Meg's Diary

Combating the Crazies

First everything sucked. Now everything’s crazy!

Case in point:

Every time you turn on the news, there is some story about how at the airports, they want you to go through one of those X-ray scanners that take a picture of your naked bits!

In my opinion, the fact that there might be a nude photo of me (especially an EXTREMELY UNFLATTERING ONE) floating around out there, possibly even being shown on the national news by my boyfriend Brian Williams, means that the terrorists have won.

So, I will be avoiding these machines if I ever encounter one.

I WILL let TSA pat me down, of course. I get patted down every time I go to the airport anyway! That’s because TSA thinks I am the beauty bomber, because I carry so many beauty products with me (and they do not seem to know what Cetafil facial cleanser is, even though I explain EVERY TIME it has been voted best facial cleanser by Allure Magazine for years).

I don’t mind getting patted down by the lady TSAers, who are always quite nice about it. To me it’s like getting a quickie airport massage, which I find relaxing before a long flight.

But that’s HARDLY the extent of the crazy, as anyone who watches the Real Housewives knows (I’m not even going to get into Kim Z). What about the fact that the soap opera Days of Our Lives has started having its characters do little mini-commercials for Cheerios and Chex Party Mix on the show (just like I had them try to force my character Meena Harper write for the characters on the soap opera she worked for in Insatiable! Only they’re not hawking vampire-related products on DOOL)?

And what’s with the sexy werewolf movie getting made based on Little Red Riding Hood? And the famously-dissed-by-Oprah author James Frey started his own “YA book factory” (read author Maureen Johnson’s recap here to find out why this is crazy). And three—THREE—insanely good movies coming out in ONE weekend? Couldn’t they spread them out a little?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (which in case you don’t know is about a young wizard many people are trying to keep from reaching adulthood).

Burlesque (which is about a young dancer many people are trying to keep from dancing).

And Unstoppable (which is about a runaway train many people are trying to keep from blowing up.) (See the hilarious SNL spoof of it here). (OK, this came out last weekend, but still. That is too many good movies at once, people.)

It’s all just CRAZY. And that’s not even including the fact that with all of this—ALL OF THIS—going on, and the holidays coming up, too, I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED MY REVISIONS (or the other book I have due).

WHY GOD WHY???

But here’s the thing. There is a cure for the crazies:

It’s called READING.

If you haven’t started to read JANE by April Lindner, the November Meg Cabot Book Club Pick, I highly recommend you do so as soon as possible, as it’s quite therapeutic in helping to combat the crazies, and super GOOD! Join us for our discussion on it here!

And did I mention Tanya Stone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Barbie, which is now a Kirkus best Book of 2010?

“How Barbie looked was never the issue. Not to the girls who loved her. It was what she taught us that mattered. And what she taught us was that, like Barbie, we could be anything we wanted to be.” –Meg Cabot

That’s part of the foreword I wrote to this book, about my own struggles as a kid to get my mom to buy me a Barbie. She wouldn’t do it, because as a feminist, she thought Barbie was a bad role model.

You have to buy the book to find out how I won that battle of wills.

(PS The reason I needed a Barbie so badly was because I wanted to use her as a tool to help me with the narratives I was spinning in my head about a detective who was half Nancy Drew, and half Peggy Lipton* from my then favorite show, The Mod Squad. Barbie was a tool I needed to help solve crimes in my bedroom, such as who killed that massive slut, Skipper.)

*Peggy Lipton is Rashida Jones mom, FYI.

Barbie has always helped combat the crazies for me. I just got the Barbie Christmas catalog so I thought I’d share some of the new Barbies you may not know are out there:


Mad Men Barbie


Samantha From Bewitched Barbie


Christian Louboutin Forever Bad Role Model For Your Daughter Barbie


Justin Bieber Ken (actually he’s called Fashionista Ken, but we know the truth, right, ladies?)


Barbie So in Style It Takes Two Chillin’ Dolls – Grace and Darren (seriously, it says this: So In Style It Takes Two Chillin’)


Bad Girl Barbie From Twilight! She Is Mean! Yellow Eyes! She Has Yellow Eyes!


Comes With a Toilet Barbie!


I Can Shave Ken (Really! That is his name!)


People You Don’t Want Coming Over To Your House For Thanksgiving But They Just Invited Themselves And Now You Can’t Get Out Of It And OMG They’re Creepy Barbie

But I think the BEST thing that’s come out to combat the crazies this week (I’ve left the best for last) is the news that there’s going to be a royal wedding!

What is it about a wedding that makes everyone so happy? And a ROYAL WEDDING is the happiest news of all!

(If you want your book to be a bestseller, just call it Royal Wedding. I will buy it.)

So NOW every time you turn on the news, there won’t be just horrible stuff about the X ray scanners at the airport that will show your naughty bits to everyone: there is ROYAL WEDDING STUFF!

It’s so nice!

This brings me back to the early days of Diana and Charles (which I barely remember because I was, of course, so very young), but those were such happy times!

My girlfriend and I stayed up all night to watch Charles and Di’s wedding (because we believed, in our youth, that they’d never show the wedding again, so we had to watch it live, which in America was at 4AM).

Of course we acted it out beforehand with our Barbies dressed in toilet paper bridal gowns, and we dressed for the occasion ourselves in her mom’s old prom dresses, and we drank gallons of hot tea because we thought we were being British (and also needed to stay awake, and were so jacked up on caffeine that we had to go run around the Indiana countryside in the dark to calm down—my friend lived outside of town).

So, there we were, in our mom’s old prom dresses. With our Barbies. Running around in the corn. In the dark. It was insane. AND SO FUN.

So, to people who are grousing about “the cost” of William and Kate’s wedding: Who cares? WE NEED THIS WEDDING. We need to dress up our Barbies in toilet paper bridal gowns and run around the countryside in our mom’s prom dresses, jacked up on tea, screaming our heads off. To work off the crazy.

Otherwise, what else do we have to look forward to?

YAY!!!!

More later.

Much love,

Meg

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