Mr. Hunky Hunky - My Ken?

A few years ago I took up yoga and discovered the freedom and beauty of being completely present and in the moment. Granted the sensation is often short-lived and I need to check-in with myself regularly to return to my breath. Even in meditation and practice, I have to remind myself that I’m just supposed to be right where I am and not thinking about everything else my brain conjures up. For those who know me, they can understand how sometimes this takes a great deal of effort.

Last Sunday while grouting my lamp I decided to practice active presence. I was moderately successful and during those periods I felt one with my craft. This focus was frequently interrupted by a vision, a dream I’d had the night before.



Saturday night I’d had this wild dream about meeting “my perfect guy”. The quotes exist for two reasons: (1) perfection is an illusion and (2) he was blond. My concentration on the texture of the grout, on cleanly edging the china, was regularly interrupted by images of Mr. Hunky Hunky in his pickup truck whispering sweet nothings of Sabermetrics to me as I gazed at his blond locks and thick, muscular arms. The Sabermetrics part is totally me but otherwise I’d describe My Guy quite differently. In the past I’d dream that he was tall, tightly muscular rather than thick like Mr. Hunky Hunky, and he had dark hair and eyes. Don Draper, really, but without the cigarettes and affairs.

The irony of this interrupting dream is not lost on me. I’m deconstructing and reconstructing beauty and focusing on the female ideal: in china, in house wares and with Barbies – more than three decades of Barbie imagery designed to illustrate the perfect woman broken and reassembled. The lamp is a tribute to and alteration of women’s ideal beauty. This collective “ideal beauty” is marketed to us and we strive for as schoolgirls and then fight against as adolescents – our hormones and bodies running amuck. Few of us enter adulthood at 5’6” with a slammin’ 39-21-33 figure and feet only half the size of the normal women. According to the NY Times that’s only 1 in 100,000 women, or .001%. That’s a really small number. That would be about 3 women in the entire city of San Francisco (and that’s if you count the city as 50% women).

Back to grouting. And probably dreaming a little of Mr. Hunky Hunky.