Godammit, I’m Mad!

I am truly blessed in the sister department. One of my sisters who lives in a Scandinavian country and who I will call “Clinique,” posted this on facebook:

[My daughter's school-class is taking a trip to Poland and] will be visiting Auschwitz concentration camps. It should be an amazing, informative, and emotional trip.

I can’t even describe my reaction to this.

But I’ll focus on the word usage. When she writes ‘Auschwitz concentration camps’ does she mean, as opposed to the Auschwitz Bar and Grill or the Auschwitz Shopping Center?

Meanwhile,Tennis just sent a list of her services to the trust, which included a charge of $600 to prepare six checks.

Whenever I walk to Whole Foods with friends, we have an adventure, and not just the one where tall thin women ram you with their shopping carts.

This time, it was a guy with an enormous didgeridoo.  We had been drinking coffee, watching the circus that is Whole Foods, Venice. My friend asked the guy if he had made his didgeridoo, and he said Yes. He added that he used it for Sound Therapy.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw a documentary called Kumare, about an American-born Indian guy who decides to pose as a guru, to see if people will fall for it. Sure enough, everywhere he goes, people lap up his idiotic impersonation of a Mystic, exclaiming how they can feel his powerful energy, etc, etc. I found it depressing. People are so stupid. Or as my husband put it, more charitably, “People want someone to follow.”

Anyway, there is a Sound Healer in Kumare who uses a didgeridoo, and he looks alot like the guy at Whole Foods. “Were you in that Kumare movie?” I asked him accusingly. He seemed baffled and said no. He wanted me to sit down and let him demonstrate his therapy. He instructed me to focus on “an intention.”  I asked him if he was going to find out what’s wrong with me, secretly thinking “If he only knew!”

A handsome Black man intervened cheerfully, “Why does there gotta be something wrong with you?” He was wearing a fedora and eating a cup of Whole Foods ice cream. He looked as contented as a human being could be. I didn’t want to spoil his mood by answering him.

The Sound Therapist started blowing into his didgeridoo, moving it slowly up and down my back. It felt great! I could feel the sound waves vibrating through my body and I pretended they were evacuating evil spirits. It was extremely pleasurable.

When he was through, he asked me if I had pain in my lower back, noting that he could sense this with the didgeridoo. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I told him that while I had pain everywhere, my lower back was a place that sometimes hurt.

The truth is, my lower back is probably one of the few places where I don’t feel pain. I don’t believe in any kind of New Age healing. I don’t believe in gurus, gods, angels, the I Ching, the Secret, Tarot Cards, reiki, colonics, or anything else.

Time doesn’t heal either, as we know. But coffee is wonderful and so is Whole Foods, if you don’t buy your groceries there.

I was excited to see this competitor of Tragic Fashion Boy on Disney Rollergirl’s blog tonight.  He’s as thin and miserable looking as anyone could ask for, isn’t he? I need to name him. Suggestions?

So I looked around for more pictures and discovered that this fancy embroidered jacket from the new Saint Laurent Fall/Winter collection is priced at $62,000.  But obviously it’s worth every penny.

Now I need to know how much they want for this fancy cape. Which is beyond perfect with the ingeniously ripped jeans.   Who will curate these items, do you think?

While I tried to adjust to all of this decadence and starvation, I stumbled across a “pop star and fashion icon” called G-Dragon who is like a Korean punk Barbie only male, but just barely. I won’t spoil the excitement by posting any photos of G-Dragon. Google him and feel the joy.

I was thrilled by a heads-up from my UK boyfriend David Duff, directing me to the wonderful lady above. Her name is Mariam, and according to her, the beard is the result of an experiment: She wanted to see what would happen if she stopped removing her persistent chin hair. Voila ! Now she works for a circus.

I’d like to work for a circus, but I’m not going to grow a beard.  I’d like to have thicker eyebrows and more armpit hair, even if it didn’t involve a circus job. More realistically, women my age should be busy signing up their best friends to care for their chin hair should they end up incapacitated in a nursing home.

Mariam probably knows that Alice B. Toklas was known for her luxuriant mustache.

I happen to love bearded ladies. I didn’t know they still existed, although I remember seeing a bearded lady in line at Toys R Us around thirty years ago. If only cell phones had been invented!

It’s easy to accept a woman’s mustache when she is Frida Kahlo. Other women might want to think twice. Even my Special Sister feels a personal bond with Frida, as she states so eloquently in her own blog: “I have always felt a strong connection to Frida Kahlo. She embraced her natural hairiness and even broke her pelvis…whadda coincidence! As much as a painter, I look to Frida as a style icon. “

Alas, I see no resemblance.

Many of the famous bearded Ladies who toured with circuses in the late 19th century look suspiciously like men wearing dresses. And that’s okay with me, because I love a man in a dress.

Ladies, are you ready to grow a beard, or will they bury you with a tweezer in your cold dead hands?

I thought I was alone in my sympathy for murderess Jodi Arias, but look, there is a whole website in support of her, unless they are joking, in which case I salute them. Actually, I salute them either way.

Like many people with no lives, I am hooked on Jodi’s trial. But I am totally on her side. I don’t blame her for killing Travis.

I’m not saying that she should have killed him, just that I understand.

When I look at Jodi, I see a poor girl who has never been loved, who was so desperate to be loved that she would do anything, be anyone, in exchange for affection. In my fantasy of Jodi, she was an ugly duckling who has worked hard to make herself attractive to men. She bleached her hair, got breast implants, plucked out her eyebrows, and even then she had to invite some Mormon douchebag to ejaculate on her face just to experience some facsimile of love.

Deep in my soul, I am Jodi, an unlovable girl with murder in my heart.

I have never had come on my face, nor have I put up with a boring ass-obsessed motivational speaker/salesman. Still, I feel a bond of unlovability.  I will thank my parents for this. Thanks, parents!

I haven’t shot or stabbed anyone because I hate violence and I will always duck or run if someone wants to hit me.  I know it’s wrong to kill Travis, but fuck him. Hearing his phone-sex with Jodi is to want him dead.

You probably think I’m being satirical or contrarian but I am sincere in this position. Not that I’d give Jodi a penny, even for her fabulous drawing of Lucille Ball.

(art © Jodi Arias)

Intermezzo was a movie starring Ingrid Bergman, and of course it’s a musical term. Now it’s also a drug for people who wake up in the middle of the night. I’ve seen ads for Intermezzo at least ten times tonight while watching TV. In the last week, I must have seen the ad 100 times. I almost know the side effects by heart. (In depressed patients, there is a risk of suicide. Not suicidal ideation, but suicide.)

You might also drive, eat or engage in “other activities” while not fully awake, without remembering the event the next day. Other abnormal behaviors include aggression, confusion, hallucinations and agitation. Common side effects are headaches, nausea and fatigue.

Is it worth all this shit for a few hours of drugged sleep? It is right to market Intermezzo as a brand new drug when it’s just Ambien at a lower dose?  Why this deluge of  TV commercials? I can answer the last question:

“Facing lower-than-expected demand for sleep drug Intermezzo, Purdue Pharma and Transcept Pharmaceuticals are broadening the commercial strategy to include DTC and a larger selling force.

Intermezzo is a sublingual version of Sanofi’s blockbuster insomnia pill Ambien (zolpidem). But the new formulation, approved in November 2011 and introduced earlier this year, has had a lethargic launch. Hence, the firms are rolling out a $29-million DTC ad campaign and, for the first time, tapping into Purdue’s analgesics sales force of 525 reps to call on PCPs and retail pharmacies. Another 90 contract reps will detail specialists.

“There are a few ads for Lunesta out there, but the market has been fairly quiet,” said Transcept president/CEO Glenn Oclassen on a conference call this morning. “So we get to take fullest possible advantage of that and believe this level of expenditure will be sufficient to get the impact being sought.” (more here)

Oh no, the ad is playing again RIGHT NOW! Unbelievable.  I won’t be happy about this until the lawsuits start rolling in.

Which one do you want more?

or

I went to see my psychiatrist when he returned from his three week vacation. Before I could make a peremptory statement about my hair, he said brightly: “New Hair!”

He had no idea what I’ve been through, hair-wise. This is the new corrected hair, a desperate follow-up to the horror of the Real Housewives hair. It is so much better, right? But still a shock to my system and a challenge to my identity.

I started to say something about the hair and he continued happily, “It’s a softer look.”

Naturally, I took umbrage and we talked about hair and self-image for the rest of the psychiatric hour.

I don’t want a softer look, first of all, because that implies that my former look was hard, or harsh. I don’t want a softer look because I don’t want to project “softness.” If I have to project anything, I would choose tough. Then he confused me further by calling my former look “forbidding.” I argued that I wasn’t trying to look forbidding but merely “attractive.”

Then we had to define the audience I wanted to appear attractive to. I explained that I wanted to be attractive to the guy in the next lane if I wanted to cut in front of him. If I’m attractive, he will smile and gesture me into his lane. Being attractive is a tool in one’s social arsenal.

We talked about black hair and red lipstick, which I defended as a classic look, citing Snow White, Betty Page, and Veronica in “Archie” comics.  If you have black hair and pale skin, you need to work with what you have. You’re not going to be a California blond, after all. The way I look is pretty consistent with how I looked at eighteen. Clearly, in the eyes of my shrink, I looked like a kooky Goth or maybe a biker/dominatrix.

I had to deconstruct my appearance and think about the message it sends to the world. We are all attempting to project something with our hairstyles and fashion choices. I’d rather not think about it but I discovered that above all I want to look attractive, while still being true to who I think I am. I want to look fuckable and intriguing but I don’t want to look fashionable and I don’t feel comfortable in prints or high heels. I don’t want a Softer Look. I hate change. If I’m not projecting the right Me, I will have to dye my hair black and find a new way to distract myself from the bludgeoning pain of existence. I will also have wasted a fucking ton of money.

Thoughts, confessions, insults?

Aside from life and death, hair is all that matters. A really bad hair situation will trump  everything else, and I mean everything.

Fucked up hair is excruciating. The pain is relentless. The knowledge that it’s your own fault makes it a source of  bitter self-loathing. “Why did I do this? Why wasn’t I satisfied with the hair I had?” Every encounter with a mirror is a fresh horror.

If both my legs were broken, I would still be wailing about my hair. If I had thirty seconds to live, I would scream, “But my hair looks awful!”

Fiscal cliffs, gun nuts, my dog’s toothache, our fine young men and women in Afghanistan, none of it matters like my bad hair. It was once long and luxurious and black, even though it was frizzy and brittle. Now I look like a Real Housewife from Somewhere.

If character is destiny, I’m a complete cunt. But I can’t go on like this. Tomorrow I’m going to try to change it back, or at least restore its brunetteness.

If you hate me, this should be a great moment for you. Enjoy! If you love me, then pray to the god of your understanding that my hair turns out okay.

Watching the news tonight, I am struck by the word “evil” in reference to the shootings in Connecticut.

A disturbed 20 year old young man who lives with his mother, has no friends, hasn’t spoken to his older brother for two years and is remembered only for his nervousness and inability to fit in….that is not evil. I see no possible evil in this tormented soul.

A mother who hoards firearms and leaves them around her house, now that might be evil, since no one could be so astoundingly careless and stupid.

I am dreading the revelations to come.