With Maureen Dowd's latest column (free subscription required), I suddenly (epiphanically!) understand why I am the way I am, and to which I give Mo' Better Dowd half a slap in high-five:A beauty bias against children seems so startling because you grow up thinking parents are the only ones who will give you unconditional love, not measure it out in coffee spoons based on your genetic luck - which, after all, they're responsible for.Unconditional love..... Excuse me a moment.
Damn, I was screwed from the start. This suddenly explains every single God-damned thing in my life that went wrong, but without-- mercifully-- the Freudian suggestion that I wanted to do something unspeakable to my mother. 
Yes-- for those of you that are wondering-- there are levels of irony in my previous paragraphs. Except, of course, the fact that I was-- have been, am now, will always be-- an ugly fuckling, a fact to which most of my readers are very, very, very well aware. (As I've said before, I was good-looking-- for a week, in 1973. Since then, well, as Jon Stewart would say, "not so much.") Grrr.
And some people call this research. And, worse, some people will read Mo's whinge and think it means something. And thanks, Maureen, for adding to the pool of cultural victimization, even if your addition is yellow and surely unwanted. Those that are coiffed and styled for regular appearances as one of those talking heads on television should not be taken, ever, as advocates of the ugly.
Now, altogether now, kiddos: ~~ I'm Richard the Third, I am I am, / I'm Richard The Third....~~
As my father used to say, to make us rotten kids behave, when we asked why we should do as we were instructed, "Because I'm meaner, older, and uglier than you are." Suddenly, I understand a certain behemother of tenure-- she constantly, but pointlessly, widening like a postmodern argument-- with refreshed vigour. And who says you have to be beautiful? (Me, miles asteep in self-relevant irony: gee, who'd have guessed?)
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