I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

pregnant and so in the episodes where she was carrying Little Ricky, the network censors insisted that she say “expecting.”)

I don’t want to go back to the days when “pregnancy” was a bad word, but maybe we can agree that while I’m trying to relax and eat some frozen yogurt at the nail salon, I don’t need to read about Hollywood stars ingesting their own placentas? That’s what online fetish websites are for—people who want to think about goo on an actress’s face in the privacy of their own home.

Granted, placenta is probably great for your health. Like colonics. Sometimes I get colonics but I’d never take to a magazine to let everyone know that one time my fecal matter was shaped like a hook, preventing it from passing through my intestines properly. When I lay in that bed and saw my hooklike poop swim through the colonic machine, I never felt so in touch with my body. Do you know we are the only mammals who need to pay people to stick tubes up our asses and flush us with water to help us shit? We are! It’s such a miracle!

See? How do you like it? It’s gross. You owe me a frozen yogurt, January Jones.

IT REALLY SEEMS like over the past few years babies have replaced pashminas as the hot new accessory to drape your arms around. Maybe my resistance to having a baby has something to do with my natural resistance to look like everyone else or to do what the magazines dictate. My mom didn’t allow me to wear Guess jeans in 1986. “Jennifah, all the girls wear those. Why do you want to look like everyone else?” Instead, she just outfitted me in the Wrangler version of Guess jeans so that I could look like the slightly worse-off version of everyone else. Now that I think of it, I’m sure my mom knew full well she was just trying to save money but realized she could couch her thriftiness in a morality lesson. I don’t think her main aim was to cultivate in me a sense of individuality, because when I started wearing thrift-store black dresses, ripped tights, and combat boots and dyeing my hair jet black, her tune changed to, “Jennifah, why can’t you wear some color? It’s very much in style right now. You look like a witch with shoe polish on her head.”

I switched to another magazine that was a few months old. If the World Wide Web ever permanently crashes and I need to know who won the Oscars in 2009—I think the nail salon would be the first place I’d go to find out. The windowsill at any given manicure place is like a national archive of celebrity gossip. I don’t know what happens to the new magazines. I have a feeling that Tammy and her cohorts take the new ones home and keep them on the back of the toilet, where they are left to absorb foul odors and humidity that makes the pages curl, only to bring them back to the salon six months later.

I read that Jay-Z made some big changes in his career upon the birth of his new daughter, Blue Ivy. (By the way, whenever I hear that name I can’t help but think of the late porn star Blue Iris, who was a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s radio show. I hope for the best for Jay-Z’s baby and that she doesn’t grow up to become a granny who says, “I’m getting myself hot,” and shows her elderly gray pussy on Pay-Per-View.)

Jay-Z had allegedly decided that since he has a daughter, he would no longer say the word “bitch” in any of his songs. He even supposedly released a poem promising as much:

Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich
I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch
I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it
Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.

Unfortunately, before I could get all huffy and wonder whether Hova ever considered the feelings and opinions and struggles of his mother, his wife, and his female friends before his daughter was born, the report was exposed as a hoax. Apparently there are still plenty of bitches in his life that he holds near and dear and it did not take making a baby for him to have basic empathy and a social conscience. Jay-Z, I salute you.

But so many other celebrities who are not married to Beyonce claim that until they had a baby their lives were just a series of trivial things like maintaining a movie career, and now that they have a baby their lives have real meaning. I’ve never had a movie career or a baby and I’m a firm believer that my life has a lot of meaning! I believe that every person on earth has meaning just by being alive. I also believe that the meaning of life is to love—whether you love a child or a string of skinny-jeans-wearing bass-player boys. One of my favorite quotes about the meaning of life is from American contemporary spiritual leader Ram Dass: “We’re all just walking each other home.” I’d never have known he said this if I weren’t scrolling through Twitter, but whatever, it still counts as spiritual reading.

Even though I don’t have a maternal instinct, I often fantasize about helping some of these celebrity babies that I read about in Us Weekly’s “Toddlers—They’re Just Like Us” section.

Me: “Hey, I’m worried about you.”

Celebrity Baby: “Who are you?”

Me: “Oh, just a nosy person who keeps reading about you and your family in the tabloids.”

Celebrity Baby: “I’m in a magazine? People can see my picture and know what I look like? What if someone decides to kidnap me? I’ll be so easy to find!”

Me: “I know. I don’t know if your parents have the best judgment. They’re kind of using you to prove to the world that they’re not complete narcissists. Not that the definition of ‘narcissist’ is ‘childfree.’ It actually just means an inability to feel empathy. Lots of childfree people are still quite empathetic, usually not toward children but… I feel bad for stuffed animals in stores that no one buys. That counts as selfless.”

Celebrity Baby: “My parents seem nice, although I still don’t get why I’m white and my mom is Mexican.”

Me: “Oh, no, honey. That’s not your mom. That’s your nanny.”

Celebrity Baby: “Oh. Where’s my mom?”

Me: “She’s off filming a movie in Vancouver for a few months.”

Celebrity Baby: “But I thought her life had meaning when I was born and that movies weren’t that important. So why is she making more?”

Me: “Well, it is her job.”

Celebrity Baby: “But she has dozens of millions in the bank and owns four estates all over the world. I didn’t think she had to work.”

Me: “Look, I told you they have judgment problems. Your parents seem to think that birthing you or paying their surrogate to birth you because they were too busy not wanting to get fat has transformed them into good people who suddenly understand the meaning of life and now care about things outside of themselves.”

Celebrity Baby: “But do I count as something outside of themselves? I mean, technically I am an extension of them. Who wouldn’t want a cute miniversion of herself and her hot actor husband?”

Me: “You seem pretty smart for your age.”

Celebrity Baby: “Yeah, well, I have to be pretty smart for my age, don’t I? I just found out that my parents didn’t have a basic moral code until I was born. They sound pretty fucking stupid if you ask me. Besides, why aren’t my parents filming movies in Los Angeles? One of our greatest exports, Hollywood, is being outsourced to Canada. This is why our economy is in the shitter.”

Next in my trashy-magazine-a-thon, I happened upon this quote from Sarah Jessica Parker:

As a working mother high heels don’t really fit into my life anymore—but in a totally wonderful way. I would much rather think about my son than myself.

Have these moms ever heard of yoga? Meditation? Volunteering for the elderly or the homeless? Taking care of a relative? There are lots of ways to not think about yourself and when you’ve truly mastered not thinking about yourself, you don’t even have the urge to tell everyone that you are not thinking about