A coincidence or is Big Brother watching?
There’s an ad for a product called Crepe Erase that keeps popping up on my Facebook feed along with ads for Honda Fit, and sales at J.Jill, LL Bean and QVC. I’ve been asking Anthony Lamacchia at his dealership for two years about a new Fit. I’ve bought a present for my daughter at J. Jill, spent far too much money at LL Bean and a similar amount at QVC. The internet is like a box of chocolates and I’ve bitten into a lot of them. They have my email address, and, no doubt, have used it to fish for my name on Facebook.
But, I wonder, how did the company that makes and sells Crepe Erase get my name and why? I’ve never Googled the product. I’m wondering about the rumors that the internet searches for preferences in other, more stealthy ways. I covered up the camera on my computer. Can they see through the camera on my phone, the camera that I don’t really know how to use?
I live in this modern world, but, let me tell you, it gets harder every day to keep up. What else does the cloud or Samsung or AOL or whatever know about me?
Take this Crepe Erase thing. I have what one might call interesting skin. Sometime in the last five years, the stuff under my epidermis that keeps things tight, let go; really let go. I was that person with her head in the clouds who thought that the marks of time would slide around me or at least only touch me tangentially … not so. If my skin were blue green, I could pass for an overhead shot of the Atlantic Ocean. My once thickly-populated head of hair struggles to keep the sun off my scalp on windy days. I can’t reach things in the cupboards that I could reach a few months ago. This latter development is exceptionally worrisome. I can get a step stool to help me reach things that have become problematic, but changing how tall I am also changes what is considered to be optimal weight. I weigh the same as I did two inches ago. I had trouble losing weight as a taller female. Now it all seems impossible.
Tim Riccardi, MD, told me last week that the reason that Father Dan looks fuzzy to me on Sunday was that my cataracts had grown. I didn’t even know that I was growing them. I thought that the fuzz was from not enough sleep.
It seems a lifetime ago that my body went through the “change.” You know – the hormonal cyclone called menopause that causes you to be able to live comfortably in the artic when assaulted by vasomotor symptoms (hot flashes) while you contemplate whether you can transplant the hair that now grows on your upper lip to the ever-increasing area of less hair on your head and find you have a new second hobby involving trying to remember words by saying things like, “what is it that you call the thing you use to clean floors?”
This episode of life’s vast drama was mediated, of course, by modern medicine and drugs that mimicked the estrogen that had left the building. Another “of course” was that these same hormones predisposed me to other maladies about which I have written ad nauseum. After treatments for this particular disorder, after my hair grew back, I still was recognizable …pretty much the same. Sure, there were ups and downs of weight, some rather dramatic, but I was able to be me. Now? It seems like those little things that made me, me, are flaking off or disappearing as I sleep, although sleep is another thing that has become elusive. I think I should form a club that meets at 2 a.m. with members who tell boring stories about various physical maladies in order to lull each other to sleep.
New words have become ascendant. Palliative is one of them, which basically means that you won’t get better, so just try to feel as best as you can. There was a time when, if something wasn’t working as well as it could, you could take steps to put it right. Now, if you can maintain a fraction of “right” you are lucky. If I self-medicate, my version of palliative care, then my thinning hair, loss of memory and stature as well as my very wavy skin can be at least mellowed out with stuff like chocolate cake and cosmopolitans, going to the movies to see Downton Abbey, reading trashy novels and testing donuts.
I wonder, though, about how Crepe Erase got my Facebook address. My memory may be fractioning, but I do clearly remember when Bonwit Teller opened a boutique for Curvy Women, which is a polite way of saying women who are larger than the ordinary range of sizes. I received an engraved invitation. My question was, “Is there a database of fat women somewhere?” because obviously they got my name from somewhere.
I apply that same thinking to Crepe Erase. Who or what has data that as identified my increasing dermatological problems? Who blabbed?
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
