Practicing my model-with-the-lips-parted look!
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen questionable lunch meat, so I’ll try to describe it for you. Imagine a piece of prosciutto that had seen better days. Now imagine that prosciutto had been hitchhiking on a busy interstate and was hit by a car where all four tires rolled over it. Let’s say the car backed up and rolled over the prosciutto again. Clearly dead, the lunch meat was subsequently buried without a coffin because it was poor, but then it was exhumed after 20 years for DNA testing because someone had filed a child support claim. Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. To make things a little more realistic, let’s just say the lunch meat was dug up after 5 years instead. There, is that better?
I stood there in front of the grayish meat and the runny cheese and tried to decide whether it was still safe to eat. I mean, who has money to waste? If I tossed it, that would be a good $2.99 down the drain. However, if I ate it and it didn’t agree with me, I could end up on the toilet for several days—again. Worse yet, I could end up in the hospital where I’d be forced to have my stomach pumped and to eat low-quality slop that looks just as bad as the dead prosciutto. The last time this happened, I lost 41 pounds in 3 days. Hmmm.
Wait a minute. Maybe I didn’t exactly think this through. If I lost 41 pounds again, I bet all the major modeling agencies would come calling and trying to put me on billboards and the sides of milk cartons. I could just see me taking calls from Wilhelmina Models, Ford, and Victoria Secret all offering me millions to be the face of their next campaign. I mean, I’m already confused with Prison Bae and Tyson Beckford at least 3 times a week, so a dead lunch meat diet could be my big break.
Well, after a thorough analysis that included several Excel spreadsheets and a few consultation calls, I opted against eating the grayish meat and the runny cheese. I wish I could say that I made the choice because it was simply the right thing to do, but instead, I thought about 50 years from now being interviewed by Barbara Walters and Oprah and having to tell them how I broke into the industry. I thought about all the doctors and nurses that would threaten to leak photos and footage of my hospital stay if I didn’t give them hush money. Absolutely not worth it to me. Nope.
Not long after I tossed the lunch meat, I began to feel depressed over the missed opportunity. Fortunately, I have a team of shrinks who make themselves available 24/7 to help me through these low moments. Well, that’s not exactly true. My main shrink was attending a funeral at the time and refused to step out into the hallway to take my call, even though I had asked nicely. I told her that I understood, but I would need her to call me immediately after the service to help with my depression and my new feelings of rejection.
Next, I called my backup shrink. Fortunately, he was more than willing to step out of his daughter’s college graduation ceremony to offer guidance. He quickly reminded me of our last session where he had taught me to be confident in my decisions even when they’re clearly the wrong ones. Whether I ate the prosciutto or not, the choice was mine and mine alone. He reminded me that no matter how bad my choices are, things will be alright just as long as I stick my chest out, profess my flawed decisions loudly, and stand behind my erroneous judgement no matter what. He then told me to turn on CNN for some excellent examples of this technique.
Of course, I then called my backup backup shrink for a second opinion. She agreed. Well, at least I think she’s a she. Although I’m sharing this with you, my dear blog readers, I will not make things uncomfortable by trying to address this with her—or him directly. In any case, it’s 2018. Be who you want to be. Live your life. And even though my backup backup shrink is my grandma, I don’t want to offend her by just assuming she’s a woman. You know what they say about people who assume: they have bad credit.
The downside of reaching out to my backup backup shrink, is that he or she always makes the session about her or him. Before I realized what was happening, my grandma (or grandpa…if you will) was reminding me that if I ate the dead lunch meat, he/she and I could both be on the cover of Vogue together. I reminded him or her that this call was supposed to be about me, but then my grandma/grandpa said he/she was waiting for his/her big break too. Clearly, he or she was applying the hit 2 birds with 12 stones logic.
The whole conversation made me wonder if I had made the right decision by adding grandma/grandpa to my team of shrinks. I mean, was he/she even a professional? Before our first session, grandma/grandpa did show me his/her mental health certification that he/she got one day while waiting for an oil change at Jiffy Lube. I was slightly alarmed by the name being scratched out and my grandma/grandpa’s name being written in with red crayon, but if you can’t trust your grandma/grandpa, who can you trust?
To make a long story less long, it looks like I’ll be losing the 41 pounds the hard way. I’m not exactly looking forward to not being able to eat or drink anything for the next four months or so, but that has to be a better choice than indulging in gray lunch meat and runny cheese. Besides, the extra time will give my grandma/grandpa extra time to come up with other ways to get his or her own Vogue cover. You don’t see Rihanna or Beyoncé sharing magazine covers with their grannies, and since I’m equally beautiful and successful, why should I?
Michael Rochelle
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