Brokedown Oprah's debt bootcamp

Last week Oprah topic was about reducing debt. I don’t know about you but I would love to learn how to reduce debt from someone who's a billionaire and can buy anything she wants and who bought some outlandishly expensive house in Los Angeles on a whim. Yeah, teach us girlfriend.

Here's an even better idea. You and me switch places. I go live in that gigantic 15 million dollar home in LA and you come to live in my 2 bedroom apartment in Seatac Washington. I host your show and you do my job. It would make a hell of a show. This is how I envision it going down.

You move to my apartment and have to live off my salary. You can only take the clothes off you back so wear something you like. My clothes are too big for you but in about a week of living my stressful life you will put on about 30 or 40 pounds and they should fit just fine. You go to my job where you have to be treated like shit by doctors, the village idiot by nurses, and that little clerk gal by the patients. You go every day and eat in the cafeteria from hell where everything is dipped in batter, deep fried and expensive as hell. You can take a lunch, like ramen noodles, ham sandwiches or frozen burritos. It would be a blast. Oh and you would have a soda pop addiction. Sorry.

I host your show of course.

Monday's topic will be makeovers. Instead of the usual makeovers in which you take people with wild and unruly hair and make them look like mannequins and Afghan dogs, take the mannequin and Afghan dog looking people and make them go wild. People will come out looking like Albert Einstein, Ludwig Van Beethoven; The Crab Man on My Name is Earl, Chaka Khan and Don King. Hair and make up done by the Wild Hair Clan-- they do my bushy hair and I can’t say enough about them.

Tuesday's topic will be the cast of the movie Snakes on Planes with Samuel L. Jackson. And as a surprise under each audience seat will be a box with a snake in it. It will be a hoot.

Wednesday I will buy everyone in the audience a Condo in New York. You get a Condo, and you get a Condo….you get the drift.

Thursday and Friday would have to be the Best of Brokedown Oprah 'cause hosting a show is hard work and I will need some rest.

This would be a win win situation for me but not so much for you,Oprah. You are so dynamic and interesting that my bosses will give me a raise, a promotion and stop treating me like crap.

While your normal viewers, suburban white women 20-50, whose biggest fear is that their teenaged daughters will turn to prostitution or run off with some gangsta rapper, will be completely turned off especially when they realize I'm not really Oprah (it will take a while to figure that one out) and my shows are not quite “Oprah” shows.

Then you the real Oprah can come back and explain how you had to work in a regular job, and earn a regular salary and even how because of you I ended up with a few bucks in my bank account for a change on my next payday instead of my normal zero balance. Then you have to explain that the other funny looking Oprah was not really you, so stop sending letters complaining about the hair and the wierd topics.

Unfortunately, things could turn ugly when you explain to your Wednesday audience that they did not really get a free Condo in New York.

Just Say Nyet

Russian

Riding the bus everyday is boring. So I have been studying Russian because it gives me something to do, besides I like it when people sit next to me on the bus looking all perplexed wondering what strange thing I'm up to and what kind of strange writing I'm looking at. It looks like Russian but it can’t be because she’s a fat black woman and fat black women don’t learn Russian, they read the bible, pancake recipes, food stamp rule books etc but not Russian.

Oh but I have a degree in Linguistics-- they don’t know that and I don’t bother to tell them, so I have a lot of fun.

The main reason I’m studying it is because the Russian people fascinate me. Those are some hardy people. I really like them. They lead hard lives, their language is hard, their climate is ridiculous, they lived for a long time under the paranoid secretive ultra military oriented Soviet Union, their language has too many fricking consonants and don't even get me started on those damned nesting dolls. Yet they still love their country, and they drop consonants every now when they have too many of them in a row and they know how to enjoy themselves under such hardships.

You know a language is hard when you have to buy a vowel just to say “Hello”. Здравствуйте! pronounced zdravst vooityeah-- that’s “Hello”. And "Hi "isn't much better privyet. “Hi”...privyet....”Hello”....zdravstvooityeah! In my little pronunciation book and the word Gulag is on the third page of the pronunciation exercises. Gulag? (It’s an acronym for prison camp and is pronounced Goolak). This word has a very negative connotation in America, being a place for political prisoners. When you first learn a foreign language you learn words like Mama, Papa, Pencil, Book House, not Prison Camp. You usually have to be way up into a language before they start airing their dirty laundry. You probably don’t learn how to say Concentration Camp in German until well after your first year. But in Russian its right there on page 3.

And how many times a day do you say “Hello” in a day? If I had to say Здравствуйте! 20 times a day, everyday, I would have to stop speaking to people. I'd be one of those people that when you speak to them they just look at you or give a lukewarm semi smile because they can’t muster the energy or social skills to say the word “hi”—these clowns wouldn’t make it in Russia.

Anyway I was thinking….. about poor Vladimir, falsely imprisoned in the Gulag because some jealous coworker made up a lie about him, only to find out that while he was serving his sentence his favorite uncle died from radiation poisoning while serving patriotically aboard the submarine K19, the Widowmaker.

Since Since Vlad lives a couple of hundred miles downwind from Chernobyl he has this weepy liver and big brown pus filled spots on his back for which he has received treatment because it takes months to see a doctor in the Gulag. The tips of his hands are black from frostbite from digging ditches in the hard dirty snow in the below zero Siberian wilderness.

His appeal is finally heard and he is finally released. He takes the long train ride (which takes three days from all the stops and mechanical failures) back to his tiny little village and finally makes it back to his home where his mother gives his frozen face a kiss in between her hacking coughing fits from pneumonia. He smiles, happy to be home and then he sits down to a big steaming bowl of borscht. Borscht?? Borscht?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht



Vlad...Vlad don’t do it, don’t do it Comrade, step… away… from… the… borscht. Look at this, Vlad. It's a juicy hot cheeseburger with pickles, mayonnaise, crisp green lettuce, and ripe red tomato----

Carla, you had me at Здравствуйте!

Don't be dissing Oprah, Okayyy?

Internet Visitor
Broke down Oprah or whatever your name is, Oprah is not fat anymore so why do you say you're just as fat as Oprah?

Me
I'm sorry, my name is Carla and I beg to differ. She may look thin but she is definitely fat. It has taken her 20 years for her to lose that weight and she looks great now but I just know that if something were to happen..... For instance if she were stranded on a cruise ship that got stuck in the water and rescue was several days away, by the time they found her she would be about 50 pounds heavier.

When she has passed the three-year mark with no significant weight gain then I will start calling her skinny Oprah, but for now she's still fat Oprah. Oprah is fat on the inside and I am fat on the outside—we’re both fat.

Internet Visitor
But she has worked hard to get where she is. You sound like someone who doesn't work that hard, it is not her fault you are not a success.


Me
I'm not blaming her, this site is not about Oprah or about bashing Oprah, it’s about me. Oprah is my unwitting focal point, my muse, my inspiration. When I say I should be successful like Oprah I don't mean I should have matching chocolate cocker spaniels, own gigantic houses with dozens of rooms, host talk shows in Chicago, run cable networks and give away hundreds of cars.

That's not my path. I believe my path is to write humor and make people laugh or at least smile through fantasy, new age foolishness and idle ramblings. I'm actually more like Mark Twain, but I can't call My site Broke Down Mark Twain, so I went with someone who most people have heard of, someone who has had a sort of similar life to mine. Except somewhere along the line she came to a fork in the road and chose to go down the good road and went on to fame and fortune; while I choose the bad one and went on to poverty, depression, and obscurity.

Internet Visitor
Oprah is a real person and she only wears make up when she is on camera or special occasions. I think it is great she lets us see what she really looks like without her make up.

Me
But she looks like two different people. It's like some magical genie comes in and blinks her a new face. When she doesn't wear make up her posture is different, her demeanor is different--she just seems different. I'm the Broke Down version so my demeanor is always discouraging, my posture is always stooped, my joints always hurt and when I put on make up I look the same, just more clown like.

Internet Visitor
I love Oprah, she is such an inspiration to me I can't imagine the world or my life without her. I have read every book in her book club, I contribute to her Angel network and I have enjoyed her journey and struggle through life. When I put her name in the search engine I got this site. This is very disappointing.

Me
Look...over there...Oh My God it's Oprah

Internet Visitor
Where? Where? I don't see her, heyyyy…. I think you're a little crazy.

Me
Broke down Oprah is more catchy.

Broke Down Oprah

I am not jealous of Oprah but I wonder why she is so successful and I am so unsuccessful. We are both black women who have struggled with our weight for years, we are educated, charming, witty, compassionate, look way better in make up and love to laugh. So why are we so different? My son is always telling me I should write he thinks I am way funnier and smarter than Oprah. He keeps telling me to do something other than lying around being broke and depressed, then he sighs and says "whatever."

So here I am all Brokedown and Starry Eyed, baring my tortured soul to the world. I hope we have some laughs out of all of this, but if not at least you will go away with a hugh DAMN! because saying that in that emphatic ebonic kind of way would be quite cathartic for you and a simple way for me to give back to my fellow man.