Bad Behavior

Sometimes I wish I could marry Gail Collins. I often save her columns to read in my foulest moods, and I invariably find myself cheered or satisfyingly riled up. At the moment I'm a big fan of "A Catered Affair," published on March 22, 2008.

I'm having a lot of trouble being not upset by the Spitzer scandal, and the subsequent announcement by Paterson that he had himself cheated on his wife. Not prostitution, not so bad, right? Sure. Frankly, it's not the illegality of Spitzer's at that bothered me so much, but the willing betrayal of his wife and family with girls only a few years older than his three lovely teenage daughters. Why does the virgin-whore dichotomy persist today? Why must women choose which to become? Or do men choose for them? 

Jerry Hall's famous quote is only famous because many people view it as good advice. Chef in the kitchen, maid in the living room, whore in the bedroom. What if you don't want to be a chef, what if you don't want to be a maid, what if you don't want to be a WHORE? Is the degradation of women somehow necessary to a man's happiness, and if you won't be party to it, they go elsewhere to get it? 

Either way, Paterson's romantic trysts at the Days Inn are not much better. They are a degradation in their own way, a way of reducing the sex he was having with these women to something sleazy. Anyone who has passed by that particular corner on the Upper West Side knows that. It's a place the neighborhood gentrification committee forgot to fix, a landscape out of the movie Metropolitan. Taking his wife there to work on their marriage was not an act of bravery or contrition, but an attempt to transfer his need for a borderline setting for sex to his relationship with his wife. 

The big sad question is: why do these women go for it? 

Anxiety in Its Various Forms

I don't like to think of myself as nuts. I spend hours upon hours getting ready to go out, be it to work or play, preparing to impersonate a sane person. I wash my face, I apply makeup like a pro, and I generally am able to get my hair to hang across my forehead in an attractive way. But even before I'm out the door, something is invariably wrong. 

Often it is with my physical appearance. My skin is dry, or I have a pimple, or my outfit makes me look like I stepped out of 1998. And suddenly the headlines start screaming at me, scrolling across my brain as I lock the door behind me and step into the elevator. 

"The Associated Press confirmed this morning that Marian Vespers, aged 25 (oh god, really?), was struck by a car on her way to a hijacked subway train on the morning of the worst terrorist attack in history."

"Her mother was unable to find any attractive snapshots of her to give to the AP. So we, unfortunately, can only run this photo of a slightly overweight, squinty eyed girl without the slightest bit of beauty in her face."

More often, not only does my physically appearance horrify me, but I find that I have a pain in my chest, or near my groin, or at my temple. Heart attack, ovarian cancer, brain tumor. I stay away from the PDR but it doesn't help. I know I have all these diseases. I smoke (I know, I shouldn't) and no smoker is less carefree than me. Perhaps it was that cigarette last Tuesday that finally did me in, allowing me a week to say the goodbyes I neglected to say. Perhaps it was that 4th glass of wine this weekend that finally killed my hippocampus. 

If, and this is rare, I actually make it all the way to the subway without any skin troubles or blood clots, waiting for the train always get me in the end. Should I get on the crowded train? Isn't it always the crowded trains that crash? The cars remind me of the journey to Aushwitz--surely I should not die being shat on by a man bound for the Financial District. And yet the empty train that follows seems ominous--why is this car so empty during rush hour?

I spend the 4-minute train ride rigid, upright, and frantically typing away on my Blackberry. By the time I get to work, my makeup has melted off.