I think that Barbie Cougar video touched a nerve, because I am reminded that I am turning 45 in a month. ROWR!! Yes, it’s true — forty-fucking-five. A cougar in winter!
I thought that my impending birthday — one that will officially mean I am closer to 60 than 30, by the way — would mark an appropriate occasion to let you young bitches know a few things they may not tell you about aging. Sure, you know the general ones: face falls, tits and ass sag, liver spots appear, vagina dries out, hair goes gray, etc. I’m here to tell you some other stuff on top of all that stuff. You may be terrified to read it now, but store it away … one day you’ll thank me.
1. Tits sagging can be over-stated. It hasn’t really happened to me yet and my ass is holding on pretty good too. However, a layer of stomach fat appears and IT sags! Pretty! You know those female kitty-cats you see walking around with their little bellies sagging, even though they haven’t had kittens? Yeah, just like that!
2. Remember those older women you’d see with really bad makeup jobs? Lipstick outside the lines, mascara smeared on their cheeks, eyeliner line woefully askew? They aren’t drunks. THEY CAN’T SEE! They don’t know how bad it looks! They glanced in the mirror on their way out of the house and thought they looked dandy! They are making the fatal mistake of not putting reading glasses on to check their makeup all the time. Never do this. At 40, buy yourselves several pairs of reading glasses and magnifying mirrors. Always check your face with either the glasses on or with the mirror. Never leave home without them! Because people won’t pull you aside to say: Do you realize you have eyeliner on the end of your nose? No, they will silently think: “Joan Kennedy.” (more…)
From my favorite web bitch Michael D of Dlisted – freak of nature Nadya Suleman has done what we all feared she would and scored herself a reality show. NO MERCY, HOOKERS.
I want to talk about some of the pop-culture crap I am exposed to every day as a media-friendly Westerner, and my total disinterest in a shedload of said crap. In this day and age, we are in a historically unique and privileged position to suffer from heretofore unseen levels of sensory and information overload, at least half of which is, as mentioned above, absolute crap.
Sometimes I feel like my brain has been peeled off the walls of my skull, drained out through my ears and nose, deposited in a jar of sugary Cool-Aid, shoved in a blender, and then filtered back into my head via a reverse-suction Slurpee straw. By which I mean to say, almost every freshly-gleaned insight and hardwon smattering of knowledge I managed to retain over hundreds of years of schooling is being gradually eroded and sanded to nothingness by a constant stream of gossip that I am internalizing and remembering about the cast of Gray’s Anatomy, a show that I have never seen nor wished to view.
The criteria for a Pop-Culture Cop-Out are loose. These may be things the general, idiot public seem to enjoy, or things that your peer group expect you to enjoy, be that enjoyment ironic, nostalgic, or genuine. It has to be more than a movie that was inexplicably popular (like Wanted, which was so godawful I fell asleep on the couch in a self-directed mercy-kill), but, instead, a franchise that is well-regarded and continues to resonate with the populace, to your utter confusion.
Some cases of Pop-Culture Cop-Out can be attributed to snobbery; in other cases, it’s just that the phenomenon simply never connected with you. In my call-outs, I’m not begrudging the enjoyment other people have experienced from these things (excepting Mariah Carey, maybe); I just want to list a number of pop-culture instances that never resonated with me, for one reason or another, and of which I work hard to maintain my willful ignorance. I have only so many brain cells, and I have to fight for their integrity.
These are things I feel I am meant to respect, but which fail to strike a solitary note of interest in my breast. What follows is a non-chronological history of popular cultural phenomena in which I have utterly failed to participate: (more…)
I don’t know how often this happens on subway systems elsewhere in the world (seemingly most dramatically in Japan, based on this movie I saw when I went through an extended J-Horror phase), but as someone who only takes the tube or rail once a week or so, it seems disturbingly frequent.
You thunder down the escalators and push through the crowd to your platform, barely listening to the station announcements in the background, until your ears pick up: “There will be delays on the Piccadilly line, due to a body on the tracks.” Which I suppose is the sedate way of saying: “Some poor bastard’s thrown himself in front of a train and, man, is it a messy scene.”
In the two or three times I’ve heard this unfortunate announcement, I’ve noticed an interesting reaction in myself, which is often visible or audible among my fellow travelers. First is, “God, how terrible.” And then seconds later, “Fuck, I’m going to be late.” I think this is a fascinating, alarming, and ultimately natural reaction, but how weird when you think about it. You’re hit first by empathy, almost dizzied by the pathos of the human condition, and then so quickly and practically the focus turns to how this unknown person’s initially unrelated tragedy is affecting you.
Last year in the U.K., 194 people killed themselves on the tracks of mass-transit systems, with some 50 of those choosing the sooty tunnels of the Tube. New York City’s subway averages 26 suicides a year. In Paris, 24 died on the tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act — even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken — death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater — for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest of us. (more…)
Today I got an e-mail from a friend, let’s call him Tim. He had forwarded me a Facebook notification he got from a professional associate, let’s call her Kelly. She was inviting him to join a new group she’d started, “Barney Lovers.” It was a fan club for her dog. She is 46 years old. It was a working day in Canada today and she has a big, big job during a very trying time in our industry. Tim’s e-mail to me said only this: “Holy shit.”
This woman has been demoted from friend to friendly acquaintance by me because I couldn’t handle the rampant narcissism. My move to the U.S. allowed me to gently cut her out of my life without it being too obvious. I also had to cut her out of my Facebook newsfeed because I heard about her relentlessly, more than I ever want to hear about anyone, and always with endless quiz results.
My curiosity piqued by the invitation to the doggie fan club, I went to check out her wall. And I saw that in the past couple of days, she’s kept up her blistering pace of doing whatever useless quiz comes her way. (more…)
I want to talk about some of the pop-culture crap I am exposed to every day as a media-friendly Westerner, and my total disinterest in a shedload of said crap. In this day and age, we are in a historically unique and privileged position to suffer from heretofore unseen levels of sensory and information overload, at least half of which is, as mentioned above, absolute crap.
I don’t know how often this happens on subway systems elsewhere in the world (seemingly most dramatically in Japan, based on 
