About a million/two years ago, Secret deodorant did an ad campaign -- prominently featured in an episode of
America's Next Top Model: Cycle 5/Kim-- called "Share Your Secret," for which Secret encouraged perspiring odorized ladies all over the country to tell Procter & Gamble
their most intimate secrets, like "Dad took me to get a tattoo" and "I failed my high school entrance exam." When ANTM shot Secret ads, two girls came up with the same secret ("I sleep with a nightlight" or "I'm afraid of the dark" or something equally retarded) and then got in a big fight over it, it was awesome, but not as awesome as Bree (who I loathe) sharing that she likes men's underwear. Who doesn't like men's underwear? That's dumb. Also not as awesome as
Lisa's wino-osity. I loved Lisa like whoa. I think she loved me too.
I thought of this Secret campaign earlier during the hour I set aside every day to think about Kim Stolz. JK. Like many semi-famous people I used to worship longingly from afar, I know people who know her now, so crushing on her isn't fun anymore because she's real, and anyone who's been outside and interacted with real people can tell you: real people are not nearly as lovely as fictional characters. Also Kim's grown up and grown out her hair, like we all do sooner or later or never. I mean, I'd still ride the hobby horse or whathaveyou with Kim, really, well, either
sex or a conversation, ideally both. I don't remember her secret. Probably "I love Riese," which is also Lozo's secret.
Anyhow, I think I like their new graphic better than my graphic:
Anyhow, I'm going to finish the rest of the secrets today [disclaimer: maybe]. REFRESH REFRESH. You know, like light beer or a cold spring of water. Refreshing. Because I've got this deep burning desire to re-create Creative Writing 323 on my blog, I've given myself the new challenge of making all the stories for the last segment LOL funny, since Lozo felt so strongly about the previous installment's sadness factor that he commented on it twice (1. "this was the most depressing thing i have ever read. please stop," 2. "these posts really do make me sad. i'll let you keep that 20 bucks if you stop.") and emailed me sharing similar sentiments. Then he told me he loved me. Then I was like "
I want a good debate and my commenters just kiss my butt." Hey: guess what Mirriam Webster -- "commenter" is a word now, just like "obvs." Stop telling me I'm spelling it wrong, you're annoying. [UPDATE: I'm not funny enough to make anything LOL funny except 'The L Word,' sorz. Not funny. Some are funny. I dunno.]
Anyone wanna know Haviland's secret? At night, she likes to curl up in her bed and watch episodes of "Private Practice" on her laptop because she's in la-la-la-love with Amy Brenneman. Coincidentally, my lesbian Mom is also in love with The Brenn. I don't know how to feel about that.
Oh also, big news, I proposed to Haviland yesterday at the Time Warner Center, the most romantic spot in all of New York City. What's my secret? I like men's underwear. I'm wearing some right now. What's my secret? Because you're hot. "It takes a strong woman to share her secret," says Procter & Gamble. I'd be strong too, if I owned a giant corporation that exploited its outsourced employees and poked bunnies in the eye with mascara wands.
SUNDAY TOP "TEN": PART THREE OF FOUR
SECRETS SECRETS ARE TOTALLY FUN
SECRETS SECRETS HURT NO-ONE
In addition to hating her job (as mentioned in the last installment) writing for a publication who's visual design makes my head explode, Lindsay would like to add that she thinks her butt is huge. Not like, "buy-bigger-jeans huge," but huge enough that it's starting to give her a complex because she's too young to be fat. In 30 years? Maybe. Now?? No.
*
What's my secret? Though I know objectively that I looked scary-skinny/unwell/gross this summer when The Depression Diet (alcohol, toast and McDonald's chicken fingers) stole my appetite and ten pounds of my already naturally-skinny body, I totally loved every unprompted "Oh my God, are you eating? You look like death," I received, and felt that secretly, "you look like death" actually meant "You look AMAZING, I'm so jealous," even though I know it didn't. (JK, I still think it did.)
**
12. Walking With a Ghost Paige meets a boy. He'll do. She thinks "I could spend the rest of my life with this boy." She's not expecting happiness, exactly, but something endurable that her parents will approve of, and they do. She thinks, specifically, that her and this boy could be happy like her parents were happy -- that kind of happiness that skates a thin sheet of contentment while the sharks of utter despair bark below the surface, that kind. "Not happiness."
They're together for what feels like forever but is actually only five years. Paige dates women on the side, including a few pretty serious relationships, but she doesn't come out to her family, because they're Catholics, and the coming-out-to-Catholic-parents scene has been historically proven to always go catastrophically poorly.
So she plays the bi card. That's a really tough card to play though, the boy's not really a fan, and so they decide to get engaged, which's sort of the opposite of what she actually wants to do, and she realises this soon enough, breaks it off, allegedly crushes his heart into a million small impossible to reconstruct pieces, goes on with her life, and then discovers she's hands down totes preggers, which is trouble.
She does the "retarded thing" and clues him in, he does the seemingly mature thing and agrees to stand behind her decision, whatever decision she makes. She chooses abortion, because we can do that in America, you know, pro-choice. Actually, we can't, because sometimes we can make a choice like "abortion," and then our asshole ex-boyfriend can drive to our place of employment, sit there for three hours until we emerge from the doors like any other night and then beat the shit out of us.
Back into third person: Paige's ex-boyfriend gets drunk, parks outside of her business for three hours until she gets there so he can beat the shit out of her for aborting "his child." She'd like to clarify that she was on the pill and never wanted to have children. She did everything she could and when science failed her she did what she had to do, and she never lied to him about having an abortion.
He broke her jaw. He broke her right eye socket. He broke her right arm in three places and gave her a severe concussion. 72 stitches.
When Paige regained enough consciousness to speak to the police, she told them she couldn't remember what'd happened. She could remember, of course, she'll never forget, of course, ever, of course, but she didn't want to deal with him anymore. He'd already told everyone what an asshole she was and left her enough nasty messages to make her want to jump off any number of bridges beyond what 72,000 stitches could ever put back together.
So she lives on. So he lives on. The anger haunts her. She can't go out without worrying about running into him or his friends. Everyone who's known her for more than a few years, which is most people, constantly brings him up. Those that know her well never bring him up.
She's not into regret. But this: this she regrets. She regrets not coming clean to the police when she had a chance to. She regrets that particular choice, and the ensuing possibility that she may never trust anyone ever again and that it won't be their fault, it will always be his.
*
What's my secret? I'd totes go
Thelma & Louise on his ass. I wish we still had vigilante justice, or that life was an Angela Robinson movie where we could all get together and imprison Paige's ex but I know and you know that'd be impossible to do in this country. That sucks, 'cause I think it's even worse in other countries. Ugh.
My BFF Natalie gets super-emotional during movies which tell personal stories containing underlying themes of social injustice (e.g.,
Bowling for Columbine), and when I was writing this story I remember sitting in the living room of our house at U-Mich after we saw
Monster while Natalie cried about the social structures that enable women to get totally fucked/fucked/fucked and defenseless [Yes: I'm sharing a "privileged upper-middle-class/middle-class college-educated white women with strong backgrounds in Women's Studies cry about social injustice" memory] and one of our smokin' hot Kappa-Kappa-Gamma roommates came in and was like "What's going on? Is it [redacted boy with crooked penis]?" and Natalie was like "Oh, you know, the state of the world," and explained a little bit about women's rights and what happens when women try to stand up for themselves and the girl looked at us like we were on crack, she was like "You can't do anything about that Natalie, don't worry so much," and then Natalie was like "waaaa," and picked her fingers to bits which is what she does when she gets anxious, and I think the funny thing is that if Natalie'd said it was about [redacted boy with crooked penis] the girl would've probs sat down with her (fat-free) ice cream and doled out 1-2 hours of advice. What's my secret? There's no point to this paragraph, I'll probs erase it later because it probably only makes sense to me why it's relevant or related [I'm not comparing anyone to
Monster, for one thing], like most things that only make sense to me.
*
Logan just got fired. Perhaps you already know this.
Also -- and this is related, trust me -- he can't talk about the fact that he gave Michael a second chance and got fucked over again and now he's back where he started from, which's no-confidence, no-anything, left simply with the bad aftertaste of getting fucked. In the heat of the fucking moment, he consciously paraphrased Samantha Jones: "Fuck me over once, shame on you, fuck me over twice, shame on me." If Micheal came back Logan knows he'd give him a third chance which makes him even more miserable because he already knows how horrible it'd be.
[What's my secret? This is a real place: that place where you know you're going to get fucked but you do it anyway. It's not that you want to get fucked again, it's that we all believe, somewhere, whether we admit it or not, that we don't really think we'll get fucked again, and the reason we think this is totally innocent and logical --
because it hasn't happened yet, that's just like, the definition of "how time works," and therefore -- like all things that haven't happened yet -- absolutely everything remains
possible. Certainly if people surprise us by being more horrible than we expected (see #12), it is possible that people can also surprise us by being more wonderful than we expected? Yes?]
This is how getting fucked by Michael is related to getting fucked by his job and to fucking in general: the Senior vice president of Logan's firm wanted to fuck Michael and so he fucked Logan over because Logan was in his fuckin' way. Logan's friendship/relationship/whatever it was made the Senior VP peg Logan as the enemy and get Logan fired because he could no longer get to Michael.
Micheal is safe in a corporate position, making thousands more fucking dollars than Logan did, being treated to $700 corporate dinners and never [Logan thinks] once fucking thinking about Logan, who is emotionally eviscerated.
But he'll be fine. You know, like that Phoenix & the ashes thing. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, whatever fucks you makes you stronger, karma's a fucking bitch, the two colleagues that helped get Logan fired can eat their expensive dinners and Logan can sit on top of every fucking bad thing that happened in 2007 and figure out how to return in strength and brilliance, because, ultimately, he's gotta prove to you [Michael] and to everyone [everyone] that they are wrong.
And I think he can. Sidenote: is 2007 over yet, for Chrissake?
[The above picture was submitted with the secret. It will totally become a part of the Auto-Winners Facebook Group Photo Album one of these days, because there are so many things about it that I love. But mostly the "delightfully butch" moniker.]
Once upon a time, Uta and her girlfriend had an open relationship with her girlfriend's ex and his wife. For about three years they did this thing where they'd get drunk (or not), go dancing (or something like it), and, more often than not, end up naked and fucking. Sometimes, in lieu of said drinking and dancing, they'd make dinner naked and end up on the kitchen floor, still naked, or sometimes in the living room (naked) , the guest room (naked), the bedroom (naked) or the pool in the backyard. (naked)
Or: in the bathroom at the bars.
This group of lovers were friends, really, more than anything, and remained so even near the end of all this when the sex became more sporadic.
They'd hang out with Uta's ex's ex's wife's family sometimes, too, and as time goes on, Uta starts falling in love with her ex's sister and becomes consequently less interested in her girlfriend, her girlfriend's ex or his wife. All her love has narrowed and focused on the wife's sister, and though she continues on with her girlfriend, she starts dating the sister. Everyone knows.
Uta's girlfriend decides she doesn't want to be with her ex's wife's sister anymore and so Uta and her girlfriend break up and Uta starts dating her ex's wife sister who is now her girlfriend.
It's been two years and she's happier now than she's ever been. She's living with her new girlfriend and although family gatherings can be awkward because although she gets along with her ex (who's still friends with her ex and his wife), her ex's ex and the wife won't talk to Uta.
What's Uta's secret? She still misses the drunken orgies and she still misses the sober orgies sometimes. She misses the ex's ex because he's the only man she's ever had feelings for and she misses his friendship and often his penis but mostly his friendship, and although she knows she should feel bad that her ex's ex's ex-wife hates her now, she actually doesn't care because her present girlfriend is the best thing that's ever happened to her and, well, ...
... let me put this in Uta's words, now? "My present partner has brought me more good, more light, and more happiness than most people ever get to know."
**
15. Hype
Jodi's always been the "smart one" in her family. She's got all kinds of poisonous pride and vanity and it puts up walls preventing her from ever coming clean about her small but important "failures." In fact: the closer she is to someone, the farther they are from her truths.
Soooo ... Jodi flunked out of college, which, sidenote, was probably more fun and involved more drinking/making out than passing college, so big up to Jodi. Howevs, no one knows this but the administrative people who filled out the forms that processed and sealed her flunkage, maybe a lecturer or two and the counselor Jodi went to to have a private breakdown about the situation. Her friends just think she's taking a slacker courseload and her parents think she's just finished her last set of exams and will be graduating in May. Actually, different friends know different stories (depending on degrees of closeness).
She's spent the last year weaving and molding a web of lies so intricate and overwhelming that it's likely far more complicated/challenging than any thesis or exam could've been. She lives in a big city but it's a small world and people talk and so she's pretty sure it's only a matter of time before someone who knows one truth meets someone knowing another truth and then all the lies will totally explode into one big full crash and subsequent exposure.
In two weeks she'll be home for "break," at which point she'll tell her parents she won't be graduating because *cough* she failed a paper.
If I was still trying to make these stories LOL-funny, I would add something here about my advice, which would include bringing Tyra Banks/Keith Ablow and a camera crew along with you to break the news, or totally disappearing from the planet for about a week so that by the time you get home they're like "OMG we are so glad that you're still alive!" that they don't care what you flunked out of, they're just like, happy to see your beautiful face?
Because really everyone should do what they want to do in life and no one should make you feel like a failure because also. also. also. A college degree won't help you get a job, really. I know of two people offhand without college degrees who make a lot o' money, and neither of them are in porn, I swear. We get second chances and third chances and fourth too. You know? Once i dropped out of college and moved to NYC and got a job at the Olive Garden and now I'm here writing this, that should be really super inspirational to everyone who ever aspired to um, be a weirdo. Right-o.
If I wasn't, which I'm not, I'd say this: That knot in her stomach, which has now evolved to a genuine Pit, and then practically a living breathing bundle of complete on-the-verge-of-vomiting ("vom," as Haviland would say) eternal nausea, is set to explode when she sees the disappointed look in her Dad's eyes. Or before.
OK! MORE LATER/TOMORROW, KIDDOS. XXXOOOOO RIESE
p.s. BECAUSE YOU'RE HOT.
