So many thoughts on so many subjects.

Item the first: Something has been bothering me about ANTM since Wednesday night. Jaslene didn’t pass the psych test last season, and that’s why she wasn’t on, but she went to therapy and tried out again. Uh, maybe I read Sun Tzu, Musashi and Machievelli too many times* but if you’re giving these hamsters psych tests, then you (meaning the producers et al) have a pretty good idea how they are going to decompensate during the series. This means that they ARE casting for the psycho bitch (NeNe Vibrato), the crying girl (Brittney), the gently bewildered (Natasha and Kathleen) and all the other stereotypes we know, love and have come to expect. Creepy or no?

Item the second: I keep having dreams about my old college chum Pati. I went so far as to look her up on various people-finders and she may or may not be living a couple miles down the road. The last I’d heard, she was living in Georgia with her parents.

Pati was bi-polar, and never diagnosed, until later in life, like when we were in our mid-twenties and by then, she was happy with being bi-polar and didn’t want to/simply didn’t take her meds. I loved being around her when she was manic, but she got vicious when she was depressed. We quit being friends when I was going through my divorce and she was in a down cycle and it didn’t work too well, friendshipwise.

I’d love to see her again, but I’m afraid to call. Yes or no?

Item the third: I’ve come to realize that I am a tad borderline bi-polar myownself. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just prone to severe mood swings. You know, like suicidal downs and Top of the World, Ma ups.

I’ve been on Prozac for years, and while it shaves the peaks and valleys, the ups and downs are still there. I just don’t crawl in the closet, turn off the lights and curl up in the fetal position anymore.

But. I don’t know quite how to express this, the ups are still hard to manage. I am currently in the middle of one that, were I not on meds, would be dangerous. I am so full of creative energy, and have so many ideas that I want to pursue, that I don’t know where to begin.

Because I’m on the drugs, I can almost prioritize and get things done, but in my bones, I feel the fire and the spin. This would be a very bad cycle, were I not damped down.

Pati hated the damping down, and that’s why she wouldn’t take her meds. Because I’m in this part of the cycle, I think that’s why I want to make contact with her again. But that would be bad, maybe. Fuel to the fire, maybe. Or she might just hang up on me, still pissed off or whatever.

I don’t know. I’m writing. I’m designing t-shirts. I’m entering photos in contests. I’ve got a pile of fabric on my sewing table, and another pile of patterns and a project list that I want to finish by tomorrow night.

The energy blast is good, but I know that there will be a crash after. Maybe this is the bounce back from the depression I was in for two months prior to this, though. Maybe I need to up my meds. Maybe I just need a vacation.

In any event, I have work that I set for myself today, so you’ll excuse me if I leave you now.

*OK, I only read “The Prince” once, and maybe not even all the way through, but I got the gist of it.

Ah, another season of ANTM slogs to a close. In the words of my beloved husband, as the credits rolled and I groaned over the winner: “Why do you even watch this?”

Because it’s a train wreck, honey. A train wreck and a morality play all in one. Where else can I see people so delusional, and yet allowed to roam free? Where else can I watch drag queens without paying a cover charge? And where else but Greek tragedy does hubris get rewarded so generously?

Ahhhh. So here it is, the final three are Natasha the Mail-Order Russian Bride, Jaslene of Dubious Gender, and NeNe Vibrato, she of the beach-living husband, floppy baby and nonstop bitchiness.

There is some recapping, and we finally(!) see Natasha’s husband and baby in one photo. Let me just say that he doesn’t look twenty years older and the three of them make one gorgeous family. Whoo-hoo.

Then it’s off to their final photo shoot: the Cover Girl cover slash beauty shot. They are on their own here, since Mr. Jay will be off with the tv spot shoot, where the girls have to ad-lib a commercial. So that they shouldn’t be flying solo, last year’s winner, CariDeemented arrives to give them advice. She won, despite asking Nigel about the stick up his ass, so yeah, I guess you might consider taking her advice. Or not, like if you wanted to win.

Jaslene has a hard time looking soft, commercial and pretty (and you know, that is such a cheap shot that even I will forgo the obvious joke). She also interviews that smiling makes her face hurt. OK, now I have to go there? That is totally a line from Rocky Horror and one delivered by my previous favorite tranny, Dr. Frank N. Furter. But whatever.

Natasha is good at smiling, and looking soft, commercial and pretty. But then she gets flustered and embarrassed and is even cuter.

NeNe waltzes in and just carries on like she’s already the winner, perhaps because Carideemented has been giving her advice that starts “after you’ve won”. NeNe, not being the brightest but certainly the most egotistical of the lot, probably took that to mean that she had, in fact, already won. So she preens and smiles and preens some more. Everyone on set jokes with her about acting/looking like she’s already won, and that just adds fuel to her fire.

Then we have the unscripted tv spots. Natasha is backstage at a photo shoot. She has written and memorized a script for herself. The Cover Girl flack and Mr. Jay tell her to scrap the script and just wing it. The resulting commercial is cute and incomprehensible.

NeNe Vibrato is out in Sydney Harbour, and starts her commercial by saying, “Nine months ago I had a baby and I thought my life was over.” The CG flack and Mr. Jay, look at each other and simultaneously shriek CUT!!!! Let’s not go there, sistergirl. Let’s try it again, a little more upbeat and positive, ok? So she gets all cute and happy and waves her arms around and delivers.

Jaslene is in a limo, and gives a sing-song freaky face version, but nails it by talking about how the product matches 97 percent of all skin tones, including hers, y “soy latina”. The CG flack just comes in his chinos. ChaCha Diva does good, in an awful sort of way.

Interviews and confessionals follow, and NeNe Vibrato is full on Cuntie-Pie ala mode. She’s on and on about how she’s got this in the (ho)bag, how she hopes the OTHER finalist isn’t Natasha, because (and I’m pretty much quoting this) she “walks like a pigeon-toed duck with poop coming out of his butt.” And then she smirks and smiles and is so proud of her analogy. She just giggles over what a cute, but oh-so-naughty girl she is.

Judging. Nigel brings it home, and reminds us why he is our favorite male ex-model turned internationally renowned fashion photographer/pervy judge. He takes NeNe Vibrato’s photo betwixt thumb and fore finger, and holding it at arm’s length like the reeking piece of shit she is, says well, she’s beautiful, yes, but she is hardly the freshest face in the box. She photographs old, and her look is old and I’ve seen this face a million times. This is America’s NEXT Top Model,  and we’re looking for something new.

The rest of the judges all nod sagely. The critiques are sharp, and Jaslene is called to task for her appalling delivery of her commercial. They applaud the fact that she managed to hide her Jay Leno jaw long enough to be photographed looking pretty and sort of soft.

Natasha is just Natasha, and Twiggy and Nigel and Tyra all love her to death. So does your viewing audience, peeps.

The girls come back in to face Tyra (wearing a set of false eyelashes that must do double duty as weight training for your eyelids). She gives a photo to Jaslene. She gives her usual wahwahwah, so who goes home. NeNe is holding Natasha’s hand. Who’s two-faced now, you old hag? Natasha gets the picture and NeNe almost drops dead. She was so sure she had it in the bag. See? Morality play. Hubris. Good times.

Back to the house, where NeNe opines about how she’s glad she didn’t win, because she has knowledge and something inside. Yeah. It’s called bitterness. Classy to the end, just like so many other LOSERS. I guess she’s going to have to hock that big-ass pearl after all. HAH!

Then Natasha comes in to find Tyra waiting on the couch. It’s face time. She talks about her years at university in Moscow, where she had nothing. NOTHING. She talks about how she’s an American, now, and how America is a melting pot, and she represents all Americans with accents. Like me? I come from the South, y’all.

Next is Jaslene, and cries and cries and kisses Tyra’s fat ass. Aiee, ju have shanjed mi vida, Tyra. This has been a life-altering experience. Ju know, cuz last season, I dint get nowhere and now here I yam inna top two. Weepy, weepy, snivel.

I turned to the husband, and said: he just won.

And then the fashion show which is lame, but not as lame as the bride of dragula that they did last year, in which Carideemented totally robbed Melrose. As in years past, there is drama on the catwalk, when Natasha’s skirt just slides off her butt. She calmly steps over and out of it and keeps catwalking.

Finally, though, all good things must come to an end, and so after much deliberation, the judges decide that Jaslene will be…. America’s Next Top Tranny.

Really. Did you SEE the size of his wrists? I’m just saying. I can’t wait till next year when they have to use subtitles for his MLAACG commercials. Because, you know, I’ll be on the couch, cosmopolitans in hand, watching the train wreck for another season.

Is it wrong that I am not at all saddened by the sudden death of Jerry Falwell, and, in fact, may even be a little bit hopeful that nobody will pick up the reins (or reign) of his evil empire of neo-con religious zealots?

The breakroom on my floor vents directly into my office: right over my head, in fact. I smell every cup of oatmeal, every piece of toast, every bit of re-heated anything. Mostly this is fine, or at least acceptable as no one has yet to reheat liver.

But the one thing I hate, that I cannot abide, that causes a visceral revulsion through and through is what is currently wafting through the vent:

Microwave popcorn, with heavy artificial butterlike flavor.

I’m retching. There is something about the smell of microwave popcorn that just makes me heave. I would outlaw the stuff if I could. Or at least ban it from public access microwave ovens. I think it makes for worse air pollution than cigarette smoking.

Don’t misunderstand me, please. I think that popcorn is one of the major food groups, right up there with fried poultry skin, coffee, chocolate and liquor. But I mean real popcorn. Popped in oil over high heat. Personally, I like to use olive oil, and I once used bacon grease after reading in some White Trash Cookbook or another that bacon grease rendered popcorn ineffably delicious. It does, but I will never be able to eat it again. I could hear my arteries seizing up over the crunching.

I also miss the popcorn of my movie-going youth, when it was popped in palm oil, and real butter could be poured over it. I have seen solid coconut oil in the health food store, but can’t quit bring myself to purchase it, having a somewhat hazy memory of the reason movie theaters don’t use it any more is because it’s even worse for you than bacon grease. Probably explains why it tastes so good, too.

ADDED MAY 17, from GOURMET WEEKLY e-newsletter:

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, author of a bill to ban diacetyl, which gives microwave popcorn a faux buttery flavor but is suspected of causing a life-threatening lung disease in workers who handle it, speaking to The New York Times: “It’s not like we’re talking about a potential flaw in the polio vaccine. We are talking about a potentially devastating disease caused by buttering flavor. And there are alternatives out there. Including butter.”

This is an experiment, sort of, although it didn’t start out that way. See, the RLA, the PDBs* and I all went out for dinner tonight to a sorta kinda sports bar. Except it really isn’t a sports bar. It’s more of a diner, only in a strip mall. And with a lot of rock and roll memorabilia on the walls and a great juke box, kind of like the Hard Rock, if the Hard Rock were owned by a couple of folks who used to own the best used CD store in town, and not by some conglomerate mega-corp, and if the Hard Rock wasn’t just another theme park with food. So, maybe it isn’t like the Hard Rock at all. But I digress. We all went out to dinner at the Rock Fish Grill, and I told the owner we were on a timer, because I had to be home by 8 to watch the hamsters.

Well, not only were we not home by eight, but our food had barely arrived, so I commandeered one of the tvs, and watched ANTM. MOS.

MOS stands for “Mit Out Sound”, and is a hold over (or so my old film teacher told us) from the Very Early Days of Hollywood, when most of the film makers came from Germany, and if you were shooting without a sound track, you were shooting Mit Out Sound, and that became MOS on film clappers to this day.

I watched ANTM MOS, and let me tell you, real-time captioning for the deaf is not real time. And who ever is typing it? Either can’t hear, can’t type or can’t spell. And if it’s computer generated? They need better computers.

So. Here is what happened on ANTM tonight, as best as I can patch it together. First the girls all discuss how much they do or do not miss Sara, and Whitney wahwahwahs some more about being a plus sized model, and how she has to step up her game and whawhawhateverrrrrs.

The hair dresser comes to the house and cuts the rat weave out of Brit’s head (there’s even a sign over her bed, and other hints that those stupid made up “supermodel” names are going to be sticking around till the end of the season. More’s the pity. And there she is, left with the hair she came in with, except a better color.

There may or may not have been some recapping of Renee’s sob session. There was definitely a recapping of Fifty Cent shoving Jael in the pool. Last week RJ and I disagreed about the timing of Jael’s saying to Fitty that she was “half black and half Jewish, so that makes [her] Blewish, and you can’t hang wit dat” and him pushing her into the pool. RJ said Jael was wet when she said it, therefore it happened after. And I said it was one of, if not the last thing she said before she got wet. In the event, according to POTES, I was right.

And then, not a couple of days after the episode aired there was this brouhahah about Fifty calling Jews thugs, and other racist crap. I leave you to connect the dots. I would threaten to boycott Mr. Cent, but since he’s never gotten a dime from me yet, that would be a tad hollow. Sort of like Mr. Cent’s head.

Anyway, back to this week. This week they get their acting lessons from someone or other who “stars” on a show I’ve never seen, and then get further lessons from someone who was in a movie I’ve never seen, but I understand was a hit with some demographic or another: Napoleon Dynamite. But not the star of Napoleon Dynamite, because even I know who he is, and he’s currently tearing up the big screen as the feather-haired sidekick to Will Feral** in Blades of Glory.

With the sound off, and the closed captioning on, it’s hard to tell how bad the girls are, and I can only take the captioning’s word for it when Dionne claims to be speaking in a Jamaican accent. For that matter, I can only take the captioning’s word for it that Renee was totally committed to the role (whatever the role was, because I don’t have a fucking clue what they were supposed to be acting) and deserved to win the prize.

I expect to hear crickets when asked to name a friend to share her prize, since we all know that everyone hates her and she ain’t so keen about anyone. But she pulls a name out of her ass, and nice Dionne gets to share the prize, which seems to be some lame t-shirt that referrences Napoleon Dynomite, which, since I haven’t seen, I also have to take on faith.

Back at the house, there is the usual whining about who won and how they didn’t deserve it, and the usual snickering about how lame the prize was that they won, and probably some trash talking about how nice it was for Dionne to get to be Renee’s friend and take one for the team, ‘cause nobody ELSE was gonna pretend to be. I might be making that up.

But then, OH. MY. GOD. A SURPRISE, surprise, surprise!!!! You’ll never guess! Oh. You guessed. Yeah, this is the week that the winner gets a visit from their family. Dionne’s momma, sister and baby come. Dionne’s momma is in a wheelchair and has a Marilyn piercing in her upper lip. Dionne’s momma is in a wheelchair because some junkie that she was tryin’ to help get straight got all jealous and shit when she was gonna git married, so he shot her and now she’s all paraplegic. See? And you thought there weren’t going to be sob stories this year. Her baby is cute enough, I guess.

The powers that be managed to find Renee’s husband out on the beach where he’s been living and pluck the baby (who looks a little floppy to me, or maybe fetal alchohol syndrome, or just a little, uh, wall eyed?) from the arms of his grandmother (and why won’t she let her son stay with them? Or why won’t he stay with his own mother?)and send them to visit, too. We see the baby crawling down the runway, and I read someone saying to the baby that Miss Jay would just snatch you baldheaded if he saw you crawl down the runway like that. Pretty funny, actually, though I have no idea who said it.

We see Jael being nice and taking pictures, and then poor Natasha just loses it cause she wants to see HER baby and why can’t she? And she talks on the phone to her husband and cries and cries and cries and we see a picture of her baby, and she is really cute. With big eyes.

Oh, well. Party’s over, y’all come back now, hear? And the family members go home and the girls go to their photoshoot and poor Natasha is all red-eyed and weepy and miserable and Renee is all smiling and obnoxious and gloating about having seen her little floppy baby. And yeah, there was some serious face sucking with the husband. Eww. And she still isn’t taking off the Darth Jader head rag.

The shoot? Well, the concept is to re-enact “famous” ANTM moments from the past. They are “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Do Nude” from season one. “The Great Granola Bar Kerfuffle”, “The Siamese Twins”, “The Girl Who Passed Out Cold at Judging”, “Joanie (now Joni) In The Dentist Chair for 12 Hours”, “I Am Bi-Curious Sarah and Kim in the Limo” and “Michelle’s Impetigo”. This is as big a snooze as it sounds, even if they do bring the original girls back to co-star in their own re-enactments.

Among the highlights is Dionne, who is totally freaked having to be in a limo with a lesbian, much less having to pretend to kiss her, discovers that Kim is hot, and that she, Dionne, is liking this. Natasha is great with big old scabs on her face. Brit totally rocks out as one of the twins, now triplets. Renee can’t compete with Joni (ha!) and Whitney totally does not rock it as the girl who won’t do nude. Whitney in a white beach towel is not pretty.

I need to interject here, that the female half of the PDBs is a former art director for SELF, back in New York City. She pegged CariDee as the winner last year, just after looking at the portfolios on-line, three quarters of the way through the season. Tonight she looked at everyone and said Brit, Natasha and Renee are the three finalists, and that it’ll go to Renee. Jael, she said, was too aware of herself and her own look to be the sort of malleable putty a model needs to be. She also said that Jael is a man. I kept telling her that that distinction belongs to Jaslene, but Jaslene wasn’t even on the PDB’s radar.

So. Judging. “Hey, look! The man’s wearing a dress.” That’s Jael, and she’s not a man, dammit. The judges seem to call Jaslene a drag queen, and not in a good way. The judges, well, Nigel, gets all creamy talking about Brit and the twins. They allow as how they didn’t even notice Renee and her ugly face were in the same frame as Joni. Jael, meh. Whitney in a beach towel? Icky. Dionne gets the love from all. They love Natasha and her fierce scabs. The photographer and Jay both say how she came to the shoot all sad and teary and then WORKED IT on the set. So who goes home? Jael and Whitney are the last two called, and Tyra finally has to say goodbye to her pet plus sized girl.

But child? Please don’t show us those thighs/knees of yours again. Christ, if I wanted to see dimples like that I could look in the mirror. Well, after the scabs and bruises heal.

Next week, Jael has to take the marbles out of her mouth and learn to speak before she gets sent home.

*PDB: Persons Dressed in Black


** Yeah, I know, Ferrel. I just don’t find him funny, OK? So feral it is.

I’ve been watching the Alec Baldwin/Kim Bassinger debacle, and remembering how I felt while I was going through the protracted divorce with the Antichrist, and I’ve designed a t-shirt that I think all women who have an ex can appreciate.

I just opened a Cafe Press shop, featuring my new design.

Because, you know, it would just be so much easier that way.