Tuesday, November 24, 2020

MOLES? We don't need no stinking MOLES!


Is mole DNA similar to rabbit DNA? And by "mole" I mean a mole on your face or body, and by rabbit I mean literal fucking rabbits. If you have two moles on your face, do their melanocytes then multiply exponentially like the proverbial rabbit? Is my face now a Ponzi Scheme?

Last year I had one small mole on my forehead, which I totally thought was a zit, but it wasn't, because no matter how hard I tried to pop it, nothing happened. Then another one showed up on my forehead and another, then one on my cheek and then two more on the opposite cheek. And now there are two others that have developed beside my mouth. 


If, over the past year, my one benign mole (because, yeah, I checked that shit out with a dermatologist) has become eight, I'm fairly certain that within a decade I will become the Mole-Faced Woman. The upside of this eventuality is that it can, and should, be monetized. 

Today? My skin melts. I go upstairs to pluck my chin, neck and face hairs (because THAT'S a daily thing now) and my skin has slumped like melted wax. My thought process goes like this:

"WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED TO MY FACE?!?"

I try to recall all the things that I've done so far over the course of the morning that might contribute to a House of Wax moment upon my person, but it takes me a full 90 seconds of panicked thought before I calm down enough to realize that they are just slinkles (sleep wrinkles). That calm is lost when I realize that those slinkles remain embedded in my skin four fucking hours after I have stopped sleeping on my face AND and I have no recollection of even seeing my face this morning, even though logic says that that shit had to have been there earlier, like WHEN I WOKE UP.   

Do you know that they make pillows for this? To avoid slinkles. They look like the kind of pillow you might wind up on if you have cervical trauma. For $174.00 + tax you can sleep the sleep of the uncomfortable so that your face at least slumps backward while you sleep.


Whenever I mention any of these things to David or Rissa they look at me like I'm nuts.

"Nobody notices this stuff but you."

"Uhhhhhh.... not true. Every other menopausal woman out there notices this shit."

"On themselves maybe, but not on other people. You have to be VERY close to other people like REALLY close to notice what YOU see in a mirror with 5X magnification."

I can't fault this chain of thought. No one other than David and Rissa gets that close to me - especially now, with all the physical distancing and mask wearing. In spite of laser eye surgery, David's eyes don't even really work that well up close and personal and Rissa repeatedly tells me that I am crazy and that I'm beautiful the way I am and I should just accept that fact.   Plus, with me already starting to forget shit? I'm not going to remember what my original face looked like. So the next time I gaze into my 5X magnification mirror, I can just be happy that I own one that helps me locate that mother-fucking white hair on my neck that I've been playing with for the last hour as I've been watching The Crown.






Saturday, October 31, 2020

Accept no substitutes


"Mom, Sean Connery died."

"What? Oh no! When?"

"This morning. He was 90."

"Oh... well, that's a good long life, but still very sad."

"Yeah, it is. I know he was your favourite."

"Yes, yes, definitely him, then Daniel Craig."

David pipes up in the background. "Second favourite."

For a moment, I am dumbfounded. "You CAN'T be serious."

"What?" David says, looking confused.

"What's going on there?" my Mom asks on the other end of the phone.

"Sean Connery is your SECOND favourite?!?" I start to stand.

"What's happening?" Mom asks.

"NO! Your Mom's! It's your Dad and then Sean Connery!" David is literally backing away from me.

"Oh, thank God," I say, sitting back down. "I thought you meant that he was YOUR second favourite Bond. That you were going to say some shit about Roger Moore being first, and then I was going to have to punch you in the throat."

"Wow. You are next level with your Connery devotion."

"Heather? Heather?" My Mom is a bit frantic on the phone.

"Sorry Mom." I then catch her up on my David's theory of favourites. 

"Well," she laughs. "He is definitely up there for me."

"This could have been an enormous, terrible, marital revelation for me. I mean, we all know that it goes Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, then the pretty-much-interchangeable Brosnan/Dalton, George Lazenby for giving Bond any sort of emotional grounding and then Roger Moore for camp."

"You'll get no argument from me," says David, hands in the air.  

***

To ignore Connery's incredible acting talent outside of the Bond franchise would be near-heresy. I haven't seen all his movies, but among my favourites are: amateur psychotherapist Mark Rutlege from Marnie, train robber Edward Pierce in The First Great Train Robbery (he did all his own stunts - it's un-fucking-believable!), space Marshal William T. O'Niel from Outland, monk William of Baskerville who gives Umberto Echo's The Name of the Rose incredible heart, immortal warrior Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez from Highlander, his Oscar-winning portrayal of Chicago cop Jim Malone from The Untouchables, crotchety senior archaeologist Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Russian submarine Captain Marko Ramius (still with the Scottish accent) from The Hunt for Red October and ex-MI-6 agent John Patrick Mason in The Rock

Now I'm going to watch all those again and discover some more of his best. You should too.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/sean_connery


***

After writing this post - it was brought to my attention that Sean Connery made some statements in Playboy in 1965 and then again in a 1987 Barbara Walters interview (defending the original Playboy statement) about how slapping women was sometimes warranted. 

https://www.newsweek.com/amid-tributes-sean-connerys-views-slapping-women-have-been-largely-overlooked-1543819

I really hate when someone I've respected has done shit like this. Yeah, he was born in 1930, yeah, he was a product of his generation with all its attending thoughts about how women could/should be treated, but outside of consensual kink, slapping women isn't and hasn't been a good thing to do for a LONG time. And yeah, in 2006, he recanted his statement, but then said that the original quote in Playboy had been taken out of context. This is not a man who took ownership of a belief that was wrong nor did he admit to the error of his ways.