I think I'm afraid of my next-door neighbor. I'm not sure I'm afraid of her, because when she's in hairdresser mode she's been very accommodating about cutting Jackson's hair without putting him in full-body restraint. But she also sits on her front porch in the dark, smoking and drinking beer and complaining with the girl who lives in the back apartment, talking loudly about all the bitches she's fucked up. Her three children, ages eight to thirteen, are mesmerisingly well behaved. She once told me how her oldest was "picking soap out of his molars" after the first time he cursed in front of her. Once we met her youngest in the alley between our houses, his arms loaded with toys. "If those aren't put away in one minute, I'll throw them out!" we heard her bellow from her front yard. "She'll do it, too," flinched the boy as he dumped everything into the dirt-floored storage space beneath their house and ran back inside.

So this weekend I'm coming home from taking Jackson to see Cat in the Hat, and he's fallen asleep in his car seat, so I'm hoping to carry him gently inside to let him begin what I hope will be at least a two-hour nap in his crib. But Neighbor Bitch-Slap is in her front yard demolishing a bush with a chain saw. I have to get about eight inches from her face before she notices me trying to get her attention. Annoyed, and without shutting off the saw, she strains to hear me plead that if she would just turn off the saw for one minute I'd be able to get my little boy into bed without ruining everyone's afternoon. With great irritation she shuts the saw off, snapping, "I hope to god I can get it to start again." I run off without saying thank you, which I immediately regret, but rescuing a sleeping child from a baking car seems just a teensy bit more urgent. However, I imagine I can feel her affront ready to be heaved at my fleeing back like a cinderblock.

And this morning as I left the house, even though my path to the sidewalk is shielded from view of her yard by a seven-foot hedge, I was waiting to hear the soft thok! of poison-tipped arrows piercing my flank and that snarling, cat-fighting, soap-weilding matriarch yelling, Hey! Shit-for-brains! You're welcome! The only reason I have the nerve to post this is I'm pretty sure her kids think I'm too boring to Google.

*Also, if you click on the chain saw photo you will find it is linked to a site dedicated to the art of chain saw sculpture. It's almost as good as the amputation and bone saw site that I found while looking for chain saw photos.

Yeah, just because I was a philosophy major doesn't mean I know a gott-damned thing about what you're doing here. I was the girl who knitted an entire cabled sweater during lectures one semester. Not this guy, though. He sat in the back, chewing thoughtfully on his blue Bic. Apart from the day the cheap pen exploded in his mouth, making Professer Pfefferkorn-Forbath's eyes twinkle briefly before turning our attention back to the threadbare hijinks of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

50

The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and he has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn't think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day's work.

-- Lao-tzu, trans. Stephen Mitchell

Things have been pretty quiet lately, unless you count Jackson's new affection for yelling "COME GET ME!" at two in the morning, or having a coughing fit and then refusing all attempts to administer Robitussin until I hide a shot in a cup of juice, and then flopping around sleeplessly in my spot in bed for half an hour until, tired of trying to sleep balanced on a two-inch strip of mattress, I take him back to his crib and sit leaning on the rail with my hand on his back until the coughing subsides and he finally sleeps again, giving me time to outline a brilliant series of young adult real estate murder mystery novels in my head, the plots of which I will not remember in the morning.

Except for all of that, and the fact that he's inventing a new language.

A. If Jackson runs up to you, jumps his legs out wide, balls his hands into fists, squints his eyes, and yells, "Ton-TATE!" be prepared to block a fist with your forearm or you will get socked in the eye.

2. If Jackson balances on the arm of the sofa with a plastic sword in his hand and starts chanting, "HOIN-ka, HOIN-ka, HOIN-ka" don't be alarmed, it just means that he's going to start jumping on the sofa cushions until he either falls on the floor or jumps belly-first on the back of the couch, hugs it with his knees, and says, "HEY! LOOK AT ME! I'M SPIDERMAN!"

A Short Story Made Long, or, you may need some sorbet to wash the taste of this one out of your mouth.

A few weeks ago we moved all our files and blueprints and tasteful desk accessories to a new office, which is in the back of my boss's new house. The office is nice. It's cosy and well lit with twenty-four halogen bulbs that cost $12.95 each (which I know because I've already had to replace two of them), and the slate floor has radiant heat so it's always miraculously toasty.

I spent the summer working out of our bookkeeper's hot, windowless conference room while waiting for the new home/office to be finished. One might think that leaving a busy, girly, candy-filled office for a woody private hermitage would be an isolating experience, but there is still so much work being done on the house, inside and out, that I'm always hearing workmen clomp past my open door, which overlooks a redwood deck which overlooks a pile of dirt, an unfinished fire pit, a buttload of bougainvillea, and a brick wall. If you strain your neck you can peek at the sea. If everyone shuts off their Skil saws you can hear it, too.

One huge perk I get from working in a private home is that I can do laundry while I work. Living where we do, in a small apartment without a washer and dryer, you can't imagine what we spent every month getting laundry done ($250). Now, I just pop up from my chic office chair every hour or so and take myself off the clock to put in another load and do a little folding. It beats cigarette breaks.

To get to the laundry room you cut through the guest bathroom, which has two doors, one that opens out onto the deck and one into the house. But yesterday the deck-side door to the bathroom was closed and a pair of Hobbity suede work boots was sitting outside the door with woolly socks sticking out of the tops.

If you're aware of my recent encounter with empty shoes in a bathroom, you, like I, would've been immediately suspicious. So I took the long way around and got into the laundry room through the front door, did my loading and folding, and took the long way back around to the office. When I rounded the corner to the deck, the young hippie/craftsman who'd been sanding beams out front all morning was sitting on the steps in front of me, pulling on his woolly socks and his I-have-chosen-the-peaceful-path-of-working-with-my-hands suede workboots.

It takes roughly an hour for the washer and dryer to go through their cycles, so after an hour I got up and walked down the deck to cut through the bathroom. What slapped me in the face was the first wave of humid wall of bean tortilla hippie craftsman shit smell that enveloped my whole being like a cloud of suffocating death. It had been sealed in there for an hour, ripening, and as I stood there in shock the second wave showed me its subtle strength, flaring its nostrils like a slightly irritated African god.

I actually managed to think two things while I held my breath and opened every available window and door to release the organically grown stench. The first thing I flashed on was growing up with two older brothers and a dad who would do the exact same hideous thing, except they'd leave the bathroom door open an inch so the smell would slowly contaminate the rest of the house, and the second was, What's the fucking deal with taking off your shoes when you poop?

"Christmas is coming." It's just something you say when your husband expresses interest in a bulletproof Aston Martin or a three-way with Jenna Fine.

Unthinkingly, the other night when Jackson was idly demanding a few new Marvel villains and some Star Wars Guys to round out his small but mighty collection of dolls action figures, I said, in an effort to put the purchase off for a couple of weeks, "Well, if you're good, Santa will bring you some toys for Christmas."

Eyes widened, wheels spun, pins were heard to drop.

"Santa? Is bringing me toys?"

I had sort of planned on not taking Jackson for a ride on the Fantasy Father Figure Bus. It was easy enough for me, at around age five, to figure out that Santa Claus was somebody's big fat lie when I deduced that our house didn't have a chimney. But there I was, helplessly, as though possessed by the tongue-tickling spirit of Yukon Cornelius, cracking open the encyclopedia of avarice from candy canes to Norelco shavers.

Before I was even done outlining the basics Jackson was struggling to open the front door. When gently questioned, he replied, wild eyed, SANTA'S COMING! HE'S BRINGING ME A GREEN GOBLIN! Naturally, this is where Jack stepped in to inform Jackson that not only would he have to wait seven more weeks, but if he stepped out of line even once during escrow come Christmas Day he'd be trying to face down his superarticulated Spiderman with a lump of coal.

The upshot is, whenever Jack comes through the door now Jackson stiffens with excitement and asks, "Is it Santa?!" And anticipation once again turns to hollow disappointment, as it will continue to do for the next forty-nine days, making Jack feel as welcome as holy water in Satan's fruit punch.

And that's the story of Jesus!

Great God of Meddling Mothers forgive me, but when I dropped Jackson off at school one day last week expecting him to run up to his best pal, Caitlin, and get his morning hug, but instead he hid behind my leg and said quietly, I don't want to play with Caitlin, while Caitlin stood two feet away and said to me, I don't want to play with Jackson, well, I just about dropped an ovary. A fight?! About what?

Armed with almost no information and unable to broker a quick détente ten minutes before work, I turned helplessly to Miss Rachel, pleading that our little best friends weren't talking today and What Are We Going To DO ABOUT IT? Miss Rachel, taciturn and schooled in the vagaries of the two-year-old heart, was like, Really? Huh. Well, we'll keep an eye on them, we don't want anyone to lose a limb, Mrs. Kennedy. *snort*

The implication being that it was up to them to settle their subtle complaints.

So yesterday we walked into the playroom with Jackson wearing last year's Paul Frank Monkey Hat and Caitlin, enthralled, wanted to tie it under his chin. Too little to know how to make a bow, she simply took the two cords and twisted them, and twisted them and twisted them until Jackson's chin fat was bulging out the top. And she kept twisting while she looked at me and said, Are you Jackson's mommy? And I said Yes, you know I am. And she said, Are you a nice person? And I said, Um, well, most of the time. And then she leaned in to me, holding tight to her lethal little macramé project, and said, I LOVE JACKSON. I LOVE HIM. And Jackson, who'd been more concerned with the tightening noose than our turn of conversation, wrested his face toward me and pleaded hoarsly, Make her stop.

Well, the potty training's going great as long as we don't leave the house. If we do, you'll see me hauling a twenty pound bag of extra pants and underwear. It's the sort of thing that gets you wondering what your grownups did to keep you dry long enough to make it to the playground and back. I'm pretty sure that my own mother stopped giving me liquids. To this day I can go for an entire workday without peeing. I store that morning cup of coffee like a camel. Of course, by the end of the day my kidneys have cottonmouth. But that's what beer is for.

I think Jackson's getting annoyed with me asking every ten minutes if he needs to pee, because now if I even look at him he cuts me off by yelling, "No, I do NOT want to visit the potty right now!" Later, I'll be doing something interesting like picking mushy peas out of the sink strainer, and suddenly he'll be standing there with no pants on, tugging on my leg and saying, "You have to wipe my butt." But it was a shining moment in our lives when he showed up at my bedside this morning with a dry diaper. Then we talked about our dreams. He dreamt that he rawred at a dinosaur and saw a sheep under a leaf. I dreamed that my sheets were tickling me. Then we ate waffles. Then I didn't post for another week because I was too busy washing peed-on king-size bed quilts in the bathtub.