Furiously Happy (27 page)

I try not to get caught up in appearance issues though because my grandmother always used to say, “It's what's inside that counts.” And that's probably true because with my luck my best feature would be hidden
deep, deep
inside my body. I suspect my best feature is my skeleton, which is a shame because it might be the most elegant and hauntingly graceful skeleton ever but I'll never get complimented on it while I'm still fleshy enough to appreciate it. That's why I'd like people to say “Nice skeleton” to me now. Just give me the benefit of the doubt, you know?

I've started handing out similar compliments to strangers, but not about their skeletons, because that would seem disingenuous or even sarcastic since I'm already pretty sure I have the sexiest skeleton ever. It's dead sexy. See what I just did there? I credit my skeleton with that joke. Clever
and
beautiful. No, instead I say things like “I'd wager you have an exquisite pancreas.” Or “I bet your tendons are
fantastic
.” People are usually so overwhelmed that they move away very quickly or tell me they don't have any money on them. No one is ever prepared to accept compliments from strangers about their internal organs, which just goes to show how seldom we compliment them.

Souls are sort of the exception to the rule here. People are always complimenting “old souls” or “beautiful souls” or “unblemished souls,” but that seems like a cop-out because souls are totally invisible and never end up in bathing suit competitions. Still, people are super-focused on souls, always trying to win them over for their particular god or sacrificing them to volcanoes or gambling them to win golden fiddles from the devil. I mean, souls are fine but they're a bit overrated. Like clavicles. Or the ability to roll your tongue. They're important but we're ignoring a lot of other parts that are probably just as compliment-worthy and sexy because we're too busy complimenting firm pecs and thin waists and untarnished souls. Branch out a little, is all I'm saying. It couldn't hurt. I bet your small intestines are
adorable
.

Of course, now that I've written about how awesome my insides are I realize I've just made my eventual skeleton incredibly tantalizing to grave robbers and so now I'm going to have to make booby traps to protect my dead body. Like maybe I should plan to get buried in a coffin full of glitter because that way if anyone in the future digs me up they'll be like, “What the fuck? Is that
glitter
? That shit
never
goes away. Fuck that noise. Let's just rob the guy next to her.” (
Sorry, Victor.
) That's how I'd keep grave robbers out. And if I get cremated I'll have the undertaker leave my ashes way at the bottom of my glitter-filled coffin so even if someone does decide to dig in they won't find me until they're beard-deep in glitter. And then there'll be a note in my ashes that says, “
AND THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ROB GRAVES, MOTHERFUCKER.
” Or maybe I'll put a smaller coffin in my coffin and a smaller one in there and it'll keep going like Russian nesting dolls and in the smallest coffin would be a sealed envelope covered in tiny specks and a slip of paper that says,
“Congratulations. Now you've got scabies.”
It'll be like when your parents give you the biggest present at Christmas but you unwrap it and there's a smaller present inside and that keeps happening until you have a mountain of wrapping paper, some new socks, and a lot of unresolved anger. And that's exactly what it's going to be like when people try to disturb my corpse. Except instead of new socks they'll get glitter and scabies.
Worst. Christmas. Ever.

*   *   *

I've tried many torturous techniques to make my outsides fit the ridiculous standards society has set but it never ends well because my body lives in reality and it's a reality that has too much cheese in it.

“I blame Photoshop,” my friend Maile once told me. “I use Photoshop to make my waist smaller and my neck longer and then I feel like I need to make those things happen in real life so that people on the Internet don't see me tagged in a non-touched-up picture and say, ‘
Oh my God, what happened to you?
' And then I have to pretend I've been in a fire or something.”

“Photoshop is a terrible enabler,” I agreed. “I always make myself thinner and my hair less awful if I publish my picture online. And then I want to Photoshop someone else's upper arms over mine, and soften my knee cellulite, and Photoshop a less-covered-in-cat-fur outfit onto me. It would be easier to just say ‘Fuck it' and Photoshop a cat falling out of a window on top of my body and then be like, ‘Yep. Perfect selfie. This shit is done.
PUBLISH.
'”

I shared my grandmother's platitude about what's inside counting more than what's outside and Maile raised her eyebrows in appraisal. “I never thought of it that way,” she said. “Maybe my uterus is
stunning
.”

“I bet it's magnificent. You've made some of my favorite people in there.”

Maile nodded. “I should do a live webcam of my uterus and call it
What's Up Maile?
”

I wasn't sure it would play on prime time but it'd probably be more redeeming than the Kardashians.

I'd recently been to a spa that offered wrinkle removals but I'd just read that some places use dead people's donated skin to fill in wrinkles, which is insulting because it's like saying, “You look so awful that we think injecting dead people into your face might be an improvement.” Although now that I'm thinking about it, I bet the donated skin is only helpful when it's pulled off of a young and still collagen-filled corpse, which seems a little like bathing in the blood of virgins, but with less blood and more injections.

Where does the skin come from? What if it's penis skin? Or ball-sack skin? No one wants the skin of someone's nut sack injected into their lip wrinkles. In fact, when I see heavily cosmetically altered people my first thought is “I wonder how much of their face is genitals?” My second thought is that they probably got their corpse skin from grave robbers. That's why I told Victor to leave a warning in my coffin of scabie-glitter telling potential robbers not to inject my corpse into rich old people's faces. Then Victor said that he was going to put a lock on his office door since I apparently didn't understand what was or wasn't acceptable to say while he was on a conference call.

This isn't to say that I'm completely averse to cosmetic surgery or even that I've never had it before. Victor recently found a picture labeled “Jenny, age seven.
After the procedure.
” I was unconscious and I had an enormous cast on my head.

(
Courtesy of Nelda Dusek
)

“
What in the hell happened to you?
” he asked. “And are those
metal bars on the windows
?”

I leaned over to glance at the photo. “I think the bars were on the hospital bed to keep me from falling out. I was always falling out of beds at that age.”

He stared at the giant brain cast, and then at me, and then nodded to himself. “This explains
so
much,” he whispered.

It looks worse than it really was. The doctor who did my tonsillectomy decided that since I was already under anesthesia they should fix the wonky ear I'd been born with. I suspect it was not his area of expertise and that he was just bored or high and thought, “Hang on, I wanna try something,” because I woke up to a misshapen head cast where giant bushels of hair stuck out in awkward clumps. I looked like if a drunken child tried to make a papier-mâché hat on an angry Snuffleupagus. A week later they removed the cast, some of my hair, and what little dignity I had left. My ear looked
exactly
the same as before, so the doctor told me to sleep with a headband over my ear for the next year because that would work just like a retainer. And it absolutely did if the point of retainers is not to work at all.

Twenty years later I tried elective surgery again when I got tired of wearing glasses and decided to get laser eye surgery. The clinic tried to up-sell me on what they referred to as “superhuman eyesight” but I told them that I wouldn't want to be able to see through clothes because that would really ruin Thanksgiving dinners for me. They explained that it just meant that I'd have better than twenty-twenty vision but it was too expensive and honestly I prefer things a little soft and fuzzy around the edges. The world always looks nicer when it's a little blurry—that's why so many of us have a second glass of wine at dinner.

The eye surgery was fine except that they used an older suction tool that made me go temporarily blind in whatever eye they were working on, which was unsettling.

“THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANT,” I may have screamed during the procedure.

Apparently it was a rarish reaction so they don't warn people of it beforehand. Also, I was like, “You guys? I smell something burning.” And then I realized it was me. The doctor later explained that it was the smell of a chemical reaction, which just happens to smell
exactly
like burning flesh. And this is why I don't trust doctors anymore. That and the ear thing.

Still, the eye surgery mostly worked and I got to stop wearing glasses for several years until my eyes got all shitty again. That happens. You expect that you're fixed forever but your eyesight continues to fade as you get older, which ends up being a nice coincidence because the older you get the less clearly you want to see yourself in the mirror.

A few weeks ago my friend Brooke Shaden came to take my photograph. She was set to do it a few years ago but I was always sure I'd be thinner the next month and so I kept procrastinating and putting it off until Brooke eventually decided to just come to me. She's one of my favorite photographers. Her work is dark and unsettling and beautiful and I imagined the photo shoot would be glamorous and insightful. And it was at least half of those things.

We drove to a swamp where I wore a thrift-store evening gown and a cape made out of a tablecloth. Brooke wanted me to sit on a tree branch that was several feet above my head. Victor and Hailey had come along for the ride so Victor decided to grab my feet and throw me into the tree, which actually worked. But then when it was time to come back down I was totally stuck. Victor suggested that I step into his clasped hands and then fall over onto him, but apparently I wasn't doing it right because Victor kept grunting and yelling, “
Just fall into me, Jenny.
” I said, “I
AM
FALLING,” and he said, “NO, YOU'RE JUST CROUCHING ON MY HANDS.
FALL ONTO ME,
” and I was like, “
I'M FALLING AS HARD AS I CAN, VICTOR,
” and he yelled, “YOU'RE NOT FALLING RIGHT,” and I said, “FALLING IS THE
ONLY
THING I CAN DO RIGHT.
I CAN'T FALL ANY BETTER THAN THIS
,” and then Hailey yelled, “YOU GUYS, I FOUND A KITTY,” and that was disconcerting because we were in a swamp and most swamp kitties end up being rabid skunks. But it was good timing because it caught me off guard and I fell across Victor's shoulder. Unfortunately, the pressure of Victor's shoulder was like being punched in the stomach and caused me to fart extraordinarily loudly.

And that was me: farting and screaming and flailing upside down and grabbing on to the back of Victor's pants to prop myself up so I could frantically scan the swamp for diseased skunks. I'm not sure I have the words to describe that moment but if there's a word that means the exact opposite of “ladylike,” that would be a good start. It was mortifying but Brooke smiled widely and said it was perfect because she thought she'd captured my essence. Victor volunteered that it would have been hard to
avoid
my essence but I'm pretty sure he was making a cheap fart joke.

A week later Brooke finished my portrait, a photograph of me as the oxymoronic Bluebird of Happiness, locked in my cage but still blithely optimistic even as dark clouds swept around me.

It was me, with all my bumps and wrinkles, and even a hint of my wonky ear. And it wasn't pretty. It was
better
than pretty.

It was goddamn
potaterrific
.