On Hedonism

My favorite thing about Jennifer's Body--in which Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody attempt to remake Mean Girls as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and end up with an affected, irritating Ginger Snaps--is the opening scene in which Megan Fox scratches a scab and chews on her hair.  Fox is, in the film as in life, an exqusitely crafted product machine-tooled to the sexual specifications of an aggregated audience of women-fanciers, and despite my knowledge of this, I can't help but enjoy seeing her walk around and even occasionally talk in films where she has not been tinted orange in post-production.  There's something going on with Jennifer's sexual power and demonic energy and physical perfection all waxing and waning together month by month, but I'll be damned if I can tease it out of the web of pointless homoeroticism and immediately dated cultural references.  Anyway, some part of the film's point, whatever that may be, is about the physicality of bodies, and the relative frailty and impermanence of even the most perfect ones.  Moon, too. 

I think I love my body just about as much as is humanly possible for a young woman of this era who doesn't exercise (hence my project of extensively documenting it), but I still get Kafka-esque heebie jeebies from many of the realities of being a consciousness in a big gestalt of semi-autonomous cells, not all of whom share my genetic material.  Sometimes my teeth just hurt for no reason, and I'm always biting the inside of my mouth.  My toenails--are they getting ingrown?  Was there always this much hair?  Does my nose look bigger when I wake up than it did when I went to bed?  Is sitting causing my ass to atrophy?  Why is all this body fat distributed as cellulite instead of smooth curvilinear forms, anyway?  Must my breasts be asymmetrical?  What happened to all the coins and paper and hair and peach pits I ate?  And my skin!  What the fuck!  I'm not even going to go into what goes on in my perineal area, suffice to say that popcorn is a sometimes food.  And as if that wasn't enough to worry about, I'm freaking mortal as well!

Keeping this in mind, it is often difficult not to eat all the cheese I want.