Geez, the word “aging” sounds so, well, old. But it is what it is, right? Doesn’t make sense to call it aging only when you’re really old and moving into extremely, surprised-you-made-it-this-long old. None of us is immune so why the hell not enjoy the good stuff about it as best you can? That’s how I’ve decided to handle the whole matter. And then I put my feet up and have a glass of wine. So far it’s working really well for me.

Here are the other SELF.com posts I did to go along with the excerpt they published in August. They’ve got some cool stuff on their site so take the time to poke around and of course enter to win a FREE copy of My Formerly Hot Life, out August 17.

How to Get that No-Makeup Look by Wearing Tons of Makeup

What Smart Stars do to Look and Feel Hot as they Age

The 5 Very Best Things About Getting Older

The 4 Weirdest Anti-Aging Tricks that Totally Don’t Work

And it doesn’t suck! In fact, it’s good. Whew. Here it is:

Funny and moving book from Stephanie Dolgoff.

courtsey of Ballantine Books

My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just The Other Side of Young is both a lighthearted and profoundly revealing offering from author, editor and sometime television personality, Stephanie Dolgoff. A memoir of a woman who has come to the realization that she is no longer considered young or hip, the book offers humor filled insights into what Dolgoff calls the “adult tween” years.

Dolgoff is editor-at-large at Parenting Magazine and blogs on a weekly basis for both more.com and parenting.com. With a literary pedigree that includes editorships in many forms for the likes of Real Simple, SELF and Glamour, Dolgoff knows well the topics on which she writes.

“…When men stop making lecherous cat-call and Spanx finds a home in your lingerie drawer, when marketeers start targeting you for Activia instead of trendy music, when you are “ma’amed” outside of the deep South, and when you have to start wearing makeup to have that “I’m not wearing any makeup glow”, it will dawn on you that somehow, someway, you have crossed the line into adult “tweenship”, that middle place between party-all-night youth and the turn-that-racket-down stage of middle age…” READ LARA DIPAOLA’S WHOLE REVIEW HERE

My friends at Self Magazine are so lovely as to help get the word out about My Formerly Hot Life. Here’s what they’re doing–incredibly cool:

• There will be an excerpt from My Formerly Hot Life in the August Issue, on  newsstands in a couple of days
• I will be blogging about your favorite topic and mine on SELF.com
• Plus, there will be a bunch of giveaways, the first of which is…THIS! Click on the link, register, and be entered to win a free copy of the book! Just as cool, you’ll get all kinds of motivating information about how to be the happiest, healthiest YOU that you can be, no matter how old you are.

Enjoy!

Much has been written about how the US is being outpaced by China and India when it comes to graduating engineers who will lead the world in important scientific and technological breakthroughs. Naturally, the President is concerned, as are legislators who predict that because we’re net importers of technology and not taking science and math education seriously enough, that our kiddies will have a lower standard of living than us and we’ll be forever dependent on foreign oil for energy.

Blah blah blah. All true.

But more to the point, who will make more and better makeup for the nation’s Formerlies, an increasingly pressing concern with each passing day? That’s what I want to know. Now that we (and by we, I mean I) need more and more makeup to look like we once did when we weren’t wearing any makeup, this issue is one that I feel I must take a stand on.

I am standing as I write this. It’s not so comfortable. I’m going to sit. But I still mean it.

Hopefully the above video for My Formerly Hot Life (40 days until it’s released!) will inspire action on the part of our nation’s leaders, who will better fund science education in our schools, and incentivize our children to seize the helm of nanoparticle technology research and uncover new and innovative ways in which to restore collagen elasticity to the faces of Formerlies everywhere, not to mention come up with cool new colors that bring out one’s eyes, drawing attention away from one’s nasal labial folds.

Are you with me? If so, please post and forward the video.

How’d that happen so fast?

I had to (pay my very brilliant tech guy to) move Formerly Hot over to a new server, which is good news–the old server couldn’t support the gazillions of visitors the site has been getting. But in the process I think I lost a few user submissions. So if you sent your Formerly/Finally story within the last month and you don’t see it here, please resend, if it’s not too much trouble. My apologies.

This week’s is from my friend Kristin, who you may recognize from the yet-to-go-viral author video for the hopefully-soon-to-be-bestselling book (see? optimistically putting it out there in the universe and visualizing it snapping back at me!).

When Kristin and I first met five or so years ago, her older daughter and my girls were in preschool together. We’d race to drop off, peel clinging kiddies off our legs (praying that they didn’t leave sticky jam hand prints on our work clothes), console one another that they’d surely stop crying 30 seconds after we left, and hop on the train or a cab to get to work on time, applying makeup in transit so as not to look like shit once we got there. Kristin was a high-octane litigator. (more…)

Ever since I posted this little video, in which I posited that if there were a such thing as an ass bra, I would wear one, several of you have sent me links to actual ass bras.

I was a bit horrified, although not really surprised. If they have Spanx for one’s bingo arms, why wouldn’t there be an actual ass bra?

Now that I see them, though, there’s no way I’m strapping one on. This one looks like a harness that you’d use for belaying down the side of a rock face, and this one, well, there are no words. It looks like it would create bizarre pantylines without solving any droop problems. In other words, the cure is worse than the disease, insofar as a Formerly butt is a disease, which I don’t think it is. It’s not exactly therapeutic, but disease is overstating it a touch.

I think I’ll just go back to my old tactic of ignoring my butt altogether–luckily, it’s pretty hard to see unless I crane my neck around–and concentrate on looking fore instead of aft.

Photo by jemsweb CC

I did a guest post for the Times of London, and have a live chat tomorrow, if you want to check it out. Info

June 07, 2010

Stephanie Dolgoff: Beach body bull*%^& and the gift of flab

Stephanie Dolgoff, an NYC-based editor, blogger, and author of the new book My Formerly Hot Life, has been ruminating on one of the most dramatic effects of having children - the speedy transformation from babe to babymomma. It’s something many mothers think about this time of the year, as bikini season looms, when our self-image bumps up against the bumpy and lumpy reality. Here’s Stephanie’s take. (Don’t miss tomorrow’s livechat about mums and the pressure to be sexy.)

Once upon a time, I’m ever-so-slightly ashamed to admit, I was one of those vain young women who endeavored to forgo food the morning of a beach trip, and tried to eat very little in the week or so before. This was all so I could come as close to rockin’ my two-piece as possible, given my unfortunate genetic destiny as a woman who was never going to have flat abs no matter how many crunches she did.

What’s more—and this I am rather more ashamed to admit–I had a specific strategy for rising up off my beach blanket without accentuating my belly rolls. It involved propping myself up onto my elbows, bending my knees and sort of springing 90 degrees to my feet without bending at the waist, so there was no opportunity for flesh to fold upon flesh. Once up, I would cease breathing, lest my pooch pop out and ruin the illusion that I was one of those fabulous young women with naturally flat abs. READ THE WHOLE THING HERE

Me at the age my daughters are now

It’s my birthday today, and here’s a secret: I’m 43.

OK, it’s not much of a secret, because I am lucky enough to have tons of friends from childhood who know my  age, my birth date is up on my Facebook profile, and what’s more, I have written here and elsewhere that I was 42 (when I was) and 41 (when I was that, until just over a year ago.) I am not above gilding the lily about many, many things, but to lie about something as irrefutable as the date you came busting out, covered with mucus and screaming bloody murder has always seemed to me rather pointless, not to mention futile.

Until now.  (more…)

In New York Magazine this week, the former Phoebe on Friends, reasserted herself as someone I totally respect. (Weirdly, I can’t find the piece online to link to–sorry.)

When my friends and I sit and drunkenly fantasize about My Formerly Hot Life (my book, due out August 17th) being made into a movie or a TV show, we run through the list of female actresses of the right age with comedic chops who could conceivably play the main character–a woman my age (43 on the 27th!). (more…)

You know when you sit and debate whether or not to do something of questionable appropriateness, knowing full well you’re going to do it, but you have that conversation with yourself to prove that in some small way you’re not a total asshole? And then you go and do it anyway, feeling marginally better about having contemplated not doing it?

I had just such a moment today, in the playground after my girls were done with their gymnastics class. (more…)