on kathy & judy this morning they are talking about gynecological exams. one of them thinks that the whole thing is overblown and women should suck it up and deal with the 5 minutes total of discomfort involved in a mammogram and the dreaded speculum. i completely agree. i haven’t had a mammogram, but i found the pelvic exam to be completely anticlimactic. it had been built up as this awful experience but it took all of 60 seconds and i was left thinking, “that was it?” i remember afterwards my mom was really concerned with how i was dealing with the whole traumatic experience and i was more concerned with getting across the loop to sign my new lease. actually, i found the whole experience to be too warm and fuzzy and i thought the doctor seemed overly sympathetic. i felt like i was being treated like i was 5 years old and now i can’t help wondering if women freak out so much because every societal cue tells us we’re expected to. i don’t want to marginalize anyone’s feelings here; i’m sure a lot of women are genuinely terrified of the whole experience, the same way a lot of people are paralyzed at the thought of visiting the dentist…something else i’ve never understood. i guess my first reaction to these sorts of situations is one of curiosity.

i’ve always thought that my neutral, or even warm, feelings about going to the dentist had a lot to do with dealing with braces for 4 years. once you’ve had someone rummaging around in your mouth, using that little hammer to see if everything’s cemented properly and causing eye-watering pain for extended periods of time, a little cleaning and flossing seems pretty tame. however, when i really think about it, i’ve never been afraid of the dentist. i think it’s because my pediatric dentist was really great – he was funny and did voices and was friends with my mom. also my parents never made me feel anxious about it.

which brings us back to the pelvic exam – i think a lot of times if you’re told over and over that something is going to be awful, no matter how not-unpleasant the experience is, your mind will find a way to make it seem as bad as you were conditioned to believe it would be. like that passage from junior year hs english – probably one of the most “holy shit, it’s true” things i’ve ever read – the mind can make a hell out of heaven or a heaven out of hell. on the other hand, some people are just more squeamish about certain things than others. i’m okay with the dentist and the gynecologist, but show me a lobster or a herring and i am reduced to a puddle of horrified goo.

every morning i put on vh1 for background noise and see pretty much the same videos over and over again. i think i’ve seen that black eyed peas video 3 times in one morning. others that seem pretty popular (in the same hour-long period) are shakira, mariah carey, lifehouse, weezer, rob thomas, gavin degraw and kelly clarkson. something i’ve noticed during my daily payola-infusion is that the same guy keeps popping up in a lot of videos. eric roberts. what’s up with that?

he’s always playing the Other Man or Evil Guy or something like that. his reputation/type-casting as a bad guy has never sat well with me because when i think of eric roberts i think of this one movie i saw him in when i was in high school. the movie was ‘dark angel‘ and he played a good (if tortured and dark) cop who had to clear his name. because it was the first thing i ever saw him in, that role has sort of defined him for me. weird how that works, isn’t it?

it makes me think harder about first impressions in general. i remember first meeting my friend nicole in junior high and being pretty sure that we wouldn’t be friends. for some reason i thought it was a foregone conclusion that she was going to be sucked into the popular group – probably because she was tall and pretty. and when i first met mark i didn’t like him either, but i think that had more to do with the circumstances under which we met, not him.

i guess the point of all of this is: now i’m dreading the kind of first impression i make. i probably seem really cold or stuck-up, but really i’m silently freaking out because i don’t know how to act, so i end up doing it all wrong. i am not good with people i don’t know but i guess i’m not really that good with people i do know either – some people can’t read me at all when i think i’m putting it all out there while others can tell exactly what i’m thinking even when i’m trying to be neutral. there was a guy i knew in high school that could do this and it was really unsettling. even at the age of – what? 16? – i had gotten used to people (even my friends) not knowing how i felt at any given moment. then this guy who spent less time with me, who allegedly didn’t know me as well, could read me like a book. are some people just more observant, or is there some sort of mental/emotional affinity that individuals can have that allows them to tune into others so well?