how oprah ruined my life, and other wailings of my heart

the day my mother followed (like so many other desparate, obese women in america) oprahs advice to starve themselves thin by drinking 3 or 4 nutritional shakes a day, was the day my disdain began. at first i was thrilled that the incessant complaints, 'i'm so fat", and insecurities that went with it might be at an end, but i would soon realize that i was in for something much worse than that. soon after starting the diet came the mood swings, then the frustration at not making progress, then the time i found her in the kitchen chewing rice and spitting it out, just to get some "flavor" (also one of the first times i realized that my mother was insane).
you see, oprah is always harping on the insecurities of women, which makes my life even harder. for instance, i can hardly read any classic literature anymore because all the covers bear the badge of "oprahs book club". i wanted to read anna karenina because i heard a reference in a movie about her leaving her lover because she suddenly realized his ears were enormous, but when i saw the book, it bore the badge, and leo tolstoys words will be forever lost to me.
and another thing. i simply hate the fact that o is an icon to millions of sad, desparate housewifes everywhere. what is so great about her? is it because she says "you go girl" once in a while, or what? i just don't see it. i mean, she's definitely no martha stewart.

"I'm going to ask you a question, and you have to answer, "'why?'"... I'm calling the Fire Department." This form an eighty year old man that I was shuttling to the Fresno Convention Center so that he could compete in the nine ball tournanment at the 18th Annual National Golden Age Games, a sort of special olympics for veterans.
"Why?", I dutifully responded.
"Because you've set my heart on fire!!!", he replied with the exuberance of a much younger man. I laughed as if I had never heard anything funnier, and at that moment, in my mind, nothing I had ever heard was as funny. I asked him how long he had been using that line and how many women he had ever caught with it. He told me he had been throwing it out for two years and it had never brought him a catch yet, which made me wonder what this man was doing, at age eighty, hitting on wemon. An then I realized that aside from his pudgy, saggy exterior, was the same man he was at age 50, and age 25. Only his body had betrayed him, and his mind and his labido were still firing on all cylinders.  Here I was, shuttling thousands of senior citizens to and from their discus throwing, swim races, bowling tournaments, and I laughed at the joke of getting older. Just when you think you "have it", and when you are at your best mentally, with ninety, one hundred years of experience behind you, you look in the mirror and see that although you are ready for another hundred, your body is not. I guess it may seem sad, but my sense is that all those old fogies are not crying- their experience has taught them that life is too short to not laugh.