I don't know how many of you check out MSN but there's an awful picture of the Octomom person, who, in her defense, looks pretty pissed off that a phtographer is leaning into her car to get a shot of her. What's awful about this picture is (if I may edge on catty here) that her lips are absolutely enormous. It's details like this that you can't study on a person when you're face to face because it would be rude to stare. But luckily, there was a rude photographer who took one look at her lips and thought, "I gotta get a shot of these" so that the rest of us can sit on the internet and stare unabashedly. Although we may irrationally fear that she'll suck us up like a vaccuum tube.
So now that I've insulted the lower half of this poor woman's face, I will go on to say that I think it's unfair to lump her and all of the other people who are included in the article entitled "The 10 Most Tiresome Tabloid stories." Why do I call it unfair, you ask? Do I feel that these people who have put themselves out in the public, people like Heidi Fleiss and Monica Lewinski, are treated with less respect than they deserve?...I meant that as a rhetorical question, but now that I think about it, my opinion of the tabloids is pretty damn low. Possibly lower than my opinion of brothels. With the exception of someone who puts themselves in one purposely, I don't think that anyone deserves to be in a tabloid. It's like a human rights violation.
But the point I'm driving at is the irony of an article featuring scandalous people who, according to the writer, are the "most tiresome." So logically it should be the single most tiresome article of all time! WOW! I never thought I'd find it! I thought I'd probably write the most tiresome thing of all time some day but to have it tossed onto my lap like a present from a drive-by Santa is a dream come true!
These are the times I look at news headlines and think, "God, that writer was desperate for a story." That's what I think when I read titles like "Why Aren't Men Calling You?" and "10 Reasons Why Your Child Will Not Grow up to be a Lawyer if You Don't Feed Her Organic Grapefruit." The people who wrote these things needed to write something and they needed to write it now!
Speaking of which, I was desperate for something to submit to my writing workshop for tonight so I took my post from the other day, the one about song lyrics, polished it up and submitted it. But instead of ending it with the Mary Oliver poem I gave you guys, I polished it off with this:
The other thing I think I might be overlooking is that it’s not an entirely bad thing that my children are singing along to a song about love and hope. I shiver and squeeze my eyes shut whenever they insist we listen to Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb,” which is about climbing mountains, or overcoming adversity, or some crap.
Keep on moving, keep climbing
Keep the faith, baby
It’s all about, it’s all about the climb
Keep the faith, keep your faith, whoa.
Miley Cyrus is sixteen year old millionaire. Her dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, is a millionaire. Her greatest adversity is perhaps when her masseuse is late, or when the back up dancer she falls in love with leaves her for her limo driver. Ok, I admit that I don’t know her and that she might have actually gone through some harrowing times. Maybe she didn’t want to be a singer like her dad. Maybe she wanted to be a goat herder, and life dealt her a bum deal.
I don’t know if my children will face a similar struggle, but given the way that life generally goes, they will eventually face some great challenge or journey of self-discovery. Maybe they’ll remember songs like “The Climb” or the rainbow-dream-believe-love song we heard the other day, and maybe they’ll smile at the thought of them. I will try to remind myself of this whenever I hear Miley’s voice on the radio and I develop little facial ticks. The cheesy chick could someday help my troubled children. Keep the faith, baby, keep the faith. Believe that they’ll never lose hope that their dreams will come true. Because they’re lifted up by rainbows of love. Whoa.
The End! I will let you know what my group thinks of it. And speaking of letting people know what people are thinking, I've been very opinionated lately, haven't I? Or am I just noticing it for the first time?
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2 comments:
Is it my imagination, or is this the first we're hearing of this writing workshop?! I like it, ma'am.
Opinionate all you want. That's what the internet is for!
I think we've heard of the writing workshop before, or maybe I found out about it some other way. Is this not common knowledge? I thought it showed up in the banners next to my gmail account or something: "Find out more about Pay Phone Vigilante Writer Group!" or something like that.
My writing workshop just had an exercise where we had to write two pages without using passive voice (she was, he is, it was...all the "to be" stuff). I made four or five errors. Didn't realize how terrible I was at it.
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