the end is nigher
Thursday 14 August 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
From the astonishingly profound depths of what is apparently nothing more fancy than a GI virus plus ongoing proto-anaemia, I wallow up from the mattress briefly to bring you one of the freakiest late-capitalist resource-sinks I’ve seen in a while (though neither San Francisco nor Tartarus are exactly short on ‘em):
Harvest your now-precious menstrual fluid and preserve it in cryogenic perpetuum—for the paltry initial payment of $499, plus an $99 annual fee (per, um, “specimen”). [As an aside, how do you collect your donation? Via the super-high-tech, medical-grade silicon…plain old menstrual cup. Bet they want a few hundred bucks for that, too.]
Alors, bring on the bone cancer! This young lady looks proleptically wan, as though genetically predisposed to something (the vapours?).
3 cookies in the jar
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How sad that the freakier it gets, the more I shake my head and mutter about it having been inevitable? But now I feel like I ought to burst, à la Monty Python, into “Every ovum is sacred.” And I could see “monthly miracle” gaining some traction around here, never having been one to bear “Aunt Flo” or any of the other charming and cute ways of referring to it.
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Monthly miracle-making editor: True, it is possibly even better than “menstrual faeries,” though I’ve always liked the faintly malicious edge of that Mandarin-derived epithet.
Why why why? For the love of God why?
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Potential stem-cell donor, if they pay me: $¢€¥£?
But I think your cry is more existential than that, and thus I can only answer: OH GOD I DON’T KNOW EITHER!
I love “late capitalist resource sinks.” H and I wandered around a local obnoxiously upscale mall yesterday and when I came out of a store I found her trying to disentangle herself from a saleswoman who was scrubbing her arm with some substance which apparently contains gold. After working with the people I work with everyday, that kind of thing (the mall, the scrub, the expensive SUVs in the parking lot) can cause culture shock.
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Culture-shocked late-capitalist editor: You rescued her! Now I must look at your statement of purpose, heroic one….