Right now my main goal in life is to have somebody intervene. I don’t think this is going to happen because they’d have a very flimsy case. “Sara, you used to be so full of life. Sometimes. You used to be marginally full of life and would sometimes go to parties and drink enough tequila to manage a mildly amusing anecdote. Anyway, Sally, what I’m trying to say is, you used to be sort of OK at parties, like to make the room seem more crowded and therefore fun, and sometimes your clothes amused the rest of us. Now, you haven’t been to a party in four entire months. I worry that if you don’t get out of the house soon you’ll continue to have panic attacks in grocery stores. I miss the moderately friendly presence you used to be. Also, you used to have a job, sort of. Now you sort of don’t. Please accept this gift of help. If you don’t, you can’t sleep on your mother’s couch anymore.”

I really love watching Intervention. I know Fred Armisen already covered the hilarity inherent in an Intervention addiction. I thought that clip was adorable, not because it was especially funny, but because I loved seeing Peggy Olson in a mature stable relationship, with good hair. Go, Pegs! Of course, I also hated the clip because I knew exactly which episodes Fred was talking about … and he’s right. Heidi looked cute as a button before she got all that surgery. Now she looks like Bettie Page with wax lips and a skein of dried glue all over her face. (I’m sorry, Heidi. I also like to buy Opi nail polish to feel better. It works.) I also don’t get why that lady bought all those airplane-sized bottles of vodka when it would have been much cheaper and more rational to buy one full-sized bottle. I know alcoholism isn’t a habit based around rationality and good judgment or anything. Maybe she wanted to be discrete, but when you buy twenty at once, a warning bell the size of a jumbo-jet must be going off in the cashier’s head. Especially when you have a camera crew following you around, I guess. Anyway, Fred brought up good points, and I’m ashamed that I understand every single one of his points, extremely well. Cause I’ve seen every episode. At three in the afternoon. With a glass of wine. Because I don’t want to sit there feeling all superior or anything!

I’m kidding. The problem is, I don’t have a problem. I couldn’t be on Intervention even if I called and begged them myself. I drink like a girl, i.e. a 9-year-old girl, in that I actually sip from shot-glasses. I’m usually with somebody else when I drink, even if they’re not drinking. I like having someone in the vicinity to listen to my theories on Tyra Banks’ love-life. Whenever I need to take a painkiller or an antihistamine, I read every bit of the tiny type on the bottle and take the dose recommended for 12-year-olds, so that if I die I can be all, “I ONLY TOOK THE DOSE FOR 12-YEAR-OLDS, IT’S YOUR FAULT.” It’s painfully obvious that I don’t like plastic surgery, and I’m not addicted to shopping, as evidenced by the fact that I recently spent a whole afternoon stitching buttons back onto my linty clothing. My mascara tubes are outdated. I wait until I’m in a monogamous relationship to hold hands. Even my relationship with food, once melodramatic, messy, and awkward as all get out, has now softened into a sort of vague and boring hostility, not any different from pretty much every woman in the country. I am totally fine. I am 100% stable and normal. No addictions here.

Still, an intervention is about all I really want in life at this specific moment. I’ll never understand why those people walk into rooms filled with their favorite relatives and friends and lovers and some guidance counselor with a cute hair-cut and TV makeup and they start freaking out and running away and punching the cameras or whatever. Nothing bad is about to happen, methadone addicts! Geez, settle down. You’re about to hear a lot of letters about what a swell person you are, and then you get to go and be taken care of by kindly strangers, and in a few months you’ll be walking through the sunshine in white seersucker, smelling flowers, feeling happier than you’ve felt in years, while titles announce to the world how far you’ve come. It’s like being plucked from the woozy burning wreckage of your life and plopped down into a fluffy bassinet. Christianity is mostly so popular because it emphasizes rebirth, and who doesn’t sometimes feel like Meryl Streep in that movie about the orchid, weeping drugged into the phone about wanting to just be a baby again? We all want to be a baby again; a baby who, by merit of some vague lingering regret souring in its cerebral cortex, will make only the right decisions this time, and grow up strong and golden and well-respected, and not cry a lot, or at least not wear dark eye makeup while it cries. (I still haven’t even started to learn that lesson. Not even brown eyeshadow: I just go for right for the glittery purple stuff, that will make the snot streaked up into my hairline approximate an oil slick. I look like a photo from National Geographic after I cry.)

So, please, if you are reading this, intervene. Intervene in me. Intervene in my simple but somehow terrifying life. It won’t take a lot … five minutes, tops. Wear something that looks good on cable. Make me stop watching Pushing Daisies and worrying about the calories in raw almonds. Make my hands stop shaking when I fill out applications for volunteer work that I’m probably not even qualified to do. Make me not fall asleep at four in the afternoon with a library book opened on my lap. Tell me why you like me, or at least why you used to. Give me a generous gift. Interrupt my life for me, and I promise I’ll do the same for you, one magical day, in a room with beige carpets and folding chairs, where everything will start anew.