My satirical take on the pursuit of youth can now be found in Happy Woman Magazine!
Dear incandescently famous and attractive actor or pop star,
I don’t care what you like to eat.
I don’t care that you were plain in highschool, and also the biggest dork.
I don’t want to hear how exciting it is to be a parent.
I don’t care what you think about politics.
I don’t care what your relationship is ‘really’ like.
I don’t care what you learned from your family growing up.
DO NOT CARE!
Unless you have became famous for your searing wit and lively intellectualism, do us all a favor and stop doing so many dull, horrible magazine interviews.
(Dear insipid tabloid magazines, please do your part and stop encouraging celebrities to think that they are interesting).
Studies show that when chocolate tastes like ashes in your mouth, you’re less likely to overeat!
With poverty and unemployment on the rise and a devastating economic crisis threatening our society’s very foundations, the thought of the grim future ahead is pushing many Americans into the depths of despair. So why not drop a few dress sizes on your way down?
Readers, if we know you, you’ve been through your fair share of hard times. Chances are you recall those miserable days through a haze of listless melancholy. What you may not remember is what you ate during those difficult times—probably because food had lost its appeal. As a matter of fact, right this moment, depressed people all around you are shedding pound after pound because in their abject misery, not even eating seems worthwhile. Why let those savvy sad-sacks have all the fun and look great in the latest fashions? We’re here to help you attain their level of miserable apathy—just in time for bathing suit season!
A key inspiration for this diet plan comes from the life and ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, an influential French philosopher (and you know how skinny the French are!) Sartre—or, as we like to call him, “The Thinking Woman’s Jenny Craig”, knew that life was a never-ending struggle against the paralyzing self-annihilation which comes from complete acknowledgement of the futility of existence. You’d better believe that man could suck all the fun out of a piece of birthday cake. But he wore a size 6 smoking jacket until the day he finally escaped the crushing agony of the responsibility of existence.
In one of Sartre’s most popular works, entitled “Nausea”, he wrote in detail of his character’s fear of being touched by inanimate objects, because of their indifference to him. Inanimate objects made him sad! The very walls around him made him want to toss his existentialist cookies! The guy was a pro. An unfocused but ever-present feeling of nausea is a great way to cut calories. And you barely have to change your lifestyle—just modify the way you view the world around you and your responsibility toward it, and we bet you’ll see proven results within weeks! As your grip on reality loosens, so will your jeans!
Readers, we know how unhappy you are, deep down. Try as you may to forget it as you go about your pointless daily routine, you know that existence is ultimately nothing more than relentless suffering. To be alive is to be constantly teetering on the edge of madness as you contemplate the futility of being. Still see the point of eating breakfast? Maybe you should go bikini-shopping instead.
Keep in mind that your efforts may be derailed if you do not dig down until you find yourself in a place of complete and total misery— that is, if you are merely unhappy. Unhappy people tend to seek comfort in food—and they often find it there, if only temporarily. A box of chocolate-glazed donut holes will offer at least a few moments of lingering solace to a person who has merely had a rough day. If you are following this program correctly, however, donut holes will be unable to move you. In fact, the very concept of donut holes will be devoid of significance, except inasmuch as they represent the missing part of a donut, which reminds you that your capacity to find meaning in life is also missing. You will be aware that the glaze which obscures them is only their way of hiding their pain from the world. There is nothing tasty about it, because it is a sugary coating of lies.
Now you’re thinking like a size 2!
Kristyn Meyer folds her long legs beneath her in the coveted corner booth of Le Crepe Beret, a Manhattan hotspot that boasts a waiting list of several hundred hopeful diners each night. She orders a cup of bay leaf tea and a baked raisin, spreading her napkin gracefully over shapely knees.
“I love this place,” the dainty twenty-three year old says, leaning forward with impulsive charm. “I wish I could live here.” I nod, and she continues. “I’ve actually looked into buying one of the apartment buildings across the street, just so I can be closer. You never know when you’re going to be hit with a craving for one of Beret’s moss dumplings.” She chuckles ruefully.
“Unfortunately, the apartment deal fell through. They didn’t allow animals in the building, and I really love animals. I can’t live in a building that doesn’t have animals in it. They just contribute so much good emotional energy to a place, you know?”
With her shining eyes and laughing hair, it is difficult not to love this vivacious honey-blonde upon first meeting. Hollywood is well aware of Kristyn’s widespread appeal, which is why she has been cast as the female lead in the last four box-office smash romantic comedies, as well as the upcoming Sassy Dames, an eagerly anticipated contemporary remake of Gone With the Wind.
When I bring up her recent successes, though, her sunny disposition becomes overcast.
“It’s not easy being a celebrity, you know?” she muses. “If you wear the wrong pants out one day, then the next day, it’s like, everybody’s talking about it.”
Kristyn’s face now shows a ten percent chance of rain.
“My friends tell me I need to just live my life,” she muses, with a faraway gaze. “And I’m like, ‘you know what? That’s easy for you to say. Nobody cares what pants YOU wear!” She laughs. “I mean, am I right?” Her good humor is contagious; I notice that customers at surrounding tables are looking at us with bemused smiles.
The food arrives. “They make the best raisin here!” Kristyn says, clapping her hands excitedly. “I order it every time. I always tell myself, ‘Kristyn! Try something else! The fig looks good too!’ But then the when the waiter comes, I’m like, ‘I’ll have the raisin.’” She grins ruefully.
I ask her what her favorite food is.
She looks at me. “The raisin.”
Kristyn tells me that a combination of yoga, walking, and natural laxatives keep her looking trim and fit.
“I don’t know what I’d do without that regimen,” she says. “Walking just keeps me feeling so balanced. It’s like, whenever there’s stress in my life, I just walk around a little, and I can feel myself forgetting about it. It’s so soothing.”
I ask about the natural laxatives, and she looks at me sharply. “I didn’t say that. I don’t do anything like that.”
I decide to change the subject. Tabloids have recently reported that the percentage of celebrities undergoing plastic surgery and other extreme measures to maintain their looks have skyrocketed in recent years, to nearly 85%. Asked what she thinks of this, Kristyn shakes her head and puts down her last forkful.
“I just don’t understand it,” she says disdainfully. “I mean, putting plastic in your face and your boobs so they look better? Disgusting. And so pathetic. It’s like, if God wants you to be wrinkly and old, then you better be wrinkly and old, because that’s what God wants, you know?”
“Plus,” she adds impishly, “What’s so bad about wrinkles? Some of my favorite things are wrinkled.”
She winks at me, and quips, “Like raisins!”
I am beginning to lose patience with myself for reading certain magazines. I really think that the time I spend reading them would be better spent doing nearly anything else, including giving wedgies to orphans. I’m not particularly opposed to newsmagazines, or to those cerebral, highbrow periodicals that come out ‘quarterly’ and are filled with pithy little fiction pieces in which neither character in a love story has a name; the kinds with comics that you kind of want to laugh out loud at, and kind of want to punch in the face. No, I’m referring to the magazines, aimed especially at women in their teens to early thirties, that have the word ‘Butt’ somewhere on the cover more often than not. Sometimes it is followed by an exclamation point. Magazines on which the number of days or weeks to a slimmer me constantly varies but is always indicated. I think it’s time I gave these magazines up, or at least tried to figure out why I read them voraciously whenever they’re around, even though all they do is make me feel as though I don’t measure up in a number of petty little ways.
I mean, really. If my friends talked down to me the way Mademoiselle does, I would claw their faces with my ragged, un-manicured nails. And yet I am content to curl up with reading material that has the emotional depth of a salad, and read articles that assume a chummy, familiar tone with me, then tell me to tone my flabby arms. The ways in which the messages of different articles in a single magazine contradict each other, boggle my mind. ‘Learn to Love Your Body!’ is followed by ‘Hide Your Ugly, Ugly Flaws!’ There’s always the piece telling you how to ‘Be Yourself!’ which is inevitably followed by something to the tune of ‘Here’s How to Be Someone Who Men Will Find Attractive!’
Ever since I began reading Seventeen magazine at the tender age of twelve (which is the age of most avid Seventeen readers who are not in prison), I have gathered the pearls of wisdom which drop, along with subscription cards, from the glossy, all-knowing pages of magazines. I will scan advice columns and apply each situation to my own life, no matter its utter irrelevance: (“Her mom doesn’t approve of her fiancée?…I have a mom.”) My favorite example of the logic of these magazines is when a handful of random men are interviewed about an issue and their responses appear next to little pictures of them that are captioned along the lines of: Bob, age 17, CT. These opinions are helpful only if I happen to run into Bob in CT, in which case I’ll know that he thinks women who have sex on the first date are “weird”. Since I’ll probably never meet Bob, am I supposed to be taking his opinion as representative of the opinions of 17 year olds, or residents of Connecticut, or Bobs…or even men in general? The possibilities are endless, and I hate them all.
Is it possible that I am making these magazines out to be worse than they are? After all, no one is forcing me to read them, and they may serve a purpose in my life that I am simply unaware of. Perhaps as a young girl, I had too much self-esteem, and needed someone to inform me that I had unsightly circles under my eyes, and how to treat them. Maybe I simply enjoy the escapism of reading articles that assume that my problems go no further than hiding my trouble spots and figuring out what he secretly wants me to do in bed. All the same, I think I could do without learning which $300 fashion must-haves are hot this season, and which foods have hidden calories (Curse you, food, and your treacherous caloric deceit! Feh.) From now on, I’m not going to read anything that won’t help me achieve inner serenity, or at least give me answers to shout out during Jeopardy. It’s quality literature for me, or nothing.
I Heard Tell 