New Years Is Coming & It Could Be Worse

In high school I went on a few dates here and there but I never had a real boyfriend. As a result I never had that special midnight New Years’ kiss. In college I dated a lot but my first real relationship was with my now ex-husband. You would have thought that would have led to years of midnight kisses on New Years, except he was a restaurateur and he ALWAYS had to work on New Years. I did visit him at his restaurant on the New Years of the millennium, I even reserved a hotel room right by his work so we could be together for as much as possible that night. But I also had an infant at that time and around ten o'clock I started feeling weird about sitting at bar with a 6 month old waiting for my husband to have a few minutes to spare between his many professional responsibilities. So I went back to the hotel room, let my baby sleep and watched the ball drop on TV alone. Happy New Millennium to me. After my divorce I had lots of dates, flings and even a couple of relationships and yet New Years never really worked out for me. Occasionally I spent New Years with friends, once I went out with my brother to celebrate in Downtown Santa Cruz. That night a man with the words "Fuck You Bitch," tattooed on his arm told me I was pretty and politely offered to give me a foot massage. I wouldn't normally expect a man with a "fuck you bitch," tattoo to want to rub my feet so his offer made it an educational and somewhat amusing New Years (one that my brother and I were able to laugh about for quite a while) but it certainly was not the New Years I wanted.

Of course I did have a boyfriend last New Years but ours was a long distance relationship and we ended up being apart for the holiday. I got seriously irritated with him when he didn't call that night. "I thought you said you didn't like New Years," he said apologetically.

"No," I corrected him, "I said I didn't like that I've never had a GOOD New Years. Big difference!" But he had every right to be confused. As a whole I'm an incredibly low maintenance girlfriend. A guy could forget Valentines Day, our anniversary, my birthday, whatever and I wouldn't hold it against him. We all get busy sometimes and I personally am horrible with dates and I'm not hypocritical enough to expect others to be better at them than I am. Of course my ex-boyfriend NEVER forgot about any of that stuff. That New Years was the only time he ever slipped and unluckily for him it happened to be the only holiday that I'm kind of a "girl" about.

See the New Years I really want is one where I get to spend it with a man I truly care about. I want him by my side at a party or a bar or even at home and when the clock strikes midnight I want him to take me into his arms and say, "Happy New Years beautiful," and pull me in for a passionate kiss. I KNOW how corny that sounds. It's such a stupid little thing but it's what I've always wanted and have NEVER GOTTEN. Yes, there have been plenty of opportunities for me to kiss strangers at midnight but for it to count it has to actually be romantic, there has to be some kind of relationship there.

And yet despite my many New Years disappointments I seem to have inadvertently started a tradition. Most New Years my son and I rent a bunch of movies, I get plastic champagne glasses (that I fill with sparkling apple cider) and noise makers and confetti he works VERY hard to stay up until midnight. When the clock strikes midnight we throw our confetti in the air and dance around the room. It's just my little way of making the holiday somewhat special for my son. I honestly never thought much about it until the last few years when my son started eagerly asking if we’d be doing it again. For him, New Years has become a special thing, filled with Jurassic Park movie marathons, cool glasses and bubbly drinks. He loves New Years and the fact that he loves it warms me to the holiday…to a degree. I still hope to some day have my special New Years kiss and by next year my son might have outgrown our particular New Years “tradition” anyway. But not this year, not yet. So I look forward to the countdown to 2010 and I look forward to future years as well because eventually I’m going to get that kiss, damn it…it may take me until I’m 50 but I’m getting it.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Dena, Google & Sizing Info Courtesy of Lifestyle Condoms

Of all my characters Dena and her story and her exploits have always been the easiest to research. It's not that Dena and I have that much in common but her "interests" turn up the most pages on a Google search. During the first round of edits on my next book, Vows, Vendetta's and A Little Black Dress (in stores June 2010) my editor asked if I could add a conversation in which Sophie and her friends list off some of the more bizarre places Dena has had sex. I was on a time crunch so rather than use my imagination I simply Googled: Most Unusual Place I've Had Sex. Immediately 12 or more pages of message boards popped up each containing dozens of confessions in regards to the various strange and public places Mr. & Ms. Anonymous chose to get freaky in. When reading this stuff you have to assume that some of it is made up but most of it sounded fairly plausible and, for the purposes of my book, very usable. By far the most common "unusual" place was a church. The pews, under the organ, at the very alter, it's all apparently a major turn on for people. I noticed no one said they'd had sex in a synagogue. Guess synagogues aren't sexy enough. Perhaps I should be offended.

On a similar note, several weeks back a friend of mine sent me an article that explained which nationality of European men have the biggest penises and which have the smallest. According to this article the Brits didn't fare very well but the French were right up there near number one. That surprised me because while I've never been with a British man I did date a French guy in college and...well, I just wouldn't have guessed French. But regardless it did occur to me that this is exactly the kind of article Dena would send Sophie and it might make a fun conversation to include in a book. So I went back to Google and Googled penis size and I was actually rather surprised and entertained by what I learned.

First of all human males have bigger penises than any other primate so if you're thinking about getting it on with a monkey you might want to reconsider. Secondly there have been a LOT of studies done to help the scientific community better understand what is an average penis length. Studies have been published in the Journal of Urology, the International Journal of Impotence Research and many other esteemed medical journals. In these studies the penis was always measured after the volunteer took pharmaceuticals in order to achieve an erection. However one of the most comprehensive and apparently accurate studies was conducted by Lifestyle Condoms who sent researchers down to Cancun during Spring Break and rounded up 401 volunteers willing to have their penis measured and just over 300 of them were still sober enough to get it up without the help of pharmaceuticals. What they discovered was that the average penis size is 5.9 inches. "Large" is considered to be around 6.3 inches. Subsequent studies have backed this up.

I'm writing this not just because it amuses me but because considering the number of "enhancement" products I've been seeing advertised on TV and elsewhere I have to assume that this is an issue that is of major concern to many men but I suspect that those men might be comparing themselves to unrealistic examples just as women compare their bodies to the airbrushed women on the cover of Shape Magazine. So if you're a guy you might want to think about this before you start taking a bunch of pills or whatever: 6.3" is large. Lifestyle says so and they should know. I'm sure Dena will have more to say about it in the 6th Sophie book.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

Catch Me If I Fall

So 2009 is almost over. It hasn't been a bad year but I'd be lying if I said I've accomplished most of the things I was hoping to accomplish. I'm feeling a little driftless although most people would tell me that's crazy. After all it seems that the Sophie series will be continuing and I think there's a good chance that I've found a good middle school for my son. Those things should be giving me direction. As for my personal status, well I'm single but I've certainly been having fun. So what could be missing in my life?

I guess the answer is a sense of security. I don't have that and without it things can seem a little scary.

The reality is that there is NO security in being an author. There's not a lot of money in it (people don't realize that there are LOTS of NY Times bestselling authors who are netting much less than fifty-thousand a year), there is no company sponsored healthcare plan and you are always only as good as the success of your last book. One big commercial failure and you might never get another contract again. The driftless feeling stems partly from my own uncertainty about what career goals I should be setting for myself. Should I be pinning my hopes on the continued growth of the Sophie series? Putting more energy into other books outside the series? Trying harder to get someone to make my books into movies? The obvious answer is all of the above but there are only so many hours in a day and I do have other responsibilities.

For instance, in addition to being an author I'm also a single parent of a wonderful little boy who does have special needs. I THINK I found a middle school that he can start next year that will be good for him. But then again we've tried so many schools. Between kindergarten and third grade we tried four schools both public and private and if you want to include preschools we've tried a total of seven schools. Now I'm homeschooling him but I can't do that for much longer. I'm falling behind on all of my writing and other responsibilities and I can see that something's gotta give. Add to that the fact that this new middle school which currently has a campus in San Diego is planning on opening here in LA in March...the word "planning" worries me. Oh and the tuition...it's not as bad as it could be (it's not uncommon for private schools in LA to charge upwards of $30,000 a year) but it's still going to be a stretch.

As for my relationship status...well like I said, I'm having fun but there is a part of me that really misses the security that comes from being in a steady relationship. When I was with my last boyfriend, who I had thought I would stay with forever, I believed that there was at least one area of my life that was settled. That was so reassuring and comforting and while it turned out that we did have irreconcilable differences I did know while we were together that if, God forbid, something were to happen to me, if I was in any way in need he would be there for me and my son. I thought about this as I talked to my friend who has survived breast cancer. I listened to her story and thought, what if that were to happen to me? What if I needed chemo and radiation? What would happen to my son? How could I support us and take care of him while going through all that? It's a hypothetical of course, something that probably won't ever happen but it bothers me that I don't feel in any way prepared for such an eventuality.

It's like I'm walking a tightrope while holding my son and I simply can't fall because when I look down I can't see a net.

And yet there is a net there. I get glimpses of it from time to time. Like the night when I went out with friends to an evening street fair and I was hit with an unexpected bout of vertigo (something I hadn't suffered from in years). I sat on the curb with my head on my knees praying for the feeling to go away. In the meantime one of my friends gathered the troops and her husband drove my car home while she drove me and my son home in her car. She was there for me and checked in on me in the days that followed. Or when my car broke down in San Francisco on a Saturday night and my friend Lamar gladly opened his doors to both my son and myself and made us a fabulous dinner and made ME a fabulous cocktail. There's my friend Brenda who sends me flowers when I'm sad and there's Kim who always drives me to the airport when I need her to, picks up my mail when I'm gone and even watches my son when I need a last minute sitter. There are many other friends too and of course there's my family who have spent the last ten years proving to me that they will always be there for me when the chips are down.

So although I occasionally lose sight of it there's definitely a net there and it's actually more solid than most. It isn't made from the fabric of my career or my romantic relationship status...it certainly isn't made from the dwindling cash supply in my savings account. It's woven from a much stronger fabric and if I were to fall, something I do not plan on doing, it will catch me. I just have to remember that.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

There's A New Princess In Town

When I was 11 I became obsessed with the Sweet Valley High book series. I lost myself in this fictional idyllic world and immersed myself in the lives of Sweet Valley High's twins, Elizabeth and Jessica. When the twins were physically described the word "perfect," never failed to appear. So of course that begs the question, what does perfection look like? Well according to this series perfection is being 5'6", a size 6, naturally blonde and blue eyed. Of course this image has been altered in the newly re-released Sweet Valley High series to reflect today's social climate...now the girls are a size 4. I'd be incensed but seeing that dress size is now the ONLY thing I have in common with the "perfect beauties," I'll let that one pass...for now.

Needless to say I spent a lot of my middle school years silently praying that I would reach 5' 6". I was never going to be a natural blonde and I would never have blue eyes so my only hope of getting anywhere close to "perfect" lay in my ability to grow a little bit taller.

But this image of beauty wasn’t just coming from Sweet Valley High. It was coming from my television set, it was coming from the movies I watched, it was coming from every single one of my fashion magazines that always featured these angular women with fair-skin and spray-on-tans stretching their impossibly long legs across the pages I read. I never did reach 5’6”. I didn’t even reach 5’5”. I didn’t have impossibly long legs and my hips weren’t narrow and my butt wasn’t tiny. What I had was an hourglass figure that the boys seemed to like but the magazines told me was absolutely wrong. As a teen the approval of Vogue seemed much more important than the approval of the pimple faced teenage boys who kept staring at my chest. So the clothes everybody else was wearing looked slutty on me. My hair didn’t flip. Plus I had brown skin and an ethnic nose.

I was thirteen when I first contemplated the idea of a nose job. It wasn't even an issue of race for me. After all, when I was a teen the biggest female black singer was Janet Jackson and look at her nose. Janet changed herself to look the way magazines told her she should look and I wanted to do the same.

But of course I got over it and when I got to college any remaining insecurities about my looks flew out the window. It didn’t hurt that Sir Mix-A-Lot came out with the helpful, albeit blatantly objectifying single, Baby Got Back around that time. After hearing that it finally dawned on me that having a butt wasn't such a horrible thing despite the Kate-Moss-Heroine-Chic that was in at the time.

But it’s important to note that my previous insecurities didn’t come out of nowhere and they were frequently reinforced. I remember talking to an Asian friend of mine in college about her high school years. She was (and is) drop-dead-gorgeous. She started talking about who got Biggest Flirt or Best Hair (she got that one) in her senior year. "Of course prettiest went to a blonde," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "You know how that goes."

I do. If you lived in a town with a small minority population those kinds of high school honors always went to someone who was...well, let's face it, thin, perky and white. To say that it’s an issue of racism would be overly simplistic. The Caucasian teens who happen to be a size 10+ had the same or worse problems. It's more an issue of a media influenced idea of what is "beautiful." The magazines, the TV ads, the movies...they all told us the same thing: we were all supposed to look like the Sweet Valley High twins and if we didn't we weren't perfect.

I wasn't thinking about any of this when I agreed to take my son to see The Princess And The Frog this last Saturday. I've never been a Disney princess fan and I had extraordinarily low expectations going into the movie but was surprised to find that I genuinely liked the film and even found it to be extremely touching at times. But again, I wasn't thinking about my middle-school years during which I was making plans for a nose job.

The next day we went to Disneyland and in true Disney fashion, the park had already put together a special Mardi-Gras celebration designed specifically to celebrate (read promote) their new movie. My son stood with me and happily watched the festivities as Princess Tiana and a conspicuously ethnically diverse group of dancers made their way through the streets of Disney's New Orleans. I looked down and noticed a little black girl close to her mom’s side, clutching her new Tiana doll and beaming at the dancer playing Princess Tiana as she waved at her. Her mother leaned over to me, her smile mirroring that of her daughter and said, "My girl finally has a Disney princess that doesn't make her want to be something she's not."

Now I read The New York Times movie review and I know they feel that Disney’s The Princess and The Frog didn't delve deeply enough into racial issues which only tells me that the folks at the New York Times have never seen a Disney Princess movie before. Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock should know that Disney isn’t interested in probing the dark social issues of our times. They’re interested in creating characters that children will not only relate to but will actually WANT TO BE. They want the little boys of the world to go to the Disney store and buy the pirate hat with the Jack Sparrow dreadlocks attached and the little girls to buy the Cinderella dresses and slippers. Everybody knows that Disney Princesses are supposed to be the prettiest girls in the world. They're supposed to be perfect. For many little girls those princesses are what the Sweet Valley High twins were to me in middle school. And now there's one princess that doesn't quite look like the others...but she's still being presented as an ideal and the little girls are still buying into it and THAT means that there will be a few less adolescents wondering if they need to get a nose job.

I know we have a long way to go. I know the magazines need to stop photo shopping EVERY SINGLE PICTURE so we can stop comparing ourselves to bodies that cannot physically exist in nature. I know that we need to redefine "perfect" to mean being comfortable in one's own skin rather than aspiring to be someone else. But I think that all starts with the media and popular entertainment offering us a diverse group of role models. Princess Tiana is a small step in that direction. As an adult it's easy to dismiss this as just another silly princess movie, but for the girl clutching that doll? This movie was life changing.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

10 Most Meaningful Albums

A friend of mine recently listed the top ten albums that meant something to him on his blog. We all have music that we can't hear without thinking about a certain time in our life. Nothing defines those important moments and transitional periods like music. Anyway, it was a good blog post so like any good Hollywood writer I'm going to steal his idea and do the same thing here.


1) Paul Simon's Greatest Hits Etc.---My mother and I used to dance around the living room to Me and Julio and Mother & Child Reunion when I was a little kid. To this day I can't listen to Paul Simon without smiling

2) Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams---Still a pretty young kid when this came out but I was finally finding my own music rather than just listening to my mother's. I loved the single and when I actually saw the video with Annie looking all tall and powerful in her man's styled suit I KNEW this was my group. I got the album and every other one they ever put out.

3) Prince's Erotic City (which was really released as the B-side of the Let's Go Crazy single)---In middle school there was this über-hip teacher named Stephanie. After school some of us were allowed to hang out in her classroom and play her records while she graded papers on the other side of her classroom. That's when we all discovered Erotic City. We would hover around the record player and keep the volume down low so no one else could hear what we were hearing...and NONE of us had ever heard anything like that before. Total learning experience.

4) Temple Of the Dog--- My first roommate in SF was Lisa. We would sit in our living room, sipping screwdrivers and listening to Hunger Strike and Say Hello 2 Heaven while she fantasized about marrying Chris Cornell and I fantasized about replacing Kelly as Calvin Klein's beard. For me that little album and those little moments personified my new San Francisco life.

5) Concrete Blonde’s Bloodletting---I lost my virginity listening to this…’nough said.

6) The Best of Disco---Yeah, yeah, I know. But when I went to New York I lived at the 92nd Street Y. This Y was actually a glorified coed boarding house but I LOVED it there! 80% of the people who lived there were foreign students and I quickly became part of an international social group that included a French woman, two Swedish women, one German guy, three Italian guys and one woman from the Midwest. We had sooo much fun together. Needless to say YMCA became our song.

7) Natalie Imbruglia's Left Of The Middle---to be fair this album is only significant to me because of one song: Torn. When the song was being played all the time I loved it and was constantly singing it, which, for reasons I didn't understand at the time made my then-husband very uncomfortable. The song's about a man who isn't at all like the singer thought he was when she first got involved with him. The lyrics talk about how "illusion never changed into something real..." Anyway, one day he stopped me mid-song and said, very seriously, "If you ever think that song describes me you have to tell me." It wasn't until years later that I realized that the man who I had fallen in love with was only the man my husband wanted to be (the illusion) while the man he actually was had been kept secret from me. And he was so aware of that he couldn't even handle hearing that song! I can't hear Torn now without thinking about that.

8) Mozart Requiem--Nothing calms and centers me like Mozart. During the hours of my labor this is the only album I would listen to, over and over and over again.

8½) Okay, Best of Disco gets two mentions---the morning after my now ex-husband moved out I slipped my Disco CD into the stereo and danced around with my two-year old to I Will Survive. Also, my ex (who had never exhibited ANY homophobia towards our friends or family) had become paranoid that our son was going to be gay (keep in mind that our child was two at this time). So after I Will Survive I taught my boy all the words to YMCA. When my ex came to pack the rest of his stuff my brother put the CD on and my son lit up and yelled, "Daddy, Daddy, it's the Young Man song!!!" while my ex practically clutched his chest in a panic. So now YMCA holds all sorts of satisfying memories for me.

9) The Offspring's Americana---This is what I listened to while working out HARD during the many months between filing and actually getting divorced. I would do 50 million push-ups, listening to this angry music thinking, "Yeah, if he tries to hurt me, I can take that SOB down." I never really believed my ex would EVER try anything like that but at the time thinking about punching him made me feel better and the Offspring seemed to sum up all my sarcastic humor and anger in one album

10) Solomon Burke's The Very Best of Solomon Burke--Sigh, I love me some Solomon. Sexy, chill and oh-so-melodic...he fits with my life now. I still enjoy Offspring but I'm not really angry anymore so there's no reason to listen to it all the time. I don't feel the need to make my son learn the lyrics to disco songs anymore either. I just want to listen to awesome music and my boy Solomon provides that for me. He makes me smile...kind of like Paul Simon.




Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

A Truly Successful Unsuccessful 1st Date

Sunday morning I went out on a first date...a breakfast date at 9:45 in the morning. For the record I usually HATE breakfast dates. I am in no way shape or form a morning person and I frequently have late night plans on Saturdays (this last Saturday night I was out until the A.M. hours at my friend's birthday bash). The very idea of having to be somewhere before 11 A.M. on a Sunday does not sit well with me...having to look good and be sociable before 11 on Sunday is even worse. But the guy I had a date with IS a morning person...in fact he gets up at 5:30 in the morning regularly so he can get in some gym time before work. I go to the gym 5 to 6 times a week but never before the sun is up...although when I worked out at a 24 hour gym it wasn't uncommon to see me there after midnight. Anyway, Sunday morning was the only time he could meet this week so I reluctantly agreed. I was late of course but he was very understanding. We sat down, got our coffee and started to chat. He began by telling me about his son's soccer game and then started talking about the last Clippers game. The only thing I know about soccer is what I've read about David and Victoria Beckham in Entertainment Weekly and I barely know who the Clippers are but hey, lots of guys are into sports and I'm certainly not going to dock him points for being one of them.

Eventually the conversation turned to my work. We discussed what motivated me to write and so on and so forth...and then he admitted that he wasn't much of a reader. Not an uncommon thing in LA so I decided to let it pass. We talked about our kids, he has to work to get them to open up to him while my son will tell anyone pretty much anything...not always a good thing. He is a big believer in the public school system while I have pretty much given up on trying to find a good school for my son within LA Unified and am currently trying to figure out which private middle school to send my son to next year. We talked about how he always liked to be casually dressed and I talked about how much I loved to get dressed up. He hates big parties while I enjoy them from time to time. We talked about museums (I adore both art and science museums, while he has no interest in them what-so-ever). We talked about music. I have very eclectic tastes in this area and frequently listen to alternative, rap, blues, classical and pop. He's not a music lover...in fact he doesn't even own a stereo or an iPod. We talked about our family. His parents were uncommunicative to the extreme while I was brought up by over-sharers. He told me all about his childhood dramas while I prefer to hold that stuff back until at least the fourth of fifth date. He started talking about how much he hates the zoo and insisted that we don't really need zoos and that they all should be closed. "Really," he said, "when's the last time you've even been to the zoo?"

"Last month," I said with a smile. "I have an annual membership."

In other words he and I have absolutely nothing in common. And yet I didn't have a bad time. It was a pleasant breakfast and he's a very nice guy and has a good sense of humor but there was no spark and it was hard to see what we could do with one another aside from eating breakfast...except even that was going to be hard since I had no intention of getting up early AGAIN just for an egg-white spinach & tomato omelet.

When we went our separate ways I paused a moment too long as I tried to figure out how to wrap the date up. He did it for me by saying he would call. As I got in my car I secretly wished I had not given him the opportunity to say that. I didn't really want him to ask me out again. I liked him but we weren't a good couple and I did NOT want to have to reject him. It's bad enough that we all occasionally have to break up with people we have a serious relationships with but it seems patently unfair that we should also have to break-up with people we haven't really even gone out with! This guy didn't do anything to me, he seems genuinely nice and he was certainly attractive...why should I have to make him question himself or his appeal? I spent the afternoon trying to convince myself that maybe I hadn't given this guy enough of a chance but by the time evening fell I knew what I had to do.
It was after nine when I got his email. I took a deep breath and opened it up, mentally composing my response before I even read his first line.

Well guess what, he wasn't into me either. He realized that we had very few common interests and after a few rapid fire emails we decided that we might work as friends. FRIENDS! How often do you go out with someone and you both walk away wanting to be friends and nothing more? No awkwardness, no hurt feelings or disappointments, just a mutual acknowledgment that we wouldn't work but liked each other enough to pursue a friendship. It didn't take a few dates to figure out, there were no long conversations about how to proceed. It was great!

In his email he said that in no way did he consider our meeting a failure. I agree. It was by far the most successful unsuccessful first date I've ever had.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!

The Male Dilemma: Passion Project vs. Money Maker

Lately I've noticed that a lot of very successful people (mostly men) will frequently lament having passed up their true passion for a career that offered them more financial security. Doctors, lawyers, bankers and highly placed government officials alike will talk about how much happier they would be as a cartoonist, a teacher, a high school football coach and so on and so forth. On the flip side I know a lot of people who have pursued their dreams in lieu of more lucrative careers who are SERIOUSLY freaked out about money. I'm honestly not sure which group has it better or worse.

The pressure on men to offer financial security to their family can not be overstated. No matter how liberated our society has become men still feel the need to be the bread winners and let's face it, a lot of women want them to be exactly that. When a child comes into the family it is still rare for the mother to keep working and the man to stay at home. I'm not saying it never happens but it's the exception not the rule. When the wife in a family gets laid off it's stressful, when the man in a family gets laid off it's an emergency. I've heard entire panels on CNN debate the reasons why women are paid less than men but rarely do they acknowledge that on a whole (and a again, there are always exceptions) women feel it's more acceptable to take a low paying job that they love than men are. Men don't feel like that's a luxury they are allowed and those who do take that route frequently stress about whether or not they made the right decision. That stress has probably intensified as we've become more liberated. Before it was completely unacceptable for a man to take a low paying job that he was excited about in lieu of the highly paid but boring position. Now society seems to be in the business of sending our men two completely conflicting messages. Message number one is that they must be a provider no matter what Ms. Magazine says. They are told that women won't want them unless they can give them a house and a yearly European vacation. They are told that not making a good living will make them a lesser man. Message number two is that as an American they must exercise their right to pursue happiness and happiness (as defined by almost all popular culture) is following your dreams. If you abandon your dream of being a lowly paid investigative journalist in order to be a highly paid CEO you've sold out and are nothing more than a misguided materialist. There is no winning. As a result the guys who DO attain financial security are less able to enjoy or even feel proud of their accomplishments and are CONSTANTLY playing the what-if game. The guys who love their jobs but don't make any money just feel like losers. Everybody is burdened with the knowledge that nothing was dictated, they made their own bed (although societal norms provided the bedding) and now must lie in it.

I don't really know what the answer is to all this is. As a woman all I can say to these guys is that from what I've heard from your counterparts it is clear the grass isn't always greener. For those of you who love your low-paying job you should know that the guys who are making more than you are secretly and legitimately jealous of you. While you are whistling while you work your richer counterparts are playing the what-if game and wishing they had more free time. You chose to follow your dreams and that's probably because you knew you weren't someone who would be able to stick it out in a career you had little interest in. You made the right choice for you. As for the guys who chose the high-paying power positions, you should remember that bringing home a small paycheck doesn't just mean you live in a smaller place. It means that you are sometimes late on your bills and actually have to stress about rent money. It means credit card debt that you can't always keep up with and stress about finances when you or someone in your family needs medical care. Poverty is not romantic and I defy you to find something romantic about being lower-middle-class. The fact that you chose a stable career route probably means that part of you knew you weren't cut out for the lifestyle of a starving artist. You also made the right choice for you.

As for my fellow women out there...God knows we have enough to complain about but before we start railing against "The Man" I think it benefits us to remember that we're not the only ones who have issues to deal with. It's not a man's world anymore than it is a woman's world. It's just one big highly complicated world that we all share. Perhaps we can help each other through it.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
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