Sorry for Your Loss

Seriously? A pie from each one?

Recently a friend of mine posted the obituary of her 85-year-old uncle on Facebook. Naturally she felt sad about his death. Following her post were a string of comments, all saying the same exact thing: "Sorry for your loss."

Okay, to be fair, some people said something different. For example:"So sorry for your loss, Sorry for your loss of your uncle, So sorry to hear of your loss, Sorry you have had such a loss, So sorry about your loss, Sorry you are feeling bad over your loss," and more like that. Really it went on ad nauseum.

Come on people -- wake up and smell your brain cells!

First of all, how much of a "loss" was her 85-year-old uncle? Sure she loved the guy, but she's got a husband and kids and a job and a very full life. And he was no spring chicken and everyone dies eventually, as we know. How about saying, "Sorry to hear of your uncle's passing. I'm sure he will live on in your memory." Or maybe, "My condolences to you as you mourn the loss of your dear family member, may he rest in peace." Or maybe, "Hope you feel better soon, may he be in a better place." Or, in fact, just about any damn thing except, "Sorry for your loss" after seeing that 47 other people already said that.

Rich People (Make Me Sick)

                                                                                                                                Mark Lipczynski for The Wall Street Journal

Consider the plight of Leah Hoffman (shown above), a 60-year-old divorced woman living in Paradise Valley, Arizona. With her kids grown and on their own, and her husband gone for reasons that aren't hard to fathom, she felt it was time to downsize. She just didn't need all that much space living alone, and besides, she was ready to "start a whole new life from scratch." Sounds interesting; just what the heck would she do?

Did she turn her giant mansion into a B & B? Start volunteering at a soup kitchen and rent out her extra rooms to the underprivileged folks she met there? Sell her house, get an RV and drive across America taking pictures for National Geographic? Move to Haiti to help feed the hungry and house the homeless? Adopt three illegal immigrant children? Build a Tiny House? (They are quite popular these days.) Nope, luckily Leah found "exactly what she was looking for" at a cost of only $1.7 million -- a teeny, tiny 3,200-square-foot home with a separate guest house right on the other side of the beautifully landscaped swimming pool.

As Leah told the reporter from The Wall Street Journal, which features her fascinating story in their Mansion section, "I like change." Based on the photo of Leah in her new backyard, I'm guessing her brand new life won't be all that different from her old, used one.

A Bad Case of WWW-TMI

                                                 Illustration: Annie Turpin

No more, please, I can't take it. It's too much, way too much. I don't need to know. Actually, I don't even want to know. The World Wide Web has ensnared us all, and to what end? What good does it do me, or anyone, to absorb the details of the latest mass shooting, the latest staff departure from the White House, the latest epithets hurled by one politician at another, or how Katy Perry looks in a bikini? (FYI, she rocks it.)

One is probably wondering and might ask, "So why do you keep looking, Andrea?" Good question. The simple answer, and it's a bleak one, is that I am addicted, like the rest of my family. We are all Internet junkies, my son and husband being far worse than I. Together the three of us clock many hours surfing the web, scrolling through Facebook, seeking explanations for strange ailments, checking our email, watching videos on YouTube and playing games. My husband claims that occasionally he is learning something new or doing work, and my son actually is often doing work since he runs a few  entrepreneurial businesses that rely on constant communication between several parties. But still, give it a rest I say.

I have tried to kick the habit and failed. I quit smoking cold turkey --not smoking cold turkey, but smoking, cold turkey) many years ago and it was a cinch: I just stopped buying cigarettes. But I seem powerless to stop logging on each day for my world transfusion. I'm sure it does tremendous damage in many ways, almost as much as smoking. I wonder, is WWW-TMI ever fatal?

I hope I quit before my head explodes. (See illustration.)

Another Waste of Time Quiz

Supposedly they don't feel a thing. (The people, not the fish.)

It's been three years since I wrote one of these, but since I've had requests for another, here it is: something to do that is nothing at all. You see these things all over the Internet and they seem to be very popular, so I assume many people out there have time to spare, despite how every fucking magazine article starts with, "In today's busy world, it's hard to find some time for ourselves."

I say this is incorrect, since I personally know many people who sit around doing nothing all day, unless drinking counts. If you're one of those with some time on your hands, take my quiz and find out, "If You Were A Tree, What Would Be Your Favorite Ice Cream Flavor?"

1. It's raining cats and dogs and today is your daughter's outdoor wedding. To make sure it's not a total disaster, you:
A. Call it off -- you hate that guy she's marrying anyway.
B. Hurry to the nearest Reny's and buy 150 one-size-fits-all ponchos.
C. Stay in bed, turn off your phone and let someone else deal with it.

2. You wake up one morning completely covered with Skittle-sized red dots. They don't itch but you think you should tell someone. You call:
A. Your doctor
B. The local newspaper
C. The police

3. There's a giant black bear in your backyard and he's lumbering straight towards your house. The first thing you should do is:
A. Look up recipes for bear meat
B. Grab the cat and get the heck out of there
C. Invite your hateful next-door neighbor over for coffee on the back porch

4. You forgot your spouse's birthday and it was a big one! To make up for it, you:
A. Buy a big house where you both can live
B. Promise to never complain about anything for a whole year
C. Eat crow

5. Your best friend lets you down, for the last time. To get over it, you:
A. Cry wolf
B. Learn to play the piano, since living well is the best revenge
C. Go shoe-shopping

6. It's the weekend and you have no plans. To spice up your life, you:
A. Move all the furniture in your house from one room to another
B. Order pizza from six different places and compare crusts
C. Adopt a pet snake

7. Your idea of a good family vacation with the kids is:
A. Wine-tasting in the Napa Valley
B. Fishing in Lake Michigan
C. Skeet-shooting in Alabama

SCORING: Give yourself 3 points for each correct answer.
0-2:   Pine tree, vanilla
3-7:   Elm tree, chocolate-chocolate chip
8-12: Linden tree, salted caramel
13 and above: Lemon tree, raspberry sorbet

America's Dumbness Factor

I hope there are no young people reading this who might lose hope (the older ones having lost it already), but there is so much stupidity fed to us by government drones (4.5 million of them, give or take) that you've got to be on your toes at all times to avoid getting dumber just by getting out of bed in the morning.

What's a shopper to do?

Case in point: In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), at the behest of then-First Lady Michelle Obama during her short-lived and unsuccessful attack on obesity in America, decreed that the words "Added sugars" must be on all food labels, even on foods that don't have any, like pure maple syrup that comes out of a tree through a tube and straight into a jar.

The rule exists because "eating lots of sugar increases the risk of obesity and cardiovascular disease," insists the FDA. See, the sugars are "added" to your diet, making them "added sugars." Many Vermont producers of pure maple syrup are appalled, aghast, and other word like that over having to print this falsehood on their labels, but hey, what's a government for if not to further muddy already murky waters?

Similarly, all food producers have added the words NON-GMO to their labels, even on foods that couldn't be GMO'd if you tried. This folly was soundly debunked in a scientific article I read last weekend (in either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, I forget which), explaining that the whole GMO thing is a myth gone viral. GMOs are not at all harmful and in fact might be good for you. (Too bad the whole fiasco drove Monsanto out of business.)

Meanwhile the production of Snickers, M & Ms, Butterfingers, Almond Joy, Hershey Kisses, Three Musketeers, and all those yummy candies we force-feed our kids each Halloween continues unabated, while lots of other "stuff" -- like those orange corn syrup puffs and chocolate-flavored, calorie-laden cereals -- flood our supermarkets, packaged to look like food. But apparently if the label says "Added sugars," the government is off the hook.

The Horror Called Maxine Waters

There are many things wrong with our government, and since we all know what they are there's no need for me to list them here. But one of the worst things that should be dealt with ASAP, like today, is Maxine Waters, who is obviously out of her gourd and a danger to society.

Like Al Sharpton, the woman has nothing going for her other than her skin color; she's black, which means she's untouchable, since if you dare criticize a black person you are perceived as a racist, and in today's upside-down and backwards world that's considered worse than being a pederast, an arsonist or even, God forbid a million times, homophobic. Racists are heinous!

Anyway, I digress. Waters is an old bag (79) who has held the office of U.S. Representative from the state of California since 1990 (can you believe it?). She is now going around shouting for people to publicly harass and heckle anyone they see who works in the current administration. Talk about fomenting hate -- these twisted Dems have it all over Trump!

Waters is a moronic lunatic who must be stopped. I suggest stopping her in any way possible, and that means any way possible. Personally, since I am a pacifist and against any sort of violence, I suggest tackling her to the ground and filling her big fat mouth with marshmallows, then taping it shut and having her go into sugar shock, which can trigger all kinds of inflammation, fuel chronic diseases and even increase the risk of cancer. But be careful, because if you try anything, she's gonna take you on! (See photo.)

In 2011, Waters said, "And as far as I'm concerned, the 'tea party' can go straight to Hell ... and I intend to help them get there." Surely she will be there to greet them.

Who You Callin' Deplorable?

I think I might try my hand at becoming deplorable, or more deplorable if you already consider me deplorable, although I personally do not. But the behavior of all those Hillary-lovers who thought she was the better choice in our last election has gone steadily downhill as they fail to grieve their loss in any sort of decent and mature way. In a desperate effort to distance myself from them I may have to vote for Trump in 2020, which I did not do last time.

One clear example of how the whole lot of them are going nuts was the unbelievably childish act of the owner of the Red Hen, a 26-seat restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, kicking Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was already halfway through her entree, out of the establishment because she works for Trump. The self-righteous and deplorable owner said the restaurant has "standards to uphold" and several gay workers in the kitchen to defend, so Sarah could not remain there with her husband and six friends and eat their food. Sarah graciously said she understood and left the establishment calmly, without so much as a doggie bag.

WTF? The people on the left -- liberals or Democrats or call them what you will -- have clearly gone bonkers and consider themselves to be Heaven-bound despite their own past sins. Here are just a few of the Democrats I know who still consider themselves above me because I voted for George W. Bush (twice) all those years ago:

1. A lifelong alcoholic who is usually passed out by eight each night declared that my husband and I "have no soul" due to our politics and is now banning us from attending his upcoming 70th birthday bash because we are so deplorable!

The Holier-Than-Thou Red Hen

2. A once-close friend dropped me cold, saying "I can't know you anymore" after I voted for Bush. This was on the heels of his year-long affair carried on with another friend of mine while his wife was away, recovering from the birth of their new baby. Despite my noisy protestations he continued his infidelity. I kept his secret, still, he considered me deplorable!

3. A loony liberal who claimed "all Republicans are scum" and admitted it was "hard for us to be friends" because of my politics spent at least five years smuggling cocaine into the country by swallowing little bags of it and flying back and forth to Mexico. She was the mother of a toddler at the time. Admit it, that's deplorable!

4. A childless avowed Democrat who used abortion as birth control for years -- at last count she had undergone six -- ended our 30-year friendship when I said I "understood the pro-life viewpoint" after having a baby of my own. She found that way too deplorable!

Now that's a fine bunch of deplorables who would be welcome at the Red Hen anytime.

What's Wrong with Erin Brokovich

She wore this once.

I'm talking about the movie, not the person. I have never met the real Erin Brokovich and I'm sure she's a total sweetheart. Until last night I had never seen the movie named for her either. But a good friend recently claimed it was a "great" film that I "have to see," so last night my hubby fired up the Apple TV and for $3.99 we settled in and watched this 2001 crowd-pleasing, Academy Award winner.

You all probably know all about it so I won't bore you with a plot recap. Suffice it to say that Julia Roberts plays the title character who we meet when she's dead broke. We know this because a close-up shot of her pantry reveals only a box of Mac and cheese and a couple of cans of beans! She's also jobless, her house is overrun with roaches (odd since there's no food), she's got a stack of bills a mile high and her car is a wreck, literally. And of course, there are those three kids to feed and clothe and take to the doctor, etc.

But somehow Erin can afford lots of fancy, albeit slutty, clothes, and many different pairs of high heels, and never shows up in the same outfit twice in the whole damn movie. Same with her earrings, dangling and in-your-face, and never a repeat. (I have been wearing the same pair every day for the last nine years.) And her hair and makeup is perfect all the time -- I wondered, does a stylist come to her trashy dump of a house early each morning?

These details obviously didn't bother anyone else since Roberts won the Oscar that year for Best Actress, and the film was nominated for Best Picture and Stephen Soderbergh for Best Director. (He won, but for Traffic, which was released the same year.) Am I the only one paying attention?

Separating Kids from Their Parents

Last week a 23-year-old California moron, oops, I mean mother, left her 18-month old son inside a closed vehicle for ten hours while she "socialized" with her friends at three in the morning, it has been reported. She returned to the car at one in the afternoon and found the child "unresponsive."  (Death does that to a person.) Earlier in the week, another mother/moron in Mississippi left her 10-month-old inside her car, windows rolled up, for an unknown length of time while she was inside her house. The temperature outdoors that day was 98 degrees. Her child also died.

Both of these "moms" are now sitting in jails somewhere, no doubt in air-conditioning, enjoying three squares a day while they wait for justice to be served. I suggest locking them in automobiles with the windows rolled up and letting them suffocate slowly, the same way their kids did. That would at least make me feel better, and possibly stop crying.

So much for children not being separated from their parents.

Other People's Stories

Last night I attended a live storytelling event in the next town over. It was held at a restaurant with a brand new theater facility attached to it. The seats were crammed close together and were quite hard and generally uncomfortable. "These better be some damned distracting stories," I thought to myself, wanting to avoid another night of horror like the one I endured at the Venice opera not too long ago when a broken spring in my chair annoyed the heck out of my butt for two hours.

A personable, gender-fluid emcee got things started by explaining that each storyteller, or "teller" as they are called, would take the stage and wow us with a true story based on the night's theme, "Grilled." Since the word has various meanings, it was up to the individual teller which way to go with it.

Grills.

Things started off slowly. The first young woman's tale had nothing at all to do with being asked a lot of questions by an authority figure, or cooking on a grill, or the grill of a car, or even the shiny metal, sometimes gold, covers that some hip-hoppers wear over their teeth that are called grills. There was no grilling in it anywhere, by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway, despite a pleasant stage presence her story was boring, going on far too long and with virtually no punch line at the end.

Thankfully we were on to the next, a spunky woman who looked like Annette Bening. She had a great personality and told a story about an actual grill she had bought back when she was in the Peace Corps in Romania. She had a great style about her, and her story was full of laughs. It was pretty much all about the grill and grilling, with the grill getting too smoky, a neighbor getting angry, the food not cooking well, etc. She was my personal favorite.

Next came a handsome young man in his thirties who talked emotionally about having grown up with a stutter and how he conquered it by taking a three-day intensive class in Ireland. On stage last night he stuttered only mildly, in fact hardly at all, and he got a huge round of applause when he was done because he had overcome a handicap. People love stories about overcoming handicaps. Still, he said nothing grill-related.

A middle-aged Norwegian woman with a hint of a foreign accent who had converted to Judaism years ago told us about being "grilled" by immigration officers one time when she traveled to Israel. Okay, fine, it was interesting to a point, but enough is enough! Finally she wrapped it up by alluding to the current immigrant crisis we are facing today in this country and so immediately became a crowd favorite, the crowd being 85% gay, 90% liberal, and 99% Trump-hating.

The last guy was the most polished and had won many awards on the storytelling circuit. He was instantly endearing and told us all about his fear of flying and how he finally overcame it by reading a book entitled Soar: The Breakthrough Treatment for Fear of Flying. (I have already ordered a copy.) A grill was not involved in his story either, causing me to wonder anew why the emcee had mentioned at the outset that the evening's theme was "Grilled." Still, it was an amusing way to pass the time on a Thursday night, and for only ten bucks. The best part is that I may learn how to conquer my own fear of flying just because I went. 

Important Message for Expectant Parents

My husband and I love our son in too many ways to count, but one of the things we're both quite pleased about is that he hasn't murdered us, despite him clearly having cause. After all, he hated that summer camp we sent him to when he was ten. But he obviously has forgiven us and has let us live this long, although who knows what the future holds.

I reflected on that after reading about a 23-year-old woman in Hong Kong who stabbed her parents as they slept, then killed herself as well, because she was bothered by eczema, a skin condition she says she inherited from them. Her suicide note said that having children if you have eczema is worse than having children if you are poor. "If you're poor, you can rely on your own hard work. With eczema, sorry, you have to suffer your whole life with no change."

Matricide and patricide are not as uncommon as you would hope, especially if you are currently pregnant. According to Kathleen M. Heide, PhD professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, "On the average, about five parents are killed by their biological children in the United States every week." Hmmm, interesting.....

But hey, congrats on the new bundle of joy!

Jewish and Loving It

The bottom line: we're all in the same boat.

My post yesterday made light of a serious subject, and I'd like to  apologize for that. Antisemitism is nothing to joke about. Personally I had never felt persecuted for being Jewish, anywhere, ever, in any circumstance, until I moved to Maine and applied for a job at L.L. Bean. They said they couldn't hire me because my sense of humor, while great, was "too strong for their client base." That was their way of saying "Jew." But besides that ridiculous experience, I have skated through life getting pretty much anything I wanted in the way of employment and housing.

But what if I hadn't? What if I never got any job because I'm a Jew, or couldn't rent an apartment or buy a house in a certain neighborhood, or eat in some restaurant? That might be annoying, but not enough to wish I were not a Jew. In fact, if we go around again and have a choice, I would choose to be a Jew again in a heartbeat.

My being raised Jewish is responsible for all my best features: I'm smart, funny, a great cook, deeply empathic, charitable, intuitive and most of all, able to detect bullshit. (That last quality is common among Jews and is why people fear them enough to shove them into gas ovens.) So bring on the antisemitism! I can take it, mostly because it's so stupid.

Send Help, I'm White

I am white and not (yet) ashamed to admit it. I guess I should be based on a lot of what I've been reading lately. Yesterday's New York Times, that slanted rag we buy for the Magazine's crossword puzzle, ran an article about the shame of being white circa 2018. It's entitled "Blank Space," which means me and my kind. We are blank space. We're bland and uninteresting and we can't dance. And you can damn well believe that our lives don't matter half as much as black lives, blue lives, and the lives of all the undocumented immigrants everyone is worrying about.

Just why do we suck so much? Well, for starters, we want football players to stand for the national anthem. (I don't give a crap, I hate football.) We under-season our food, make bad potato salad, and are thought to avoid using washcloths. Not one of those three preceding crimes am I guilty of, yet still, I am "awful."

My son says my saving grace is that I'm a Jew and Jews are not white. This would be some small consolation, except for the rise in antisemitism I keep reading about too. In the very same paper, there was a letter in response to an editorial about antisemitism that ran a few weeks ago. The letter writer mentioned that any Jew who could afford it had already bought a condo in Israel. So now I want a condo in Israel, even though I have never even been there. (Hey, I saw The Pianist three times, I'm no idiot.)

FILM REVIEW: "First Reformed"

Artists are often deliberately esoteric, as if limiting the number of people who understand their work will somehow increase its value. For example, I read the following sentence in an article about art forgeries, describing one of the top experts in the field: "Martin, a tall man with lumber-beam shoulders, has a voice that never surpasses a murmur." Momentarily confused, I had to read it twice, sidetracked by the murmuring lumber beams. Oh, I get it -- why not just say he had broad shoulders and spoke in a low voice?

"First Reformed," the new film by director Paul Schrader starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried, goes the esoteric route whole hog. In fact, one reviewer (Roger Ebert.com) praises the film as "very special.... for a certain, inevitably rather limited audience." Naturally I was intrigued, wondering if I was special enough to be part of that audience. Turns out I was -- and I wasn't, mostly because Schrader does a lot of murmuring lumber-beaming in the telling of his story.

Pastor Toller (Ethan Hawke) wears a worried expression throughout.

Simply put, small-town pastor Ernst Toller (Hawke), depressed after his soldier son dies in Iraq and his marriage ends, tends to his small flock at a 250-year-old church in upstate New York that hardly anyone attends. He lives alone and drinks heavily while writing his darkest thoughts in a journal each night. One day Mary, a young parishioner (Seyfried), approaches and asks him to counsel her husband Michael (Phillip Ettinger), a just-sprung-from-Canadian-prison climate-change activist who is suicidal over the continuing degradation of the planet. Mary is pregnant and Michael questions the validity of bringing a new life into an ever-worsening world.

There is a lot of talk. Lots and lots of talk, about God and the meaning of life and climate change and pollution. It must have taken quite a while for everyone to learn their parts.

I can't say more about what happens since I don't want to be a spoiler and besides, I'm not 100% sure. (The director also isn't sure, and admitted as much in an interview.) But I will say there are superb performances by the entire cast and stunning images throughout, be it a lovely country church or a glittering toxic waste dump. There are also gruesome scenes of a body in decline from a severe illness. (A close-up of Pepto-Bismol bubbling in a glass of whiskey will stay with me forever, tainting both.) There's a very long kiss, possibly longer than the memorable one between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. And let's not forget that head blown off in the snow. All of this is accompanied by horror-movie music.

The film ends before you're ready. See it if you're special enough.

What A Way To Go

In 1776, when Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase "all men are created equal," he wisely made no mention of how all of us might come to an end. That's because there's no way of knowing, a fact I find annoying since we are all born exactly the same way, and yet we die in drastically different ways. Would it have been so hard for God to pin that one down?

What's got me on this is reading about a 54-year-old woman who was out doing her gardening and got swallowed whole by a giant python. Okay, calm down -- it happened in Indonesia so if you're reading this in America you're pretty safe, at least one would imagine. When her family noticed her absence and went looking for her they came upon her gardening tools and nothing else. Then, about 50 feet away they spotted the python with a bloated belly. Putting two and two together, somebody killed the snake and looked inside and voila! -- there she was, still fully dressed but of course dead.

This gruesome manner of leaving seems unfair when compared with all those people who pass away painlessly in their sleep, or on a morphine drip surrounded by their loving family and friends. It's bad enough that life sucks for so many people and is great for so many others, but does death also have to be so undemocratic? I hate that.

My Private Detention Center

"So help me if you can, I've got to get back to the house at Pooh Corner by one,
You'd be surprised, there's so much to be done: Count all the bees in the hive,
Chase all the clouds from the sky  --
Back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh."

Those lyrics are from "House at Pooh Corner" by Kenny Loggins & Jim Messina. I've always found them quite soothing whenever I'm caught up in adult thinking, like that mess with my health insurance and the water pump in the basement is making that terrible noise again and what the heck is that lump under my arm? At times like those I find it helpful to go outside and chase the clouds, at least for a little while.

Today is a blank slate with plenty of time for cloud-chasing (or bee-counting except I'm allergic so that's out). It's my favorite kind of day, one with no plans: no lunch with a friend, no doctor's appointment, no volunteer commitment -- in fact, no reason to leave my house except to pick up the mail, half a mile away. I like this for many reasons, not least of which is maintaining a childlike attitude towards life.

The only thing on my agenda is sitting at my easel and painting. This is what many artists do, and with good reason: It's quite a lot of fun, and very distracting from the transitory, often negative things going on in the world posing as important that serve only to dampen our spirits, and about which we can do nothing.

For example, unless you're planning to go to Texas and help out at one of those immigrant detention centers housing the children whose parents are awaiting trials for breaking our laws, what good does it do you to fret about it? Besides, from what I saw on TV the kids are eating well and receiving medical care when needed, have lots of games to play, and are even attending schools that are likely superior to those in that bad place they fled seeking a better life. And I'm certain more than a few of them stay busy chasing the clouds from the sky.

Stayin' Alive

It really works!

Weight loss is a huge motivator for those on a diet. This morning I found another pound had fled in the night and suddenly all was right with the world, despite my knowing that nothing's right with the world. Still, in the teeny "world" that is my body, it's all good as I continue my adherence to The Fast Metabolism Diet. As for everything beyond my quickening metabolism, things are bleak.

Anthony Bourdain's self-inflicted death certainly opened up a can of worms. Now everywhere you turn, it seems, there are videos and articles about suicide and how it's growing, who does it and why. The one odd thing each article says is that "there is help" for those considering suicide. Usually the "help" is a voice on the other end of a "suicide prevention hotline" saying things like you'll feel better, tomorrow's another day, this too shall pass, you can't undo it, your loved ones will miss you terribly, and blah, blah, blah.

I dispute this method, since sometimes the decision to end one's life is a sound one based on irrefutable facts that portend a miserable future that will worsen over time. I say that for those people, no words from a well-meaning stranger can help and we should respect their decisions and let them go without shame or regret. Instead, what might help is reminding the depressed person that there's a big world out there and they haven't seen it all, so stick around because "you never know." That would do the trick for me.

In Aubervillers, outside Paris, a herd of sheep soldiers on, ignoring proof of their certain fate.

For example, I have never witnessed a herd of sheep strolling along a busy city street, which seems like it would be pretty much fun to see.  It's the little unexpected moments and personal joys -- see opening paragraph -- that make the big, bleak, overwhelming horrors of war, pestilence, famine, natural disasters, disease, brutality, and the disappointing evidence of man's inhumanity to man worth enduring the relatively short time allotted each of us. We should work hard to make the best of it.

For My Fast Metabolism Diet Groupies

I hope my regular readers will bear with me for one more day of diet talk. It seems that there are tons and tons of people out there following The Fast Metabolism Diet. I know this because my stats for yesterday's blog were through the roof! They were 500% higher than the closest competitor post, which was about lady killer Jodi Arias who stabbed her boyfriend 29 times, so I feel I should at least give them a few more crumbs as I enter my third day, a.k.a. Phase 2, of this diet.

Burger between two Portobello mushrooms. Fun!

The first two days (Phase 1) were fun, fun fun! Lots of juicy fruits and veggies and grains like brown rice and quinoa and even bread, the sprouted wheat kind, but still, bread is bread as any true bread-lover will tell you. (I'd rather have a two-day-old toasted bagel than an ice cream sundae any day.)  But that's all behind me now: for the next two days it's all protein and veggies, and nothing else. I repeat: Nothing. Else.

So far it has sucked, but I've only had breakfast, which was a 3-egg-white omelet made with zero shortening in a non-stick pan. (Of course it stuck.) I threw in some of last night's leftover zucchini for some flair, but basically I felt like I was in solitary confinement and it had been delivered to me through a hole in my cell door. I had this with a nice big glass of water, since no coffee is allowed. (Frowny face.) The trick is to be creative, for example think of a mushroom as a bun made in a bakery instead of as a fungus that grows in the dirt. (See photo above.)

Still, I've lost two pounds in two days and I feel great! And it's nice knowing what I'll be eating instead of mindlessly shoving any random thing down my gullet and ending up with a big bowl of Bloated and Nauseous, my usual dessert after most meals. Besides, I just have to do this particular Spartan diet today and tomorrow, and after that it's three days of fabulous foods of all kinds: Olive Oil! Nuts! Avocados! More bread! 

I am pumped for Phase 3; only five meals, four snacks and 132 ounces of water to go. I know I can do it, especially if I focus on all the people the world over who would kill for anything to eat besides mud pie.

Be Nice to Your Insides

Shown in red: The adorable little adrenal glands!

Desiring nothing as much as to avoid sinking into the quicksand of Trump's meeting with Kim, I will instead write about a subject that few people ever talk about: our fabulous internal organs. They go about their business with little appreciation and hardly any mention at all, until they stop working right. Then we hear that this one had a heart attack, that one's got pancreatic cancer, and the other one had his gall bladder removed. Meanwhile, that poor drunk slumped over the bar has cirrhosis of the liver. But really, can any of us say what each of those organs do when they are in good working order? I certainly couldn't. Not until recently, when I spent a good part of the weekend reading a book called The Fast Metabolism Diet, which I then embarked on and committed to following for the next 28 days.

It all started when I met a friend for lunch last week. I hadn't seen her in a couple of months, and the last time we met she was looking haggard and grey, and a bit puffy. So I was stunned to see her all aglow and much thinner, looking like she had just returned from a month on a Greek island where servants fed her peeled grapes as she languished in the sun with nary a care in the world. Turns out she had been going to her job every day as usual, but had been on the aforementioned diet. With her enhanced health as an endorsement, I got the book.

Now I am up to speed on my adrenal glands, which I never thought about once in my entire life but it turns out they are responsible for almost all of my bad moods, high anxiety, runaway blood pressure, and tons of other crap I've been dealing with for the last ten years. FYI, "Your adrenals are small glands that lie on top of your kidneys in your lower back, and they secrete hormones that regulate your body's response to stress of all types: physical, emotional, environmental, and mental," writes author Haylie Pomroy. Eating the wrong foods can cause adrenal exhaustion, which comes from your body secreting stress hormones that should be saved for emergencies, only it's happening all the time, causing your metabolism to slow way down.

There's much more to it, but let it suffice that your mistreatment of your adrenals might be why you are fatigued and/or depressed! I decided to start being nicer to all of my insides, including my liver, my pancreas, my pituitary gland and my thyroid, and to thank me, I lost a pound and a half the very first day. Only 27 days to go....

All the News That's Fit to Distort

The New York Times is so slanted, I have to lie in a diagonal position with my neck twisted in a funny way just to read it. Of course this is very uncomfortable, which is why I don't do it very often. Today I glanced at the front page and saw the photo, which was captioned: "President Trump arrived late for a discussion on gender equality at the G-7 meeting, which he left early for talks with North Korea."  Like that's a bad thing? I'd much rather our government focus on avoiding nuclear war with a crazy foreign leader instead of pontificating on where people should be allowed to pee or whether we must call a "he" a "she" or a "she" a "he."

Despite disliking the president, I can still applaud him for arranging a meeting with Rocket Man, and so should the Times! Instead, they are committed to never writing one good thing about the guy, just as they were committed to never saying one bad thing about Obama. It's painfully obvious that the head honchos at the Times have lost their ability to report the straight news without "spinning" it first.

Also in today's paper, a front page article disses Trump for being "the first president since 1942 not to name a science advisor." You know -- those guys who say the sea levels are rising except for where they're falling, or that eating fat is bad for you, oh wait -- actually fat is good for you, or circumcision is a mandatory health procedure, oh no, circumcision is quite harmful to babies.

That's why I stick to doing the crossword puzzle in that prestigious paper's magazine section and use the rest as fire-starter when we grill. But sometimes even that pisses me off. Like in today's puzzle, there was a rather distasteful clue in light of recent events: "Rope used for strangulation." The answer was GARROTE. But did we really need to see that this particular week? I'm telling you, they could use some new editors over there.

It's a Jungle Out There

I made a personal promise not to hang myself from a doorknob no matter how depressed I get, but more and more that's a hard promise to keep if you read the news. Besides learning about people who have done that recently, all the horror stories floating around the Internet and infecting my brain make it hard to stay upbeat, try as I might.

A recent one concerns a woman in Florida who has been missing for days, last seen while walking her two pit bulls. Then, a few days later, a human arm was found inside an alligator in a neighborhood pond, and authorities are putting two and two together. (Well, not two and two since they just found the one arm, but you know what I mean.) Anyway, I was surprised that people would walk anywhere near a pond in Florida since that toddler got eaten in Disneyland awhile back, and even more surprised that they still get pit bulls.

Face it: It's a jungle out there. Best to stay home and paint pretty pictures. Shown below is one I'm working on at the moment that has nothing to do with suicide or depression or animals eating people. I like it, although it still needs something --  I may add a small pond in the distance outside the window, with an alligator looking guilty. Or a pit bull attacking a toddler. That would make it more relevant for sure. Who knows, it might even sell.

Another One Bites the Dust

Okay, what the heck is going on? Today another fabulously wealthy (net worth $16 million) person with a dream job (paid to travel the world, meet new people and learn about other cultures while eating interesting foods in wild and crazy restaurants) who could design his own project and get it funded ASAP by any and every TV network decided to hang it all up, pun intended, in a Paris hotel room. Celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain, 61, had the cheeky gall to end his own life less than a week after fashion designer Kate Spade did the very same thing in her New York City apartment.

First of all, copy cat! Next, didn't he realize how disheartening this would be for all of us (and his daughter) so soon after Kate's death? What, he couldn't have waited? Making matters worse, this morning the CDC issued a new report about the rising suicide rate in America, with 25 states recording increases of more than 30%.

I blame it all on cell phones and social media.

The lack of real connection is taking its toll on everyone, but don't let it get you. Starting today: No more texts! From now on, risk everything and make a call. Better yet, go visit. Feeling down? Stop looking at the Internet. Go for a walk, a run, a bike ride. Don't let your kids use computers except for doing their homework. Dare to be different.

#MeToo, Sort of

What if you have no goals? Then what? This has been my problem for most of my life. Sure, I've had small ones that I accomplish and move on, like finishing a painting or buying more cat food or graduating college. But none with a capital G -- no guiding star for my life, like curing cancer. Of course I would have loved to be the one who finds a cure for cancer, but I hated calculus, and besides, I never could use laboratory animals as test subjects.

So here I sit, alive and kicking and unemployed since my husband pays for everything. Often at a loss as to how to spend my time, I have volunteered at more organizations than I can remember and never felt the slightest bit of personal satisfaction from whatever task I was given to perform, primarily because anything important or meaningful in any organization is done by a staffer who gets paid. I did enjoy working in our community food bank dispensing food to the needy, until a snooty couple dressed to the nines came in and balked at the fact that we only had French's mustard and they far preferred Grey Poupon. After blurting out, "Beggars can't be choosers," I realized I had lost my heart for the job and resigned.

To fix my what-to-do problem, at least temporarily, I attended a job fair yesterday at Maine's only Whole Foods store, located in downtown Portland. The organic supermarket recently bought by Amazon is always bustling and full of good vibes, and it seemed like a few days a week there would balance out the solitary days spent at my easel. I was interviewed by three different employees, one who could have been my grandson and the other two my sons. They seemed to like me and made just a few references to my advanced age, pointing out that many "younger people" had also applied and that "younger people" were willing to work weekends and holidays and "younger people" could lift heavy things if necessary. I told one of them that I work out twice a week with a personal Crossfit trainer and he whistled, adding "Wow, that's amazing!" (I hope that didn't sound too boastful.)

I hope I get the job and will find out later today. But I'm sort of thinking if I don't get it for whatever reason, I could do what everyone else does these days and sue them, only for age discrimination instead of sexual harassment. (Although that one guy did whistle at me.) Anyway, the big boss is Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man. Those are some deep pockets.

Suicide May Be an Option, But It's a Dumb One

As my grandmother always said, and probably yours too, there's plenty of time to sleep in the cemetery. This was her way of saying, "Get out of bed you lazy so-and-so and do something with your life!" I remember that whenever I hear that someone has committed suicide, which by the way is now a politically incorrect thing to say. You have to say they "died by suicide," since saying "committed" implies a crime, which is not nice. Whatever -- they're dead, they did it, and that's that.

This is on my mind because of yesterday's sensational news that the insanely successful fashion designer Kate Spade took her own life at the age of 55. Found dead in her Park Avenue apartment by a housekeeper, she left behind a note for her only child, a 13-year old daughter: "Bea, I have always loved you! This is not your fault--ask Daddy!" How nice. So not only does Bea no longer have a mommy, she has a very bad daddy.

What is wrong with people? How can someone hurt themselves as well as the people they love and who love them, and in many cases rely on them for support, both emotional and financial? No matter how you slice it, it's at bottom an act of supreme rudeness, selfishness and self-absorption, of such magnitude that it almost makes you not feel sorry for the person.

"But Andrea," you're thinking, "they must have been in such terrible pain!" Okay, exactly how much pain? Enough to rob your only child of a halfway decent life? Sure, I've been down -- way, way down -- far down enough to have incredibly detailed and disturbing suicidal thoughts trample all over my muddled and befuddled brain. But I'm still here, mostly because A, I can't even remove a splinter from my pinky much less inflict pain on myself and B, I have a son. (Every study on the subject shows that parental suicide results in a greater risk for suicide attempts in offspring. Besides, watching him live his life and hoping all goes well for him is fun for me.)

And then there's C: Life is good and bad. There are upswings and downturns. One day it's rainy, the next day it's sunny. You get cancer, and a hellish year later you're cured. You get the point. Suicide  can't be undone, and anything permanent that you can't undo is a bad idea, which explains why God made divorce lawyers, moving vans and laser tattoo removal. Admit it, Kate had it all: Looks, personality, money, business success, a family. Now she's got nothing because she is nothing. I bet if we could get her back today and ask if she still wants to go through with it, she'd say no.

Some Things Never Change

You know the old saying, "They can put a man on the moon but they can't" do whatever crazy thing it is they can't do? Well, here's a good one for you: They can put a man on the moon but they still haven't come up with a colonoscopy prep that doesn't make you want to shoot yourself. (Sorry for the gun reference, I hope I didn't cause any PTSD flashbacks and no, I am not a member of the NRA. I also don't own a gun, am a total pacifist and won't even watch reruns of M*A*S*H on TV.)

Anyway, it's nearing time for me to undergo that nasty rigmarole again and I figured by now they'd surely come up with a modern way to prep for a look-see inside the colon. But no, it's still the same old Draconian formula of laxatives and gallons of putrid-tasting Gatorade they've been using since forever. (Each time I go through it I am reminded of Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan wailing, "Why me?")

Tired of waiting to hear from the gastroenterology people about an appointment -- my doctor said they'd call -- I finally called them and asked why I hadn't yet been contacted. I was stunned by the response: "We receive 300 requests per day for colonoscopies, and it takes time to wade through all the information for each patient. We'll get back to you in about five or six weeks."

You'd think that with so many aging hippies clamoring for the procedure, some of our best minds would get on it and devise a prep involving Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia and a couple of Valium. And here's a tip for all the young doctors out there: If you're looking for a way to pay off your student loans, move to Maine and specialize in colonoscopies. Sure it's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

What's So Happy About Birthdays?

Imagine if we could behave how we feel, without "Act your age!" hanging over us.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am not happy about it. I do not enjoy counting the rings. I wonder how old I'd think I am if nobody were keeping track, like the government and the Internet and every store I ever shopped at. For weeks now my mailbox has been crammed with birthday discount cards from places I forgot even existed, all wanting me to celebrate by buying something from them.

One positive thing about birthdays is the tradition of giving people gifts on the day they were born. (As if still being alive for another year isn't enough of a gift.) But too often they miss the mark and you've got to lie to your friends and family and say how much you love the thing before tossing it in a drawer or, worst-case scenario, the trash. (Yup, I've done that, except for anything from my son which has intrinsic Zack value.)

But this year I hit pay dirt. My husband surprised me with a new easel, without me even asking for one! My old one was cheap and rickety and, after countless years, caked with layers of paint. It hardly moved up and down anymore. The new one is a thousand times better: sturdy and solid, made of beautiful wood that seemingly demands one to create works of art worthy of its fine craftsmanship. It makes my being a year older a bit more palatable, although if you ask me it still sucks.

Often Overlooked Travel Dilemmas

Is it just me, or has everything been said already -- twice? It seems that every article I settle down to read tells me stuff I already know, and everyone else already knows too. For example, I just saw one that was called "How to Be a Travel Artist", promising to make your travel experiences fabulous and hassle-free. Naturally I clicked, since all of my travel experiences are fraught with unplanned problems I am ill-equipped to handle.

Tip # 1 was "Don't check your bag. This allows you to avoid the crowds at the baggage claim area and ensures your bag will not be lost." Oh really? Gee, I never thought of that before, right? Wrong -- who doesn't know that by the second grade? The rest of the tips were just as lame, like "Don't just take pictures on your iPhone -- instead, look around at the scenery." Again, thanks a lot.

What I want are solid suggestions for how to handle the following scenarios, a few of which have happened to me and some of which very well might have:

1. What if 20 minutes after takeoff the pilot announces you will be making an emergency landing and orders everyone to slide down the rubber chute, first removing all shoes and eyeglasses. Should you actually remove your glasses if you are helpless without them, or risk permanent blindness if they break and puncture a cornea?

2. How do you remain sane during an eight-hour layover in a crummy airport like, to pick one at random, Newark or LaGuardia?

3. Supposing you suffer a surprise bout of bleeding hemorrhoids at the gate as they're starting to board your group. Do you get on or not? What if you're wearing white pants -- is the answer any different?

4. You just remembered there's half an ounce of pot in your carry-on bag while you're going through security and your bag is already on the conveyor belt. Should you run?

5. Say you notice in the waiting area that many of your fellow passengers are fat and ugly. Does this necessarily mean that all of you have been singled out for elimination from the gene pool and the plane will crash? Could it mean anything else?

6. You get to your hotel at 11 PM and learn that your room is right next to the elevator, there's a convention of video gamers going on, and the air-conditioning is broken and it's Phoenix in the summer. Do you check in or sleep in the park?

7. The 24-hour train from NY to Miami has left the station when it is announced there is no Dining Car and you'll have to get all your meals from vending machines at the stations where the train stops along the way. This includes Georgia. Is that the moment to take that cyanide tablet stashed in your bag in case of a nuclear holocaust?

8. What if just as you land in a low-lying area there's a tsunami?

These are the answers I'm looking for. Surely I'm not the only one.

The Glory Days of Testosterone

 Robert Mitchum exuding pathological machismo.

Here in the Maine Public Schools, a new curriculum called "Boys to Men" teaches boys how to stop being boys. Actually, it "retrains middle-and high-school boys away from pathological machismo." This of course goes hand in glove with the national discussion regarding gender, and how it's now unacceptable to apply labels like "girls" and "boys." Let's all just be fluid, i.e., "I'm feeling mannish today, so call me him." That sort of thing.

Fine, I sincerely don't care. What gender someone is or pretends to be bores me; I'm more interested in if they're funny and how much they give to charity, and do they have those dripping snot jewelry piercings coming out their nostrils and are they kind to animals. Beyond that, what someone does with their genitals is their business. But I do wonder how future generations will be produced if men stop being masculine, which for many of them is the only quality that attracts women to them in the first place. (I suppose cloning will be perfected.)

I'm glad I grew up when men were still allowed to be men, producing Hollywood box office bait like Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, James Caan and Al Pacino. Those were the glory days of testosterone.

Does Free Speech Include Saying Cunt?

Night before last, a second-string comic who is not even American and not even funny called Ivanka Trump, the president's gracious daughter and mother of three, "a cunt" on her national late-night TV show. And worse, she called her a feckless cunt, as if there are perfectly good cunts out there. (Feckless means worthless and irresponsible.)

She has since apologized. She was not fired, and in fact the very next day received an award for her show on the Turner cable network, unlike Roseanne Barr who was sent straight to bed without dinner and woke up to find all her toys gone and no friends to play with after she implied that a woman of African-American descent is either a Muslim or an ape, possibly both. The unequal treatment of the two comics is because the cunt-sayer, who goes by the name of Samantha Bee, is a liberal, and apparently anything They do or say is acceptable.

A liberal can get away with calling the president of our country an orangutan, the ape of choice used to describe him because of his supposedly "orange" hair, and many of them have, since most of them mimic whatever others of their ilk say and do. (To be a Democrat is to be a thoughtless clone, excepting for my son, my nephew Keith and my friends Ira, Mike, Patsy and Tony, all of whom actually think for themselves).

I'm wondering why all the reporting of this recent incident says that Ms. Bee used the "C-word" rather than writing out the word cunt, when she actually said the word on TV. I also wonder what size firestorm would have broken out had a conservative pundit, like say Ann Coulter, called Chelsea Clinton a cunt. (Oy, oy, oy -- just imagine!) But wait, there's more: A few weeks ago, another who-the-hell-is-she comic made ugly jabs at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president's press secretary, during a fancy dinner attended by members of the media, and she immediately became the darling of the CNN-MSNBC crowd.

Come on people, wake up and smell the inequality! And by the way, I like Sarah Sanders a lot, think she does a great job, and find her quite pretty in an offbeat way. So there.