Brad Pitt's Skin Disease

It rained today. Again. So I drove to the bike store and bought Sport Beans and some little maps of routes to take from the end of the MM trail. They're even laminated, which is awesome, because my health insurance card is just a flimsy bit of thick paper and I carry it with me in my back pocket and I got it soaked (with sweat, I know, the grossness). I had to dry it out with a hair dryer and laminate it with clear packing tape so I can take it out with me again. It's for just in case that one Masshole driver tries to kill me, then the paramedics can find my health insurance card and driver's license and whisk me away to whatever colour body cast I choose.

I also went to Target, the Happiest Place on Earth, where I wasted more time than I want to admit. After an hour and a half, I walked away with a 3-subject notebook for classes, cotton balls, the CD "Death By Sexy" by the Eagles of Death Metal and a $15 iTunes gift card. The reason I was there so long is because I was torn by guilt . . . buy a CD and iTunes things when I'm broke? Am I going to need that money to go out for drinks or something before school? What if I pop two tubes and need to buy another one, since I only have one spare?

But Eagles of Death Metal are so much fun, and there's a ton of random songs I want, so I figured a gift card would keep me from plugging in my credit card number and accidently racking up $103 in Kanye West songs or something. Additionally,now I have "Peace, Love, Death and Metal" and "Death by Sexy" and can shake my junk for a consecutive two hours plus. They're so much fun. Thank goodness for good music.

Last night I had a serious attack of the Bed Bug Boogies, which was me thinking I had the buggers in my sheets and freaking out and ending up sleeping on top of the bedsheets and boiling my bedding today. See, evidently the northeast has bed bugs and they're not just part of a cutesey saying that freaks out little kids. For those of you who don't have the backstory, my mattress was given to me by Creepy Craig, the Rhode Island boyfriend of former roommate Amber. Craig had this in storage and gave it to me when he helped Amber move in because I was sleeping on an air mattress. (Evidently Megan still tells people about the air mattress because it's pretty darn funny.) I was unsure about the hygienic state of the mattress and worried about bugs so I wrapped it up good in two waterproof mattress covers, one on top and one on bottom. And I've never seen a trace of bugs, and I guess you end up with tiny bites if you have them, but I don't have them. I didn't have them last night, either. I was just itchy and paranoid because I found a beetle on my pillow a few days ago that had crept in an open window.

I work myself into these weird states over the stupidest things, I swear. Like my freakout about getting a job on Friday, and then last night and the invisible bugs.

Sunday night I watched a movie called "The Dark Side of the Sun," which was made in '88 or something and was shown on some local channel. It was horrible. Really, really bad. But it had Brad Pitt, and I was just curious enough to see him that young. I think the only movie I've ever seen all the way through that he's in was "Fight Club." But this movie was about this kid with some horrible disease who has to wear a full leather mask all the time and gloves and no skin can be showing or he could die IN THREE DAYS if exposed to the sun. His family moved to Yugoslavia so he could be healed by some medicine man, and this American actress visits his town for a festival and he becomes enamoured with her and forsakes his S&M leather gear for a few days with her.

You can tell how horrible it is, can't you? The opening line of the movie, I kid you not, was Brad Pitt saying (while he's on his motorcycle in his leather), "I don't want to die. I want to live!" And then at the end he dies anyhow, and it isn't until 40 minutes into the movie that we get to see him. He's kinda pasty with red rimmed eyes but has an elaborately blow-dried long feathery haircut which made my day. It was greatness. And in the last scene he goes in to kiss his mother and he's all scaly and tumorous or something and then drives away on his motorcycle into the sunset, presumably to crawl off and die in the Yugoslavian mountains.

I dunno if Yugoslavia has mountains.

But it should, for the sake of this horrific movie. I thought it might be related to the disease xeroderma pigmentosum, a legitimate genetic disorder where people's skin cannot repair itself from skin damage, so they must stay out of the sun and light otherwise the rays will break down their skin and cause skin cancer and lead to death. This is one of my "pet" diseases. I have a couple random ones that I'm fascinated by and research all the time because they're so odd and it's miraculous the way the body works when it's well and how people must adapt their lifestyles when it doesn't. There was a pair of novels about a man with XP written a few years ago that were pretty good, and I thought the movie would be as well. No such luck. People with XP don't die in three days. But it was still amusing.

A good book or movie or piece of art about a disease cannot be underrated. That's probably my fantasy science writing job . . . writing books where a disease is brought to light in a convincing, accurate and humane way. Like "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" for autism or "Flowers for Algernon" for mental retardation and "A Beautiful Mind" for schizophrenia. (Those are all pet diseases as well. I'm big on neurological things.) I'll write my newspaper articles or magazine articles, but rest assured I'd be working on something like this in the mean time.

And hopefully nothing I do will be turned into a movie with a pasty Brad Pitt.

There's a guy on TV with a baby raccoon. Does anybody else remember the book "Rascal"? My dad had a coworker who had a raccoon he'd found abandoned when a tree got chopped down or something. Its name was Crash and it used to sit on this guy's head when he was puttering around in the garage or whatever. It was in San Antonio, and he lived a little ways out of the city with some really pretty land and at the time his daughter was in a wheelchair with pins and rods sticking out of her legs because doctors had surgically broken her legs and rotated them because she was severely pigeon-toed. Even then, when I was in 7th grade, I remember the medical stuff. I was fascinated by the pieces of metal poking out of little puker-holes in the sides of her thighs and calves.

I think our pet dinosaur is done growing. He's almost the size of the bowl now and hasn't done much in a few days. Now on TV there's West Germans and Czechs playing bicycle soccer. They use the wheels to kick the ball and they have amazing track stands and mad skillz with a z, Czech style. But Lance still rules--obviously, because he powers all of ESPN. (http://www.sportscenteraltar.com/multimedia/video.asp)