cindy capitani's Open Salon Blog

50 shades of grandma: A 98-year-old’s take on ‘Grey’

Mon, 9 Apr 2012 09:04:01 -0400

It’s true: I downloaded the steamy book dubbed “mommy porn” onto my grandmother’s unsuspecting Kindle. It, like she, were expecting another nice romance, the kind where kisses are stolen at the gate just after sunset and eyes meet briefly across the pews at Sunday Mass.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” by E L James has a sprinkling of similar type language, but more in the vein of “wicked grins” that travel “all the way down there.”

Gram didn’t mind all the “down there” references, or the repetitive use of “holy crap” and “jeez” over other choice words. She was actually swept up in the initial romance of the dashingly handsome billionaire Christian Grey and the sexually innocent college student Anastasia Steele.

But as soon as things went from grins to, well, spankings, my grandmother was a bit perplexed. So, yes, I did download the book into my Nook so I would know what she was talking about and could answer such burning questions like “Have you ever heard of such things?”

I didn’t know much about “Fifty Shades” expect that I didn’t want to read it. I’m not into romances and once it was compared to “Twilight,” I really didn’t care. I tossed it my grandmother’s way because she likes breezy romances with a bit of sex. And sometimes it’s tough coming up with a new book week every week.

Well, this book did give her something to talk about. “I shouldn’t be reading this at my age.” Then, “Do people really do this?” And, “I must’ve missed a lot.”

Gram shook her head a lot when she talked about “Fifty” and mused that all this silly heroine does is gaze at this man’s eyes and hips. “She’s a stupid, stupid girl.”

Despite the head shaking, she couldn’t put it down and quickly wanted the 2^nd book in the trilogy, “Fifty Shades Darker.” About half way through, she decided to ditch it. “Is the weird sex getting to you?” I asked.

“No, no. Well, it’s just dumb sex if you can even call it that. But it’s just the same thing over and over.” She reads me a paragraph that sounds so familiar from the first book I’m still trying to get through. “How many times can you read the same thing?”

So she won’t be going on to book three, “Fifty Shades Freed,” and if I don’t finish the first, I know I’m not missing anything I haven’t already read in the first 200 pages.

It’s a scientific fact: The older we get, the happier we are

Thu, 8 Mar 2012 18:03:15 -0500

The other night my roommate walked in to admire herself in my full length mirror, something she does fairly often.

“This looks cute, right?” she said, turning back, sideways and front again.

“Sure, if you’re going for hooker-chic,” I said.

This is typically how our conversations go. She asks me how her outfit looks, I tell her the truth as I see it, she laughs, I laugh. She goes out to some ridiculous club, I go back to my book.

She asked me once if I wished I were in my 20s again. I didn’t hesitate before saying no. I back-pedaled a little, saying maybe, but only if I could know everything I do now. The truth is, while she’s often pissed off or stressed out, I’m usually happy and care-free. Why would I want to return to a time in my life when angst was my default mode?

I remember being so fearful of 50, I started using eye cream before I could drive. I did waist bends as I blow dried my hair and donkey kicks as I waited for my nails to dry. I was fearfully obsessed with growing old and getting fat.

A funny thing happened on the way to my middle ages: I stopped caring. I mean, I do care about my appearance, but it’s more about how I feel than anything else. I eat right and exercise to maintain good heath, not to stop gravity or compete with 20-year-olds in a swimsuit competition. I dress more for comfort than to impress and I’m well groomed because I’m a professional and want to be treated as such.

But the most noteworthy thing about hitting the midway mark is that I’m way happier and more content than my younger self ever was. In my 20s and 30s I was almost never satisfied; I always wanted something better, bigger, fancier. I cared about what everyone thought, was always worried about the future and fretted about the past. In the end, I just wanted to be happy. But it was a complicated package of requirements to achieve that.

Now? The past is history and I really don’t care what most people think. Generally, I’m as happy as I make up my mind to be and a shift in attitude can change my day, even if it’s half over. I’ve learned lessons that can only be acquired by years of living, the most important being that acceptance is the answer to most of my problems.

It’s not just me who’s happy and content for no reason at all. A recent study at Northeastern College of Science indicates that older people are just happier. Another study shows happiness rebounds after 50 and peaks when people are in their 80s.

So there is something to look forward to as we add birthday candles to our cake: increasing happiness. It’s comforting to know there’s an upside to aging that’s backed by science.

The surprising place I found peace

Mon, 5 Mar 2012 06:03:24 -0500

My first crush was in the third grade. He wasn’t just my crush; every girl was in love with baby-faced Billy with the tousled hair and crooked smile. We all longed to sit next to or in back of him, hoped to be his partner on line, and crossed our fingers and toes that we’d be picked for his team during gym.

If I couldn’t have Billy – and I couldn’t, I wasn’t nearly cute enough or popular enough – I had a second, third and fourth boy choice, and even an “I’ll settle for” pick. As long as I can remember, I always wanted a boyfriend.

My first kiss was in fifth grade – John Lawton, during a heated out of town game of Spin the Bottle. I was disappointed for years that he never tracked me down for a follow up date. I remember contemplating if I could be a funeral director’s wife, if I could live above dead bodies. If I had known then that my first real date wouldn’t be until ninth grade, I wouldn’t have come out of my room.

Girls and boys, women and men. Without this crazy dynamic, pages of women’s magazines would be empty and thousands of websites blank. It may be true that women dress up for each other, but in the end, it’s the man’s eye we’re trying to catch.

This is the first time in my life that I’m not with a man or trying to catch some man’s attention. It’s also the first time I’m experiencing something really unfamiliar: peace.

When I got divorced eight years ago, online dating was just taking off and I had a blast with it. I dated youngsters and musicians, artists and New Yorkers, stay at home dads and trust fund loafers. I had a one night stand with an Italian tourist, a fling with a man who never got it up and a bohemian who channeled Jim Morrison. It was an adventure. Some men I really fell for, some I almost loved, and a few loved me. But, as my single friends predicted, the whole dating game got old.

After a few years I settled into the comfort of a relationship that got really messy after factoring in ex-spouses, soccer games and the whole whose-weekend-is-it craziness. After some more online fun, another intense relationship ensued, this one even messier because we actually fell in love.

Midlife love is messy. Anyone who arrives at the midway mark without a lot of baggage obviously didn’t do much traveling through life. In the end, the second relationship sadly ended over baggage -- my baggage -- some of which I should’ve left behind long ago. But that’s another story.

I’ve been intentionally flying solo now for over a year. I set out to see what it would be like to just be a party of one. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I expected to enjoy deciding what I wanted to do every weekend. I expected to enjoy reading instead of being forced to watch a movie or do something more conducive to couples. I didn’t expect to find peace. I didn’t expect to be so damn happy all the time. I didn’t expect to like it so much.

I also didn’t expect to find out so much about myself, to get a chance to, well, look at some of the baggage that I’ve been lugging around. I’ve been doing a little unpacking and plan to discard a lot of things I haven’t needed in a long time.

Part of me is thinking I should end this solo flight and find a man soon because time is running out. But that’s just crazy talk. Right now I’m peaceful and happy. I’ll know when it’s time. And when it is, my load will be a little bit lighter.

Unscrambling the alphabet soup of buying eggs

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:02:47 -0500

Buying food used to be a fairly easy process. I went to the store and just bought whatever what was on sale, whatever I had a coupon for, or whatever brand my mother bought while I was growing up.

It’s not so simple anymore. As awareness grows about the dangers of processed foods, chemical additives, pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones and labels in general, it’s increasingly difficult to know how to buy healthy food.

^{Caged chickens have a higher rate of salmonella}_{photo/wikicommons}

Since I can’t digest too much information at once – or make many too many changes at the same time – I decided to start with educating myself about eggs. I love eggs, and generally start the day with two, something I’m thrilled is actually endorsed by the nutrition powers-that-be. Eggs, it turns out, are packed with all kinds of good-for-you nutrients and also are convenient, low cost and low calorie.

I love to eat my eggs soft boiled, sunny side up or poached, which never used to be a problem until salmonella became an issue. The foodborne bacterial illness – which causes 40,000 cases of food poisoning each year – is often traced to undercooked eggs, the worst case being in 1994 when 224,000 Americans became sick. Another bad case was in 2010 when 1,300 people got sick from eggs. There was even talk of putting warning labels on egg cartons and menus that eggs – like beef – must be thoroughly cooked.

All it takes is one sick hen to spread the disease to all the others before there’s an epidemic of salmonella-infected eggs. That’s the problem with industrial farming: hens are jammed into cages, unable to stand, let alone move.

So buying eggs that come from “cage-free” hens should be better, right? Well, not necessarily. Aside from “organic,” labels are mostly unregulated and that’s what makes it so hard for consumers. Eggs labeled “free range” or “cage free” lead people to think the hens are roaming about an open field. They’re not. There’s actually no legal definition for either term. All those terms mean is that the hens are not kept in cages. They can be kept jammed into large, indoor spaces, however, without enough room to even spread their wings. And neither term is any indication of what they’re fed, which means pesticides, antibiotics and hormones can all be part of the recipe.

The rules for certified organic are legally defined and do offer some guarantees, like hens have to live cage-free, with access to outdoors. They also eat an organic, hormone-free diet that’s free of genetically modified organisms. Granted, this is no guarantee that their eggs will be disease-free. But the odds are better. In a British survey, 25 percent of caged hens were infected with salmonella compared to just 5 percent of organic hens. In six other U.S. studies it was concluded that people who ate eggs from caged hens had twice the risk of getting salmonella compared to people who ate eggs from cage-free hens.

Organic is the best bet, but they’re about double the price of conventional eggs, and not as readily available. It’s also easy to be tricked. I used to buy Egglands Best Eggs, thinking I was getting something better, something organic. I pictured hens roaming about in an open field, feeding on fresh, organic grains. The label makes a lot of health claims, dropping words like “natural” and “cage-free” and health claims like less cholesterol, more omega 3, B12 and D. Then I realized that nowhere on the label did it say “organic.” Egglands Best does make organic eggs, but the ones most commonly found in supermarkets aren’t. Further digging uncovered complaints to the FTC over deceptive claims, and a bad rating from the Cornucopia Institute that Eggland’s organic eggs came from a dozen different producers that were known for poor hen house conditions that offered little to no transparency. In fact, many of the most commonly found supermarket organic egg producers had poor ratings and were on an industrial scale.

Overall, studies indicate that cage-free of any kind is still safer than industrial brands, and organic is likely the safest bet of all. For me, organic is the way to go when I am going to eat cake batter and runny eggs. But when I’m cooking eggs thoroughly, I guess I’ll go the less expensive route.

I can’t wait to start researching chicken …

Chipotle bans customer on Facebook for having opinion

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 17:02:57 -0500

Stephen Murphy, a reporter I worked with many years ago, just announced on Facebook that he got banned from a corporation’s Facebook fan page.

I swear I’m not making this up. He said he got banned from Chipotle Mexican Grill’s page for sticking up for his friend Ryan Madrid, who got banned for making a FB comment the company’s social media moderator apparently found unpleasant.

There was a discussion on the Chipotle fan page about how great it would be if the Mexican chain would cater weddings (they don’t). Well, Stephen’s friend commented that serving Chipotle at a wedding would be less than classy. So, Chipotle’s FB moderator “Joe” banned him for saying that.

Stephen, in turn, commented that a company shouldn’t ban customers who make slightly negative comments. Suddenly, he too, was banned, something he said he totally didn’t see coming.

The thread has since been deleted by Chipotle and reduced to this (as stated by the original poster): “I wish you guys catered. I’d love to serve Chipotle at my wedding!”

The odd thing is, in Stephen’s comment on the original wedding thread, he said in response to his friend Ryan’s comment that he thought having Chipotle at a wedding would be “amazing.” He also told me said he loves Chipotle and eats there several times a week.

The chain has a loyal following with over 1.6 million Facebook “Likes” and Joe the moderator is right in there interacting with the continuous stream of commenters. That’s a smart move on Chipotle’s part; that’s the way to build a fan base. I’m actually surprised by how few companies actually engage users.

But boy did “Joe” blow this one. Short of obscenities, threats or in-fighting, what corporation would ban a customer from a page? Is it because they have so many “Likes” Chipotle feels a few banned users won’t be missed?

The whole point of social media – especially for a corporation -- is to get the conversation going. Granted, some of that conversation might not be positive. But even the negative is useful for a company to know.

Companies usually bend over backwards to get an angry customer to return. In this case, the company is booting the customer out simply for having an opinion. It doesn’t make any sense.

It’s time to find a new place to buy a burrito.