Presto Chango

It was a boring summer afternoon. The tween downloaded a new app for the iPad, a fun little photo editor. It was free, and it was a tween dream. You take a picture of yourself, your friends, your cat, whatever, and then you embellish it in all sorts of crazy ways. You can change eye color and hair color and style. You can add make up and fake eyelashes. You can edit out your acne and uneven skin tone. You can even do some sort of fake face lift thing to change your face shape and make you look like someone else entirely.

I’m sure it has more practical applications as well, but for the tween, it is a great way to see how she will look in make up since she is not yet allowed to wear it. Especially since I took it all away from her when she wore it anyway and lied about it, as if I don’t know what under eye raccoon circles are. Her make up collection is for experimentation, not snagging pre-pubescent boys at school.

She spent last night with one of her besties, and I am pretty sure all they did is photo editor makeovers on her iPad. When she came home today, she was ready for round two of photo editing. She redid a couple of her pictures, changing her eyes to gray, her hair to blond, and her face to WASP. She redid her sister next. I don’t want to see a picture of my ten year old all tarted up like it’s Alabama pageant time, but I had to admit she looked beautiful in an unnatural whorish way.

I encouraged her to put down the iPad and find something else to do. Something productive. Write a song. Read a book. Send an email. Dance. Take a nap. Scoop the kitty litter. Play piano. Anything that doesn’t involve that damn iPad. She agreed, but only after she made over me.

As I was rolling out dough for tonight’s dinner, the tween approached me with the iPad.
“What color would you want your eyes to be?” she asked.
“I like my brown eyes,” I said. I do. I describe them as shit brown, but honestly, I love them because they looked like my dog’s.
“Well, you have to pick another color.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Just do it, Mom. Your life depends on it.”
“Whatever, I’ll take green,” I said.
“Why green? Why not blue?” she asked me. This is a game the tween has played with me ever since she was a toddler. When she was two, she would walk up to me with an object in each hand, hold them up, and say,” This one or this one?” I would pick one of her hands and she would say,” Wrong! You want this one!”

“What difference does it make? Just give me whatever eye color you want.”
“Fine, green then. What about your hair? Do you want Lady Gaga pink?”
“I don’t know, how about blond? I’m trying to make dinner here,” I said.

She got quiet, her little fingers working on the screen as I filled the dough with sliced roast turkey and Havarti cheese for the stuffed bread I was making for dinner.

“All done,” she said happily, about five minutes later. “Wanna look?”

I wiped my hands on a dish towel and walked over to her. On the screen was a picture of me, only not me. I had bright green eyes and short platinum blond hair. And OH MY GOD, I almost looked just like my mother!

“Aahhh! Stop that! You’re freaking me out!” I screamed at her. “I look like your grandmother. My eyes!” “It’s not that bad,” she said.
“You stop that right now! Get rid of it. Give me back my eyes!” And my identity.

The tween was delighted with herself. She conceded that yes, I did look more than a bit like her grandmother, who incidentally has blue eyes, not green, but the light hair and eyes were disturbingly familiar.

I don’t want to look like my mother. She isn’t an unattractive person, but her horrible behavior over the years has certainly made her less appealing. Looking like my mother is too close to turning into my mother, and nothing scares me more than that.

One time I looked in the mirror and I saw my father’s mother, which is almost as scary. If I started wearing blue eye shadow and hot pink lipstick, I could be her doppelganger. Does that mean one day I too will traumatize my grandchildren by removing my brassiere in front of them?

Privacy was not apparently an issue with my grandmother. Neither was natural looking makeup. And for the record, my grandmother wouldn’t just pop out her titties in front of children for fun. She was undressing to take a bath, and my sisters and I, who were quite young, wanted to keep her company. I recall her breasts flopping down to her knees, and later, when she was in the tub, floating like islands on top of the bath water. I am haunted by that memory to this day. Thanks to that memory, I don't even like to look at myself in a bathtub.

Who knew a free app came with such a high price?

Who You Gonna Call?

Do you believe in ghosts? I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, if so many people throughout time have experienced supernatural or unexplainable phenomena, they can’t all be making it up, can they? We have whole television shows and film genres devoted to ghosts, not to mention a field of pseudo science. And don’t forget the Ghostbusters. Most of us have had one of those unusual sort of feelings that can’t be explained rationally, or at the very least known someone who was related to someone who felt a presence or saw something or lived in a house where something may or may not have occurred. It all sounds so vague because of its very nature; none of it can be explained rationally.

On the other hand, though, seriously? Just because we had Casper comic books and watched Scooby Doo doesn’t mean we should believe that ghosts are real. Or does it?

Cue the eerie music.

My older daughter, E, has had a sixth sense sort of thing ever since she was a baby. It’s not so much she could see things as sense something that would make her uncomfortable in some way. On her second Thanksgiving, for example, we went to an old inn in North Carolina for our holiday meal. Every time we took her in one room in the inn, the one with the buffet tables, she would freak out baby style, which involved lots of screaming  and crying and pushing in an attempt to get us to haul her out of that space. Once outside, she would  immediately calm down like nothing ever happened. Which would make us think she was ready to go back in and eat, until we would walk back in the buffet room, when the process would start all over. It wasn’t a fun Thanksgiving, but at least we didn’t overeat.

Another time when she was a toddler, I had taken her to see some goats at an old farm. We walked the property, went into the farmhouse, and avoided the goat pellets while petting the goats, but the minute we stepped foot inside the dairy barn, E freaked out and had to be carried outside, where almost instantly, she behaved completely normal.

E is now twelve. A few months ago, she asked me, “Mom, do you ever get the feeling that something happened in a building? You know, like the old homes in Charleston? Do you ever go inside and feel like something bad happened there, somebody died or something?”

I smiled knowingly. “Oh, that?” I said. “You’ve been doing that since you were a baby.”

Now, before you think my child sees dead people, you need to know something about my family. We value rational, scientific thought very highly in our home. We believe in the power of logic and the ability to explain things. We employ critical thinking skills and do not believe in much that cannot be proven or demonstrated. That being said, I still allow for the possibility of the supernatural and the inexplicable. I don’t think that Big Foot is real, but at the same token, it seems sort of self-important of us Earthlings to think that in all the vast universe, we are the only living creatures.  You get where I am going with this, right?

Last week, we vacationed in the low country of South Carolina. We spent our last day before driving home exploring Beaufort and the barrier islands nearby, finishing the day with a stop at Hunting Island State Park. We had never been there before, but they have the only lighthouse in the state that allows visitors to explore inside and climb to the top. The whole family thought that sounded cool.

But it wasn’t cool. With the heat index, it was over a hundred degrees that day. The lighthouse, built in 1873, is constructed of cast iron, with a brick interior. It has 168 steps to the top, and maybe four windows that open. There was nothing cool about it. We paid our admission fee and started the climb to the top. It was a fascinating structure, full of romance and history. As I walked those spiraling stairs, I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like to live on the island alone, to wear a hot as hell lighthouse keeper’s uniform, making sure that I protected the ships along the shore in my lonely existence.

We reached the top and enjoyed as much of the view as we could without getting queasy looking down. E has a decent fear of heights, and after creeping along with her back to the wall of the top of the lighthouse, she was ready to begin the descent. I decided to join her since I looked too far down and had that weak in the knees feeling, although it might have been worse due to the heat.

We walked down the stairs, and with each landing, I was covered in more sweat. Not a dewy, lady like glistening sweat, but more like a Gatorade commercial, or a maybe a hose under my hair had sprung a leak. Sweat was pouring down my face, my back, between my boobs, my butt cheeks. If there was a crevice anywhere on my body, it had become a flash flood zone. I decided to stop and take a rest on the next landing, only a few levels from the bottom.

“Mom, are you alright?” E asked me.

I looked at her, and said, “Watch out. You are going to walk into that woman.” I meant the woman behind her. She had blond hair tucked in a bun, and she was wearing a long cream colored skirt, almost down to the floor. She looked like she was about to walk right into my daughter, as if each didn't know the other was there.

“What woman?” E said.

 She was right. It was just the two of us on that landing. It was just the two of us walking down the stairs as well. My husband and younger daughter were still at the top of the lighthouse, and we had not passed any other tourists on the way down. What I saw was a woman who almost walked into my daughter, a woman that was clearly not there.

My rational mind tells me what I choose to believe. I was overheated. The lighthouse was an oven. I hallucinated.  I imagined I saw a woman standing beside my daughter. My not right mind tells me otherwise. E did not see a woman, but she does confirm that I asked about one and that I was convinced there was a person next to her. I am a little scared to ask if she felt  a rush of cold air or any movement near her at the same time. I don’t want to put ideas in her head, and I also don’t want to know the answer because it would screw with my hallucination theory.

You can believe what you want to believe. I am not claiming I saw a ghost. I’m also not denying it. But I will say this: don’t climb a cast iron lighthouse on a hundred degree day. It’s fucking hot.

Fifty Shades of Bad

Spoiler Alert: In case you couldn't tell, I’m getting ready to unleash a diatribe on “Fifty Shades of Grey” by E.L. James. With details. If you haven’t read it yet, chances are good you aren’t going to read it. Thus, the spoiler alert really isn’t necessary. How can you spoil something that's already rotten?

Yeah, I read “Fifty Shades of Grey.” I even read “Fifty Shades Darker”, the sequel, after which I determined there was no way in hell I was going to read the third one. I get the feeling I don’t need to read the third one to know what it’s about, an argument that could be made for the first two. I read them because it seemed the rest of the women in the US of A were reading them. I didn’t want to feel left out. I also wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Okay, I know I didn’t need to read it to make that determination, but I wanted to see if it was worth it. The short answer? No.

I knew a little about these smutty books before I cracked open the first paperback. They are mommy porn books about an older man who dominates a younger woman. The sex was  allegedly hot. The writing was mediocre. The editing was nonexistent. I thought that was enough to work with. Wrong! The first of the trilogy introduces the characters, Christian Grey, the dominating older man, and Anastasia, his naive submissive.

When you think older man and younger woman and throw in the word grey, you would think we are talking a true May-December romance. Not so. They are both in their twenties. Twenties! That’s not old. It’s especially not old considering the target audience.

Okay, so Christian, which is an odd name to pick for the main character of a dirty book, is not only in his mid to late twenties, he is also the multimillionaire owner of his own business. He can fly his own helicopter. He knows a lot about wine. And he was the adopted son of a crack whore. Wait, what? Yes, we, the readers, are supposed to believe that a man in his twenties who started out life as a white trash kid and was adopted in his preschool formative years is now the most eligible bachelor of Seattle. Seattle should feel insulted.

 His love interest, Anastasia, is an innocent college graduate who meets the charming Mr. Grey when she interviews him for the school newspaper as a favor to her roommate. And guess what? They are interested in each other. And guess what else? She’s a virgin. Seriously? She just graduated college. The percentage of 23 year olds who are still virgins in the US is roughly ten percent. I Googled it so you know it’s a fact.

Give me a break. Give us all a break.

But wait, there’s more. He is so screwed up by his crack whore mother, to whom he refers as “the crack whore,” that he can’t have a regular relationship with a woman. Instead, he has contractual relationships with submissives, who have hard and soft limits of what they are willing to do, and safety words, and a trial period, and all the alleged sexual relations take place in the dungeon room in his apartment, and oh yes, did I mention they sign a do not discuss clause or some other bullshit, so Ana can’t even discuss her love and unusual relationship with her roommate, who ends up dating Christian’s brother. Oh Jesus. Just writing about this shitty book is making me dumber.

Okay, I will buy the argument that the plot isn’t really that important. After all, the plot lines of porn movies are even worse. And no one watches those for the plot. Which brings me to my next complaint. If you are going to write porn, make it good porn. Make the reader want to read it. In the first book, E.L. James decided to use some words liberally. Like clamber and apex. Clambering into bed is fine every once in a while, but when you start counting the number of times someone clambers, then maybe that characters needs to scurry or jump or crawl or fall into or do anything other than clamber. Plus, clamber reminds me of clabber, which reminds me of clabber milk, which reminds me to empty out my fridge, not take out my vibrator. Likewise for apex. I don’t want to read the “apex of my thighs” over and over. It’s not sexy, it’s weird, and this isn’t an historical romance, it’s a cheap trade novel.

The plot is bad, the writing is worse. So how is the sex? It's like eating at Ruby Tuesday. It still counts as food, but I wouldn't ask for it.  It's just not that great, and the menu is all the same. And this inexperienced young woman cums like there's no tomorrow. Yeah, right. She doesn't even touch herself, and we are supposed to believe this twenty seven year old man has unlocked the secret to her multiple orgasms the second time he bangs her?And straight to bondage from virginity? Please. Wouldn't anal come before hogtying?

As horrible as the first book was, the second one was even worse. I will confess to getting  occasionally aroused while reading the first book. If you showed me bad porn, I might still get a little turned on despite my rational brain telling me how degrading and stupid and unrealistic it is. Bad sex is still sex, said every man ever.

The second book, however, was so dumb that I swear it made me dry up like a hot Phoenix summer. I sneezed and a tumbleweed blew out of my cooch. Why so bad, you may ask, since you were so embarrassed reading the first one that you couldn’t stomach picking up the next? Because the plot didn’t thicken; it clabbered. Now this young couple are so in love with each other that all their sex is making love. Who wants to read about love in their sleazy porn? That’s disgusting. And then there is the ex-submissive stalker who gets a gun and comes after Anastasia. Oh, and the  marriage proposal? How about that plot twist? Did you see that coming?

The apex, if you will,  was that Anastasia, when thinking about Christian, would refer to him as her “Fifty Shades.” Oh, my Fifty Shades. There goes that Fifty Shades. What the fuckity fuck? In the first book, Christian Grey tells Anastasia he is “fifty shades of fucked up.” How does that become a nickname?

More likely, it’s some bad tip the author learned in a marketing class. If you keep referring to your product, it will become so ingrained in the consumers’ minds they won’t forget it. Was the author concerned we would be so numb while reading it that we needed constant reminders of what the crappy book was called?

The worst part of all? We, the American reader, made this woman a millionaire by buying and reading this schlock. Could we not find a better use of our time? We need more mental stimulation than Words with Friends, people. Visual porn doesn’t have to be intelligent. We can watch pretty much whatever sick shit we want whenever we want for free online. Shouldn’t our written porn be a cut above?

I read today that E. L. James now has a movie deal. I hope Anderson Cooper would consider playing the lead, with the part of Anastasia played by Kelly Clarkson. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Just like the books. Or you could stick to this version: