the megan

A few minutes into her visit with plastic surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a 40-something brunette pulls up a photo of Megan Fox on her iPhone.

But it’s not Fox’s nose or cheekbones that the patient wants.

“This is how I want my eyebrows,” she says.

The doctor smiles politely. It is the third time in a week he’s been shown a picture of the actres

“I assured her that it’s not really necessary [for me to study the portrait], because I have the shape of Fox’s brows and the direction of hair growth imprinted in my brain,” says Epstein, recalling the client’s consultation last month. “The look is incredibly popular."

Just as Jennifer Aniston’s “The Rachel” was the most requested hairdo of the mid-1990s, in this boom time for cosmetic enhancements, “The Megan” is the must-have eyebrow of 2012.

Powder and pencil can only go so far. With the bushier look back in vogue — fuller arches are the signature style of everyone from Kim Kardashian to Kate Middleton — specialists such as Epstein have seen a 30 percent rise in the demand for eyebrow transplants.

“Over the last two years, it’s got really big,” adds Epstein, who performs between 12 and 15 eyebrow surgeries in New York and Miami every month. “A lot of women want [to copy] the Kardashians, but Megan Fox is far and away the favorite.”

This is real life.

mal de coucou

Just like that, she was back in Junior High again.

Except the secret this time around is not howAshley got felt up by Brian at the Winter Ball and worst of all, liked it. It's the kind of secret that is shared in bathrooms, scratch that, bathroom stalls. The planning, the whispers, the illicit glances, the rush, the seemingly intractable bondage that forms under the guise of a secret. 

The first time she tried it, it made her feel the same way she did when she lost her virginity. It was like those cautionary tales had seeped into her bones, telling her what to feel (which was dirty), that nurture finally triumphed nature with a score of 5 to 4. 

Eventually that feeling, not unlike the pain of a recently broken hymen, dissipated and the pleasures of the act surpassed the initial guilt. How nice it was to finally know what to say at parties, to know what to say to fill those scrambled silences when everyone is racking their brain for the next topic. In fact there was so much to say and she just had to keep up with her captive audience who hanged on every syllable that spilled out or at least, so it seemed. 

How delicious it felt to finally have this world be her reality, a world that had seemingly only existed in Facebook albums of the beautiful and glamorous. Those quotes that ex-sorority girls might as well inscribe on their gravestones- "Well-behaved women rarely make history", "Dance like nobody's watching/Laugh like you've never been hurt"- suddenly had both relevance and reverence. 

Of course there would be those times, especially those late hours when the sun threatened to rise, when it almost seem like this new life was a hallucination of her own wanting. Her new friends seemed like ghosts that faded away with the dawn, leaving her with a lingering, gnawing ache that seemed to only be subsided with a few spoonfuls of peanut butter. She existed in their clouds of chatter, she subsisted on the inclusion of their company, bathroom or no, but couldn't put away the most earnest of her desires that creeped up upon her when she was alone in her bed; to hold her baby blanket and have someone who loved her sweetly stroking her hair.

you know what you know

If earnestness is the hallmark of youth

then cynicism is the patron saint of adulthood

Let's examine this in the most organic of ways- music taste which tends to fluctuate with the listener's state of mind, being, whatever.

When I was young, flush, and in love with the notion of love, my favorite song was "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve. 

Although the message is trite, the soaring violins and classical hook seemed to endow it with sophistication.

Night after night, I would lay in my bed listening to the song over and over in my headphones, indulging the secret fantasies that always plague the young- a crush noticing me, a moment in class where everyone realized my brilliance, a singing performance that caused the crowd to stand and cheer, finding friends that understood me, etc. 

The song remains a time capsule- holding in it all the pain, awkwardness, and confusion  

It's amazing what ten years can do. 

The sweeping majesty of the violins have given way to the anarchic howl of guitars on my current and probably forever favorite, "Where is My Mind" by the Pixies.

 If you look lyrically at the two, there is a similar core theme- the recognizing of living in a stifling intractable society. 

Whereas the singer of Verve wants to change and liberate himself from the confines of reality

the Pixies actually do so

choosing absolute inebriation and obliteration of consciousness as a way to avoid coming to terms

Literally losing themselves, distancing themselves from reality

Maybe we get that way because avoidance and cynicism is an easier pill to swallow

As time escapes and we see that our lives don't match up to our grand narrative that we've constructed,  as we begin to compromise our dreams, as we look at the omnipotent pillars of society that are seemingly intractable, how are we supposed to hold onto those candy-colored dreams that pervaded our inner lives? 

Some choose to avoid that pain. Some choose to keep themselves in a haze of substance.

And some choose to fight.

cut open my sternum and pull

I'm no stranger to pain

There's this odd little game that we play sometimes.

A game that seems simultaneously a universal dance for two but also utterly ours

The game is usually set in motion after some sort of catastrophe either viewed on TV or through hearsay

We'll look at each other, happy and safe in the couch/on the bed, but briefly imagine the other in that situation

The fear grips us at a safe distance- the knowing of us currently being safe but the knowledge of possibly losing the precious object a faint but threatening reality

Joel and Clementine flirted with this dance too

She would pretend to smother him with a pillow and he faked dead

until she pestered him enough that he awoke 

like a modern day Lazarus

This play is all fun and games until the play becomes reality

At the thought of actually losing him, my chest seizes and I lose my breath

As long as death is a distant specter, the game remains fun

Mitigating the fake pain of a fake passing

exitstrategy

1. Run away to Brooklyn. Rent an apartment with a claw footed bathtub. Commute to Manhattan during the week and put in hours at a menial publishing job. Drive home to New Jersey on weekends to swim in the pool and cry to your mother. Smoke Gauloises on the fire escape. Let yellowing issues of Rolling Stone and Vogue pile into a protective fortress around your bed. Listen to Cat Power. Fall asleep mostly naked beneath the duvet watching Sportscenter and drinking earl grey. Date a Yankees fan and kiss his hands on the 4 Train into the Bronx.

2. Run away to Barcelona. Eat milk chocolate magnum bars and drink cheap champagne. Burst into charming fits of laughter whenever you get embarrassed about butchering the Catalan language. Wear denim cutoffs, Dr. Pepper chapstick, and very little else. Go dancing at 3 a.m. Whiten your teeth. Tan your shoulders. Braid feathers into your hair. Perpetually wake up with sand caught in the thin cotton sheets of your tiny bed. Listen to the Rolling Stones and kiss all the longhaired boys you can get your hands on without ever having to apologize.

3. Run away to Los Angeles. Sublet a studio in Venice three blocks from the beach. Listen to top 40 radio. Go to Chateau Marmont and charge drinks you can’t afford to a long-dormant credit card. Sleep with a television actor who lives in the valley. Sleep with a musician who lives in Bel Air. Break things off with both of them when gas prices begin to rise. Find Gilda Radner’s star on the Walk Of Fame and swallow a sob when you see the filthy cement around her name is cracked. Walk through the Venice Canals until the sun sets and you forget your own name. Call your mother crying from the parking lot of a 24-hour Ralph’s supermarket. Tell her you want to come home.

4. Run away to Paris. Gaze at the pink and pistachio glow of macarons in the window on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Listen to Joni Mitchell. Meet an Argentinean man in the Latin Quarter for drinks. Melt into his accent and kiss him goodnight, but return to your apartment alone because his face doesn’t look enough like the man’s you are trying to forget. Get lost in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, admiring Napoleon’s fine red damask. Walk alone along the Seine in an old dress, ten-dollar shoes, and an Hermes scarf. Fumble with the locks on the fence overlooking the river. They all have lovers’ names etched into them and the girl who left the red heart-shaped lock has the same name as you.

5. Run away to Martha’s Vineyard. Write heartbroken stories during the day in front of a large fan that blows curls of humid hair across your tired face. Take a waitress job at The Black Dog at night and try hard not to drop too many trays. Learn to ride a moped. Pretend you’re a Kennedy. Listen to Carly Simon. Eat hand-churned ice cream out of waffle cones. Visit the flying horses and consider how many girls just like you have sat on the same horse clutching for the same brass ring. Get stoned and dance barefoot down the length of the eroded Jaws beach. Date a Red Sox fan. Yell at each other during baseball games, and then kiss and make up between tangled sheets.

thestoryofourlives

You want to know why I love TV?

We're always trying to look for ways to validate our existence- whether it be through

religion, power, drug use, whatever it is that allows us to connect with something

higher- something intangible that makes us feel more connected, less alone, the truth of the triviality of our lives forgotten for that moment

And here we are, a species that has created a whole other medium

a world that we can escape to for an hour or a half hour

where every action a character has generally affects the other

the effect of the action giving that action meaning and depth

TV allows us to perpetuate the notion that each of our lives has a narrative

We aren't alone. Our lives have meaning.

The cruel joke is that TV isn't reality- it's a construct of our fantasies and fears

The genius of the human race is that language and storytelling allow us to communicate our experiences to make us feel less alone and engender the idea that our lives have direction and meaning

The tragedy is that it's a lie.

keep your body still

sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. sin gives more chances to desire. —luis buñuel