Let's Play Us Weekly!

This makes me tremble with white hot desire.

I must have it.

Because, honestly, it is not enough to amass a weekly barrage of celebrity gossip on my coffee table (if I had a coffee table, but, that's a different story). I want to be able to play out the fabulous, gucci-soaked dramas of celebrity lives. I want to load up Linday's SUV party limo with MK and Ashley, send them off to some hott club opening, and perhaps see what happens if they happen to run into Hillary Duff or Paris*.

Ah, to crouch around a tiny red carpet, marching plastic starlets up and down, seeing them eye each other jealously, trade snide remarks, stumble a little from too much xanex or pre-premier champagne. Fabulous.

Would any woman not secretly long to have a mini closet full of miniature coture gowns, perhaps a few fashion mistakes to sneer at? If the powers that be at toy companies would listen to me, I would suggest that they partner with Us Weekly or Star Magazine in order to create an Amazing Celebrity Empire -- not just settling for soothing the masses with celebrity antics, they would be able to raise children completely dependent upon the celebrity machine for entertainment -- picture it:

- Create a line of children's toys branded with your gossip source of choice -- in this example, I will be using Us Weekly. The dolls will be created in the likeness of the stars of the day -- each week's cover story would bring on another drama to be enacted by little plastic Jessica Simpsons or Nicole Richies (In the case of Nicole, I would suggest some sort of inflatable version that could be plumped up or emaciated easily).

- The Us weekly web site and print version would feature the dolls for easy ordering on a weekly basis -- as new celebrities rise in fashion, so do the profits for the toymaker.

- Us Weekly would print a toy companion -- much like a sleazy version of the ever-popular American Girl Dolls. Little magazines would proclaim, "THIS WEEK, SOURCES SAY, LINSAY LOHAN HAD A PUBLIC CAT FIGHT WITH NEMISIS HILLARY DUFF!" They would include instructions for recreating the scene in playrooms across America. Children across the countr would seize up their Aaron Carter dolls to sneer on the sidelines as Hillary and Lindsay dolls grabbed at their plastic hair with little manicured plastic hands.

- As these children grow up, steeped in the sweet brew of Celebrity Culture, they will be primed for voracious consumption as adults.

My plan is totally brilliant and completely fun! Some desparately needed accessories include:

- Paparazzi, of course, complete with real digital cameras! Take shots of your scene and load them on to the Us Weekly web site! Share with your friends!
- Sources. As in this week's Star Magazine's screaming headline -- "JESSICA SIMPSON PREGNANT! - sources say." These would be shady, homely dolls that would ride on the sidelines and report back to the magazine all about the inside story -- is there really trouble in Brangelina land? Sources say yes.
- Feather Boas. Because, d'uh. Sequins, too.
- Little coke mirrors. Tiny 10 Carat diamonds. Little celebrity gift baskets full of Keihl's products and certificates for elaborate vacations.
- Blackberries, sidekicks, and little pink flip phones that really ring! (or vibrate).
- Hulking bodygaurds with real bat-swinging action arms!
- Tiny oversized Dior sunglasses! Itty bitty Hermes Birkin Bags!

I am hoping to develop this plan into a cross merchandising orgy. Perhaps this can morph into entire cable channels full of stop-action cartoons, miniture coture during fashion week, entire warehouses of tiny limosines just waiting to act out this week's excursion to Nobu.

Sigh. . . until next time, I'll be dreaming of tiny Sushi, tiny bottles of Crystal, and little, itty bitty toilets for regurgitation.


* Note that Google didn't turn up any mass marketed Paris Hilton collectible dolls.
There are plenty of sad, dirty-minded alternatives. I do admit to finding the barbie version of the Paris Hilton Sex video pretty effing hilarious. I love the details -- bed, infared, creepy reflections in the eyes. Is it sad to be Paris, so scandalous that no one will fashion a plastic doll out of you in order to cash in on vast amounts of whining kid money?

This post is just your imagination.

This just made me cry a little -- partly, given, this is because I am currently a cheerfully bubbling pot of emotion stew these days. However, it hits home. I'm a fat girl. I've always been a fat girl, even when I was a skinny girl (which, when you're really a fat girl, can be an incredibly confusing thing).

Fat girls know that the very last thing a fat girl wants to do is call attention to her fat. However, it is pretty much the predominant thing in her life. As a fat girl, you are preoccupied with trying to simultaneously hide and prove your worth. That's why fat girls tend to be very funny. We tend to be pretty competent, and, unlike the imaginary fat girls, we're usually not lazy.

At least not in front of other people.

We are always watching these images of the "imaginary fat people." I don't know anyone else who would talk about it, but I think we're all thinking the same thing. "I'm not like that." And, as an inevitable subext, "Why do they think I'm like that?"

As I've changed my body over the years, back and forth, the world has changed the way it treats me. I have a theory, formed at my fattest, that people don't want to look at me when I'm fat.

The mere existence of the "imaginary fat people" makes me think -- they don't see me, after all.

Of course, sad but true, the fat girl in me is a little relieved.

The Art Of Paranoia

1. Assume everyone is talking about you. Strain to hear them. Pretend you have business by the copier or at your mailbox or at the waterfountain so you can surrepticiously eavesdrop to your colleagues.

2. Be especially suspicious of closed doors. Find reasons to walk past offices with closed doors in order to find out who is behind them. Peer inside, scan faces, imagine reasons the individuals in question could possibly be discussing you. Sweat.

3. Assume They Know. They Know you are writing on your blog right now. They are monitoring your keystrokes and have found ways to intercept your thoughts.

4. You are in deep shit.

Good for What Ails Ya

So, what to do when you've humiliated yourself professionally, when you're feeling about as unattractive as you ever have felt, when you're too lazy or overwhelmed to do the dishes piling up in the sink?

Well, yes, drinking an entire bottle of wine (or two) by yourself is always a good option.

However, I chose to take it to the next level.

The answer, my friends, lies in the contacts menu of your cell phone -- that's right, people, it's time for the old booty call.

Ex boyfriend to the rescue!

I've spent the last 20 or so hours rubbing bodies with the ex, stirring up a host of conveniently distracting emotions, drinking copious amounts of wine, eating crappy delivery pizza, and having bone-shaking (no pun intended) orgasms.

Do I regret it yet?

Nah. Let's wait a few weeks, perhaps tease out some kind of fantasy that we'll get back together -- AGAIN -- perhaps send out a few green tendrils of possibility. Let's be lovers and friends and then we'll set ourselves up for yet another spectacularly devestating breakup. THIS is what I choose.

I choose life.

Unless, god forbid, I end up pregnant. . .

The Sands of Mine

I have a theory. It is about denying my own shame.

I cultivate these crystals of negative thought. These little self-contained notions -- hard and possibly sharp-edged, tiny but numerous. They have gathered, throughout my life, into a sediment that cushions the bottom of my conscious. They are sublty building themselves into an undeniable majority.

Sometimes I have fantasies, as I lie in bed in the dark, that I can carve a hole in my skull and pour them out into a pile of white on the living room floor, I can watch them skitter away, little pieces of self loathing, under the couch, under the chair, let them be ground into the weave of the carpet. Hold them up in handfuls, watch them pour through my fingers.

Maybe vaccuum them up, perhaps using one of those long thin attachments designed to help you suck dirt from small places.

They'd still be there, though.

The specific chemical makeup inside my head would still combine to precipitate them, filtering like snow until I am a shuddering, capital-a-anxiety-filled mess again.

Hence, the therapist.

His name is Dan but I call him DeeP. This has to do with my own personal amusement -- a shortening of his initials (DP) into a little jibe at his chosen profession.

He accepts this with little comment. I believe he is secretly pleased at garnering a nickname. One of the sick, sick aspects of therapy is how therapists love to vivisect your relationship with them as part of "the process." You are constantly forced to analyze your own analysis of the situation, creating a sort of MC Escher effect that, occassionally, I consider to be fucking annoying.

Of course, when I say, "DeeP, you are being FUCKING ANNOYING," He seizes upon this moment to say something like, "I seem to have hit a nerve." He usually does this while arching an eyebrow in a coy manner.

Well, I like the guy, anyway. Trust him, even. Which makes me, I suppose, a very lucky girl. There is a possibility he can help me manage my in-scull beach situation.

He is not the first therapist I've tried. Only the first I liked.

About four years ago, I was having trouble keeping my sand-filled head above water, and a friend refered me to her therapist.

This woman, I'll call her Dr. Friend, (ironically, this really is her name. Don't tell anyone, okay?) shares a huge modern loft space with her husband, who is also a therapist. They had a receptionist who sat at a massive oak desk with a phone, a lamp, a rolodex, and a vacant smile.

Dr. Friend came out and ushered me into her office, which contained a desk, a couple of large, overstuffed chairs, and massive bookcases filled with books. During my first and last appointment with Dr. Friend, she peered at me over her stern half-glasses, underneath her perfectly coiffed hair helmet, and nodded silently over her notebook as I articulated my pain -- recent suicide in the family, fucked up divorce, fucked up relationships, etc. and on and on.

At the end of the session she cut me off mid-rant. "Well, we're out of time," She said, closing her notebook and tucking the pencil into a drawer. "I want to say that you definitely need therapy. But I can't be your therapist."

That's right, people. I was rejected by the therapist.

Turns out, my friend was too close of a friend for me to see Dr. Friend. She might have had some sort of conflict inherent.

She said, "I will connect you with my husband."

Dr. Friend is married to a man I simply refer to as Dr. Chuckles. Dr. Chuckles had an office full of objet d'art behind glass, artfully lit. He would sit in his uncomfortable wooden chairs and chat. Dr. Chuckles would sit at a slouch, his long legs sprawled in front of him, and slide his sock-clad feet in and out of his tasseled loafers. Dr. Chuckles and I didn't have too much chemistry, but, in the end, it was his loafers that drove me away. I just couldn't take the way he would slide his feet in and out of his shoes while I paid him to do just that.

Next, I was referred to a severe older jewish woman in a ritzy neighborhood. She had an office filled with piles. Piles of books, piles of papers, piles of magazines, piles of files. She had a space carved out of the piles for a couch and a lamp, where we would sit together during our sessions.

At first, I felt like I might be able to handle this one, the pile lady.

But then I noticed she had a tendency to forget what I would tell her from session to session -- I would have to fill her in again and again on the most basic of details. Then, I noticed that she began to make strange, sweeping diagnoses -- on the fourth visit, she suggested that, perhaps, was I a compulsive, chronic masturbator?

What?

Lady, I hardly know you.

Now, good people, I may, on ocassion, enjoy a nice release now and again. Not that I particularly want to share this with anyone, even, sometimes, my own lovers. It's, well, kinda private.

Point being, I wasn't sure pile lady even remembered my name. Why on earth was she making me wonder if my self-pleasure was an unhealthy indulgence?

Nonetheless, I persevered. Over the next several weeks, I:
-was told to go out and buy this book. Yes, I am easily distracted, I am an American Child of MTV. People, yes, I have my moments. But, as I read this book, I knew that this was absolutely not me. Strike two, pile lady.

The final strike, the eventual out, happened at my final session -- I was describing a situation with a friend. Now, there is no denying that my friendship with Johnny is, at times, somewhat unhealthy. But, ultimately, he is like my brother. He's with me to the end. Some other time I'll tell some stories about Johnny -- in the meantime, I cannot get driven to distraction -- as I wound down my description, she eyed me with alarm. "I think this friendship is unhealthy," she said, after hearing me describe it for exactly 50 minutes. "You must cut off this friendship altogether. Until you do this, I suggest you don't come back here."

Now, to me, this seemed somewhat irresponsible of pile lady.

I'm still friends with Johnny, but I didn't go back.

I found DeeP when, in a apopolectic depression, I dialed one of those 1-800 lifelines you always have as part of your benefits package. I dialed the lifeline at 3AM on a Saturday morning, weeping uncontrollably.

They sent me to DeeP.

Ah, DeeP, with your smart mouth and sweet mannerisms. Thank goodness for you.

Conde Nast Wedding in Paradise and other Hellish Outings

I just returned from here. Where I was to attend a conference for beautiful people. I mean, my friends' wedding.

These are my beautiful friends. The type of shining, flawless people you stare at when they are sitting in restaurants because, wait, are those people famous? Are they emitting some sort of ethereal light? The type of people who you really anticipate that you'll thoroughly dislike, because, people that pretty are incapable of identifying with those of us who get pimples and could never wear a bikini. The type of people who shock you by being sweet and kind and flawed and overall fabulous.

This wedding, it was on the beach. I mean, it was literally on a cliff surrounded by a cove of splashing surf under a blue sky awash with sunlight. His mother married them. Then she gave a speech that made everyone weep into their napkins.

They had tables on a ledge over the water.

We ate gourmet food and drank thousands of pina coladas.

I asked my friend Susan -- do weddings like this sometimes make you feel lonely?

She said, "Oh, no! They mostly just make me glad it's not me!"

I got home and my best friend ccalled to tell me she's engaged.

I told my mother. She said, "Oh, well, that's a low blow."

That woman gets me.