The morbid months are well and truly upon us. I hadn’t noticed because this month started so well – I should plan to go on tour every winter.
Last year at this time I was home, sitting in the hallway with my back against a radiator, furiously finishing the final copyedits for Lessons in Taxidermy and wishing that I could stab someone in the eye. Not exactly a festive feeling. Though from the evidence in my public journal, I was doing a pretty good job of faking it.
More about magazines: the Piers Morgan interview of Steve Coogan is hilarious and reminds me why I continue to read GQ. I was also thinking about why I tend to enjoy the celebrity and lad mags but not the glossies for ladies and came up with a somewhat simplistic but possibly valid explanation: if I’m going to read stuff that drips with hatred of women, I’d rather it be from the male perspective than the female. This is quite likely a character flaw, but remember, I work in the media. I keep my enemies close at hand.
On the subject of gender differences, I would like to lodge a protest about the fact that Joaquin Phoenix and Seal are both routinely featured in glowing reviews and lifestyle pieces that never once mention the scars on their faces.
No female in either industry, if they could create a career at all, would be able to avoid talking about such things.
My radical disability side thinks it is amazing that anyone can achieve mainstream fame without having to talk about the scars all the time. Hurray for integration and acceptance and so forth. But the part of me that had to learn to accommodate the reality of being a girl with hundreds of scars is just plain annoyed.
I refused to have plastic surgery to correct the more gruesome examples, but it occurred to me that the doctors must have done something to my torso before I was old enough to consent or decline. I asked my mother and she replied yes; they injected every single skin cancer scar with cortisone.
So, in service to the presumed vanity of the adult I did not become, I underwent not only nearly four hundred biopsies, but four hundred cosmetic renovations. Without my consent or knowledge.
It is not surprising that I now have a terrible allergy to cortisone, and a fierce hatred of unnecessary medical interventions.