The Secret Handshake: Do You Really Need an MFA to Get Published?

If you answered "no" then click here.

Quotidian. Why use quotidian when mundane works just as well?  Don't try citing some subtle shade of connotation, because there isn't one; they mean the same damn thing, except ninety-five percent of the English-speaking world could tell you what mundane means.  Barring mundane, why not give everyday, commonplace, or ordinary a day in court?  Too quotidian?

Using quotidian, you're not trying to tell us what the office is like, or describe Chester's workaday habits, or what materials an artist used for his pieces - unless you're Lionel Shriver, you're being deliberately obscure to add mystery to your piece, to make the reader work a little harder and invest more of herself.

I see the word all the time.

"Look out! The Quotidians are behind you!"

That, and words like it.  Elegiac ("expressing sorrow") is one.  Anodyne ("uncontentious or inoffensive") is another.  To me, it's all grandiloquent ("Pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, esp. in a way that is intended to impress").

I think my vocabulary is better than the average bear's.  If you're not David Foster Wallace, it ain't right to have me running for the dictionary (well, for Google).  It's also no comment on my lack of education (I hope) because it's the same words over and over.

I remember a poster in my sixth grade English class, back in the days when it was called Language.  Flying in the face of the Mighty Elmore Leonard (see Rule #3), this poster declared, "Said is Dead; Use These Instead."  An alphabetical list of words which wouldn't make it past an AP writing class followed- Argued, Berated, Chided, Declared, etc.  Seeing elegiac in four different books I've read in the last two months makes me imagine a spreadsheet handed out at creative writing programs across the country; Simplicity is Dead; Use These Instead.

Leonard says, "if it sounds like writing, re-write it."  John D. MacDonald says, "Author intrusion is, 'Gee, Mama, look how nice I'm writing!'"  John Dufresne says, "thou shalt not be obscure."

Look, I'm all for high fallutin language if it serves the voice of a piece.  I like learning new words, particularly from a Shriver or a Wallace who knows how to use them.  But most of the time these words just seem underlined.  If you tell me your book is a "bildungsroman" rather than "a coming-of-age novel," you're proffering the secret MFA handshake.

McWriterface, listen closely: shake off all those fancy words you discovered pursuing your degree.  They are weighty words and you need to build up your muscles before you can lift them properly.  I see intransigent ("unyielding") and suddenly you're not trying to tell me a story, you're waving your MFA in my face.  You can't expect editors to stop these words because they all have their MFAs, too.  So it's up to you, Authorton.

Only you can prevent grandiloquence, Authorton... only you.

if we want hell then hell is what we'll have

And I would turn on the TV

But it's so embarrassing

To see all the other people

I don't even know what they mean

And it was magic at first

But let everyone down

And now this world is gonna hurt

You better turn it around

Turn it around

- Jack Johnson, Cookie Jar

While researching stupid criminals on which to base the crime spree of Betty Corona and Eric Clueless, I came across a great deal of crime which is the opposite of funny.  In the glut of horror which news channels drool over in the pursuit of ratings, three stand out.

First, there’s one I’ve heard many people talking about, the 17-year-old whose parents wouldn’t let him have a house party.  He decided the thing to do was beat them to death with a hammer and throw a party anyway, with their murdered corpses locked in their bedroom.  He told a friend about it during the party, and the friend called 911.

Maybe the murderous teen used the same tone another teen at a different party might use to confide a venial sin; dude, I raided my parent’s liquor cabinet for this; they’re so gonna kill me.  Maybe he was bragging.  We don’t know yet.  He’s not cute like that girl who killed her baby and got away with it, so the spotlight only flickers over him.  You can read about his crime and watch videos on websites which make snide comments like it’s more “news of the weird,” the same websites which invite you to vote on celebrity hotness and rate fad diets.

The next is also getting a lot of play, the California woman who cut off her estranged husband’s penis and threw it down a garbage disposal.  I was in college when Lorena Bobbit created a national punch line by cutting off John Wayne Bobbit’s penis.  He was abusive, beating and raping her over the course of their six-year marriage.  On the night in question, he came home drunk, raped her, passed out, and she reacted violently.    

By contrast, the California woman drugged her ex, tied him up, waited for him to regain consciousness, then cut his penis off.  People seem to be taking this one much more seriously.  In 1993, there were a few pundits who did not see the funny.  They asked readers to imagine if the roles were reversed; would anyone be laughing if some husband waited for his wife to pass out, then cut her breasts off / sewed her vagina shut / cut her nose off?  These few were a minority.  Even they conceded that while the reverse was horrific, there was nothing on a woman’s body that had achieved the symbolic status of masculinity (and even abuse) as the penis.  

There was no way to prove abuse beyond Lorena’s word, but Bobbit has abused the two wives he’s had since so I think we can agree that Lorena didn’t make it up to avoid conviction.  Since we couldn’t be clear on the couple’s dark history, at the time the general reaction was, Hey, the penis got sewn back on - no harm, no foul.  Folks want the California woman locked up for life for various offenses, including torture.  We don’t know what the history is with the California couple beyond the woman’s curt declaration to the cop who picked her up; “He deserved it.”

Then there was a squib I haven’t heard anyone talking about.  A couple of California meth addicts attempted to sell their 6-month-old baby outside of a Walmart for $25.  It’s the type of awful crime, the loveless, soulless, everyday atrocity so senseless and terrible you know it will never make a Leno monologue.

Except it does.  Snarky bloggers use the $25 dollar Walmart baby as a punchline about rock-bottom pricing.  You can envision a world, years from now, so lacking in empathy, so inured to cruelty, that crimes like these become fodder not for anonymous bloggers but are exploited on network TV by beloved comedians.  It’s no world you want to be a part of, but you are.  You are living in this world, this country, day by day, and every day we lose a little empathy toward our fellow man, every day the collective “norm” takes another step toward a national pychopathy.  

Is the world getting worse?  In the early 20th century, a woman used a cutting board and a kitchen knife to behead her baby because “I always thought there was something wrong with him.”  Now we have Casey Anthony.  As far as I can see, atrocity has always been with us.  It’s the way we act about it that’s getting me down.

“The way we act, or rather don’t act.”  That’s what I wanted to like to write.  But we’re beyond not acting.  Our attention feeds the machine.  By enjoying the 24-hour news coverage - even if your enjoyment is rooting against the criminal, or hoping to see justice done, or marveling at where we stand as a society, you are enjoying the broadcast - we are complicit.

  

Your Reviews Suck and I Hate You

I’ve gotten into a habit which is sure to give me an ulcer - reading bad reviews of books I love. 

First, there’s Amazon.  When I first heard that top reviewers were getting paid to write good reviews for books before they came out, I was angry but not surprised.  Damn, I thought those reviews were legit!  Followed by, It’s Amazon, what low business practice won’t they do?  

That’s what you get for trusting the internet.  Turns out these top reviewers are “paid” in free books.  Advanced Readers Copies, Uncorrected Proofs, Advanced Readers Editions, these are the pennies, nickels, and dimes with which top-rated Amazon reviewers are compensated.  And me, frankly.  

This is bribery! went the internet cry.  Publishers are trading free books for 5-star reviews!

Actually, they aren’t.  Free books are a publisher’s cheapest form of advertising, but they run the risk of the reader hating it, and putting that hatred online for all to see.

The comments which really irked me said the only way publishers could get 5-star reviews for crappy books was by giving away copies.  

No one knows what makes a bestselling book.  Sometimes authors become favorites and you know they’ll always do well, but the breakout bestsellers vary so much in tone and content that there’s no way to predict what will be next.  But one thing which always helps a good book build sales is word of mouth.  When you have a product you believe in, be it an album, movie, or book, you want it in as many hands as possible.  You especially want reviewers, taste-makers, and buzz-generators to have copies.  

Just because you’re jealous that you don’t get free books, don’t take shots at the practice.

Then, there’s Goodreads, a site I vastly prefer for obvious reasons.  When I got around to adding Darin Strauss’ Half a Life to my profile, I decided to take a stroll through other people's thoughts on the book.  Apparently I’m not the only one reading bad reviews of books close to my heart.  

I don't know Strauss personally and I'm not a rabid fan, I just thought his book was excellent.  I have no idea why I've felt compelled to answer critics for a book I didn't write.  Probably because I can't take the lesson that there are different perspectives in life, and sometimes they are both 100% accurate even though they are different.  

But that's no fun, so I’ve decided to review the review.

I was really surprised this book received any good reviews. It is really about a guy, who on a bad luck day, hit a girl on her bike when she swerved into his lane. He was told it was not his fault, and he went off to college, got married and had two kids.

Losing the first really is really up to you, but the second really is really unnecessary.  Really.  

PS, is “bad luck day” a thing, or are you just too lazy to be coherent?  

Strauss' neuroticism about this "event" is dull, without a sparkling bit of prose, and not well done in the circle around an event mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well. 

Why is event in quotes?  Does striking and killing someone with a car not qualify?  Perhaps you meant to put the quotes around “circle around an event mentally technique” to clarify that part of the sentence.  

You might also try: “...and not well done in the circle-around-an-event-mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well."  Or: “...and not well done in the circle around an event mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well.”  Better yet, take your time, make this two sentences, and ensure that your point is clear.  Or slap yourself in the face.

By the way, Lydia Davis writes fiction.  Fiction is the place for sparkling prose (or sparkly bits), as opposed to a memoir about coming to grips with taking a life. 

I am deeply saddened that someone who is a creating writing teacher wrote a book without any sort of drama or dramatic arc. The narrator dates around, doesn't want to tell people, feels guilty...its like duh...you hit a girl and it is a tragedy, but the real tragedy is your inablility to provide a shred of insight, prose, or humanity to the entire situation.

It saddens me that you teach a memoir class.  I worry your students will never find their own voices because you’ll teach them to sound like Lydia Davis.  Maybe you should teach "creating writing" instead?

Again, fiction is the place for a dramatic arc.  There’s plenty of drama involved in killing a classmate.  In visiting her parents.  In walking the hallways and streets of the community afterward.  In trying to live your life and connect with people while something so life-altering has happened to you at such an early age.  Strauss' humanity and insight is there, presented in simple, straightforward lines.  He doesn't need purple prose to express his anguish.  If anything, the stark language underlines his struggle to cope.  


There are plenty of places to look for beauty in the written language.  Half a Life is a beautiful exercise in self-examination.

I read this light book in a night and was left feeling grossed out by the total solipsism of this book. 

(Which book?  This book?  Okay, got it.)


When you say “light book" I think you mean “slight.”  Or was it physically light?  Or a poor examination of the subject matter (which is pretty heavy)?  Did it give off beams of light?  Be more constructive with your feedback, please.  

FYI, criticizing a memoir for solipsism is like complaining that a detective novel is too mysterious.    

Nice use of “grossed out,” though.  I don’t see that enough in book reviews.    

At some point, an editor or a publishing house should say no, this is not a valid book to publish and spare the audience something that should have stayed in a journal, a therapist's office, a conversation with your wife. 

At some point, you should have realized you can’t look at the book objectively.  You should have spared readers looking for genuine guidance on whether to purchase a book something that should have stayed in your diary, or a text to your BFF, or an overly-loud cell phone conversation on a subway train. 

Sorry, this book just really pissed me off. 

I think I’ll follow your reviews just to read everything you hate. 

You Should Read Cara Hoffman

“…there is no beach down there, and there never was.  That’s not what you find when you go digging.  There are bodies and bones.  Women’s bodies, which first became their coffins at puberty, a skin coffin.  A place from which you will never be heard, except maybe by those who are buried nearby, or those with their ear to the ground.”

 - Cara Hoffman, So Much Pretty

  In high school, I got into a debate on Sex Education with a girl from another school.  It was some future leaders of America something, where the top percent of students from different schools get together to butt heads.  The question of whether to teach contraception quickly became about religion (there are more churches in central New York than schools or grocery stores), with my Born Again best friend leading the abstinence-until-marriage charge.   

A few desks away, a girl with a future Women Studies Major’s enthusiasm led the condom charge.  Spittle flew as she spoke and gestured, blood flushed her face.  She talked about owning our bodies, taking responsibility for our sexual identities, ending the war on women.  She knew more than anyone else in the room and had given all of this serious thought.  Her fervor also scared us all, including the students on her side.

When she mentioned the use of animal feces as a contraception, we giggled.  We were still teenagers after all.  She giggled too, saying, “it’s true,” before heading back to her point.  We needed that tension breaker to hear what she had to say, and she needed it to calm down a bit.

Her passion told me there I was missing something about the world, with my matriarchal Mohawk upbringing, where tota means both grandmother and grandfather, where the men know they exist to season their women's lives, where the eldest woman names each newborn child.  I wanted to know what this passionate student knew.  Hopefully without the spittle.

At Syracuse University, I was accepted as a member of the Peer Sexuality Program.  If a Resident Advisor requested a Sex and Dating Workshop for her floor, the Peer Sexuality Program answered.  When a Fraternity wanted a program on Rape, we were there.  When a Sorority wanted a program on Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Contraception, they called us.

I did all the workshops with various partners (workshops were presented by one guy and one girl), but my two favorites were Homophobia and Gender Issues.  

I don’t remember all of the research and required reading of the Program, but the backbone of these two presentations was Suzanne Pharr’s “Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism.”  I also remember Dr. Charlotte Davis Kasl’s Women, Sex, and Addiction and Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s The Lenses of Gender.

The readings deepened my interest in gender studies.  Moderating folks from the Greek fraternity and sorority system as they discussed all manner of sexuality, these young male and female fish who didn’t know the rigid roles and gender divide in which they swam, made this interest become a life-long fascination.

To give you an idea of how slack my reading on these topics has gotten over the years as I’ve gravitated toward fiction, Self-Made Man has been on my to-read list since it was published in January 2006.  


  Then along came Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty.  

  You can read all the non-fiction in the world on a topic but never really feel it.  The everyday horrors of life are so overwhelming they become white noise, then a story comes along and makes them real.

The best stories are mirrors.  They reflect life and shed light into the dark corners in ways that change the reader.  So Much Pretty is one of these stories.  It manages to attack the topic of violence against women without salivating over it, the way so many stories with dead women as central plot points unfortunately do.  It's a page-turning thriller, but look between the lines.  It's also a feminist manifesto.


 Keep your ear to the ground on this one.

I Quit the Gym

The One with the Ballroom Dancing

Examining my monthly spending to see how my income can better suit our family’s needs. . . was how I originally began this post.  Truthfully, I don’t think about money all that much.  Well, that’s not accurate either.  I think about money indirectly all the time, as in I’d love to go out / visit your aunt in California / see an opthamologist / update my wardrobe, but after rent and groceries there’s not much left.  I didn’t “examine” anything, though.  There were no pie charts or graphs involved, I just got rid of things I didn’t need.  This fiscal spring cleaning led me to cancel my membership to Bally Total Fitness.

My relationship with Bally goes back to 1996, when I saw pictures of myself on Virginia Beach and realized over-eating every meal wasn’t the giggle it used to be when I was seventeen.  I joined Bally when I got back to Syracuse, and it only cost me $50 down and $35 a month.  

I stayed long enough to lose the jelly roll and stop feeling like my limbs were filled with lemon juice instead of blood after every weightlifting session.  Three months at Bally cost me $120.

Then I moved to Miami and saw pictures of myself papering cars for Starbucks short-lived Tiazzi frozen tea beverage.  True, the big green apron wasn’t doing me any favors, but I’d skipped Billy and Stephen and gone right to Daniel Baldwinsville.  I spent $250 on a Premier Membership, with access to a trainer, a supply of some kind of legal speed pep pill, and the promise that my monthly membership fee would only be $15.  

Bally had gotten smarter.  They locked me into a one-year contract, so I paid them $430 for my second go around.

On the plus side, you’d be amazed what those pep pills will do for your motivation.  I dropped back into the 190lb area in no time.  Unfortunately, the motivation only lasted as long as the free pep pills.  I didn’t want to spend money to buy more legal speed, so I stopped going regularly after two months, and completely after three.  Through the magic of automated debit, my payments continued.  When this contract expired in 1999, I’d paid Bally’s a total of $550.

1999 was also the year I got digital cable.  Apparently, sitting around watching TV and eating potato chips doesn’t burn calories like you’d hope; it was the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.  

This time I wanted to do it right.  I was tired of putting down huge sums every time I got fat.  I wanted a low monthly payment I could live with the rest of my life, so if I ever caught the workout bug again, the cure would be as close as the nearest Ballys.  I became a Premier Fitness Plus Member because the monthly payment dropped to a mere $5 after a year of $15 payments.  It also came with a trainer for six weeks, plus free training consultation whenever I wanted it, for as long as my membership lasted.  It also came with a humiliating body measurement session, eight weeks of legal speed, protein supplements, and the promise that I could go anywhere in the world and always have a Ballys nearby to keep me in shape.  

The big pimpin' package cost me $499, bringing my total Bally payments (as of August 2000) to $1,229 dollars.  

I’ve been a Premier Fitness Plus Member since 1999.  Unlike some of the horror stories I’ve heard, my monthly payment did indeed drop to $5 after a year.  This lasted until 2004, when it went up to $8.  Since 2006, my monthly payment has fluctuated from $11.41 to $10.15, every other month.  I’ve no idea why.  

After the millennium, I read Critser's Fat Land and Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.  I eliminated high-fructose corn syrup from my diet, and ate every couple of hours.  I started doing yoga.  Gradually, over the course of a few years, I became comfortable with my eating habits and my weight.  Before the car accident I was very into yoga.  Post-accident, as soon as I was able, I was back in the gym at my apartment complex, and biking to and from work.  

What I did not do was set foot inside any Bally Total Fitness, anywhere.  

But I kept paying that $10.15 to $11.41 every month.  If I ever decided to blast my body into shape again, I didn’t want to lose a huge down payment.  Trouble was, that didn’t work for me.  I need exercise that fits with my schedule, and biking to and from work and is it.  Finding time to travel to a gym is not.  

I’ve paid Ballys $2,178.44 for very little of my time.  I could have travelled.  I could have bought clothes.  I could have bought a used car.

Anything but exercise.  

SOBE 2011: Thanks for the Memories

People travel from all over the world to attend the South Beach Wine and Food Festival (and I’m not just saying that- accents abound, and my favorite customer of the year was a restaurant owner from Greece).   If you tried to book a hotel room within a hundred miles, you’d never know we’re in a recession.

As we have since the festival’s inception, Books & Books sells cookbooks at the Grand Tasting Village.  Not the bargain basement Kidz Kitchen ticket for $20 at Jungle Island, or an $85 Lifestyle Seminar or $150 party at a swank hotel, not the $200 Bubble Q or Burger Bash, but the hot ticket: $225 of all-you-can-eat-and-drink fun, right on the sand.

Here’s what I don’t get.  Folks shell out upwards of $400 dollars to eat and drink, and then not only protest when presented with a $30-$40 cookbook, but actually get offended by the suggestion that they should purchase a book to meet their favorite chef and have him or her sign it.

“I’ve spent $540 dollars on this weekend,” one woman told me, “I’m not spending another $40, that’s ridiculous.  I’m sorry, but it is.”  

Um... how much can you eat and drink between 10:45am and 6pm?  If tapas and sliders flowed over you on a river of vodka, you still couldn’t consume twenty bucks a minute worth.  Yet a cookbook your grandchildren could use one day is the rip off?  The phrase more money than sense comes to mind.

You could try to explain that the cookbook money is not going to The Food Network.  You could explain that the money they spend on Rachael Ray’s Look + Cook (“Isn’t she rich enough already?”) doesn’t actually go to Rachael Ray.  But these folks are slugging back wine faster than the sun can dehydrate them.  It’s not the ideal forum for a discussion on independent book selling.

But it is fun.  Folks come to have a good time, and they’re high on the atmosphere before they imbibe a thing.  When the gates open, people actually run across the sand like children on a playground who want to get the best swing.  How can you not love that kind of enthusiasm?  

The food is unbearably delicious.  From gunpowder cocktails made with actual gunpowder to a simple barbecued beef brisket sandwich, I wish every plate came with a logo so I’d know who to thank for some of the amazing creations.  Instead, I’ll just say thanks to everyone who cooked.

Except for the free food tent for employees, “catered” this year by Dominoes.  No wonder the volunteers left early and no-showed in droves.   

In the portable bathrooms out front, I stopped for one last pee break on Sunday before it was time to pack the books up.  In the lowest denominator of male bonding, the dude next to me slurred, “That was totally worth it, huh?  I wasn’t sure going in, but that was a lot of free stuff.”

He wore khaki shorts, a button-down, short-sleeved knit shirt, and leather loafers.  His body was buffed and outdoorsy.  He looked like a chiseled, blonde, happy J Crew ad.  I was wearing ratty jeans, sneakers, and a sweaty black ABFFE t-shirt which said, FREADom. 

I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I said as kindly as I could, “I work here.  At the Books & Books booth.”

“Oh,” he said, facing forward hastily.  I looked down and saw I was peeing on the front button from someone’s pants.  Either the guy was in such a hurry to relieve some of the booze that he ripped his pants open and lost a button, or he ate too much and it popped off on its own.

Either way, that’s a hell of a party.

I Wish I Had Your Life

Re-watching Sex and the City on DVD had made me realize why I loved the series in the first place - it’s funny.  I laughed out loud more than I remembered doing the first or second time around.  Yes, it’s stuffed with hokey puns, but those are some of my favorite parts.  Of course, for every stellar “paper beats rock,” there’s a cringe-inducing “You take a nap-a, you don’t move to Napa,” but when you love something, you forgive its flaws. 

If you don’t get those references, feel free never to pop in a single SATC DVD.  In fact, why not hate fun the rest of your life?

Sex and the City is artificial, and a lifestyle I would still judge harshly even if I could afford it (and I’m talking about “help” and $500 shoes, not fucking and drinking), but whoosh it’s a good time.  To criticize Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha, and Carrie as being gay men in disguise is to miss the frolicking point of the series.  It’s a comedy, a comedy with occasional pathos that celebrates friendship above all else.  Besides, creator Michael Patrick King is a gay man, but of the 20+ writers, only 5 are men (that 5 includes King and someone named “Ollie,” which I’m assuming is short for Oliver rather than Olivia).   

No one would ever accuse the series of being a feminist beacon, but let’s not confuse the financial power and considerable draw these four women (five, if you include Patricia Field) enjoy in life with the characters they portray.  You might not like the choices and behavior of Charlotte, Miranda, Samantha, and Carrie, but you have to respect the clout of Kristen Davis, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Speaking of clout, here’s the news which inspired this post: Kristen Davis read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and liked it so much she decided she wanted to play Gretchen Rubin in a TV series.  So yeah, that’s happening.  I’d love to be able to plot the course of my life with a phone call, wouldn’t you?

So I can continue to love this series, I’m pretending the second movie didn’t happen.  Something needs to be horrifically bad to cancel out the brilliance of its inception, and Sex and the City 2 is exactly that bad.  I laughed once (thanks, Samantha) but only because, as The Editing Room put it, “we had to set the movie in the Middle East because it’s the only place left where we can pretend that being sexually liberated in 2010 is groundbreaking.”

I’d like to see them grow old gracefully.  Enough with the Botox, for fuck’s sake.  If Michael Patrick King really does go ahead with a third movie - and #2 is over $300 million world-wide so they just might - it needs to be clever as hell to end the story of these four characters in a way that honors rather than exploits what has come before, and at the same time erases the shit storm of the second movie from our minds.  It’s impossible, really.  But here’s hoping.

Remember when Sex and the City was a book?  I finally read it last year and mentioned it briefly.  While I still bristle at the “Bicycle Boys” chapter, the book is sexier and darker than the series (another thing re-watching showed me was how many of the sex scenes were played for laughs), and while it’s not as funny, it has a lot more substance.  It’s straightforward and straight up, a shot of vodka to the series Cosmo cocktail.  If you’ve been finding other things to read first, like me, it’s definitely worth your time.

So fair warning, Mrs. Davis.  Have fun with your series, but the book is always better.    

You're Better Looking Than They Give You Credit For

The voiceover playing during the “before” shot of a woman with a nice butt in an ill-fitting bathing suit says that with Hydroxy-cut, women can have the hips of a ten-year-old boy in just four to six weeks (the “after” shot is hot, if you like young boys).  A guy and a girl wearing the bare minimum of black spandex with abs I could bounce quarters off tell me that with Bowflex just ten minutes a day, I’ll see results in only six weeks.  A fairy-tale princess with Tori Amos hair and freckles tells me that if I want my nasty, yellow teeth to glow like hers, it’ll take whitening strips.  A stunningly gorgeous young brunette in a business suit says if I have a painful yeast infection slowing me down, I should do what she did and get Monostat-7.  A tall, thin, impossibly gorgeous black girl tells me that if I want skin like hers, all I need to do is scrub my face twice a day with some foamy stuff that looks like cottage cheese.  

Then there’s the celebrity group assault.  Brook Shields, Jessica Simpson, Vanessa Williams, and P. Diddy all let me know that they used to have faces like a DiGiorno frozen pizza before they started the exclusive three-step system of Buy This Product Now Before You Turn Into A Leper.  Now, people come up to them all the time and accuse them of drinking baby blood to stay young.  

Even if your problem (which is always physical, and therefore easily fixable with the right purchase) has nothing to do with age or weight, the person trying to sell it to you is young, thin, or young and thin.  Whatever’s wrong with you that three easy payments of $29.95 will fix, there’s two underlying messages throughout; you’re too old, and you’re too fat.

Nacho Man is history, and don’t tell me about the satellite TV guy- the Michelin Man is a pile of tires and it somehow went on a diet.  The Pillsbury Dough Boy lost weight and he’s a dough boy.  Not only did the Kool-Aid pitcher lose weight, its arms got thicker.  How does a pitcher get buff?  IT’S A FUCKING PITCHER.  

Maybe I am too old.  The Brook Shields telling me my acne problem makes me John Merrick?  She’s not the nothing comes between me and my Calvins hot girl I grew up with, she's a thing with no baby fat or eyebrows, a latex mask stretched over good bone structure.  Who knows what a beautiful woman she might have been, if she wasn't so obsessed with looking young.  Vanessa Williams?  Same thing.  She may still be hot, but there’s a desperation to her, a need to look not just younger than she is, which she already does, but to really look science fiction younger than she is, which she doesn’t.  What she looks like is inhuman.  That's what they all look like, and we're so used looking at these flesh masks that we barely notice.  

Who's next?  What will Jessica Simpson look like when she’s forty-something, being tortured by pictures of herself in Daisy Dukes for longer than she’s currently been on the planet?  Will she grow old gracefully, or become another plastic person? 


The joy is the meltdown.  Buy so many copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album that the sales record will probably never be equaled despite the increasing population, then sit back and watch him carve himself up.

  

What do I want?  Health, which includes a positive self-image.  It doesn’t include a nineteen-year-old kid I work with who walks around with one of those little wrist-flexers to build up his forearms.  From the waist up he has the body of a Greek God.  Meanwhile, his calves are boney and he smokes a pack a day to keep food intake from covering his ten-pack stomach.  That’s not health.  

Me wishing I had his body is not healthy, either, but that's another story.   

I’d also like the media to stop portraying eating as an activity, because it isn’t.  “Don’t just sit there and watch TV,” these commercials scream, “EAT SOMETHING!”  That’s why you never see people just sitting in a McDonald’s in their commercials any more.  Sedentary is bad because it leads to fat; the food has nothing to do with it.  People are dancing and leaping while stuffing their faces with Big Macs and french fries.  “See?" these commercials scream, "McDonald’s isn’t something that barely qualifies as food, it’s ROCKING YOUR BODY, BABY!”  

Finally, it would be nice for plastic surgery (including Botox and whatever other crazy nanobytes or microbiotics they come up with in the future [because We're Science]) to stop.  A bomb blew your face off?  Fine, get a new face.  You've got a new movie coming out and you need to look like you did twenty years ago?  You don't, you won't, and my daughter's self-esteem matters more than how your face looks in Hi-Def, so deal.  The way advertising plays on our insecurities sucks, but these body modifications are a plague.  I've seen where it leads, and it's not pretty.  

There's a lot more we could do, but let's start with these three and see what happens.