A House on the 101?

Today I woke up to find out two very interesting things: the house had been removed from the Cahuenga Pass, and anorexic actress Isabelle Caro is featured in an ad campaign designed to coincide with fashion week in Milan.FIRST: There has been a house stuck on the 101 Freeway – the Cahuenga Pass – in Los Angeles for 11 days. The house was being moved from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita by the owner who was trying to save money by moving it himself.

Question #1: Who moves his actual HOUSE from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita? You know there’s something called buying and selling, and the house I saw on the side of the freeway….

Anyway, as he rolled his house on down the road the wheels started to come loose from the trailer. He made some emergency repairs, halting traffic for some time, then got back on the move.

Question #2: When the WHEELS come loose from your self-built trailer, don’t you maybe, call a professional to come help, thinking “maybe I didn’t build this so well,” instead of puttin’ them back on yourself?

Next he got to the Western Avenue Bridge and guess what? The house was too tall to go under, so what happened? The roof was sheared right off.

Question #3: don’t you check the height of your house against the height of any overpasses BEFORE you decide to move your HOUSE from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita yourself?

At this point professionals WERE called and it took over three hours to get the house unstuck from the bridge. Then they moved it up to the Cahuenga Pass where there was enough room to park it on the shoulder of the freeway while they figured out what to do next.For the next 10 days this guy tried to get permits and figure out a way to move his house off the freeway and get it back on the road to Santa Clarita. And guess what was happening to the house during these 10 days? Wow, you’re smart – of course! People were vandalizing his roofless house.Apparently during the 10 days he couldn’t figure out a way to move the house on his own because this morning, the 11th day, CalTrans finally hauled it off on THEIR own, at HIS expense.

Question #4: while your house sits on the side of the freeway with no roof, wouldn’t you immediately call some professionals to move it, as, oh, maybe, someone might break in?

SECOND: And this is far more serious… Actress Isabelle Caro is on billboards all over Milan, nude, showing off her 65lb frighteningly thin, anorexic body in an effort to bring eating disorders to the forefront of Milan fashion week.

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Skin and bones on the runways, ie the “size zero” debate has been ongoing for the last two years and is something I’ve even written about for publications like the London Evening Standard. It is far more debated in Europe than America. In fact, in Milan models under the age of 16 are no longer able to walk the runways, nor are models with a body mass index of less than 18. And I believe London followed suit.

Having grown up in the world of classical ballet I witnessed more than my fair share of eating disorders. I even started my college education wanting to study them at the neuroscientific level. I always wanted to see them from the body dysmorphic point of view – to see what a girl with an eating disorder saw in the mirror.

Isabelle, at 65lb and probably about 5′ 6″ or so, has admitted that her body is grossly disfigured and wants to share it with the world, and yet for 15 years she has suffered and cannot stop. What is it that motivates her? I have always wanted to understand on both an emotional and scientific level.

But I have too mention another note about eating…and please do not think that I take any sort of radical weight loss disorder lightly. I do not. Whether it is too much exercise with too little food or extreme bulimia by way of syrup of ipecac and and a regimen of laxatives. All are horrible disorders, painful to live through, painful for loved ones and hard to overcome. And many never overcome but live with.

But I would be negligent if I did not mention these statistics:

It is estimated that 1% of the U.S. population is anorexic and 4% suffer from bulimia.It is estimated that 66% of the U.S. population is overweight or obese.

We’ve got to fight both sides of the eating disorder problem. Eating disorder doesn’t just mean anorexia or bulimia anymore. It also means overeating, lack of exercise, poor diets – all leading to massive health problems: heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol… The U.S. has many forms of eating disorders to deal with, problems that European and Asian countries don’t necessarily have to fight.

So please, when you think about what’s happening in Europe, remember we’re a different country with a different set of problems.