Antidote to the blues
So I’m thinking maybe I should have kept that last one under wraps indefinitely, eh?
Here. Go look at some cute kitties and puppies.
D.
Hymenology
Not the Goddess Hymen. But after fruitlessly wading through hundreds of naughty images this morning to find a picture of the Goddess Hymen, I decided Ceres was close enough.
This morning, I opened my New York Times Book Review (March 25, 2007) to find Alex Kuczynski’s review of Virgin: The Untouched History, by Hanne Blank. Reading it purely for its Continuing Medical Education merit, I was struck by the following:
Blank’s thorough scholarship is to be commended, even if I found my eyes glazing over during passages about the Protoevangelion, an apocryphal Gospel from the second century A.D. that describes the courtship of Joseph and Mary; the rise and fall of convents; and the difference between annular and fimbriated and crescentic hymens. While the author admits that, as pieces of tissue go, the hymen is “really awfully dull,†she nevertheless devotes an entire chapter to it.
Annular? Fimbriated? Crescentic? Clearly I have major holes in my education! A quick google led me to the discovery that there are, per Our Bodies, Ourselves, six different types of hymens. I also discovered that the procedure to rebuild a hymen, hymenoplasty, heretofore common only in those retro corners of the globe where men still care about such things, is on the rise in America:
For her 17th wedding anniversary, Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband. In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again.
“It’s the ultimate gift for the man who has everything,” says Ms. Yarborough, 40 years old, a medical assistant from San Antonio.
This, too, is still one of the dark places on Earth.
As a surgeon, this gives me the creeps. You might assert that a hymenoplasty is no different than any other type of cosmetic operation, but I don’t think the argument holds up to inspection. Cosmetic surgery is all about correcting deformity or restoring beauty. Hymenoplasty reconstructs a bit of tissue for the sole purpose of destroying it all over again.
And then there’s Ms. Yarborough’s claim that this is the ultimate gift for the man who has everything. Has your man had everything, Ms. Yarborough? Have you given him that threesome he so fervently desires? Would cost a tad less than $5000, I imagine.
I think a guy who would allow his wife to undergo unnecessary surgery just for the once-in-a-lifetime (until the next hymenoplasty) opportunity of ripping through the surgical site, maybe that’s a guy who doesn’t deserve everything.
My hymen-google also led me to Wikiality, the Truthiness Encyclopedia — yes, Stephen Colbert has his own version of Wiki! This is from Stephen’s article on Virginality:
According to many Youth Ministers, what we’re trying to avoid having to actually having to talk about here is far more than just the act of “doing It.” While the liberal media wants to undermine virginality and corrupt America’s children by insisting that virginality concerns sex alone, the truth of the matter is quite different. Virginality affects your entire essense as a person; that’s why it’s so shameful to talk about It. Virginality is not available to godless liberals, gays, lesbians, terrorists, or people who have non-abstinent sex before they are married. Virginality is only for Christians, Republicans, and Amerisexuals.
And what does Stephen have to say on hymens?
I read somewhere that your hymen will grow back in one to two years if you don’t have any more non-abstinence “sex” and don’t do masturbation. LikeaVirginality can happen much more quickly for boys, who don’t have to worry about that pesky hymen in the first place.
There ya go, Ms. Yarborough. This from a doctor — Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, no less. If your husband wants a hymen-bearing wife so much, make him wait for it.
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My opinion? We waste way too much energy worrying about virginity and the loss of innocence, and put way too little energy teaching our kids about love, about what it takes to maintain a successful relationship.
But that would require teaching by example, which is beyond most people.
D.
SBD: Too stupid to live!
For a change, I have some real, honest to Gaaaaah bitchery for today’s Smart Bitches Day post. To wit: Maddie Faraday, heroine of Jennifer Crusie’s Tell Me Lies, is too stupid to live.
I don’t often bail out on a book when I’m past the 100 page mark. I really don’t usually bail on mysteries, no matter how far I am into the book. But in Tell Me Lies, I made it past page 200 and THEN bailed.
I don’t care who done it. As far as I’m concerned, Maddie deserves to get framed with the murder of her cheating, embezzling husband Brent. She has done nothing to earn the love and protection of stock-hunky-hero C.L.; she hasn’t even earned the love of the Requisite Crusie So-Ugly-Is-It-Even-a-Dog?® dog, Phoebe. She definitely doesn’t deserve to retain custody of her lovely daughter Em. The woman will be the death of that child. There should be a special Darwin Award for people who take not only themselves but their children out of the gene pool.
I mean — seriously. Hiding the murder weapon in a Spam casserole? Why is she even touching the murder weapon any more than she has to? And the crap she does with the embezzled money. Why, why, why? Why, if not to further the plot?
And that’s the real bitch of this novel. If Maddie’s gonna get set up, let the murderer set her up. She shouldn’t set herself up. She especially shouldn’t set herself up since she knows she’s the number one suspect!
Soon after Maddie stashed the gun and the money, I closed the book in disgust. Enough already. I admit I’m tempted to flash to the end, but only if it’s to read about Maddie cleaning the Women’s Prison toilets with a bristleless toothbrush; to see her visited by C.L. with a new girlfriend it tow (“Sorry, Maddie, but she was there, and you weren’t. Have a good life”); and to watch as her daughter is raised by Maddie’s evil in-laws, who will lie to the girl and tell her that her mother died in an attempted prison break.
Yeah, sure, I’m cruel. I’m a bastard, in fact. But I wasted over 200 pages of my reading life on that book and I want ’em back.
Oh — forgot to say it. Better late than never.
Spoilers!
D.
Indian weekend
Here’s a change: I’m going to write up a recipe before I’ve ever tried it. I’ll post a followup to let you know how it turned out.
Regulars here know about my favorite Indian cookbook. Last night, I made potato samosas and chicken in creamed coconut sauce; tonight, I’m making a meat curry (gosht kari). Follow me below the fold for some curry, baby!
Lurker roll call
Lurkers, here’s your chance to say hello. I’d love to check out your stuff.
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Anyone up for live blogging this evening?
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And can anyone explain to me the vicissitudes of blog traffic? Total suckitude this week — isn’t anyone searching for cameltoe photos any more?
D.
What might have been
I can well imagine the conversation which took place behind closed doors after I left my interview at Wake Forest University.
“I don’t care what you want,” the chairman must have said. “I want him.”
“We don’t need another assistant prof,” said my would-be boss. “I need a fellow. A FELL-OW.”
“You don’t understand. He’s the future!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. But it’s my fantasy and I’ll put whatever words I want into the chairman’s mouth.)
“Then you find a place for him in the department, but I don’t want him.”
So the chairman, hoping to find some sort of niche for me at Wake Forest, sent my CV to one of his cancer research buddies — Frank Torti, a guy who just happened to have been on my thesis advisory committee at Stanford.
My CV hit Frank’s desk like a steaming hotcake on a breakfast platter. It cooled over the next four months, buried under reprints and grant proposals. But Frank found it eventually.
Courage. Character.
Most of you have probably heard the bad news: Elizabeth Edwards’s breast cancer has returned (report on MSNBC). This morning, Karen and I followed the story with a lot of concern and anxiety. When we heard the couple were holding a press conference to discuss Elizabeth’s health, we feared the worst.
We support John Edwards — but that phrase barely scratches the surface of how we feel about these two. We’re enthusiastic about John and Elizabeth. We admire them. We regard them as heroic figures.
And neither one of us can remember the last time we felt this way about any candidate for the US Presidency.
Some of you know that Karen and I have been through a certain amount of grief. Nothing like John and Elizabeth, who had to get past the death of their son, Wade, but I think we’ve been through enough to appreciate the difficulty of picking things up and moving forward. Tough enough to just keep going; truly remarkable to turn everything around and live an exemplary life of service to the nation.
Before Wade’s death in a car accident in 1996, Edwards was an extremely successful North Carolina trial lawyer. Judging from his book (Four Trials), the man had it made — a much sought-after attorney who had made his reputation by defending the underdog against big corporations. He writes,
I have always been an optimist, but I was a different kind of optimist before Maundy Thursday, April 4, 1996. That was the day my son died and my world stopped turning.
In spite of disappointments that had been real to me, up until that day I had always known mine was a happy life. And I admit that all along I had a secret sense that it would go on like that forever.
Edwards has since attributed his move into politics to this tragedy. Here is a guy — a family — who got kicked in the teeth, but they got up, dusted themselves off, moved on. They did it again in ’04 when Elizabeth was first diagnosed with breast cancer, and they’re doing it now, with the news of her recurrence.
From the MSNBC report:
Mr Edwards insisted it was possible to combine a vigorous campaign with caring for his wife, promising to be at her side “any time, any place” she needed him.
“We’ve been confronted with these kind of traumas and struggles already in our life,” he said, referring to the death of their 16 year-old son in a car accident in 1996. “When this happens you have a choice — you can go and cower in the corner or you can go out there and be tough.”
If you saw the press conference, you know the bond that exists between Elizabeth and John. It’s palpable. They’ve been together thirty years, they’re true partners, they love each other, and it all shows.
Regardless of your political affiliation, take a moment to check out Edwards’s website. Get to know the man. And you can give them your best wishes and prayers here.
D.
Crosseyed and Painless Thirteen
This is, what, the third week I failed to write a Thirteen about my surgical internship? You wouldn’t think it would be such a big deal. After all, I made my romance protag a surgical intern; but I also filled his life with prime booty, and gave him a sex drive powerful enough to overwhelm even the worst internship fatigue.
Yup. Fantasy.
No, the memories are still too tetchy. I might as well try to write “Thirteen Painful Memories.”
Hey, there’s a thought!
Blissed
This is Charlotte, our ferret. We used to have two, but her sister Emily escaped one day and never showed her twitchy nose again. My fault, unfortunately. I’ve never been good at multiprocessing, and one day, I tried simultaneously to give the ferrets some exercise and clean house. Emily slipped out, but the smarter and nicer Bronte remained.
I would love to think that Emily is sipping mojitos with other expatriate ferrets, chatting about the irresistible cache of stray socks and the unbearable yumminess of human toes, but alas, ferrets can’t exist without humans. Ours would only eat one brand of kitten chow and never, ever showed interest in other offerings. If Emily were dying of thirst and found a puddle of water, I doubt she would know what to do with it.
Not to mention the sad fact that something — a dog, perhaps — picked off the cats in that neighborhood. A ferret would be no match.
Charlotte doesn’t miss her sister. Emily was nasty to everyone, her sister included, and Charlotte’s personality improved greatly following Emily’s disappearance. We keep Charlotte up in our master bedroom so that she’ll feel part of the family. Kind of a bitch when she musks, but it’s worth it to keep her happy.
Short blog tonight — I want to start working on my Thirteen. Happy Hump Day!
D.