Rub me the right way, baby!

I have a terrifically appointed home office, complete with a “real” writer’s desk that features an ergonomically-correct lap-height keyboard tray. My files are all within convenient reach, along with not one but two phones (one cordless, one speakerphone) and a tasteful cup that holds a colorful assortment of writing implements. Nevertheless, thanks to the marvels of modern technology—namely, wireless internet connection—most days find me snuggled into the far corner of my leather living room club chair, contorted into a miserable half bend in order to reach my laptop on the too-small side table next to it.

Which is why yesterday I found myself driving aimlessly about town, searching for a walk-in massage place. I spot the neon “Thai Massage $42/hour!” sign and (to the obvious annoyance of the guy behind me) slam on my breaks just in time to make the turn into the parking lot.

I admit to being just the tiniest bit disappointed when I am introduced to my masseuse, Tami (which I am guessing was not the name her parents chose for her). Tami is probably 4’ 10” and might weigh 90 pounds if she were dripping wet and holding a stack of phone books. I’m in pretty serious discomfort here, and right now I want someone who can hurt me. Tami doesn’t look like she could press the wrinkles out of a shirt with a piping-hot iron.

Ten minutes later, I’m sprawled naked on an unfamiliar table, marveling for not the first time how mistaken first impressions can be. Tami is on the table on top of me, straddling the backs of my thighs and kneading my ass-cheeks as if they were a pair of day-old balls of pizza dough. I am in heaven.

Here’s everything I know about Tami: As far as I can tell, she speaks two words of English (which sound a lot like “harda?” and “softa?”), and she has impossibly small, beautiful feet that apparently have recently been pedicured. It occurs to me how odd this is—stripping down and being caressed by a total stranger within moments of meeting, in exchange for money, no less! I wonder if I’d recognize her if she were in line behind me at Starbucks tomorrow, or if it would be awkward. Then I realize I couldn’t care less.

When it’s over, I tip Tami $20 and she looks as if she wants to kiss me. Which clearly would be taking the whole payment-for-pleasure thing a little too far.

Hey, Check Out My Big, Gnarly Zit!

I have invented a new beauty product and I am sure it’s going to make me an overnight millionaire. I almost decided not to spill the details here because I was afraid someone would steal the idea, but the truth is, my product has been around forever. You probably own several sticks/tubes/bottles/pans of it, but it’s called something totally different. My plan is to repackage and reposition this wonder balm, using my marketing and advertising background to really focus on its multitude of currently untapped Unique Consumer Benefits.

I am going to call my product HEY, CHECK OUT MY BIG, GNARLY ZIT!™ (The exclamation point is key, and therefore part of the trademark.) The product itself will be made of a chalky, semi-flesh toned paste that has just a tiny bit too much white (or green or yellow) in it to actually resemble flesh. Applied to freshly broken out skin, it will highlight those oozing, inflamed patches unlike anything you have ever experienced. If you strapped a strobe light to your forehead and aimed the pulsating beam directly onto the BIG, GNARLY ZIT™ in question, the result would pale in comparison to the application of HCOMBGZ!™. Even when applied with the utmost of discretion under a brigade of klieg lights you borrowed from your SWAT-team neighbor, the resulting completely off-color, mountainous mound of cakey, flaky product plastered over a tiny, weeping, bloodshot eye works like a neon sign to announce to the world that the Skin Gods pissed all over your face last night. Best of all, HCOMBGZ!™ immediately traps any existing bacteria on the skin, causing the BIG, GNARLY ZIT!™ to grow even larger, thereby necessitating further application of HCOMBGZ!™.

Trust me, this stuff works.

Just $14.95 (plus shipping and handling) a tube at www.jennamccarthy.com! Packaging may vary. Order now and I’ll throw in a copy of my new book.

Putting the "trick" back in trick-or-treat

I have a skeleton to pick with whoever came up with the whole trick-or-treat concept. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for pumpkin-carving and adorable costumes and ghoulish, glow-in-the-dark decor. But the dimwit who decided it was wise to send our kids door-to-door amassing their weight in sugar in a single evening ought to be hog-tied and forced to spend thirteen back to back hours in a room full of the wound-up goblins. (Whatchamacallit Dude, I’m talking to you.)

My daughters may only be three and five, but they’re smart. They take a mental inventory as the loot drops into their bottomless bags, so it’s not like I can even sneak a bite-size Snickers out of the deal when they’re not looking. “Mom! I had forty-six Tootsie Rolls and now there are only forty-five. Let me smell your breath.” Little witches.

Back in her day, my well-intended grandmother attempted to sway the tide by opting to give out shiny new pennies in lieu of candy. (The woman actually pawed through her pennies to be sure they were indeed both shiny and new.) Trust me when I tell you there is nothing sadder than the sight of a seventy-seven year old woman leaping about her lawn and trying to remove ninety-two miles of toilet paper from her trees.

I mentioned to my friend Ann that I’d been fretting about how I was going to pry the sticky haul out of their grubby Halloween-stained hands. “You don’t know about the Switch Witch?” she asked, aghast. I admitted I did not. “Oh, she rocks,” Ann insisted. “Your kids get to pick out a toy that they want and the day after Halloween, they leave their candy sacks by their beds and the Switch Witch takes it away and trades it for the toy.”

I feel bad for the poor Switch Witch’s thighs, but I’ll take a ginormous bag of candy over a blood-stained incisor any day of the year.

My Sacred Space (It's not what you think)

I have a secret pick-me-up spot, a place I go when I want to feel fabulous. They don’t give out massages, they don’t serve cocktails and as far as I know there are no illicit dealings going on there. The best part: It’s absolutely free. I’m going to share my heavenly haven right here, because we’re all women and every one of you deserves to know about it, visit it frequently and bask in its magnificence.

I’m talking about the fitting rooms at Anthropologie.

The space isn’t particularly luxurious or ample, the seats are hard and cold; but the lighting—oh, the lighting!—is downright bewitching. Inside that sanctified 5-by-5 space, I am a golden goddess, smooth and flawless (well, relatively speaking). If that lighting existed in the rest of the world, I wouldn’t even be shocked if I got carded to vote or was asked to model some modest lingerie. I haven’t figured out the secret yet, and believe me I’ve tried. Maybe the mirrors have the faintest layer of flattering film pasted to them or are tilted ever so slightly at some mystical angle; perhaps the light bulbs are pink. Whatever it is, I’m hooked.

Listen up, designers of all other fitting rooms on the planet: Next time I get the urge to count my pores or scrutinize my thighs in glorious topographical detail, I’ll be sure to visit your fluorescently floodlit cubes. (Nothing like a little cellulighting to really brighten my day!) In the meantime, you could take a page out of Anthropologie’s playbook and probably double sales overnight.

A suggestion: If you experience a bit of sticker-shock when you’re in there (Anthropologie’s duds are admittedly not inexpensive), remember that anything you buy wouldn’t look quite so good at home—minus that magical ambiance—anyhow. You’re just using them for the free, flattering light.

Hey, they asked for it.

What do Wii Think?

My five-year-old recently received a pearly pink Princess phone for her birthday. You know, the pretend kind with the preprogrammed keys that say things like, “Prince Charming isn’t in at the moment, please leave a message!” and “Hi, this is Sleeping Beauty. I’m taking a nap right now, but I’ll call you as soon as I wake up.”

After a cursory examination, she promptly passed it to her (extremely stoked) little sister.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked her, surprised.

“Because that thing’s lame,” she explained. “It doesn’t have a camera or a stylus.”
This is the same child who didn’t get a perfect score on a recent vision test because she couldn’t correctly identify the “telephone” icon. Hello? The illustration she was shown featured one of those desk-top rotary models with the heavy, curved hand piece that sits up on two pitchfork-shape prongs. She clearly could see it; she just had no idea what it was. Sure, she might have spotted a picture of a replica “retro” phone in one of my Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware catalogues, but it’s not like she’s ever been in the same room with one or heard it ring. To her, a phone either looks like a skinny silver piece of toast inexplicably fashioned with a miniature keyboard and a nifty photo-viewing screen (my BlackBerry), or a fat, black remote control (the cordless house phone).

Raising kids in the techno-age is daunting. I only caved in and sprung for an iPod for myself last year, and already both of my kids are begging for their own. I had no intention of getting them a computer this soon, but on the first day of preschool I watched the other kids line up to show off the mouse-wielding skills they’d picked up over the summer, and realized my 3 year old is already woefully behind the pack. In an economy where some of us are genuinely concerned about paying our mortgages, the last thing I need is two doe-eyed darlings asking Santa for “toys” that cost more than my first car (that I had to push uphill in the snow, both ways… oh forget it, you know the story).

We need to ban together, as parents—because if your child gets the latest MP3 player/iPhone/Playstation/Wii Will Rule the World, it’s only a matter of time before I’m gonna hear about it. At the very least, can we all agree that none of us will get our kids their own cell phone until they are old enough to vote? My theory is that if there’s nobody else to call, they might just give up on the idea.

A mother can dream.

A Letter to the Maker of a Certain Battery Operated Bubble Machine (You Know Who You Are)

Dear Sir or Madam,

Thank you so much for taking the time to create such an adorable little product! My three-year-old’s eyes nearly popped out of her head when she realized that Santa had brought her the pink plastic bubble-blowing monkey of her dreams. As you can imagine, when she saw that BBM even came with his very own bottle of bubbles (okay, it was a few droplets of watered down cheap-ass generic dish soap, but how was she to know this? The kid’s three. She’s hardly a bubble connoisseur.), she nearly wept with joyous anticipation.

Except—and you probably can guess what’s coming here—the effing thing didn’t work. Oh, once I unearthed eight AA batteries and finally fashioned them in the totally random configuration your malevolent designer thought would be fun to torture parents with, I will admit that the monkey’s mouth did open and close as the box promised. His frightening little bubble-wand arm did rotate and dip into his watery soap-filled mouth between yaps. And what sounded like a tiny burst of air did gurgle up from his throat when the watery soap-dipped arm was positioned in front of his scary clown-like lips. But—and this was slightly anticlimactic, I have to admit—no bubbles came out. Not a single one. We watched in disappointed horror as slippery, watery slop dripped down the poor monkey’s bubble-wand arm, over and over. And over. And over.

Hum, click, drip. Hum, click drip.

The worst part is, my kind-hearted daughter feels sorry for what I have since christened the Stupid, Goddamned, Ugly, Useless Troll-Monkey. So instead of momentarily enjoying him and then letting him fade into oblivion like a good, cheap toy, I have to stare at his worthless, repulsive form—which now sits right by her bed—for the rest of my life.

So even though we’re obviously not returning him, I would still appreciate if you would refund my eleven dollars. It’s the least you could do.

Thanks in advance.*

Sincerely,

Jenna

* Unless you don’t refund my money. In that case, rot in hell, you evil, greedy bastard.

I am so high-tech I can hardly stand myself.

I’m blogging. I’m a blogger. And to think, just a year ago I had to ask my dear friend Jen what exactly a blog was.

I’m going to use this very first post as an opportunity for some shameless self-promotion. (Is there any other kind?) ForeWord Magazine just released their ten year anniversary issue, which features a kick-ass review of my upcoming book The Parent Trip: From High Heels and Parties to Highchairs and Potties. The best line is the last one: “Parents-to-be and new parents who really want to know what to expect during pregnancy and infancy should throw out all those other unrealistic parenting books. The Parent Trip is the true guide to parenthood.” Here’s a link if you’d like to check it out in full.

They also ran a fun little Q&A with yours truly (including a photo so large and high-resolution, I am pretty sure you can count my eyebrows if you are so inclined). In it I discuss everything from my fascination with shampoo bottle verbiage to shopping for caskets at Costco. It’s all right here:

Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to visit me any time at my web site.
.