Cancer’s not a fad

Enough with the pink already. I’m glad to know that everyone is concerned about my boobs, but really, they get plenty of attention already. They are very nice, still fairly perky, and collect a lot of dropped food. They don’t need you to wear pink shoes on the football field to show your support.

Pink was already a problematic color before cancer claimed it. It was Barbie’s color. That was enough association with breasts. And it was the color of Pepto-Bismol. So it was sort of the big boob, feminine, upset stomach color.

I’m ready for all this cancer pink mania to stop.  It’s becoming counterproductive. I’m more than a year behind in getting my mammogram and seeing a breast cancer buffalo doesn’t really encourage me to make that appointment. In fact I’m now afraid that I’ll enter a waiting room full of women and men all in pink, all chanting some cancer slogan, trying to get me to buy pink legal pads, pink jewelry, pink floor mats, and pink whole wheat bread. I don’t know when I’ll make my appointment.

I do have an appointment to check my cervix for cancer for the fourth time, but I haven’t see any products for cervical cancer. I guess I can show up for the colposcopy wearing whatever I like. No one cares. The market only cares about my secondary sexual characteristics, not my primary ones. And that’s OK by me. I’d like to keep my cervix, uterus, and ovaries to myself. They’re mine and I’ll take responsibility for them.

If you want to do something for a woman with breast cancer, how about you take care of her kids while she’s going in for treatment, or drive her there and back? Or make a donation for research on something like adrenal cancer which has a poorer prognosis and less research wealth.

Every time I see a breast cancer commercial or a product being marketed with pink breast cancer ribbons, I think of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Welcome to CancerLand” article in Harper’s Magazine. I particularly liked her observation that “men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not receive gifts of Matchbox cars.” A Google search for “testicular cancer products” only returns 312,000 results and most of those are for t-shirts and bracelets.

Google has 25,600,000 listings for “breast cancer products.” From a site devoted to all popular cancers, I now know that cervical cancer’s color is teal (which is nice because if I do get this cancer I’ve always liked teal and wouldn’t turn down a teal mug or t-shirt). I also discovered that testicular cancer’s color is orchid, which is pretty close to lavender so I sort of wonder how some marketing firm selected these colors. And I should probably tell my friends who love wearing black that they are supporting melanoma awareness. Although not all cancer product marketing sites agree on color. Testicular cancer’s color wars might be won by goldenrod.

I’m certain that in the 2050′s people will look back on this decade and cancer pink will be one of the identifying characteristics. Like pet rocks were of the 1970s. Let’s not treat cancer like a fad.

Make it work or get rid of it

While the title of this post could refer to a car, either of my cats, or pretty much any piece of electronics, I am referring to our bodies. Last night as I lay on my side spooning with my husband, I was wishing I could just swing my one arm around to me back. It would be out of the way and offer another hand for pushing the cat away.

It got me thinking about how our bodies just don’t work as well as I’d like. For instance, auto-immune diseases shouldn’t exist. It’s as if there was some internal big brother who grabbed you and started shouting “why are you hitting yourself?” as he punches you with your own hand.

Wisdom teeth just make you wise to how much it can hurt to have something dug out of your gums.

I remember being very young and asking Mom why we have eyebrows and other hair. And why you get hair in new places when you get older. Why would you need hair at 16, but not at 6? She wasn’t able to give me a satisfying answer. At that same age I thought it would have been awesome to have had a prehensile tail. Why would apes and humans give up something so cool and useful? You could climb trees, swat away flies, carry an extra bag a groceries, and do all sorts of things if you just had that tail.

I’m not alone in my dissatisfaction. Darwin for one. According to Discover magazine there are all sorts of useless body parts. The first item on their list is the nasal sinuses. So true! I’d love to get rid of that snot swamp.

They also list the third eyelid. We have a third eyelid? That report that “a common ancestor of birds and mammals may have had a membrane for protecting the eye and sweeping out debris. Humans retain only a tiny fold in the inner corner of the eye.” Why did we give that up? I want it back for when I’m out in the wind and dust.

Another curious item is the subclavius muscle. “This small muscle stretching under the shoulder from the first rib to the collarbone would be useful if humans still walked on all fours. Some people have one, some have none, and a few have two.” Well that’s not fair at all. And I want to know my subclavius status. Then I’m going to start a Facebook group for whatever that status is.

I’m OK with men having nipples. They give some added visual interest to the male chest. And if you want to draw a half circle on a boy’s stomach, then the nipples can be the eyes.

Now the other sex-related body features they list just seem like some sort of a joke or poor housekeeping.

MALE UTERUS
A remnant of an undeveloped female reproductive organ hangs off the male prostate gland.

FEMALE VAS DEFERENS
What might become sperm ducts in males become the epoophoron in females, a cluster of useless dead-end tubules near the ovaries.

You can read more at “Useless Body Parts” on the Discover site.

I’m going to go contemplate the word epoophoron. Like the word caruncle, I think it has insult possibilities. Some dude has claimed the word for his MySpace page. So I’m thinking it could mean a dude who’s really trying to be manly and a stud, but is really just a useless dork.

Ironic and a waste of money

Remember those old TV commercials telling you that you could get all sorts of information for free by requesting the Consumer Information Catalog from Pueblo, Colorado? They still print it. I picked one up from outside a Sam’s Club. My favorite offering is for an 8 page booklet, titled Apply Online for Social Security Benefits. You can avoid the $2 service fee if you order it online. Is the Social Security Web site really so bad that you need 8 pages of instructions? They only offer a single screen (maybe  400 words) of instructions on their site, so maybe you get a better deal in print. You probably get instructions for applying for retirement, medicare, and disability benefits, how to apply if you’re blind, and other options you might miss on their site since they are hidden right smack in the middle of their home page.

Then there’s the Advance Fee Business Scams booklet from the Department of State. They charge you a $1.50 in advance for that. But it’s available for free online.

Don’t think this agency is in the dark ages. This place understands Web 2.0. They have a free publication all about it. It looks like all the stuff in the catalog is available online. You can even go to the Federal Citizen Information Center site and “
Sign up to get e-mail notices of each new Catalog.” You don’t have to be bothered to use Google like the rest of the world to learn how to attract birds, learn about ID theft, or get the facts about cholesterol. You can receive convenient emails reminding you that these facts are out there.

They have their own blog, too. It’s called Gov Gab and it’s at http://blog.usa.gov/roller/. Maybe at one time they were going to name it Roller? There are even more free publications to be found here. But no links to the contents of the publications. You’ll have to order them online and have them mailed to you.

But if you want to know how to contact President Obama and didn’t want to type “contact Obama” into a search engine or go to the Contact Us section of the whitehouse.gov site, you could learn how to do it from the Jan. 26 blog entry.

I don’t understand why they replicate on their site the exact same data as on the publishing organization’s site. You’ll see that the Federal Reserve Board and the GSA have the same brochure on their sites:  http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/bounce/ and http://www.pueblo.gsa.gov/cic_text/money/protect_overdraft/bounce.htm. The only difference is that the Fed logo isn’t a link back to the Fed on the GSA site.

I’m not against print. This catalog is probably still serving a purpose. My mother and others don’t have Internet connections and print is sometimes easier to use. I resented having to make up a non-existent e-mail address for my mother when I went online to change the addresses for all her magazine subscriptions. But I’m not sure the GSA Federal Citizen Information Center really needs its own blog or social media releases.