Furiously Happy (12 page)

In truth though, I was a bit concerned about the whole process. I remembered watching Slim Goodbody on TV, an odd white guy with a small Afro who wore a full-body leotard with the inside of the human body painted on it, which made him look as if he'd been flayed alive. He was like a terrible precursor to those Body Worlds corpses they show at museums-that-have-given-up-on-being-actual-museums, and I worried that I might end up looking like Slim Goodbody's estranged sister, Fatty Noskin.

The next day, Laura and I arrived at the clinic and immediately felt out of our element as we huddled together on the couch and gazed at women who looked as if they'd had fat sucked out of their clavicles and injected directly into their lips.

We signed a pamphlet that explained the risks but that also promised we'd end up with “thicker skin,” which I think meant our faces would get huge and our feelings wouldn't get hurt as much. I felt conflicted. “So I'll
gain
inches … but on my face. I'm paying to get fat-faced.” Laura looked at me uneasily and we considered running, but then a nurse came to bring us back to the exam room. She was sweet and nice and she looked like she was thirty-five but she said she was in her fifties. Laura assumed she was a poster child for the process. I assumed that she was a compulsive liar.

The nurse had each of us put her head into a glowing machine that took a series of pictures of our faces and then she used those pictures to scare the ever-loving shit out of us. She showed us sun damage and scarring, and then she showed us the picture that made me stand up and shout, “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”

It was a colony of bacteria living on my face.

“Holy shit,” I said, while peering in at the large green clusters across my nose and forehead. “There's an entire alien race camping out on my face. It's like a fucked-up version of
Horton Hears a Who!
EXCEPT THAT THE WHOS ARE SQUATTERS LIVING ON MY FACE.”

“It's pretty normal,” the nurse tried to assure me. “It's just bacteria.”

I stared at the nurse. “THERE ARE LIVE CREATURES SQUATTING ON MY FACE AND YOU ARE GOING TO KILL THEM.”

“
Well.
That's a … strange way to look at it,” said the nurse uneasily. Apparently she'd had a lot of people grossed out by these pictures, but none had ever had an ethical crisis about them.

“EVACUATE, YOU GUYS!” I tried to yell at my own face. “GO TO THE NECK,” I offered.

“Wait,” I asked the nurse, “you aren't doing my neck, are you?”

“Oh, stop being such a hoarder,” Laura said.

“I'm not a hoarder,” I countered.
“I'm trying to stop a mass murder on my face.”

“No,” she replied. “You're a face hoarder. You're hoarding bacteria on your face. We're going to have to have a skintervention.”

I looked at the nurse, who seemed baffled and slightly unnerved (probably because of Laura's terrible pun). “Does PETA ever have a problem with this since you're killing all these tiny life forms?”

She shook her head. “I can honestly say I've never had
anyone
have a problem with this until now. They're
really
not good to have on your face. Your porphyrins are unhealthy and can—”

“What the shit?” I interrupted. “THEY'RE CALLED ‘
POOR FRIENDS
'?
You want me to murder my ‘poor friends'?
”

“No. You're pronouncing it wrong. Honestly, it's just a routine cleaning.”

“IT'S A
GENOCIDE
.”

The nurse took a deep breath and tried to change the subject. “So, what would you
expect
to have happen as a result of this treatment?”

I paused and thought about it for a second. “I sort of expect to have my face ripped off and find John Travolta's underneath it. But just for the day. After that it wouldn't be funny anymore.”

Laura had a much more normal reason why she wanted the treatment. “I want to get rid of some of these wrinkles, but I don't ever want to get Botox.”

“Well, Botox
can
be very helpful,” explained the nurse.

“I don't need Botox,” Laura countered. “I got
Bangtox
. It's when you decide to get bangs to cover your forehead wrinkles. It totally works and no one injects poison in your face.”

I nodded in agreement. “Yes. I would also like to avoid getting poison shot near my brain.”

Laura concurred: “I need my brain. It's where I keep all my best stuff.”

The nurse looked a little lost and did our treatments quickly. It was much like getting your teeth cleaned, but for your whole face.

The nurse reluctantly gave me the filter after she was done but there was hardly any face in it and pretty much no diamond dust. It wasn't even enough to pan for. So in the end I was left with a small vial of face dust filled with now-homeless Whos, an expensive face toothbrush, and hundreds of dollars' worth of what I assume is Vaseline.

I also ended up with a newfound appreciation of what my dermatillomania was doing to my face and I went an entire month without scratching it open. Mostly because I didn't want to disturb the “poor friends” who were probably valiantly trying to rebuild after the tragic act of God they'd just encountered.

Still, my face does feel very clean.

Clean and
terribly, terribly
lonely.

 

It's Like Your Pants Are Bragging at Me

There are few things in the world that make me angrier than poverty, the lack of basic human civil rights, and the fact that most women's clothes don't have pockets. Obviously the first two are more pressing, but the pockets thing is pretty irritating too.

Victor claims girls don't need pockets because they have purses, so I had to explain, “No. We are forced into purses
because
we don't have pockets. Imagine if I ripped all of your pockets off of your sweet pocket-pants right now and you had to carry them around with you everywhere. You have like …
seven
pockets in those pants. Imagine carrying seven pockets with you at the carnival. You can't. You'd need a purse. Then you'd get on the Zipper and it'd be fine for a minute until your purse popped open and all of your stuff was being poltergeisted around the cage at you like you were a kitten in a dryer full of batteries, and then your phone gave you a black eye. This is all based on real life, by the way.”

Victor seemed a bit taken aback but argued that “pocket-pants” don't exist and that “
they're called cargo pants
.” But that's just semantics.

“You have pants with
multiple
, masculine purses all over them,” I may have screamed. “Frankly, it's like your pants are bragging at me.” Then Victor gave up, probably because he didn't want to look like he was taking his pants' side.

The closest equivalent women have to pocket-pants are pocketbooks and honestly that's just insulting. Pocketbooks aren't pockets
or
books. They're liars. Basically they're pockets you have to carry around with your hands until you get tired of it and give up and buy a purse to put it in. It's as if the clothing industry just came out of a bad breakup and was brainstorming during a bitter drunken rage and was all, “Hey, you know how girls hate carrying purses and they just use you to carry their lipstick and shit in your pocket and then they leave you for Brad? Let's make a purse in the shape of a pocket. But we'll make it too big to fit in a pocket so you have to buy
another
purse. AND WE'LL CALL IT A
POCKETBOOK
. THOSE BITCHES WILL NEVER SEE IT COMING
AND
THEY'LL PAY FOR IT.” I might be overreacting but it feels like they did it on purpose. I don't even know Brad.

And yes, you might be thinking that girls can totally wear cargo pants if they want to, but I disagree. Skinny girls might be able to wear those things, but girls like me look like they're wearing pants with a bunch of purses stapled to them, and that's really the last thing you need when you're looking for something slimming in the plus-size section. In fact, most of the pockets you see on women's pants are just illusions made to taunt you. Or sometimes they really are pockets but they are intentionally sewn closed, as if to say, “I'm letting you have these pockets but I'm sewing them shut for your own good.” And most of us leave them sewn shut because we'd rather look thin than have pockets.

Really the only way it would work is if the pockets in the pocket-pants made me look thinner
and
still held tons of stuff. I guess basically I want magic. In a size sixteen. I want my pockets to be like a TARDIS, or Mary Poppins's carpetbag. Also, why did Mary Poppins even need such a huge bag if it's magically designed to fit everything? Seriously. I'm guessing that Mary asked for a magic pocket and the wizards were like, “What,
like a dude
? Nah.
I don't think so, lady.
You'll get a purse.” Those guys were motherfuckers. They were probably the same guys who were like, “So, let's get this straight … you need to magically travel long distances to find young children, and society says you're not allowed to wear anything other than dresses?
Got it.
FUCKING FLYING UMBRELLA.” Thanks, wizards. I didn't think you could come up with a worse design than Wonder Woman's invisible jet,
but you did it
. Thank God cell phones didn't exist then because there would be a shit-ton of Mary Poppins up-skirt pics all over the Internet now. This is exactly why I don't trust wizards.

On the upside, yesterday I taped a Ziploc bag to the inside of my skirt so I'd have someplace to store my
everything-that-didn't-fit-in-my-bra
and it worked really well, so now I'm working on a cape made solely from stapled-together Ziploc bags. It'll be awesome because I'll be able to see all the stuff in my Ziploc pockets (unlike my purse, which just eats everything, like a tiny black hole). And it'll also double as a rain poncho.
And
I can put a stiletto knife and a “How to Stab People” pamphlet in it so assholes know not to fuck with me and I don't even have to pull it out and threaten them.
There is no downside to this.

Long story short? I'm going to get super rich selling pocket-ponchos. (Which will be all-pockets-all-the-time, and also compact enough to be stuffed into a pocket so if you rip one pocket-poncho you can just pull a spare one out of the first.) And I will use that money to invest in magic, and overthrow those goddamn misogynistic wizards. Also, I just realized that men get stiletto knives and women get stiletto shoes. This whole thing is fucked.

Thanks for nothing, feminism.

 

Nice Bass

Sometimes people just need to get away from their ordinary life to escape and recuperate. Personally, I prefer to do that by locking myself in my bedroom with a bottle of rum, several books, and lots of questionable British TV, but most people prefer to leave home and go to a beach or something. Probably because
most
people don't end up on vacations where small gangs attempt to break into their hotel rooms at two o'clock in the morning.

Hang on. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Victor goes to Japan every year because he studies Japanese stuff. I'd be more descriptive but I tend to just blank out even more than usual when he starts talking in other languages. Regardless, he eventually decided that I needed to go with him at least once, even though I really hate traveling. I finally said okay, but only if my mom could watch our daughter because I didn't trust anyone else to stay with her. Hailey was seven at the time and was that strange combination of confidently independent and dangerously stupid that really only comes with young children and drunks, so I was hesitant to leave her. But I knew my mom was very responsible and would counter any instability caused by my entertainingly insane father, who gave me a giant hug when I came in to drop off Hailey. He sat down at the kitchen table and went back to casually inspecting the new order of glass eyeballs that had just arrived. He assured me that my worry about leaving Hailey was normal but unfounded and that vacations are what keep people healthy and sane. “Like, remember when I brought those ringtails in a coffee can on vacation with us?” he asked.

Strangely, I did not.

“
Why would you bring a bunch of ringtails on vacation?
” I asked. My father seemed slightly offended and assured me that he'd never bring “a bunch” of ringtails on vacation and that it was just two, because “
who brings a bunch of ringtails on vacation?
” A better question might be “
Who brings
any
ringtails on vacation?
” but I realized I already knew the answer.

“Well, they couldn't be trusted at home alone,” my father continued. “The last time I did that they broke into the filing cabinets and made nests out of our taxes.”

“
Why don't I remember any of this?
” I asked, and my mom casually explained that I wasn't with them on that trip.

“So you took a bunch of lemurs on vacation
instead
of me?”

My mother looked at me like I was overreacting again. “Well, it wasn't an
either/or
situation.”

“And ringtails aren't lemurs,” my dad said, seeming vaguely disappointed that he was even having to explain this. “They're more like small raccoons. Like if a raccoon and a squirrel had a baby.”

It was informative but it wasn't making it any easier to understand why anyone would choose to take a vacation with wild animals and not me.

“It certainly wasn't
my
idea to take them on a trip,” my mom explained, with a mild glare at my dad. “They were orphaned and your father was nursing them back to health until they were old enough to be let go. I didn't even know they were in the car with us until I saw the giant coffee can in the backseat.”