In the grand scheme, I know that the things I tend to get riled up about are pretty inconsequential. You know, teens with pubic topiary, prom dresses that show ass crack, etc. People are dying in war, after all. Global warming is going to crush our puny human selves. I know these things and I think about them every day, because they are important, and I struggle with them, trying to reconcile my choices with my beliefs. But sometimes. SOMETIMES something seemingly inconsequential and at the same time impossibly ridiculous wanders into my awareness that I have to turn my full and complete attention to it. And so now, I would like to talk to you about Anal Bleaching.

Thanks to an informative advertisement in Atlanta Magazine, I was recently made aware that One can get One's Anus Bleached. Firstly, Um. And secondly, what the fuck? I can't remember the last time I took a good look at my own anus, but I can tell you that the only time it would be logical to be worried about the color of that area would be if say, it were covered in red blisters.

I am really offended by the notion that plastic surgeons are so greedy that they're making up things for us to be worried about. Not only can you have your breasts augmented, your wrinkles erased, your calves implanted, your tummy sucked and your lips plumped, but, hey! You there, with the darkened butthole! You can have that fixed, you know!

Or maybe it's the mainstream acceptance of pornography that has people thinking about how they'd look flexing their sphincter under stage lights. I brought up Anal Bleaching to Julia and she was all bemused, like, How could you have never heard of Anal Bleaching? She said it's for porn stars and they do it on Nip/Tuck 90210 Ink or some show. Even if porn is the impetus behind (ha, ha?) this craziness, I still can't imagine someone watching Anal Sluts & Sweethearts and going, "well, this is OK, but what would really do it for me is if her butthole were a little bit whiter."

I was talking about this with Conrad last night and he was like, "how the hell do they do that procedure?" Which naturally led to a discussion of maintenance and whether touch-ups would be necessary.

"They'll probably come out with an at-home anal bleaching kit, for convenience," I said.  

"Ha, yeah, it'll be like the Preparation H Anal Bleaching Strip!"

"Conrad, that would never work. It's the Anal Bleaching Ring."

"Up to three shades lighter!" 

Conrad: 'Natural Cheetos?' What the hell is that?
Me: There's nothing natural about a Cheeto.
Conrad: It should just be an empty bag!

I have spent MANY hours scanning the nearly 300 photos of our honeymoon to St. Lucia, uploading them, tagging them, arranging them and describing them on Flickr. Since I've gone to all that trouble, you just have to go look at them! They're beautiful, I promise. View the set here.

 

 

 

Today I had lunch with the Honorable Steve LaBate, who was in town on an undercover operation. Or something. I had already apprised him of all recent life developments the other night on the phone (I just tried to spell it fone, y'all) and vice versa, and our lunchtime conversation, thus freed from the back-and-forth current events update, was almost exclusively contained to telling each other ghost stories. Ghost stories are all about how you tell them, and many of the ones we exchanged had me totally creeped out. But mostly, if you write down the kinds of ghost stories that people like to tell to each other, they suck. As an exercise in brevity, and to demonstrate how much power they lose when translated from oral telling to written word, here are today's ghost stories, told in one sentence.

• A teenage Ryan Adams (whom Steve recently interviewed) was in a bathroom in a house reputed to have a poltergeist, when a shower door inexplicably slammed shut, shattering the glass.
• In third grade, I saw the filmy white apparition of a little girl praying in my bedroom.
• My friend Jace once awoke to find himself pinned to the bed by the malevolent spirit of a dead rottweiler who was growling in his ear. 
  
• Some of Steve's friends were locked out of their dorm room by a mischievous haint who moved their Halloween candy.
• My friend's mom was driving down a lonely road through a historic Civil War battlefield at night when she saw a man with a face of bloody, rotting flesh walking alone down the shoulder.
• Steve was at an abandoned house where a man went crazy and murdered his family when he noticed that all the crickets he'd heard at the top of the driveway were now silent.

What are your favorite ghost stories? Share them here--and see how silly they become once you try to write them down. Weird, huh?

Rooms, crafts and toes.

 

 

New turquoise color in the laundry closet; enameled pots for my kitchen herb garden; the darkest color I could find in my polish bucket (not dark enough!).