2006-09-12 - 10:56 a.m.
A good returned peace corps volunteer (Ginny Winter, everyone!) sent us a copy of Oprah magazine to us, which might be the best gift anyone could send to me. I know it’s all cliché to love Oprah Winfrey a lot, but seriously? You guys? Remember how cool she is? Yeah, I do. People here in Turkmenistan have no idea who she is except the information about her salary that they learned off of MTV’s “The Fabulous Life of…Oprah Winfrey.” I was trying to explain to some students of mine, in English, why Oprah Winfrey is the most amazing woman alive and I literally just stood there with my hands flying around randomly in front of me while I kept saying, “I mean, Oprah is, like, I mean…everything…like the best, I don’t know, person? Or something? I mean, she’s just everything.” There were a lot of blank Central Asian stares at me during that moment of time.
Two thoughts I had while reading Oprah magazine:
1) I really like Suze Orman and her financial advice a lot but someone, for the love of God, has to tell her to stop wearing so much freaking eyeliner. It’s always a bit of a shock to turn the page and see Suze there with her big fat black eyes all big and wide (I would call them “POW! Eyes” if I was a professional photographer, which, incidentally, I am not) with that creepy grin on her face. Lady, scrub the coal out of your eyeballs and tell me where to invest my money.
2) There’s this page in the magazine that shows America’s most dangerous sexual predators so that people can find the men and call this number and put them in jail or whatever, right? My brain looks at the pictures, reads the words “Find these men!” and immediately starts scanning my memory for people I’ve seen who look like that. As if I’m going to be some sort of help here in Turkmenistan. As if child molester Tim O’Brien, or whoever, decided to start hiding out in T-stan and I’m all, “I’m on the case, Chief Winfrey.”
