All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

Throwing the Tiger out with the Bathwater

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E.O. Schaub

“I don’t know, I’m just so, I guess… disenchanted by the whole thing,” a twenty-something young man walking the opposite direction was saying into his cell phone. As our family hurried into the Essex Junction Exposition, weighted down with an impressive assortment of snacks, hats, blankets and sunscreen, I didn’t have much time to ponder this statement. After all, we had an urgent roster of tasks to accomplish in the next 30 minutes— 1. Register, 2. Visit Bathroom, 3. Find Our Schoolmates, and 4. Get Daughter’s Hair And Face Painted in Garish, Girly Colors— in that order.

We were walking with the stream-like flow of hundreds of other families and seemingly ka-jillions of young Vermont girls into the fairgrounds for one of the most highly anticipated events of our Spring: the Girls On the Run 5K.

For those of you without girls in third grade or older, I will explain that Girls on the Run, along with its partner program for older girls Girls on Track, is something of a phenomenon. The idea, as I understand it, is to combine exercise and healthy living with self-esteem to prepare girls for the onslaught of negative emotions and body image that await them as tweens, teens, and young adults. “Education and preparing girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living,” is the motto posted on the banner of the non-profit’s website, which boasts “more than 150 Girls on the Run councils across the United States and Canada.”

But wait, it gets better. On the “Our Program” page under “Vision” the final goal listed is “to assist in nothing less that a complete transformation in the way girls and women perceive themselves and their place in society.” Continue reading Throwing the Tiger out with the Bathwater →

Chemical Soup

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E.O. Schaub

 

Every once in a while you hear one of these random statistics that actually applies to you, and you sit up and pay a little more attention. Like a few months back I was pretty happy to hear Vermont was officially the healthiest state. Numero uno! How cool is that? I thought to myself, as if I personally had contributed to the state of overall healthiness by first: choosing to live here and second: managing not to get hit by a bus or fall down an elevator shaft on a daily basis. Yay for me! Us! Whatever! We’re not dead!

 

Even without the United Health Foundation’s annual beknighting of the healthiest state (take that Minnesota!) we all have this unconscious assumption- don’t we?- that living in a rural, traditionally agricultural community is a badge of some intrinsic kind of healthiness. So when we hear news like this we smile as if something we knew all along has been confirmed.

 

The tricky thing about these random statistics, though, is that before you can so much as pat yourself on the back for having the foresight to live in a particular place or be born from some genetically fantastic parents or whatever, you can bet your healthy little fanny there’ll be another random statistic coming down the pike to make you hopelessly depressed again.

 

In my case it was the stunner of a realization that Vermont, and my area of Vermont in particular, has some fairly high cancer rates: the incidence of three big ones- colorectal, breast and cervical- all reportedly higher than national average. Whoops. Yes, we’re all just delightfully healthy right up until the polyps metastasize. Continue reading Chemical Soup →

Razzmatazz is the New Black

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My friend told me the other day she needed a black dress for a funeral she is going to be in this summer.

 

No wait- wait… wedding, sorry, it’s a wedding she’s in. Right. So of course, she needs a black dress. To be in the wedding party. Of course. Will the bride wear black too, I wonder? How about the flower girls? Will the bouquets be black? How about the cake? Perhaps the guests could all throw black beans instead of rice.

 

And then at the reception they could all enjoy a nice aperitif of human blood and perform a ritual sacrifice. How festive.

 

Seriously, are Miss Manners and I the only ones who have a problem with this idea that black works with e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g? That it’s appropriate for every conceivable occasion from christenings to space shuttle launchings? Since when did the color of Darth Vader and Hell’s Angels jackets get to be our collective color of choice? Our default hue? The chicken with broccoli on the fashion menu of life? Heck- black is so devastatingly important to our sense of style that it is now THE COLOR against which all others are measured, as in: “Brown is the new black!” and “Pink is the new black!” And then guess what? That’s right: “Black is back!” And so on.

 

Personally, I have had it up to HERE with all the supposed truisms: choose black dear, black goes with everything you know! That’s what makes it so economical! And everyone looks good in it… plus it is so very slimming!

 

You know what black also does? It collects pet hair. It’s hot. It makes regular people look pale and pale people look nauseous. Look black up in the dictionary and you find words like: bleak, dim, dark, sinister, grim, mordant and opprobrious. Do you want to dress opprobriously? I didn’t think so. Continue reading Razzmatazz is the New Black →