Nothing to see here, move along

What is the opposite of a hypochondriac?

Maybe it's because I'm getting older and things could be starting to go wrong with my body, or maybe I watch too many medical shows, or maybe there's just too much medical information out there for a regular person to deal with.....whatever the reason, I've turned into that person who doesn't go to the doctor because I don't want to know what's wrong.

It started a few years ago when I realized that my back had been hurting, badly, for months so I finally went to see the doctor and was convinced that he was going to tell me to stop being such a wuss but instead he sent me in for x-rays and mri's and next thing I know I'm diagnosed with a herniated disk.

I wasn't prepared for that. Or for the months of physical therapy and all the other crap that goes along with it. I'm like George Costanza on that episode of Seinfeld where the show "Jerry" has finally been picked up by NBC but George notices a white dot on his lip and reluctantly goes to the doctor and all he wants to hear is "That's nothing!" but instead they take a biopsy. All I want to hear is "That's nothing!"

But lately, it's always something.

This morning I forced myself to see my doctor after dealing with on-again-off-again symptoms (OK, I thought I had a urinary infection. I just don't like saying it.) What I WANTED to hear was "Oh, here's a prescription to clear that right up." but instead I heard "Hmmmm, no infection. We're going to take some blood and check some other things. Just lie low and drink clear liquids for now."

WTF?

I don't NEED any more scary medical stuff this year, thanks. The Red Cross took care of that earlier this year when they blackballed me for life. Right now I just want someone to give me some antibiotics and tell me to stop being such a wuss.

Pop culture points out my bad parenting

A few days ago I got home from meeting a friend for coffee and my 13-year old daughter, who had been babysitting, asked if she could go to a movie with some of her BFF’s. I said yes because, well, she had been babysitting and school starts next week and I was trying to score Good Mom points. (I believe this is the first time that Daughter has been dropped off at the theater to hang with some friends, but I’ll have to check the records.)

She runs upstairs to call her friends and say she can go and when she comes back down I ask “Which movie?” YES, I realize that this is the FIRST question a GOOD mother would have asked. Especially after Daughter informs me that they are going to see House Bunny.

Yikes. I haven’t done my parental research on House Bunny. It looks pretty harmless – smart girls learn how to wear lip gloss and dumb girl learns how to use a sentence with a noun AND a verb – but it does start out at the Playboy Mansion. My only consolation is that one of the attending BFF’s has a mother who is even stricter than I am and if her kid is going then I’m not going to backtrack and be the Movie Nazi.

I really haven’t thought too much about it until I was flipping through Entertainment Weekly this morning and came to a one-page story on the styling of the girls in House Bunny and saw that Katharine McPhee and Rumer Willis are two of the “stars” of the movie.

Dammit.

I have to be honest. We live in a fairly affluent area; my daughter has an iPod, and a cell phone, and a laptop. And because my husband works in the media our children have been exposed to some pretty decent perks – suites at sporting events, the occasional front row seat at a Disney musical. They are fairly spoiled. But I am NOT ready for the why-can’t-you-get-me-a-part-in-a-movie-or-let-me-audition-for-a-reality-show-so-I-can-have-a-career-in-Hollywood onslaught that movies like House Bunny are sure to elicit.

Why, oh why, do you have to do this, filmmakers? Are there not enough cute Midwestern girls who have quit school and moved to L.A. to work the second shift at Denny’s so they can audition all day to fill your casting requirements? And I can’t even imagine the tension when the actresses are all sitting around between takes, smoking their cigarettes to stay skinny, and one of them asks Rumer how many times SHE had to sleep with the producer to get the role and Rumer says “Uh, none.” At least she had to wear the back brace, which only seems fair.