A Better Place

And yet I find myself watching Laguna Beach last Saturday. Mere glimpses throughout this season sufficed to key me into the details of their questionably sordid liasons. Apparently the much-covetted boytoy of one blond bombshell kissed another in front of her, during a family function, leaving all involved in a state of confusion, anger, expressed so vividly by the blunted affect that afflicts these teenage youths, in their noble attempt to appear blazé and over it.

At one point in my existence I would have envied that their woes consisted of deciding which Fendi purse to purchase and which football hunk to fornicate with. And perhaps on that particular Saturday I had been none the wiser. On the same day I had ventured into the palatial Westchester Mall with my roomate, where at once the same blond prototypes surrounded us in clusters, replete with their phones, skin tight jeans, and theatrical makeup. I had wanted to be one of them, hating them only out of envy, because I had missed the youth as they experienced it -- blissful, superfluous, ostentatious.

But something was different that Saturday, whereupon I believed I finally experienced that much-needed epiphany -- that feeling of distance between me and them, and how such comparison is, in fact, non-sensical. For the first time, I fully appreciated my reality, and the beautiful surprises therein, that exist, and promise to reemerge, independent of whatever deprivation I have previously suffered. Then is when I realize that I am the one who truly can be blazé and over it -- because I am in a better place, where the ephermerality of glamour and fantasy no longer apply.

It is good to finally move on.

I don't own a big boat.
- Lee Raymond, Exxon CEO. on the Wall Street Journal Report.

Oh sorry, all's forgiven then. Carry on, old chap. We'll just get back to sucking dicks for gas money,

Get Rich or Try Richie

What I could do is tell you that I am trying not to judge, and perhaps submit that Ms. Richie is, underneath her vapid veneer, a spectacular writer. And that I strongly feel that I must read this book before I pass sentence.

But this would be to lie.

This bespeaks loudly of some megalomaniacal attempt to evoke sympathy for the hardships of our rich, fabulous counterparts. And yes there is a very real human beneath the bronze godess and my God is she an admirable one.

But the truth is that this, in the spirit of Laguna Beach, heralding the end of good sense in our teenage girldom, really brings me to tears.

But this would be to lie again. I really do not care that much. In the end, it's just a few more trees dying.

It's just the way that I love Paula

For you kids, Paula was actually a singer before she was a judge! said the z100 DJ today.
And so my age was felt.
But 15 years after I bought my first tape of American Music (by Ms Abdul), I still knew every word to "Straight Up."
Which I sang in my car, loudly, on the way to Starbucks.
This made me happy.

Madballs for Lunch

Watching VH1's I love the 80s (3D!) I was suddenly reminded of why madballs held particular significance to me. It was not a fan of aesthetically unappealing toys as a child, preferring barbies and My Little Ponies to their more obese counterparts, otherwise known as cabbage patch kids and the neon-haired wrinkled faced trolls. But this was somehow not apparent to my mother. (Somehow the time when I bit another girl because she was allowed to wear a dress and I wasn't didn't clue my mother into the fact that maybe I was a girly girl.)

So for my first lunchbox, instead of buying me one festooned with the likes of Rainbow Brite or My Little Pony, it was one, composed of flattering neon-green plastic, depicting madballs in all their wide-mouthed, buck-toothed, eyeball-enucleated glory, jumping out at a crowd of terrified school children. I was to scared to complain, and merely made it a point to press the pictoral side of the box to my body, hoping to fool my peers into thinking that some product-developer at Mattel was stoned enough to come up with a neon green Barbie box.

The idea of ugly toys always fascinated me. It seems to me that children should be revolted by such inventions as the madball, as I was. I never understood how prepubescent girls found those Cabbage Patch kids, with their cushionoid features complete with pin-sized eyes and obese habitus, appealing. One wonders if indeed advertising could be persuasive, as to catapult these terrible products en masse into public consumption -- and succeed! And if this were the case, how sad it is to think that the (assumed) good aesthetic sense of our youth can be led astray so easily.

Luckily, their attention span is often as ephermeral as their good taste, and such fads fade until VH1 bring them into our recollection, at which point they, all grown up, will scoff at their past temporary insanity, and continue playing with their Furbies.

Laguna Bitch

Why do I feel like Laguna Beach is a part of a conspiracy to make 98% of the female race feel inferior in their station in life? The trials and tribulations of the rich and gorgeous. And I was wearing tapered Lees and Mickey Mouse T-shirts, taking the late bus home from Math Team during high school. One likes to imagine, albeit falsely, that some justice exists there.

Hurt

Mired in a world of hurt, I find the internal discourse shifting away from narcissistically questioning the rejection of the other, and toward validating these feelings altogether in the grand scheme of things. There has been greater hurt, in response to greater spurn, but oh how the experience, experienced, precludes any rational stratification of woe and pain, such that a mere scratch, inflicted on one's own body, becomes tantamount to the genocide of nations.

And so in this I refuse to feel guilty, and indulge in my self-defined suffering. Judge me if you dare.