For more “what cancer is” photos here at IBTP, including a blamer’s actual surgery and a fun post-op pic of my second mastectomy, click here.

Via Jezebel, with thanks to Stellatex

Related posts:

1. Just when you thought it was safe
2. Countdown To Uniboob
3. The Social Whirl

So it is fair to ask: Just what are the scientific and medical standards to which the Susan G. Komen Foundation adheres, if any? Why would a breast cancer organization hire staff and elect board members that misrepresent science and facts?  Can you trust them to give you sound information about breast cancer?  And can you trust them with investing your money in the best possible efforts to end breast cancer? — Jodi Jackson, RH Reality Check.

The answer:

No. Duh.

If you missed it, the story so far:

1. Komen withdraws $600,000 in funding from Planned Parenthood, citing a policy that prohibits Komen’s support of any organization that is the subject of an investigation (Planned Parenthood is currently being harassed by House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), who has launched a politically-motivated, trumped-up “inquiry” into whether PP has used federal funds for abortion services).

2. Komen’s Senior Vice President for Policy turns out to be ultraconservative antifeminist Georgia gubernatorial washout Karen Handel, who thinks shocked Planned Parenthood supporters should “cry me a river” (click the thumbnail for a screencap of the offending retweet via @JessicaValenti). Handel is an anti-choice right-winger of the first water. In her gubernatorial campaign she pledged to “eliminate” grants to Planned Parenthood.

3. Outcry is substantial. I just wish it went a little deeper.

Deeper than what, you ask? Well, right now the principle criticism of Komen is that Planned Parenthood used the Komen cash to administer breast cancer screenings, about 170,000 in all, to mostly low-income and marginalized women. Now, nobody is against breast cancer screenings for the poor. But once an indigent or uninsured woman gets the free mammogram, and it comes up positive, what then? Who is going to pay for her treatment? Cute teddy bears? Volunterrorists in pink baseball caps? Consumer philanthropists eating “Crunch for the Cure” junk food? “Early detection” doesn’t mean shit if the early detectee is just left flapping in the breeze.

Listen everyone, Komen doesn’t prevent cancer, and Komen doesn’t pay for breast cancer treatment. It “raises awareness” through “early detection” and funds “research” focused on pharmaceutical cures for cancers that many of Komen’s corporate sponsors might likely have a hand in causing in the first place. Of the 11 Austin-area Komen grant recipients, for example, only one, WINGS, lists “comprehensive no-cost breast cancer treatment” in its list of services. The other 10 focus almost exclusively on diagnostics, “education,” and “patient navigation” (“patient navigation”? What the heck is that, they throw indigent patients in a boat and make’m row for the cure?).

I hasten to point out that WINGS received only $218,000 from Komen-Austin in 2011. That might sound like a lot, and it is, but in terms of cancer treatment it’s a drop in the bucket (for example, my own little foray into the cutthroat world of breast cancer patienthood has cost well over $100,000 so far. Although I have insurance, about $50,000 of that amount was out-of-pocket for designer drugs and genetic testing that insurance wouldn’t cover). So, out of all the women in the Austin area who have breast cancer — a lot, since 1 out of 7 women get it at some point — there’s only enough Komen loot to pay for the treatment of — I’ll be generous — 2.5 of them. And that’s if WINGS doesn’t spend any money on anything else, and that’s if the women go to San Antonio for their free treatment, because WINGS has no affiliation with any health care providers in Austin.

In other words, Komen doesn’t give a shit about poor women, so the hell with those who look to Planned Parenthood for a free breast exam.* With politics clearly a greater priority than women’s health, it’s no surprise that Komen is, quoth Jackson, “allied with those who misrepresent medical and public health evidence, including about causes of breast cancer.”

Nefarious Komen VP Karen Handel is not alone in her misogynist agenda. Board member Jane Abraham is also affiliated with some very nasty groups. You know those crisis pregnancy centers where lying liar godbags lie to pregnant ladies about abortions causing breast cancer and other spurious shit? Jane Abraham is, like, the queen of those things. Meanwhile, says Jackson,

you don’t see too many folks working with the Komen Foundation who are out there pounding the pavement on, say, the possible links between environmental toxins and breast cancer, causal links between which make the corporate partners of Komen very, very nervous.

Komen is the most visible brand in the whole cancer industrial complex. It disguises itself as some big altruistic community effort for women’s health, but it’s really just another conservative, honky organization with a misogynist political agenda. A marketing juggernaut instrumental in raking in piles of cash for and cleansing the tarnished images of its evil corporate sponsors, Komen has successfully brainwashed millions to believe that the “problem” of women’s health can be solved by licking yogurt lids.

_________________
* In fact, the whole Komen-driven breast cancer “movement” is centered around middle-class white women. Drop by any pinkathon on race day if you need corroboration.

Related posts:

1. I Got Yer Boobython Right Here
2. Sneer of the week
3. It’s Gratuitious Erotica Month!

Daily hot flash laundry pile

6:30 A.M. Alarm goes off. Discombobulation commences.

[Open appeal to architects: when designing bedrooms for people who will be turning 50 or coming down with lady-cancer, kindly install an automatic espresso machine within reach of the bed. Otherwise, your client's hapless, lurching feet will become entangled, every morning when the alarm goes off at 6:30, in the giant pile of hot-flash laundry that has accumulated on the bedroom floor.]

That’s menopause!

The above has been my nightly ritual for five-and-a-half years, ever since the Cancer Industrial Complex cut out, among other organs to which I had become rather attached over the years, those dear little estrogen-generators, my ovaries. Because of the estrogen-loving nature of the cancer that occasioned my many amputations and toxic therapies, hormone replacement is not an option. This is too bad, because spinster aunts, it turns out, actually need a little estrogen, if only to prevent their going absolutely batshit from hot-flash-induced sleep deprivation.

I blame surgically-induced menopausical insomnia for my having seen an infomercial last night to which no eyes as delicate as those of a fuzz-brained spinster aunt should ever have been exposed. The producers of this infomercial might just as well have been throwing acid alien blood right in my grimacing face.

The infomercial was selling a dick-enbiggener pill. The thing that was so grippingly, vomitationally absurd about it, besides everything about it, was the slew of giggling 22-year-old pornulated chiquitas who purported to speak for all of womankind on the subject of dicks. They revealed — in “candid confessions” consisting almost entirely of the phrase “like, why even have sex if it’s, like, so small you, like, won’t even feel it?” — women’s general disgust with any dick that isn’t the size of a Mexican Coke bottle.* They all agreed that the only sorts of dudes they’ll ever want to pork are “confident” and “aggressive” men who have “grown some balls.”

Also grippingly, vomitationally absurd were the “Men’s Minute” segments, wherein a porn actor named Dr. Victoria Zdrok, speaking in an unearthly-yet-strangely-familiar accent, urges the viewer to buy the product because it was made in America out of time-tested ingredients you can trust. “Over 88% of women admit that size does matter,” quoth the good doctor heteronormatively, “and the other 12% are lying.” In the background is footage of a rocket launching.

Now, I’m not going to argue either that “size” does or doesn’t matter, as this is simply personal preference and is therefore irrelevant to the revolution and shit, and because thinking about actual you-know-whats (Dr Zdrok’s clinical term for “penis”) makes me retch. But I am going to propose two hypotheses.

One: that the idea that women universally yearn to be impaled by tireless, oversized bratwursts-of-iron attached to “aggressive” men is a myth. This myth portrays women as insatiable sex maniacs*, which in turn informs the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, which in turn enslaves women as the sex class. The women-as-sex-maniac myth adversely affects women in many ways, not least of which is the interference of “male enhancement” drugs with the natural attrition of the invincible peen. How many women were looking forward to a mid-life reprieve from prong-duty, only to have it snatched away by ViagraNation’s aggressive marketing of the “cure” for “erectile dysfunction”?

Two: that, even if I were a straight woman who, despite the fact that our social order has co-opted my sexuality to turn me into a receptacle for my oppressor’s incontinence, still wanted to do dudes, and even if I were one of those women whose preference for you-know-whats leaned toward something in the Macho Combo Burrito range, I would find other ways of scratching this itch than by boinking the kind of dude who would buy pills from porn stars on TV infomercials as crappy as this one was.

Not to denigrate dear old Dr Zdrok, though! After carefully analyzing her accent, I believe that, like me, she is formerly of the planet Obstreperon. Sadly, it appears that Dr Zdrok has been rather more extensively assimilated by the dude-borg than I. The obstreperal lobe bleeds for her.

______________________

Photo 2: collected from this part of the Internet.

Related posts:

1. The Social Whirl
2. Pink: Hell Trembles at the Hideous Name
3. Pathetic fallacy

First it must be acknowledged that here at Spinster Aunt HQ we are suffering from Chilean Miner Fatigue. Yes, we’re as enchanted as the next aunt by the time-honored spectacle of extracting humans from holes in the ground, but in the name of all that’s tasteful we draw the line at traveling to the nearest Chilean embassy to hang teddy bears on the railing.

Teddy bears. That reminds me. It’s breast cancer awareness month! Awesome!

There is much patriarchy to blame when it comes to breast cancer awareness month. Such as Komen. Komen, as I have declaimed extensively, has brainwashed millions into believing that the act of buying pink crap turns them into selfless philanthropists. Snap out of it! All you are doing is buying pink crap. Komen is a patriarchy-replicating commerce facilitator. They do not reduce breast cancer occurrence. They do not reduce breast cancer deaths. All they do is hook up sanctimonious shopaholics with corporate leeches who want to shine up their tarnished public images.

One may also blame such vile entities as Estee Lauder, which bolsters its public image with gratuitous pornography (see photo). There is a bizarre connection in the public consciousness between hottt! cleavage and deadly breast tumors. Remember that “Boobython” freakshow? How many other cancers can be successfully advertised with sex? Can you picture an ad for prostate cancer featuring a delicate, manicured hand squishing a dude’s junk? It blows the lobe.

Of course Estee Lauder is a bleepin cosmetics company, a world leader in the woman-hating Beauty Industrial Complex. According to Cosmetics Database, Estee Lauder manufactures at least 120 products with moderate to high hazard ratings. But a little pink ribbon erotica making vague allusions to breast cancer solidarity makes it OK to poison their customers, I guess. “Prevent breast cancer one woman at a time” indeed. By burning her fucking Estee Lauder wrinkle cream!

One may also blame breast cancer awareness month as the month when Vagina-Americans are most likely to Shop/Walk/Eat Toxic Processed Yogurt For the Cure. If I see one more pink teddy bear, one more pink food processor, one more pink TV commercial where those chicks stop in the middle of their triathlon to lick yog-spunk off their pink Yoplait lids, put on your raincoats, girls, because I’m gonna bust another lobe. I have no wish to observe yogurt-coated tongues sticking out of models’ faces while being told that replicating this act will cause 10 cents to be donated to Komen. “Save lids to save lives” is the slogan. As though Komen, or Yoplait for that matter, saves lives.

“Avoid this crappy yogurt at all costs to save lives” is more like it.

Yoplait. You know what’s in a Yoplait yogurt? Me neither, because they decline, for some reason, to publish any ingredients on the website. Yoplait.com says only that Yoplait is good for your “health.” The website suggests, for example, that the vitamin D in a Yoplait yogurt is sufficient to ward off “bone fractures [...] heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and certain cancers.”

Yoplait anecdote alert

A couple of months ago, when cruising the Super S grocery store in Dripping Springs, Texas for a head of iceberg lettuce, I bought a Yoplait yogurt called Yoplait® Whips!® Key Lime Pie. It was a ghoulish pastel green color most commonly found in My Little Unicorn play-sets. This “yogurt” had the sticky, fluffy texture of a sugary pond scum, and tasted like pure polyester syrup. The only way that creepy unnatural thing was gonna be good for me was if I threw it away instead of eating it. In fact, the best thing would have probably been be to load it onto a rocket and shoot it into the sun.

As the world’s leading expert on human nutrition, I suggest getting vitamin D the old-fashioned way: 15 minutes of sun. It’s free, it feels nice, and involves little-to-no FD&C Yellow No. 5.

Related posts:

1. Breast Cancer Awareness Month Finally Over: Retailers Descend Into Funk
2. Sneer of the week
3. Good news, bad news

A couple of months ago I had a near-death experience.

Oh no, an autobiographical interlude! If I were some science blogger I’d probably say, “Hey, get your own fucking blog for that crap!”

But you know how it is. Everythang I do gon be funky from now on, etc.

The near-death experience was a 24-hour interlude wherein lab tests performed by a local branch of the Cancer Industrial Complex made it seem likely that my cancer had returned. Well, lemme tell you, I had about 47 kittens. When the interlude was over, and it turned out I was still what they call “cured,” I spent an hour in the can doing what you do when you have just found out you’re not going to die after all (at least not right away).

When that was over, I said, “That’s it!”

And I meant it, by gum.

Whereupon I quit pussyfooting around. First to go were the three or four cigarettes I was letting myself smoke every day after fifteen years of botched attempts at quitting, which botched attempts included hypnosis, Wellbutrin, 637 boxes of Nicoderm, chemotherapy, and three complete rounds of Chantix, the pill that makes you sui/homicidal. Who was I kidding? I had fucking cancer. I can’t smoke.

So I went back on the patch for a month and just fucking did it. Blam. The end. It turns out it is not possible to quit smoking unless you have recently been under the impression that you’re about to croak of a hideous disease but somehow you oiled out of it at the last minute.

Next, I removed from my nightstand drawer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of peanut M&Ms. Not only are M&Ms fundamentally gross, they have those creepy TV commercials where the talking M&Ms are delighted to go to their deaths as cheap human snacks.

I also removed from my freezer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of tater tots. Processed frozen fried reconstituted potato nuggets! What am I, twelve?

I hauled out of storage my old elliptical machine, therabands, balance ball, heart monitor, yoga mat, and dumbbells, and began sweatin’ to the oldies.

Next, I invented Aunt Food. Aunt Food is an organic whole wheat tortilla smeared with avocado and topped with grated carrot, grated zucchini, diced red bell pepper, steamed corn, a few sunflower seeds, cilantro, and pico de gallo. It is washed down with an ice-cold half-gallon of Liquid Sanctimony.

The result? I am now a superfatted bore with huge guns and gas bloat!

Because of its beauty and whimsical health claims (it can make you invisible), everyone’s been begging me for the recipe for Liquid Sanctimony.

Liquid Sanctimony

2 giant kale leaves
2 giant chard leaves
handful dandelion greens
fistful spinach
handful parsley
handful wheatgrass
handful broccoli florets
1/16th of a red cabbage
2 celery stalks, with leaves
1/3 cucumber
1 carrot
1/2 avocado
1/4 lemon (with rind)
1 tomato
2 of those little tangerines that come in plastic net bags
1 banana
1 apple
1″ pineapple ring
1″ ginger
handful blueberries (fresh or frozen)
handful strawberries (fresh or frozen)
handful raw cacao nibs
handful dried goji berries (Navitas brand is somewhat edible)
handful sesame seeds
handful sunflower seeds
handful almonds
handful flax seeds
1 tablespoon coconut butter
1 tablespoon bee pollen
1 maraschino cherry (optional)
1 miniature paper umbrella

Put the greens in a VitaMix with 2 cups of water.
Don goggles and protective noise-blocking earmuffs.
Set VitaMix on “stun.”
Activate.
Whirl 17.4 seconds.
De-activate Vitamix.
Wipe off goggles, kitchen cabinets.
Add remaining ingredients (except cherry, umbrella).
Re-activate Vitamix.
Whirl 28 seconds.
De-activate VitaMix.
Inspect resultant sludge with critical eye.
Dilute with water or ice to desired viscosity and re-whirl.
Serve with cherry, umbrella

Makes about 2 quarts. Drink the whole thing. Repeat daily for 2 weeks. Prance around town glowing with vitality and smug superiority.

Note 1: For maximum sanctimony, use only organic fair trade ingredients grown by weathered-looking folk living simple lives.

Note 2: Do not attempt with a lesser blender. The machine should be capable of generating a wormhole, lest the beverage come out all gritty and lumpy and insufficiently liquefied, which would impair both digestibility and your sense of sanctimony.

Note 3: if you use Liquid Sanctimony to detox after coming off a hardcore tater tots/cigarettes/peanut M&Ms habit, steel yourself for interesting gastric events.

Related posts:

1. All-Purpose Vegetable Slurry Korner.
2. The Social Whirl
3. Halibut à la Chicken-Burger

But, out of the loop though I be, even I have heard about this no-mammograms-until-you’re-fifty malarkey, and it probably won’t blow your lobe to hear that it blew my lobe. The report made particularly gikky reading in view of the recent Stupak craptacity. America just feels like taking a big old televised crap on women’s basic health care this week, I guess. If, after reviewing the stunning and sweeping misogynist antics our government has pulled over the past couple of weeks, a person could stand up and announce with a straight face that patriarchy doesn’t exist, he’d have to be a complete imbecile.

I allude to the absurd recommendations, released Monday by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, concerning the age at which women should begin queuing up at the old mammogram machine. They used to say 40. But now they say 50, and only every other year.

Check this out: the “harms outweigh the benefits.” Not just for under-fifty mammograms, but for over 75 mammograms, and — this one really kills me — breast self-examinations!

Wha?

That’s right, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force says women shouldn’t be taught to touch their own boobs. The harm outweighs the benefits!

The dreadful harm from which they seek to protect us?

Anxiety.

Anxiety is bad for ladies. Worse, apparently, than blowing off the timely diagnosis of life-threatening illness.

Anxiety! Are they fucking kidding me? Does the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force think women pass their days carefree, lounging on puffy clouds of pink velvet laundry eating Boston cream pie-flavored Yoplait? For fuck’s sake, I don’t know a single woman whose lobes aren’t fucking soaking in anxiety just as a matter of course. I slurp down a couple of Ativans every morning with my Bloody Mary or I can’t leave the house. Anxiety is pie for women. It’s death that tends to slow us down a little.

Here’s an anecdote. One time I came down with breast cancer myself. I had the impertinence to come down with it at the age of 46. How did I know I had cancer? I happened to be giving myself one of those harmful self-exams and found a tumor the size of Guam up in that mug, that’s how. Did I subsequently experience anxiety? Hell yeah, I did. Do I prefer anxiety to death? Hell yeah, I do.

Of course, nobody really gives a crap whether women suffer anxiety. That’s just a lot of smoke up your ass. If they did give a crap, they’d make rape illegal or something. What they’re really so concerned about is that mammography can have false positives, which means expensive biopsies that insurance doesn’t want to pay for. But for crying out loud. Wouldn’t you rather have a biopsy that turned out to be unnecessary, than not have a biopsy that turned out to be necessary?

If I’d followed the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force Recommendations, I would be dead. Dead, dead, dead. As it was, I was pretty fucking sick.

So I’d like to shove my entire 46-year-old malignant tumor up the U.S Preventative Services Task Force’s entire ass.

Note: mammography is stunningly imperfect. It’s only useful in detecting cancer that’s already there. Which is to say, it’s a cure-based tactic. This makes it vastly inferior to preventative measures — vaccines, elimination of environmental carcinogens, etc — that might preclude cancer in the first place. Also, mammography is, as are all cure-based measures, useless for women who can’t afford subsequent treatment.

You know what else? Everyone should have access to free genetic testing to determine whether they have the breast cancer mutation. If you’ve got the mutation, your chances of tumoring out before age 50 are, like, 80%. Currently that test costs like 4 grand, and good luck getting your insurance company to cough up for it.

Related posts:

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2. Pink: Hell Trembles at the Hideous Name
3. Breast Cancer Awareness Month Finally Over: Retailers Descend Into Funk

Julia's surgeons break out the barbecue forks.

The deadly apathy/writer’s block combo, which results from intermittently spasmodic crystalline antimatter anomalies in the obstreperal lobe — brought on, no doubt, by extended megatheocorporatocratic interference — is also responsible for my having chucked college, all my rock bands, my juicy restaurant critic gig, and of course, my science fiction novel.

But today I crawl out of my lair to present something for you fans of pictorial cancer blogs. Reader Julia emailed me recently with a link to her mastectomy website. Quoth Julia:

When I was going to have my mastectomy I tried to look up surgery photos online and couldn’t find any. This is understandable; women don’t often want to be photographed topless and especially not when they’re frightened and vulnerable. There’s also a very small window of opportunity to decide whether or not to photograph something like that and figure out how to make it happen. Since I couldn’t find photos when I wanted them, however, I decided to figure out how to make it happen. I had my entire mastectomy photographed as well as my hysterectomy and my port installation and a bunch of other things.

Julia does not lie; there are no mastectomy photos online. Veteran blamers may recall that I (and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done this) uploaded a few gross post-operative pix featuring my staples and blood-bags and bruises and scars and so forth (see below), but it never occurred to me to document the actual surgeries, on accounta I’m stupid, and besides that shit makes me hurl.

What’s left of my left side, feat. MC Gruesome Drain Tube. Yes, it was sewn directly to my skin with black thread. Yes, it hurt.

Julia’s hypothesis — that women don’t feel like flaunting their chests on the internet when they’re sick with a fatal disease — is right on the money, but I submit that there’s more to this dearth of mastectomy documentation than that.

I allude, as so I often do, to repellent social mores oozing forth from the Cult of Breast Cancer Survivorism: the brutality of treatment must be hidden from view if the cancer-industrial complex is to continue flourishing (at the expense of sick women) in the opulent manner to which it is accustomed. As per the Global Accords Governing Breast Cancer Patient Behavior, the breast cancer patient doesn’t photograph her surgery. The breast cancer patient (unless she has the effrontery to die from her disease) is a Survivor ™, a dainty little pink teddy-bear-lovin’ non-feminist who has bravely put all that unpleasantness behind her, who purports to have experienced immeasurable personal growth as a result of her illness. Meanwhile, as an ambassador for The Cure, she wears a pink scarf to protect the world from her scary chemo baldness. Her amputated breasts are “reconstructed” so the boob-lovin’ public won’t have to confront the horror of her amputations.* She’s a fighter, but not an activist. She’s plucky, but doesn’t challenge the status quo. As Samantha King writes in the enlightening Pink Ribbons, Inc:

[Women] are discouraged from questioning the underlying structures and guiding assumptions of the cancer-industrial complex. The culture of breast cancer survivorship does not, in other words, embrace patient-empowerment as a way to mobilize critical engagement with biomedical research, anger at governmental inactionk or resistance to social discrimination and inequality, even if its history is bound up with attempts to do just this.”

People can’t find out how really fucking gross treatment is, because if they did they might start thinking, hey, maybe preventing breast cancer — as opposed to waiting for women to get sick and then slamming them with a series of debilitating, barbaric procedures — is a good idea. But prevention is not in the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy. There is just too much filthy lucre to be made from selling the romantic notion of “cure.”

So, thanks, Julia, for pioneering the field of Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) breast amputation documentarism.

Also, fucking nice tattoo, girlfriend!

_____________________
* I never miss a golden opportunity to poop on the concept of breast reconstruction. This surgery serves no purpose except to appease the patriarchal demand for femininity by preserving the appearance of funbags. It’s not like the procedure actually reconstructs a breast (a breast is not a lump of abdominal fat relocated to the chest. A breast contains a functional mammary gland to nurse infants.). What this reconstruction procedure does is, it constructs a totally useless, cumbersome protuberance. The only reconstruction going on is the reconstruction of the patient’s feminine compliance. Nobody’s telling dude breast cancer patients to reconstruct their manboobs.

Inevitably, women who have opted for reconstruction will take offense at these remarks. Don’t be silly, reconstructed women. Patriarchy, not you personally, is to blame for the expectation that you endure more surgeries than are necessary for your health. Post-operative fancy-free flat-chestiness is a luxury enjoyed only by a fortunate few who can afford to spit in the eye of the Beauty Ultimatum.

Related posts:

1. Anecdote mania!
2. Countdown To Uniboob
3. Pissed off cancer patient holds forth

1. While awaiting phlebotomization yesterday at Cancerland, I thumb through a copy of People magazine. Here is what expert sexologist Bristol Palin has to say on the efficacy of magic fundamentalist christian abstinence-juju sex ed:

“If girls realized the consequences of sex, nobody would be having sex,” says Bristol, sitting at her parents’ lakeside patio table. “Trust me. Nobody.”

2. Here is what my oncologist, Dr Cure, had to say during yesterday’s routine quarterly palpation/ lifestyle /mental health lecture:

“You literally need to have your head examined.”

“Not so fast, lady. Didn’t you just examine it?”

“You are, in fact, clinically crazy.”

Dr Cure is dissatisfied with my cynical worldview. She thinks patriarchy-assimilation therapy will fix me right up. When she revealed the news that it was colonoscopy time, for example, I failed to burst into song or whatever. I suppose Dr Cure celebrates her colonoscopies with a catered affair and a string quartet in a tumor-shaped hot air balloon floating over the Grand Canyon at sunset.

3. While in a fitting room at the mall trying on a pair of shorts, I overhear a conversation between the sales woman and a guy in the next fitting room. The guy is asking the sales woman will his new pants shrink. The sales woman has been waiting all week for the opportunity to impart her laundry knowledge. She looses a torrent of laundry tips on the guy: all shrinkage happens in the dryer. Dryers in this day and age are too hot. Never put clothes in a hot dryer. She even dries her jeans unhotly. The guy interrupts her.

“Oh!” woman answers. “Of course you don’t do your own laundry.”

The guy had wanted to know if the clothes were idiot-wife-proof.

Related posts:

1. Danger and slapstick on Savage Death Island!
2. Super cute fawn sprints across Savage Death Island
3. Hanging Chads of Savage Death Island bore the shit out of spinster aunt

Admittedly, you are between a rock and a hard place here. If you don’t replenish your packing supplies, your whole Ambitious Plan comes to a grinding halt, at which point all you can do is fester on the lime green recliner, surrounded by cardboard chaos, emitting muffled sobs.

But if you do go the the U-Haul on Ben White Blvd on a Saturday — which U-Haul is, you will discover, held in the highest possible esteem by all other South Austin residents as the most desirable Saturday destination in Central Texas — you will be 48th in a queue of sweaty truck-renters, few of whom possess magnetic personalities, and each of whom requires an extended period of personal quality time with the U-Haulist behind the counter.

To be perfectly accurate, there are two U-Haulists behind the counter, thus two lines of sweaty truck-renters. But, as is required by rent-a-truck law, only one of the U-Haulists possesses sufficient security clearance to operate the top-secret truck-rental computer. This slows transactions down to a maddening trickle, which has the effect of escalating the anxiety amongst the clientèle, who by now are packed in cheek to jowl like hogs to the slaughter. The interminable line, the incompetence of the customer service dudes, the overwrought frenzy of movers who see their security deposits slipping away with each passing minute — you get the picture. U-Haul on a Saturday is like the IndyMac Bank on Failure Day.

If you conclude from the above that I chose, last Saturday when I ran out of wrapping paper, to go to U-Haul rather than sit weeping in my corrugated prison, you are correct. After waiting 25 minutes to spend twenty dollars on two boxes of paper, I dropped one of them in a puddle in the parking lot and was nearly creamed by a speed demon piloting a 17-footer.

Well, my obstreperal lobe blew right then and there, all over the dented hood of some poor schlub’s eggplant-colored Saturn. On the way home, with no internal regulating mechanism to prevent it, an imp of the perverse caused my car to turn in at the Bluebonnet quick shop, where I grabbed a roadie* from the handy ice bin and heard myself utter the most beautiful words in the English language: “pack of Marlboro reds, and make it snappy.”

Four-and-a-half packs later, it is Tuesday, and the self-preservational blaming gas produced by my blown lobe (obstreperone), has begun to kick back in. I have called my oncologist and renewed my date with Chantix. I love Chantix. Apparently there are six or seven people in the world who are not transformed by this anti-smoking drug into homicidal maniacs, and I am one of them.

Meanwhile, did anybody happen to hear a piece on NPR the other day about some Christian weight-loss group’s vilification of fat, and obesity as a moral issue, etc? I can’t find it anywhere on the site now, or, indeed, on the entire World Wide Web, and I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing.

See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because “health,” in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of “unhealthies” who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I’m too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let’s just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn’t be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can “prevent” cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap.

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* A roadie is an extra-large can of cheap beer that all Texas quick shops stock on ice right next to the door, thus simplifying the important work of driving drunk.

Related posts:

1. What I did on my Christmas vacation
2. Breakfast of quadragenarians
3. A Few Remarks on the Smoking Ban Proposal

As a spinster aunt whose monthly cancer drug bill could put a kid through Harvard, I always enjoy getting emails from people named Andrew at the National Boob Job Awareness Foundation who love my blog and are certain that my readers would equally love hearing about the Lap Dance For the Cure event or whatever. For every boner raised they’ll donate 10 cents to the Global Disease Awareness Educational Research Outreach Fund.

Why do I get the feeling that Andrew is not so avid a patriarchy-blamer as he suggests?

We have the Komen Foundation to thank for this crap. Ever since they figured out how to make people equate buying stuff with “curing” sentimental women’s diseases, doing-pointless-shit-for-the-cure is now America’s second-most-popular weekend activity. And Andrew, with his list of women bloggers, has job security for life.

Lately I’ve been getting spammed by some pretty persistent internet marketing flacks. They’re trying to leverage cervical cancer into big retail underwear bucks.

“Only one day left for Cancer Awareness Opportunity!” warns Andrew. Ah, if only I could believe that after tomorrow people wold stop trying to sell me more cancer awareness.

But this underwear thing, jayzus. Never has the commodification of fatal disease been so transparent. The pitch is something called “The Annual Undie Awards.” You log onto some site that sells underwear, input a bunch of information about the dimensions of your ass, and “vote” for your fave rave knickers. The retail underwear site will donate a quarter for every vote. They’ll also sell you your sexy animal-print thong after you vote for it.

“We all know someone who has been touched by this deadly disease,” eulogizes the sexy animal-print thong-marketing flack. “Please let your readers know about [the retail underwear site], and how their vote will also generate a contribution to this vital mission.”

Well, readers, now you know. Underwear, cervixes, voting. It’s “fun”!

Still, although cervixes are located down there, they aren’t quite as sexy as boobs, so I can appreciate that selling anything with this particular cancer is a tough slog. Here are the guys sitting around Starbucks, trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their site.

Underwearpreneur A: How about a Paris Hilton look-alike contest?

Underwearpreneur B: Dude, she doesn’t even wear underwear.

Underwearpreneur C: Hey. Let’s jump on that pink cancer bandwagon!

A: C’s right. You tell women how down you are with breast cancer and they throw cash at you AND go jogging in pink hot pants. Cha-ching!

B: Are you kidding me? We can’t afford breast cancer. Do you have any idea how much Komen charges for that logo?

C: Well, aren’t there some cheaper cancerous ladyparts?

A: Hymens?

B: Dude, hymens are too cheap.

A: Cervical cancer, then.

B: What is a cervix, anyway?

C: Nobody knows. That’s why we can get it for cheap.

B: I’ll text Andrew right now.

The underwear website is full of helpful pointers to assist women in navigating the mysterious and treacherous currents of feminine behavior. It’s not easy being a girl. Putting on a pair of underwear is apparently rocket science.

Step both legs into your panty, then pull it up until the waistband is at the desired location. Check and make sure your crotch is centered and pulled forward. Now, starting at the sides, run your fingers along and under the elastic of the leg openings towards the back to make sure the back panel is properly cupping your buttocks. Finally, run your fingers around the inside of the waistband to set it evenly at the waist.

Somebody actually got paid to write that.

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Cervix photo link
Thong photo link

Related posts:

1. Good news, bad news
2. I Got Yer Boobython Right Here
3. It’s Gratuitious Erotica Month!