Boo! Be Happy! Just Kidding, Gals!

Whatever you might celebrate today and even if you don't celebrate anything at all. Be happy. But don't give up fretting and worrying about politics or how safe the candy is you have bought for trick-or-treaters or if you will still have a job next year or if the world will collapse because Bush might not get kicked out.

Just be happy at the same time, serene and beautiful, a good mother, partner, friend, daughter, neighbor, worker and so on. But remember that the health of your family is on your shoulders and so is the safety of this nation. And of course children must have their fun in going out tonight and getting deliciously frightened of all the monsters, but of course you have to go with them and stand there like a gigantic KGB agent and make it all really boring for your children but if you didn't do this, you'd be a very bad parent. And what on earth is in those chocolate bars? If it's not poisons won't all the fats clog up the little arteries of little children so that they'll drop dead at fifty and even if you're dead by then it was your fault. Everything is your fault, even what you ate twenty years ago, because it might be stored in you and one day you might be raped and then the unborn baby might get this thing that is stored in you and be born one-eyed. And guess who'd go to prison then? But be happy and smile. People don't like anger and fretting over everything like the worry-wart you are. Smile! You look so much prettier that way?

But don't think about how you look! That is so superficial and shallow and trivial when people are dying in Darfur and starving all over and dying of AIDS and terrorists are stomping across the universe and Bush is stomping back. So how dare you worry about makeup or clothes or your weight! Just goes to show how silly women are. But you must not look slutty or uncared for! If you don't care for your own appearance, how could you possibly care about any of the larger issues? Even a poor, single mother with three jobs could have lipstick and a smile and a clean apartment!

All it takes are these Easy Nine Stages to Perfect Nails and these Twelve Ways to Take Your Man to Orgasm or these Six Home-Made Desserts (in twelve hours and while you work!) or this Perfect Little Black Dress ($3,600, Sax Fifth Avenue). And then you need new breasts and narrower feet, but these are for sale, too. Remember to smile!

The world is your oyster! Or maybe you're the thing inside it that's irritating the world so much that it will encase you in a shiny, beautiful prison pearl so that you can just lie there until you are Discovered! No, that was in the old instructions. In the new ones you are supposed to go to school and do really well and advance in any job quite fairly only if you work really hard, as long as you also lie there in the pearl and do your nails and worry about diet and exercize and prepare yourself to be a good mother, too. And keep a clean house and always stock up for Halloween candy.

And get a sense of humor! For Chrissake, not every single little joke about how women are bitches or cunts is worth getting your knickers in a twist. Come on, cool it. Laugh a little! Did you hear the one about Eve going for a bath in the river in Eden and God saying how he'd never get the smell off the fishes now! Now that's funny and if you don't think so you need to get off your high horse (before it smells, too) and learn to relax. Everybody hears jokes like this about themselves, everybody, and everybody laughs at them except you. Because you're a rigid bitch, that's why. And you have no sense of humor.

So do you want the trick or the treat? Come on, choose! The treat? Ok. But here comes the trick, too! Wasn't that funny?