GUILTY PLEASURES, OLD AND NEW
One of my favorite guilty pleasures is this British gossip email thing called Popbitch. It’s mostly full of weird links (like the one to the “KISS midget tribute band”), stories about people whose job it is to “wank off” dogs and chatter about British celebrities you’ve never heard of, which is surprisingly fun. I don’t know who James Gooding is, but I’m as shocked as anyone that he’s dating Aimee Osbourne. It’s kind of like reading strangers’ blogs, I guess, but with good bad jokes (Q: What’s the best thing about having sex with twenty eight year olds? A: There’s twenty of them.)
Here is my favorite thing from this week’s installment, an excerpt from Mariah Carey’s book proposal (or so they say – this just seems too good to be true). Apparently, Mariah wants to write a book of poetry for kids. This is from her poem titled “The Unicorn and I”:
If that is real (and I pray that it is), someone has to publish it. Otherwise, what will future college kids read when they’re stoned?
My latest guilty pleasure is reading people’s “Dear Birthparent…” letters on the internet. I’ve been reading “The Kid” by Dan Savage, about his attempts to adopt a child with his boyfriend, and I learned that people trying to participate in open adoptions are required to write letters to prospective mothers as a means of introduction.
And naturally, I became obsessed.
You can find tons of these letters on the internet by typing “Dear Birthparent” or “Dear Birthmother” into a search engine. I feel so many emotions reading these people’s stories and picturing them waiting by the phone for the call that some expectant mother has chosen them. I can’t explain the voyeuristic thrill it gives me. It’s like a non-psycho person’s fight club. Instead of going to support group meetings for diseases I don’t have, this is what I do to feel alive.
Most of the profiles have photos of the happy couples (and occasional singles) smiling with a mixture of hope and desperation alongside lengthy pleas to anonymous mothers to entrust them to raise their unborn children. Some common themes: what a difficult decision the birth mother must be going through, how they met each other, how much they love playing with their niece/nephew/neighbor’s kid, how much they love each other, how much they love their pets, how much they love Jesus, how many wonderful cultural institutions are in their immediate vicinity, and hiking.
And there’s nothing more exciting than seeing one that has “Matched!” printed next to it. My favorite so far is the couple who spent a lot of time acknowledging that yes, they were “a same sex couple and a multi-racial one at that” and “yes, we are two men”, and who obviously thought that for these reasons, they’d never in a million years get picked. But they’ve been “Matched!”, too. Congratulations, Avi and Will!
Some favorite quotes:
“We can’t wait to buy that first pair of Mickey Mouse ears.”
“We have a dog named Gryffindor and a cat named Hufflepuff who are great playmates.”
“Monica already has millions of ideas to make our child’s room a fairy-tale like place.”
“We have a very deep well within our hearts that is filled with love and caring and we are confident it will spill over and fill the heart of your baby as well.”
“He looks forward sharing his passion with a child by building a tree house play structure in our backyard.”
“Frank will be a great dad. I know this because of the special relationship he has with our cat Max.”
jerry-mahoney.com 