Support the Foundation for Cotton Ball and Q-Tip Mental Health

It’s been such a long, depressing winter. Funny that I’m speaking in the past tense, considering it’s currently 39 degrees in New York, which, as I recall in my saner moments, is fcuking COLD. You know you’ve been in New York far too long when 39 degrees seems like a sign to bring out the cabana wear. Today, it’s cold and dismal, threatening to snow. Gray clouds are lurking in the sky, like a weak-chinned guy hovering around a children’s playground . Kinda makes you shiver, just to think about it. In meteorological lingo, I think the correct term for this kind of weather is “shitty.”

Sigh.

It seems like everyone’s been horribly depressed for the past month. Late March and early April are like the last six miles of a marathon, when people are dead tired, and their feet hurt, and in some cases they’ve crapped their pants (no, really – this actually happens; it’s #38 on my list of reasons “Why I’ll Never Run a Marathon,” right before “You have to run 26 miles” and “The dude in the dinosaur costume would almost definitely beat me”).

April really is the cruelest month, and not just because of the “breeding violets out of the dead land,” blah, blah (but that, too). Early spring always gets your hopes up with one or two beautiful, sunny sit-out-on-the-restaurant-terrace days, just to let you remember what you’re missing before taking it all away again. Spring is a big tease. Really. It’s like the lap dance of seasons.

I haven’t written in the blog for a while (I refuse to say “blogged”; it just sounds gross, as if it might involve killing baby seals) , for a few reasons:

1. I’ve (temporarily?) lost all desire to do anything but sit on the couch and read New Scientist and/or watch specials on VH1 and/or E! about former child celebrities who are now addicted to crack and/or hold minor political offices somewhere in the Valley.
2. The universe is going to implode in a few billion years anyway, so, like, what’s the point?
3. The “premarital blogging” concept is a bit anachronistic now that we’ve been married for two years (happy anniversary, P). I meant to create a new blog, with a more relevant theme, but that would require effort (see #1).

To an outside observer, my recent lifestyle changes might just look like pure, unadulterated laziness. But I prefer to think that I’m going through a “fallow period.”

You know, like how farmers sometimes let their fields go unplanted for a season or two, so that the crops come back stronger. I’ve been doing this for a while (about 32 years, now). So far, so good.

According to the cartoon cotton ball in the T.V. commercials, I could be suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), or just plain old Depression (sad, sans acronym).

But if we listen to the animated evangelists for name-brand pharmaceuticals, we could all have everything from terminal nail fungus to erectile dysfunction or Restless Leg Syndrome (finally, a medical treatment for white people’s genetic tendency to do a little disco shuffle whenever we hear “Brick House”).

You really have to wonder how Americans diagnosed their medical conditions before the advent of talking bees and animated toenail fungus goblins. I guess people had to resort to something barbaric, like consulting “trained physicians” about their ailments.

Fortunately, we’ve come a long way in the past 20 years.

The most depressing pharmaceutical spokes-thingy is, by far, the Zol0ft cotton ball. Maybe it’s not a coincidence, but the commercial alone is enough to make you need anti-depressants. You know the one – the cotton ball hops around with a little rain cloud over his head. It rains only on him.

These commercials make me want to quit my job and start a foundation to help depressed Cosmetic Puffs ...

Sally Struthers has nothing on this little guy - his plight is somehow a brief but very concise history of human sadness. Never mind that he/she/it isn’t technically human, or that cotton balls don’t technically, uh .... emote. Still. Only a monster could fail to be moved.

In other ads, we’re supposed to believe s/he/it doesn’t want to play on the swing with the other cottonballs. But maybe all those other cottonballs are a bunch of douchebags? Or maybe our hero thinks it’s creepy for an mature, adult Cosmetic Puff to be playing on a swing?

It’s interesting how some conditions have an animated spokesperson, whereas others don’t. For instance, erectile dysfunction treatments never seem to have animated mascots. I think I speka for all of us in wishing that Viagra or Cialis would have a marketing campaign centered around "Dickie" the flaccid cartoon penis ...

Kind of like Digger from the nail fungus commercials. Heck, I would get a prescription for Cialis myself, just to support Dickie.

My other favorite is the Nasonex bee:

I recently came across a blog pointing out all the inconsistencies of the Nasonex bee, e.g., “the bee in the ad was talking with its mouth. This would be very difficult physiologically, as the bee respiratory system (the tracheal system) is not connected to the mouth at all, and thus the bee could not easily pass air over structures in its mouth to make noise.”

This is all very interesting, but failed to mention out the #1 inconsistency, which is that bees don’t speak with a Mexican accent (many speak with a Swedish accent). Although I guess that’s more of a stereotype than an inconsistency.

(Why are bees always portrayed as Mexican? If it were a the Nasonex Chihuahua, or the Nasonex Burrito, the accent might make sense...)

But I digress. Which, of course, is a symptom of Attention Deficit Disorder, which is another very handy excuse for my recent lack of interest in anything. When I was first diagnosed with Adult ADD a few years ago, I was very excited to finally have a condition that would explain all my horrible behavior. Not that being an adult is an excuse for anything…

Besides, I really don’t like the term Attention Deficit Disorder. It seems to focus too much on the negative of this condition, which isn’t necessarily a disorder, per se. As someone who likes to look at the bright side, I prefer the term Laziness Abundance Condition (LAC). As in, I LAC interest in doing the dishes, or finishing my work. Maybe I can apply for federal disability?

Of course, just because you have ADD doesn’t necessarily mean you’re crazy, lazy, or stupid, as the book title goes. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean you aren’t. When people can have more than one mental or physical condition, they call these “co-morbid conditions.” Thus, you can have ADD and be lazy and crazy. And suffer the heartbreak of toenail fungus.

I have several co-morbid conditions. So does Paul. So between the two of us we’re co-co-morbid. Or does that just make us “morbid”? Paul does have a rubber model of a skull sitting on his desk. That’s pretty morbid. Or is morbidity just another co-morbid condition? If so, does Pfizer make a cure for morbidity?

And most importantly, does it have a cartoon mascot? Maybe Lurch from the animated Addams Family could be the spokes-cartoon?

Or maybe the A.D.D.ams family could become the mascots for Ritalin or Adderall - a very disorganized family with co-morbid conditions. That would be hot.