TKM

It was without question the nicest doctor’s office I have ever entered. Spare, spacious, and moodlit with rice-paper tower lamps and recessed lights. Four semi-lounge chairs invited clients to settle in and relax with a magazine—Glamour, Allure, Sunset, Wine Spectator—as if one were poolside on a Princess cruise. These reading choices, no doubt selected for their idle browsability, were neatly arrayed on a sturdy coffee table, which itself was centered on an Oriental rug, a real one, not one of those winking acrylic imposters at IKEA that start shedding red fuzz all over your living room 10 minutes after you lay it down. Twelve-inch ocean-colored marbled tile subtly offset soft white walls whose hushed serenity was broken only by three oil paintings bursting with bright colors and a flat-screen TV wall-mounted above a table of brochures advertising Cynosure, Juvéderm, Restylane, and Latisse, the latter of which, I learned, is a treatment for eyelash hypotrichosis, a chilling term for the relatively nonmalignant condition of short eyelashes.

While the wife and I have a DVR and enjoy our ability to fast-forward through commercials—thereby helping to kill the time-honored model of sponsor-driven television we’ve known our entire lives—whenever I see an advertisement flitting by for a pharmaceutical I’ve never heard of I make her back up, because I find novel drugs and their ads tragicomic in a complacently American way. That’s how I learned of the possible side effects of Latisse, whose first-line application is as a glaucoma treatment—we all knew that no scientists actually set out to “cure” short eyelashes; clinicians simply noticed that glaucoma patients who were taking Lumigan, the alter ego of Latisse, to decrease ocular hypertension, which sounds way more painful to me than eyelash hypotrichosis, developed darker pigment in and around their eyes, which made for thicker, longer lashes. Now, look alive, this hyper eyelash growth is not a permanent side effect; eyelash hypotrichosis is as chronic as disappointment and will reassert its bad ass the moment you discontinue use. However, the potential darkening of your iris pigment is likely permanent, so, you know, if the eyes are windows to the soul, your soul will become darker too. Permanently. Just saying. Heaven knows I’m a major consumer of pharma. Still, it seems excessive to me—especially in a world visited by the miracle of mascara—to take a prescription medication for the rest of your life, at a cost of $120 per month, to maintain slightly longer eyelashes, but that’s probably only because I dodged the eyelash hypotrichosis bullet. My eyelashes are quite long. And my irises are already plenty brown.

I could go on about the injectible wrinkle fillers that were on offer, like Juvéderm, Restylane, and Radiesse, any of which promise to usurp your unsightly nasolabial folds (a.k.a. smile lines), melomental folds (creases emanating from the corners of your mouth, or “marionette lines” in aesthetician parlance), crow’s feet, or just about any other mark of a life well-lived—for about six to nine months, after which your body absorbs it and your face resumes its natural joyful state. But one must put her judgmental opinions about necessity and excess aside when entering the previously alien dimension of plastic surgery and injectible/pharmaceutical cosmetology. I was there for the former, or at least for a consult about the former. And it wasn’t just some random plastic surgeon’s den of solicitude. I was in the surgical cosmetology capital of the world, Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, so named for the obscene consumerism and self-righteous privilege that radiate from its Rodeo Drive nucleus like the seductive, combustible rays of the sun. Touch me, skanks.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember, as hard as they’ve tried to forget, that my girls developed in a free-spirited, artistic way, with one big, floppy D-cup accompanied by a little sister two full cup sizes her junior. I would more plainly call this a developmental deformity, but I don’t want yonier-than-thou feminists all up in my grill for not embracing the perfection of my temple. On the contrary, I mask my goddess-given uniqueness, augmenting my dwarfish side with a prosthetic to approximate a chest that fails to alarm strangers.

Though I long ago stepped up from the nylon-covered foam pad of my youth—which had to be surreptitiously wrung out whenever I was so bold as to go swimming—to a silicone insert that conducts at nearly the same bounce rate as its mate when I walk and feels less like a wadded sock to those who hug me, it’s still uncomfortable and prone to slippage, and I’m tired of stealing moments for furtive adjustments. If I were less self-conscious I suppose I could adjust it more brazenly, like men shifting their merchandise in the deli window, but I’m afraid I could never summon up enough attitude to make that maneuver seem like anything but a lonely lesbian awkwardly groping her own tits.

In truth, I’ve just never taken pride of ownership in my chest; inasmuch as I think about my breasts at all, it’s mostly about how to camouflage them—or how much I’d like to not have to think about camouflaging them. I’ve been dreaming about corrective surgery since I was a teenager, but it’s not the kind of procedure one’s HMO covers—I’ve certainly tried to convince mine that they should—and it’s always been beyond the means of my pitifully stagnant income. But lately, catching a draft off the success of my overeducated wife—who has generously begun to cover a larger share of our household expenses with her more dynamic salary—I’ve found myself with greater financial freedom. So, totally taking advantage of my wife’s largesse, I’m blowing my newfound savings on plastic surgery. Good thing I don’t look like a trophy wife. (Give me time: My nasolabial and melomental folds are only getting deeper.)

So why lop off the big boob instead of augmenting the little one? Augmentation is, after all, less expensive, less invasive, and far less scarring—a state of affairs I find corrupt; how else to explain this being one of very few instances in which women are encouraged to want more, and punished for wanting less. I’m sorry, but if surgeons have figured out how to insert and secure 1-kilogram silicone slabs through straw-sized incisions tucked discreetly under the arms, how have they not yet stumbled on a way to decrease breast mass without cutting off our nipples and slicing down and around the mammary like they’re skinning and de-boning chicken breasts?

Still, I do want less. It’s true that as an adolescent I tried exercising only on the right side to increase the breast muscle of my stunted member. It didn’t work. At all. Probably owing to the fact that breasts are composed of milk ducts and fat, neither of which much respond to exercise.  As an adult, well, my personal presentation can be somewhat at odds with itself, with a pronounced disconnect between my chosen aesthetic and my unchosen mammatude; even as my breasts may well be the only characteristic of prove-it-in-your-face womanhood that keeps me from being bounced out of ladies’ restrooms, I’m tired of them lording their bounty over me like some sick cosmic joke.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that modern medicine has given us ways to “correct” just about anything we find disharmonious to our own big ideas about how we feel we should, want, or deserve to look? (For a staggering fee, the indirect costs of which will be passed along to my wife; good thing I married her when I had the chance.)

I’m tempted here to address the issue of misguided plastic surgery. There are plenty of people who manage to incorrect themselves in their bitchfight with nature, even people who, by virtue of having had, say, a dozen or two or three surgical procedures in their quest to micromanage their genetic code, find themselves featured on A&E, which has lately found its niche in dwelling on the addictions and obsessive compulsions of Americans gripped by PTSD, dysphoria, or even simple ennui. But who am I to say that my boob job is somehow more meritorious than that of the 110-pound 21-year-old who knows in her heart that she was really meant to have F-cup breasts? And if her newfound “self-esteem” opens avenues previously closed to her—like maybe the gates of the Playboy Mansion in Bel-Air…

Or even the stage door at San Bernardino’s Flesh gentlemen’s bar…

Well, then bully for her!

One can look up any number of websites that have little purpose beyond tracking plastic surgery disasters, generally of the celebrity variety because, really, how many uncelebrated people are going to emerge from anonymity simply to say, “Wow, look at this horrifying ‘after’ shot of me! I’m not sure what I was going for, but I sure ended up disfigured!”

Hence, the old saying is particularly applicable here: I didn’t want to just pick somebody out of the phonebook. Not that anybody uses phonebooks anymore. My wife and I occasionally receive a copy of the yellow pages but haven’t cracked one open in years, and when we recently found a white pages volume lying on the doorstep we were momentarily fascinated by the relic, as if an IBM Selectric typewriter had been mysteriously delivered to our side porch.

Needless to say, I had not started my search in the yellow pages. Rather, I asked a transgender professor at my wife’s institution of higher learning whether he could recommend any local plastic surgeons, figuring that surgeons who regularly do “top” surgeries for trans dudes would have no trouble whatsoever with the level of reduction/reconstruction I have in mind.

I had been harboring some concern that maybe someone who spends so much time thinking about breasts—defying mass-to-perk physics ratios, discerning ideal nipple placement, defining perfect cleavage plumb lines—would try to talk me into, if not a straight-up augmentation on the wee side, meeting somewhere in the middle of the two, perhaps at a nice, plump C? Like maybe there’s a whole cadre of surgeons involved in a secret fraternal organization foresworn to protect the worldwide breast population from fallen women like me, like a sort of Operation Rescue for boobs. I didn’t want any contention with my surgeon about desired outcomes, because at a certain critical point in this transaction I’ll be out cold on a table and at the mercy of the surgeon’s mammipulations.

Trans dude having come up empty, I went to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website, where you can search doctors by surgery type, ZIP Code, etc. I chose “breast reconstruction” and selected a 10-mile radius as my parameter. It returned 194 hits, about 150 of which sported Golden Triangle addresses. Even I can’t believe there’s that much call for boobwork by Angelenos, and I’ve lived among their peculiar breed my whole life.

Daunted, I had to narrow my search down somehow, and of the 194 doctors only a handful had recognizably female names, so I started with them, guessing I was less likely to encounter pushback from a female surgeon. The “patient care consultant” for the first doctor I contacted was friendly and incredibly responsive to follow-up e-mails—though the surgeon’s consultation fee seemed a bit on the absurd precious side. Given that, before setting up a first date I wanted to have a reasonable expectation that we were going to get to second base; I didn’t want to fork over $250 taking a surgeon to dinner only to find that she didn’t want to go to bed with me, or that she had a tacky, shedding IKEA rug. When I expressed concerns to patient care consultant Sonya about whether or not the surgeon and I might be on the same results page, or living in the same financial universe, she invited me to e-mail photos of my breasts, front and profiles, for a preliminary look-see and quote.

Enter dear wife for weirdest photo shoot ever.

You know how you sometimes look at pictures of yourself and say, “Jesus, do I really look like that?” That feeling is amplified in naked photos. I sincerely didn’t think it was possible for me to harbor more dislike for that particular portion of my body, but as I sat editing images of my dysmorphic chest, cropping out all references to my head and happy trail, I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to look past it for so long. Have I had carnival mirrors all this time?

I sent the images to Sonya, resisting the urge to apologize in the body of the e-mail. I’m certain that mine isn’t the first set of amateur, anonymous, totally unsexy naked pics Sonya has been sent, nor will it be the last.

I wonder if guys surfing for free online porn ever look at before-and-after shots of breast augmentations. There seems to be an endless supply out there—most categorized by cup size, which can be pretty handy for the discerning breast man. To get an idea of what my reduction would look like, I had to use the “before” and “after” shots in reverse, flipping, for instance, A-to-D and B-to-D augmentations. This was annoying because I wanted to see an actual surgically enhanced breast in the size I was shopping for: These ragtag A’s and B’s were all just as prolapsed as mine, with none of the lifting and smoothing and precision nipplescaping that I’m hoping for in a finished product. I couldn’t find a single site that pictured a woman who had undergone a reduction with an end-point size below a C cup. Is there really no demand for such a result? Do surgeons just not post those pics because they don’t want to scare away clientele who may be worried about having too much of their womanhood slurped out while comatose? Or are the surgeons members of Operation Brescue?

Knowing that most women get reductions in order to relieve neck and back pain, the scope of these reductions seem startlingly minor to me, sometimes sloughing just a partial cup size. And pictures I’ve found depicting disparity corrections suggest that women overwhelmingly opt for an overall augmentation, with implants of differing sizes equalizing the imbalance. At the end of the day, it seems, everybody wants more, not less. Even kittens.

The online transmission of my own “cheesecake” pics—which felt weird enough; I can’t imagine e-mailing a naked picture of myself with my head attached. I guess that’s what separates me from the TMI generation, who gamely engage in sexting and then seem genuinely surprised when, post-breakup, their ex-boyfriends disseminate the nudie shots to anyone with a cell phone. Gah, I clearly wrote FYEO right there in the subject line!

But now I guess I know how those girls feel. I received no further correspondence from Sonya, not even when I followed up five days later to ask whether the doctor had had a chance to view the pics, adding, solicitously, “Now that I’ve decided to give myself this gift, I’m very excited to move forward with it.”

Nope. Nothing. Sonya may at this very moment be sending pictures of my tits to her entire e-mail address book. Subject line: OMG, so FUBAR!

But I wouldn’t let Sonya’s rejection dissuade me. I simply moved on to girlfriend doctor number two, who seemed more qualified than the last anyway, carrying board certification in both surgery and plastic surgery; her office asked for the less precious consultation fee of $125. And her patient care consultant, Nadia, informed me that a patient had just canceled an appointment two weeks out and would I like to see the doctor then? Yes, I really, really would!

Which brings us back to me, sitting in a semi-lounge chair in a moodlit office not reading a fluffy magazine, surrounded by brochures for injectible cosmetic enhancements, waiting for my name to be called, hoping this doctor would be the one.

To be continued…

Sometimes we need our mates to point out the obvious, to challenge our sense of normalcy. Normalcy in this case being a slight blurriness of the world—about which I had been audibly rueful on more than one occasion—thanks to glasses whose prescription remained predictably static as my eyes merrily continued their maturation process.

Our vision degrades most noticeably during that first decade after we’ve been prescribed our first corrective lenses, or so I was told by an optometrist during those formative years, when my prescription seemed to turn on the whim of a fruit bat (a species which—non sequitur alert—was recently discovered to have a menstrual cycle similar to that of humans).

Once we get over that 10-year hump—as did I in my 20s—we expect to tuck into several decades of more-or-less stabilized impairment, changing glasses according to whims determined by nothing more than our own idiosyncratic sense of style.

I didn’t know I was about to fight this vision war on two fronts.

“I’m going to write you a prescription for separate single-vision reading and distance lenses or progressives,” said the 15-year-old optometrist who examined me.

“Progressives, like bifocals?”

“Yes, but because you have a reading-intensive job, you’ll want a wider field of vision in your reading glasses, so I recommend you keep them separate,” he said, avoiding the b word. “But like I said, I’ll write the prescription for either or.”

So this is how bifocals happen. No one sits you down in a quiet room to break the news, or presents them as an optional upgrade—“Tell me, Ms. Morrison, have you ever considered progressive lenses?” You just turn 40 and the next thing you know you’re at LensCrafters* weighing the merits of juggling two pairs of glasses versus the do-it-all wonder of bifocals, now euphemistically re-branded “progressives.”

(*Ordinarily I would balk at patronizing big-box vision over my friendly neighborhood optometrist, but I don’t live in a friendly neighborhood, and the last time I went to a local independent optometrist I disliked him and his entire staff more intensely than I would have preferred given how much money I was giving them. And even if le domestique hadn’t been the one to set up my appointment—after I approached her with my old glasses and pitifully asked whether she thought a broken piece might be successfully glued—I might have recalled that LensCrafters has a program wherein they repurpose old prescription glasses through clinics where some needy someone with a level of vision impairment remarkably similar to my own can walk away with my ex-glasses, which I suppose kind of makes us sight sisters, each with one not-so-bad eye and another eye that just doesn’t try very hard at all. Just imagine, someone in some dusty village in Mali could be walking around in my Oakleys, or those Giorgio Armani torties I wore in college, or even those ill-advised John Lennon glasses I bought back in my early 20s—apparently without looking at myself in the mirror first. I hope all the new owners of my old glasses get to look at themselves in the mirror first. Do Malians have a “geek chic” equivalency?)

Other than the bifocal thing, it had been a pretty routine exam—except when the tech insisted that I “guess” after I failed to pick up any more than two dimensions in the last couple of lines on a depth-perception test.

I blinked hard and opened my eyes wider, as if to let in more of the magic required to gauge depth, and scrutinized each line for its 3-D letter again. “Dunno,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.

“Guess,” she repeated gleefully, like she was the keeper of some really awesome gossip she was dying to tell me.

“Can’t I guess ‘none’?” I asked. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I didn’t want to randomize, because it seems to me that eye exams would have a sort of inverted guessing penalty. Like, SAT scoring assesses fractional point deductions for wrong answers, but here, correct guesses could result only in compromised vision assessment.

“Just guess,” she said doggedly.

“OK, I guess ‘none,’ ” I said firmly, because I’m no fun at all.

Later, five minutes into my post-exam shopping, the same woman walked up behind me and asked if I had found anything yet.

“No, I’m still looking.”

“I’ll help you,” she said gamely.

I didn’t want her to help me. At all. I had le domestique on hand for any necessary consultation. Besides which, the saleswoman/tech whose name I’ve forgotten clearly had taste dissimilar to my own. For starters, she wore a pink blouse, and also, she was recognizably female.

“Um, maybe give me some time to get an idea what I want first,” I said.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can make suggestions,” she said, punctuating her eagerness with a little bounce on the last word.

If you get any pushier, I thought, I may make some suggestions of my own.

I glanced around the store to confirm my suspicion that other shoppers were being allowed to go it alone. Maybe pink blouse thought she could mentor me and save me from my own worst instincts. Surely she doesn’t look that way on purpose, pink blouse may have thought, filled with a sense of altruistic purpose. I will help her look like the female of her species.

Employing a language of certainty, I managed to shoo her away, but only for a little bit. I’m a very slow shopper, and anyone who thinks I can make a decision about something I have to wear every day—on my face—in a period briefer than, say, the menstrual phase of a fruit bat (24 hours) doesn’t know me at all. Even if my brain’s processing speed weren’t impaired, my decision-making capacity and I divorced ages ago. (Typical sad story: It wanted a level of trust I just couldn’t give it, so it ended up shacking up with some teenage boy who, it bragged petulantly, never questioned it, ever. Last I heard they were doing 20-to-life in the federal pen.)

Pink blouse was back. “Have you found anything?”

I know when I’m beat. I retrieved all the frames I had liked and put them in the little velvet-lined staging area she was holding. If it’s possible to grant someone else some small happiness at no cost to oneself, one really should.

But there was a cost, because now, based on the frames I had chosen, pink blouse thought she had a bead on my baseline taste and commenced her mentorship by showing me frames that, to her, resembled what I had chosen but had a little more of the something she thought I should want, like maybe rhinestones.

I’m not a fashion-forward girl. In fact, I find some fashion so disagreeable it’s viscerally upsetting. For instance, it makes me angry that the very worst fashion instincts of my mid-’80s high-school era are galumphing attitudinously down the catwalk in 2007:

Ill-fitting high-waisted (called “paper-bag waist” in the industry) jeans? Et tu, Diesel?

Because my fashion sense shoots blanks, I generally jones in one of two frame directions: rimless, or something evolved from your standard-issue GI horn-rims. (I can’t wear contacts, as I found out when I was going through the hiring process for the LAPD—yeah, I know, more about that another time—which requires contacts instead of glasses for officers who need vision correction. I got insane levels of calcium deposits no matter how diligent I was about cleaning my lenses, and my optometrist said that just happened with some people. I imagine that for the right contact-intolerant candidate, the department might have granted special dispensation to wear glasses, but we never got to that bridge—my psych evaluation required disclosure of my mental health treatment history, making whether or not I could wear contacts utterly moot.)

Pink blouse was having none of my standard-issue nonsense, as she tirelessly brought me frames that I pronounced too shiny, too flashy, too glossy, too trendy, too sparkly, too clubby, too colorful, too Dolce&Gabbana, etc. She cajoled me into putting some of them on, for her, but I drew the line when she approached me with frames that had a sort of pink undertone.

“They’re pink,” I said.

“They’re not pink.”

“They’re pink enough,” I repeated, assuming the crossed-arm stance of a child refusing cough syrup.

“Just try them. I want to see them on you,” she said.

I shook my head and turned away from her. We’d crossed some weird line now, like I was shopping for school clothes with my mom circa 1974. Why can’t I pick out my own frames like all the other kids?

Once we had settled on five frames, one of which she had picked out—yeah, I threw her a bone—I sat down at one of the fitting stations and began assessing them in a more concerted way. I eventually narrowed my choices to three, and hers didn’t make the cut. It came down to a rimless frame, a horn-rim-esque frame, and these racy frames in a frost-gray color:

The Ray-Bans were pretty flash for the likes of me, but I really liked them. I especially liked them on the shelf, and I tried like hell to like them on my face. I put them on, I took them off, I put them on, I took them off, I put the horn-rims on and took those off and really quickly replaced them with the Ray-Bans, like if I could do that fast enough, then maybe I could effect a side-by-side comparison with myself. Le domestique weighed in; she liked the horn-rims best. Pink blouse weighed in; she liked the ones she had picked out that I had already eliminated best. Then pink blouse shopped me around to her coworkers, and I put on and took off all the frames for them too, imagining as I did so that to a person they were thinking, Well, sweetie, they’d all look better if you grew some hair.

As you might guess, I rejected the Ray-Bans in the end. I know they weren’t actually all that flashy, but they were just flash enough that when I put them on I couldn’t get past the idea of a 40-year-old who had just been prescribed bifocals making a lame play at fashion relevance. Like maybe I should just go get some paper-bag waist jeans to go with them.

Instead, I embraced my age, though I took the optometrist’s advice to get separate reading and distance glasses—and not just to avoid the idea of bifocals; I understand that I’m still fighting a two-front war—so once I narrowed my frames to two, the only choice that remained was which prescription to put in each. That was pretty easy, since I was really the only one who particularly liked the rimless pair; they would be my reading glasses, leaving the frames with three-way approval (with the caveat that pink blouse still liked the ones she had picked out best and was only on board with this second choice as a conscientious objector) as my all-the-livelong-day glasses. These are they:

But wait, there’s a denouement.

The standard-issue pair was ready the same day, that being the whole LensCrafters about-an-hour shtick, but rimless glasses take longer—about a week. So I reported to the store the following Saturday—wearing my other new glasses, naturally—to pick up the not bifocals. I gave the optician my name and sat at the fitting table. When she presented them to me, I took off my glasses and replaced them with the new pair, causing her to gasp theatrically.

“Oh, my God, those are so much better on you!” she said with a big sunny smile on her face. “They’re like night and day!”

I looked silently back at her, wondering whether she would dig this hole deeper or go ahead and knock off for the day.

“Your old glasses, I don’t know, they just didn’t suit your face, but these were a great choice,” she shoveled.

I waited another beat before I said, “Actually, these are just my reading glasses. The other ones are my primary glasses; I got them here last week.”

A blank expression flickered ever so briefly across her face before she rebounded. “Oh, well, they’re both great,” she said, then bid me, “Put the others back on.”

I did, and she said, “Yeah, you made two really great choices.” Then we proceeded to my fitting, over which there was some disagreement as to whether the glasses were sitting crooked (my assertion) or my face was itself crooked (her assertion). Rather than argue against the latter, I proposed that an adjustment be made regardless, making the glasses either rest even on what I thought was my properly balanced face, or align with rather than against this newly reported asymmetry. She made the adjustment, but she also made it clear that this was one of those customer-is-always-right gestures, which she might rephrase as “The customer is always right inasmuch as I’ll do any stupid thing they ask so long as they understand that they’re actually wrong.”

A few weeks ago le domestique complained on her blog about our Select Comfort bed, and much to our surprise a real-live Select Comfort customer service representative read her post and attempted to address the problem. So it’s not completely outside the realm of possibility that LensCrafters representatives are currently standing by and—beyond marveling at my copy editor’s fastidious attention to the styling of their company name: solid, with an internal initial cap—wondering how my already great shopping experience might have been even better! So here are some takeaway lessons:

1. Don’t make clients “guess” when they and their eyes reach an impasse during the exam.
2. Don’t stalk clients as they shop.
3. Trust that the client probably thinks about her personal aesthetic more than you think she does, and that she means with all her heart to look like that.
4. Never insist that a client try on frames she doesn’t like, not even for you.
5. Don’t grimace when a client tries on a frame she has picked out—unless the client grimaces first.
6. If the client grimaces when she tries on a frame you picked out, don’t try to coax her out of her unfortunate fashion retardation. No means no.
7. If the client makes a blanket assertion that she does not like, say, pink or rhinestones, assume that she won’t like anything you bring her in the pink or bejeweled family. If the client says she doesn’t want anything “too Dolce&Gabbana,” assume that this includes, among others, frames actually branded Dolce&Gabbana.
8. If you think the client is being a poopyhead about all your great suggestions, see rule 2.
9. Never insult a client’s old glasses—even if you think the new ones are ten thousand times better—not just because they might not be such old glasses but because regardless of how old they are, she picked them out at some point, liked them at some point, and has likely been wearing them—in public!—for a considerable length of time. She doesn’t so much want to hear how lame they were.
10. Even if the customer isn’t always right, pretend that she is right about the symmetry of her features. Arguing with her about whether her face is crooked benefits no one.
11. I cannot emphasize this enough: Disclose the price of the lenses the first time a client asks, and when she says she doesn’t need scratch-resistance, glare protection, or any other treatment jacking up the price of her lenses, don’t insist that the optometrist prescribed the upgrades. Doctors do not prescribe scratch-resistance.

Other than that, everything was great.

——————————————————–

Update: As alluded to in rule 11, pink blouse tried to up-sell me numerous unnecessary lens treatments without disclosure. Her initial quote included a charge of $300 for the lenses alone, with no description as to what that included. When I said that price was absurd, she sort of shrugged her shoulders like a bored teenager. It wasn’t until I insisted on being shown a schedule of charges that I discovered her quote had included not only an upgraded lens material that I hadn’t asked for but numerous special treatments, none of which would have been covered by my insurance. I then specifically said I wanted absolutely basic plastic lenses—the kind my insurance would pay for—at which time pink blouse presented me with a LensCrafters price schedule listing basic plastic lenses at $120.

On February 7 I received a document from my insurance provider explaining what was covered and what wasn’t and noticed a line item for “scratch protection coating” (a treatment I had specifically declined), charged at $20, of which I paid $15. The lenses themselves—the absolutely basic plastic kind I asked for, the ones that are covered by my insurance provider—were listed at $100. Nice, LensCrafters. Enjoy that extra $15 you weaseled out of me, because your ethically challenged business practices guaranteed I’ll never come back.

Now, what was the name of that review site I ran across the other day? Oh, right, PissedConsumer.com. Must go there now.

You know that urban legend that says if you’re out for a pleasant night drive and you see a car with its lights off, DON’T FLASH YOUR BRIGHTS AT THE CAR, because, the legend goes, it could be a gang initiation wherein thugs drive around in the noir until they encounter a driver courteous enough to signal them, at which time THEY WILL KILL YOU DEAD!

The frequency with which that cautionary tale is circulated and cited as fact speaks volumes about the American psyche: Think twice about drawing attention to yourself among strangers, however friendly your intentions, because you may be singling yourself out for attack!

Well, I flashed my brights at the Episcopal Church via a December 19 Advocate.com commentary praising the gay- and lesbian-inclusive platform its leaders and members have embraced over the last several decades, a movement that reached a boiling point with the 2003 consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay and actively partnered priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. The church has since been wracked by conflict both internal—several dozen conservative U.S. congregations and one entire diocese have left the national body in protest—and external, with the worldwide body to which the church belongs, the Anglican Communion, threatening in fits and starts to cut the whole darn U.S. province adrift. Much more detail can be read in the essay itself, should you be so inclined.

Mine was meant as a friendly flick of the brights, a little shout-out to the church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, who has held the progressive line despite enormous pressure to back down, and its beleaguered members, the majority of whom favor an inclusive church even if such a platform visits uncertainty and strife on their denomination. In recognizing and praising the national church’s vanguard position, of course, I noted its fallout, including the recent secession of that aforementioned diocese (in my own home state of California, no less), an unprecedented event within the church that underlines the recalcitrant position of Anglican traditionalists, many of whom habitually drive about with darkened headlights and a frank willingness to lash out at those who threaten to illuminate the world beyond their frosted windshield.

Given the Advocate.com audience, I anticipated a largely LGBT readership, thus vastly underestimating the Internet’s powers of dissemination. Remarking on the commentary’s Web traffic the day after it was posted, our digital media director said that the piece was logging the kind of numbers we typically see only on breaking news of, say, homophobic Republican senators caught in flagrante delicto with gents in public toilets. And you can’t just make that shit up; we have to wait—sometimes months between occurrences—for such gifts from the news gods.

Happily, most of my traffic was of a friendly persuasion. Plenty of nice Episcopalians, both gay and straight, clicked through from links on progressive blogs; several even took time to drop me an e-mail noting how gratifying it was to see a story acknowledging a straight Christian voice in matters of LGBT social justice. But links to my commentary inevitably also landed in a couple of inhospitable Web neighborhoods, the kind of places where we dykes and faggots had best drive through quickly if at all, lest the thuggish local holy men shoot out our headlights and smite us under cloak of darkness.

When my commentary came to the attention of members at a certain conservative Anglican blog, I was subject to much disliking. (I’m given to understand, courtesy of the aforementioned conservative Anglicans, that gay and lesbian folks overuse the word hate because, in truth, we relish victimhood. So chastised, I won’t be throwing that word around here, nope, not even when speaking of the only emotion I can think of that could possibly inspire random heterosexuals to spend such significant amounts of their limited time on this earth contemplating and communicating the kind of vitriolic hate not-liking speech that springs from the mouths of homo haters dislikers—other than that stultifying fear among certain types of their own inclination toward the love that dare not speak its name.)

What surprised me about the response among conservatives was the personal chord struck by their hatred disliking. Of course I knew when I published the piece that at least a few traditionalists would see it, and of course I knew they would like it not one bit; the commentary lionizes those very stances of the Episcopal Church that make its detractors go absolutely nuclear. But I think I did a fairish job of presenting the facts as well as my opinions without resorting to personal attacks, so I suppose I expected an in-kind response. If any. I mean, really, who the hell am I that those concerned with the serious work of calibrating the nation’s moral compass should waste energy shouting me down?

It took just four comments at the aforementioned blog for its readers to regress from parsing my text to parsing my appearance. From there, nearly half of the 31 comments to the link were concerned with, first, whether I was a boy or a girl, and second—after they deftly worked out that my first name, Teresa, and my self-identification as a lesbian indicated girlness—how much I didn’t look like a girl. Friends, I have met the enemy, and it attends junior high school.

The emphasis on my appearance seemed especially odd since I didn’t say one word about what John-David Schofield, the bishop who led the secession movement in central California, looks like:

But why go to town on a man’s appearance when there’s so much to say about his actions? Namely, that he has betrayed the will of his own denomination by refusing ordination to women, railing against gay and lesbian inclusion in the church, and operating an “ex-gay” ministry through his cathedral—naturally, he is himself a closeted homo (another factoid I didn’t mention in the commentary), having gone on record as an “ex-gay” years ago in an interview his followers now deny exists. But really, isn’t it more of a surprise these days when a virulently antigay leader isn’t a great big closet case?

Regardless of whether parishioners in crystal cathedrals ought to throw stones, they did so with delight—during a week in which I hope they also found time to celebrate the birth of their lord and savior. At one point the discussion addressed the likelihood that my appearance and orientation indicated a history of sexual abuse, an incredibly popular trope among the religious right—Google “childhood sexual abuse” and “lesbian” and your top hits will be “studies” conducted by fundamentalist organizations showing that a lesbian orientation is practically a gift with purchase of molestation. Was the poster asking the others to lay off discussing my appearance in deference to that probability, or was he gamely making sport of sexual abuse survivors? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certain that the only time it’s appropriate for a stranger to bring up the possibility of my or anyone else’s sexual abuse history is never.

I responded by flicking my brights again, helpfully providing the Anglican blog community with a link to my earlier essay about gender, seeing as how they were so very interested in sussing out mine. Then a funny thing happened: The comments sort of petered out. Oh, sure, there was the peanut gallery member who countered with a link to an article about female aggression and lack of maternal behavior among spotted hyenas, appearing to suggest that, like the hyenas, women like me might be successfully treated with anti-androgen drugs to curb our masculine aggression (omigod, if they only knew how not aggressive I am) and cultivate feminine behaviors. A second poster brought up another popular conservative trope: that they don’t so much hate dislike homos, they just don’t understand why we always have to run around flaunting our relationships.

I know, right? It’s nearly impossible to go to mainstream movies or read popular books without being subjected to same-sex love story after same-sex love story. We lucky homosexuals grow up in environments where our sexuality is constantly reinforced as the norm.

To add homosexual insult to heterosexual injury, a person can’t go anywhere without seeing us engaged in acts of explicit physical affection!

If only we homos could just step back for a moment, we might recognize that ours isn’t the only valid kind of relationship.

Hey, your god just called. He hates dislikes disingenuousness.

Despite the aforementioned couple of stragglers, about 15 minutes after I announced my presence at the hateful dislikeful blog, the theretofore spirited commentary on my androgen-laden hyena-like ways ceased. Were the sanctimonious creeps turned off by the idea that their words didn’t appear to hurt me? Were they legitimately embarrassed to discover that I was privy to their ugliness? Or were they simply not interested in having an actual conversation with participation not strictly limited to those who completely agree with them?

Among many brilliant things le domestique has been heard to say, one of my favorites is, “The Internet slices people too thin.” Whatever personal inclination we want to feed—liberal or conservative, gay or straight, secular or religious, cat or dog, Mac or PC—there are scores of blogs and discussion boards online where we can get precisely the information and resonance we think we need. Such a sense of belonging is truly wonderful. But as the ease and abundance of access draws communities of common interest closer together, it pushes camps who disagree ever further apart, because increasingly, if we don’t want to, we don’t ever have to talk to anyone we don’t already completely agree with. It doesn’t bode well for the promotion of an open society. (For an accounting of 21st-century regressions of liberties and attitudes in the United States, read Naomi Wolf’s essay “Ten Steps to Close Down an Open Society” at the Huffington Post. It’s a chilling reminder of how far we’ve strayed from what most people think of as incontrovertible U.S. ideals.)

My flirtation with the Episcopal Church had consequences both expected and unexpected. While I have made much of the negative reactions by traditionalists, the positive response was tenfold the negative. Never has my writing been so profoundly rewarded as by the gratification and fellowship I’ve felt with Episcopalian readers these last couple of weeks. Confronting that same firewall of depersonalization their conservative counterparts sought so lamely to penetrate, many progressive Christians simply flicked their brights back at me to acknowledge that my gesture was well-received. Those who pulled over to invite me to their churches did so not to pressure or proselytize but to let me know that their doors would always be open.

To clarify, I have not had a religious epiphany. Nor can you expect me anytime soon to gift you with a New Testament—or even an Amy Grant album. This secular humanist doesn’t expect to undergo a faith makeover in the foreseeable future. But I have experienced a shift in my attitude toward Christianity. After a decade of static from the religious right, I had developed a bone-splintering knee-jerk reaction to the ecclesiastically inclined. I didn’t cultivate it, but I didn’t deny it oxygen either—like most people I seek online resources and news stories that reinforce my worldview, and, well, being an atheist sometimes makes me feel like a freak, like I’m missing something that everyone else sees, and feeling like a freak can make a person a little defensive, especially when religious organizations are actively distributing free bumper stickers condemning my right to equality.

Like the conservative Anglicans I encountered, I too had become a bit blinkered to the idea that a monolithic concept—in my case Christianity, in theirs homosexuality—is best viewed in full light of the individuals who give it life. I’ve since been reminded that for every Christian who dims his headlights to get a bead on his enemy, there are many more who understand that true humanitarianism is contingent on communication with people outside one’s immediate faith and social circles. In this age of increasing polarity I’m grateful that such people exist at all, and even more grateful that so many of them flicked their brights back at me to signal that my message was well met—and perhaps also to let me know that those shadowy thugs in the next car, for all the dire warnings we’ve heard of their quick and powerful wrath, are only threatening if we give credence to their legends and thus snuff our own lights.

We’re having butter issues, le domestique and I.

Actually, we’re having buttery spread issues—butter originating in the udder is untouched by the controversy.

It’s sad, really. We thought we had found a buttery spread with which we could form a lifelong bond, but our BBF betrayed us—or, rather, never had our back at all. Land O’Lakes® Light Butter with Canola Oil, a product chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and lack of hydrogenated oils, served us in any number of ways for a year or more. We had switched to LO’L from Brummel & Brown®, a yogurt-based spread previously chosen for its low fat content, rich flavor, and agreeable spreadability factor. (For the record, LO’L was a little too spreadable. Straight out of the fridge it was ready to melt invitingly on to—or even molecularly merge with—your toast, your pancakes, what have you. But if you happened to take it out of the fridge too early, like, more than 30 seconds before you absolutely needed to, it assumed its preferred liquid form. That’s what one gets, I suppose, for asking too much of her buttery spread.)

We had turned our backs on B&B—the discovery of which, its product Web site promises, is “like when you discovered that laughing was also a full-body workout”—only because its “vegetable oil blend” (B&B is advertised as 10% yogurt and 35% vegetable oil, leaving the product potentially, by my calculation, 55% puppy blood) contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil—hydrogenation being what puts the trans in trans fat.

I’m not typically a dietary alarmist, but when I heard an NPR story some time ago calling hydrogenated oil “plastic fat,” as in, that’s how it reacts with your biology, those long-dormant alarm bells sounded. My larder is quite full enough, thank you, without ingesting something predisposed to settling into a cozy pocket of my stomach for a years-long nap. Even our corporate-friendly government, by way of the Food and Drug Administration, has declared that when it comes to trans fat, the only healthy dietary intake is no dietary intake.

I labored over my choices. Have you had to choose a new buttery spread lately? The variety is astounding, but while all promise “rich, buttery” flavor, very few lack hydrogenated oils (almost all claim 0% trans fat, but because of business-friendly consumer-hostile FDA labeling standards, those products can still contain significant amounts of the stuff; the only way to figure out whether your butter products contain hydrogenated oils is to stand interminably before your grocer’s dairy case inspecting labels).

After reading the nutritional information on a number of promising products, I settled on the aforementioned LO’L spread, one of only a handful of contenders that appeared to meet all my criteria. And all was sunshine and buttercups until the Human Rights Campaign released its confounding 2008 Corporate Equality Index, a.k.a. the “good to the gays” rap sheet.

As an operative for the Gay Agenda, I’m well acquainted with the Corporate Equality Index, which reports the results of surveys returned by hundreds of large corporations, detailing their LGBT inclusion in employment and public outreach policies. Even if it weren’t my job to pay attention to the list, I’d find it worth studying. With LGBT rights increasingly politicized by BushCheney Inc., how we spend our money has become at least as powerful as how we vote, an idea underscored by the fact that while we’re still having trouble getting a law passed at the federal level that would make it illegal to fire an employee simply for being gay—currently A-OK in 31 states—nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies who responded to the HRC survey met every single LGBT-friendly criterion set forth, which is no cakewalk: In order to receive a perfect score on the CEI, employers must prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as gender identity and expression; provide diversity training covering each of the above; offer a transgender wellness benefit; offer employees’ domestic partners the same benefits package as married spouses; and support an LGBT employees’ resource group. Compared to LGBT rights at the federal level, such corporate policies are nothing short of extraordinary.

Anyhow, this year I have rededicated myself to putting my money where my rights are, and it is with a heavy heart that I report Land O’Lakes received a measly score of 53 on the CEI. According to the chart accompanying that score, LO’L fails to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; fails to provide diversity training in areas of sexual orientation or gender expression; has no LGBT employee resource group; and makes no effort to include LGBT populations in advertising, marketing, or philanthropy.

For the record, I’ve identified a number of companies with lackluster scores with whom I’ve done business in the past but have no problem abandoning until they get it together to show my people some love. In most such cases, there is at least one counterpart company that seems to have my back. To wit:

• Barnes & Noble got a 63? Fine. Borders got 100 (and I like its stores better anyway).

• Bayer got a 15? Fifteen? Are you fucking kidding me? Wouldn’t you think a company that’s been sued by multiple Holocaust survivors claiming the company was involved in concentration camp medical experiments and other war atrocities would try just a little harder to redeem itself in the 21st century? It isn’t as if Bayer has no competition in the rarefied field of pain relief, or even more narrowly, aspirin, which, having been invented in the late 19th century, isn’t exactly a patented formula these days. (Interestingly—to me, at least—Bayer fought tooth and nail in the early 20th century to trademark the name “Aspirin” and was repeatedly refused, even by its own German government. When the company finally won a trademark suit, in the United States naturally, it began to charge up to 10 times as much for its product here as in the rest of the world. Then in World War I the Allies seized Bayer’s assets, along with those of just about every other German company, and by 1921 “aspirin” had been reduced to a lowly lowercase genericism.)

Should you care for a tablet or two, might I suggest Walgreens’ generic version? The company not only scored a perfect 100 on the CEI but stood its ground when Christian right organizations appealed to their crazy fundamentalist minions to boycott the brand, asserting that the company, in giving money to the 2006 Gay Games, was promoting casual gay sex in an effort to increase the HIV-positive population and thus the client base for prescription medications sold in its pharmacies. I don’t make this shit up. The company disregarded the lunacy and stood by its support of the Games, held in the company’s hometown of Chicago that year. Go, Walgreens!

• ExxonMobil Corp., number 1 on the Fortune 500, got a big old doughnut, just as it does every year. Meaning not only that it fails to meet any criteria for gay and lesbian inclusion but that its PR folks gleefully return a survey to HRC saying so (whereas they could simply ignore the query), implying that such failures may even be a point of pride in the company ranks. Not content merely to ignore gay rights, Exxon managed to regress them when it acquired Mobil, rescinding the latter company’s existing gay and lesbian nondiscrimination policy and domestic-partner benefits. To put that 0 in perspective, and please don’t take this as an endorsement of Wal-fucking-Mart, but yes, even the big W-M, number 2 on the Fortune 500 list, offers the small concession of a written nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation and provides diversity training to its employees, earning the world’s most ironic smiley face a 40 on the CEI.

Like Bayer, Exxon has a bit of a gaffe in its past—the whole Exxon Valdez thingy—that one might think would cause the PR department to work that much harder to overcome its poor public image. (BTW, Exxon has yet to pay court-awarded damages to 33,000 fisherman and landowners negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez’s pollution of 1,200 miles of Alaskan coastline. After being ordered in 1994, five years after the disaster, to pay $5 billion in punitive damages, Exxon filed appeal after appeal seeking to duck the penalty, which at the time of judgment represented one year’s clear profit for the corporation. Even after the award was reduced to $2.5 billion by a federal appeals court, an amount that now represents just three weeks of profit for the corporation, Exxon appealed to our big business–friendly Supreme Court, which, yeppers, agreed on October 29 of this year to hear the case sometime in the spring of 2008—meaning that we the taxpayers continue to pay for America’s most powerful corporation’s refusal to cooperate with a 13-year-old jury award that has since been reduced by half even as inflation has made the amount increasingly insignificant to the company. Something to think about when choosing a filling station.)

Chevron (which also owns Texaco) and BP (which also owns Arco and Amoco) both received perfect scores on the CEI. With a gas station at just about every major intersection, we have options, so if you can’t ride your bike or walk or take mass transit to work, while there might not be a true “best” choice for your fossil fuel needs, there sure as hell is a worst.

• FedEx got a 55? Fine. UPS not only earned 100 on the CEI but came in at number 39 on this year’s Best Corporate Citizens list, which scores large companies according to criteria such as community relations, diversity, employee relations, and environmental efforts. Besides which, deliverywomen look hot in their UPS browns.

For the record, the other companies who earned perfect CEI scores and are among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens are, in order of BCC ranking: Nike, Motorola, Intel, IBM, Agilent, Starbucks, General Mills, Herman Miller, Dell, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, the Gap, Google, Eastman Kodak, American Express, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Wells Fargo, Xerox, Bright Horizons, Sun Microsystems, Best Buy, Lexmark, Nordstrom, KeyCorp, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Principal Financial.

Hey, not all corporations are bad.

As much as I want to adhere to the lists for all my consumer decisions, there are instances where that’s impossible. Of the three pharmaceutical giants whose products I require enjoy, two received perfect scores, while the third received an 85. AstraZeneca fails to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression; while this issue is pretty close to my heart—because I think it’s utterly absurd that anyone should get antsy about anyone else’s personal presentation and, let’s face it, I have a somewhat alternative PP myself—I feel that it is, mentally speaking, both easier and wiser to reconcile such an omission in AZ’s employee relations than to go off a med that keeps me relatively sane.

I also recognize that I often have no idea how smaller companies, who are not rated by HRC, conduct themselves. Just as not all corporations are bad, not all mom-and-pops are good. In my nine years of service to an independent music store—during which I served as the senior buyer and witnessed its expansion from a 1,000-square-foot strip mall space to a 5,500-square-foot store, moving twice to accommodate its growth—I never received a single paid vacation or sick day, and I was completely uninsured. Nevertheless, anyone who shopped there felt superior for not shopping at nearby chain music stores like Virgin and Tower, who undoubtedly compensated their key employees more fairly.

While the competing low-fat, non-hydrogenated buttery spreads I’ve located are hardly mom-and-pop enterprises, they are marketed by companies that fly a little further under the radar than LO’L (number 301 on the Fortune 500). For instance: Smart Balance and Earth Balance, my leading contenders to replace LO’L. The Balance sisters are two of only three buttery spreads available at Whole Foods, which outright bans any products made with hydrogenated oils. (While Whole Foods’ score of 90 isn’t perfect, it beats 75, awarded to both Safeway [which owns Vons] and Kroger [which owns Ralphs]. My overall grocer preference is for Trader Joe’s, which is too small to be rated.) The third was a rice-based spread, at the idea of which le domestique made a face.

As it turns out, the Smart Balance® and Earth Balance® products I tried are both contender-worthy. At least I think so. Le domestique criticizes SB’s spreadability factor, which is very low. While it melts obligingly enough on hot skillets and just-toasted bread, it is otherwise as dedicated to its solid form as LO’L is to its liquid. Which confuses me, because the very reason hydrogenated oils show up in so many processed foods is that hydrogenation solidifies oil—fully hydrogenated oil is shortening—making it very versatile in achieving desired consistencies. I had assumed LO’L melted all over the damn world because of its lack of such hydrogenation; it certainly isn’t due to its inclusion of actual butter, which in its refrigerated form is about as spreadable as my dog’s jaw when I need to give him a pill.

Despite my desire to pronounce the Balance sisters both delicious and pro-gay, and therefore my new BBFs, I think it’s only fair that I do my best to hold the smaller companies to the same standard as the larger ones, so I sent the following e-mail to Smart Balance Inc. (as well as Trader Joe’s, while I was at it):

Hi there—

Can you please tell me whether your company promotes LGBT inclusion by including sexual orientation and gender identity/expression in its employee nondiscrimination policy? And, where applicable, are the domestic partners of your employees entitled to the same benefits as married spouses? I enjoy your products very much, and as a consumer it’s important that I spend money with companies that support my rights. Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I acknowledge that whoever fields consumer feedback may dismiss mine as the work of a crank, and I imagine that if I receive a reply at all, it will be along the lines of:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Thanks for your feedback about our products! Please use the attached coupons to continue enjoying them.

Kind regards—

Your New BBFs

Then I figured that as long as I’m corresponding with the corps, maybe I owe it to LO’L’s rich buttery flavor to give it another chance. After all, according to the company’s corporate home page, “Land O’Lakes Inc. values and recognizes the unique talents and potential of all employees and is committed to continue to build a diverse workforce.” I figured I should drop LO’L a line to let the feedback folks know of my quandary and offer them a chance to tell me about any upcoming diversity planning.

Hi there—

I’ve long enjoyed many of your products, particularly your light butter with canola oil. It’s difficult to find a butter spread that’s both low in fat and free of hydrogenated oils, and yours happens to be my favorite.

As such, I was dismayed to see that Land O’Lakes Inc. earned a relatively low score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. I recognize and appreciate that you prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and that you offer your employees’ domestic partners benefits equivalent to those of married spouses. But many Fortune 500 companies like yours now explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression as well, which I think is necessary for the full inclusion you strive for in your workforce.

I hope that you’ll consider adding such protections to your written nondiscrimination policy; LGBT issues are becoming increasingly politicized, not so much by LGBT people themselves as by our own state and federal governments, and sometimes it seems that our only political capital lies in spending power. In such a scenario, it’s essential that I put my money where my rights are, and I would love to be able to include your products in the “buy” column of my consumer activism campaign.

Thanks very much for your time!

Best regards—

Teresa Morrison

I’ve thrown down the exceedingly polite gauntlet, and now all I can do is wait to see whether either, neither, or both of these companies care to answer my plea for just one delicious buttery spread that has my gender-vague lesbian back. If not, we may have to try that rice stuff. Le domestique hopes it won’t come to that.

————————————————————————————————-

November 6 update!

I have just received the following reply from Trader Joe’s:

Teresa,
We appreciate your inquiry and bringing your concerns to our attention. Trader Joe’s specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. We also offer the same benefits to a Crew Member’s qualified same-sex partner as we would to a Crew Member’s opposite-sex married partner.

Sincerely,
Amy
Trader Joe’s
Customer Relations

Yay, Trader Joe’s!

—————————————————————————————–

November 11 update!

Smart Balance Inc. responds:

Dear Ms. Morrison—

Yes, to all questions asked.

Sincerely,

Smart Balance Customer Relations

Brief? Perhaps. But affirmative all the same.

With all due apologies to my male readers—both of you.

How have I managed to menstruate all my life—OK, not quite, but I can barely remember a time when I didn’t—without knowing about The Standards? My partner knew about them, but apparently hadn’t seen fit to fill me in until I pointed out the little chart on her box of o.b. tampons, laughing at the idea that any woman would have any clue how many grams of menstrual blood she passes during any determined period of time. I was totally ready to chalk up such a silly notion to her preferred brand, as I’ve never quite warmed to the o.b. gospel. I want my applicator to be as environmentally friendly as possible, but I want a goddamn applicator.

“Oh, yeah, those are industry-wide standards,” she said confidently. “All the brands have to use the same terminology for the same absorbency levels.”

Of course I had to look it up for myself. Not because I don’t trust her, but because I don’t always believe her, and those are two very different concepts.

Oh yes, there are federally mandated standards, and like the miracle of nature the theretofore unregulated products sought to contain, they didn’t come without bloodshed…

Remember when talk of toxic shock syndrome tripped from the tongues of every lady in the land? It was around 1980, at the precise time I and many gals who read this blog were just becoming acquainted with what it means to be a woman, and it was fucking scary. It turned out that the selfsame products that enabled us to ride horses and row boats like nobody’s business—because any incapacitation a woman may experience during menstruation has everything to do with errant leakage control and nothing at all to do with the physical sensation of birthing a bowling ball—could also, by the way, maybe release bacterial toxins that could KILL US DEAD SUDDENLY AND WITHOUT WARNING!

TSS reached a fever pitch around the time of the Rely Recall epoch. In late 1978, Procter & Gamble rolled out a new technology with the Rely tampon, sporting the zippy tagline “It even absorbs the worry,” which is some pretty damned powerful absorbency. Indeed, Rely “gently billows out into its unique cup shape” in the vagina, offering “virtually wall-to-wall protection,” ready as it was to absorb 20 TIMES ITS OWN WEIGHT in fluid due to its fun new shape and combination of tiny polyester sponges and super-absorbent fibers.

You see where this is going, right? The bacterias Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes, better known by their gang names S. aureas and S. pyogenes, thrive on protein (mmm, menstrual blood) and oxygen, which is introduced to typically anaerobic vaginas via porous tampons. Bacterial toxins can then enter the bloodstream through the vaginal wall, which is particularly vulnerable to tears and lesions in conditions of extreme dryness. Sponges and super fibers, anyone? As P&G might—and actually did—say, “Remember, they named it Rely.”

Tampon-related toxic shock syndrome, which wasn’t even identified until 1978, was diagnosed in 813 women in 1980, 40 of whom died. Between 60% and 70% of those diagnosed said they had used Rely tampons—samples of which had been sent free to millions of women in the summer of 1979 in a marketing blitz that promised, “Rely is so different it will change the way you think and feel about your period.” And did it ever!

Rely was pulled from the market, and federal agencies got busy trying to prove they cared about women’s health—despite the 40+ years tampons had already been on the market all footloose and fancy-free of regulation and safety controls. (Historically made almost entirely of cotton, tampons hadn’t caused any known physical problems until 1978; that’s the year tampon engineers—chortle—introduced super-absorbent manmade fibers, which counter-introduced the bad bad bacteria in question to the vaginal environment.) The FDA, which had back in 1974 designated tampons a class II medical device and therefore subject to “special controls,” agreed with the Centers for Disease Control and women’s health and public advocacy groups that perhaps it was time to impose some actual special controls in the form of industry-wide standards. All concerned parties met periodically with Big Hygiene for the next decade or so to argue about the nature of those standards. Hell, it took them two years to agree on so much as mandatory product labeling warning users of TSS risk.

So it was that, even though an apparent causal link between TSS and super-absorbent varieties of tampon was identified during the Rely era, tampons were still so unregulated in 1985 that, according to The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation—oh yes, I own it; e-mail to borrow—Playtex regulars were twice as absorbent as Tampax regulars, and more absorbent than any other brands’ supers excepting its own. This really fucked with women’s attempts to follow their doctors’ advice to choose the minimum absorbency required for flow containment in order to avoid actualizing that feeling of death menstruation affords us all.

Do you remember where you were on October 26, 1989? That’s the day the FDA released The Standards, only nine years after the TSS crisis was linked to super-absorbent tampons. And here they are:

• Junior = Less then 6 grams
• Regular = 6–9 grams
• Super = 9–12 grams
• Super Plus = 12–15 grams
• Ultra = 15–18 grams

Awesome! Now all we have to do is find a way to measure the fluid weight of our menstrual discharge in any given one- to three-hour period. The only wrinkle being that, as Americans, most of the scales we keep around to measure menstrual discharge and such display fluid weight only in ounces, so I guess we’ll have to convert our readings to grams. One fluid ounce is equivalent to just over 28 grams— Oh Christ, never mind. TSS is now so rare that the CDC no longer even conducts surveillance on the disease. In 1998, the last year for which records are available, there were just three confirmed menstruation-related infections.

So basically, I guess I can use a regular and chance leakage, go crazy with an ultra and trust my antibodies to do their immunizing thing, or choose something from the magic middle. In any case, S. aureas vaginal colonization is even less likely than any decision on my part that my period would be an awesome time to go horseback riding. Besides which, the last time I visited with my mother, as I stood in her kitchen populating her hair with rods in anticipation of pouring hot chemicals all over her head—oh yes, I know my way around a home permanent; e-mail for appointments—we got to talking about my impending 40th birthday.

“So, you’ll probably be getting the hot flashes soon,” she said, all cavalier-like.

“Isn’t 40 kind of young for menopause?”

“Nah. You’ll be there before you know it,” she said confidently.

So, according to my mother, the expiration date on this carton of eggs is nigh, and I can shift from the TSS hysteria of my teenage years to the contemporary hysterias of middle age, like recent research showing that women who have never had children are at higher risk for breast and ovarian cancer, the latter of which has earned the moniker “the silent killer” for its propensity as a difficult-to-diagnose disease with a nearly asymptomatic onset and propagation to KILL US DEAD SUDDENLY AND WITHOUT WARNING!

Surely there’s an unregulated product of vague Chinese origin to blame.

Katherine Heigl and I don’t look very much alike. Oh, sure, there are similarities—the swanlike sweep of the neck, the winsome girl-next-door quality, the overall luminosity—but few would mistake us for twins or sisters or even species mates. Which is why it was worrying when my partner of 13 years went, well, kinda moony when Heigl arrived at The Advocate’s 40th anniversary party last week.

One minute I was holding forth about how much I dislike drinking perfectly respectable beverages out of martini glasses—

“Katherine Heigl is here,” le domestique blurted.

I looked toward the door and traced the ethereal glow to its energy source.

I would show you a picture of myself from the party, but my efforts to duck the paparazzi were apparently completely successful. Instead, here I am in my front yard.

Eerily dissimilar, aren’t we?

“T.R. must have brought her—they’re best friends,” I said knowingly, having fact-checked T.R. Knight’s cover story in which he said so. (I didn’t actually check with Knight or his publicist to confirm that Heigl is his best friend because [a] we don’t verify interview quotes unless they seem wrong, incendiary, or just weird, [b] I think it’s reasonable to think that Heigl is in fact his best friend, [c] ringing him up to ask “But is she really your best friend?” would regress us both to grade-school sensibility, and [d] fact-checking is, much as the term connotes, concerned with objective facts—spellings of proper names, exact dates, ages, etc.—whereas best-friend status is subjective, as can be seen by flipping through the autograph pages of your high school yearbooks.)

Knight was among the last of the invited celebrity hosts to arrive. I had already stalked Jane Lynch to some degree, or she had stalked me—I’m honestly not sure which. All I know is that every time I looked up she was within six feet of me, and she’s very tall, so if she had lain down at any point during the night her head might have landed in my lap.

Had Jane Lynch’s head fallen in my lap, I’d like to think I might have said something terribly witty—which would absolutely exclude “Come here often?”—but I was in a bit of a buzz state most of the night, so I probably would have said something like, “Yer hair’s pretty.”

The buzz wasn’t so much cultivated as thrust upon me. Immediately after entering the venue and ascertaining the whereabouts of the facilities, as one should, le domestique and I were confronted with one of several bars sprinkled about the event. In keeping with the evening’s general conviviality and open-bar rules, which practically insist that one take on hard liquor, I ordered a Manhattan, bourbon being my favorite among your grain alcohols.

The pretty and somewhat flirty bartender gamely reached behind the many bottles of (event beverage sponsor) Skyy vodka for the lone bottle of Maker’s Mark. She poured the bourbon generously, augmenting it with the merest glances of vermouth and bitters, and dispensed it into a Skyy martini glass. Then she frowned and, with a mock-pout that reads as sexy, said, “I don’t have any cherries.”

“Quite all right,” I said. “No garnish necessary.”

“I’ll give you more bourbon instead,” she said brightly, turning back to her bottle stock to retrieve the beverage sponsor of generations of sailors and prostitutes. Listen, nothing garnishes a 98% bourbon drink better than bourbon, especially when there’s none of that messy ice to potentially melt and throw off the delicate balance of the bourbon and air that make up one’s cocktail.

Ordinarily I’m kind of a wallflower at parties, but you know how wallflowers get with the aid of multiple-shot bourbon cocktails. Yep, I was a sort of fuzzy wallflower—like maybe a bulrush. And with all those lowered inhibitions I was not about to move along when the wall I happened to choose, sort of off to one side of the stage, turned out to be the zone where all the fancy people were queuing before and after taking the dais.

I will stand very close to as many celebrities as I please, thanks very much! Not that anyone was trying to get me to move. But, you know, sober me would have of her very own volition hustled out of fancy town to make way for fancier folk than myself.

I think I was saying something about wanting to lick William Baldwin, because really, how often do you get your chance to lick a Baldwin, when—

“Katherine Heigl needs a drink,” le domestique said with no small amount of urgency. “Someone should get Katherine Heigl a drink.”

I turned my head toward the Knight-Heigls to see them just chitchatting away with the gays. She didn’t seem in crisis at the time, but I understand an elevated hydration level is required if one is to glow so constantly. Also, I think fluids help to maintain healthy pores, and an actress can’t be too careful in the age of hi-def TV. Just as squeaky-voiced silent film stars lost their livelihood in the transition to talkies, HD may prove ruinous to the careers of the large-pored set.

“She was doing this,” le domestique said, tipping her hand toward her mouth with her pinky extended—the universal symbol for thirstiness.

Le domestique’s enchantment with Heigl was only fair. On the way to the party I mentioned that the guest I most wanted to meet—or more appropriately, stand really close to—was Jenny Shimizu. Le domestique hadn’t heard of her.

“The really androgynous dyke model from those Calvin Klein ads in the ’90s,” I offered.

Blank stare.

“She was a mechanic in West Hollywood until she was ‘discovered,’ then she became a big-time altie model,” I said. “Oh, and she was Madonna’s lover.” With that, I had offered my entire inventory of knowledge about Jenny Shimizu. “Anyway, she’s hot.”

“How androgynous is she?”

“In the Calvin Klein ads she could have gone either way,” I enthused.

“I worry about your type,” le domestique said, not being at all androgynous herself.

Over the years, and certainly in the week since the party, we’ve had a conversation or two as to “types”: whether we have them, what they are, the number of ways in which we each seem to resemble the other’s not at all.

Is le domestique interested in a willowy, blond evocation of Audrey Hepburn? If so, I’m in trouble. I go whole days and sometimes weeks without remembering that I’m a chica. And my moments of feminine lucidity are generally prompted not by a mirror but by a stranger whose quizzical eyes dart furtively from my face to my breasts and back again. (It’s fun or irritating, depending on my mood.)

Am I obsessed with straight-hipped, flat-chested boy-girls? Le domestique is very much a woman, with hips and breasts and curves and everything. She has medium-long hair, soft features, and a professional wardrobe that I would describe as “flowy.”

In light of such disparate attractions, neither of us can be faulted for worrying that we’re not keeping the home fires stoked properly.

But when we scrutinized each other’s supposed types, we stumbled on an interesting truth: We had each identified an ideal that reveals much more about our personal conceptions of womanhood than about what we’re attracted to in a partner. Mine is outwardly tough, even forbidding, and inscrutable to those who don’t know her—though in my fantasy she has a soft nougat center. Le domestique’s ideal is outwardly soft and radiant, but she’s approachable and authentic and, one gets the sense, having the last laugh on folks who only think they know her.

Heigl and Shimizu, I think, provide us with real-world faces for our personal mental constructs of gender. Mine is just a little more, um, third-sexed than hers.

Readers, you’ll be pleased to know that someone did retrieve a drink for Katherine Heigl. Sadly, I never did see Jenny Shimizu at the party; I just assumed she hadn’t made it—she’s very distinctive, and the guest list was cozy enough that one could fairly easily find anyone she might be looking for. But in the days to follow I saw pictures from the party, and there she was—with a new “girl” haircut!

Sweet Jenny, I thought we had an understanding.

(Psst. Click here to read my new piece on Advocate.com.)

I make kind of a lousy sister, which distresses me not least because I’ve always harbored fantasies about how different my life might have been had my parents produced exclusively X chromosomes. A sister wouldn’t have intimated to me, just after our 1972 move, that our house’s former occupants, a family of four just like us, had all been murdered in my new bedroom. A sister wouldn’t have confined me in a padlocked homemade coffin until she could no longer hear my panicked hollering, later blithely noting that so long as I was able to shout she knew I still had oxygen. A sister would never have seized my clip-on bear collection and demanded the king’s ransom of two weeks’ allowance for its safe return.

Those of you with sisters may disagree with any or all of the above. Still, even if a blood-relative American sister could turn out to be a sadist just as easily as my blood-relative American brother, my Rwandan sister would never be so cruel, a certainty that makes me feel so much the worse that Veneranda Nyiahabimana, my first Women for Women International sister match, received neither correspondence nor goats as a result of my sponsorship.

It’s conceivable that Veneranda, given the option, simply didn’t care for any livestock at this time. Had I bothered to write, I might have gleaned more about her attitude toward goats by offering up my own goat anecdotes. I could have told her about the time, when I was in junior high, that a goat in the petting zoo at Knott’s Berry Farm—”America’s 1st theme park!”—cost me what felt at the time like a small fortune by eating the unlimited ride pass hanging from my belt loop, forcing me to buy another or face a rideless future—the future being the succeeding six hours or so. Then maybe I would have explained the U.S. concept of theme parks and why American children would want to go somewhere and pet goats.

Corresponding with Veneranda was certainly in my plans. WFWI urges that sponsored women benefit as much from kind words as from material support. But the best intentions stretched before me until, finally, I received notice in late July informing me that Ms. Nyiahabimana had graduated from the 12-month program. (All sponsorship matches are limited to one year, at which time program participants are encouraged to put any acquired job skills and micro-enterprise financing to work, and sponsors are encouraged to make peace with the idea that while they may feel they’ve made a forever sister, their material support will henceforth be transferred to a spanky new sister.) I was delighted to see that Veneranda had provided her address for future correspondence, indicating that it’s never too late to right a wrong—provided I can locate someone versed in Kinyarwanda, because WFWI furnishes translation services only for active sponsorship relationships.

Despite my lax correspondence, I was eager to learn how Veneranda felt she had benefited from the program. And while I was disappointed that her exit interview didn’t address her lack of enthusiasm for goats, I was pleased that she noted improvements in her general housing conditions, health, self-confidence, and awareness of civil rights. And if I was at first chagrined that she listed knitting as her sole field of skills training undertaken, I quickly gathered that Rwandan women approach the craft with far less irony than do any of my stateside knitting friends.

Unemployed when our partnership began last year, Veneranda now identifies as self-employed in a nonagricultural (i.e., goat-disinterested) activity. She still struggles in raising five children, two of whom are hers by birth. The other three, she says, are nieces and nephews whose mothers, her sisters, are dead, as are her own parents. She has no husband.

Veneranda was around 15 at the time of the Rwandan genocide, and her living situation practically maps its ongoing social repercussions: Around 10% of Rwanda’s citizens were killed during that three-month period in 1994, leaving hundreds of thousands of orphans in the care of a population that was, when the dust settled, 70% female, thousands of whom were pregnant as a result of rape by militia men. Compounding mass rape with Rwandan laws forbidding abortion under any circumstance, the country now counts as many as 5,000 enfants mauvais souvenir (“children of bad memory”).

Despite such souvenirs, Rwanda’s women have been pressed to put their bad memories behind them. Veneranda, in her brief letters to me, wrote only of the importance of family, her faith in Jesus and prayer, and her gratitude for my sponsorship. “God bless you,” she wrote, or at least that’s how her translator interpreted her handwritten Kinyarwanda. She wondered about my family and living situation; and she requested pictures, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. And that’s where I ran aground in my commitment as Veneranda’s sister.

The money’s easy enough, autodebited monthly from my account such that I hardly even miss it. But interpersonal matters are more complicated. Though I’m anything but closeted in my daily life—and could seriously give a flip how I’m perceived by folks who disapprove of “my lifestyle”—I’ve been at loose ends over just how honestly to describe my family to Veneranda.

“I have a female life partner and we’ve been together for nearly 13 years,” I might write, “which reminds me, how do you feel about President Kagame’s desire to update Rwanda’s penal code by criminalizing consensual same-sex relations?”

Or how about, “I’m pleased to hear that you take solace in your spiritual beliefs, though I don’t myself believe in God.”

Veneranda certainly isn’t in the minority in Rwanda, where 90% of citizens identify as Christian—and only 2% claim no religious affiliation. Roman Catholics account for roughly two thirds of the Christian majority, with the lion’s share of the rest falling to the Anglican Communion, the 77 million–member worldwide religious body currently engaged in a war of wills with the U.S. Episcopal Church, (presently) a province within the Communion that Anglican archbishop and primate (seriously, that’s the term for Anglican grand poobah types) Peter Akinola, who leads the African council of provinces, threatens to excommunicate en masse if the American body won’t stop treating the goddam gays as legitimate folk, a “plunge into unrighteousness” epitomized by the 2003 consecration of openly gay—and noncelibate—V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Go, ’piscies!

Do not underestimate the vexation felt by Archbishop Akinola over the homo problem: “As we are rightly concerned by the depletion of the ozone layer, so should we be concerned by the practice of homosexuality.”

I’ve been called many things in my life, but this is almost certainly the first time I’ve been likened to a greenhouse gas.

As for Team Roman Catholic, Pope Benedict XVI’s views on homosexuality differ from Archbishop Akinola’s only in tone, and are more influential, articulated as they are from the throne of the head bully of the largest bully pulpit in the world: “[Homosexuality] is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder…”

Now, I know that our affiliations don’t define us. Nor can we each be held accountable for the views and statements of our leaders, religious or otherwise. I would hope, after all, that Veneranda doesn’t collapse my worldview with that of the current U.S. administration. But the words and attitudes of perceived authorities bear influence that doesn’t always confine itself to the philosophical sphere. For instance, according to FBI statistics, hate crime incidents against sexual minorities—gays, lesbians, transgender individuals—spiked by double-digit percentage points during President Bush the Younger’s first term, throughout which he campaigned feverishly for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Lest that spike be confused with some kind of overall trend, violent crime on the whole saw steady decline during those same years.

Rhetoric kills. Rwandan propagandists’ violent exhortations to kill all Tutsis were broadcast on a popular radio station that blended music programming with hysterically pitched political talk shows. The shows’ hosts sowed hatred and disgust for Tutsis while convincing rural Hutus that they would face genocide themselves if they failed to eradicate the other—along with any fellow Hutus who refused to join in the slaughter. Such motivations and actions seem far beneath the murkiest depths of human reason, especially as delivered through an entertainment medium, but I don’t have to strain very hard to hear Bill O’Reilly’s or Rush Limbaugh’s voice urging listeners to wreak violence and destruction on all who are not like them.

So, what has all this to do with Verneranda? Well, I suppose I wonder if she might be predisposed to hate me. I wonder if Veneranda has been taught to love antigay Rwandan president Paul Kagame, and what he stands for, because his political party’s rise to power ended the genocide—even if it’s widely believed that his party was also responsible for the assassinations and ethnic tensions that led to the genocide in the first place.

Hey, here’s President Kagame with President Bush!

Perhaps my reluctance to write Veneranda hinges on the fact that I know how easy it is to judge someone in the abstract. For instance, I know that there are complicated, thoughtful, open-minded Christians who view Scripture in relative terms and unreservedly accept me, until proven otherwise, as a worthy human being, and one whose sexuality is not pathology. But if all I know about a person is that he or she is a devout Christian, because of my own anecdotal and statistical knowledge, I may not anticipate such generosity of spirit.

Then again, if I fail to casually mention my female life partner and my spiritual disbelief, just as a heterosexual Christian would unreservedly speak of her husband and faith, how is anyone lacking such prior acquaintance to know that gay atheists can actually be pretty OK people?

So, Veneranda, how awesome is it that WFWI brought together two such disparate souls? You, with your unshakable faith in God, despite about a thousand reasons to doubt his presence in your life. Me, with my wary skepticism of the world’s dominant mythologies, despite any number of advantages for which I might offer thanks to some entity larger than myself. You, with your five children, those you’ve borne and those for whom you care because someone must. Me, with my constant nagging, however psychic, about goats—like you need any more “kids.” But even as you reject the goat husbandry lifestyle, I trust that you accept it as a valid way of life, maybe even one that’s “in the blood” for certain folks. Despite our own differences, I hope that we can still be forever sisters, because we actually do have quite a lot in common. We both live in a world where the human appetite for violence is unfathomable, where sexuality is too often weaponized, and where women are often charged with rebuilding what men have destroyed.

I’ll keep your address on hand in hopes of one day finding a translator, but it may be a while; while Kinyarwanda is the dominant language in your country, fluency in same is rare here. I do know someone who can translate my letter into flawless French, and it may be far easier for you to locate a French-Kinyarwanda translator than for either of us to find someone fluent in each of our own languages. That idea, I know, veers perilously close to an actual I Love Lucy plot. Has Lucy ever been translated into Kinyarwanda?

While we sort out our language barrier, I hope it won’t make you feel too much like a test-sister if I go ahead and write to my new sister, Halima Uwimana. I think you would like her. She, too, is a single mother of five, one of whom she bore herself, and she writes that she enjoys praying with her family. She asks after my husband and children and requests a picture—if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’m sensing a trend here. At any rate, I think I’m ready to address Halima’s questions, and I’ve received a mysterious sign that she’s ready to hear the answers: It may simply be a mistake in translation, but I prefer to think my sister Halima is speaking directly to me when she begins her letter “Dear brother…”

Due to a confluence of recent events I found it deeply necessary to shave my head. Again. This marks the second such episode in my life. Let’s call them my Otter Periods. OPs arise during times of suicidal depression, and I’ve found that mine is not such a unique response to that most perilous mood swing. In chatting with my friends at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance forums, plenty of women have come forward to say, “You get urges to shave your head when you’re depressed? Me too!” and more than a few (straight women, at that) have also obeyed the urge. It’s both disarming and illuminating to discover that something I’ve always thought a personal quirk is in truth fairly common.

Where I may claim some diversion is in the aftermath. Many women who shave their heads during depressive periods say they do so out of an urge to self-mutilate; and isn’t it better to attack dead cell filaments than flesh? Afterward most say they found themselves ugly, and few choose to maintain the look.

My first head-shearing urge came over me in my mid 20s. I awoke one morning with a wicked compulsion to shave my head and, as if under hypnosis, I got dressed, walked to my local Rite-Aid, bought clippers, and returned home to do the deed. Under all that hair I found that I have quite a shapely scalp, and for the first time in my life I thought I looked kind of extraordinary, in a good way. I kept it buzzed for two years. Some people (friends, girlfriends) loved it; others (my mom) hated it.

I was waiting tables at the time and my tips went through the roof, the result, I think, of altered expectations. I looked serious and a bit mean, and when I proved to be a friendly sort I was rewarded just for being me—there was no change in my personality, just a shift in societal perception.

(Note: A brief period of hairlessness occurred between my first OP and this last, but because it was motivated not so much by intense depression as by a bad haircut it cannot be considered a clinical OP.)

Fifteen years on the urge made itself known again. This time I knew a couple of things in advance, namely that (1) shaving my head has vast potential to lift my spirits, and (2) I have a shapely scalp. So it should have been a gimme, yes? Well, not entirely. It’s not that I feel particularly old at 39, but I certainly feel older than I did at 25, and I had an attack of self-doubt that I could still pull this look off. Maybe folks would attribute my aesthetic choice not so much to youthful freedom as to midlife crisis.

I resisted the urge for several months.

Here’s where the aforementioned confluence of events comes in. I’ve recently emerged from a short stay in a psychiatric hospital, about which I’ll write more later. It was my first such commitment, and I expect and hope that it will be my last. I made a pact with myself that when I was released I would pull out all the stops to fight that bully in my psyche who taunts and torments me until I feel that I can no longer accept responsibility for keeping myself safe.

It’s difficult to articulate why shaving my head is for me such a powerful antidepressant. I do like the way I look, but it isn’t a simple matter of self-esteem. It’s an expression of personal freedom, a letting go of concerns over what people think. In making myself less conventionally attractive I make explicit the idea that I seek no one’s approval but my own. And there’s a powerful sense of light and calm that washes over me when I remember to live first for myself, second for those who accept me as I am, and not another moment for those who do not.

Here I am, four days on. (My hair grows like a weed.)

Via Salon’s Broadsheet blog, which was itself citing a New York Times article, I learned this summer that Lands’ End had introduced a revolutionary new swim line promising suits “thoughtfully designed to fit real women and flatter every figure.” Every figure? Really, Lands’ End, are you sure you want to make that claim?

I’m shaped, roughly, like a refrigerator, with identical hip and bust measurements, without a heck of a lot of contour in between. Oh, and I have only one boob—just born that way, or developed that way at any rate. And no amount of one-armed pull-ups during my teenage years did a lick of good, as my horrified pubescent self gamely tried to help the stunted hemisphere catch up with its mate.

Go for it, Lands’ End, show me the suit of my dreams.

I visited the online site and called up their virtual model, where a girl can plug in her own ghastly stats and try suits on her CGI doppelgänger. I had big ideas about giving my CGI self a makeover, with a crew cut and glasses and a less vacant look, but I couldn’t even get the thing to accept my measurements, not because it didn’t believe such a figure existed but because the application didn’t like Safari. Nor did it like Explorer. And I’m not going to download a new browser for any goddamn swimsuit model. So my virtual model defaulted to something like the actress Anne Archer, which isn’t terrible, as CGI selves go, but she wasn’t going to be very illustrative of me without considerable imagination.

Lands’ End offers a variety of ways to shop: by “anxiety zone” (my brain?), body shape, suit type, bra style, and…omigod, they have mastectomy suits with built-in pockets for prostheses! This really is revolutionary! Though in the past I’ve installed my own fake-boob pocket—a deconstructed sock sewn into the suit’s “breast shelf”—my fix has always left me wanting. For starters, I think I look reasonably lopsided even with my gelatinous friend in place. Then there’s the whole fear about it falling overboard whenever I’m hit by a wave, causing me to grope at it anxiously and often—at which time its stress-ball-like properties come in handy. (Ha! Get it?)

I’ve been kluging my own solutions for so long it never occurred to me that there might be more “manufactured” options. A mastectomy suit would be almost as momentous a leap forward for me as when I switched to silicone from foam, which lacked natural movement and absorbed water. Yep, that girl you saw so many years ago wringing out her boob as she emerged from the Big Sur River—that was me.

My breast(s) and I, we have an uneasy relationship.

Have you ever been to Frederick’s of Hollywood with your mother? I have, and I can’t say as I recommend it. This was back in the day, in Orange County, and Frederick’s may as well have been the moon—if the moon were populated entirely by things you never, ever wanted to see in the presence of your mother, like panties whose crotches were decorated with feathers and googly eyes. But my imbalance—the fleshy, not chemical, one—was becoming obvious as I transitioned from a “B” to a “C” cup in early teenagehood, and my mother had heard Frederick’s sold “breast enhancers.”

If there are two things my mother can’t stand, and certainly there are many more than two, they would be slutty women and “showboaty” types. Frederick’s is the five-and-dime of sluts and showboats, the twin groups’ needs converging in an NC-17 miasma of hot pink, lace, and fake animal skin. And it was into this world that I was led—past the fur-lined bondage cuffs and edible undies, my mother disgustedly tsking all the way to the counter—to solve my “problem.”

A very friendly woman who was statistically likely to be named “Brandi” took me into a dressing room and nonchalantly sized me up, then she sold us a couple of sets of nylon-encased foam boobs. To “Brandi” the purchase was as controversial as soap, but we couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We paused only long enough to scout our position before stepping out of the store and back into the mall, thus ensuring that a neighbor didn’t happen upon us and get the wrong idea. This wouldn’t be my last lesson in shame.

Now a “D” cup (nature’s cruel joke on me), I’m frustrated to find that the mastectomy suits at Lands’ End all seem to top out at “C.” Are bountiful breasted cancer survivors SOL?

Never fear. Lands’ End offers live chat help, and no sooner had I entered my name and requested a chat session than a little window popped up and representative “Karen” asked how she could help.

“Hey, Karen,” I typed, then, because I’m not accustomed to using chat, I hit return to skip a line, at which time “Hey, Karen,” popped up as my complete reply, as though I were greeting my very best friend.

“Hello,” Karen typed, “How can I help you?” It sounded terse in my head, though I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way. That’s just not who “Karen” is.

I type, “I’m what your catalogue calls a ‘rectangle shape’ (Oh, stop it with the sweet nothings, Lands’ End, you’re embarrassing me!), and I need a mastectomy suit that accommodates a ‘D’ cup.”

*pause*

“Hold on,” Karen replied. “Let me check with our Shoppers.”

“Thanks!” I typed, hoping she was going to check not with actual customers but with someone whose official job title is “Shopper.”

*pause*

“Sorry,” Karen replied. “We don’t have any ‘D’ cup mastectomy suits.”

“Shoot,” I typed, hoping to charm her with my quaint word choice, then I waited patiently for her to offer some alternative advice. I’m not sure what kind of advice I expected from “Karen” exactly. I’d exhausted the whole “buy a regular suit and make it your own” thing. I was looking for something more sophisticated this time. Something along the lines of, “Maybe you could just cut the other one off?” which, believe me, has occurred more than once.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Karen asked, a bit lamely, from my consumerist standpoint.

“No,” I replied, wondering if she could sense my disappointment in the type. “Thanks anyway.” Our chat session ended with a thud, the little window vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Better put an asterisk after that “flatter every figure” promise, you silver-tongued devil. It’s not nice to get a girl’s hopes up like that.

Looking back, fear of being found out wasn’t the only reason (perhaps not even the main one) I was shy about boyfriends groping my breasts. But at the time it seemed like such a momentous announcement—maybe even a deal-breaker: “By the way, before you feel me up, I should tell you not to be put off by a certain sponginess on my right side.” Since I didn’t much date guys I couldn’t take in a bar fight, most of them took it well enough, though they more or less avoided my little underachiever from then on.

Lesbians, you may have heard, are of a different breed entirely, and the girls have by and large found my stunted member compelling, if not downright fetish-worthy. From girlfriend number 1, the littlest mammary has enjoyed acceptance and affection, and girlfriend number 6 suggested that we go so far as to celebrate it with a unilateral piercing. This wasn’t long after I had first seen—in a feminist bookstore, natch—the “Tree” poster of a topless Deena Metzger, her arms spread wide in joyful tribute to her tattooed mastectomy site.

I became fascinated by the idea of turning a potential source of shame into a focal point. “Let’s do it,” I said, and just for the asking I was shirtless in a gynecological exam chair, a heavily pierced and tattooed dyke asking me where I wanted it. “My right,” I said, losing my bra. The piercer smiled and nodded at the dwarfish one. “Cool,” she purred, and got to work.

If there’s enough call for the term acrotomophiles—folks sexually attracted to people with missing limbs—surely there’s a tiny kingdom in which I and my fellow uniboobs would be worshipped by dint of what’s not there, and methinks it would be populated largely, if not entirely, by lesbians. God bless ‘em.

I ordered a mastectomy “tankini” in a “C” cup, and upon receipt I was delighted to find its built-in “soft-cup bra” just generous enough that I could pour myself ever so gently into its smallish confines. (You’re not off the hook, Lands’ End—see to those generously endowed cancer survivors PDQ!)

Still, I see a little breastwork in my near future: I think I’m gonna let ‘em cut the other one off. I know that this imperils my status as an object of worship, but the imbalance is almost certainly exacerbating my spinal arthritis, and at this point I measure relief by the inch, not the yard. I hope to get it lopped off in the next year or so, thus achieving the boy-girl body of my dreams. (Is it too late to become a supermodel?)

At any rate, my left side has seen quite enough attention lavished on the right, and she’s felt more than a little slighted: Imagine for a moment that you’re a conjoined twin—no, really, imagine it—and that your dwarf sister, who was for many years considered grotesque and weird in comparison to you, because, you know, though you had a dwarf growing out of your side you had developed in a more expected way, is now continually fêted because, after all, isn’t she just as cute as a button? And come to think of it, who ever said bigger was better, Jolly Green Giant? Yeah, you’d be pissed, too. And maybe it’s about time ol’ lefty meets the brief, white-hot pain of a piercing needle and joins the ranks of her much-venerated sister. She’s been in exile so long, my left breast, the prodigal daughter led astray by punky hormones all those many years ago, and she’s ready to come home at last.

Forty-five people were expected at my parents’ ranchito Saturday for an extended family reunion, so naturally my mother had made enough scalloped potatoes for 100. Actual head count: 30. The low turnout was attributed to a variety of reasons, many of which impugned the character of those not in attendance, but I thought it perfectly acceptable to avoid the California high desert during fire season—with blazes actively flanking my parents’ property to the north and the south—on a day that promised, and delivered, a high of 106 degrees.

My aunt was pouring the leftover scalloped potatoes into a very large ceramic bowl that was long past heaping. She kept pausing to glower at the volume, willing the thick glop of creamy potatoes to somehow settle and make room for more.

“I could take some off your hands,” I suggested. I *heart* my mother’s scalloped potatoes, and she only makes them on special occasions, like, to celebrate fire season.

“Oh, good idea,” my mom said, then, assessing the overflow, exclaimed, “And I have just the container!” With that, she hurried out the door of the kitchen and crossed the yard to The Shed™. (No offense to certain readers of this blog who may have quite handsome sheds of their own, sheds that serve their sheddy utilities very well at that, but this is no ordinary shed. Were one to amuse The Shed™—an act I didn’t think possible until recently—it wouldn’t so much snicker as explode in paroxysms of mirth.) Mom returned with a plastic clamshell container, the kind one would get when ordering, say, a quart of macaroni salad at the grocery store deli counter. These are the sorts of things for which one apparently needs a gigantesque shed.

In light of our utterly bizarre weather of late—humidity in California?—no doubt signaling the death knell of a planet at last defeated by our timeless quest for convenience and transient gratification, my mother’s frugality has become something of an asset. Disposability is in the eye of the beholder, and neither squares of aluminum foil nor plastic forks are squandered at the ranchito until they’re utterly spent.

During my childhood my family’s thrift was a source of embarrassment. Also confusion, as demonstrated by the dreaded shell game “Which margarine container in the refrigerator actually contains margarine?” Ungrateful at the time for the ascetic ideals I would later value, I selfishly yearned for Tupperware.

Tupperware was rarely sold at yard sales, from whence came most of our household goods and clothing. When it did pop up, it was generally warped beyond use—or stinky. And even when perfectly good Tupperware appeared, my mother, for her own arcane reasons, refused to buy it. “You don’t know what people have been doing with that,” she said. I pushed for details, but she couldn’t come up with any specific scenarios to illustrate her fears. I knew from experience, though, that urine figured prominently in her distrust of strangers.

I grew up in a part of Orange County that was, during my youth, one part residential to three parts agricultural. And while we loved going to local fruit and vegetable stands for our produce, my mother admonished me never to eat so much as a strawberry until we got home, where it could be properly washed. I thought she was concerned about dirt, something I had eaten a fair amount of in my childhood, until she told me that the field workers relieved themselves on the fruit. And lest I think this was aberrant behavior, she also advised me never to send food back at restaurants. (Having worked for a number of years in a restaurant, I can say with some certainty that line cooks in general exercise no such urine vendetta against diners, even picky ones, but pissing off waiters is a total crapshoot.)

No one wants Tupperware that’s been used to collect or distribute urine—for which vessels suburban needs are myriad. And no one’s fool enough to pay retail for new pieces when our lives are so very rich with empty margarine tubs and plastic clamshell deli containers, especially when The Shed™ is there to store an airplane hangar’s worth of storage containers—and, good God, how we Americans love storage: One need only observe the checkout aisles at Target, with all those shoppers buying coffin-size plastic bins, to witness our zeal for stuff and the putting away of it.

Logic against such profligacy aside, I grew up with a platonic fetish for genuine Tupperware. (Rubbermaid knockoffs just aren’t the same.) But it took many years of adulthood and financial independence before I treated myself to a few pieces. Old notions die hard, and in my world Tupperware was for those with more disposable income—and far less monetary sense.

In short, I was a sitting duck when Phranc came to my workplace to host an afternoon party—working as I do to further the Gay Agenda™, my company’s HR goddess thought it the ideal office event—demonstrating the wondrous wares of Earl Tupper. The überbutch lesbian folksinger and latter-day Tupperware Lady has elevated the classic home sales party to the level of performance art—and she brings her guitar to strum out a ditty about the miraculous burping plastics.

Who could resist her androgynous wile? Besides, I gave Phranc absolutely no reason to pee on anything I purchased from her.

And so it is that I finally have Tupperware of my own. The phabulous Phranc sold me two CrystalWave™ soup mugs. The little red nubbins let steam escape when microwaving!

Two sandwich keepers, for the sound use of which I must caution you to buy squarish loaves of bread, not the pillow-size loaves that are increasingly the norm:

Your classic Wonderlier® bowl:

And a neat-o cake decorating set that Tupperware International seems to have discontinued, making it a comparative rarity that just makes it more special.

But we didn’t stop there, my partner and I. We’ve since acquired a round cake taker, which, alarmingly, we bought at a yard sale. (Only a barbarian would pee in a cake taker.)

A Jel-Ring® mold, allowing us to make fabulously retro desserts:

And a snack cup set, for your peanuts and cottage cheese and what have you. These little guys compete with the CrystalWave™ soup mugs for Most-Used Tupperware status:

I still covet a Spin ‘N Save™ salad spinner, one of the pricier items in the Tupperware catalog. It would be perfect for rinsing the urine from my farmers’ market greens, and if I had one, I would eat salad every single day for the rest of my life.

Can a shed really be so far behind?