My two favorite exes have been alternating in taking care of me emotionally, taking me to stand in the pharmacy line at USC, or rushing there to get my mammography files. But I feel I need all the boyfriends I can get right now; I am preparing to be an epic and unending source of tragic need.

I’m lazy anyway.

Today, I asked my new boyfriend for a Valium prescription. I promised I wasn’t a pill-popper, but I felt some Valium would be beneficial at this particular moment in time. He understood, but doesn’t prescribe.

I am pretty sure I also flirted with him – mildly: I didn’t have any drinks in me. I know I murmured in my soft, cultivated voice, while my sexy infected breast hung there between us, how very proud his parents must have been with their oncological-surgeon son. He demurred that all parents are proud. I think maybe he hasn’t met all parents.

I have another appointment with a different surgeon at the Breast Center in the morning. I should be getting a biopsy on-site, and should have a diagnosis within a day or two.

The thing is, if it’s not an infection, it’s an incredibly rare and particularly lethal form of cancer, called inflammatory breast cancer. Which is lame and stupid, and I have many thoughts on the matter. I imagine I will tell you more of them later.

I am writing to you from a stretcher in a hallway in County-USC Medical Center. I am waiting to see a radiologist about the lump in my breast.

I am 38 years old. I have been out of work for 3 years. In that time, I have gone back to grad school and gotten my master’s — specialized journalism focusing on urban policy.

I used to be the editor of a newspaper. It’s not your fault what happened to publishing. We did that to ourselves.

I would like to tell you a little about myself. I am a single mother of a 17-year-old boy. He’s actually my brother, but his mom (my stepmom) died when he was a baby. He came to live with me when he was 18 months old and I was 22. Hes a terrific kid — really sweet! Loves his mama! (Me.) But he is not college-bound. I am trying to get him into the Job Corps when he graduates in June. I worry.

I am a proud liberal (raised by an actual Communist!). I am a happy feminist. I used to write a pretty famous column called “Commie Girl” in Orange County, California. Even though I have been out of work (again … not your fault!) for 3 years, I still manage to send a few hundred bucks a year to Doctors W/O Borders and environmental groups. I am frugal. I still have some money in the bank (obviously because I don’t own my home). I take my cloth bags to the store. I am a really good citizen.

I even love jury duty! (I mean it. I truly love it.)

So. About you. As a rule, I have defended you from all sides. When my younger Occupy brother said you were as bad as Bush, I smack him and yelled at him that he was an idiot. I was disappointed frequently with what I saw as your propensity to give away the store in negotiations w/ the GOP — single payer, for instance — but then would listen to your grand liberal speeches and be instantly swayed.

The day after your election, I wept and wept. I was in my editor’s office (by which I mean my office) just watching speeches and weeping. I’m enclosing the newspaper we put out that week — it was a scrappy little paper; my tiny staff made miracles with the budget I had. Please read the contents page. It is everything I felt that day. Jesus — even Condi Rice made me cry! Even George Freaking Bush made me cry that day, talking about your beautiful little girls.

I’m feeling a little raw, a little emotional today, with the lump in my breast and all. 38. Out of work. Single mother. No insurance, of course.

And I started my day seeing on Twitter that you were about to “compromise” with the Religious Right on women’s health, and I wept like you couldn’t believe. I don’t know how to explain the grief I felt, the betrayal.

That the men in your administration — Daley, for Christ’s sake! My fave, “Old Sexy Joe” Biden — had gotten your ear, and the women had been stiffed.

And it’s unnecessary! I’m Catholic. 98% of us use birth control. Exactly why does our boss get to decide our morality for us?

You’re a Constitutional scholar. You are well aware that wasn’t what was meant by religious liberty. Hell, I’ve taken Constitutional Law my own bad self. The SC has no problem w/ forcing sects to abide by laws as long as they’re generally applicable. Like the peyote one — you know the one I mean. I can’t look it up since I’m in the hospital and all.

But it seem like Fox News opens its yap — and you take cover.

It is moral cowardice, Mr. President. It truly is. You should be fighting for us.

I read (in Politico, I think?) about your wife, whom I so admire, and her battles with Rahm Emanual. A friend said it made her look bad. I heartily disagree. Mrs. Obama was exactly right in every one of the battles detailed. Rahm wanted you to take the coward’s way out, to drop your principles, which I believe are firmly held, at least when I listen to your beautiful speeches. Your wife was right to hold you to your promises. Rahm’s way didn’t even work! It just made you look weak. Even John Boehner has been trying to roll you now — and even when he knows damn well (like w/ the debt ceiling) that you’re RIGHT.

Since I’ve been in the hospital all day, I haven’t gotten to see the details of your “compromise” with the Church — or rather, the Church hierarchy, who think they get to determine the morality of people work in their secular institutions.

I hope to hell that when I finally get home (oh — County USC is a hospital for poors, so I’ve been here 9 hours so far) that I’ll be delighted by your clever solution — you know, Andrew Sullivan’s insistence that you’re really playing like 5-dimensional chess — instead of sickened by a betrayal that truly feels like a shiv.

Please stand up for us.

Please stay firm. Not just on women’s health, though of course I’m so raw and tender about it this week. I don’t care about my breasts. I care about my life. I am so scared it is ridiculous.

No, stay firm for all of us.

Whether it’s poors or gays or the ladies, or the middle class, or … I don’t know. Bankers. Whatever. We’re all Americans. (Oh, and your foreign policy has been amazingly strong, but maybe you could throw a bone to Glenn Greenwald.) Or we’re all humans. One or the other.

Please do right. As as happy side benefit, Americans will react to your strength. Real strength, not phony Reagan strength.

PS: I forgot to mention — in our endorsement issue in 2008, we (and by “we,”I mean “I”) illustrated you in the Garden of Eden, with a unicorn. It was my idea. It was hilarious. You would have loved it.

Very truly yours,

Rebecca Schoenkopf

Los Angeles, California

Tami Abdollah at KPCC has been reporting the hell out of this story.

This Week/Last Week’s Ranking

1/1. The Dowager Countess. Of course the DC takes precedence on this list—but it, like the monarchy, is a vestige of yesterday. The DC did nothing so terribly wonderful this week, but then, nobody else at Downton did either.

2/19. Bates. Now that you might have MUUUUURDERED your wife, you may take your proper spot near the top of the rankings.

3/15. Carson. While I didn’t understand your love for Lady Mary before (when she was as thoughtless, spoiled and grasping a model for shitty-nobility as there came), now I think it’s lovely that you’ll be there to help her set up house with her terrifying and abusive media mogul fiancé, should she not be so stupid as to jilt him.

4/5. Matthew Crawley. Your skin looks amazing, you’re not whining and kvetching near so much, and did you just feel a little tingle in your schwingle?

5/2. Lady Mary. Lady Mary, who was a nothingburger this week—blah blah blah, I push you in your chair, etc. and so forth—takes Top Five by virtue of the fact that the list is incredibly bottom-loaded this week. I wish they could all tie for last.

6/3 and 4. Thomas and O’Brien (tie). I will be needing more evil from you two, who are generally so accomplished at it. And no, smoking WITHOUT being evil doesn’t count. And being nosy and getting up in people’s business doesn’t count. And trying to eavesdrop doesn’t count. That’s just life at Downton!

6/11. Sir Richard Carlisle. At least we had SOME evil to enjoy this week, courtesy of the brutish Sir Richard. Class will out, won’t it?

7/7. Lavinia Swire. You looked quite fetching in your orange lipstick. You love Matthew. You intend to fight for him. Now stand up to Lady Mary and let’s get some 1917 catfights up in here.

8/6. Daisy. You don’t want to lie. You don’t want to cheat. But you do want to REPEAT YOURSELF A WHOLE MANY TIMES. We understand. We heard you last week.

9/10. Hughes. Taking food to the slutty maid, getting caught taking food to the slutty maid, trying to get the slutty maid’s major to do the right thing. All well and good but I fear I am sleeping now.

11/8. Lady Sybil. You, miss, have fallen in love with the radical chauffeur—who I will remind you again WAS NOT DISMISSED AFTER ALMOST SOUPING THE GENERAL WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT. You, miss, are retarded. Lucky for you your sister is deviations more retarded than you.

12/13. William, you are dead.

13/14 and 17. Cook (Mrs. Patmore) and Anna, you do not exist this week.

14/9. Lord Grantham. Are you gonna start fucking that new maid, or what? Why do you keep talking to her? Are you somehow unaware that you are not supposed to be fraternizing? Has your relationship with Bates so skewed you to proper noble/servant relations? Of course it hasn’t. You are gonna get busy with her, and then it will be soooo obvious that no one should ever have hired a war widow in the first place, because everyone knows you can’t trust a lady with a baby.

15/12. Mrs. Crawley. Oh Mrs. Crawley, sometimes you’re so strong and capable, and other times you’re just locked in your bossy head. (And really, sister, the balls on you when you ask them for their HOUSE.) And you let Cora get the better of you this week? You fell right for her little trick, as easily distracted as a crow by a gum wrapper? NOT impressed. Bad showing, YOU!

16/20. Elizabeth McGovern. Getting kind of sick of your underhandedness and manipulations—whether or not they’re for what you deem the best. Get Shirley Maclaine up in this bitch, stat. Lady Cora needs a talking-to.

17/18. The redheaded chick who left to be a secretary last season.

18/NA. Branson. I have deigned to recognize that you exist, though I still go out to smoke whenever you come on screen.

19/16. Lady Edith. Lady Edith, you are too stupid to live. You’re going to fall for I had AMNESIA? And that’s what gave me my American accent? And how dare you not recognize my voice as the departed heir who’s been “DEAD” for 6 years? Even though I am American now? And my name is wrong? And you’re gonna be all outraged on behalf of the poor dead now-American heir with the wrong name? I mean, really, Show, you could have at least made it a mystery if it was Patrick or not. But the patent ridiculousness of Peter’s impostorage was really too far. Lady Edith should be sent to a nice place—I’d say a farm, but we know what happened there—where she can run free in the fresh air, quacking like a duck or barking like an umbrella or whatever it is that the barking mad nobility bark like, and nothing can hurt her. A place for the special second children of the nobility, who have clearly been inbred until their brains are shot full of holes from Mad Cow Disease. Lady Edith has Mad Cow Disease. It is the only explanation. We must quarantine her at once.

* Don’t have anything to do? ASK.

* If you are washing silverware, make sure all the food is actually off the silverware.

* HOT SOAPY WATER. SO HOT IT HURTS YOUR HANDS. STOP WITH THE NON-HOT, NON-SOAPY WATER ALREADY.

* A kitchen isn’t clean until it’s swept.

* Have a smile on your face when someone asks you to do something.

* I mean it, put the phone down.

*Are you zoning out? Stop zoning out.

* Just because everybody else is teasing someone does not mean you get to join in. You are the new guy. You haven’t attained teasing status.

* Don’t ask if you can go home until someone tells you to go home.

* If your girlfriend can’t deal with the fact that you are not available for texting, time for a new girlfriend. 

I bet there’s some real pretty ones at Osaka.

Got advice for my buttercup of a son? Leave them in the comments!

It is December 1990 and I am 17 years old. Things are really awful at home, and I have taken up smoking, ditching, and sex.

I have been called down to the vice principal’s office to discuss my many absences. I look at the printout and explain that for that absence (I don’t try to whitewash all of them) I was at Planned Parenthood. She crosses it off the list.

She is slim, professional, probably in her 30s. The next time I have an appointment, I pop into her office. Hey Ms. ___. I have to go to Planned Parenthood. Can I get an off-campus pass?

“I can’t give you an off-campus pass without a parent’s permission,” she tells me, and then she walks me to the parking lot.

I don’t think I even had an appointment that day, but I might have.

So it was all well and good, and it was nice seeing about 5,000 people in a gallery. BUT!

The first thing we saw in a gallery devoted to new acquisitions was a white canvas painted with the slogan, in black, “I drive a Prius.” And MOCA had paid for it. WHY? FOR WHAT? HOW COME AND THE FUCK?

I’m not saying MOCA should invest in Kinkades or anything quite so accessible as that (Leroy Neimans, maybe?), but these are the kinds of choices that will nauseate the average viewer and drive a wedge between her and Serious Art. MOCA, you have lost your mind.

Culture Monster has more on another recent acquisition.

But there I was on the couch, prepared only for empty brain calories and larfs, when I got whomped back so hard I almost fell out of my Snuggie.

On the day of her sister’s funeral, Rob Lowe accuses his young wife of sleeping with her brother-in-law (I think?) because she touched his arm. Don’t even think about what might happen if she has lunch with a male friend. She sometimes struggles against his control, but usually she goes with it. It’s easier that way. He will end up killing her, of course. Everyone knows that. Even the wife.

I had that boyfriend. I went back to him for years–even begging him to take me back instead of the other way around. And it was some time after he was finally gone before I didn’t think it likely that if I was murdered, my family and friends knew where to tell the fuzz to look first.

A boyfriend like that cheats constantly–constantly; two girls got pregnant while we were seeing each other–but accuses you of it instead: screaming, top of his lungs, calling you a fucking whore. And if you try to quiet him, please, by reminding him your child’s sleeping, he looks at you, smiles, and then starts screaming louder.

The next day, when you’re walking your small son to school, he’ll tell you he heard the screaming and he was scared. And you will know you should leave but there are so many reasons you won’t.

He breaks everything in the house you share–mirrors, furniture, your small objets–but somehow even in his rage has enough sense to only break your things, never his. He holds you down (by the throat) to pull the diamonds he gave you from your ears so you can’t fuck anyone else while you’re wearing them. Your actual fidelity is absolutely beside the point.

Your dad will come over to vacuum the thousand shards of glass out of the carpet while you cry. He will tell you to leave–and if not, he’ll offer to take the kid, who shouldn’t be there for this. You reject both.

And eventually he does leave, and it turns out life is fine without him. The meanest thing your next boyfriend will ever to say you is that he doesn’t understand why you make sauce from scratch when there’s no difference between that and store-bought. (Still: pretty mean, right?!) And there were men out there like him all along.

Who fucking knew?

1. The Dowager Countess. If there is ever a week that she does not top, kindly shewt me dead.

2. Lady Mary comes roaring into second, from last. While I wanted to go to my deathbed hating Lady Mary, much as I will Baltimore Raven/doughy succubus Tony Siragusa, Julian Fellowes has outwitted me. Mary has left behind her Hiltonian disregard for others and is a model of empathy, honesty about her slutitude, and a willingness to deal with the consequences of her actions instead of whining or pitying herself. Well-played, Fellowes, you sneaky bastard.

3. Thomas, the evil footman, who is evil. So evil, and yet a proper class warrior??!?!#

4. O’Brien, the evil lady’s maid, who is evil, and yet conflicted.

5. Not too shabby, Matthew Crawley. Fairly stiff upper lip and all that considering you’re not the man you used to be.

6. Hmmmm, Daisy! Your weird stand-offishness and basic Asperger’s hid the fact that you take vows seriously.

7. Lavinia Swire. From a complete nonentity to the top ten. Passionate, loving and selfless without devolving to Bates Levels of martyrdom.

8. Lady Sybil. Boring, and far too susceptible to the shockingly disrespectful chauffeur (WHO NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN KEPT ON after almost SOUPING THE GENERAL DUDE! Where is Carson’s sense of propriety!!!). But she does have such pretty lips!

9. Lord Grantham. How very liberal to allow a war widow to work a job! Sort of a Mary Sue of a self-portrait for the Conservative Fellowes, no yeah?

10. Aw, Hughes, you old softy. Up the list with you!

11. Sir Richard Carlisle, the Rupert Murdoch guy who owns the tabloids and is slated (obviously not for long) to marry Lady Mary. Sort of terrifyingly pushy. And yet you get his boner for dragging Lady Mary down into the mud to meet him. Plus, you sort of dream of an amoral scummy heartless bastard/Tijuana mayor/Mexican druglord to keep you safe until he is MURDERED or TRIES TO MURDER YOU (whichever comes first)! (You get over him in peacetime, or when there’s no zombies, unless you are a Real Housewife or Nancy Botwin.) I do think next week might be the kind of week you REGRET marrying the Latin American strongman/tabloid owner (same thing). Again: because of the murdering.

12. Mrs. Crawley. A very Second Wave Feminist Mother/Auntie Mame moment right at the end. Had been off doing her thing and working on behalf of the world, and then there to nurture in the crunch.

13. William is a maguffin. Am I using that right?

14. Oh, Cook (Mrs. Patmore). I know youe heart’s in the right place, but you’re really overstepping your boundaries there, Pushy.

17. Anna. My regard for you is waning the longer you’re a perfect beacon of perfect perfection.

18. The redheaded chick who left to be a secretary last season.

19. Bates, you are beginning to bore us with your martyrdom.

20. Elizabeth McGovern.

*Were you wondering why I didn’t include Branson the chauffeur? Because Branson the chauffeur is a poorly drawn caricature of a radical and beneath my notice.