brain makeover show

holy fuck. Minnie is being tortured by our mom. At the mall, and then with some video of a makeover show.

We have this nice mom. Sometimes she is replaced by an evil parallel universe mom who comes here when there is a psychic transporter accident.

I am nearly hyperventilating with rage, shame and concern. My best idea so far is to have a brain makeover show, where you take shallow, insecure assholes and then help them see how they could be nice people who think about things other than nagging, bossing, criticizing, and hating both other people and their own selves. WTF with these makeover shows. I enjoyed watching Queer Eye for its commodification of maleness. (Because I think we can't totally fix or undo the commodification of femaleness so it might as well be equalized a bit.) But people are so fascinated with these shows and they are all about packaging and marketing yourself as a certain kind of product. If they must, how about packaging it a little differently...? How about teaching someone not how to make themselves look nice, or respectable, or hip, but about how to make over what they spend their time THINKING about so that they are not always thinking about how they look! Jesus fuck! What a waste of time! A little goes a long way, then think about something ELSE!

As far as my own clothes and "look"! Fucking hell! Either I dress in what is cheap and comfortable, or I dress to look like a whore! There is no middle ground. Yes, it will be useful to learn that middle ground someday, but the time is not now. For now it is, button down shirt, tuck it in with belt, unscuffed boots, and black jeans. That is as far as it is going! I will now return to bitching with Minnie about our mom, after which I will read Seneca, Foucault, and Cherry Ames until I pass out from the drugs.

***

Later I have other ideas, about the ideal world that is the dream of the cynic. My mom's ideal world (okay, try to forget for a minute that a crucial factor of it is that there are no fat, old, poor, or non-white people in it...) *ahem* My mom's ideal world would be a haven of order, a perfect island of harmony and serenity, a garden under her own cultivation. It would be perfect beauty down to the last exquisite detail. She would be its queen. There would be no snoring. No one would fuck with her shit. She would wear a ball gown every day, and have a tiara.

As a dream of an ideal world, this is not so awful. Ideal beauty. A garden. Orderliness. Harmony. In fact, picturing it helps me out a little in understanding her and feeling a little bit of pity for her apparent misery.

Unfortunately it also helps me understand why she hates herself so much, and she can't stop complaining about how ugly, ignorant, fat, and annoying everyone else is.

On the other hand, it exposes that she is a fascist, and shares the dreams of an emotionally stunted, prissy, self-centered, 6 year old child.

***

Other ideas: possibly she could be helped by basic techniques of any sort of halfway decent therapy, like making lists and charts of goals and things one likes and dislikes and then ways to get more of the likes into your life and eliminate as many bad irritating things as possible.

Or get her to track or agree to be tracked on everything she says so that it is in categories... the categories would be (unfortunately)
a) criticisms of other people's looks
b) criticisms of the ways other people do things
c) self-hatred (intelligence)
d) self-hatred (looks)
e) something about housecleaning
f) something about clothing

Are there any other categories? Well why the hell not? WTF? What percent of what is said in a single day, or a week, are in those categories?! Ponder, and correct.

***
Other idea:
She is perfectly happy how she is and isn't going to change. I should butt out and keep my distance and just tolerate her weirdness. Her weaknesses are her strengths, ie, she understands how awful the world can be (and as you know, I can bitch).