SWAG

Maybe you've heard of SWAG...a standard acronym (you know, one of those words where each letter is the first letter of another word--see, I remember something from elementary school) apparently meaning "Southern Women Aging Gracefully." Considering the sweltering humidity and the steam wafting off the pots of those beautiful green beans with fabulous bacon fat swimming in them that is so iconic of the South I would think that Botox clinics would be few and far between.

Although I wonder if microdermabrasion clinics--(is that the sandblasting thing for pores?) rake in the dough in the South with the humidity opening up the pores like ant architects diggin' swimmin' holes...I should know, they've been using my pores as war bunkers for years even when I wasn't living in the South, now they use them for community bomb shelters.

Drive on any highway in Houston and you will see billboards for liposuction, lap-bands, laser hair removal, miles and miles of cosmetic surgeons, etc. In Colorado the closest thing to this I saw was a billboard for a dog spa. It seems that if there are so many billboards in Houston for cosmetic help then there must certainly be a market for it. So yeah, I'd say that Southern Women are absolutely aging "gracefully" if the number of ads on the highway is any indication.

However, between the "chicken-fried everything" I'm consuming on a regular basis, the sweet tea that I can find in almost every restaurant (the nectar of the gods), and my freelance writing career which involves me sitting on my rump all week writing at the computer and engaging my dog in staring contests I am going to predict that in several years I will be able to start my own SWAG club and call it "Southern Writers Asses Gigantus" and we can all go get our lipo together with all that moolah we'll make from freelancing. We can probably even call it a tax deduction. Genius!