So, for that matter, is appraising your chances of cancer, for science pelts us daily with new studies on everything that prevents it, and everything that promotes it, and everything that they thought caused cancer before but now realize actually prevents it, and vice versa. At the moment, for example, I have been given to understand that if I stay short, drink red wine, eat tomatoes, use olive oil, cease working in a coke foundry, avoid cigars, sleep more, take aspirin— or, no, that's been shown to cause pancreatic cancer— take less aspirin, swallow Vitamin E, alter my estrogen levels, sip green tea, shun charcoal briquettes, dine on fish— but not from the Great Lakes— reduce my stress level, find religion, and stay clear of Eastern Europe, my chances of dying from cancer will be reduced. For the time being.
But it turns out that the sunblock that I've been smearing all over my arms for five years may be carcinogenic, whereas sunshine is now thought to act as a cancer preventive. Meanwhile, the spinach and apples I've been eating all these years to bust cancer are laden with cancer-causing pesticide residues. Likewise, Vitamin C, long touted as an antioxidant par excellence in megadoses, may actually change the structure of our DNA in such a way that— no, you didn't guess, did you?— it makes us more susceptible to cancer. And those soft plastic dishes I've been using to microwave my anticancer vegetables in? They cause cancer.
Every now and then, a cancer-fighting diet book comes out, and I've noticed that the author has an extremely narrow window of opportunity, maybe three days, to sell out the print run before a squadron of doctors charges forth to the media mikes to repudiate all of its findings. Isn't that great? I wanted to phone my mother to tell her how I've had it up to here (writer's hand slicing sideways at chin level) with trying to keep track of every eensyweensy obscure bit of research on health perils. But I'd just read that cell phones were being implicated in brain tumors. I sent her a note.
"It seems to me," I wrote her, "that what this whole explosion in medical research is actually discovering is that sooner or later people die."
Of course, scientists are finding out other things that are useful to them, but they are not very useful to me. What all this research is generating in people is the expectation that somehow they don't have to die— that if only they can get all the information, they can beat the odds. If you talk to an insurance actuary, you'll be told what people actually die of, cancer-wise: everything and nothing. Plus smoking. Smoking is way, way up there with car accidents and heart attacks as a cause of death. And you know what to do about that one. Every other prevention strategy, in my opinion, is a crapshoot.
From now on, I follow the only recipe for longevity that's ever actually made sense to me: moderation in all things. A little wine, a nice walk, a good dish of pasta, a minimal amount of microwaving in Tupperware containers, a dash of olive oil, a souprjon of Vitamin C, a very brief visit to Eastern Europe. Live life modestly, except during the holidays and when you're depressed or bored or having marital troubles, and then hope for the best. It is, after all, not a life worth living if it is lived only to see just how long it can last.
CHOICES WE DON'T CARE TO MAKE
Top Ten Toys in the Pearson Household
'Tis the Season for Hottest Toy Lists, la la la la la, la la la laaaa.
Oh Lord, I hate these Christmas lists. They correspond not at all to what my children play with the whole year through. The toys the stores promote are trumped-up, fleeting, and a colossal waste of cash because most of them are electronic and last approximately forty-eight hours before getting trashed or disemboweled.
Consider this one toy I came across called Commando-bot, a plaything that contains more sophisticated gadgetry than my 2003 Mazda. Commandobot responds to voices. If I was coming down the hall, for example, Commandobot might burble "Help! Help! Don't throw me in the trash!" To which I— responding to its deeply annoying vocal timbre with my own built-in capacity to distinguish sounds— would say: "The trash is too good for you, toy, you're going into the FIRE! Ha ha ha."
Honestly, I defy my fellow parents to think of a single electronic toy that hasn't driven them completely insane within hours, and whose batteries haven't either been ripped out and hidden or lost under the couch. What parent fails to anticipate the fate of Hokey Pokey Elmo in a house full of preschoolers, even as he or she forks over the dough for this waltzing puppet, currently claiming pride of place in Toy Wishes magazine's "hottest dozen"?
I know, Sesame Street's Elmo seems cute, and the song is endearing . . . at first. But, let me tell you, I've had a bouncing Tigger in my home for several years now that has become as familiar a bit of detritus as dust balls and never-used extension cords. I come across it weekly actually, on Saturdays, in my attempt to move Useless Things to new Useless Thing Containers. When I try to throw it out, my daughter intervenes on the magpie principle. It glimmered once, this Tigger, for roughly two weeks, and so she cannot let it go. I replaced the batteries once, thinking that would thrill her. She made Tigger bounce for five minutes and then ignored him again. But I am a chump, and honor her nostalgia.
For the record, here are the ten hottest toys in the Pearson household:
• A stick found in the park. This comes in a variety of wood hues and is, ideally, three or four feet long with shorter versions available after the prolonged temper tantrum about huge stick's inability to fit into the car. Sticks can function as a dragon to menace one's elder sister, can be poked into desiccated mice, and can be rattled along a picket fence.
• The phone. This is a versatile object that rings and has buttons. The receiver can be picked up and put down again to miraculously end the ringing noise. The buttons can be punched endlessly, dialing 911, and 411, and the mayor. The cord can be attached to the dog as a leash. Six-hour conversations with fellow adolescents can take place from the comfort of one's own bed. Recommended for children aged one to eighteen.
• A bottle of Lancome nail polish. Possibilities include hiding the nail polish in a boot and applying its contents to doll's lips, the cat's tail, or one's pants.
• Toilet paper. Several uses. Damp spitballs, fake breasts, Barbie bedding, bathtub experiments, cardboard roll turned into telescope. Simple act of unfurling and trailing all the way down the stairs will entertain kids for as long as it takes a parent to notice.
• A sack of Robin Hood flour, a spoon, the garden hose, and a pot. Add twigs, paint, chewed gum, or other easily available ingredients to taste.
• The cat. Preferably asleep and therefore willing to wear a kerchief and be transported in a stroller.
• Dirt. A chestnut found on the sidewalk. Fantasies of planting said chestnut in the dirt and waking up to a fifty-foot tree.
• Food. No toy beats mashed-potato sculpting with "found objects," such as one's thumb or a pen on the kitchen table. Mashed-potato accessories, like ketchup, sold separately.
• The Internet. Outlasts the Energizer Bunny.
• Dollar-store stuff. Perfect. Quality matches attention span.
Under the circumstances, I now resent practically every toy I have bought for my children and proceeded to trip over, retrieve from the toilet, or find caked in dirt in the garden. The entire Christmas shopping exercise seems to me to have become a process of alienating parents from their own progeny, in order to fulfill commercially pushed fashions.
Needless to say, this is not done for the benefit of parents or children but for the on-going health of the toy industry. Consider the practice of brand extension, which is a marketing concept in which you take one reliable product and spin it off in endless variations. Apply this concept to the old kitchen play-set. A standard play-set, involving sink, oven, and fridge all rolled into one object, can last for years, which isn't good for the toy industry. So now, if you peruse the toy store shelves or watch TV commercials, you'll note the plastic fridge, the pretend microwave oven, and— for parents who have totally lost their minds— the pie cabinet at Pottery Barn Kids, which will wind up concealing the toothpaste and cooke
d squash sauce that your child whipped up experimentally and then hid— until you began rooting around her room trying to locate that godawful smell.
Whatever happened to the world so magically invoked in the book series Little House on the Prairie, in which the excitement of Christmas involved receiving fresh oranges and handmade doll quilts? Gone: a vanished era of keeping material wealth in perspective.
The great irony of this is that children themselves are capable of keeping wealth in perspective, in the sense that they can rest content with far less than what we shower upon them. True, they will jump up and down in glee when you present them with the Barbie "Cook with Me" Smart Kitchen that they saw advertised on TV. But they're just game for the hype. Otherwise, they achieve marvels with sticks. It is our job, not theirs, to stand back and ask ourselves what we wish for ourselves as families in a resource-scarce world.
Shop and Do Twenty
Christmas is almost upon us. I know this because TV commercials tell me so, as do the garish displays of gift baskets in my supermarket. Christmas is coming, they all shout in chorus. Time to buy things!
On Christmas Eve, as is my tradition, I will be found standing around dumbfounded in a mall, having been unable until then to decide upon gifts for at least three people. Then, staggering home with the last of my frantic acquisitions, I will plan to go to Midnight Mass and cross my fingers that I'm not too exhausted to pay my respects to God.
The collision between commercialism and spirituality in America is never so extreme as during this particular season, when we profit and worship with equal fervor. It is a pairing of objectives so opposite to each other that it builds a unique sort of stomach-clenching stress. America is simultaneously the most religious of the great Western nations and also the most consumer-driven.
Hence, the stress of holiday shopping, as Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, pointed out to me recently, involves the desire we feel to honor the spirit of Christmas by giving gifts— which is to say tokens of love that are meaningful, thoughtful, personal— and the fact that we have to choose those gifts from a vast, impersonal array of mass-produced goods.
"The anxiety is not really about the crowds and getting to the store," Keane says, "but trying to resolve the contradiction between the social meaning of Christmas and the anonymous, even alienating nature of commodities."
If we didn't feel so ambivalent about the purpose of holiday shopping, Keane told me, we would simply exchange money orders. Alternatively, we would skip gift giving altogether and enjoy our friends and relatives, as we do at Thanksgiving.
Instead, we go to great, headache-inspiring lengths to find the perfect doll or sweater, and then conceal the material nature of the objects we've bought by, for instance, removing the price tag and wrapping them. Look, honey! I've bought you a mass-produced sweater from Banana Republic, but I slid it inside colored paper myself!
Shopping anxiety increases exponentially, or so it seems to me, when we don't have the time or the energy to truly personalize our gift giving— a quandary that is increasingly true for women, the traditional gift givers, who are caught more and more in the work-family time-bind.
I was reminded of this when I stood mindlessly gazing around in a book superstore one weekend, paralyzed at the prospect of browsing through hundreds of thousands of titles. I noticed a book called Simplify Your Christmas and wanted to pick it up, but I was carrying a to-do list, a gift basket, a bag of takeout food, a door wreath, and my briefcase, and didn't have any hands. Also, I had no time.
Just then, I spied a time-management guide, which distracted me for about ten seconds— long enough to forget where I'd seen Simplify Your Christmas.
I tried to find it again, but after scanning twelve shelves with my head bent sideways, I developed neck pain and had to sit down. Luckily, I was in the self-help section.
How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, one title beckoned, as if it wasn't partly the fault of that very book, barking for my attention in this enormous chorus of woof-woofery.
What about a book called How to Do Christmas Shopping Without Being Confronted with 411,000 Product Options per Square Block? Where's that title?
The tension of Christmas shopping may be a "perennial complaint," as Keane argues, but never before have retailers clamored so relentlessly, pushing— through gigantic malls and superstores— a volume of product so overwhelming that it oppresses the soul.
In what has now become the most prolonged product boom in American history, we are strapped for time and overloaded with choices. The average supermarket currently offers sixty thousand products. (I am bewildered at a dairy counter, merely pondering brands of cheese.) Companies that used to offer one type of soup or toothpaste now have up to a dozen variations: Colgate Baking Soda & Peroxide Whitening with tartar control, Crest extra whitening with tartar protection, Ultra Brite advanced whitening, Colgate Total, and . . . bleh . . . I'll just brush my teeth with twigs.
Add to this, if you dare, entire categories of retail merchandise that didn't exist when our parents were shopping: product tie-ins with film and TV shows, for instance. There's an entire contingent of furtive mothers out there— I've met two of them recently— who are snaking past the McDonald's drive-thru window twice on a given day in order to get the second and third toy in the Happy Meal product tie-in lineup. Videos and video games; computers and everything associated with them.
The whole enterprise of shopping, which we are being encouraged more and more emphatically to engage in to patriotically bolster the economy, has grown strangely disempowering, as if the freedom to choose has been overridden by the compulsion to choose whatever is pushed in our faces.
E-commerce has added its own potent fuel to this fire of abundance. At one time if you wished to buy a book for your beloved, there was pleasure and solace to be found around the corner at the local bookshop, where a clerk could chat knowledgeably with you about literature. On the Net, books are available by the oceanic ton. One company, Advanced Book Exchange (www.abebooks.com) offers nearly eleven million titles from its global network of dealers. The Net effect? How can you fail to come up with the "perfect" present when you have access to everything ever printed or made?
Add to this, finally,another stress factor: As Keane noted, "our sense of community is even more unstable and fractured than it was before." If Christmas is about our efforts to forge relationships with one another, then shopping, when our relationships are that much more tenuous, far-flung, and delicately in need of tending, is all the more fraught with anxiety.
The solution, for me at least, will be to make donations to charity on behalf of those I love and otherwise raise a toast of good cheer to them all.
Beauty Shop Bullies
I have stumbled across a book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, that finally explains why I would rather be stuck in an elevator with bees than shop for cosmetics.
According to the author, Paco Underhill, fancy-ass makeup sold at gleaming department store counters by what he calls "the dolls in the official white lab coats (and Saturday-night-out makeup)" make women like me feel like dirt. On purpose. It's a sales strategy.
Why am I not surprised?
"This is the high-pressure school of cosmetics selling," Underhill, a retail anthropologist, reveals. "You sit on the stool, she turns you into a slightly toned-down version of herself, and you buy what she urges on you (in theory, at least). The prices are intentionally obscure, figuring that you'll be too intimidated to ask."
Isn't that exactly right? What woman but Nicole Kidman has ever felt comfortable entering the perfumed zone of department stores, with their cold chrome counters and ultra-polished sales women, who remind you of the cool girls in high school who knew how to put on eyeliner without looking like hungover raccoons?
I always feel like a loser at makeup counters. One minute I'm strolling through the hosiery section in an upbeat mood, and the next thing I know I'm at the Lancome counter staring into
the huge blown-up face of Elizabeth Jagger. I instantly feel so unfashionable that it seems impudent for me even to be there, let alone solicit the attention of the Cool Girls.
It's like a hostile little ecosystem of female rivalry, with a smell of sugar-coated bitchiness in the air, which is what I always think of when I sniff Poison and Eternity.
So, over the years, I've reduced my cosmetics purchases to two items: Lancome's intencils mascara, which I can dart in, grab, and dart out again with, never having asked the price, and M#A#C's Twig lipstick, ditto.
Another problem women face in the cosmetics bazaar, Underhill points out, is that "manufacturers and retailers want to sell the products in as clean and orderly a way as possible." Women, however, "want to try before they buy, which is not always a clean and orderly impulse. The interest of seller and buyer shouldn't be at odds, but often, they are."
Indeed, who wants to hang around being stared at by a Cool Girl while trying to imagine what "hydrating and matifying long-lasting treatment oil-free fresh gel" feels like without being able to touch it?
Not only does the anal-retentive environment remind you of standing in your boyfriend's mother's kitchen during college, noticing that the bananas are Saran-wrapped and wondering if you dare have a snack, but the products are mystifying.
Area Woman Blows Gasket Page 3
