notion of helping to protect something that is valuable, rather than to correct an inadequacy. The difference between these two mindsets is huge, and has made all the difference to a great many women. With pheromones, being sold all over the place, from questionable sources, the hype is usually focused on men getting the girl to do his bidding. Wrong!! The overall effect of this product is that the woman using pherAdore has a heightened sense of her own attractiveness. Break loose a woman’s sense of her own power, and amazing things begin to happen—to her, for her, and the people around her. And happily, much of what we do is directly under the control of our own biochemistry.
The biology of reproduction stops, usually, somewhere in the early 50’s. The biology of attraction goes on as long as there are two people with a pulse. Men are always “on”, and always seeking a nesting place for their charms. Women, of course, are completely in control, and if the woman doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. What has plagued us for the last thirty years or so is this youth culture that makes mature women feel like they are past the age of acceptability in this dance of attraction between men and women. And we know now that when a woman feels inadequate, she begins to send off a message of “stay away from me”. It is a lot like the common wisdom that says that a dog knows when you are afraid of it, and therefore he becomes more aggressive, because he senses your vulnerability.
People can be the same way. Ever been in a business presentation where you can see the speaker sweating bullets? What happens to the room? The group shuffles papers, coughs, doodles, interrupts, does everything but pay attention. It’s because the message of vulnerability is coming from somewhere in that speaker’s soaked underarm and everybody knows this person is not formidable or worth listening to. The same thing happens when people are socially ill-at-ease. You see them in bars, clusters of women—or men—peering out over their drinks, looking around with a practiced non-chalance, like they want you to think they don’t care if anybody approaches them or not.
Pheromones are chemical messages too, and for some reason we do not quite yet understand, the messages of availability and desirability tend to diminish in women when they are no longer regularly in the company of men. This is societal by circumstance, but biology is destiny, and we know now that we can give biology that little extra push by introducing pheromones to the woman and letting nature resume doing its thing. And neither a fashion magazine nor Dr. Phil needs to enter the picture. Just a little whiff of pherAdore and the world becomes a pretty wonderful place.
This isn’t a stretch for the 90 million baby boomers who spent most of the 80’s putting something up their noses anyway!
But let me tell you what pherAdore did for me. I had been divorced for some time by the time the clinical trials on this pheromone blend came about. I was crazy mad in love with a handsome, handsome man who looked exactly like Sam Elliot and who had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of marrying, ever, because women take your stuff, boss you around, make you have dinner at her mothers every weekend, and usually will produce a baby which will cry, throw up and poop all day every day for years and years.
He wanted no parts of any of this. I had been married more than once prior to becoming involved with this man, who at 43 was a confirmed and very happy bachelor. I wasn’t all that concerned about marriage and had been out of the baby business since a hysterectomy at age 31. This is why I was in the pheromone study, since I was exhibiting early menopausal symptoms as a result of that surgery a decade earlier. We were having a good time dating and found great joy in each other’s company, mostly because of the freedom it afforded both of us.
Once I started using pherAdore, all my symptoms were gone. Hot flashes, night sweats, cranky moods, stopped immediately. And for some reason, I just couldn’t get enough of this guy. I had never really had much trouble in that department anyway, but this was downright undeniably a boost in my libido. And that wasn’t all.
A little while later, I had to take a job out of town for a few months. On one visit home, I was minding my own business at his place, whereupon he suddenly and without prior conversation about it, proposed! With a diamond ring, and an expression of willingness to marry me anywhere or any way I chose, even the Catholic Church, my now-49-year- old bachelor boyfriend became my fiancé!
We celebrated our seventh anniversary this March.
So the question you have to ask yourself is not just “How’s your love life?” but also “How are you lovin’ life?”
The story of Lineman’s Lotion - Part 1 of too soon to know how many
The story of Lineman’s Lotion is a saga that literally consists of two decades of a real woman’s fountain of blood, sweat and tears. But within all the heartbreak of Patti’s odyssey to bring her dream to fruition, there were some amazing events, and people, that kept her going. This blog will provide a series of articles known as the Ten Magic Moments of Lineman’s Lotion. The first describes how the product came to be, twenty one years ago this month.
Bloody Knuckles, Ice Storms and Beer
In the rolling hills of Pennsylvania we are accustomed to winter weather, and before the advent of the Inconvenient Truth of Global Warming, we never heard the weatherman call for a ‘wintery mix’. It usually just snowed like crazy every year and the country schools where we live had thirty six snow days a year built into the schedule.
In March of 1986, we were having an ice storm, with high-speed frozen pellets pinging on the roof and rattling the windows, covering the porch with a sheet of treachery too severe to let the kids out. I hadn’t seen my husband in two days. He worked for Bell and was up a pole somewhere, splicing wires to restore phone service to the thousands of people holed up in their farm houses and bi-level homes without benefit of the Internet, which Al Gore had not yet invented.
I was using the time at home to finish up the report on a consult I’d taken when my Dad was traveling; I was manning (womanning) the lab we operated together. We were in the business of studying skin and testing products to reduce the ravages of aging. We specialized in functional topicals, the things that really could do some good when applied to the skin.
A client in the Midwest had an ingredient they called Skin Respiratory Factor, or SRF, which had a rather inelegant folklore. Although its therapeutic purpose was to shrink hemorrhoids, some actresses had told interviewers they used this greasy tube of medicine to get rid of puffy eyes and wrinkles. Trying to tag onto the success of the big cosmetic companies, one wild-thinking executive in this stodgy company investigated the players in cosmetic research, saw my dad’s work repeatedly referenced, and contracted our lab to investigate its mechanism. Further, we were to create a nice product which would serve as a sample formulary to the cosmetic manufacturers, who would in turn purchase SRF as an additive to their youth-extending lotions and potions.
All I knew about this test product, which arrived in a plastic bag and smelled like old socks, was that it was a by-product of the brewery industry. Somewhere in the mash that gets thrown away when the beer is being made, there is a long chain molecule that promotes healing of human skin tissue. My Dad was in Italy when the bag arrived, so I did the preliminaries, working up the parameters of performance and working out how little material it would take to do something good. We call this the “effective dose concentration” and I had already tested a dozen super cosmetic ingredients that worked well in lotions. We had recommended these to several high-end company clients, to replace the cheaper mineral oils and soap additives that so many had used for eons. It seemed the industry preferred to pay preteen supermodels millions of dollars to be the face of their anti-aging brands rather than improve the functionality of their products. No matter, I was happy formulating for my own benefit and to learn as much as I could.
I had never been much of a cook, but remarkably, I took to whipping products together in a beaker. I had developed what is called a good “feel”, which means that I selected ingredients both because of the physical properties of each raw material, and also an instinctive inclination about how the product would feel in actual use by the consumer. Although I wasn’t ever formally trained as a cosmetic chemist, I did have the most respected formulation consultant in the world as my father. I was fearless in formulating because you could always rinse a failure down the sink, wash out the glassware and start over again. It wasn’t like cooking where you could poison your family.
So I made this light little lotion, using all the things I knew were good for moisturizing and smoothness. I never formulated with a fragrance because they are generally the reason for itchy reactions. I tossed in the magic ingredient without concern at that stage for the way it smelled. We were after performance first.
Once the lotion was done, safety and stability tested, and felt nice to use, I set about designing a simple clinical study to see how it would work on ladies’ faces. My dad had a good subject pool, pulled from his former patient population. He had retired from family practice some years prior, and many of his patients had been farmers and various laborers as you would find in a small community. My job was to find a couple of dozen gals who weren’t really sophisticated skin care consumers—none of them regulars at the Estee Lauder counter. I selected farmer’s wives. Most would be found alternately in the freezing barn milking cows at 4:30 a.m. or driving a hay wagon in the blazing sun. Delightfully non-pretentious women, they were happy to have the pin money we paid our subjects, and they were the perfect subjects to try something new.
The ladies used the product twice a day, morning and night, and the results we were getting were quite good, at two weeks, four weeks and six weeks when they came in for evaluation. They liked the way it felt, and what it was doing for their complexions. Then one woman said something that ran through me like a lightning rod.
“My husband said I look better…” then she paused a minute and said softly, “and in 35 years of marriage, that’s the first time he ever said anything about how I look”.
BA-BIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was wildly intrigued by her comment, and the rest of the group echoed their approval. I was a little bit surprised that nobody mentioned the smell of the lotion, because it had a very yeasty topnote, coming from the active ingredient. I realized most of them were around farm animals all day, so a little trace of musty hops wasn’t going to be a big deterrent. But it wasn’t going to fly off the counters at Bloomingdale’s and that was where it was intended to go.
The study ended well, so I was trying to figure out how to mask the smell in a facial lotion without getting the fragrance concentration so high that it would be an irritant. I started typing my report to the client, saying that the effectiveness was high, and ultimately greater formulation minds than my own would have to work out an acceptable fragrance.
So I was sitting at the dining room table, pecking away on my enormous MacIntosh, and in the door comes my frozen husband. I greeted him warmly and brought him a drink. When he picked up his beer, his knuckles all split open. I was horrified.
“Don’t they give you anything on your job for that?”
“They can’t. Everything slimes up your hands and you drop your tools”.
“Well here, try this.” I screwed the lid off the specimen cup marked UF-386-07, and poured some lotion into his hamburger hands. He clapped them together and rubbed it all over the scrapes and cracks across his knuckles, and then did what everybody in the world does when they’ve applied something -- he cupped his hands, brought them to his nose, took a deep breath, and then exclaimed, “SMELLS GREAT!”
BA –BIIIINGG!!!!!
And in that moment, it occurred to me that what had been a handicap five minutes earlier had suddenly changed. Suddenly, I had a freeze-frame moment of thought: there were enough manufacturers in the world worrying about wrinkles, but nobody who deeply cared about the millions of hands that go to work everyday in pain. The hands that keep things running. The very hands that keep us all in touch. Like the hands of telephone linemen.
And the issue of fragrance?
Well, let me say this about that…there are some places where smelling like old beer gets you in the door.
Next time Part 2 of the Lineman's Lotion Saga: Patti describes her ground-breaking product test on a group of telephone linemen, known as The Bell Study, and how it changed her life forever.
Bloody Knuckles, Ice Storms and Beer
In the rolling hills of Pennsylvania we are accustomed to winter weather, and before the advent of the Inconvenient Truth of Global Warming, we never heard the weatherman call for a ‘wintery mix’. It usually just snowed like crazy every year and the country schools where we live had thirty six snow days a year built into the schedule.
In March of 1986, we were having an ice storm, with high-speed frozen pellets pinging on the roof and rattling the windows, covering the porch with a sheet of treachery too severe to let the kids out. I hadn’t seen my husband in two days. He worked for Bell and was up a pole somewhere, splicing wires to restore phone service to the thousands of people holed up in their farm houses and bi-level homes without benefit of the Internet, which Al Gore had not yet invented.
I was using the time at home to finish up the report on a consult I’d taken when my Dad was traveling; I was manning (womanning) the lab we operated together. We were in the business of studying skin and testing products to reduce the ravages of aging. We specialized in functional topicals, the things that really could do some good when applied to the skin.
A client in the Midwest had an ingredient they called Skin Respiratory Factor, or SRF, which had a rather inelegant folklore. Although its therapeutic purpose was to shrink hemorrhoids, some actresses had told interviewers they used this greasy tube of medicine to get rid of puffy eyes and wrinkles. Trying to tag onto the success of the big cosmetic companies, one wild-thinking executive in this stodgy company investigated the players in cosmetic research, saw my dad’s work repeatedly referenced, and contracted our lab to investigate its mechanism. Further, we were to create a nice product which would serve as a sample formulary to the cosmetic manufacturers, who would in turn purchase SRF as an additive to their youth-extending lotions and potions.
All I knew about this test product, which arrived in a plastic bag and smelled like old socks, was that it was a by-product of the brewery industry. Somewhere in the mash that gets thrown away when the beer is being made, there is a long chain molecule that promotes healing of human skin tissue. My Dad was in Italy when the bag arrived, so I did the preliminaries, working up the parameters of performance and working out how little material it would take to do something good. We call this the “effective dose concentration” and I had already tested a dozen super cosmetic ingredients that worked well in lotions. We had recommended these to several high-end company clients, to replace the cheaper mineral oils and soap additives that so many had used for eons. It seemed the industry preferred to pay preteen supermodels millions of dollars to be the face of their anti-aging brands rather than improve the functionality of their products. No matter, I was happy formulating for my own benefit and to learn as much as I could.
I had never been much of a cook, but remarkably, I took to whipping products together in a beaker. I had developed what is called a good “feel”, which means that I selected ingredients both because of the physical properties of each raw material, and also an instinctive inclination about how the product would feel in actual use by the consumer. Although I wasn’t ever formally trained as a cosmetic chemist, I did have the most respected formulation consultant in the world as my father. I was fearless in formulating because you could always rinse a failure down the sink, wash out the glassware and start over again. It wasn’t like cooking where you could poison your family.
So I made this light little lotion, using all the things I knew were good for moisturizing and smoothness. I never formulated with a fragrance because they are generally the reason for itchy reactions. I tossed in the magic ingredient without concern at that stage for the way it smelled. We were after performance first.
Once the lotion was done, safety and stability tested, and felt nice to use, I set about designing a simple clinical study to see how it would work on ladies’ faces. My dad had a good subject pool, pulled from his former patient population. He had retired from family practice some years prior, and many of his patients had been farmers and various laborers as you would find in a small community. My job was to find a couple of dozen gals who weren’t really sophisticated skin care consumers—none of them regulars at the Estee Lauder counter. I selected farmer’s wives. Most would be found alternately in the freezing barn milking cows at 4:30 a.m. or driving a hay wagon in the blazing sun. Delightfully non-pretentious women, they were happy to have the pin money we paid our subjects, and they were the perfect subjects to try something new.
The ladies used the product twice a day, morning and night, and the results we were getting were quite good, at two weeks, four weeks and six weeks when they came in for evaluation. They liked the way it felt, and what it was doing for their complexions. Then one woman said something that ran through me like a lightning rod.
“My husband said I look better…” then she paused a minute and said softly, “and in 35 years of marriage, that’s the first time he ever said anything about how I look”.
BA-BIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was wildly intrigued by her comment, and the rest of the group echoed their approval. I was a little bit surprised that nobody mentioned the smell of the lotion, because it had a very yeasty topnote, coming from the active ingredient. I realized most of them were around farm animals all day, so a little trace of musty hops wasn’t going to be a big deterrent. But it wasn’t going to fly off the counters at Bloomingdale’s and that was where it was intended to go.
The study ended well, so I was trying to figure out how to mask the smell in a facial lotion without getting the fragrance concentration so high that it would be an irritant. I started typing my report to the client, saying that the effectiveness was high, and ultimately greater formulation minds than my own would have to work out an acceptable fragrance.
So I was sitting at the dining room table, pecking away on my enormous MacIntosh, and in the door comes my frozen husband. I greeted him warmly and brought him a drink. When he picked up his beer, his knuckles all split open. I was horrified.
“Don’t they give you anything on your job for that?”
“They can’t. Everything slimes up your hands and you drop your tools”.
“Well here, try this.” I screwed the lid off the specimen cup marked UF-386-07, and poured some lotion into his hamburger hands. He clapped them together and rubbed it all over the scrapes and cracks across his knuckles, and then did what everybody in the world does when they’ve applied something -- he cupped his hands, brought them to his nose, took a deep breath, and then exclaimed, “SMELLS GREAT!”
BA –BIIIINGG!!!!!
And in that moment, it occurred to me that what had been a handicap five minutes earlier had suddenly changed. Suddenly, I had a freeze-frame moment of thought: there were enough manufacturers in the world worrying about wrinkles, but nobody who deeply cared about the millions of hands that go to work everyday in pain. The hands that keep things running. The very hands that keep us all in touch. Like the hands of telephone linemen.
And the issue of fragrance?
Well, let me say this about that…there are some places where smelling like old beer gets you in the door.
Next time Part 2 of the Lineman's Lotion Saga: Patti describes her ground-breaking product test on a group of telephone linemen, known as The Bell Study, and how it changed her life forever.
Language!
One reason to do a blog is to force myself to use language. Creative language, specific language, useful language, beautiful language is the only thing besides thumbs that separates us from beasts.
Does anybody remember a grade school exercise called sentence diagramming? I think it was fourth grade, maybe seventh. I don’t know—I didn’t grow breasts until freshman year when we moved up to the big consolidated high school. I have no clear vision of when I transcended childhood and moved into adolescence and therefore no clear physical memory of myself actually doing this exercise. I know it was a short lesson, not like the reading and rehashing of a Tale of Two Cities, which went on endlessly and I thought wasted a goodly portion of an English class with one of my favorite teachers.
But whatever year it was, the process was one of my favorites, because every word had a purpose and a position in the Statement, whose function was to communicate a thought or information to the recipient. That is of course, what language does. Or used to.
What was the point of the sentence? Who was doing the action? What WAS the action? Which were the descriptive words and what did they describe? Where did the action happen and to whom? Did anybody say anything that required quotation marks or (my personal favorite) an exclamation point? I was actually described once as “a woman who lives her life in exclamation points”. I like that imagery.
You can sit in any fast food restaurant where nowadays school kids can GO out to ---for lunch (in the middle of a school day!) -- and you will overhear an entire peer exchange and come away with absolutely no idea what they have said to each other, nor any insight into their personalities or preferences—even if there was not a moment of silence, not even between bites.
Conversations seem to consist of a pattern of indecipherable greetings which are coded contractions. “Zup”, when accompanied by a head tic, I learned, is an efficient means of saying “Hello—how is your day going and is there any news?” or simply the illiterates’ contraction for “what’s up?”
Once the salutations are out of the way, one single word which always begins with an F and whether it ends with -s, –er, or -ing, (which is heard as –iiiin) fully dominates the rest of the exchange. Apparently one word is so versatile that it serves as all seven parts of speech, and this verbal communication is accompanied by an odd sort of arthritic-looking hand signals, head and neck movements, flashes of metallic tongue adornments and, when warranted by some transfer of extreme importance, “Sheeee—it” is the globally accepted response of empathetic exasperation.
The politically correct awkwardness of what to call a female companion is gone as well. Without reaching for a presumptuous descriptive such as girlfriend, friend, just-a-friend, best friend, friend of a friend or new best friend, (and honestly, I still don’t know what BFF is, or if I have one, or maybe AM one?!!?!?!
It seems “Ho” is categorical and “Bitch” indicates some ownership.
Without bright feathers, the males are devoid of obvious categorization although I suspect firearms and footwear are involved in the hierarchy.
I am confounded as to what exactly is considered “disrespect” but a whole lot of people are wrapped around the axel about it to a significant degree and although a recognizable word in itself, any evidence of respect for anything is obfuscated by the harshness of the tone in these belly-and-bottom-baring kids.
English is a beauteous language with nuances, complex declensions and homonyms that drive foreigners to distraction when they try to learn it. Phonics came in while I was in grade school in the sixties. I have one friend who is now a teacher, just a few years older than me, who was educated in the school district of our state capital (and I will discuss the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at length at another time). Her school, in some insane double blind study of learning, opted to keep her class away from phonics as a “control group”, and to this day, although she is well spoken, expressive and one of the most brilliant conversationalists I‘ve ever enjoyed, she cannot spell. She was also raised in an ethnic community, an educated one, but without benefit of proper guidance in creating plurals, still refers to more than one penny as, say “thirty five cent”.
I cannot take on the subject of ebonics, or whether or not Spanish should become America’s required second language, but I can say that I tend to agree with Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, when he said “The French don’t care what you say, actually, as long as you pronounce it properly.” I had a little French teenager stay with me some years back who was so amused by the frequency of the aforementioned all-things-to-all-conversations F word that I provided for her a document that got faxed around in the halcyon days of office life back before the hate-crime of email Forwarding. It is affectionately known as the “F Dialogue”. With homage to that original, I will resurrect a modern version of it and start faxing it around again—and will provide my own version in a future blog, for educational purposes.
My New Year’s resolution for 2007 is to retire this “F-word”, which, although endlessly diagrammable, is henceforth retired from my vocabulary.
And I guess there’s an argument for not getting hung up on technique of expression, but strive to tolerantly offer open acceptance of any type of effort toward communication; men define talking as serial grunts and the monosylballic response that means “Screw off” and can be used in virtually every Q & A. She says “blahblahblahblah” and He says……“Fine.”
Let me say this about that. Women are all about talk—we need it to live. So we vent to our women folk and spare men as much as we can from enduring our “process”. And we do process--to death. And we just want to use that skill we got (when you got biceps and the gift of peeing while standing). We got words.
If a man (the non-communicator in this case) got it in his mind to go outside to pull some wrenches, say on a classic vehicle he adores, you can be sure he would have the best tools he could get his hands on to strengthen, maintain, repair, and preserve that ride, that pride.
A relationship is a magnificently engineered and divine vehicle. It will take you anywhere you want to go. Enjoy the ride—with friends, family, old and young, lovers and others—connect and make it count. Relationship is all that matters.
Communication is what makes it work. We all need to better our craft in saying what we mean and meaning what we say—especially now in this, our modern and highly connected world, with lots of talk, and not much communicating. Maybe we need to use some new words.
Language is a tool.
Using it well can fix just about everything.
Does anybody remember a grade school exercise called sentence diagramming? I think it was fourth grade, maybe seventh. I don’t know—I didn’t grow breasts until freshman year when we moved up to the big consolidated high school. I have no clear vision of when I transcended childhood and moved into adolescence and therefore no clear physical memory of myself actually doing this exercise. I know it was a short lesson, not like the reading and rehashing of a Tale of Two Cities, which went on endlessly and I thought wasted a goodly portion of an English class with one of my favorite teachers.
But whatever year it was, the process was one of my favorites, because every word had a purpose and a position in the Statement, whose function was to communicate a thought or information to the recipient. That is of course, what language does. Or used to.
What was the point of the sentence? Who was doing the action? What WAS the action? Which were the descriptive words and what did they describe? Where did the action happen and to whom? Did anybody say anything that required quotation marks or (my personal favorite) an exclamation point? I was actually described once as “a woman who lives her life in exclamation points”. I like that imagery.
You can sit in any fast food restaurant where nowadays school kids can GO out to ---for lunch (in the middle of a school day!) -- and you will overhear an entire peer exchange and come away with absolutely no idea what they have said to each other, nor any insight into their personalities or preferences—even if there was not a moment of silence, not even between bites.
Conversations seem to consist of a pattern of indecipherable greetings which are coded contractions. “Zup”, when accompanied by a head tic, I learned, is an efficient means of saying “Hello—how is your day going and is there any news?” or simply the illiterates’ contraction for “what’s up?”
Once the salutations are out of the way, one single word which always begins with an F and whether it ends with -s, –er, or -ing, (which is heard as –iiiin) fully dominates the rest of the exchange. Apparently one word is so versatile that it serves as all seven parts of speech, and this verbal communication is accompanied by an odd sort of arthritic-looking hand signals, head and neck movements, flashes of metallic tongue adornments and, when warranted by some transfer of extreme importance, “Sheeee—it” is the globally accepted response of empathetic exasperation.
The politically correct awkwardness of what to call a female companion is gone as well. Without reaching for a presumptuous descriptive such as girlfriend, friend, just-a-friend, best friend, friend of a friend or new best friend, (and honestly, I still don’t know what BFF is, or if I have one, or maybe AM one?!!?!?!
It seems “Ho” is categorical and “Bitch” indicates some ownership.
Without bright feathers, the males are devoid of obvious categorization although I suspect firearms and footwear are involved in the hierarchy.
I am confounded as to what exactly is considered “disrespect” but a whole lot of people are wrapped around the axel about it to a significant degree and although a recognizable word in itself, any evidence of respect for anything is obfuscated by the harshness of the tone in these belly-and-bottom-baring kids.
English is a beauteous language with nuances, complex declensions and homonyms that drive foreigners to distraction when they try to learn it. Phonics came in while I was in grade school in the sixties. I have one friend who is now a teacher, just a few years older than me, who was educated in the school district of our state capital (and I will discuss the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at length at another time). Her school, in some insane double blind study of learning, opted to keep her class away from phonics as a “control group”, and to this day, although she is well spoken, expressive and one of the most brilliant conversationalists I‘ve ever enjoyed, she cannot spell. She was also raised in an ethnic community, an educated one, but without benefit of proper guidance in creating plurals, still refers to more than one penny as, say “thirty five cent”.
I cannot take on the subject of ebonics, or whether or not Spanish should become America’s required second language, but I can say that I tend to agree with Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, when he said “The French don’t care what you say, actually, as long as you pronounce it properly.” I had a little French teenager stay with me some years back who was so amused by the frequency of the aforementioned all-things-to-all-conversations F word that I provided for her a document that got faxed around in the halcyon days of office life back before the hate-crime of email Forwarding. It is affectionately known as the “F Dialogue”. With homage to that original, I will resurrect a modern version of it and start faxing it around again—and will provide my own version in a future blog, for educational purposes.
My New Year’s resolution for 2007 is to retire this “F-word”, which, although endlessly diagrammable, is henceforth retired from my vocabulary.
And I guess there’s an argument for not getting hung up on technique of expression, but strive to tolerantly offer open acceptance of any type of effort toward communication; men define talking as serial grunts and the monosylballic response that means “Screw off” and can be used in virtually every Q & A. She says “blahblahblahblah” and He says……“Fine.”
Let me say this about that. Women are all about talk—we need it to live. So we vent to our women folk and spare men as much as we can from enduring our “process”. And we do process--to death. And we just want to use that skill we got (when you got biceps and the gift of peeing while standing). We got words.
If a man (the non-communicator in this case) got it in his mind to go outside to pull some wrenches, say on a classic vehicle he adores, you can be sure he would have the best tools he could get his hands on to strengthen, maintain, repair, and preserve that ride, that pride.
A relationship is a magnificently engineered and divine vehicle. It will take you anywhere you want to go. Enjoy the ride—with friends, family, old and young, lovers and others—connect and make it count. Relationship is all that matters.
Communication is what makes it work. We all need to better our craft in saying what we mean and meaning what we say—especially now in this, our modern and highly connected world, with lots of talk, and not much communicating. Maybe we need to use some new words.
Language is a tool.
Using it well can fix just about everything.
I kissed a man that wasn’t my husband.
I kissed a man that wasn’t my husband.
Now, as a woman who has had five husbands, I’ve attached no date to this to identify the time frame, thus maintaining the privacy and dignity of the particular fellow to whom I’d promised my fidelity at the time this occurred. That isn’t really anybody’s business. But now that Hillary has announced her presidential candidacy, I couldn’t help recall that this strong, self-assured woman once dealt with an infidelity that was everybody’s business.
This kiss didn’t end that marriage, but the reflection it caused triggered what I wanted to share with you today. I used to be fond of saying that men have affairs for sex, and women have affairs for conversation. And trite and maybe true as that is, it still made me wonder how, and why, did it happen?
Which criticism was so deep, which thoughtless comment so unrecoverable, which searching question was left hanging unanswered, which romantic milestone went uncelebrated, which effort unacknowledged, which muffled sobs unheard?
What is the significance of these little chip-chip-chippings away at the rock-solidness of a marriage versus the hit-in-the-guts-with-a-bag-of-ice moment of OHMIGOD MY SPOUSE IS HAVING AN AFFAIR!!!! If you ask any divorced person what happened to their marriage, the first response is “He….” or “She….” Rarely, we hear about the “I….” who occasionally takes responsibility for some portion of the breakdown before the break up
In my case, you’d think I would have a veritable boxed set of reasons why divorce happens.
There’s of course room for the very real possibility that one married the wrong person for the wrong reasons, in which case the actual married life that was “lost” was never more than a mirage in the first place. I think it’s true that there are three sides to every breakup: her side, his side, and the truth.
Once, I was getting my hair done at a new salon, where I had yet to engage in the kind of major chick sharing that occurs in that hour when one’s neck is bound by a velcro’d nylon poncho rimmed with a terry cloth towel. Years of secrets spill shamelessly under those conditions and a really good beauty shop is a close second if you can’t make it to therapy or the LSA (love and sex addicts) meeting in the basement of the church.
On this occasion, at holiday time, my regular gal was booked, so I had to go to a different salon for an emergency touch-up. With no bonding moment to precede it, the shampoo girl suddenly disintegrated while pulling tin foil and crumbles of dried bleach from my head and revealed, in that shell-shocked, thin, humiliated voice of a child slapped in the face in front of someone else, that her husband of 23 years had just informed her that he was having an affair and was moving out of their home. He told her he’d unexpectedly fallen in love with someone else, and that she, his wife, had done nothing wrong. What the hell is a jilted spouse supposed to do with that kind of statement from the person who promised to love her forever?
But just as one offense doesn’t destroy a strong marriage, it isn’t one nuance or gesture or gift or call or deed that “makes” you fall in love with someone else unexpectedly as hell—the broth has to have been seasoned, slowly, with a bit of this and a pinch of that and a gentle stirring, and all of a sudden a new taste hits your lips right there and you go YUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMM!
And just like that, everything changes.
What precipitated my desire to kiss this non-spouse? To risk everything that made my life make sense? He was someone I knew for not too long, but I liked him immediately and immensely, and I liked myself better after every casual conversation with him. And then one time, alone after the rest of our companions had left, I complimented him on a particularly brilliant comment he’d made, and he said, with great spontaneity and honesty just this: “ I’m not as smart as you think I am….I work hard.” And that’ all I heard.
Pretty simple statement. But with that self-effacing caveat and the immediate self-respecting acknowledgement, he had me. That was the defining moment that did it for me. And, as he walked me to my car for my safety, I melted into that kiss, which I can recall to this day with absolute clarity, and always will.
For someone who doesn’t cook, it is ironic to describe romance like a pot of soup, but there it is—nourishing, warm, filling, and within all that, there is comfort, comfort, comfort.
Yes, I can feed myself—but nourishment is a whole ‘nother story, and in married life, the bowl is too often empty and both parties are starving to death.
A third party can not come in and break up a solid marriage…but I do believe encounters like this one can, however, break up a long held illusion or even a valiant honorable effort toward a respectful partnership with someone you care for, and love, deeply. That’s why it can be so tricky to ask yourself if what you need is what you’ve got, and then decide if the onus is on your partner to provide it for you. With people living so darn long now, it is a question many of us will face, in mid-life, or at some point along the way to our eighth or ninth decade, which most of us, amazingly, will achieve. That’s a long time to live in limbo, or with the wrong partner.
In a world that is now without definition of what marriage actually is, legally and morally, the individual must make the call as to what this marriage is, and isn’t.
So here’s what I came to, in the time after that kiss and all the agony and ecstasy that resulted from it:
if sustaining the honorability of that promise, that marital vow, is more important in the totality of life than the actual totality of life itself, then that is what a marriage really is.
And that is what I meant when I said “I do.”
I heard once, from my Uncle Harry, that marriage is fifty percent love and fifty percent law”. With all the other stuff we mid-lifers have to evaluate, it appears we are also challenged to redefine what we mean now by our ‘better half’.
Now, as a woman who has had five husbands, I’ve attached no date to this to identify the time frame, thus maintaining the privacy and dignity of the particular fellow to whom I’d promised my fidelity at the time this occurred. That isn’t really anybody’s business. But now that Hillary has announced her presidential candidacy, I couldn’t help recall that this strong, self-assured woman once dealt with an infidelity that was everybody’s business.
This kiss didn’t end that marriage, but the reflection it caused triggered what I wanted to share with you today. I used to be fond of saying that men have affairs for sex, and women have affairs for conversation. And trite and maybe true as that is, it still made me wonder how, and why, did it happen?
Which criticism was so deep, which thoughtless comment so unrecoverable, which searching question was left hanging unanswered, which romantic milestone went uncelebrated, which effort unacknowledged, which muffled sobs unheard?
What is the significance of these little chip-chip-chippings away at the rock-solidness of a marriage versus the hit-in-the-guts-with-a-bag-of-ice moment of OHMIGOD MY SPOUSE IS HAVING AN AFFAIR!!!! If you ask any divorced person what happened to their marriage, the first response is “He….” or “She….” Rarely, we hear about the “I….” who occasionally takes responsibility for some portion of the breakdown before the break up
In my case, you’d think I would have a veritable boxed set of reasons why divorce happens.
There’s of course room for the very real possibility that one married the wrong person for the wrong reasons, in which case the actual married life that was “lost” was never more than a mirage in the first place. I think it’s true that there are three sides to every breakup: her side, his side, and the truth.
Once, I was getting my hair done at a new salon, where I had yet to engage in the kind of major chick sharing that occurs in that hour when one’s neck is bound by a velcro’d nylon poncho rimmed with a terry cloth towel. Years of secrets spill shamelessly under those conditions and a really good beauty shop is a close second if you can’t make it to therapy or the LSA (love and sex addicts) meeting in the basement of the church.
On this occasion, at holiday time, my regular gal was booked, so I had to go to a different salon for an emergency touch-up. With no bonding moment to precede it, the shampoo girl suddenly disintegrated while pulling tin foil and crumbles of dried bleach from my head and revealed, in that shell-shocked, thin, humiliated voice of a child slapped in the face in front of someone else, that her husband of 23 years had just informed her that he was having an affair and was moving out of their home. He told her he’d unexpectedly fallen in love with someone else, and that she, his wife, had done nothing wrong. What the hell is a jilted spouse supposed to do with that kind of statement from the person who promised to love her forever?
But just as one offense doesn’t destroy a strong marriage, it isn’t one nuance or gesture or gift or call or deed that “makes” you fall in love with someone else unexpectedly as hell—the broth has to have been seasoned, slowly, with a bit of this and a pinch of that and a gentle stirring, and all of a sudden a new taste hits your lips right there and you go YUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMM!
And just like that, everything changes.
What precipitated my desire to kiss this non-spouse? To risk everything that made my life make sense? He was someone I knew for not too long, but I liked him immediately and immensely, and I liked myself better after every casual conversation with him. And then one time, alone after the rest of our companions had left, I complimented him on a particularly brilliant comment he’d made, and he said, with great spontaneity and honesty just this: “ I’m not as smart as you think I am….I work hard.” And that’ all I heard.
Pretty simple statement. But with that self-effacing caveat and the immediate self-respecting acknowledgement, he had me. That was the defining moment that did it for me. And, as he walked me to my car for my safety, I melted into that kiss, which I can recall to this day with absolute clarity, and always will.
For someone who doesn’t cook, it is ironic to describe romance like a pot of soup, but there it is—nourishing, warm, filling, and within all that, there is comfort, comfort, comfort.
Yes, I can feed myself—but nourishment is a whole ‘nother story, and in married life, the bowl is too often empty and both parties are starving to death.
A third party can not come in and break up a solid marriage…but I do believe encounters like this one can, however, break up a long held illusion or even a valiant honorable effort toward a respectful partnership with someone you care for, and love, deeply. That’s why it can be so tricky to ask yourself if what you need is what you’ve got, and then decide if the onus is on your partner to provide it for you. With people living so darn long now, it is a question many of us will face, in mid-life, or at some point along the way to our eighth or ninth decade, which most of us, amazingly, will achieve. That’s a long time to live in limbo, or with the wrong partner.
In a world that is now without definition of what marriage actually is, legally and morally, the individual must make the call as to what this marriage is, and isn’t.
So here’s what I came to, in the time after that kiss and all the agony and ecstasy that resulted from it:
if sustaining the honorability of that promise, that marital vow, is more important in the totality of life than the actual totality of life itself, then that is what a marriage really is.
And that is what I meant when I said “I do.”
I heard once, from my Uncle Harry, that marriage is fifty percent love and fifty percent law”. With all the other stuff we mid-lifers have to evaluate, it appears we are also challenged to redefine what we mean now by our ‘better half’.
Meeting New People: Why Appearance Matters by Peter T. Pugliese, MD
Our overall appearance is what we present to the world, but we see each other first in bits and pieces. When we meet a new person we look at the mouth first, specifically at the teeth. Why? Because the teeth can hurt us, they bite! This is an early protective mechanism, developed long before we could speak, to identify friend from foe. Today we smile to assure the person we meet that we are friendly, our teeth are not in a biting position. (You can laugh with your mouth open, but try to smile with your mouth open, it looks ridiculous.)
Next we look at the eyes to make sure the smile is real. A lower face smile is a fake smile. If the eyes do not light up with a smile, we are put on alert that perhaps this person is not hostile, but is not friendly either. After checking the eyes we look at the skin of the face, then the hair on the head and finally the rest of the body is given a quick once over. All this is done for two reasons. The first is for protection, and the second is for reproduction. We shall decide in a matter of second whether or not that person will be a sexual, or non-sexual partner purely from appearance sake. If you have already made a life long commitment to a mate and yet find the other person attractive, your higher brain center will say to you, “Back off, this is a non-mate”. If you do not heed this instruction immediately you have set yourself up for trouble. But you already know that.
The need for approval is the need for acceptance, for humans are not designed to live alone. To live alone, without daily human contact and without love, is a slow, destructive process except for a relatively few people who are solitary types. The need to be attractive is an inborn sexual mechanism that stays with us for life. As noted above, every animal has some sexually attractive feature, be it bright feathers or a lion’s mane, it is always there. Humans have developed very subtle sexual attraction mechanisms, but our skin is one of the most important of all.
The attractive person gets the best job in most instances, gets the most attractive mate and usually makes the most money. A whole book has been written on the subject of human appearance. We shall use some technical terms from time to time as noted, but they will be defined. The glossary in the back of this book will help you with any terms that may not be part of everyday language. I have tried to make this book fun to read but still be informative and worth your effort and expense. One of my basic beliefs is that work should be fun, not easy, but fun, and therefore enjoyable. We begin with exploding some myths about aging and then some myths about skin care. This is a fun thing for me to do because some myths are like dangerous monsters in the night; dragging them into the light of day kills them.
Every woman I have known, including my wife, has a sense of insecurity about how she looks. No matter how beautiful she may be, the insecurity is there. I am now convinced that this is truly a genetic mechanism specific to women. While men surely are aware of the importance of appearance they are, as a group, less occupied with how they look than women. This may be a burden to women, but I believe God in the design of women, has given each woman a very special appeal, unique to her and to her alone. If women could sense this special trait and maximize it, perhaps then they would spend less time worrying about how other women look.
One Last Item: The knowledge gained by scientific research has opened new frontiers. I say frontiers because that is all they are. We are only at the beginning of great discoveries in our understanding of biological mechanisms. Our knowledge of biology, while awesome compare to 50 years ago, still is quite primitive. This is not said to downplay the significant discoveries that have been made, but to emphasize that the best is yet to come, every true scientist knows that quite well. Aging is tied to sexual activity in a complex way, more complex than we can enter into in this book. My goal is that you will have acquired the basis to appreciate the relationship between attractiveness and sexual activity, and how a longer happier life can result from maximizing both of these marvelous gifts of God.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
Next we look at the eyes to make sure the smile is real. A lower face smile is a fake smile. If the eyes do not light up with a smile, we are put on alert that perhaps this person is not hostile, but is not friendly either. After checking the eyes we look at the skin of the face, then the hair on the head and finally the rest of the body is given a quick once over. All this is done for two reasons. The first is for protection, and the second is for reproduction. We shall decide in a matter of second whether or not that person will be a sexual, or non-sexual partner purely from appearance sake. If you have already made a life long commitment to a mate and yet find the other person attractive, your higher brain center will say to you, “Back off, this is a non-mate”. If you do not heed this instruction immediately you have set yourself up for trouble. But you already know that.
The need for approval is the need for acceptance, for humans are not designed to live alone. To live alone, without daily human contact and without love, is a slow, destructive process except for a relatively few people who are solitary types. The need to be attractive is an inborn sexual mechanism that stays with us for life. As noted above, every animal has some sexually attractive feature, be it bright feathers or a lion’s mane, it is always there. Humans have developed very subtle sexual attraction mechanisms, but our skin is one of the most important of all.
The attractive person gets the best job in most instances, gets the most attractive mate and usually makes the most money. A whole book has been written on the subject of human appearance. We shall use some technical terms from time to time as noted, but they will be defined. The glossary in the back of this book will help you with any terms that may not be part of everyday language. I have tried to make this book fun to read but still be informative and worth your effort and expense. One of my basic beliefs is that work should be fun, not easy, but fun, and therefore enjoyable. We begin with exploding some myths about aging and then some myths about skin care. This is a fun thing for me to do because some myths are like dangerous monsters in the night; dragging them into the light of day kills them.
Every woman I have known, including my wife, has a sense of insecurity about how she looks. No matter how beautiful she may be, the insecurity is there. I am now convinced that this is truly a genetic mechanism specific to women. While men surely are aware of the importance of appearance they are, as a group, less occupied with how they look than women. This may be a burden to women, but I believe God in the design of women, has given each woman a very special appeal, unique to her and to her alone. If women could sense this special trait and maximize it, perhaps then they would spend less time worrying about how other women look.
One Last Item: The knowledge gained by scientific research has opened new frontiers. I say frontiers because that is all they are. We are only at the beginning of great discoveries in our understanding of biological mechanisms. Our knowledge of biology, while awesome compare to 50 years ago, still is quite primitive. This is not said to downplay the significant discoveries that have been made, but to emphasize that the best is yet to come, every true scientist knows that quite well. Aging is tied to sexual activity in a complex way, more complex than we can enter into in this book. My goal is that you will have acquired the basis to appreciate the relationship between attractiveness and sexual activity, and how a longer happier life can result from maximizing both of these marvelous gifts of God.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
Skin As A Sex Organ by Peter T. Pugliese, MD
Lepers were shunned in ancient times partly because they were a contagious group, but more so because they had a repulsive appearance. Any serious skin condition is a signal to the observer that the other person has a problem: whatever the problem may be, the signal is negative, and attraction is not sparked. While we are much more sophisticated today about skin disorders there remains an innate negative quality about unattractive skin. This is mainly because of the sexual nature of skin. Skin is the largest and most visible sex organ in the body. All sexual activity starts with an initial attraction between partners, and without mutual attraction nothing else happens, or even matters as far as sex goes. Attractiveness is the alpha and omega of all sexual activity, an attribute in which nature has invested vast resources.
Plants and animals that reproduce sexually require some type of attraction mechanism to draw the male and female together. These mechanisms are of four basic types: chemical, visual, auditory and tactile. The higher the life form the more mechanisms employed by the organism. Mammals for example often use all four mechanisms, while lower forms may use only one, or two. The female firefly uses visual light signals, while female moths use a sexual scent called a pheromone. In this series we are concerned about the visual signals produced by the skin, though the skin also produces chemical signals which play a role as well. Many surveys show that sexual turnoffs are related to defects in skin and hair. In humans sexual attraction is mainly visual so our topic is how to maximize your attractiveness through healthy skin.
Our appearance, how others see us, is the key message that we send each time we meet an individual, long before we say a single word. Looking attractive and feeling good about how we look sends a powerful, positive message. My aim is that you will have an appreciation of the incredible wonder, beauty, and excitement of life and how you can enjoy these gifts for many years. A few items I must set straight from the beginning.
I know of no better way to absolutely guarantee ugly skin than cigarette smoking. Smoking is a prime example of how people try to be happy by employing a destructive process. Ask any smoker why they smoke and they will all answer that “they enjoy it”. I cannot believe that these people are ignorant of the fact that they are injuring their bodies. If you want to smoke, that is your business, but remember you will have poor health and ugly skin and that is not what this book is about. In a later chapter we present a discussion of just what cigarette smoking does to skin.
If you are overweight you will need to lose that weight if you are really seriously interested in being healthy and attractive. I know that the subject of “overweight” is controversial and fraught with political land mines. The facts are simple. The body is not designed to carry and service that extra burden, so it taxes all you physiological systems. Carrying extra weight has no merits, and is not beneficial by any stretch of the mind. It does matter how overweight you are and for how long, but the real key to successful weight control is understanding the reason you are overweight and correcting that reason. Here is one appearance guide to go by, whether you are a man or a woman, your waist must be smaller than your hips. If you cannot define a waist you are overweight and there are no exceptions. This is important for a number of reasons, one of which is the cardiovascular association, but equally important is the attraction process. To the opposite sex, a waist that is smaller than the hips is a powerful sexual attraction. We shall discuss why later.
Next post…Dr. Pugliese discusses Meeting New People: Why Appearances Matter.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
Plants and animals that reproduce sexually require some type of attraction mechanism to draw the male and female together. These mechanisms are of four basic types: chemical, visual, auditory and tactile. The higher the life form the more mechanisms employed by the organism. Mammals for example often use all four mechanisms, while lower forms may use only one, or two. The female firefly uses visual light signals, while female moths use a sexual scent called a pheromone. In this series we are concerned about the visual signals produced by the skin, though the skin also produces chemical signals which play a role as well. Many surveys show that sexual turnoffs are related to defects in skin and hair. In humans sexual attraction is mainly visual so our topic is how to maximize your attractiveness through healthy skin.
Our appearance, how others see us, is the key message that we send each time we meet an individual, long before we say a single word. Looking attractive and feeling good about how we look sends a powerful, positive message. My aim is that you will have an appreciation of the incredible wonder, beauty, and excitement of life and how you can enjoy these gifts for many years. A few items I must set straight from the beginning.
I know of no better way to absolutely guarantee ugly skin than cigarette smoking. Smoking is a prime example of how people try to be happy by employing a destructive process. Ask any smoker why they smoke and they will all answer that “they enjoy it”. I cannot believe that these people are ignorant of the fact that they are injuring their bodies. If you want to smoke, that is your business, but remember you will have poor health and ugly skin and that is not what this book is about. In a later chapter we present a discussion of just what cigarette smoking does to skin.
If you are overweight you will need to lose that weight if you are really seriously interested in being healthy and attractive. I know that the subject of “overweight” is controversial and fraught with political land mines. The facts are simple. The body is not designed to carry and service that extra burden, so it taxes all you physiological systems. Carrying extra weight has no merits, and is not beneficial by any stretch of the mind. It does matter how overweight you are and for how long, but the real key to successful weight control is understanding the reason you are overweight and correcting that reason. Here is one appearance guide to go by, whether you are a man or a woman, your waist must be smaller than your hips. If you cannot define a waist you are overweight and there are no exceptions. This is important for a number of reasons, one of which is the cardiovascular association, but equally important is the attraction process. To the opposite sex, a waist that is smaller than the hips is a powerful sexual attraction. We shall discuss why later.
Next post…Dr. Pugliese discusses Meeting New People: Why Appearances Matter.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
Skin, Sex and Longevity…the search for happiness by Peter T. Pugliese, MD
Prelude:
In 1999 my father brought me a manuscript to proof read for a book he had written called Skin, Sex and Longevity…the search for happiness. By then, he had written extensively for years on the scientific aspects of skin care, publishing tons of articles in professional trade magazines, and had also written the first comprehensive text book for estheticians before anybody really knew what that profession was about. If you still don’t know what an esthetician is, you are not alone. Only 14% of Americans know this word, which could be why the Swedish Bikini Team looks so darn much better than most of us Yankee women. Skin care, and for that matter, sex and longevity, have always been of much more concern outside the US than in our own nose-to-the-grindstone young country. And if European and Scandinavian women have historically looked better than American women (with that certain Je ne sais quoi!as they say, whatever the juice that means) it is because for most other civilizations, having a practitioner who cares for the skin has been right up there with having a dentist and an ob/gyn and the other specialist areas of health care. It just took us a little longer to get on board.
You’ll get to know more about me as we go along, but it all started in 1956 at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital when my Dad was in med school. To know me is to know my people, and we’ll start with the grown-ups. My mother, Joanne, is a precious and stunning woman, who was a willowy USO girl who met a handsome Marine in Wilmington, North Carolina during the Second World War. Today, as I look out my window and across the field at their 200 year old stone home, I marvel at my blessings. My parents are both alive, vital, have been married for 57 years, and are still crazy about each other. They still live on the farm they bought in rural Pennsylvania in 1957, and both look like a million bucks. Do I feel lucky? You betcha.
My father, Dr. Peter Pugliese, a retired general practitioner, left his successful country medical practice in 1978. He had the vision to see then that the dread HMO craze was just the beginning of the death of family medicine as it had always been, particularly in the heartland of rural America. He didn’t much like the idea that a doctor’s first question was going to have to be “who is your Provider?” before asking “where does it hurt?” And he wanted no parts of practicing that kind of medicine.
My dad also knew, quiet unassuming visionary that he was, that the health care concerns twenty years down the line would be very different from those of his patients. His kids—four of us-- would be the “old people” seeing doctors at the dawn of the new millennium, and that the reasons for seeing a doctor in the future would be less about pathology (heart disease, cancer, gout) than they would be about comfort and appearance. We were, and are, seriously, a generation of brats. ME!ME! IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!! It’s been our generational battle cry since 88 million of us came into the world in a veritable explosion (BOOM!) beginning nine months after our Dads came back from the war, and we really haven’t shut up yet.
Be that as it may, I had the extraordinary privilege of working for over twenty years with Dr. Pugliese while he quietly became a highly respected researcher in the area of anti-aging mechanisms, long before the slew of celebrity doctors jumped on the train to fame. For over fifty years, I have had the further extraordinary privilege of calling him Dad. The influence of these two people, my parents, has colored every move I’ve ever made, and I’m old enough to admit that now.
So I thought it prudent to begin my blogging life by including a few comments from that early manuscript for this little book, written to help people at all ages deal with what they were hearing, feeling and facing in themselves and the people they love, in a world that was going quite mad as roles and bodies changed like never before in history. As Dr. Pugliese had already become quite a force in his second career among the researchers, he wanted to share, in simple language, some very basic concepts about the whole Aging thing. Ever a man of mastering the basics, he starts off by answering the question “Why do we even care about how our skin looks anyway?” The insights he offers bring a focus to this blog, and set the tone for the kind of things we will talk about. As part of that generation who never shuts up talking about “ME! ME! IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!”, I will try to correlate his scientific prognostications with the very real day-to-day life and reflections of a Baby Boomer who is no longer a baby.
But the irony is this--when we talk about skin, sex and longevity, and the search for happiness, we begin to see that biologically, it really IS all about The Baby. But not like you think. Because whether you have one, had ten, want none or can’t have any, Life as it was planned by the Divine –yes, we’re going to shamelessly say it, planned by God--is about procreation. And whether or not a sweaty-palmed guy at a bar on Friday night knows it, the girl he’s buying a drink has already sent him a very clear message, and he is moving in to see what his chances are of making her the mother of his kids.
Herewith are three of my favorite excerpts from this little gem of a book, which we are planning to publish sometime with updates of some advances that have happened since the original was written. What is presented here is from 1998, and nothing about this has changed.
Truth be told, nothing has really changed since the first cave man dragged his date home by the hair. But we’ll talk about that at length at another time.
Take it, Dad…………
We live in a period of human history which is incredibly exciting, filled with more promises and opportunities than ever before in the history of man. Our scientific knowledge has expanded into areas that point to the possibility of human life extending for over 200 years, using only our current developing technology. It is not all technology, however, for longevity is tied in with our sexual make-up and a great deal of our happiness is tied in with our sexuality. Sexuality is obviously linked to the survival of mankind as a species, but ultimately it is the need for individual happiness that is the driving force behind sex. The search for happiness is the motivation behind all human actions.
No matter how absurd or stupid it may seem later, it is impossible for a human to deliberately do something that will make him or her unhappy. Think about it for a moment, and you will see the truth in this statement, for even the most unselfish action is designed for our own happiness. This is a biological mechanism over which we have no control, for it stems from the need for an individual to survive. This book is about maximizing your chances for happiness by living a long and healthy life. It is written with an emphasis on skin care and how your skin plays a key role in sexual attraction. The role that sex hormones have in maintaining a strong functional body and the need for hormone replacement is emphasized as well. This book is not about sexual techniques. So many of these have been written, rewritten and copied that I think the topic has been overdone. Sexual activity for most of us is happiness, but not essential for a long life, as many dedicated celibate lives have proven.
It is my purpose, in writing these articles and books, to convince you that the process of aging, as we know it, is no longer seen as the inevitable outcome of life. Aging is viewed as a disease process by many scientists, and there is no need to become incapacitated and unattractive as we move through life.
Next post…Dr. Pugliese discusses Skin as a Sex Organ.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
In 1999 my father brought me a manuscript to proof read for a book he had written called Skin, Sex and Longevity…the search for happiness. By then, he had written extensively for years on the scientific aspects of skin care, publishing tons of articles in professional trade magazines, and had also written the first comprehensive text book for estheticians before anybody really knew what that profession was about. If you still don’t know what an esthetician is, you are not alone. Only 14% of Americans know this word, which could be why the Swedish Bikini Team looks so darn much better than most of us Yankee women. Skin care, and for that matter, sex and longevity, have always been of much more concern outside the US than in our own nose-to-the-grindstone young country. And if European and Scandinavian women have historically looked better than American women (with that certain Je ne sais quoi!as they say, whatever the juice that means) it is because for most other civilizations, having a practitioner who cares for the skin has been right up there with having a dentist and an ob/gyn and the other specialist areas of health care. It just took us a little longer to get on board.
You’ll get to know more about me as we go along, but it all started in 1956 at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital when my Dad was in med school. To know me is to know my people, and we’ll start with the grown-ups. My mother, Joanne, is a precious and stunning woman, who was a willowy USO girl who met a handsome Marine in Wilmington, North Carolina during the Second World War. Today, as I look out my window and across the field at their 200 year old stone home, I marvel at my blessings. My parents are both alive, vital, have been married for 57 years, and are still crazy about each other. They still live on the farm they bought in rural Pennsylvania in 1957, and both look like a million bucks. Do I feel lucky? You betcha.
My father, Dr. Peter Pugliese, a retired general practitioner, left his successful country medical practice in 1978. He had the vision to see then that the dread HMO craze was just the beginning of the death of family medicine as it had always been, particularly in the heartland of rural America. He didn’t much like the idea that a doctor’s first question was going to have to be “who is your Provider?” before asking “where does it hurt?” And he wanted no parts of practicing that kind of medicine.
My dad also knew, quiet unassuming visionary that he was, that the health care concerns twenty years down the line would be very different from those of his patients. His kids—four of us-- would be the “old people” seeing doctors at the dawn of the new millennium, and that the reasons for seeing a doctor in the future would be less about pathology (heart disease, cancer, gout) than they would be about comfort and appearance. We were, and are, seriously, a generation of brats. ME!ME! IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!! It’s been our generational battle cry since 88 million of us came into the world in a veritable explosion (BOOM!) beginning nine months after our Dads came back from the war, and we really haven’t shut up yet.
Be that as it may, I had the extraordinary privilege of working for over twenty years with Dr. Pugliese while he quietly became a highly respected researcher in the area of anti-aging mechanisms, long before the slew of celebrity doctors jumped on the train to fame. For over fifty years, I have had the further extraordinary privilege of calling him Dad. The influence of these two people, my parents, has colored every move I’ve ever made, and I’m old enough to admit that now.
So I thought it prudent to begin my blogging life by including a few comments from that early manuscript for this little book, written to help people at all ages deal with what they were hearing, feeling and facing in themselves and the people they love, in a world that was going quite mad as roles and bodies changed like never before in history. As Dr. Pugliese had already become quite a force in his second career among the researchers, he wanted to share, in simple language, some very basic concepts about the whole Aging thing. Ever a man of mastering the basics, he starts off by answering the question “Why do we even care about how our skin looks anyway?” The insights he offers bring a focus to this blog, and set the tone for the kind of things we will talk about. As part of that generation who never shuts up talking about “ME! ME! IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!!”, I will try to correlate his scientific prognostications with the very real day-to-day life and reflections of a Baby Boomer who is no longer a baby.
But the irony is this--when we talk about skin, sex and longevity, and the search for happiness, we begin to see that biologically, it really IS all about The Baby. But not like you think. Because whether you have one, had ten, want none or can’t have any, Life as it was planned by the Divine –yes, we’re going to shamelessly say it, planned by God--is about procreation. And whether or not a sweaty-palmed guy at a bar on Friday night knows it, the girl he’s buying a drink has already sent him a very clear message, and he is moving in to see what his chances are of making her the mother of his kids.
Herewith are three of my favorite excerpts from this little gem of a book, which we are planning to publish sometime with updates of some advances that have happened since the original was written. What is presented here is from 1998, and nothing about this has changed.
Truth be told, nothing has really changed since the first cave man dragged his date home by the hair. But we’ll talk about that at length at another time.
Take it, Dad…………
We live in a period of human history which is incredibly exciting, filled with more promises and opportunities than ever before in the history of man. Our scientific knowledge has expanded into areas that point to the possibility of human life extending for over 200 years, using only our current developing technology. It is not all technology, however, for longevity is tied in with our sexual make-up and a great deal of our happiness is tied in with our sexuality. Sexuality is obviously linked to the survival of mankind as a species, but ultimately it is the need for individual happiness that is the driving force behind sex. The search for happiness is the motivation behind all human actions.
No matter how absurd or stupid it may seem later, it is impossible for a human to deliberately do something that will make him or her unhappy. Think about it for a moment, and you will see the truth in this statement, for even the most unselfish action is designed for our own happiness. This is a biological mechanism over which we have no control, for it stems from the need for an individual to survive. This book is about maximizing your chances for happiness by living a long and healthy life. It is written with an emphasis on skin care and how your skin plays a key role in sexual attraction. The role that sex hormones have in maintaining a strong functional body and the need for hormone replacement is emphasized as well. This book is not about sexual techniques. So many of these have been written, rewritten and copied that I think the topic has been overdone. Sexual activity for most of us is happiness, but not essential for a long life, as many dedicated celibate lives have proven.
It is my purpose, in writing these articles and books, to convince you that the process of aging, as we know it, is no longer seen as the inevitable outcome of life. Aging is viewed as a disease process by many scientists, and there is no need to become incapacitated and unattractive as we move through life.
Next post…Dr. Pugliese discusses Skin as a Sex Organ.
You can learn even more by going to the Dr. Pugliese site or the Dr. Pugliese Store. By the way, dad does sell some nifty stuff at his store.
Let me say this about that...
Allright! Allright! Allright!
For as long as I can remember, someone has been saying to me "You should write a book! You should write that down!"
But I've found it particularly difficult for most of my life, particularly over the last thirty years, to live it and tell it, since both living and telling are full-body experiences and both require my full attention.
But when I hit 50 this summer (on Flag Day, and I will speak about this at length at another time) it seemed like as good a time as any to begin to sort through what I really think versus what I think I think and God forbid, what I used to think and now think I was just dead wrong.
Six months down the line, I agree with myself, and with that Gemini duality, let the blogging begin!
The title for this blog is Let Me Say This About That, and that doesn't necessarily mean I am right but in some cases I totally am, so when someone genuinely wants the truth from me I have to just say "Let me say this about that", and I have prefaced many a conversation with that, as I will herein as we go along.
My agent and I discussed a number of titles for this tome, but I think, in the totality of life, my opinions on things are pretty much summed up by my over-riding feeling on just about everything. Believe as you wish, believe in yourself, and stick to your story. If you live long enough, you're bound to be right at least some of the time. And then, having reached an age of irrascibility, you get to say the one thing every grown up in the world lives to say to someone, just when it counts the most.
Toldya.
p.s check out some of our dead serious web site stuff on either http://www.drpugliese.com or http://www.drpugliesestore.com
For as long as I can remember, someone has been saying to me "You should write a book! You should write that down!"
But I've found it particularly difficult for most of my life, particularly over the last thirty years, to live it and tell it, since both living and telling are full-body experiences and both require my full attention.
But when I hit 50 this summer (on Flag Day, and I will speak about this at length at another time) it seemed like as good a time as any to begin to sort through what I really think versus what I think I think and God forbid, what I used to think and now think I was just dead wrong.
Six months down the line, I agree with myself, and with that Gemini duality, let the blogging begin!
The title for this blog is Let Me Say This About That, and that doesn't necessarily mean I am right but in some cases I totally am, so when someone genuinely wants the truth from me I have to just say "Let me say this about that", and I have prefaced many a conversation with that, as I will herein as we go along.
My agent and I discussed a number of titles for this tome, but I think, in the totality of life, my opinions on things are pretty much summed up by my over-riding feeling on just about everything. Believe as you wish, believe in yourself, and stick to your story. If you live long enough, you're bound to be right at least some of the time. And then, having reached an age of irrascibility, you get to say the one thing every grown up in the world lives to say to someone, just when it counts the most.
Toldya.
p.s check out some of our dead serious web site stuff on either http://www.drpugliese.com or http://www.drpugliesestore.com
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