Can't hardly wait

Summer is my favorite season, even when it's brutally hot and dry like this year. Heat doesn't bother me too much, although my meds have greatly amplified the effects heat has on my body.

Everything I loved about my childhood revolved around summer. The warm weather, days at the pool, three weeks down the shore (that's the beach for those not familiar with Philly lingo), playing outside, reading outside, splashing through the local creek (pronounced 'crick'), catching lightning bugs, camping in the back yard, riding my bike, cookouts, and, the highlight of everything, looking for shooting stars.

August is greatly maligned. Many people say it's too hot, there are no holidays, and it's too damn close to back-to-school. They overlook the most precious event of summer: The Perseid meteor shower.

Around the first week of August, the anticipation builds. I start getting antsy and impatient, scanning the night sky every night, hoping for a glimpse of just one shooting star that portends the arrival of a sparkling sky.

It's easy to overlook this celestial event. You have to get up in the middle of the night to see the best of it. You have to be patient. If you're hardcore like me, you have to plan where you will go for optimal viewing. It's worth it.

Several years ago, my husband and I took our vacation in the Rocky Mountains, in a town called Estes Park. Estes Park is just outside the gates of Rocky Mountain National Park. We had a full eight-day agenda of hiking, bird watching, relaxing, ranger education programs, shopping in town, and drinking in the velvety darkness of the cool evenings. Actually, the nights were downright cold, and we had to go into town to buy flannel pajamas so we could sleep at night.

We rented a tiny cabin that had an enormous deck across the front. We hung up hummingbird feeders and kept track of the drama of the tiny birds jostling for this precious territory. As soon as we arrived, I took note that there were lounge chairs on the deck. Perfect. Just what I needed.

As it turned out, our trip to the Colorado mountains coincided with the Perseid. I had binoculars, a blanket, and an alarm clock. That year, the best viewing was set for 2:00 a.m. in the northeastern sky. I set the alarm and went to bed with the same anticipation as a child on Christmas Eve.

The alarm woke me at 2:00. My husband was neither interested nor amused. I put on a sweathshirt and pressed my face against the tiny bedroom window. Within seconds the stars started falling. It was a stunning display, and unlike anything I had ever seen. The stars were shooting across the sky in clusters, coming every 30 seconds or so. I had no idea that this is what the Perseid really looked like.

I put on my shoes, grabbed the blanket, and headed outside. It was chilly, like see-your-breath-in-the-air-chilly. I bundled up on the lounge chair and settled in for a beautiful show. It looked as though some unseen force was throwing handfuls of stars across the silent, inky sky. I shivered, but not from the cold. The immense beauty of a sky so crowded with stars was almost too much to take in.

Eventually, my husband came outside. He felt uncomfortable in such absolute darkness and he insisted that I come in. It was probably time since my eyes hurt from looking. Before I got back into bed, I looked out the window for one last glimpse of the shooting stars. They were coming less frequently, and I took this as a sign that I should get some sleep. As I dozed off, I tried hard to see every image of the meteor shower in my mind's eye so I could call up the memory later in perfect detail.

I often do.

The brain on the press circuit

(I wrote this post long after I took my bedtime meds and it came out a little bit messy. I have edited as necessary.)

Twice in one day the brain and its capacities are in the media. Both discussions are engaging and provactive. One is controversial.

First up, a story from NPR. Author Virginia Woolf eloquently described the constant stream of consciousness that eventually becomes cohesive thought from which we draw conclusions and take action. From the on-air story:

Woolf thought, and thought hard, about how a mind processes all that it sees, hears, feels, tastes, remembers. "The mind receives a myriad of impressions," Woolf wrote. "From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms," and she wanted to describe that process.

And so, Woolf created minds in action. Clarissa Dalloway in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse are portrayed from the inside out. They are all mind — jumbles of thoughts, memories, faces, objects, peeves, joys — all disconnected and incoherent. And yet, out of all that blabber there emerge very distinctly, real personalities. How did that happen? "If the mind is so evanescent," Lehrer writes, "how does the self arise?"

It's a fascinating interview and story. The text is on the NPR site, but it is well worth the five minutes it takes to actually listen. For anyone who has experienced racing thoughts, the story is absolutely enlightening. One of the most interesting facts to emerge from the research is that there is no command center for the brain. The work is done in separate but connected areas where it figures how to work with all of the other departments. Sounds like a good management strategy to me, unless the hippocampus wins and puts the temporal lobe in a key position, and then we're all going to be taking medication and pondering the meaning of life or how to just end it.

The second media blast of the day was Larry King talking to people who think we can just choose happiness and there it will be. Uhhhh, yeah. The metaphysics guy (from "What the Bleep do we Know?") wasn't so strict about considering other possibilities, but the other people, including a pharmacologist, would not be swayed from their if-you-can-dream-it-you-can-become-it view.


Still, they say we can change our moods, our thought processes, our emotions and our chronic poor health with a simple decision to be different. I say, Have you met me? I can be perky and positive, for sure, but it hasn't done a thing for my multiple health problems. Anyway, you can link to http://www.candacepert.com/, the website of Candace Pert, pictured here. She has written two books on the subject. Her main philosophy is that people don't need antidepressants; they just need a soul overhaul, better daily affirmations, and a more positive outlook and the brain will respond with health and bliss. She claims that because she is highly credentialed in pharmaceutical science, she is better qualified than any of us to make these claims. Obviously, Candace has never had a serious depression or she would know that all of the happy, happy thoughts one can muster are sometimes not enough to chase those blues away.

I would be more passionate and articulate about this, but I am about to be shut down hard by Ambien.

From the back yard

My gardening attempts continue. I have a fondness for lillies, both asiatic and day lillies. Here are some pictures of both, taken in my garden in the past few weeks. you can click on any picture to see a high-resolution photo.

How to be kneeless

In 2000, while juggling graduate school, three part-time jobs, and a looming mood disorder, I decided that commuting by bike and putting in 50 miles every Sunday morning was getting boring, so I decided to take up running. I weighed about 140 pounds, and I was mortified. I was frustrated that my seriously healthy lifestyle did not equate to the size 4 clothes I so desperately yearned to wear.

Here's the thing. I am not all that impulsive. Research is my friend, my comfort, my hobby. I research everything to death before jumping in, mostly to avoid making mistakes. I hate to make mistakes. I bought this book that was going to guide me along in my new sport, and I followed the plan to the letter. Running was actually OK.

Six weeks into the plan, it was obvious that something was very wrong. Whenever I walked, it felt like someone was trying to peel my kneecaps off. The book said that if I had pain at week six, to go see a doctor. I went to a sports medicine specialist, and ended up having knee surgery. Chrondomalacia. Cartilage. Two words I couldn't spell until I had this problem.

The doctor was very clear that I had done nothing to bring this upon myself, and running had not caused it, rather, it just made it apparent sooner. He told me that running and walking quickly were two of the worst things I could do and so it would be for the rest of my life. Furthermore, the surgery would only be a temporary fix and I would likely need the surgery again in about five years, regardless of my activity level. Dr. Steve told me it was not too late to ride my bike and actually see the world before I developed the weird obsessive behaviors of a runner.

Whenever I hear interesting knee news related to chrodomalacia, I immediately tune in and pay attention. The other night while I was sitting here blogging, a commercial came on TV for Cigna insurance. There is no voice over, only words on a black screen. Very dramatic.

I read the words as they appeared and then melted from the screen. A weight loss of only one pound takes four pounds of pressure off of your knees...

Hmmm. Realllly? I did the math very quickly. If I lose 45 pounds, my knees will float freely as I will have achieved zero pounds of pressure on those joints! Suddenly, it became clear--I had found the real link between weight loss and avoiding knee surgery. Avoid knees altogether!

Damn, I am brilliant sometimes.

Where is the part about the ice cream???

Disheartening news. That whole thing about moderate exercise for 30 minutes a day being sufficient for health and all of that...Turns out it's wrong. No, not wrong in the way I would have hoped. Wrong as in, get off your big, fat ass and stress your pathetic flabby excuse for a body for at least an hour a day or until you puke. OK, even if you puke, you still have to torture yourself for an hour a day; anything less doesn't count.

Really? My sincere yet meager attempts don't count? Then what the hell am I still trying for? If 30 minutes of moderate exercise is meaningless, I would prefer to achieve meaninglessness by doing absolutely nothing. It's much easier to fit into my day and it doesn't make me break out in a rash.

May, May, May...what are you babbling on about?

Why, that would be the report released this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine stating that for the obese of the world, diet is a thoroughly insufficient means to weight loss. Diet and moderate exercise are nothing more than a token attempt at reducing body size. Alas, it requires about 68 minutes of vigorous, rigorous exercise every day for the exercise to have any meaningful effect at all. Even then, it might all be for naught:

Still, the underlying question remains: are diet and exercise a reliable cure for obesity? Modern-day obesity researchers are skeptical — achieving thinness, they say, is not simply a matter of willpower. Research suggests that weight may largely be regulated by biology, which helps determine the body's "set point," a weight range of about 10 lbs. to 20 lbs. that the body tries hard to defend. The further you push your weight beyond your set point — either up or down the scale — some researchers say, the more your body struggles to return to it. That might help to explain why none of the women in Jakicic's study managed to lose much more than 10% of their body weight. After two years on a calorie-restricted diet, keeping up more than an hour of physical activity five days a week on average, most were still clinically overweight (though much less so than before). For the obese, the end goal should not be thinness, but health and self-acceptance, which are more realistic and beneficial objectives.

To which I emphatically say, bullshit. I see no value in this kind of tedious, painful self-induced suffering if thinness is not the ultimate goal or result. Who are these people? They did all this research, didn't they bother to ask the study participants what motivates them to diet and exercise? Duh. People like me don't do it for our health. We do it because we don't like the way we look. It's about looks, looks, looks, body image, and the size on that little cloth tag inside of our clothes. Duuuuh. Those researchers know what phsyical benefit weight loss and exercise can bring, but those of us involved really only care about what's on the other side of the skin. The outside part.

I know about set point. I know that four years ago, I was many years into spending 15 hours a week at the gym (sometimes more). I never lost more than a few pounds. Very few. The trainers at the Y were stumped. So much wasted time. So much wasted money. Once I started taking all of these brain meds, there was nothing working to my advantage. The weight came over me almost overnight, despite all of that clean living.

Here is what I know. I eat a small dish of ice cream every day. It hasn't made any difference in my weight either way, but it makes me a much happier person at the end of the day.

Post Traumatic Emotional Experience

Time is supposed to heal all wounds, but it doesn't. I don't think it heals anything at all. Physical wounds heal from natural processes and medical interventions. Emotional wounds never heal, they just get reinterpreted, accepted, synthesized into the greater emotional experience, or left to simmer, fester, or stay filed away until a new experience stirs the memory back into action.

I like to think I move beyond the hurts and deep emotional gashes I believe I can overcome. I want to believe I can make peace with my experiences. I'm not one to obsess over the long term. Obsessing is a painful thing I do when I am hypomanic.

My friend, Jolie, is recovering from a serious crash that in an instant had her body skittering across the road, abraded, bleeding, and with a serious blow to the head. Among other injuries, she sustained extensive damage to her pelvis and lower back, as well as a concussion. A brain bruise can have long-term consequences for anyone who sustains such an injury, but for those of us who are "differently wired," even mild head trauma can cause all things cranium to get bumped off an already precarious axis.

Jolie's mood has slid into a low, low place. Some of it may be situational, but some of it is likely a result of neurotransmitters that have started dancing without permission, as Jolie herself would say. Nobody really knows. The thing about this type of injury that takes people by surprise isn't only that it causes cognitive and vision problems, but it can greatly amplify the patient's irritability and the ability to speak tactfully. When the brain's doing its dance, the mouth is on its own.

Jolie and I have this in common. When we aren't doing very well, we stop trying to be polite, which is something we mostly do for other people's benefit anyway. Along with rampant apathy, there is a complete lack of energy to put toward polite social intercourse. At times like these, we'll tell you exactly what we're thinking, no holds barred.

We aren't bad people; we just become painfully honest. And that pain is felt by other people, not us.

Another thing that Jolie and I have in common is that we are actually both kind and generous people. We are diplomatic. We are charming, but direct. Unless we don;t feel well, and then we just say what we're actually thinking. From the time my bipolar disorder started building itself into a teetering stack of unmanageable symptoms, my propriety filter disengaged itself little by little until I just couldn't stop myself from saying exactly what I was thinking. People who knew me were offended by this. I was surprised by it, but later came to find out it's a very common symptom of an unstable bipolar sufferer.

For a long time, I thought those people were offended because of my words. Later, though, when they confronted me, I was shocked to learn that they were offended by the change in me. I was no longer fitting into the image with which they felt comfortable. My words, my moods, my demeanor made them uncomfortable simply because it was unfamiliar. they honestly believed my behavior was willful and completely within my control.

At that time, I needed support. I needed to know that my friends would ride this out with me, help me through it, love me when it wasn't easy, and soothe the raw parts of me that were stripped bare by my anger and resentment at whatever had caused me to have my affliction. I don;t care how many famous people have it and have gone on to have successful lives. I just knew I didn't want to have it, period, and I was upset that I could only hope to keep it at bay, but it would never be gone from my body.

Only two people stuck around. The rest ridiculed me to my face and criticized me for not being the me they liked. they were mad that I had changed. The fact that I was sick wasn't even on their list of issues to talk about.

that hurt. A lot. I cried for about a year, and then I got angry. Eventually, the more I thought about this, I became enraged, a hunched over, monosyllabic vessel for rage. I was always the helper, the listener, the friend in deed, and I had just gotten screwed so hard, I could not process it. What added insult to injury was when the same people tried to re-enter my life later, when I was closer to stability. I was stunned. It was like, now that the coast was clear, it was time to go back to knowing the May who didn't make them examine their own attitudes and behaviors. No, they didn't like her at all.

I wrote off everyone except the two who stayed true, and in the middle of everything, I met Jolie. She met me at my worst, but she understood that my edginess wasn't something that was intended to be a personal affront to anyone. I was just having an episode of a very unpleasant illness. She liked me anyway, and the feeling was, and remains, mutual.

Over time and with talk therapy and blogging, and medication adjustments, I learned to reframe my anger. I analyzed it into manageable chunks and filed it away when I thought it had served its purpose and run its course.

In the past week, Jolie has had to confront people whom she supported through their worst upheavals, only to find that the support wasn't even close to mutual. She told me that one of those people told her he liked her better "before." He said she wasn't as nice now, and that she had become unaccommodating of the other's needs. She was only focused on herself.

Hey, well, when you fly off a motorcycle and then in a helicopter shortly thereafter, there might not be a better time to be self-centered.

Like me, Jolie was disappointed in the mentality of her friends, and then her indignant outrage took over. I know how she feels. I have been there, immersed and drowning in it.

Shortly after Jolie recounted everything she was experiencing, my own anger came back. For days, I've felt it like new all over again. I find myself having mental confrontations with the people who betrayed me with their indifference. It has all resurfaced, although this time, I understand that it will do no good to try to "work it out" and explain what I needed at the time. This time, I am trying to feel what I feel, acknowledge that these are valid hurts, and just go with the course of emotion in the hope that it will subside more easily when influenced by my new insight.

Sometimes I am surprised at how visceral our emotional memory really is. As the Burmese would say, Very, very.

Honeeeee, change the channel

When the cat's away, the mice will watch bad movies.

My husband is a closet action movie freak. When I go out of town or work through the weekend, he fills up on cinematic crap that he knows he'll never get to watch when I'm in the house. I'm not saying my taste in movies is in any way academic--it's not. However, there are certain things I just cannot sit through either for intellectual reasons or because they make me afraid of the dark.

When I got home from frying myself on an AstroTurf field yesterday, my husband was deeply engrossed in Apocalypto. There was an immediate flash of recognition in my brain: I didn't watch this because it's gross. Almost on cue, my husband said, "Those Mayans were fucking psycho. That's a society that was no great loss. Brutal." I assumed the movie had neglected to delve into the artistic and engineering related accomplishments of the Mayan culture. Of course. Mel Gibson had been too busy focusing on disembowelments of live people,blood-spurting head wounds, and mass executions. Eeewwww.

I thought Braveheart had a good story line but was one of the most graphically violent movies I had ever seen. Unfortunately, I watched it the same week I watched Rob Roy, so I had far exceeded my ability to tolerate violent visuals.

I will say this: Apocalypto was beautifully and lovingly filmed. It's like watching a tropical painting come to life. The sound editing is phenomenal. The rest of it just seems like a two-hour attempt to out-gross-out the previous scene. Couldn't the story have been told just a little less sadistically?

Before this movie, I thought Smurfs were the only blue people running around in the forest. Now I know better. Evil Smurfs. Sadistic, psychotic, Yucatec-grunting Smurfs. Mel Gibson's Smurfs...

I saw one!

The weirdest trivial nonsense can make me happy. Rainbows make me happy, even though they're pretty common here in the summer. I once came across the Olympic Torch Relay just coincidentally, and it made my week. I get giddy when I happen upon the Weinermobile. I even stopped and chatted with the driver once (and found it's their job to chat with idiots like me).

This morning could make it into the May's Cool Things Spotted hall of fame. While driving to work, I started thinking of how cool Google Maps is, especially the street-view pictures you can pull up to get a 360-degree view of a spot on the street. The picture of my house is close and finely detailed. The only thing you can't really make out is the house number, and I wondered if that was intentional. About 30 seconds after pondering this, I arrived at an intersection just as the light turned red, putting me in the first position in the line of cars. And then I saw it. It was right there in front of me, driving down a busy street, just as nonchalantly as any other car.

It was a Google Camera Car. A mundane Chevy with metal rails on the roof and a bizarre array of equipment perched atop a long pole on top of the car. I did what anyone would have done. I smiled and waved. Hey, you never know.

I'm not sure which is the bigger deal here--that I saw the Google Camera Car, or that I saw it only seconds after thinking about the very photos it produces, or that I am such a geek, I waved at the car.
(The camera car pictured in this post is one spotted in Milan. The equipment is exactly what I saw.)

Rosy

Note to self:

SPF 45--Good.
SPF 0--Not so good

It was like being in a dream

I am generally not fond of any Sunday that starts by the alarm waking me at 5:10 a.m. and goes on to find me actually working. Outside. On another blistering hot day. The event was on the football field at a high school.

I learned something today I had sort of been aware of but hadn't fully appreciated before. The field was Astroturf. If it is a cloudless, 97-degree day, the temperature on the field is actually about 107. The college intern at the next table over started tanking pretty early on. Her coworker asked me if I had water. I did. I also brought her a chair and an ice pack to hold on her pulse points. I had been drinking large amounts of water from the time I got up, so my body was doing better, but only marginally.

The event ended an hour early due to, well, heat exhaustion. I can't unpack my car yet. Maybe later when it's much, much cooler.

The effects of the heat, the early morning, and a late bedtime caught up with me late in the afternoon. I stretched out on the couch and fell into a fitful sleep.

I awoke about an hour later, hazy, confused, and drenched in sweat. I distinctly heard giggling. Helium-induced, hallucinogenic giggling. Familiar voices. A lovely voice. Why was I sweating like this? Why couldn't I wake up?



It took a while, but eventually I realized that the TV was on and TNT was once again airing The Wizard of Oz. Glinda is my favorite. I love her. She speaks vaguely helpful phrases that leave Dorothy puzzling over what to do next, believing she's had advice, but without actually having received any advice at all. Glinda would be a great therapist. Her ambiguity is so charming. She knows the answers, but her wisdom requires her to provide nudges along the yellow brick road, but no clear directions.

Where should I go?
"Start at the beginning!"

"Don't give the slippers to her. She wouldn't want them so badly if they weren't very powerful."

"Click your heels together three times..."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"Because you wouldn't have believed me. You had to find out for yourself!"

Glinda rocks the pink dress.

I could write an entire month of blog posts on the topic of The Wizard of Oz. My husband and I quote it daily and liberally. We are currently shopping for a new front door. My husband saw one that has a little hatch door in the upper half, decorated with small ornamental iron work. Every time we go to Home Depot, he stands on one side of the display, flips the door open, and says..."Who rang that bell?!?!"

I have at least 100 Wizard of Oz related items in my home. That might be a conservative estimate. Hehe. It's like that.

It's midnight. Do you know where your blogger is?

I am blogging under the influence of Emsam, lithium, Lamictal, Lyrica, Ambien, Hydroxyzine, and Elmiron. My time is limited as I will soon go into semi-hypnotic sleepy state. Just before that, though, I'll be overcome with waves of nausea.Wheeee. What fun it is to take prescription drugs. I could make a small fortune selling off the things I don't use. Do people take trazadone recreationally? I have about 300 pills. They were prescribed, but I never took them. Lots and lots of Xanax, too.

It's hotter than hell here. It's also humid and that is just unheard of. This is a semi-arid climate. Ack. My scalp is sweating. Ack. That lovely skin fungus I get across the front of my neck every summer is back. My ex-primary care asshole doctor said I get it because I'm fat and if I would just lose 60 pounds, I wouldn't sweat on my neck and encourage the natural skin flora to thrive. He said losing weight would make me lose that neck roll and I wouldn't get rashes. Uhhhhh, I can't see a neck roll. Anyway, now the crud has spread, probably because my meds make me sweat. The crud is at the outer corner of my eyes and under my eyes, as well. I guess that fucking neck roll is so goddamn huge it must cover my face at night and cause the skin flora to go out of control around my eyes. Maybe that's why I can't sleep. The massive neck roll must be smothering me.

Why am I blogging at this hour? It's because I'm printing out glossy, four-color brochures for an event that starts at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. I should have help. This isn't really about the fledgling nonprofit. It's really about my actual job. I participate in events like this throughout the year. Smile and inform May, smile, smile, smile. My work in the community is the only thing standing between me and screaming at bad customer service people in stores, and more important, it's what stops me from participating in outrageous acts of road rage.

I've been trying to get a grip on my mood. I am a rapid-cycling kind of girl, and that complicates things tremendously. Maybe I'm just tired. I'm having a hell of a time with the shingles pain. I fear it will never go away. I'm not sure I can live in harmony with this particular malady.

I seem to be mostly normal, but prone to bouts of crying. Then I'm OK. then I have a dark mood for a few hours. Then I say hilariously funny things. Then I go to bed and watch the ceiling fan whirl in silence while I alternate between sweating profusely and freezing my feet off.

I went to Ross today. I didn't buy a black skirt, but I was tempted by many. Instead, in a bold mood, I bought shorts that actually fit, a T-shirt, and I forget what else. A stretchy shirt, maybe.

Yesterday, I was sitting outside of Kamila and Ali's house, (a nice couple from Iraq) waiting to go in. I had on NPR's Talk of the Nation. The psychiatrist on NPR said depression is not a disease, and people need to get over the idea that they need medication. He said in almost all cases, people just need to manage their lives better through diet, exercise, stress management, talk therapy, yoga, and deep breathing. I asked Frank what he thought that guy would say if I were to tell him that when ADs were prescribed for me five years ago, at that time, I was spending 15 or more hours per week in the gym, I was eating about 1,000 sugar-free/fat-free calories a day, and my annual physical proclaimed me to be exceptionally healthy. I must have still been doing something wrong because I became severely depressed anyway. Maybe I just wasn't breathing deeply enough.

Have I ever mentioned how psychotically livid I become when it is suggested that my depression/BP are my own fault? Excuse me while I go breathe into a paper bag.

(Thanks to my friend, Area25, for letting me borrow from my own email to tell this story. )

Meds kicking in. Teeth not brushed. Brochures sstill printing. Ink low. Not now. It's bad enough our washing machine croaked mid-way through my load of darks today. Why always on a weekend?

OK, I'm into the stage of visual disturbance now. Proofreading and editing tomorrow. Good night.

Big, fat genius

Necessity is the mother of invention, or sometimes, adaptation. When faced with a conundrum, I can puzzle over that challenge indefinitely. The answer might come to me in the shower, in the car, or in the middle of a conversation--or never.

I've always tried to be resourceful. Sometimes I work at it, but other times, I just seem to know how to MacGyver my way through a lack of resources, especially when what I need doesn't exist, and so I must find a way to make do.

I love summer. Summer does not love me. I sweat very easily and I always have. Unfortunately, I was born with very sensitive skin, and trust me when I tell you that sweat and sensitive skin are a bad combination. I am the rash queen.

Gold Bond powder rocks. Cool showers are delicious. Ponytails are a necessity. Weight loss would be...helpful.

I prefer to wear skirts to work. It's just easier, especially given the amount of time I spend sitting on the floor in people's homes. Of course, having fat thighs complicates things because when I walk, my inner thighs rub together and eventually bloom into huge, swollen, fiery red, burning circles. Once this happens, it can takes days for the irritation to subside, and all the Gold Bond on the planet doesn't help.

In the winter I wear tights. In the summer, I'm already hot to begin with, so I know that wearing pants is the safest option. It's also the least attractive and usually the least comfortable, as well.

I started thinking about this last week, during a string of 100-degree days. Just sitting in my car made my thighs sweat. By the time I made the four-block walk from parking to work, the irritation was already almost unbearable. Until I broke out in prickly heat and my day really went straight to hell.

If I could just stop the rubbing. If I could just stop sweating. I could try something like Bodyglide to address the chafing. I knew cycling friends who used it, as well as runners, but what if it melted and left spots on my skirt, revealing to the world that I needed thigh lube just to walk on a hot day?

So, if not lube, then weight loss, but I can't stop the rubbing unless I drop, like, 70 pounds or more. Probably not even then because I'm not built like that. I remembered reading a story in a magazine about people who have excessively sweaty feet. Among the suggested treatments was roll-on anti-perspirant deodorant. Hmmm. If it works on feet...

One morning last week, I toweled off after my shower. I pulled out the tube of Secret clear gel stick unscented. What the hell? I applied a thin coating to the surface of each inner thigh. When it was dry, I applied a second coat. I maintained a wide-legged stance as I finished my morning routine. Everything seemed OK and comfortable, but I wouldn't really know anything until I made that long, long trek from the parking garage.

It worked. It worked with all-day protection! No mess, no irritation, no wetness, no sticky residue! Lubricates and provides wetness protection!

I have made a few small tweaks to the application process (larger), and I have never been so comfortable. Lalalala. My Secret has a secret. Hehehehe! Makes me want to twirl when I wear a skirt. I'll spare the world that particular visual.