Due to the changes that are being made to our publication, our old website, inthisweek.com is no longer accessible. We knew that the website was going to be taken down but we did not have any warning as to when it would happen. It went something like this...
The new website is up.
Holy shit, the old website is gone! How are we going to get all of our articles?
Luckily, I have access to an archive of that old website, for which I wrote a large amount of blogs and nearly five years of my work is published on. So, I am going to start adding some of my favorite blogs and articles to this site so that my work is not lost forever.
I will include the original posting date at the end of each blog and hopefully some of the older stuff will still be entertaining to readers.
Let's start with this one:
"Kendra's Reality Woes"
When former playmate Kendra Wilkinson was one of the three Girls Next Door living in Hugh Hefner's mansion, she was more of a Sporty Spice to me than a Playmate, and quite honestly, she annoyed the hell out of me. I am not sure if it was after she found love with Hank Baskett Jr., or after she became pregnant and had a baby, but somewhere along the way, Wilkinson became more tolerable to me. I would stumble upon her show, "Kendra", on E!, and would find myself stopping on the channel, and actually staying there until the show was over. This usually resulted in marathon episodes of "Kendra" in one sitting because it seemed to be my luck that every time I stumbled upon E! it would be during one of their reality marathons.
Nowadays, I find myself an avid "Kendra" watcher. How this happened I have yet to figure out. But Kendra somehow became not-so-annoying to me and even though I am still not a fan of her laugh, I watch her post-pregnancy and find myself not only feeling sorry for her, but actually identifiying with her!
My newfound television connection with Kendra is not because I have had a child, because that is definitely not the case, but more so because the former Playmate goes through an extremely hard time dealing with her new body, which she reveals is now at a size 27, and was a size 23 before becoming pregnant.
With my hips and a bootie that just won't quit, I can only dream of what being a size 23 would be like. But, I can sympathize with gaining unwanted weight, and looking at yourself in the mirror with sadness and disgust. No matter how you look to other people, it's the person in the mirror that judges the hardest. It's Kendra's vulnerability in this season's episodes that I connect with. When watching her cry to her husband over her big belly (that really still looks like there is a baby in it), while her hot and thin Playmate friends are in the other room, I found myself getting emotional and my eyes tearing up a bit. She actually appeared human. Yeah, she is married to a hot NFL player, and lived in the Playboy mansion and is making more money off of one episode of "Kendra" than I will probably ever make in my entire life, but by god the woman is human. No amount of money could make her look at her new figure and feel comfortable.
So, Kendra hires a trainer and works her ass off. All the while, I am rooting for her from my couch while sometimes eating those 100 calorie bags of popcorn. As I find myself looking forward to the next new "Kendra" episode, I decide that I will work out the free way, and pretend that this Hollywood charmer is my workout buddy. With weekly updates on her weightloss progress, I feel like I can compare my progress to her. I know it sounds crazy, but I swear Kendra somehow wrapped me around her finger and I decided that since I can relate to how she is feeling with the whole bigger body thing, I don't want to be getting bigger while she slims back down.
Way to go E!, you have done the impossible and I now call myself a Kendra fan. Dear god, reality TV strikes again.
(this blog was originally written for inthisweek.com on April 15, 2010)
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