I don't see any potential for "trickle down effect" in C.C. Sabathia's Contract

Last week my roommate and I finally watched No Country for Old Men. The story revolves around an evil, creepy man pursuing a briefcase containing two million dollars that is found following a drug deal gone wrong by a random passerby. This man is absolutely brutal, shooting anyone who gets in his way with no mercy.

At one point, I asked my roommate, “How much money is in there? Two million?” He nodded. I followed with “Doesn’t A-Rod make that, in, like, one game? It’s pretty sad all these innocent bystanders are losing lives over two million bucks when A-Rod earns about that much per at bat.”

I love baseball. Always have. Always will. But when I heardabout C.C. Sabathia’s $161M contract with the Yankees yesterday, I was finally ready to admit for the first time, that baseball players' salaries are beyond extravagant. They are an insulting slap in the face toward those who are being hit hard by the economy.

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The Reality "Trainwreck" Show is Overdue for Cancellation

Last night, I was brutally reminded of the fact that I’m a trainwreck. My good old Facebook newsfeed alerted me that my friend had posted some pictures. She lives in Italy and I last saw her well over a month ago, soI went to look at her pictures purely out of boredom, not thinking I was featured in them. The very first photo was of me when we saw each other in New York, dancing on a table at the Thompson Hotel lounge with my crotch hanging out of my hiked-up minidress.

This particular friend and I have been jokingly calling ourselves “trainwrecks” since college and there is plenty of evidence to back it up. In a way, we have glorified self-destruction, which coincidentally was in vogue last year, as everyone obsessively followed the antics of Britney Spearsand Lindsay Lohan.

When I first decided I wanted to become a television writerat some point in 2007, I was fixated on creating an HBO dramedy pilot called “Trainwreck,” an idea I have since abandoned. I pulled dialogue and created outlines for the show based on my countless real life anecdotes, from knocking a girl out at prom, to a night in a New Orleans prison holding cell with an alleged murderer, to returning a pregnancy test to get the $11 back, to narrowly avoiding being abducted by a rapist.

In September of 2007, everything came to a head when I had afull-fledged panic attack and went to the hospital. For several months, I had been so hyper, even my closest friends thought I was on drugs. People would ask me where to find blow and were always shocked to hear I was actually a self-proclaimed cocaine virgin.

My state of mind reached such an extreme, I was having vivid thoughts of falling down and cracking my head open. I was living in a crazy, self-created horror movie. I was overly aware of everything, which can be a blessing and a curse for aspiring writers. Everything was stimulating the shit out of me and I was bugging out. During the month leading up to my twenty-fourth birthday, I had jokingly started to say, “I’m twenty three now, but will I live to see twenty-fo’ the way things are going I don’t know.” But then, I suddenly felt like I really might die prematurely.

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Last Monday morning, one of my two best friends growing up called to tell me she had had a baby boy only twenty minutes ago. She had chosen not to find out the sex ahead of time.

After the initial elation, a thought occurred to me a day or two later. What was his circumcision situation going to be? I vaguely remembered asking Sarah when we got together for dinner just under a month ago, but I was kinda drunk and wasn’t sure what her answer had been. As a raging ADHD case, I have a tendency to ask questions and not listen to the answers.

Sarah is a reform Jew and has been living in Tanzania on and off for about three or four years. The father of her baby is Massai, albeit relatively Westernized, having grown up predominantly in liberal Sweden. One thing I remember Sarah telling me (when I was drinking enough for both of us) was that the Massai are traditionally circumcised at puberty as a rite of passage into manhood.

My question was answered a few days ago, when I called her house and spoke to her mom. I told Masha I would be arriving back home in Boston for Thanksgiving on Tuesday evening, to which she responded, “Oh, you’re going to miss the Bris!” which takes place earlier on Tuesday. Although, as a notorious poser Jew, I have yet to participate in this tradition, and would somewhat like to, I told Masha my missing the occasion was probably beneficial to, not only myself, but everyone else emotionally involved.

You see, anything gynecological or anything involving pain inflicted to the private parts, male or female, makes me dizzy. One of the three times I have fainted in my life was at my annual exam and I once had to leave my Sociology classroom when we were watching a video about female circumcision abroad. A rather trainwreck-y girl at my job was lamenting one day that she was in pain, because the day before, a dog had bitten her where it counts, and the image of that happening to myself quite literally haunted me all day; I couldn’t shake the thought.

I feel somewhat selfish and hypocritical that I have a very explicit preference toward circumcised men, considering that the very thought of being snipped and cut down there is pure torture to me. Granted, Jewish males always get it over with when they’re tiny, like kids whose parents get their ears pierced as babies, but that doesn’t mean watching Sarah’s baby Ezra scream and wail at his bris would sit well with me, even if he won’t remember it in adulthood and, fortunately for him, does not have to go through with it during puberty, as many of his Massai relatives have.

Obviously, 99+ percent of my male readers here on Jewcy are going to be circumcised. However, even though it’s a given in the Jewish community, it is also a given in the American community overall.

There are many aspects to culture shock, and as an American girl living in Italy over a year, lack of circumcised cocks was a front-runner. Of course, most American girls accustomed to a nice clean, easily navigated circumcised dick, find uncircumcised penises kinda aesthetically displeasing,to say the least.

The other thing that we American ladies find incredibly irritating about uncircumcised dicks is how friggin’ oversensitive they are. A good guy friend of mine in Italy, who is half Italian and half Peruvian, was experiencing a little awkwardness with an American girl who he had been hooking up with. He explained with the fact he was uncircumcised and she had hurt him when she was going down on him. He said being uncircumcised made him sensitive and that she hadn’t anticipated the accommodations uncircumcised dudes required.

She wasn’t the only girl who found out the hard way uncircumcised cocks, well….suck cock. They suck a fat uncircumcised one, with extreme caution. Almost every American girl whose played the uncircumcised field has a story of accidentally injuring their partner and killing the mood, making themselves feel guilty.

My experience was that the Italian male community has trouble keeping their icky overflowing with foreskin members up. Now, I must acknowledge that Italy is probably not the most accurate representative microcosm of the vast uncircumcised world community. Italian men are exceedingly in tune to their emotions, which as we all know, affects sexual performance. I had a guy go soft on me because he decided to start thinking about, and getting depressed about, an American ex while having casual sex with me. Come on!

It is no surprise to me that these Mamma’s boys, Mammoni as they are called in Italian, had been spared the snip, as Italian women hold motherhood on a pedestal and emotionally spoil their sons. Not only would they never subject their precious sons to circumcision, but I’ll bet they nurse them until adulthood, considering how eager Italian guys always were to suck on my tits til I felt like a mom whose milk had gone dry, chafing like a dairy cow in the dry, cold winter.

Maybe Italian mothers realize their son's nasty dicks cause mediocre sexual performance and disgusted reactions from American girls. Maybe it's a conspiracy to cock-block their beloved bambini so they won't do the unthinkable, and move out of the house before their mid-thirties. The invisible umbilical chord remains, as does the foreskin.

I know for a fact Italian mothers wouldn't approve of me. My gynecological squeamishness and phobias have yielded fear of childbirth and thoughts of adopting in order to avoid the physical effects of motherhood. While my morals certainly play in to the fact I would never want to have an abortion, or face the decision in the first place, the principal reason I don't want to get pregnant is how much I hate the thought of a painful abortion procedure, or constant poke n' prod maternity check-ups. I'd rather play Russian Roulette than dilate thirty plus centimeters down there or break my pelvis giving birth.

While it is certainly considered "normal" to embrace motherhood here in the States, and even preferable to have your own instead of adopt, you are not considered quite as much a pariah if you choose not to have kids here. In Italy, you would be perceived as rejecting your role in nature to procreate and shower every ounce of affection on your kids. In especially superstitious parts of Italy, like Sicily, you would even be seen as a dry, sterile spinster who was probably cursed and evil. A life without motherhood is portrayed as a life not worth living in Italy and yet they have the lowest birth rate, so the iconography of motherhood is arguably just for show.

After about half a year in Italy, I was so thoroughly over the image of Italian men as good lovers, I pursued the only Jewish guy I had met there. He wasn’t anything to write home about, but man was I craving a smooth cock that could stay hard.

I was asking my friend’s mother, now the grandmother of her baby, about the bris and circumcision in general, and I was shocked to hear that, despite how typically Jewish their family is, her only son is actually not circumcised. The father of the family is a German from a Christian family, and like other Europeans, considers circumcision cruel butchering. Poor Danny. Every girl he knows learns he’s Jewish, but anyone who goes to bed with him is in for an unpleasant surprise.