Mirror, Mirror, Leaning Against the Wall

I accidentally discovered the easiest solution ever for my weight problem.
If only I could market it, I’d be rich.
It happened when it dawned on me that, once my daughter moved back home to work, I would not be able to use her room as my office/personal huge closet. As I was removing all my collection of stuff, I realized that the longest mirror in the house was fixing to be off limits to me sometimes.
So I did what all sensible mothers would do under the circumstances.
I moved the mirror to my room and leaned it against the wall.
And, like Galilee and Thomas Edison and countless inventors before me, I had my own eureka moment when I accidentally looked in the mirror.
Things may appear skinnier than they are.
Apparently, when you look at a person at a certain angle, mostly as if you are looking up, they look really trim and tall. It was a new experience for me. Not unlike the trick mirrors at the county fair each year.
We possess another mirror that I have always claimed had similar secret powers. Now I suspect that this other mirror, too, has some kind of design flaw.
You might be a candidate for my leaning mirror trick...
- if you tell your girlfriends that girdles, not diamonds, are a girl’s best friend. And, yes, like me, you are getting old if you call them girdles, not bodyshapers or spanx.
-if you have strong opinion about the florescent lighting in retail dressing rooms ending with the phrase “I don’t see why we can’t have candle-light!”
-if you grab a pen and paper when your friend tells you her favorite recipe for her juicer.
-if you count the calories in chocolate as medicinal. Okay, maybe that has nothing to do with weight; that may be a female thing.
-you are pretty sure that a good belly laugh burns calories.
-you write columns about mirrors and you actually think someone else might care.
I call my new leaning mirror trick, “The Skinny Angle Principle.” I want credit for discovering it. I’m claiming that it is even more practical than, say, the law of gravity or Newton’s Law.
There are obviously some other easy ways to put the Skinny Angle Principle to work for us.
We can simply make it a habit to stand on stairs. We can bring stools with us to every social function. We can exclusively hang out with six-year-olds and similarly short people.
As a short person myself, I am also working on a corresponding theory: Tall people may not be as skinny as they appear. I find that comforting somehow.
The other good thing about this new discovery is that it gives me the perfect excuse not to bother with actually installing the mirror. It’s not like hanging a mirror will burn that many calories anyway, right?
Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are invited at http://checklistcharlie.blogspot.com or cathykrafve@gmasil.com.