Cancer: The New Morality

Scientists released findings from a breast cancer study that shows women who have more than three drinks per day will see their risk of breast cancer increase by 30%. To this I say: Hello, breast cancer, come on in and make yourself comfortable! Say hi to your roommate, cervical cancer. You guys take a look around and get a feel for the place. My main groundrule is: no metasticizing. This is not your place, it's mine, so kindly stay out of my colon, brain, throat, liver, lungs, uterus, pancreas and stomach. Especially the stomach.

Seriously, what the fuck doesn't cause cancer? I just find it interesting that sex and drinking are often linked to various types of "female" cancers. Personally, I think next surgeon general should be The Church Lady: "Sooooooo, out at a bar all night were you, Sweetie? Meet a boy, did ya, Cupcake? Weeeelll, isn't that spaaayshal. It's a good think you enjoy getting poked by strange men because you're going to get a whooole lot of that in the hospital when your ladyparts are being rotted off by The Cancer, you Babylonian whore!"

In conclusion: yes a person can get cancer after a lifetime of risky behavior. So can a strapping 21 year-old with a huge cock and his whole life ahead of him. So it goes.

A Few of My Favorite Things (This Week)

In lieu of boring you with a long post of my boring borepinions, I thought I'd recommend some truly great shit to you with prodigious use of links and short, palatable bursts of borepinions.

Here is my current favorite...

-answer to people who claim America is not a fascist state.

-new song (well, new to me): “Punchlines” by Mates of State—catchiest bastard ever, especially the second half. It’s definitely worth a dollar.

-peon: Carla Bird, a TV assistant, actually collected her overtime. I’m so impressed with this woman and her refusal to be exploited by her employers. As a publishing assistant, it was made clear to me that no one ever collected overtime and an attempt to do so would basically be viewed as an act of aggression against the company. This is so completely typical in the media and entertainment industries. Also sadly typical is that it is mainly young women who take these low-paying, long-hours assistant jobs, maybe because (if I may editorialize a bit) they tend to place less value on their skills and abilities in the workplace than young men do. In my experience, when young men do take assistant positions they get promoted much faster, probably because they speak up more and aren’t afraid to push for what they want. One hard-working female editorial assistant I knew, certainly no shrinking violet herself, was passed over for promotion twice. Each time she was told to “wait and see” for six months and maybe there’d be opportunity for her to advance then. It was only the third time she was given the same line that she quit and found a new, much better job that rewarded her work. I don’t know any guy in publishing who would “wait and see” even once.

Anyway, this is all to say, Carla Bird, you are one brave, smart cookie. Nice work. May you be given your own TV show to run one day and your own assistants to not-exploit.

-baby replacement: Gorillas are now critically endangered. I don’t know why this bothers me so much more than, say, the same information about snow leopards. Maybe because “Gorillas in the Mist” was my favorite movie when I was little. In any case, you can “adopt” a gorilla (or a snow leopard, if that’s your thing) through the WWF. The money goes towards helping gorillas and you get an adoption certificate (adoption: so hot right now!) and, if you’re a big spender, a stuffed gorilla. The perfect gift for the childless spinster in your life.

-hater: Even though it shit talks my future ex-husband, I must insist that you read this essay about Brooklyn Books of Wonder. This is precisely what is wrong with popular literary novels now. The author’s points are scathing and spot-on and nothing short of revelatory for me as a writer and a reader. If I taught a class right now, this would be on the syllabus.

If I were a doctor and this, a disease, my prescription would be Mary Gaitskill.

Enjoy!

Jack

Also, I just needed to share this with you. Meet Jack. Jack is Angela and Dustin's new baby.

He is obviously the cutest baby who has ever lived. Suri Cruise looks like a total pile of barf by comparison.

A Tale of Two Jimmies

Yeah so James Frey landed a million-dollar book deal at Harper Collins. I would go off about this but I have almost completely exhausted my interest in talking and reading about him, which is too bad for me, especially since he seems poised to become The Writer of Our Times. Yes, it's completely retarded that he landed a million dollar book deal but there are far worse fake writers out there--I don't mean people who lie, I mean people who can't actually write, but somehow manage to string together 100,000 insipid and cliched pieces of the English language and then sell a million copies of their disasters. Plus, it's obvious that any shred of dignity left in the book publishing industry was dumped down the garbage disposal with the proposed publication of IF I DID IT by OJ Simpson. Public outcry made the book (and it's publisher, Judith Reagan) go away, but some small press snatched it up and to no public outcry at all the fantastical tale is scheduled to print with a tiny publishing house/vanity press and pretty much no one in the whole world cares anymore except for the Goldmans and Browns.

Oh, but I have an idea! Instead of ever buying another James Frey book again, you could buy this one instead:



It's written by my friend Jim McGarrah, who was a tunnel rat during the Vietnam war. Jim would eat James Frey's tiny testicles for lunch and then belch the alphabet, if he wasn't busy being an amazing poet and inspiring college professor. And for you who prefer your memoirs truthy, I can vouch for Jim's. He has not had an easy life, but lucky for us, he's had an interesting one.

p.s. I don't know what happened to my little link-maker so just go here to buy copies of Jim's book:

http://shop.indianahistory.org/index.html?lang=en-us&target=d40.html