Selling Prints & Jewelry on Etsy
Well Tabs
I’m blue. I’m melancholy, I’m lonely, I feel vulnerable and helpless and hopeless and I’m a little sleepy but I can’t sleep. So naturally, I turn to Investigation Discovery.
And I’m watching the Rodney Alcala trial for about the ninth time when the show cuts to a commercial for Well Tabs.
Now, I’ve seen this commercial before. A polished, shiny faced woman with unnervingly white teeth exuding phony scripted empathy for depressed individuals reassures you you’re not alone in this battle. “Millions of people feel the same way,” she insists as a slideshow of black and white images featuring particularly healthy looking actors and actresses posing in cliche depressive set ups (a young woman laying on the couch in a bath robe accompanied by an empty wine bottle contorts her perfectly painted face into a pouty puppy dog frown) plays in the background.
“….until now….” and a box of Well Tabs opens itself to reveal lime green colored tablets as the woman’s voice over describes this miracle breakthrough one-a-day tab that’s curing depression like it was the very hands of Jesus.
So you begin to understand the manipulative appeal to desperate, vulnerable minds we’re seeing in this commercial.
“This breakthrough tablet contains Positive Mood Technology, or PMT…”
….Positive Mood Technology? And then they add the PMT to make it seem legit.
What the sam hell is positive mood technology? Will you answer me that? Couldn’t they have just made up something, like, “Well Tabs contain zolketamorphzalonzac tiziantadine, a breakthrough chemical proven to enhance mood and…” They don’t even explain what it is, they just flash an image of scientists hunched over test tubes with a clearly montaged image of a Well Tabs package clumsily pasted onto the table, in effort to make this generic image seem to directly pertain to Well Tabs and the extensive test tube PMT studies supposedly responsible for its creation.
Then after flashing the Well Tabs package a few too many times, the images we’re shown are in color and feature people laughing, smiling real big, having a blast.
And lime green? “What color can we make them to ensure it’s both clearly distinguished from anti-depressants that DO NOT contain positive mood technology and subconsciously appealing to the connections people make between bright colors and happiness….?” Lime green, exactly. A perfect balance of the unsettlingly bright McDonald’s yellow and the inappropriate NyQuil green.
And WELL TABS? Come up with a synonym for that. Like, another name for it that basically means the same thing.
Happy Pills.
It just occurred to me how asinine that commercial is, and if I weren’t so angry with how absolutely asinine it is I’d be disappointed by the realization that, despite the initial sense of hope it offered, it’s a bunch of bullshit.
It just occurred to me… that Cee Lo Green looks exactly like a boobah. So in case you couldn’t picture it, I made this Cee Lo Boobah.
Guess Who’s Back?
So I noticed the Ramseys are back in the public eye. I guess it’s got me wondering, aside from what the hell they’re doing back in headlines, if we still think someone in the Ramsey family is responsible for the murder. I want to watch some more interviews and read up on the case a little to gain a more educated perception of the case, but I’d like to hear what you my tumblr friends think. Can people even comment on tumblr? Because I don’t think I’ve gotten any comments and I’m still not sure if it’s even any option. But if it is, I’d like to hear what you think.
Apparently ol’ John’s got some regrets about putting Jonbenet in pageants and wanted to step forth to discourage families from putting children ‘on display’. For me this raises a lot of questions (…aside from calculating the number of years it took for the Ramseys to form this opinion, experience these regrets, come to a conclusion and present it to the media…) concerning the current American pop-fascination with child pageants and the seemingly uniquely American phenomenon of these things.
More to come…
Blonde
I just did probably the worst thing I could have done. He’ll probably hate me as much as I hate him right now, but I hurt him in the only way I knew I could. He chose to betray me, to break my trust, to break that last shred of my heart. And so I did the same. Only the things he loves are stuck on the internet. No expression of my pain could make him feel remorse. But not being able to access a website… that will crush him to pieces. And that gift he was so excited about giving me for Christmas, I’m driving up to his house and dropping it on his doorstep in a few hours. I can’t even stand to see it under my tree. A girl he just met at a party… flirting with her right in front of me. Kissing her, touching her. The mixture of sadness and anger and abandonment in me is so heavy I am frighteningly still. I’m not shaking, I’m not crying. I’m still. Calmly smoking. Calmly drinking. Calmly hating him as I picture them cuddling.
Trich or Treat: A Little Insight Into Trichotillomania
Trichotillomania, in a most basic, medical, textbook summary sort of way, commonly defined as an impulse control disorder or branch of obsessive compulsive disorder marked by compulsive pulling of one’s own hair.
So most basically, it’s a disorder where people pull out their hair. And I have it.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
I’m watching an episode of 48 Hours on I.D. about Dr. Chris Koulis and the death of his girlfriend Lesa Buchanan. This case got me thinking again about our judicial system and its flaws. In a way it’s like religion. In essence it seems pure, but inevitably tainted by the human tendency to twist and distort the world around us, especially those sets of rules intended to keep us from allowing our own emotional nature, complete with streaks of cruelty, jealousy, anger, desire, and vengeance, from leading to disorder and destruction. We are for the most part incapable of judging completely without bias, emotion, prejudice, presumption, or the preemptive attacks as the consequences of fear or naiveté. Every set of rules that we live by, originally instated to maintain a civil existence between the clashing differences in character, behavior and belief, is twisted millions of ways to suit each life, to comfortably conform to each worldview. There is one Bible, but there cannot be one Christianity. There is one American president and main judicial system, but States operate according to their own adaptations or the rules, to what best suits those in charge.
Gender Roles and Criminals
An observation I’ve made about American society is that our tendency toward the tradition of gender roles applies even to criminals, including serial killers, or those criminals we consider most dangerous and evil.
