Monday Monday

I went to the drugstore today to buy a new toothbrush and I happened to glance down at the tabloids. The Globe caught my eye. The headline was Oprah: Only Six years to Live! (This is the second time I've mentioned Oprah in my blog and I have never even seen her show. Imagine how much clearer we could think without all this crap about other people we don't know permeating our minds!) Anyway, my first thought upon seeing the headline was...ONLY six years? Six years is a long time. Think about who you were and what you were doing six years ago. My son was thirteen years old six years ago. Now he's a young man. You have six years to live. It's so specific. Would a doctor say you have two years, a couple months and three maybe four days left? How do they determine these things? Then I looked for the article. I past by Ed McMahon selling walk in bathtubs and an article on botox shockers and actresses with duck lips. All so interesting I wanted to go back to the pharmacist and purchase some arsenic. But I finally got to the article and the doctor who was saying that Oprah had six years to live did not even know her. He just observed. He thought she was working and eating her way to an early grave. This guy, and may his license be taken away pronto, invented something he actually had patented called a Death Calculator. Now wouldn't everyone in America just love to have one of those things. He also predicted with his little calculator that Britney Spears will be dead at 43. Duh!! Here's how he figures things. Oprah loses two years on her life because of media overexposure. Thank goodness, one thing none of us have to worry about. Second, she loses 4 years for living alone. I hate this guy. She loses 5 years for her eating habits, even though he admits that she does have a personal chef who prepares healthy meals everyday. What's a girl to do? But here's the real crazy part...The part where he tells you how to ADD years to your life. First he says you get 2 extra years if you help the needy. Hello, the woman just built a school for girls in Africa. I'm sorry but that has got to be worth at least five extra years. Second, you get one extra year for taking a bubble bath every day. I hate bubble baths. They make me itchy. But that's only one extra year so who cares. You get two years for praying. Come on, even God is going to give you more than two years if you really stick with it. And there's a picture of the doctor with the article. And the guy's a fatty! A big fat fatty. I'd say for that and inventing the death calculator this guy loses at least 25 years.

A saying that I have to reconsider is this one..."Enjoy each moment as if it were your last." Saturday I was in Starbucks in Ocean Park and a young man, around mid twenties, was invading my space. I was standing in line minding my own business, checking out the cd's and this guy was on his cell phone talking in what seemed to be my ear. "Johnny, we're calling Benedict at UTA. He's gonna love it." I turned around to ask if he could move back a little but he put his finger to his mouth in a shush gesture. "We gotta have a hook." This kid was just the son I did not want my son to turn out to be. I thought of pulling the..."Could you not get so close, I have cancer." thing, but it was all happening very fast. Someone left the line and almost in tandem we moved forward, like that horse act when someone's the head and someone's the tail. He was yacking away and I was trying to breath deeply and know in my heart that this kid was never going to make it in Hollywood and someday he would be completely depressed and that kept me going for a while. But then my mouth got the better of me. He said, "We'll tell him it's sort of a cross between Entourage and Dexter." And I said, "Oh puleeeeze." Practically right into his cell phone. And he asked if I would just mind my own business. And I said I certainly would if he would stop doing his business in my ear. And we went back and forth and I told him you can't do an original idea based on someone else's idea, even if you paste two good ideas together to make it your own. And he looked at me like I was insane and he told Johnny on the other end of the phone line that he'd have to call him back when he got away from the "crazies". Yes, he said crazies. That would be me. So I ordered my soy chai tea latte (too many words for tea, don't you think?) and that's when it occured to me. About living each moment as if it were your last. If that moment in Starbucks was my last moment, then man, that really sucks. What a ridiculous ending. It's like when you see a movie and it has a good beginning but the ending is weak and all over the place, well, that's all you really remember. The lousy ending.

Which leads me to conclude...Absolutely nothing. I don't know a thing. I know that a cross between Entourage and Dexter is a stupid idea. I know an asshole when I hear him in my ear. Trust me, I am trying to embrace each day, but how to avoid the assholes. I could never leave the house, that's an idea. Hmmmm. Maybe I should reconsider that bubble bath.