I caught Margaret Cho’s new show, Beautiful, on Saturday night at the Chicago theatre. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, given the fact that in her last show, The Sensuous Woman, she and a friend danced around in skin-tight bodysuits to “Me So Horny.” Fortunately for me (and anyone with a latex allergy), Beautiful proved an uproarious return to Margaret’s comedic roots. (Sorry, but I’ve been waiting for months for an excuse to use the word uproarious.)

Margaret mentioned in the show that everything seems to go downhill for today’s young, female celebrities after they’re caught getting out of a car without panties, which made me wonder what the next few months will bring for poor Emma Watson. (You may know her as Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter movies.) Sadly, it seems there’s no public relations spell to undo this mess. However, I’m trying to focus on the positive and be thankful it wasn’t Maggie Smith.

Beautiful was my first time seeing Margaret live and I had a blast. If you don’t have a chance to catch the show, I recommend a little light reading to hold you over until it comes out on DVD. Allow me to suggest this little article in which Margaret discusses heavy flow days and the downsides of being Britney spears.

When I was younger, moving was a miracle cure. New surroundings provided a temporary sense that I was moving forward. I told myself I was leaving everything behind that couldn’t keep up with my insatiable appetite for an extraordinary life. At 15, when I was tired of living with my parents, I moved to a boarding school 300 miles from home. When I was tired of attending college in Alabama, I studied in France. When I got tired of that, I moved to Germany. I eventually moved back to Alabama, but got restless within a year and moved again for grad school. After grad school, I packed up for Chicago.

A change of scenery instills everything with a temporary sense of wonder. This is especially true when traveling abroad. A routine trip to the grocery store is filled with foreign products to ogle, foreign packaging to read, foreign music to bob your head to with foreign lyrics to ponder, and foreign shoppers to study as they push around foreign babies spouting foreign baby babble from the seats of foreign grocery carts. Even the mundane (and often distressing) act of paying for your groceries offers foreign expressions to master, foreign customs to observe, and foreign money decorated with foreign faces that beg to be caressed and held up to the light like treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon.

Eventually, however, friends or family or significant others begin to tie you to one place and it becomes harder and harder to simply pack up all your shit (which no longer fits in the back of a Civic hatchback) and go prospecting for wonder in some untamed frontier. As a result, your hunger for change is forced to find a new outlet, which often manifests itself as an urge for a new boyfriend, a new job, or a new condo across town.

The problem is eventually your city, boyfriend, job, and condo reach a critical threshold of amazing-ness. They become as good as they’re ever going to get, and further tinkering will only yield a result of equal or lesser value. Unfortunately, I think it’s hard for most people to recognize when this threshold has been reached. (See exhibit A: Jocelyn Wildenstein.) That’s not to say change just for the sake of change is always bad. It’s just important to be aware of what you’re really trying to get away from and what you’re really running toward, lest you wind up disappointed and full of regret over what you can’t get back. My thesis here isn’t to advocate that we all accept that life has to become increasingly mundane over time. I’m primarily trying to point out that when we stay in one place, we tend to apply the term mundane to more and more things that, at one time, held a certain sense of wonder. So, if we could just find a way to recapture that wonder—to see our next trip to Sam’s or Super Target through the eyes a North Korean exchange student, for example—we might not feel compelled to fuck up the good things we’ve worked so long to get right.

Just think about how intriguing everyday American life is the next time you’re staring at a bottle of Ms. Butterworth’s. She’s a giant woman full of syrup that pours out of her head and, according to her ad campaign, that bitch can COME to LIFE (despite repeated, prolonged exposure to microwaves).

There’s something oddly sexual about the whole thing—that raspy voice, the repeated references to her “taking her own sweet time” and being “thick and rich.” Is this a script for a maple syrup commercial or a new Lil’ Kim single? But I digress. The bottom line is, before you dump your boyfriend or quit your job or move away for no good reason, ask yourself if you’ve fully tapped the low-hanging wonder all around you. Then ask Mrs. Butterworth. That bitch knows her shit.

Ever since I started reading A New Earth, I’ve been trying my best to recognize my ego and awaken my inner consciousness. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to rise above the petty concerns of human existence when you’re really afraid of being known as that guy who starts conversations with, “Ever since I started reading A New Earth…”

The problem with spiritually enlightened people is they’re just not funny. We all know Jesus was a great guy, but he wasn’t the kind of person would could make you piss your pants a little by doing a spot-on impression of Mary Magdalene after her fifth glass of wine or by recounting a recent experience at the Nazareth DMV. Of course, when you’re living on a higher plane and glowing with inner peace, perhaps humor just doesn’t matter.

Despite what Oprah would have me believe, it seems impossible to have it both ways—to be Tina Fey and the Dalai Lama all wrapped up in one. It’s a really depressing thought, which makes me wonder what happens to our sense of humor when we die. I keep imagining my soul leaving my body, stopping by my house to pick up my Roseanne and Golden Girls boxed sets, then proceeding toward the light only to hear some James-Earl-Jones-esque voice say, “Sorry, but you can’t bring those in here.” Maybe this is why so many people have trouble crossing over.

Kristen Wiig’s Suze Orman impression is almost as good as mine.

This Joann woman should open Jacket Junctions across America. Or maybe she could just work out a distribution deal with Talbots. I don’t know what it is about menopausal women and Talbots—like moths to a flame, they are. I think Talbots stores have actually been proven to cause vaginal dryness. There really should be a warning near every entry.

I started Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth about a week ago. I almost bought it back when all the true Oprah fanatics did, but I didn’t want to get that look from the Barnes and Noble cashier. You know the one. Their mouths say, “That’ll be $15.40,” but their eyes say, “Will you be charging this on your husband’s credit card, or has he finally let you have one of your own?” I’m also just too cheap to pay for books—unless you count those coupon books that cost $20 and promise to save your hundreds on fine dining and entertainment. So, I got on the wait list at my local library where the staff already know I do whatever Oprah tells me and I have little dignity left to maintain.

I have no idea how Oprah convinced everyone—from Minnesota soccer moms to Mississippi Baptist grannies—to read this book. It’s a slightly alarming testament to her power that so many of her fans made it past chapter one, “The Flowering of Human Consciousness,” which is full of hackneyed self-help pearls of wisdom like this:

“Once there is a certain degree of Presence, of still and alert attention in human beings’ perceptions, they can sense the divine life essence, the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form, recognize it as one with their own essence and so love it as themselves.”

Mr. Tolle wastes no time pushing the very modern notion that the world’s major religions provide the same basic roadmap to enlightenment, and that human beings have screwed everything up by misinterpreting the teachings of Jesus, Buddah, and the like. He even gives Kaballah a plug and praises the mystical sects of major religions for stripping away all the excess baggage that more controlling, exclusionary denominations have added over the years. All this sounded just fine to me, but it’s hardly the sort of mind-blowing epiphany I expect for $14 plus tax.

Once you make it past the intro, with its minefield of new-agey witticisms and mild blasphemy, the book takes a sort of neo-Freudian turn. Tolle presents his theory that most human minds are controlled by the ego, which wants more than anything to be right while making others wrong. As a result, people do horrible things to each other. (If you’re hoping the author might make it through this section of the book without trite references to Hitler or the Holocaust, you’ll be disappointed.) Tolle also spends a lot of time pointing out that the ego has an unhealthy obsession with material possessions. He offers up a revolutionary hypothesis that people use cars, clothes, homes, and so forth as extensions of their own identities, but that this is only a temporary fix for a lack of greater self-awareness.

I keep waiting for Oprah to announce that Tolle has inspired her to stop wearing $500 shoes and stop giving her rich friends $30,000 earrings. Then again, I guess the Legends Ball wouldn’t have been as exciting if the finale included Della Reese and Phylicia Rashad opening $25 Applebee’s gift certificates. (Although I totally would have tuned in to see Maya Angelou accept a practical gift basket composed of FiberCon caplets, control-top pantyhose, and a blouse from K-Mart’s Jaclyn Smith collection.)

I’m far from done with A New Earth and, all joking aside, I’m trying to keep an open mind. I do like Tolle’s notion that I am not my thoughts or the voice inside my head. Tolle claims we are the awareness that is aware of that voice and those thoughts. He also states that Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” philosophy fails to acknowledge that there has to be a higher consciousness inside of all of us—one that is capable of observing and analyzing the ego, which seems to control our thoughts even when we don’t want it to.

It’s comforting to imagine that if I can just become more aware of how my ego operates, I can render it powerless and find myself on an entirely new plane of existence. The big question is, once I get there, will my higher consciousness fantasize about a penthouse with concrete countertops and first-class flights to Europe? Tolle says material success and enlightenment aren’t mutually exclusive, but I have to wonder if that caveat is just a convenient way to sell lots and lots of books without coming off like an anti-consumerist hypocrite.