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RIDING THE FLUX CAPACITOR TO VANDERLAND

RIDING THE FLUX CAPACITOR TO VANDERLAND

I've always been kind of fascinated by the idea of time travel, but only in a theoretical and romantic kind of way because the actual science behind it makes my head hurt. I'm guessing it all started with wishing it were me getting into that DeLorean with Michael J. Fox, but then it progressed into an idea that I started to associate with second chances and who doesn't crave a few dozen of those? I know exactly the moments I'd return to and in some I'd say something different and in some I wouldn't say anything at all. Without question, all of my elective time traveling would involve me going back to the past and not hurtling forward into the future.  When it comes to the future, I just figure that I'll get there eventually.

It's probably regret mixed with the understanding that comes from retrospect that makes me daydream about getting a redo, another life, like I'm Mario trying to save the Princess. (Fun fact: when I was in the 9th grade, I could get the Princess with one life. I was in my gawky stage then. It was better for society in general that I stay indoors and I had to pass the time somehow.) Now I'd like that extra chance to go back to right some wrongs, in some cases against myself. I guess I just don't subscribe to the idea that negative experiences stem directly from fate. I think they begin with bad choices and I think I'd sleep better if I had the opportunity to correct a few. The time traveling me would be braver in some of the moments to which I returned. In others, I'd stop worrying about how I looked. I'd stay awake in a few. I'd never have entered the room in one.

Before the movie should have had a real effect on me, I loved Peggy Sue Got Married. I got shivers when Buddy Holly played over the credit sequence. I wanted to wear the silver fifties-style dress Peggy Sue wore to her prom to the mall. I managed to pretend that Nicolas Cage wasn't in the movie. And the line, "If I knew then what I know now, I'd do a lot of things differently," haunted me, even though I hadn’t lived nearly enough life yet to be haunted by anything. My biggest fear became that I would do life wrong, that the choices I would make would lead to roads I wouldn't get back from.  I became determined to at least think things through and try to meander down the right paths so course correcting would be less necessary in the future.

I'd be curious to know which moments of their lives the Vanderpump Rules cast would go back and correct, and I'd like to suggest a couple as a purely sweet gesture on my part. They don't have to take my advice; after all, it's their lives and their imaginary time travel, but if they get to a point where they're having some sort of inner conflict about deciding, maybe my ideas can push them over the edge. My perspective? Stassi should go back to that time she was in middle school so she could respond with anything but, "I want to be on a reality show!" as an answer to a question someone asked her about her long-term goals. Jax should have been severely punished for whatever was his first major offense against another person that I’m guessing the person instead allowed him to get away with, setting up a behavioral pattern that is antediluvian. Katie should have put down the orange hair dye she bought a few years ago and bought Pringles at that CVS instead. Kristen never should've broken the social media stalking seal on that long ago twilight when she first broke into her boyfriend's Myspace account and instantly memorized every feature on the face of every girl who messaged him so she knew for sure who she should scrawl on her newest hit list. And James? He should bypass his entire history and crawl back into his mother's uterus so that he can do the whole thing over again and maybe not end up a badly dressed evil troll. 

At any rate, I'm not crawling into a time machine with any of them. I call shotgun on that fucking DeLorean. They can call an Uber.

 

 

 

 

THE CUNTY TEMPTRESS DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

THE CUNTY TEMPTRESS DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

The other night I saw God and it turns out he looks exactly like Bruce Springsteen.

I haven't completely figured out if there's a poetic meaning behind it all, but my 30th Springsteen concert was part of The River Tour, meaning he would be playing the entire iconic double album straight through before launching into another full set. I'd missed the original River Tour. I was too young to go to a show, a fact that didn't comfort me in the least when my parents and my sister left the house and promised to bring me back a tee shirt. No joke: I remember almost nothing from the earliest part of my life – and when it comes to the night I had to miss the Bruce show, I can vividly recall the name of my babysitter and that the feety pajamas I was wearing were yellow.

I still have the shirt they brought me. It fits now. I've been to many shows since and I feel nothing but blessed for all of those perfect nights, but still – the River Tour was always the one that got away. 

Then December came. Springsteen released The Ties That Bind, a collection of outtakes from The River. Soon after, he announced that he and the band were heading back on the road for a mini tour and they'd be making two stops at The Garden. Pretending for a moment that I'd actually internalized anything from that time I secretly read The Secret, I entered the date of the show in the calendar of my phone before tickets even went on sale. (I think the pretend-gurus call this action "visualization.") The thing is, I knew I'd end up with tickets somehow. If 29 concerts had taught me anything, it's that I would happily trudge through gigantic cold parking lots looking for scalpers or suck it up and just pay far too much on Stubhub to gain entrance to a cathedral where holy music was played on a black electric guitar.

It was my first stop on the Let's-See-How-Much-I'll-Pay-This-Time ride, but I didn't really expect to come away from Ticketmaster victoriously. So many times I've frozen when it's time to type in that weird computerized security code and then a terrible message pops up to coldly inform me that all the tickets are gone. I think there's also a pop-up that appears that tells me my hair looks shitty at the moment, but my devastation might just be causing momentary hallucinations. This time – for this tour – I got tickets immediately. They weren't the best seats in the place, but it was a sure thing: all these years later, I was going to hear one of my favorite albums of all time played from side to side (to side to side). It could only be better and more memory-inducing if The Garden's floor was covered in a rust shag carpet for the evening.

I can hardly remember the first song he played, so dumbstruck I was rendered the minute he walked onstage and I realized that I was in the same room as someone whose words have defined my entire life. So yeah, the first verse of Meet Me in the City is a little fuzzy, but I recovered quickly and the night was magical. It was almost a little bit bizarre – but in a beautiful, hazy way – to hear all those songs that once played on a loop in my den as I built forts with my sister. Images came rushing back like a wave and the water was warm and still. As we all went along on Bruce's River journey, I found myself going on my own memory tour and I began to understand my past just a little bit more clearly.

There's a real gratitude I feel when words someone assembled and then crafted into a sentence moves everything inside of me. I think that one of my biggest goals is to write that one line that resonates so powerfully within somebody else. It's the dream of sharing that kind of lyrical collective consciousness that I guess I find so damn interesting and during the show, I thought that dream just might come true.

I mention all this because I'm imagining the act of seeing Erika Jayne perform live brings upon the same kind of emotional peace. Sure, the guy's been famous since before I was born, but I'm pretty sure nobody's ever called Springsteen "an enigma wrapped in cash."  No, Erika Jayne is the real legend and I'm guessing that watching her hump that stage will finally convince all of us that real art does exist and I know that she will dazzle me to such a degree that I'll have the immediate desire to leave her show – while she's still singing – go home, and bedazzle everything I own.

 

PLATO'S GOT A POINT

PLATO'S GOT A POINT

A few weeks ago, I was given the mindless task of proctoring a History exam during midterms and the test took place in a classroom I've never been inside of before. See, my room's on the top floor of the school and my heels are simply way too high for any aimless wandering to take place so the truth is that there are probably a lot of places in my school I've never been. On the day of the test, I did what I needed to do: I passed out booklets and paper to kids I'd never met so they could write some essays and then the time officially started and I realized that I was expected to stare at these strangers unflinchingly for the next two hours. I got tired of looking at them after five minutes; all they were doing was writing and stopping every few minutes to shake out hands that already appeared to be cramping. It was 7:30 in the morning and they were writing essays about Colonialism and, well, I just felt too badly for them to continue to stare. Instead, I started really looking around the room for the first time. Tests during midterms are held in random classrooms and I knew I wasn't in the room of a History teacher, but I wasn't actually sure just whose classroom I was in until I saw the person's name written in what looked like wite-out across a stapler. My first reaction was to roll my eyes and wonder who in the world would write her name on a stapler. My second reaction was to feel a wave of an understanding as to why my staplers always disappear.

What I liked immediately about the room were these gauzy curtains the teacher had draped near the windows along with a bunch of colorful paper lanterns that dangled down from the ceiling. The touches made the room feel homey and they managed to accomplish what I think they were meant to accomplish: to make every student in that room forget they were really there to learn math. Still, the curtain look was working for me and I started to contemplate that maybe I should hang some flowy curtains up in my own classroom and I started to seriously consider which color would best highlight the Taxi Driver, Fight Club, and Pulp Fiction posters on my wall. What hue of curtain goes best with the spatter of cinematic blood?

My minutes-long curtain fantasy faded once I realized that the chances were sky high that I'd never take them down to wash them and they'd probably just wind up gathering mountains of dust, causing students who sat near them to sneeze, blow their noses, and then toss those germ-filled wads of Kleenex into the garbage can that sits right beside my desk. Since I've decided that I'm allergic to other peoples' germs, I officially put the mental kibosh on the Curtain Plan and decided to pass the time instead by checking out the quotations emblazoned on every wall of the room. I'd been in a lot of classrooms that testing week; I'd become pretty accustomed to seeing breezy and optimistic proclamations decorating barren walls. It all made me realize at some point that I don't have any quotations on the walls of my own room and I was almost sure I should quickly scrawl, "And don't call me Shirley" on some construction paper, but I still wasn't a hundred percent sure because maybe I should use a quote from Primal Fear instead and, by the way, does anyone know where I can find some construction paper?

None of the quotes on this Math teacher's wall came from excellent movies, but they were all sweetly uplifting, especially the one by Plato: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato has a very good point, I thought to myself – and I swear that I could almost feel a steel hardness inside of me instantly begin to grow soft as I began to consider how the paths we're all on are unfamiliar and difficult. But just when I was about to become someone my yoga teacher would be very proud of, my eyes flicked over to the next quote and my burgeoning kindness began to melt. 

The other quote actually said, "Life without geometry is pointless." Now, I'm somewhat positive that there's an adorable mathematical pun hidden in that quotation, but fuck if I get the joke. I've never been all that big on math humor and along with biblical allusions, those are the connections I probably understand the least. I did try for a moment to imagine what kind of roads I would have had to have taken in my life for that sign to ever hang anywhere on one of my walls, but just the symbolic journey got me immediately lost so I decided to start wondering instead about which Vanderpumper could most associate with the quotation’s meaning. (It's very worth explaining that I don't have these people invading my thoughts because they're fascinating. The reason I think about these people at all is because I write recaps and I've never been one to just bang out a "this happened and then this happened" kind of post since it's more fun for me to weave a little narrative. Also: proctoring is mind numbing and you've gotta think about something.) Anyway, the (maybe) hilarious geometry quote wasn't attributed to anybody – because that person is embarrassed – so I began to wonder if maybe James could have written it. Can't you just see it happening? Imagine James – obviously wearing a low-cut tank top – surveying the crowds of people dancing blandly to the beats he's created as the hemisphere's greatest living DJ and he has a moment of total clarity where he realizes that he's pathetic and maybe he should quit music and go to college for math. Or maybe it was Kristen who thought up the math message. Perhaps she was out on one of her frequent "walks" – the ones she goes on wearing all black creepy crawling clothing like she's a Manson Girl. Maybe one evening she was tucked in some nice shrubbery while she separated the bills she'd stolen from Sandoval's garbage cans and she was calculating how costly Ariana's life is and she decided right there in that bush that Ariana, like geometry, is pointless. Of course, it could have also been Jax who came up with the quotation, but I'm pretty sure he can't read or write.

 

 

FISHNETS & FUCKING FAYE RESNICK

FISHNETS & FUCKING FAYE RESNICK

Is there a place a nonreligious girl like myself can go to ask for forgiveness for taking last week off and not recapping the episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills when Faye Resnick came face to face with the woman she talked total bullshit about twenty years ago in a book that was written in two weeks alongside one of the editors of the National Enquirer so she could most effectively capitalize off the murder of someone she claimed was her best friend in the whole entire world?  Would it suffice for everyone to know that, even more than I hate the slug-like Resnick, I hate myself for spending last Tuesday night leisurely resting up for the Springsteen concert I went to the following evening instead of watching the Housewives devolve into simmering pits of resentment while the sea monster in their midst sat calmly on a patio she probably decorated?  Can I ever possibly come to terms with the fact that it took me a full day to actually watch that slithering Resnick asshole smile her collagen-pumped grin while telling Kathryn, the new Housewife whose life she tried to destroy a score of years ago for profit, that she looks beautiful? 

Let’s just call a fucking asshole a fucking asshole, shall we? Why split hair extensions and beat around what I’m guessing is a carefully lasered bush?  Faye Resnick is a fucking asshole.  Here are the facts of my case: 

1. She achieved infamy because of her proximity and involvement in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.  This infamy was not a surprising result that befell a shy woman who desperately wanted to keep her privacy.  No, this infamy was garnered strategically by writing a book and posing for Playboy.

2. Rather than mourn the woman she maintained was her closest friend, she wrote a book about that woman’s secrets.

3. She’s really good friends with Kris Jenner and makes sure to appear every now and again on her reality show so she won’t disappear into the void of nothingness that can plague a woman who desperately needs attention. 

4. Kyle Richards considers her to be like a sister.  Score.

5. She once tried to shame Lisa Vanderpump at the woman’s own house where she showed up to a vow renewal ceremony uninvited and honey, you can do a lot of things before I contemplate cold-clocking you across your shaved jawline, but you’d best not fuck with Ms. Vanderpump.

Now, I’ve known for some time that Faye Resnick sucks the humongous sweaty balls of a farm animal during an August heat wave, but I got to be reminded of just how ridiculous a creature she is during the Kathryn Confrontation that never really got off the ground.  First, Faye did not need to be invited to that dinner.  I don’t give a shit if Kyle claims that she invites Faye everywhere and that the world would stop spinning on its axis and angels would stop getting their wings and Mauricio would stop getting covert blowjobs from interns if Faye was left off a guest list. I mean, we have watched Kyle gallivant on this show for years now and Faye most certainly does not go everywhere her raven-haired mistress goes.  No, Faye was there for a showdown she then refused to participate in and she instead chose to sit and quietly nod in a nonsensical fashion as Kathryn (not so eloquently) attempted to call her out for her past misdeeds.  

Faye refused to engage.  She refused to say a single word.  She refused to get up and just leave.  She wouldn't even say that she was sorry or that she had been going through a tough time back then and she made some questionable choices she now has to live with and she would like to apologize for the fact that she is one of the greatest examples of why some entire cultures hate women.  She refused to say pretty much anything even as she had the fucking audacity to stare blankly at the woman sitting before her and then cluck about how pretty Kathryn is, a compliment apropos of exactly nothing.

THE CONTRITION TOUR

THE CONTRITION TOUR

There are some certainties one can always count on:  

• The parking lot outside of a gym will be absolutely packed during the second week in January – and then it will be half-empty (half-full?) during the second week in March because resolutions only really last for so long.  

• The very minute Christmas is over, those chalky sugar conversation hearts – the ones that used to have expressions like “Be Mine” but now have adorable sweet nothings like “Text Me” engraved in sugar across even more sugar – will appear on the shelves of drugstores nationwide. I will buy four bags and eat three before remembering that I hate them.

• One or more of the Kardashians (or those lucky enough to be Kardashian-adjacent) will experience some sort of monumental existential crisis every three weeks like fucking clockwork and that crisis will result in one of them deciding to host a brand new talk show because this family understands one simple fact better than you or I ever will:  an event is only meaningful if everybody on the planet knows it’s going down at the exact moment it’s happening.  

• The momentum inherent in the passage of time can turn a ravaged and stinging heart into one that quietly thuds with just a dull ache until eventually it doesn’t hurt at all anymore.  You will be able to slide what was once ragged with the edges of memory down your throat like it’s a perfect oyster – and you will do it in one little gulp and you won’t even need a chaser. 

Those of us who watch reality television and do not suffer from narcolepsy have become adept at picking up other patterns.  These thematic configurations reveal themselves almost cyclically over the passage of time.  We know, for example, that each season a different Real Housewife is given “the bitch edit” for probably no other reason than because she once showed up to Andy Cohen’s clambake late while hoisting a platter of cookies that contained gluten.  We realize that the least emotionally-balanced chick who competes on a season of The Bachelor will undoubtedly be hauled back during the summer to bawl her eyes out on Bachelor in Paradise where she will stand on a tropical beach and explain how destroyed she is that the guy she’s known for about an hour doesn’t see her for the person she is deep down and now all of her hopes for forever-love have been smashed into smithereens so small that she can’t even snort them.  We can be certain that there will always be another cheaply produced show upon which Farrah Abraham can appear so she can deny that she knowingly did porn. Should you flip to E! at any time of the day or night, you will be able to watch Kim or Khloe or Kendall or Kylie or Kill Me as they stare at their phones instead of saying anything of interest and you can feel free to go ahead and make a nice healthy wager about exactly which day it will be when my head finally explodes from not having a legitimate answer to the question, “Why are these people famous when they never even look up unless it’s to take a selfie?” 

But perhaps my favorite constant in the world of reality television is The Contrition Tour that some participants embark upon usually around year three in their involvement with a show they probably never should have appeared on in the first place.  The goal of setting sail on a Contrition Tour is to attempt to rehabilitate the reputation you essentially gave ratings-obsessed producers and underpaid editors carte blanche in crafting in exchange for an often paltry paycheck and the chance to either endorse some shitty wine nobody has ever heard of or to finally get the chance to record that dance single you and your tone-deaf heart have always dreamed of belting out to an unsuspecting world.  The journey towards The Contrition Tour begins soon after you allow yourself to realize that the attention you got for appearing on television was probably not worth the misery that has come with being known as a verbally-abusive monster or so fucking stupid that it almost defies comprehension.  Sure, you rode that wave of infamy for a little while – that wave made quick stops on The Wendy Williams Show and Watch What Happens Live so you could display even more of your flaws – but you eventually felt like you were caught in the funnel of a riptide and you could no longer see clearly and you couldn’t even breathe and you became furious that reality television did the opposite of showing the world “the real you” so you decided it was time to enlighten a mass audience who doesn’t actually care about you in the least and already made up its mind about you anyway.

Few people have aced The Contrition Tour, but Camille Grammer came off of hers like a fucking champ.  This woman spent the entire first season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills either gyrating against another woman’s husband, inviting bile-spewing psychics over for dinner, misusing words like “Machiavellian” and “pernicious” and pretending her marriage was just fine and that her husband hadn’t already left her.  I recall seeing magazine covers with photos of her huge eyes and her sneering mouth printed above headlines like, “The Most Hated Housewife?” and knowing – just knowing – that we would all see a very different Camille Grammer during season two of the show.  In fact, the Camille who showed up for the second season barely resembled the woman we’d met just a few scant months prior.  This lady appeared chastened and humbled.  She spoke about her life with a rueful smile on her lips.  She didn’t call Kyle pernicious even once.  And she often wore a white coat with long sleeves and it was probably to hide the IV that was pumping copious amounts of liquid tranquilizer directly into her bloodstream so she would make it to the end of the tour and take a victory lap at the Reunion.  Honestly?  Bravo, Camille – I’d buy a commemorative tee from your tour and I'd wear it without irony. 

Something tells me that the Contrition Tours won’t go nearly as well for the Vanderpumpers in our midst.  Camille Grammer spent the first season of her show projecting to the world that she was flat-out ridiculous, but we can work with ridiculous, right?  Can we – do we want to – work with the issues ailing Jax, Kristen, and Stassi?  Are we meant to pretend that Jax has seen the light and he’s no longer a piece of shit who is so stupid that he ought not to be permitted to procreate?  Should we make believe that Kristen’s brand of crazy is just dangerous to her and not a potential calamity that could impact all of humankind?  Can we believe that Stassi genuinely feels this badly about ditching a group of people who were kind of shitty friends to her anyway and that she is not just crawling back now so she can get herself back on television?  Can’t these legs of the tour just be cancelled?

 

 

 

 

THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT, JAX HAD TO STEAL SHADES

THE FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT, JAX HAD TO STEAL SHADES

Maybe the only that’s interesting to me about preparing for the onslaught of a blizzard is how it all starts to feel so primal.  Our basic wants morph almost instantaneously into what we manage to convince ourselves are desperate needs and those needs cannot possibly be quelled without making a frantic trip to a supermarket and posting at least three completely unoriginal messages on social media.  Me?  I did it all. That’s right – I turned into the girl who ran out to buy shit like egg whites and three different kinds of cheese and more fresh broccoli than anyone should ingest outside of a dare.  See, I recently began tracking everything I eat and I lost 8.6 pounds in only two weeks by scarfing down mostly seafood and vegetables and I wanted to make sure that turning briefly into a shut-in would not cause me to pile back on even a tenth of a pound because I’ve become mildly obsessive about what I’m eating and I’ve chosen to pretend that such an obsession is a positive thing and not the mark of a latent eating disorder.  But then I realized that I was going to have some company during the blizzard and I am nothing if not an excellent hostess.  And what do hostesses do? I thought to myself while coming to a dramatic standstill in the baking aisle of Stop and Shop. Hostesses bake brownies, dammit!  And kick-ass hostesses bake brownies that have chocolate chips mixed into the batter and then they top those already-decadent chocolate squares with marshmallows that are shoved for a second into a hot broiler so the marshmallows will melt slightly and turn the perfect shade of toasty brown!

Like Odysseus being beckoned by a bipolar Siren, I began to listen to the insane voice inside of my head and that voice screamed that cheese should never be served without some nice crunchy bread and that only a Neanderthal would not pick up gourmet olives and fresh shrimp and the next thing I knew, I had spent two hundred dollars on groceries and my oven was churning out something besides zucchini.  And since I was quite consciously ruining the excellent progress I’d recently made in terms of portion control and ass size, I decided to start sprinting about my home like a madwoman.  My goal? To plug every device I own into an outlet so everything would be fully charged come the storm.  This particular action – which I’ll consider both cardio and a core-based workout because it involved lots of bending – was dictated by some rather devastating past experiences when my power cut off the moment a swift wind blew through my town and I was left with only the fear and the fury that comes with having a phone that is rapidly losing battery power and the inability to watch even a bad movie.  Listen: I’ve been through blizzards and hurricanes and freakish random experiences like when the electricity in my entire community shut down for six hours one cold February evening for absolutely no good reason at all and I have learned some things, my friends!  Here’s what you must do to prepare for the likelihood of having everything spontaneously go dark:

1. Buy a jar of instant coffee.  Who cares if it sits unopened in your cabinet for a year straight?  If you have been blessed with a gas stove, you can heat up water and still get your coffee fix during a storm without resorting to shoving some coffee grinds under your gum like it’s tobacco, a real thing I did during Hurricane Sandy.

2. Shower the night before the storm, flatiron your hair until it’s straighter than it’s ever been, and refrain from tossing it up into a ponytail so it will continue to look pretty while you’re trapped inside of a house with way too many mirrors that you have to look at unless you’re playing a game that requires you be blindfolded.

3. Buy a blindfold.

4. Turn the temperature of the refrigerator as low as you can.  When your strawberries become so frozen that they can be used as weapons, that’s when it’s cold enough in there for your dairy products to withstand the potential loss of power headed their way.

5. Conversely, blast your heat until you can hardly take it anymore.  Think about it this way:  sure, you are sweating your ass off in the middle of January simply as a precaution – and you are probably spending a fortune to do it – but just try to recall how unpleasant it was to sleep in the frigid air when you had no power for four days during both the hurricane and the last huge snowfall.  Remember how your pinky toe almost snapped off even while swathed in four pairs of socks and you were lying beneath three comforters?  Throw on a tank top and some boy shorts and stop complaining.

6. Charge your current laptop, your gigantic ancient laptop that has the DVD player, your iPod, your iPad, and your phone.  Yes, eating brownies and having sex are lovely ways to pass the time, but so is checking email and watching a movie.  Think ahead!

I spent the night before the storm gathering candles and searching for flashlights and locating my lingerie so I wouldn’t have to eventually search for it in the pitch-black darkness.  I ran my dishwasher and did my laundry and made sure my extra blankets were easily accessible.  I sorted through the clothing people have bought for my puppy and pulled out her yellow fleece and her pink sweater so she could look stylish while feeling comfortably warm.  I backed my car in and popped up my windshield wipers so they wouldn’t freeze.  I located my shovel and leaned it against the wall in my foyer.  And then I got into bed and felt an exhaustion that was quite real spread through at least a third of my body and I realized that I had just allowed myself to feed into a frenzy that could and should have been totally avoidable.  Yes, there would be snow – a lot of it.  But I’d be stuck at home for a grand total of perhaps two days and that fear had caused me to spend and to consume and to prepare like the end of time was upon me?  That fear had caused me to make a platter of brownies topped with s’mores?

Yup, it sure did. 

Now sure, those brownies were unbefuckinglievable – but the storm passed and it’s time to hop back on the healthy eating track and try to forgive myself for falling victim to a desire that I allowed myself to believe was a pressing need.  And if I can learn to forgive myself for making the questionable choice of eating a few (okay, five) brownies during a brief environmental crisis, maybe that means I can forgive the Vanderpump Rules gang for their choices too!  After all, eating a marshmallow-topped brownie is right on par with stealing a pair of sunglasses or crawling with your bedazzled tail between your legs back to a group of people you swore you’d rather die than ever talk to again, right?  Aren’t we all just flawed creatures by nature?

 

 

FAYE RESNICK SLAUGHTERED MY SOUL

FAYE RESNICK SLAUGHTERED MY SOUL

I’m not quite sure how it can be this way, but there remains a rather quixotic side to my personality and it's really starting to piss me off.  It just doesn't make any sense! Really, you’d think a constant and steady exposure to questionable people starring on mindless reality shows would have eliminated my patently unrealistic levels of idealism, but that's just not the case – and I can’t seem to help it. I somehow still harbor the insane belief that most people are good, that they actively want to better humanity at large.  Trust me: I've tried to quiet the blatantly out-of-vogue ideals I still blame my parents for instilling in me back when they were hippies who tried to pass carob off as chocolate. It's totally their fault that I cannot seem to cease having faith in the fact that the vast majority of us must have actual reasons for the times we find ourselves behaving in a manner that could best be described as heinously inappropriate.

The thing is, I no longer have any sort of pride about feeling this way. Holding tight to an optimistic mindset has turned into nothing but a fool’s game, one that ends in a shootout as balls (and not the fun scrotumy kind) fly at my head.  Gone are the days when everything made actual sense, when someone's questionable motivations could be entirely justified with just a little bit of logic. We simply don’t live in that world anymore.  Instead, we now exist in a time where an educated CEO – a mother no less – can go on an interview blitz where she steadfastly refuses to apologize for calling the virtual stranger she invited into her home a prostitute before telling her that her music videos have a shitty production value.  We live in a world where this rude creature gives snappy sound bytes accompanied by a toothy smile about how she’s been chosen to guest star on a show precisely because she’s an asshole and she would therefore never temper her assholery just to be a decent person.  After all, being decent is not what made her a zillionaire.  

Welcome to the dystopia, everybody.  It’s a land drenched in Skinnygirl crimson and it smells like a knockoff version of Chanel perfume and it’s run in absentia by Mayor Kim Richards –otherwise known as She Who Shall Not Be Mentioned. Leave your integrity at the door of Kyle By Alene Too and instead shrug on an overpriced ugly caftan. You'll fit right in.

 

 

 

 

FREE LALA'S NIPPLES!

FREE LALA'S NIPPLES!

Regrets are tough things to live with because they sting while they're happening, burn when they're swallowed, and they leave scars that no high-end BB cream can mask. Me? Oh, I've got a mess of regrets and they run the gamut from the utterly superficial to the psychologically damaging and can be empirically measured on a scale of zero to forever. Let's see: I regret that time I gave myself a bikini wax and all the years I roasted in the summer sun covered from head to toe with baby oil. I regret the freckles I could have avoided and the overuse of filters to mask them in pictures. I regret all the nights I was too worried about liking my outfit to concern myself with making memories that were not colored by the sepia tone of body dysmorphic disorder. I regret not spending more time with people I love and I regret the years I lived by the doctrine, "In the grand scheme of my life, this will not matter," because I was often very wrong. I regret going out on a few second dates and I really regret that time I went out on a twelfth date. I regret letting one guy sleep through the night in my bed without taking off his boxer briefs with my teeth. I mean, yeah, I did just that come the dawn, but I wish I'd done it in the darkness too because I was bored while he slept. Oh, and I guess I'm supposed to pretend to regret the fact that I sometimes lack any and all inhibition, but that regret would just be a total lie.  

The thing is, regrets are something most of us have in common. We don't always treat one another with kindness or compassion and sometimes our insecurities march like an army between ourselves and a far-off goal. I think you have to know yourself pretty damn well in order to recognize a pang of emotion as a twinge of regret and you have to be willing to go excavating through the clenching confines of your mind to dig out the source and origin of what caused the regret to transpire. It would probably be far easier to never take that hike inside of a dusty subconscious, but I still recommend doing so. Call it emotional cardio. 

I'm not sure some of the Vanderpumpers are able to recognize the feeling of regret because some of them probably think what they're experiencing is a pang of hunger or that itch they always feel around their nether regions after a bender, but I think maybe it's time for them to pay attention. Acknowledging regret smarts like a dumb motherfucker, but it can't possibly bring more pain than what the future will deliver to people who are making grave mistakes on television in exchange for a paycheck. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe being emotionally barren is the way to go. Maybe it takes someone ultra-evolved to prance around half-naked on basic cable and drink like a sloth suffering from acute alcoholism and steal sunglasses before, during, and after lying to your live-in girlfriend. Perhaps in the future, regret won't exist in the slightest and that will be the platform under which President Jax Taylor will have campaigned. Seriously, people – it could happen. Did anyone really believe Donald Trump would still be in the lead for the GOP?

 

MEET ERIKA JAYNE

MEET ERIKA JAYNE

I have a confession to make:  the image of Yolanda’s bloody implant is slowly destroying me from the inside out.  I’ve had dreams about that thing.  The very worst one involved placing my head dreamily upon a pillow I thought was made out of baby pink cotton candy only to find that the sugary fluff had disappeared and what enveloped me instead was a gelatinous mess of silicone and guts.  Really though, that gooey implant terrified me as much as catching a glimpse of a Pegasus in a movie usually does and a big part of me believes that the implant did not actually come from deep inside Yolanda’s chest cavity as the world-renowned surgeon wearing the colorful baker’s hat would have us believe.  I think there’s a good chance the implant really originates from the dankest and darkest depths of the bottom of the ocean where its kin continues to frolic with mythical beasts that are made entirely of gills and whatever it is that first birthed Faye Resnick.  

I’m hoping (and praying…and chanting…and lighting candles) that now that Yolanda’s implants are out of her body for good, the nightmares will finally cease.  I realize, of course, that the visual revelation of Erika Jayne that has been promised to us tonight could cause a new phobia to burst forth, but I made sure to exercise for an extra hour earlier today so chronic exhaustion would crush fear.  Besides, there’s probably not all that much to be nervous about.  It’s not like I haven’t seen porn before.

 

 

 

 

PERMANENT BAD CHOICES

PERMANENT BAD CHOICES

As long as we’re on the subject (since I just brought it up), here are a few things I don’t miss in the slightest:

 

·      Those incessant blizzards that rocked the east coast last winter.  Yes, I realize that I might have just committed the weather equivalent of shouting, “Looks like a no-hitter!” during the ninth inning of a baseball game right before the batter smashes a grand slam homerun straight into the outfield bleachers, but should a month of continuous snowfall accompanied by ice thudding from the sky suddenly commence, please blame Mother Nature, not me.

·      Thinking that I have to say yes to everything I’m asked to do at work.  There were those early years when I tutored for the SAT and helped students write college essays and ran classes designed to get kids a better score on the Regents exam.  I was even suckered into being the advisor for the Trivia Team my first few years, an act that mandated that I accompany kids who loved shit like physics and trigonometry to academic decathlons where I had to read questions that I not only didn’t know the answer to, but often I couldn’t even pronounce half of the words in the question.  Even the time I dove into a pool and then unknowingly conducted an entire conversation with a guy I was interested in for fifteen minutes straight before realizing my left tit was hanging out did not make me feel as big a moron as I did when I went to those trivia competitions.  Finally recognizing that I was allowed to say, “fuck no!” to random requests at work changed my life.

·      In terms of technology, I do not mourn the commercial-crammed days when I lived without XM Radio, the dark ages when DVR was just a figment of an excellent idea in some madman’s mind, and the years my phone didn’t contain that beautiful “block” button that I’ve started to use pretty frequently.

·      I do not miss the days when I refrained from telling people in my life who were behaving like pathetic assholes that they were acting like pathetic assholes and I definitely don’t miss the nights I couldn’t sleep because I was far too consumed with running the imaginary conversations I should have had with them in my mind.  I also do not miss the years when my nearest and dearest were less than honest with me.  Maybe it’s a loss of patience or maybe it’s the gaining of patience or perhaps I’ve just formed an allergy to bullshit, but I’d much rather have the difficult conversation for real than perfect it a hundred times in my mind for imagination’s sake and nothing else.

·      I can’t even pretend to miss the dewy mornings when coffee didn’t spurt instantly from the Keurig that sits in a place of prominence on my kitchen counter, especially since I never properly learned how to make a pot of the stuff on a normal coffee machine and it turns out that exploding coffee grinds are a real pain in the ass to clean up.

·      I’ll never again long for the years when my salary was so low that I internally debated every now and again how maybe settling for a guy with money and not much else wouldn’t be the single worst choice I could possibly make – and that includes the time I got those terrible choppy side bangs that not even my closest friends could react to with anything but horror.

·      I was once certain that I would, but I do not miss those flavored ramen noodles that made my hair smell like chicken or that month when I went on an all-candy-corn diet (scoff all you want; it worked) or when I moved out for the first time and realized that it meant I could buy any kind of cereal I wanted – that it didn’t have to be one of the healthy kinds – and I truly began to believe that Apple Jacks tasted like a sugary form of freedom.  I mean, sure, it might have been the single most liberating experience I’ve ever had inside of a supermarket, but that doesn’t mean I miss that day.

·      I also don’t miss the banana clips that could never properly hold back my too-thick hair, the year everyone (including me) wore a tiny Prada backpack for no good reason at all, the nights I spoke to guys in bars who rocked fedoras completely without irony, the years I was convinced thongs had to be equivalent to having a perma-wedgie, and the money I spent on Juicy sweatpants because I managed to convince myself that my ass would look best in ridiculously overpriced aqua terrycloth.

·      And more than any of it, I do not miss Stassi Schroeder.

Yes, my dear friends, it looks like Stassi will soon be galloping back to Vanderland on a wounded pony and I for one could not be less excited to see her.  Her return feels the very opposite of triumphant; in fact, it strikes me as remarkably similar to the reaction I have when that one student who graduated five years ago continues to stop by every few months just to say hello.  “Time to move on!” I always consider bellowing his way, but I just keep the interaction to a swift, “Nice to see you,” before I go fleeing down the hallway and away from a kid who is perpetually ensconced in the dynamic that was high school.  I’d argue that Stassi continues to be stuck in a high school mentality too and that high school probably felt like her glory days when she ran that fucking cafeteria like an Adderall-guzzling Gestapo agent who inspired fear in her lowly minions with just a withering glance or a flick of her newly-dyed hair.  I cannot forget how, at the start of this series, Stassi would mandate who her “crew” were and were not allowed to speak with and how she would threaten minor punishments like castration done with a rusty chainsaw to anyone who dared violate a single one of her decrees.