Godammit, I’m Mad!

Sylvia Plath was a crazy mother, but what should we make of her son’s suicide? We know that depression runs in families, but most of us manage to hang on, even if our mothers were crazy.

Maybe when a family member commits suicide, it presents itself as an option that wouldn’t otherwise be considered. My own mother liked to threaten suicide, but her theatrics only went as far as rattling her pill bottles.

I had a phase, a few years ago, of routinely announcing that I wanted to put my head in the oven. I still think it’s a funny image. I am hoping to find a jeweler who will collaborate with me on my vision of a gold medallion depicting a little oven with legs sticking out of it. In memory of Sylvia, the feet would be wearing low-heeled pumps.

The other day, my ex noted that his uncle and a cousin had committed suicide, but he had an excuse for both of them; they didn’t really count, in his opinion. Men can be funny about depression, because it goes against their gender description.  Yet they kill themselves far more often than woman do, in a ratio of 4 to 1 in the US.  Are women more adept at suffering? My feeling is Yes.

When a famous person commits suicide, it’s always a blow. It makes me wonder why they didn’t wait another day, or call their doctor, or just stay in bed. Nicholas Hughes seems by all accounts to have been a vibrant, talented and lovely human being, who didn’t suffer from depression until his father died from cancer. It sounds like the loss broke his heart, and he simply couldn’t recover.

When Hunter Thompson killed himself, my prevailing reaction was resentment. How could someone so pugnacious just give in like that? What a quitter!

People who commit suicide are not only depressed but impulsive, apparently. Most important, they have lost all sense of humor. Sylvia Plath should have waited around, until the image above struck her as funny. I’m glad my own crazy mother set a better example by sticking around and tormenting us until she was 73.

It’s hard to believe that Phil Spector (above with his crazy wife Rachelle) is STILL on trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson. But on Friday, the prosecution rested its case against him. The last person to testify was Lana Clarkson’s mother, Donna, who maintains that her daughter’s purchase of eight pairs of shoes just prior to her death proves that she was not suicidal.

Apart from the fact that we already know Phil Spector is guilty, the shoe argument is a convincing one. At first, anyway.

Eight pairs of new shoes seems like a really optimistic investment, a gesture of hope. That’s a lot of shoes, even to me. If I was planning to kill myself, I know I wouldn’t buy eight pairs of shoes first.

Lana Clarkson went shoe shopping with her mother at Nordstrom, looking for flats to wear at her new job. She found eights pairs of black flats, including the Mary Jane’s she was wearing when she died. Her mom loaned her the money for the shoes, a total of $150.

150 divided by eight is….I can’t do math, but it means the shoes were cheap. This makes me reassess the whole suicide thing. What if you went home with eight boxes of awful cheap shoes and thought, God, why do I even bother to live?! That I can relate to.

I ran this by my husband, who replied, “But it’s Nordstrom, she could’ve taken them back.” He is well aware of Nordstrom’s liberal return policy, since he has driven me there to return things at least a thousand times.

But that’s not the point, duh! Even if you knew you could return them, the horror of having bought so many black flats might in fact be overwhelming. If you were already depressed, it could push you over the edge.

Of course, whatever Lana was feeling on the night she went home with Phil Spector, he blew her brains out. There is more than enough proof of that. His new lawyer is attempting to defend him by showing that Spector doesn’t hate and threaten women, specifically, but rather he hates and threatens men, too. It’s a brilliant defense strategy if the jury has been lobotomized.

However, I’m stuck with the idea of shoes and suicide. Maybe I’ll have to have a philosophical discussion with Imelda Matt. Until then, here is a pair of shoes that make me want to kill myself. They’re on sale at endless.com for only $771.81.

My Best Friend’s Girl

This is a godawful romantic comedy that grates on the nerves and delivers another worthless performance by Kate Hudson in the role of a smiley airhead/vixen. Dane Cook is predictably repellent as the wise-cracking love-interest. The plot is familiar and the dialogue runs the gamut from excruciating to enraging. The only point of interest is the question of why Kate Hudson keeps getting paid to make movies that tank. Why can’t she go away and leave us the fuck alone?!

Nights in Rodanthe

Here are Richard Gere and Diane Lane paired again after making that thriller where she cheats on him with a yummy foreign guy. This time, love blossoms between Gere and Lane just when they’ve given up hope of ever finding Mr/Ms. Right! The romantic locales and the surging soundtrack provide the perfect background for these two glamorous Botox addicts to show how much they can fake emotion.  But where is the gerbil?? Expect laughter and tears from the desperate spinsters in the audience. Only see this movie if you need to take your mom somewhere for a couple of hours.

Body of Lies

Leonardo Dicaprio turns in another impressive performance as a haunted man with conflicting loyalties. Leo runs around trying not to get killed as he attempts to sort out the truth about something. Russell Crowe is the perfect foil for Leo, in a role that shows how different he looks when he changes his hairstyle. It’s a battle of wits as Leo and Russell fight against the clock to come to a concluding chase scene that will have you saying “No wonder Leo gets all those supermodels!” As Imelda Matt writes, “….a wankfest!”

The Women

This is a debacle that will make you thankful for your own face when you get home and look in the mirror. A terrible excuse for a chick movie, The Women is a pathetic stab at revamping the career of Med Ryan, featuring a bunch of actresses you don’t care about except for Eva Mendes, just a little bit, because she hasn’t made you detest her yet. Give her time. Do not even think of renting this movie when it comes out on DVD unless you want to contemplate killing yourself.

*NOTE: I canceled the Weekend Festival of Hate in order to maintain my hatred-level for PAP Smear.