Response To Reader Who ‘Wants To Die 5 Out Of 7 Days’

I’m scrapping today’s originally scheduled post because of a message that hit my inbox overnight. I’ll keep this man’s name out of it, but a more visible response is necessary.

Mood music:

This was a comment attached to a post I wrote a few months ago called “A Depressed Mind Is Rarely A Beaten Mind.” I’ll give you this fellow’s comments in bold italics, with my responses along the way.

Hello. Was wondering if I could ask you a few questions? What age did you first realize your depression? When did you accept it? 

I remember becoming aware of my depression as a kid. I didn’t see it for what it was, but had those awful feelings of hopelessness. The brighter the sun shined, the darker I felt. I’ve only come to accept in recent years that this for me is a chronic condition that can be managed but not eradicated.

I respect you’re a man of God and you haven’t killed yourself, but is it worth it?

Most of the time, I’ve felt that life is worth it for several reasons. The first is that this world is bigger than me and I truly believe I was put here for a reason. Maybe it was to write the stuff I write. Maybe it was to help raise the two children God entrusted me with.

Whatever the case, I’m a guy who simply doesn’t believe we’re put here by coincidence. It doesn’t make sense to me that we would be conceived by pure randomness or by accident. That’s my faith talking, but it’s what I believe.

I’m going to be 23 and 5 out 7 days I wanna die. And I don’t know why. My heart feels like its falling into my stomach and then nothing matters no more. My mind wonders to the darker side of life. Smiles turn to blink stares and burst of rage. I sleep 3-4 hours a night and am close to only eating one meal a day. Tried writing out my feelings distracting my mind with music and activities, although no one other than myself sees me in this state.

I’ve been there. For me, music has always been a savior, and the writing has been a critical coping tool in more recent years. Rage? I’ve lived with that many times and still do some days. Thing is, I think EVERYONE has those feelings from time to time. The problem is when those feelings crowd out the good stuff.

I don’t want people sympathy so I don’t bring it up to friends or family. Worst part of everything is, I wanna help people like myself but I can’t even help myself.

It’s funny how we try and sometimes even succeed in helping others when we can’t help ourselves, isn’t it? People tell me every day that this blog helps them, and I’m always dumbfounded because I still fall short in so many areas of my own life.

One thing has gotten clear to me as I’ve grown older, though: Keeping it inside is the absolute worst thing you can do. You need to talk to family and friends. You would be surprised how much they can relate to your feelings. Most people, after all, suffer in silence. When you discover you’re not alone, you feel a strength you never knew you had.

Don’t stop there, though. If you haven’t already, find a therapist and get the special help only they can offer. A lot of people balk at the idea of seeing “a shrink.” But I would be nowhere today had I not sought one out. A therapist can help you pinpoint the fault lines in your brain and help you seal them up.

Medicine also helps me. I take two drugs for OCD, ADD and depression, and they have done wonders. Some consider these drugs snake oil, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. I try to explain it in a post called “The Engine.”

Sorry for burdening you just trying to find answers from all sources. Thanks and again I envy you. Take care.

You’re not a burden. And don’t envy me. I’m far from perfect, and the truth is that you don’t have to live your life this way. There is always a way out in which you get to live. You either want the help and the better life or you give up. I’m 41 and if I had given up in my 20s I would have missed out on so many joys that I’ve experienced since then.

I don’t know you, but based on what I’ve been able to glean from your note, you’re not a quitter. If you care enough about others to try to help them with the things you can’t help yourself with, that tells me you have it in you to bring the demons to heal.

I’ll pray hard for you, and end for now by wishing you the very best.

God Bless you.

Bill Brenner

Was ‘Hunger Games’ Star Too Fat For The Role?

There’s a controversy swirling around online regarding “Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence. With one critic suggesting she was too curvy to play the role of emaciated heroine Katness Everdeen, the anger is on.

What is making some people bristle is that this smacks of the bullshit talk that sends girls into the hell of eating disorders.

Mood music:

I’m not a girl. But I’ve dealt with an eating disorder for much of my life. So, naturally, I have some thoughts on the matter.

First, let’s look at what people are saying, starting with the movie review by Manohla Dargis of the New York Times that set people off. In the review, she makes a point that the character Lawrence plays is a starved teen with bones sticking out everywhere. Specifically, she wrote:

A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.

The L.A. Times “Ministry of Gossip” column ran with that single comment, calling it a “bold indictment” of a 21-year-old star “who currently captivates the attention of impressionable young females and her same-aged peers in show business.”

Are the critical sentiments — Vulture has a comprehensive roundup — correct? On the one hand, the content adapted from Suzanne Collins’ dark novels dictates that these oppressed citizens are in fact emaciated. But by all standards Lawrence is hardly overweight, though widely attributed with that dread celeb magazine buffer of “curvy.” 

My colleague at CSO Magazine, Joan Goodchild, expressed her outrage in a Facebook post, which is where I saw all this for the first time. She wrote:

This is the kind of b*llsh*t story that pisses me off. I haven’t seen the film, or read the book. But if it is a “Hollywood interpretation” of the book, then this is hardly the first time the film deviates from the book. Yet here we have an article about how a thin, yet healthy, young actress was “too well fed” to play the part she had. And we wonder why so many young women have issues with food and eating disorders in this country? This is ridiculous!

I agree in the sense that there is a lot of this bullshit in Hollywood. How “curves” got to be synonymous in Hollywood with overweight is beyond me. Media in general has perpetuated the myth for years that stars need to be super thin. That warped view is especially glaring in the case of women.

There’s a certain evil to how Hollywood carries on this way, because filmmakers know their work influences young people and instills them with the idea that they have to look a certain way to fit in and be loved.

Did Hollywood influence my own eating disorder? Absolutely, though my relationship with food was corrupted long before by growing up in a family of compulsive over-eaters.

For me, the Hollywood part stemmed from my love of Heavy Metal music and the culture built up around it. The heroes in this world of musicians were the skinny guys with long hair. To be emaciated was to look good. Wanting to be like my heroes, I did a lot of things I covered in a recent post called “Skinny Like A Fool.”

I think, to a certain extent, I abandoned my earlier goal of being a musician and got into journalism because in the latter profession, you could be fat and cool at the same time. Of course, I took that to the other extreme and became a 280-pound pile of waste before it was over. While I’m some 80 pounds lighter than that today, I’m still a big, stocky guy who had to drop flour and sugar and start weighing all my food to regain some sanity.

I was never trying to make it in Hollywood, and, being a guy, there were certain pressures I never felt. But what I did and why still left a lot of scars.

Having been down that road, I share Joan’s anger. But I also think some of the rage over calling Lawrence well-fed has been blown out of proportion.

In the original New York Times review, the words “too well fed” are never used. “Seductive” and “womanly” are over the top, but not the same as calling someone fat. The L.A. Times gossip column is where the “too well fed” came into play. Of course, that’s the newspaper of Hollywood, so spin that as you will.

Maybe someday we’ll move beyond looks and start judging each other by what’s in our heads and hearts. But not today, apparently.

What Else Is There?

When I’m wallowing in self-pity, I like to ask that question. It always goes back to those moments when I’m not particularly enjoying the clean and sober life.

Mood music:

For the most part, it’s gotten easier. When you don’t spend all your time thinking about how to pull off a binge, you get to experience a much fuller life. You enjoy the company of people more. You pack a lot more living into your travels. Best of all, you don’t go through the day under a foggy shroud that follows a drinking, eating or drugging binge.

But I won’t lie. Sometimes, when everyone around me is enjoying a glass of wine, a few beers, some cake and a smoke, I feel like the spoiled child who sits with his arms folded, pouting, because he lost dessert for leaving vegetables on the plate.

Saturday night kind of left me feeling that way. Erin and I had a fabulous evening at an auction to benefit our kids’ school and afterwards we went to the home of friends. The kitchen was packed with people whose company we’ve come to treasure. We didn’t go home until around 2 a.m., which for us is almost unheard of.

It was St. Patrick’s Day. Part of me would have loved indulging in the whiskey and wine on the table, and I would have enjoyed a cigar even more. But I can’t do that stuff anymore. Luckily, our hosts had Red Bull on hand. That’s my go-to beverage when the temptation for alcohol becomes too much.

I’m starting to realize something about these “what else is there” moments. It’s the dark side of my soul trying to trap me in old behavior. The devil whispers something in my ear about how I should be able to enjoy some of the finer things in life; that I shouldn’t be living the clean life if it’s going to make me a miserable bastard.

And yet I still weigh out every meal I eat. I avoid flour and sugar as if it were lethal poison. And whenever I have the opportunity to drink alcohol or smoke — particularly during travel — I don’t follow through.

I suppose I have a strong enough memory of all the pain that followed indulgence and I remember how hard I’ve worked to clean myself up. I guess the thought of falling backwards pisses me off and sparks worry more than the self-pity I feel when I can’t party.

Strangely enough — particularly where the smoking is concerned — I think the Wellbutrin I take along with Prozac to keep depression at bay has eased the craving for smoke. I’d heard about Wellbutrin having this effect on people, but I quit smoking several months before taking it and I didn’t really connect the dots.

What I’ve discovered, I told Erin Saturday night, is that I stopped being pissed about the no smoking when the Wellbutrin took hold. Until then, though I had quit, I was pissed about it. I wanted to smoke and only stopped because I got caught.

The clean and sober life is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.

But when I look at the things I’ve gained in life, I know it’s worth every deprived minute.

Such A Waste To Lose One’s Mind-Fulness

A combination of OCD and ADD has given me a bitch of a handicap: Living in the moment and being present has become tough as nails. Health experts call this elusive thing I search for “mindfulness.”

Mood music:

Here’s what happens:

When the OCD runs hot, I develop tunnel vision. I focus in on the task I’m either doing or thinking about. That’s good if you have a major work project to complete. It’s bad when someone is trying to talk to you and your brain is weaving a hundred schemes.

When the ADD picks up steam, I lose my focus. I’ll start thinking about a song I heard that day or how good it’ll feel to get into bed with a book. All while someone is talking to me.

I thought I stabbed this problem in the heart and killed it. On further reflection, I’m finding that the same problem has simply changed bodies like Dr. Who.

That in itself is still good, since the old persona was intense fear and anxiety that often incapacitated me. I broke out of that shell and life has been so much better as a result. But my current troubles are still painful.

Dealing with this issue has become the main focus of recent therapy sessions. I started bringing up the issue with my therapist because I’ve been realizing how unfair and hurtful zoning out can be at home. I don’t want to be that guy. And yet, for the moment, I am.

It’s not just a problem at home. Anywhere I go, when people are talking to me for anything longer than five minutes, I start to enter a fog. I still capture the main points of the conversation, but it requires heavy effort — effort that can be physically painful.

In recent weeks, I’ve considered what this handicap could cost me. My first reaction was to feel scared. That has settled into a low-grade anger.

Anger that I can’t just fix my brain and be done with it.

Anger that I have to do more therapy than usual.

Anger that the whole thing is exhausting me.

But that’s life. I have a problem, and I intend to beat it. And if I can’t beat it, I intend to figure out how to manage it.

At my age, I’m really not sure how much more I can fix. But even though I haven’t achieved perfection up to this point, the journey has been a beautiful one, full of experiences I never could have had a few years ago.

What lies ahead could be unpleasant. But as with past challenges, I may find gifts buried beneath the ugliness.

Art by Bill Fennell

When Difficult Kids Turn Out Alright

Readers know by now that Erin and I have a big challenge — helping our second child manage ADHD. He’s often difficult. Fair enough. I was a difficult child, too.

Duncan is actually tame compared to the 8-year-old me. He’s never filled up my gas tank with a garden hose. He’s never lit his plastic toys on fire, nearly burning down the house in the process. He’s never stolen money from his Dad’s wallet. He doesn’t bring home revolting report cards. That stuff was all me.

But it’s easy for me to forget those things when I’m the parent. When Duncan leaves a path of destruction around the house, causes scandal in the schoolyard by telling classmates Santa isn’t real or earns a note home from a teacher concerned that he’s not playing well with others, all the worries start about where he’s headed in life.

But I have hope.

Erin found a blog post from Rick Ackerly — a nationally recognized educator and speaker with 45 years of experience working in and for schools, dealing with kids of every harrowing stripe. It’s about how difficult children often grow up to be enormously successful adults.

He writes about an encounter he had on a flight with a CEO and three other high achievers. They talked about how they were bratty, rebellious children, and how the resulting experiences proved more valuable than a college education. He then says:

I put these stories together like this, not to try to convince parents and other educators that being bad is good, nor that one should hope for a difficult child, but to remind us of three critical education principles:

1) Difficulty, conflict, struggle, mistakes, disappointment and failure are where most learning comes from—usually the most important learning.

2) Difficulty is the life we are preparing our children for. We naturally hope that our children will be happy and successful, but that is a mirage–and we know it. The life they will get is a life of challenge, and the best preparation for challenge is challenges. When it’s harder for us, it might be better for them.

3) Raising difficult children might interfere with the rainbow life we were hoping for, but it might be better for the world. Remember Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, the willful child who started a charter school in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods when she was 23 and now at the age of 30 is running the thriving, vibrant Academy for Global Citizenship serving 250 students, 81% of whom are low income.

Someday I want to be on a flight from Chicago to Decatur with the Spanish teacher, the CEO, and your formerly difficult child.

Having a difficult child may be difficult, but it is not the worst thing that could happen to you.

If you haven’t seen his blog yet, you need to do yourself a favor and bookmark it. Every parent should read his work.

One would think I don’t need such reminders. Despite my rough patches, I turned out fine. I have a beautiful family, a successful career in journalism and I’m in the best health I’ve been in for years — despite all my self-destructive behavior.

But as I said, when you’re the parent, you forget and need lots of reminders.

Thanks for that, Mr. Ackerly.

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Beyond Boing Boing: Xeni Jardin Inspires Me

I’m a long-time reader of the Boing Boing site and have always been particularly fond of the work of editor Xeni Jardin. Her openness in talking about her breast cancer makes me appreciate her all the more.

Jardin’s greatest strength as a writer has always been her ability to focus on the human side of technology, and she was doing just that in early December when she live tweeted her first mammogram. She poked fun at a procedure that scares the hell out of most women who have one for the first time, saying, among other things:

Comparing her experience to Katie Couric’s TV-documented colonoscopy some years back, she said:

At the end of this string of tweets came this:

She filled in the blanks with a column later on, in which she described having an ultrasound:

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor’s name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we’d hoped to find.

“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. 

Since then, Jardin has taken her readers through every step of her treatment experiences. She started a Twitter exchange the other day about how to wake up veins that have collapsed from too many IV needles. Having suffered through the collapsed veins as a kid when Crohn’s Disease made regular IV drips necessary, I knew how valuable this kind of exchange was.

She has tweeted about the sickening effects of chemo and not being able to taste her coffee in the morning.

She’s done it all with a lighthearted demeanor that makes the suffering accessible and less scary. For us, at least.

I’ve always had enormous respect for those who share the experience of a medical procedure many consider embarrassing. Many women are reluctant to get their boobs flattened into pancakes, just as I’ve never enjoyed the frequent colonoscopies I have to have because the childhood Chrohn’s Disease makes me a high risk for colon cancer in middle age.

But when someone shares the experience, it becomes less embarrassing and, more importantly, less mysterious and scary.

That’s why I’ve always respected Couric. Her on-air colonoscopy happened before Facebook and Twitter, where people share so much that nothing is surprising anymore. She did it to raise awareness after colon cancer killed her husband.

It made the procedure a lot less scary for people.

Jardin has done an admirable job making breast cancer treatment less scary. I think that will inspire a lot of women to get early mammograms that may well save some lives.

This post is to thank her and encourage my own readers to tweet her some words of support as she continues the fight. Her Twitter handle is @xenijardin. Thanks.

I Bet Health Insurers Would Gladly Cover Suicide Pills

The Catholic Church is bringing out its heavy artillery to fight a Massachusetts ballot initiative that, if passed, would allow doctors to prescribe lethal pills to terminally-ill patients that want to be put out of their misery.

I’m with the church on this one.

Mood music:

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh describes this quite nicely:

An initiative petition to legalize physician-assisted suicide has been certified by Attorney General Martha Coakley. If backers collect enough signatures, and the Legislature fails to act, the question will go on the November 2012 ballot.

Modeled on the death-with-dignity law in Washington state, the measure says that if an adult state resident is judged terminally ill with less than six months to live by two physicians, he can get a lethal prescription.

The initial request has to be made in writing. Two people, one of whom is not a family member (and would not share in the estate), have to witness the signing of the request and attest that patient is capable and acting voluntarily. The terminally ill patient has to repeat the request twice verbally, at an interval of at least 15 days. He would be counseled about alternatives like hospice care and pain control. The lethal dose would not be administered by a physician; rather, the patient would swallow it himself.

If the initiative does make the ballot, expect determined opposition. Indeed, Cardinal Sean O’Malley focused on the ballot question during a recent Mass for Bay State lawmakers and jurists, saying he hoped that Massachusetts citizens would not be seduced by language like “dignity,’’ “mercy,’’ and “compassion.’’ Those words, he said, are a “means to disguise the sheer brutality of helping people to kill themselves. A vote for physician-assisted suicide is a vote for suicide.’’

After laying all this out, Lehigh asks:

“If a terminally ill patient wants to end his life a little early, why is that against the good of his person?”

Fair question. Here’s my opinion:

When a person chooses to end their life it’s always tragic. If depression is the cause, the individual has lost all hope and is effectively no longer able to make sand decisions. If a person is terminally ill, they are often in unspeakable pain. On some levels, you can’t blame a person in that situation for wanting to end the pain.

Here’s my problem, though:

Doctors are often wrong. I know of many people who were told they had six months to live and outlasted the grim prognosis by years. Whether you have weeks, months or years to live, there’s a lot of good you can still do with your life. We’ve heard many tales of people who achieved greatness in the face of death, helping their fellow man and living with dignity instead of rolling over and quitting.

When a person is so sick they can’t do those things, they want to relieve loved ones of the burden they feel they’ve become. But to me that’s bullshit. If you spend your life taking care of people, it’s perfectly appropriate for them to take care of you when the time comes. Most people I know want to care for their sick loved ones.

My ultimate attitude is that it’s not over until God says it’s over. Trying to die before it’s really time is cheating. Some will cry bullshit on that point. I don’t really care.

If you want to die with dignity, that’s your business.

I’d rather live with dignity — If for no other reason than to piss off the health insurers who fight tooth and nail not to cover life-saving procedures on a daily basis.

I bet my insurance provider would gladly cover my lethal injection. It’s cheaper than paying for my other procedures.

This could be my way of saying “fuck them.”

In Defense Of Wolfgang Van Halen

With a new Van Halen album out, everyone has an opinion. Fine by me, because I have mine. But one writer has taken his displeasure over bassist Wolfgang Van Halen to levels that earn him a smack to the back of the head.

Mood music:

When you question quality of the songwriting and musicianship, it’s all well and good. If you’re a music critic, that’s your job.

But Martin Cizmar, former music critic at Phoenix New Times (he’s now at the Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon) makes personal attacks, specifically against Wolfgang, son of Edward Van Halen. Maybe I shouldn’t care because Cizmar wrote this article in 2010. His argument was that Wolfgang represents everything wrong with Millennials. Sarcasm is Cizmar’s thing, and I get that when reading this. But good sarcasm need not look like this:

First, let me say that, like most right-thinking people who’ve successfully avoided consuming any Chernobly Energy Drink in the vicinity of a hot tub, I don’t really give a shit whether the Van Halen brothers team up with their old singer David Lee Roth or not. I mean, seriously, is anyone expecting this to rock at all? The dudes are too old for Spandex and too proud to reinvent themselves as a bluegrass-y acoustic outfit, a la Robert Plant. So whatevs.

However, as both a taxpaying American citizen and professional critic of popular music, I am outraged by the band’s decision to fire original bassist Michael Anthony so that Eddie’s 19-year-old son, Wolfgang, can take his spot in the lineup.

Okay, look, I don’t know how to put this delicately, so I won’t try: “Wolfie,” the son of Eddie and his ex-wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, is a fat little pig with bad skin who has no business being on stage with Van Halen. Letting him “play rock star” on huge stages is a travesty of embarrassing proportions. If VH wasn’t already in rock’s hall of fame I’d suggest they be banned, Pete Rose-style.

Can Wolfie play bass? Who cares? I’m sure he’s competent. Because, really, who can’t play bass? Fact: There are several trained apes playing bass in circus bands touring the country. They get way more chicks than Wolfie and they party way harder.

So why is Wolfie taking the place of a guy who was in the band for nearly 40 years? Because his daddy wants to pretend his special little son is talented or gifted or cool or whatever. Like those parents who sued their kids’ school for suspending them after they were busted with booze, Eddie wants to teach his son to have no respect for anyone or anything.

They call this the Age of Entitlement. I’m not sure The Bubonic Plague II would be worse. It seems that when you’re a Baby Boomer with money or power, your goal is to teach your asshat children to show nothing but utter contempt for your fellow man and the rules and standards that govern polite society. It’s a horrible thing to see.

What a jerk.

I don’t know Wolfgang, but neither does this guy. I don’t care what he looks like, but it apparently means a lot to Cizmar, who has written a how-to-lose-weight book called “Chubster.”

I agree when he says a lot of parents today are out of control, spoiling their children and not teaching them responsibility and respect. But that’s always been a problem.  He writes about this like it’s some new crack in America’s superior armor. There are good parents and bad parents. It’s always been that way and always will be.

I haven’t seen much from Wolfgang in terms of quotes in articles. Since he comes across as quiet, how would Cizmar know if Wolfgang lacked respect for his fellow man? And how could he possibly know what Edward Van Halen’s parental motivations are?

My uninformed opinion is that Wolfgang’s addition to the band is what probably saved it — the younger Van Halen inspiring his dad to put the bottle down and get back to work.

Whatever the case may be, I think Cizmar is the real “asshat” of this tale.

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RIP: Whitney Houston

As a rocker kid in the 1980s and 90s, I never really liked Whitney Houston. I always respected her talent and she seemed like a decent person, but that was it.

Mood music: Whitney at her best…

http://youtu.be/5jeUINzHK9o

But I had kept track of reports in recent years about the drug use, the family dysfunction and the fall from musical grace, and it always made me sad. Everyone has a demon or 10 to fight. Some call it our cross to bear. You’ve read about mine plenty of times in this blog.

Unfortunately, some have better luck than others in beating the demons back.

Houston deserves credit for being honest over the years. People love to gawk when the mighty fall, but she didn’t walk around pretending nothing was wrong. I think back to the 2002 interview she did with Diane Sawyer, where she admitted that she was a user. In 2009, she admitted to Oprah Winfrey that she laced her marijuana with rock cocaine and revealed that she’d done time in rehab and had undergone an intervention by her mother.

I feel for her fans. I remember the sadness I felt when Kurt Cobain and Steve Clark died.

It all goes to show that addiction and mental illness are killers. Some, like me, are lucky enough to get help before it’s too late.

Others lose the fight.

I’ll say a prayer for Houston and hope she is in a better place.

And I’ll thank God for my own recovery. I’m sober and abstinent today, but I know I’ll never, ever be fully out of the woods.

Grab life by the balls and don’t let go to grab the pills, the booze, the food or whatever else will make a slave of you.

Good morning.

Gisele Bundchen Ain’t My Cup ‘O Joe, But I Give Her A Pass On This One

My interest in football is minimal. I love a good story of athletes overcoming the odds and showing us that anything’s possible. In that regard, Tom Brady is a hell of a role model.

I’m also not a fan of the Patriots quarterback’s wife, Gisele Bundchen.

Mood music:

It’s nothing personal. The world of professional modeling and fashion bores me, except for the occasional episode of Project Runway. And that’s just to see the train wrecks.

As for all the money they have, I don’t hold it against them. I know rich people who are miserable and poor people who are happy. And vice versa. I know rich people who are giving, beautiful souls and poor people who are self-absorbed assholes. And vice versa. The good and not-so-good exist in both worlds.

Now that I’ve clarified things, let’s turn to the public outrage of the week.

A lot of people are furious with Gisele for some sore-loser verbiage following the loss of her husband’s team in the Super Bowl.

On the way out of the stadium, someone heckled Gisele with this:

“Eli owns your husband.”

She responded, within earshot of the TV mics: “My husband cannot (expletive) throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.”

What outrages people most is that her comment essentially blames the rest of the team for coming up short. Teams are supposed to succeed and fail together, right?

It’s unfortunate that she said that. She should apologize to Tom’s teammates.

But in all the angry comments everyone is making on Facebook, Twitter and the news media, an important truth has been kicked to the curb: Gisele is human. All us humans say stupid things on a daily basis, especially when we’re getting defensive about someone trash-talking about a loved one. But we don’t have a camera on us to capture the moment.

It doesn’t matter if we’re swimming in money and mansions or living on the streets: We have our good moments and pathetic moments. Since Gisele is human like the rest of us, I’ll give her a pass on this one.

This morning I read a column from Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan on the whole affair. She writes:

Super Bowl Sunday offered a telling glimpse into the Brady/Bundchen household. Our suspicions may be true. 

It was never Tom’s idea to dress like a girl in headbands with hair down his back.

Or buy a $1,000 Toto toilet with water jets and blow dryers.

Or ride a bike through town with Gisele’s 5-pound ratty dog in his front basket like a teeny, tiny, nasty ET.

At least Tom put his foot down when Super Gi had the Super Idea to name Super Baby Benjamin … River. “Something always flowing, immortal,” blogged Super Gi after her Super Pregnancy and Super Childbirth in the tub, where she meditated for 8 hours. And don’t forget: She wanted a law requiring all mothers to breast-feed and claimed she’d potty-trained Benjamin by six months.

I mean, beyond nauseating.

None of that stuff is my cup ‘o joe, either. I prefer the simpler life of old jeans, broken-in leather and old-fashioned toilets you can sit on without being fondled by mechanical doo-dads.

But Tom did ask for all that. That’s the woman he chose to marry. In marriage husband and wife merge their lives in a blender, and the end result sometimes looks strange.

That’s beside the point, though.

We all do and say things that are nauseating. I’ve read and liked Eagan’s columns for years.

But she can be nauseating at times, too.