Read me

Here's what I wrote about on Forbes this week:

What to do when your boss has a vagina: "How to Work for a Female Boss."

Think about it this way. For all intents and purposes, I may as well be a man at work. I’m aggressive, competitive, and outspoken. You think it’s easy for me to work for a woman? You think I like subjugating myself to a woman more powerful than myself? I don’t.

Hate your life? Do something about it: "Change Your Life in 5 Easy Steps."

Women proffer excuses. Men stew in resentment. Is that who you are? Someone who leaves their excuses in the comments section of other people’s blogs, or someone who stops sitting at their computer and goes out in the world and does something they haven’t done before?

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Magic

I went to see "Magic Mike" tonight. It was pretty good. It has a lot of dancing naked men if you're into that sort of thing, but if you are a straight guy, you can also see Olivia Munn's boobs if you're into that sort of thing.

Basically, it's an American Dream story that reminded me of "Pretty Woman" and reminded my husband of "Flashdance."

The dancing is phenomenal. As stripper Kat wrote of Channing Tatum in her co-review of the movie with stripper Bubbles: "His pelvic thrusts are the cathartic thrusts of a man who can only express himself truly on the stage with his crotch."

I would like to see Matthew McConaughey be the first actor to get an Academy Award for playing a male stripper.

Not all the acting is great, due to Soderbergh's in recent years interesting in working with non-actors or not-great actors. So things drag a little when people are trying to portray emotions they're not so sure they're having.

But it's fun. Like popcorn.

People are always interested in what a movie like this says about the current state of masculinity. It explores a lot of the same things Susan Faludi explored in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. If you haven't read the book, I recommend the chapter on male porn stars: "Waiting for Wood: A Death on the New Frontier." The book is mostly about how men can be men in a post-industrialized America, and the answer seems to be: It ain't easy.

The same factors are at play in "Magic Mike." Men are objects at which women throw their money, and the guys' sexual gyrations are a punchline to a joke nobody's sure they get. Women make the first move and don't call you after they fuck you. In the wake of masculinity's absence, young men try to fill traditional roles, fail, and feminize themselves for dollar bills if that's what makes a bunch of oversexed postfeminists happy.

In the end, Mike seems to make something out of the wreckage. The bespoke furniture he creates includes the detritus of a bygone time that washes up on the shores after the latest storm. There isn't much left, but for a guy in the 21st century, this is the closest he's going to get to a happy ending.

Engaged

One of my jobs is Digital Copywriter for Billion-Dollar Brands. That's a Fancy Way of Saying I write Facebook and Twitter content for products that are in your home, in all likelihood. For reasons I will never be able to fully explain, I really like doing it. And I'm really good at it. I can turn Totally Horrible Engagement into Super Awesome Engagement. If you are a Bigwig at a Big Company or a Digital Leader at a Bespoke Firm looking to Radically Boost your clients' Digital Engagement, email me, and we can discuss What I Can Do for You.

Updated to add: Coke is not a client. I just came across the image and liked it.

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Shit

I keep wanting to write a post that's like, "Oh, I finished chemo," but I didn't know what to say. I felt like I got run over, and then re-run over, and then run over again just out of spite, and I was crabby. Stabby, really. Very, very irritable.

I didn't think it would be like this. I envisioned myself (actually envisioned!) dramatically weeping as my Yoda-like oncologist said, "You are done." But I didn't. Instead, I wept in the car on the way home out of fury, and I have been in a sour mood since.

Of course, it's not supposed to be this way. I'm supposed to be a happy fairy living life to the fullest!

I prefer Barbara Ehrenreich and a book she wrote: Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. It's about how she got diagnosed with breast cancer, and her response to it is nothing but nasty and ill-tempered.

My hero.

That said, I took one of the dogs for a walk today. It's very, very hot. This dog likes water. It is bred to like water. I make it go near the sprinklers and tell her to go ahead, and she sort of dances around in the water, the spray going all in her face and soaking her, coming back around to take gulps from it.

Side note: Do not fucking email me.

I get email

Dear Ms. Breslin,

Well, thanks for the discouraging word. But I'm not one to give up. I have recently completed a manuscript tentatively entitled

Prostitution: [redacted].

The table of contents is reproduced below. I would very much appreciate a review on your site. I will be happy to send you a pdf of the entire book if you're interested (34,000 words). I will likely self-publish this, and have hired a copy editor and a cover designer for that purpose.

Thank you,

[redacted]

Gecko

Gecko, Chicago, Illinois

What?

Doctor: "Are you a murder?"

Me: "Am I a what?"

Doctor: "Are you a martyr?"

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Mope

Mope, San Fernando Valley, California

Side effects

1. Nose bleeds
2. Rashes
3. Muscle and joint pain
4. Fatigue
5. Cognitive problems
6. Insomnia
7. Depression
8. Anxiety
9. Nausea
10. Martian visitors

I get email

Oh, the irony burns. One of the worst written 'articles' I've ever seen. It was like listening to some snooty high school diva telling the ugly girl why she'll never amount to anything. The question is...why did you write it? You break one of the major rules by failing to sum up your train of thought...the article just ends after tip #3. What the moral of the story here is, and the conclusion you should have drawn, is that even if your skill set is sophomoric (like yours), you can still fool the people at Forbes into hiring you.

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Spread

 
If you read my work online, which you do, you're probably reading it for free. This is good. This is great.

But it's not enough to passively ingest the work of creatives whose work you admire. If you want to keep reading them, you have to do something.

In this tweet, I suggest that you link to, tweet, share on Facebook, or otherwise share your love of our work with the world.

This is how we make our living. This is how you pay us back. This is how you help us.

Thanks.

Gods

A lot of people hated "Prometheus," but I didn't.

Oh, by the way, I am going to discuss a spoiler here, so if you don't want a spoiler, stop reading.

TRIGGER WARNING FOR SPOILERS.

Anyway, a decade and change ago, I used to be a film critic or something like it. I went to a lot of movies. I love movies. Particularly going to the movies. I like the whole overwhelming largeness and the submerging of you in it-ness. That's great.

When you write about movies, you have to remember all the facts, and get the stories straight, and one thing that's nice about watching movies now is that I don't have to do that anymore.

I think that's part of the trick of liking "Prometheus." It's like loving Quasimodo. It's flawed, but you love it anyway.

My absolute favorite scene in the movie is when the girl bones the dude, and the dude has the alien in him, so he ends up impregnating her with an alien. Or alien thing. Or whatever.

Then it starts growing fast, and of course she happens to be half-naked, and she runs around while you watch it trying to blast itself out of her belly.

It's super creepy.

But there's this machine thing there, like that sort of thing Michael Jackson used to sleep in so that he would be albino Peter Pan forever, and it performs surgery on you. So while she's got this thing trying to ram itself out of her gut, she starts pounding on the keys to tell the machine to give her an abortion. And it's all, "Sorry, I only do dudes, not abortions." It doesn't say that, but it says something sort of like that, and I love that because it says something about the difference between women and technology.

Anyway, she basically tells it that there's a foreign object in her midsection that needs removing, and she climbs into the machine, and then she basically watches while it gives her an abortion.

It is fucking fascinating. There's screeching, and blood flying, and a baby alien thing writhing, and one thing I love is the complete absence of maleness in it. Like, I don't know. For reasons I can't explain. Like this is the true the horror, the horror of womanhood.

Anyway, I think it's a lovely movie, and she's a superb final girl, and you should see it in 3D.

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Hustler

Hustler Mannequin, Chicago, Illinois

Don't

I wrote a post on Forbes that's causing a stink: "Why You Shouldn't Be a Writer."

People don't like the post because it's true. They want to cruise around the internet watching those stupid ass videos that tell you how your brain works, or how to hack your toilet, or ways you can make millions publishing shitty novels that no one wants to read. It's all so supportive.

Most people are not great [INSERT WHATEVER YOU WANT HERE -- EXAMPLES: CHEFS, DANCERS, SWIMMERS, ARTIST, SINGERS, ETC.].

The internet meant everyone was like, ooh, I ticky-tacked some words together, ta-da, I am a writer! Bleh. You're not. And it's not about monetizing it, and it's not about being famous for it, and it's not about doing it anyway because, dang it, you can't help but do it!

In fact, all these people yammering on about BUT OMG I CANNOT HELP BUT WRITE IT POURS OUT OF ME LIKE MY BOWELS EMPTYING are freaking delusional.

Writing is like a heroin addiction. Do not want. Have anyway.

The end.

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I get email

Hello Susannah,

My name is [redacted] and I am a 16 year old sophomore.

I love to do blogging and everything else that you could fit under journalism!

The reason I am emailing you is I am wondering if I could email you a sample of my stuff and you could judge it and give tips to improve.

Thanks!

[redacted]

Significant

There's a book coming out soon, and I have a story in it. It's called Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things.

Basically, the creators asked me and other writers to write a piece of short fiction about an object, and that object was then sold -- well, let me let them explain it.

The project auctioned off thrift-store objects via eBay; for item descriptions, short stories purpose-written by over 200 contributing writers, including Meg Cabot, William Gibson, Ben Greenman, Sheila Heti, Neil LaBute, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Jenny Offill, Bruce Sterling, Scarlett Thomas, and Colson Whitehead, were substituted.

The objects, purchased for $1.25 apiece on average, sold for nearly $8,000.00 in total.

It's a really amazing project, and I am happy to be a part of it.

Pre-order it HERE.

I get email

Hw are u doing,hope you are moving around much,i realy love everything about you,you are beautiful and i must tell you that i want you to be my girlfriend.my name is [redacted],am from Nigeria.

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Doggy

This is Jake. Here he is, doing what he does best. I guess you could call it chillaxing. This is not long after getting up in the morning. Then he ate. Then he sprawled across the kitchen floor and went back to sleep.

This is how Jake rolls. When something good happens, or when something at all happens, really, he opens his mouth and smiles and pants and lets his tongue loll. It looks like he's really enjoying life, really having a good time, really grooving into the river of energy that is the universe.

There is a lot to be admired in Jake. He shits in public and doesn't give a shit. He enjoys lounging across chairs with his chin on his paws and his paws on the arm of the chair and looking something like a cat. He likes going to the dog beach but sometimes fetches so much that he is sore the next day.

Too bad Jake can't write. Or blog. Or have opposable thumbs.

If he did, anything would be possible.

Shrinkage

Every Wednesday morning, or whenever, I go to the person I call the "cancer shrink." Basically, he's a social worker connected to the hospital. We sit in this really spare room and talk. It's just off the hall where you get your chemo. So you complain while people zonked out on Benadryl get toxic waste pumped into their veins.

I like the social worker because he is very hard to read. In fact, he rarely expresses much. I like this because I don't complain a lot outside of the cancer shrink room, or at least I think I don't, and this means that when I complain in the cancer shrink room, the person I'm in there with isn't making some big deal out of it and weird faces and what have you.

I was wearing the T-shirt you see above today. I sat down and waited in the waiting room before the appointment. There was another woman in there, older than me and wearing a red hat. I'm bald and mostly don't cover it up. I think this is because I originally thought I was trying to prove something to everyone else -- Fuck that shit -- but I think really I'm trying to prove something to myself.

Fuck hiding. Or whatever.

The lady said she wanted to not wear a hat, and she sort of tilted up her hat so I could see the mostly gone hair there, nothing but a few strands left or so. We got diagnosed around the same time, and we have the same number of treatments left. And she said I looked beautiful. Twice, I think. And then when the cancer shrink showed up, she told him that I looked beautiful, too. So, thanks, lady in hat, for that.

She said something when we were talking about mostly it's hard because of vanity. Yeah, I said, because you can't hide it anymore, not even to yourself, when you look in the mirror. She nodded. She knew what I was saying.

Hustler

Last night, we went to the Hustler store because I had to get something for a story I'm doing. It was the only place I could find it. I called around to some other stores, but no one else had it. Finally, I found it here.

It made me remember when I used to live in LA. And I had a closet full of stripper shoes, and a cupboard full of porn, and a T-shirt that read: "FUCK ME I'M FAMOUS."

It seems like a long time ago and yesterday.

I can't say I miss it. But I do.

For a while, I was embarrassed by it, but now I'm not really.

Working on this story, I tweeted something like that it made me feel how the dog gets, because it was trained a long time ago to be a drug-sniffing dog, when it gets around hubcaps. It gets all intent. And intense.

Either way, it doesn't make a difference, really. If you believe in alternate universes, on some other planet in some other dimension some other me is running around with a pink rhinestone necklace that reads "BITCH," and it's nighttime or that weird time when the whole sky is sort of periwinkle blue, and I'm driving through the Cahuenga Pass into or out of the Valley.

Baseball

Baseball, Chicago, Illinois

Thong

It's about seven months into Letters from Men Who Go to Strip Clubs.

Typically, I run these things for a year, and this one was started in late October of last year, so it will end in late October of this year.

So far, I've gotten 31 letters.

Here are the top 10 most popular tags in no particular order: "marriage," "tips," "friends," "sex," "alcohol," "lap dances," "money," "naked," "strip clubs," "women."

If you'd like to write an anonymous letter, send it HERE.

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