Honestly, the DSM IV needs to open up a new definition for the mental illness where a person will do anything to get on Oprah's show. Because last night, as I was chillin', I happened to get stuck on Oprah. The featured guests were some doctors who had written a "user's guide" to the human body and they were talking about health and food and stuff and all the typical things they talk about on Oprah.
Then things get a little funky and prevented me from switching over to bowdlerized "Sex and the City." Oprah and the good doctor start talking about poop. Yes, poop. And how it's supposed to look. Don't any of y'all tell me you don't look at your poop, you do, it's not just a curious ape thing, it's an unconscious health instinct. Also, according to a chick I know in Reno, a polygraph question for the FBI. Are you going to lie about looking at your poop? What else will you lie about?
So, okay, this is a fairly abstruse poop discussion. Healthy pooping. But then Oprah introduces two blandola white women with poop problems. The B-roll scrolls by, with these women recounting how badly they eat and how little they poop (one of them says maybe every five days; the audience collectively clutches its gut) or how much and one of them talks about her hemorroids (she says they're like grapes hanging out of her butt and the audience freaks out). I mean, with a setup like this, I was left hoping they'd get a makeover or enemas or something. At least some personal advice.
But nope. They get to touch a healthy cadaver colon and a grody cadaver colon. They get to learn that all poop is green before it passes through the final bit of the colon because of bile. They learn that thier poop should be curved like a banana or an "S." They learn that when Oprah makes an "S"-shaped poop she pumps her arm and goes, "Yes!" They learn that poop hitting the toilet water should make a sound like "a diver" and should not make a big splash, Olympic-style I guess, and I didn't make that up. And we learn that one woman poops "tiny marbles," which Oprah will sing Don Ho style about ten times during the show. Yes, Oprah, it *does* just get funnier.
The poor women never get to have any kind of personal poop check. They're left on the poop deck. They're up shit creek without a pooper. They get told the same advice the rest of the audience is — eat bananas and stuff. I know, there's only so much poop talk one can take, but I was really moved (har har) by their plights and wanted to see them get more curation.
If they had gotten their curative enemas or personalized advice (and I have to respect that there is probably a limit for all talk poop-related that a syndicated talk show's distributors' can handle (though not the audience. I firmly believe that people can be endlessly fascinated with the health divinations of their poop and I do believe there are centuries of pre-20th Century medicine that prove me right about this)), that might have made up for the fact that one of them said she had grapey hemorrhoids hanging out of her butt so bad she stays in bed for days at a time. Instead, she and her counterpart just look like whackos who'll do anything to be on Oprah. Including discuss poop frequency and consistency.
1 comment:
My yoga teacher saw this episode too and she can't stop talking about it. Especially the "shaped like an S" thing. Is it that once Oprah makes says things, they become ok to talk about? This was a good thing when it was Phil Donohue talking about gay teenagers in the 80s but the poop thing, for me, too much.
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