Shirley Temper

This blog started as a place to review cheap makeup. I love makeup and wanted to advise others on how to look good without spending a lot of money. Recently, it has occured to me that this is absurd, because I usually look like a hungover hobo whith a racoon just got fresh. I'm taking this blog in a different direction. The current focus will be about discussing and elucidating the philosophy about Montel Williams as espoused in his seminal philosophical work, Mountain, Get Out of My Way: Life Lessons and Learned Truths. To be fair, this philsophy is not Williams alone, but was widley practiced by the Gnostic Christians before the canon was established and their esoteric practices forced underground.

Years ago, some friends and I were discussing an imagined scene which would epitomize the idea of tragicomedy. An example of the sort of our inquiry were the real-life rape allegations against self-proclaimed “Lord of the Dance,” Michael Flatley. To be clear, these allegations were made by a woman. This is an example of tragicomedy in that the idea or rape conjures up horrific images, while the idea of Michael Flatley conjures up (to the exclusion of all else) images that are, well, really, really gay; these images also step lively and involve colorful pyrotechnics. (See: fagbam*)

The idea that we ended up settling on (settling on, by the way, in the sense of agreeing to, not in the sense in which Clinton settled on Lewinsky, lacking any other options of the rotund, beret wearing variety) was that of a clown, naked, in full face makeup with his red rubber nose, crying and masturbating in the shower. This, however, was an agreement of sorts, because wasn’t complete: we were divided over whether sobbing would better describe tragicomedy rather than a single tear, leaving in its wake a kaleidoscopic line of smeared makeup.

Over the years, I’ve wrestled with this divide among my friends; sometimes joining one group only to open up my heart to the compelling reasons of another and, like a drunken college girl trying to get attention, again switching teams.

At long last, I’ve come to believe that the single tear is more poignant a signifier of the delicate sensibility of tragicomedy.

But on to other issues which, given the single tear/sobbing divide, have not received the attention they deserved. We’ve been over looking the hastily thrown off clown garb, a rainbow puddle in the austere, military barracks style apartment. Forgotten, they lay on the floor like a pool of hope among the ruins of the clown’s life. He too had bigger dreams. And now, at long last, I see also his shoes—both pairs. The clown shoes are on the floor alongside his regular shoes; the former triumphant red, bulbous, the latter workaday, pedestrian, grey, befitting those with normal feet and average aspirations.

I put it to you that he hadn’t ever meant to deceive us about the size of his feet, but rather, he too had bought into his own mythology: a big man with big dreams, who needed large feet to get to higher places.

*Meads, Potluri: Brooklyn, NY 2007. Consensual homosexual acts done in manner at once joyous and celebratory. Can involve pointy, paper party hats.

The Switzers, awaiting twins, found India to be a cheap, secure alternative

This makes me sick.

I find this article deeply upsetting. The questions that kept occurring to me as I read it was: is there no end to Western narcissism? Does our fetishization of fertility and parenting know no bounds? Is nothing sacrosanct from the long arm of US capitalism?

The pursuit of these American women to have biological children past their fertility window is yet another symptom of our society in which we all live like perpetual adolescents, unable to accept that unfortunately, there are simply things in our lives which we will want but will not have. We cannot accept that if we make choices in our 20s and 30s to not have children, we may not be able to have biological children afterwards. Rather, we are a deeply consumerist society, in which even a womb can be purchased, and now, at a bargain rate! Each case of infertility is considered a catastrophic tragedy, not a part of life, which is often hard and unfair. Can Americans, more and more myopically narcissistic, simply not accept a life with consequences? A life in which there exist problems, the solutions of which cannot be purchased with greenbacks?
Have any of these women considered adopting a child born into less fortunate circumstances?
The discussion in this article is shallow regarding the very real dangers these Indian women face without the legal and medical protection, nor the emotional support offered to surrogates in the US. There is little if any concern about their emotional welfare and future physical health that may be affected by carrying additional children, often in quick succession. There is no discussion of the fact that these women face potentially real and very dangerous medical complications during pregnancy, nor is there any study about the long-term emotional and medical effects of repeated surrogacy. The fact that American women are paying minimally for the womb-rental is skirted, but the reality is, these Indian women are being sought out with the same type of thinking that might cause this same American woman to buy a dishwasher at Sears rather than Lowes. The motive here in choosing India is purely capitalistic.

The American women who exploit these third world women can comfort themselves all they want with antiquated, Orientalist notions of India.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, and in the spirit of trendy, Angelina Jolie paternalism towards the third world, these American women speak of the spiritual side of having children born in India, and their token gifts of toys and clothes for these women is held up as a sign of goodwill, of the global bonds of sisterhood. Rather, this attitude and the money and other material returns earned by Indian women for surrogacy should be viewed as yet another example of the American idea that any sin can be forgiven, and problem solved, if enough money is thrown at the problem.

The idea of American "medical tourism" in India is laughable and ironic.
These women, while not agents of US government, are its subjects; the very government whose protection of corporate pharmaceutical companies and their patents have caused the premature, medically un-aided deaths of thousands of Indians and other third world citizens.
That one of Americans hugged her surrogate was written about as if it were a sign of Western ideas of equality shaking off the shackles of the Indian caste system. To the contrary, it is precisely the Indian caste system, not to mention the global one, in which millions are locked into poverty, which allows cheap surrogacy in the first place.
What next? Indian hair is already harvested for most of the world’s wigs.
Should we also ask that organs are harvested? After all, us Americans can smile and answer reassuringly, "we’ll pay, of course!" $5,000 for a kidney?
$10,000 for a heart? An HD TV for a lung? We can console ourselves knowing its more than these poor villagers will make in a year otherwise, and after all, we too will face hardships, like the mosquitoes and heat that one American complained of in the article.

The plight of these Indian women is truly and profoundly deplorable. At the bottom rungs of Indian society, they work hard and long for little. Then they carry white women’s babies, which are removed from their bodies for what is—in anywhere other than the 3rd world—very little money. Then they are asked not to complain, after all, they received a handsome sum. Violated once by Indian society, they are violated again by the endless greed and limitless sense of entitlement of Western society, and then asked to say thank you for the favor.

Samuel Johnson said, "If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman."

I wish there was an opposite to putting a flag at half mast, like if we were to raise it higher as a sign of joy or pride. If that was possible, I'd raise the flag of the great state of Oregon, home to yours truly. Why? Because of this video. I mean, first we bring you undeserving bitches Tonya Harding and now this. Go Ducks! Please keep this in mind the next time you are fixing to piss me off. I mean I literally have neighbors back home that stock guns, canned goods and have home-made bomb shelters for the impending race-war. Oregonians won't go down like bitches.

Some of you have asked, but Anna, after you die, how will we continue to keep you memory alive?

I've come up with a nice option, best followed by jumping in after the casket arms raised to the air screaming "WHY GOD WHY!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU TAKE ME INSTEAD!?" This will be especially touching since I plan on being cremated and you will be jumping on someone else's casket. I've asked Sabrina to throw frogs down over the services for dramatic effect. At the end of the funeral I would like you to please reenact Michael Jackson's Thriller video while sobbing.
So after that, please see the attached memorial tattoo of ODB, and have one of me done on your upper arm. The face is so similar looking that really all you have to do is have the tattoo artist make the hair longer.

I realize that I didn’t account for possible heirs when writing my living will. I will now address my death as it concerns my first child, Jianna. For those of you who don’t know the story of Jianna, I will briefly elaborate here.

When I was in middle school in Portland, my class went on a retreat for three days to a local campsite for “Sex Camp.” We learned about STDs and condoms and crap. Then, to discourage us from ever sitting on a boy’s lap or sharing gum or any other means of getting pregnant, the teachers drew names out of a hat and assigned us spouses.

I was madly in love with a half Irish, half Iranian boy named Mike, and crossed my fingers that I would get him. Rather, I ended up with Jonathan Peterson (I’ve changed his last name). Jonathan was a fat, bespectacled genius who ran in gym class with a scarf around his neck and a cardigan around his shoulders. Looking back, he was pretty awesome but I was a mean pretty girl and I was so mad about being paired with him I couldn’t see straight.

Any who…our child was a sack of flour that I called “it” and Jonathan named “Jianna.” He drew long, Daisy Duck eyelashes on it and a little red mouth. A day later, in a fit of parental rage, I threw Jianna into Jonathan’s chest and she exploded against her father.

Last year, I found out that Jonathan is now an Ivy League educated, contact lens wearing homosexual. I really believe that people are born gay or straight, but I can’t help but think that the fact that his first experience with a girl involved him tolerating her emasculating rantings and the murder of his daughter.

Jianna gets nothing.

I'd like a propose a question to my readership. Robert Downey Jr: Down with the swirl?

Please take this question seriously. I see him as the sort of, I dunno, nearly homosexual, heart of gold, bipolar coke-head I could really see myself with. I'm about as white a woman as you'll ever meet, in every way other than the fact that by some accident my skin is of a burnished gold only otherwise seen on statues of Mayan goddesses. Will this stand in the way between me and RDJ?

Please use this blog as a sort of HQ for all your John Beck fanfic.

Okay I'll start.

I'd like to see JB dating a surly black woman in a wheelchair. I know he's married, but I don't care. This is how I see it. JB and SBW see each other across a crowded buffet hall, he's got cheesecake in one hand, and cheese bugles in the other. She's shouting obscenities at no one in particular. He pushes his women and children aside. JB and SBW remain lovers for years, in a relationship not unlike that of the late Graham Greene and his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.

Now it is your turn.