Last night I found out that one of my closest friends, Ryan, was in The Onion before I knew him. I smile upon the fun facts in my friends' lives so I wanted to post it here. (Sorry for the poor scan).
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:00 AM
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BEWARE OF VERY ROUGH FIRST DRAFTS. Don't expect anything too pretty or polished. I'm simply trying to squeeze out some rough ideas across the face of this blog. These musings may or may not find their way to the pages of my book. But as you will see, I'm taking certain liberties in voice and style that deviate from my published writings. I hope you enjoy, in spite of all of that.
The Onion
Last night I found out that one of my closest friends, Ryan, was in The Onion before I knew him. I smile upon the fun facts in my friends' lives so I wanted to post it here. (Sorry for the poor scan).
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Last night I found out that one of my closest friends, Ryan, was in The Onion before I knew him. I smile upon the fun facts in my friends' lives so I wanted to post it here. (Sorry for the poor scan).
Pit Falls
I had an epiphany. In a bathroom, of all places. But it wasn’t just any bathroom. This was at a Penthouse magazine lingerie party. Considering the searing hot, scantily clad dream girls gliding about, you’d think I would have been in heaven. Instead, I was locked in a john, gunning a blow drier at the dark sweat stain on my pink dress shirt.
It wasn’t a surprise that I was dripping wet. Afflicted by a rather inconvenient condition called axillary hyperhidrosis, my armpits were always streaming. But I was appalled that my foolproof plan to conceal my sweat had backfired. Earlier in the evening I had strategically harnessed a pair of Maxi-Pads to my armpits with an Ace Bandage. Yet within an hour of my arrival at the Hollywood mansion, mutiny. My female diapers had slipped.
And that’s when it hit me. I’m not as crafty as I think. I needed to find an actual, certified cure.
I first realized that I had a sweating problem a year earlier. It was in the grip of a Brooklyn winter and I was shivering in my friend’s unheated apartment. As I flipped through a magazine, Dan, who was wrapped like a burrito in a blanket, pointed to my tee shirt and asked, “Nervous? Got the IRS after you or something?” I followed his finger to my light gray tee and discovered the two dark gray stains.
Suddenly aware of sweat trickling over my goose bumps, I fumbled for an excuse. “Nah, these shots of Paris in a bikini are hot,” I fudged. I had no idea why I was sweating. My armpits were glazed with my daily antiperspirant, and besides, I was cold. Perhaps chattering my teeth was a new aerobic workout.
For the next few days, I surveyed the shirts of all those around me. My reconnaissance mission was discouraging; devastating, actually. Not only was everyone else drier than dirt, but they didn’t even sweat when exerting themselves. Dan ripped off twenty pull-ups without a hint of moisture, but I couldn’t pull a pen from my pocket without looking like I had just bench-pressed a car. So I turned to Google.
Typing in keywords like “extremely sweaty pits,” I came across SweatHelp.org, the website for the International Hyperhidrosis Society. I wasn’t alone! Apparently I shared this condition with a whole three percent of the population. While this may seem like a high percentage to some, to me it felt like an obscure curse - something with which Stephen Hawking might even sympathize. I scanned every inch of the site on a quest for information. What causes this? Why me?
Little to nothing is known about the exact cause of hyperactive sweat glands, but research suggests that it’s hereditary. This is not surprising as I always suspected that there was something behind my mother’s conspicuous costume changes. She switched shirts so many times a day you’d think she was a pop star on tour. And since I had already inherited chronic bedwetting from my father, it only seemed fair that Mom would serve me up some sort of shortcoming.
Despite my medical maladies, I did feel marginally better about myself when I read about the hand other sweaty people were dealt. There were degrees of hyperhidrosis that sounded even more humiliating - sweaty faces or palms, in particular.
While I simply had to be smart about the colors and fabrics of my shirt or how I moved my arms, those afflicted with the facial or palmer forms couldn’t blink or shake hands without a cascade of warning signs. But there was one common sweat problem I envied - plantar hyperhidrosis, or sweaty feet. While there’s nothing at all sexy about sweaty feet, this seemed like the least of evils. Sure, your feet may rot through shoes but at least it wasn’t broadcast to the public. Secrecy was key.
Fortunately there are treatments. Super concentrated antiperspirants like Certain Dry work for some, Botox works for everyone, and endoscopic thoracic surgery will stop sweaty pits or palms in their tracks. However, ETS carries a very high risk of compensatory sweating whereby your torso or legs or some other part of your body from which you had never sweat suddenly soaks your clothes. I opted for Certain Dri.
At ten bucks per roll-on stick, the high potency antiperspirant was about a grand cheaper than Botox injections, and it promised to shrink my pores and plug sweat ducts. I applied the stuff religiously for a few months before being struck with an insufferable sweat stain on my shirt that streaked all the way down to my belt. Apparently nothing is Certain, except for axioms like “You pay for what you get.” As spring crept into summer I began to panic - not because I would sweat anymore than usual but because I could no longer conceal my sweat beneath a cocoon of clothes. I might be mistaken for a suicide bomber.
With no relief from antiperspirants and unable to afford a new Botox habit, I had to rethink my wardrobe. Cotton shirts were too revealing, so I went shopping for clothes that could keep a secret. I road-tested the shirts I liked in the dressing room, clamping them in my armpit until sufficiently wet. Then I checked to see if the discrepancy between the sweat and dry look was too sizeable. It usually was. My options were limited to black and, well, just black actually. I did buy one pink shirt for the day when I stopped sweating, but mostly I bought black and reluctantly embarked on my Dark Period. This new look wasn’t me, but it beat being that sweaty guy.
Of course, this plan wasn’t foolproof. While some shirts could conceal sweat stains from the naked eye, a wet shirt is still a wet shirt. I learned this during a music video shoot where I made a cameo walking with my arm slung over some model’s bare shoulder. She quickly recoiled and as she glanced at her glistening skin, the word Yuk slipped past her lips. I’d have to keep the sweat off my shirts to be safe.
This is what led me to fasten pads in my pits. But as the mishap at the lingerie party proved, I’m no MacGyver. The only other option was Botox. On the SweatHelp site I learned about a doctor’s conference in Huntington Beach: Hyperhidrosis Emerging Concepts and Treatments. I arranged to be their Botox test dummy.
The dermatologist painted a Betadyne solution in each armpit and sprinkled it with cornstarch – as soon as sweat hit the cornstarch it would turn purple. But strangely enough, as I lay with my hands behind my head and forty dermatologists huddled around me, I wasn’t sweating at all. At least not until the doctor informed me that my armpits were “much bigger than most patients.” Apparently I would need roughly twice as many shots – twenty-five in each armpit. My underarms wept.
“Look, there it comes! He’s sweating!” cried the gaggle of doctors as my armpits turned a Barney-esque shade of purple. “It’s pouring from everywhere!” another shouted. Their excitement made me feel like a circus freak-show, greatly aggravating my sweat glands. Within seconds the entire expanse of my underarms outed themselves as sieves. Dr. Said penned twenty-five equidistant dots in my hairy pits with a Sharpie. And then the stabbing began.
The first one burned like a bee sting and I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. Suddenly I didn’t mind sweating at all. In fact, I looked terrific in black. They complimented my pupils nicely. There was no need for the — Ouch! Oh My God! — forty-eight more jabs of the needle.
***
I’m now eight months into my new life as a dry guy. And while I feared that my sweat would be rerouted to another part of my body, it hasn’t. My days as a brooding Goth with something to hide are but a dark, distant memory, and with my brightly colored clothes I now look more like me. At twenty-nine, I have finally found freedom - albeit a fleeting one.
My Botox will inevitably wear off and my sleeping beast will awaken. I can either accept my fate or pay to change it. Since I’m cursed with more psycho-physiological pitfalls than I care to count on my nail-bitten fingers, I have that dermatologist’s number on speed dial. Sure, I’m embarking on an expensive adventure, but I’d pay anything, anything, to party with Penthouse Pets again without Maxi-Pads falling from my pits.
Friday, March 10, 2006
I had an epiphany. In a bathroom, of all places. But it wasn’t just any bathroom. This was at a Penthouse magazine lingerie party. Considering the searing hot, scantily clad dream girls gliding about, you’d think I would have been in heaven. Instead, I was locked in a john, gunning a blow drier at the dark sweat stain on my pink dress shirt.
It wasn’t a surprise that I was dripping wet. Afflicted by a rather inconvenient condition called axillary hyperhidrosis, my armpits were always streaming. But I was appalled that my foolproof plan to conceal my sweat had backfired. Earlier in the evening I had strategically harnessed a pair of Maxi-Pads to my armpits with an Ace Bandage. Yet within an hour of my arrival at the Hollywood mansion, mutiny. My female diapers had slipped.
And that’s when it hit me. I’m not as crafty as I think. I needed to find an actual, certified cure.
I first realized that I had a sweating problem a year earlier. It was in the grip of a Brooklyn winter and I was shivering in my friend’s unheated apartment. As I flipped through a magazine, Dan, who was wrapped like a burrito in a blanket, pointed to my tee shirt and asked, “Nervous? Got the IRS after you or something?” I followed his finger to my light gray tee and discovered the two dark gray stains.
Suddenly aware of sweat trickling over my goose bumps, I fumbled for an excuse. “Nah, these shots of Paris in a bikini are hot,” I fudged. I had no idea why I was sweating. My armpits were glazed with my daily antiperspirant, and besides, I was cold. Perhaps chattering my teeth was a new aerobic workout.
For the next few days, I surveyed the shirts of all those around me. My reconnaissance mission was discouraging; devastating, actually. Not only was everyone else drier than dirt, but they didn’t even sweat when exerting themselves. Dan ripped off twenty pull-ups without a hint of moisture, but I couldn’t pull a pen from my pocket without looking like I had just bench-pressed a car. So I turned to Google.
Typing in keywords like “extremely sweaty pits,” I came across SweatHelp.org, the website for the International Hyperhidrosis Society. I wasn’t alone! Apparently I shared this condition with a whole three percent of the population. While this may seem like a high percentage to some, to me it felt like an obscure curse - something with which Stephen Hawking might even sympathize. I scanned every inch of the site on a quest for information. What causes this? Why me?
Little to nothing is known about the exact cause of hyperactive sweat glands, but research suggests that it’s hereditary. This is not surprising as I always suspected that there was something behind my mother’s conspicuous costume changes. She switched shirts so many times a day you’d think she was a pop star on tour. And since I had already inherited chronic bedwetting from my father, it only seemed fair that Mom would serve me up some sort of shortcoming.
Despite my medical maladies, I did feel marginally better about myself when I read about the hand other sweaty people were dealt. There were degrees of hyperhidrosis that sounded even more humiliating - sweaty faces or palms, in particular.
While I simply had to be smart about the colors and fabrics of my shirt or how I moved my arms, those afflicted with the facial or palmer forms couldn’t blink or shake hands without a cascade of warning signs. But there was one common sweat problem I envied - plantar hyperhidrosis, or sweaty feet. While there’s nothing at all sexy about sweaty feet, this seemed like the least of evils. Sure, your feet may rot through shoes but at least it wasn’t broadcast to the public. Secrecy was key.
Fortunately there are treatments. Super concentrated antiperspirants like Certain Dry work for some, Botox works for everyone, and endoscopic thoracic surgery will stop sweaty pits or palms in their tracks. However, ETS carries a very high risk of compensatory sweating whereby your torso or legs or some other part of your body from which you had never sweat suddenly soaks your clothes. I opted for Certain Dri.
At ten bucks per roll-on stick, the high potency antiperspirant was about a grand cheaper than Botox injections, and it promised to shrink my pores and plug sweat ducts. I applied the stuff religiously for a few months before being struck with an insufferable sweat stain on my shirt that streaked all the way down to my belt. Apparently nothing is Certain, except for axioms like “You pay for what you get.” As spring crept into summer I began to panic - not because I would sweat anymore than usual but because I could no longer conceal my sweat beneath a cocoon of clothes. I might be mistaken for a suicide bomber.
With no relief from antiperspirants and unable to afford a new Botox habit, I had to rethink my wardrobe. Cotton shirts were too revealing, so I went shopping for clothes that could keep a secret. I road-tested the shirts I liked in the dressing room, clamping them in my armpit until sufficiently wet. Then I checked to see if the discrepancy between the sweat and dry look was too sizeable. It usually was. My options were limited to black and, well, just black actually. I did buy one pink shirt for the day when I stopped sweating, but mostly I bought black and reluctantly embarked on my Dark Period. This new look wasn’t me, but it beat being that sweaty guy.
Of course, this plan wasn’t foolproof. While some shirts could conceal sweat stains from the naked eye, a wet shirt is still a wet shirt. I learned this during a music video shoot where I made a cameo walking with my arm slung over some model’s bare shoulder. She quickly recoiled and as she glanced at her glistening skin, the word Yuk slipped past her lips. I’d have to keep the sweat off my shirts to be safe.
This is what led me to fasten pads in my pits. But as the mishap at the lingerie party proved, I’m no MacGyver. The only other option was Botox. On the SweatHelp site I learned about a doctor’s conference in Huntington Beach: Hyperhidrosis Emerging Concepts and Treatments. I arranged to be their Botox test dummy.
The dermatologist painted a Betadyne solution in each armpit and sprinkled it with cornstarch – as soon as sweat hit the cornstarch it would turn purple. But strangely enough, as I lay with my hands behind my head and forty dermatologists huddled around me, I wasn’t sweating at all. At least not until the doctor informed me that my armpits were “much bigger than most patients.” Apparently I would need roughly twice as many shots – twenty-five in each armpit. My underarms wept.
“Look, there it comes! He’s sweating!” cried the gaggle of doctors as my armpits turned a Barney-esque shade of purple. “It’s pouring from everywhere!” another shouted. Their excitement made me feel like a circus freak-show, greatly aggravating my sweat glands. Within seconds the entire expanse of my underarms outed themselves as sieves. Dr. Said penned twenty-five equidistant dots in my hairy pits with a Sharpie. And then the stabbing began.
The first one burned like a bee sting and I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. Suddenly I didn’t mind sweating at all. In fact, I looked terrific in black. They complimented my pupils nicely. There was no need for the — Ouch! Oh My God! — forty-eight more jabs of the needle.
***
I’m now eight months into my new life as a dry guy. And while I feared that my sweat would be rerouted to another part of my body, it hasn’t. My days as a brooding Goth with something to hide are but a dark, distant memory, and with my brightly colored clothes I now look more like me. At twenty-nine, I have finally found freedom - albeit a fleeting one.
My Botox will inevitably wear off and my sleeping beast will awaken. I can either accept my fate or pay to change it. Since I’m cursed with more psycho-physiological pitfalls than I care to count on my nail-bitten fingers, I have that dermatologist’s number on speed dial. Sure, I’m embarking on an expensive adventure, but I’d pay anything, anything, to party with Penthouse Pets again without Maxi-Pads falling from my pits.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 2:49 PM
Please Pass me the Yarmulke
There was once a time when I believed balding was a religious choice. I was young and seated in the back pew of Sunday mass when I noticed all the grown men in front of me had shiny bald spots that shone so bright that if you squinted, looked like washed out halos. Shortly thereafter I went to my first Bat Mitzvah where I made the assumption that Christians shaved a sacred circle in their heads while Jews wore yarmulkes. I had no explanation, it was just an observation, and when you think about it, I wasn’t so far off. Balding does in fact have a lot to do with destiny, but I’ve come to realize it’s less of a sectarian destiny than a genetic one.
My genetic curse.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not bald yet, buuuuuuut…
While my Dad has a pretty great head of hair for a sixty-year-old, I’ve read and heard over and over that this doesn’t matter.
It’s kind of like saying your neighbor just won a Corvette in a charity auction; it’s great for him but probably won’t affect your life too much. No, I know that it’s my Gramps that I have to worry about. And that’s probably why I’m pouring over old photo albums of my mother’s father. I want to know what kind of coverage he had when he died at the age of seventy.
Unfortunately for me, Gramps had a chrome dome and according to the photos, sported a wispy, unconvincing comb-over that flapped like a flag in the wind. I was too young to remember, but I can’t imagine that even I was fooled. And now, as I examine my own plot of hair with a hand mirror, from all angles and under multiple different lighting scenarios, I fear that I too will be facing some hard choices in the future.
Luckily, I’m not freaking out about balding with quite the passion and pizzazz of my early-20s, when I feared my hairline was receding faster than the glaciers. Ah those good old, hyperaware days when I neurotically combed my fingers through my shoulder-length hair just to see how many were falling out. My hand rake culled one and three and six strands with each pass, over and over obsessively make me stop, please. I couldn’t, for the life of me, quit until I came up empty-handed, which happened about as often as rolling snake eyes in Monopoly. When I finally did I should have felt relief, but it was tough to relax with enough hair on my desk to knit a scarf.
Torture is a euphemism for what I subjected myself to.
Eventually however, I wisened up. My hippie shag was way too long so every fallen hair looked as significant as a logged Sequoia. Seeing several twelve-inch strands of my dark hair in my palm incited a sense of panic that swiftly snowballed and spun and swirled me into obsessive compulsion. I wondered how many of these I was losing and how often and so I culled and culled until finally I walked into a salon and threw down for a shorter style.
Now with my faux-hawk firmly in place, my hair looks fuller and I worry much less about balding, or my widow’s peaks, than I did with long hair. I’m not sure if my shedding has slowed or if it’s that my hair is much shorter, but I am happy to report that my shower drain takes much longer to clog. While I’m fairly pleased with my current hair count, I’m not nearly as optimistic about turning forty and fifty and beyond. It may be falling out slowly or slower, but falling out it is. In the front and the back.
And this, my friends, is why I’m fixated on the hairlines and hairstyles of older men. I take inventory of every possibility and project my future self onto that skin tone or jaw line. I pour over the pages of pop culture rags, scrutinize television or movie screens, and comb the streets to see what works and doesn’t, what to shoot for and what to avoid, and where I stand. Will I look better or worse than this man?
Fortunately, besides the rise and fall of my ego, this impulse doesn’t have any noticeable physical side effects. While I might be a little envious of Bono’s full mane in his late forties, I know it would never trigger an eating disorder. (Although, in fairness, if it were revealed that starving oneself could thicken things up, my finger would be jammed down my throat faster than you could say ‘bulimic’). I’d like to think I’m doing market research, for that day when I have to decide how I’m going to present myself. Will I be wild and sport the balding Ben Franklin like Graydon Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, or thank my lucky stars and keep it short like Letterman?
In any event, I’m not worried about ever rocking the Gramps. The sports, movie and rock stars of today have fortunately turned the comb-over into an anachronism, like Polio or Polly-O-String Cheese. But I am concerned about how I will look when my dome betrays me and I’m left with two strips of a Mohawk and a dash of skin.
Maybe I should keep that yarmulke handy after all.
There was once a time when I believed balding was a religious choice. I was young and seated in the back pew of Sunday mass when I noticed all the grown men in front of me had shiny bald spots that shone so bright that if you squinted, looked like washed out halos. Shortly thereafter I went to my first Bat Mitzvah where I made the assumption that Christians shaved a sacred circle in their heads while Jews wore yarmulkes. I had no explanation, it was just an observation, and when you think about it, I wasn’t so far off. Balding does in fact have a lot to do with destiny, but I’ve come to realize it’s less of a sectarian destiny than a genetic one.
My genetic curse.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not bald yet, buuuuuuut…
While my Dad has a pretty great head of hair for a sixty-year-old, I’ve read and heard over and over that this doesn’t matter.
It’s kind of like saying your neighbor just won a Corvette in a charity auction; it’s great for him but probably won’t affect your life too much. No, I know that it’s my Gramps that I have to worry about. And that’s probably why I’m pouring over old photo albums of my mother’s father. I want to know what kind of coverage he had when he died at the age of seventy.
Unfortunately for me, Gramps had a chrome dome and according to the photos, sported a wispy, unconvincing comb-over that flapped like a flag in the wind. I was too young to remember, but I can’t imagine that even I was fooled. And now, as I examine my own plot of hair with a hand mirror, from all angles and under multiple different lighting scenarios, I fear that I too will be facing some hard choices in the future.
Luckily, I’m not freaking out about balding with quite the passion and pizzazz of my early-20s, when I feared my hairline was receding faster than the glaciers. Ah those good old, hyperaware days when I neurotically combed my fingers through my shoulder-length hair just to see how many were falling out. My hand rake culled one and three and six strands with each pass, over and over obsessively make me stop, please. I couldn’t, for the life of me, quit until I came up empty-handed, which happened about as often as rolling snake eyes in Monopoly. When I finally did I should have felt relief, but it was tough to relax with enough hair on my desk to knit a scarf.
Torture is a euphemism for what I subjected myself to.
Eventually however, I wisened up. My hippie shag was way too long so every fallen hair looked as significant as a logged Sequoia. Seeing several twelve-inch strands of my dark hair in my palm incited a sense of panic that swiftly snowballed and spun and swirled me into obsessive compulsion. I wondered how many of these I was losing and how often and so I culled and culled until finally I walked into a salon and threw down for a shorter style.
Now with my faux-hawk firmly in place, my hair looks fuller and I worry much less about balding, or my widow’s peaks, than I did with long hair. I’m not sure if my shedding has slowed or if it’s that my hair is much shorter, but I am happy to report that my shower drain takes much longer to clog. While I’m fairly pleased with my current hair count, I’m not nearly as optimistic about turning forty and fifty and beyond. It may be falling out slowly or slower, but falling out it is. In the front and the back.
And this, my friends, is why I’m fixated on the hairlines and hairstyles of older men. I take inventory of every possibility and project my future self onto that skin tone or jaw line. I pour over the pages of pop culture rags, scrutinize television or movie screens, and comb the streets to see what works and doesn’t, what to shoot for and what to avoid, and where I stand. Will I look better or worse than this man?
Fortunately, besides the rise and fall of my ego, this impulse doesn’t have any noticeable physical side effects. While I might be a little envious of Bono’s full mane in his late forties, I know it would never trigger an eating disorder. (Although, in fairness, if it were revealed that starving oneself could thicken things up, my finger would be jammed down my throat faster than you could say ‘bulimic’). I’d like to think I’m doing market research, for that day when I have to decide how I’m going to present myself. Will I be wild and sport the balding Ben Franklin like Graydon Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, or thank my lucky stars and keep it short like Letterman?
In any event, I’m not worried about ever rocking the Gramps. The sports, movie and rock stars of today have fortunately turned the comb-over into an anachronism, like Polio or Polly-O-String Cheese. But I am concerned about how I will look when my dome betrays me and I’m left with two strips of a Mohawk and a dash of skin.
Maybe I should keep that yarmulke handy after all.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 10:19 AM