Last night I was at the stove stirring risotto (all Jeff Smith risotto recipes require that you not merely boil your arborio rice but stand at the stove stirring thoughtfully -- and, in my own special twist on the classics, drinking buckets of pinot grigio -- for half an hour) when Jackson wandered into the kitchen and asked me to pick him up so he could see what was cooking. I stooped down to put him on my left hip, and as I started to straighten up holding thirty-three some odd pounds of boy I got this awful pulling sensation across my abdomen, like my uterus was about to detach from its tendons. As I gently replaced Jackson's feet on the kitchen floor, I felt the hot wave of adrenalin-fueled hypochondria start to claw its way up my spine, and for the thousandth time in my life I began to run down my Checklist of Sudden, Possibly Life-Threatening, and Definitely Painful Diseases That I Probably Have.

Symptom:

Generalized lower abdominal tenderness.

Possible reasons to panic:

1. UTERINE PROLAPSE!
Who cares if it's been two-and-a-half years since I gave birth. Or perhaps I've just been reading too many web sites of people who just had babies.

2. ENDOMETRIOSIS!
Check calendar -- the time is right for ovulation, though this would be the most dramatic dual-ovary synchronized egg release ever in my personal experience -- but there's no time to Google endometriosis before Jack suggests it's a . . .

3. HERNIA!
Lower intestine suddenly pops through abdominal wall while person is in the act of lifting heavy object -- lift up shirt, pull down waistband of pink velour pants -- see any lumps of intestine straining through skin? Negative. Still, though. But wait! What about . . .

4. APPENDICITIS!
Oh my god! I once had a friend who, after an emergency appendectomy, said that his only symptom before fainting in the emergency room was that it had felt like he'd been doing too many sit-ups. Lightheadedness ensues. Order Jack to stay at the stove and keep stirring while I stagger away to collapse on the couch. But wait, is that a gas bubble I feel traversing my colon? Could it be . . .

5. THE TWO FIVE-DAY-OLD CHICKEN ENCHILADAS I ATE FOR LUNCH?

The True Story of My Miraculous Self-Healing:

While Jackson stood next to the toilet shouting "Pee-WEE! MOMMY FARTED!", I closed my eyes as if in prayer and took a big orange-colored five-day-old-enchilada shit.

And then we had osso buco.

Alright, no one cares, but two big thumbs up for Courtney Love's new album. I guess it's actually a CD, forgive me, I have Mad Cow Disease, plus I still own at least five linear feet of vinyl recordings meant to be played on a turntable with a sharp little diamond stylus, and God Help You if it gets dull and you need a new one, it's like looking for typewriter ribbon. A girl came to my door a few weeks ago selling magazines -- yes! a door-to-door magazine* salesperson! She had a nonselfpitying tale about being a young single mom with an unpottytrainable son six months older than Jackson, my wee Casanova, who stood at my feet doing his come hither, fair damsel, and let us make like ninjas together whilst we woo routine, and she saw the long bookshelf in our hall filled with records and, awestruck, she asked, "Are you a DJ?" She really had me stumped for a few minutes, trying to imagine myself in some Ms. Mixalot situation with a bag over my head to diguise my decrepitude, doing a tricky Tommy Bolin - to - Heart segue.



Anyway. What was I saying. Oh, yeah! So here's an opportunity to once again scan and link to a favorite Matt Groening cartoon! I miss Life in Hell, but if I was riding the Simpsons gravy train I'd probably retire the snarky weekly panel cartoon, too. My point, dull as it may be, is that the phrase "thumbs up" sets two adorable little thought trains in motion. First comes the Roger Ebert train in a rusty heather Shetland crew neck sweater, beaming happily, with a projector's bright light mounted on the front of his engine. Then, from the opposite direction clickety-clack comes the black-and-white Matt Groening cartoon train with Conductor Binky waving from the caboose, which is painted with that one "Thumbs up!" guy from the cartoon** about how to be a film critic. And then here comes Stationmistress Courtney with her cute conductor's hat and half-buttoned conductor's coat and no panties, waving two bright orange Jimmy Choo shoes, directing both trains onto the same track where WHAMMO! they collide at forty miles per hour, right in front of the platform, spectacularly maiming hundreds of Roger Corman fans.

So, thumbs up, Courtney! Wow!

*Which reminds me, we have yet to receive our first issue of Nick Jr. Magazine that we ordered from her. Hmmm! Well, if it was a scam, she put a fuckofalot of work into getting my twenty-eight dollars, she bent my ear for almost half an hour. She wore me down. I wrote her a check just to get her to leave.

**Don't forget to click on the film critics to see the whole cartoon

I love how when a kid poops his pants we say he had an "accident." Like, the responding officer reported that the driver of the red Ford Explorer thought it was just going to be a fart.

Thank you, that was your Pseudo-Paula Poundstone* moment for today.

*Poor Paula! Drunk Driving Mommy, okay, but honestly! Who believed the molestation charge? I guess it happens, though. I mean, Anne Sexton, right? Blurg. There's your lesbian incest moment of the day, too. You're welcome.

Letters to the Editor: "I fail to see the harm to anyone."



Photos by Derek Powazek: Justly Married

link via superfudgechunk

Here's half a picture of a woman on her honeymoon in Mexico. She'd been drinking an awful lot of good tequila and sleeping like she'd been hit in the head with a brick, despite the toe, broken on a concrete step her first day there.



There I was, hungover and somehow sunburnt only from the neck up, pacing myself through Mary Karr's Liar's Club. It's a terrific book, scary and comic, exactly the way I felt about being married, after having been at it for less than a week. There's a lot of drunken, blinding sunlight in the book, too, so mentally, at least, I felt right at home.

"Mother's bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I'd seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck. I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield's head -- still wearing cat's-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges -- all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball.

Here's a poem of hers that was in a recent New Yorker. It makes me hope we can all weather a certain person's coming adolescence with good grace and snappy comebacks.

My grandfather liked burnt toast for breakfast. Basically, a shingle of charcoal. If he went to a restaurant and the waitress brought him anything less than a serving of smoking brimstone, he would crumble it up in his fist, scream, "THIS ISN'T WHAT I ORDERED!" and throw it across the room. I mean, really, A little anger management, sir? is what you'd say these days, but then? Did people just go, Tch! Cookie's asleep at the grill again! and go back to gossiping about the town slut?

This obituary got me thinking. This quote in particular:

"By the turn of the century, you know, we didn't have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays," Jones recalled. "We didn't have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other."

Maybe people really were a lot more different way back when, or maybe they were just less self-conscious about being alcoholic/bipolar/anorexic/major flaming assholes. We're all much more aware of these things as failings these days. Yet the Catholic Church turned at least one woman who drank lepers' pus and treated bloody scabs like communion wafers into a saint. And then there's Wuthering Heights. It contains one of the meanest, least-evolved, clinging-to-their-neuroses set of bastards you'll ever read about short of the Third Reich. That whole novel is one big fuck you to mental health*.

So, this is why I'm going to quit shaving my armpits. Who's with me!?

*This sort of in-depth literary analysis earned me a C in Eng. Lit. 101.

Where did that $100 of birthday money go?

1. Pin -- $17 (now that I'm 40, I can't leave the house without a pin on my cloak, a silk scarf over my bouffant, and making sure I radiate Chanel No. 5 for at least fifteen feet in all directions).
2. Two essential Bill Murray movies (Kingpin and Groundhog Day) -- $30.
3. Muted safety orange down vest, stone cropped low-riders, and electric cranberry velour pants from the Gap sale rack -- $45.
4. Finally getting my vibrating pink gel dildo repaired -- priceless.

I was vaguely concerned about joining the pink velour pants brigade, which seems mainly to be comprised of UCSB girls on their way to or from Starbucks. I guess if I start wearing them with flip-flops you can take me out with a pellet gun.

My other weak, half-hearted concern is for Ben Affleck, who is all up in arms about this new player deal for the Yankees (Jack came up with a good headline this morning: "Affleck Apopleptic"), but I'm reserving my special edge-of-panic concern for HELLO!? Mad Cow Disease! The New York Times keeps publishing these windy, midsize, no-one-wants-to-be-the-first-one-to-admit-that-they-think-there's-an-enormous-problem articles on page 17 about how the USDA tests only about 40,000 cows out of bajillions each year, and how witnesses report sick cows stumbling up the ramp to be slaughtered, and how brain and spinal tissue sticks to the machinery and potentially gets mixed into food product meat, and how even if the machinery is clean the carcass parts with infected prions get rendered down into stuff like gelatin, which is made into those gelatin capsules, implying that even if you're a vegetarian and you take supplements or medication contained in gelatin capsules, you can still contract your distinctly human but still crippling version of Mad Cow Disease. And if cows have been Cannibal Cows with twisted prions starting ten, twenty, thirty years ago? Then we all have it. Is what I'm thinking. Is anyone else half-panicked about this, or is it just me? Because I forgot my own phone number the other day.

This morning's scenario

Me: Sorry about being so grumpy last night.
Jack: Because your life is so hard.
Me: It had nothing to do with my life not being hard, it had to do with me being tired, and you accepting my apology and not making fun of me.
Jack: I . . . I can't do that.

This afternoon's scenario

Me: There's a parking spot!
Me: No, it's a driveway.
Me: Oop, there's one!
Me: You unbelievable wanker. You took two valuable parking spaces with that teeny wanker piece of shit, unconsciously, selfishly parked car, and I know that it's not one of those cases where somebody else parked badly and forced you into a tight spot, and then they left and now you look stupid, because you are parked at the end of the block! Don't you know how long your goddamned car is?
Me: My brain is swollen with unspeakable rage.
Me: Miles and miles of no parking spaces.
Me: It's so peaceful, driving around this slowly.
Me: I will now turn into this completely full and blocks away from my destination parking lot.
Me: Hey! It's that street kid girl who went behind the Dumpster with Parking Lot Blow Job Guy! Well, I must say, those are some very attractive Le Sportsac knock-offs you have your worldly belongings stuffed into, but do you have to repack it all while sitting . . . in that parking space? Yes? Okay, never mind.

Among the most excruciating of American Idol’s excruciating moments are those in which parents greet their booted babies, offering reassurance that the judges were dead wrong. "You’re amazing, they don’t know what they’re talking about," the parents coo. In an age when parents are not able to confront their kids’ shortcomings, it sometimes seems like Mr. Cowell is the only one who will.

Link via TMFTML

Two Things That Happened Recently In Bed

1. Jackson woke me up at about 1:00 a.m. the other morning and said, "Can you help me?" He was sleeping in only a t-shirt, and he'd kicked off the covers and his lower portions felt like a delicious bundle of Otter Pops. So, intuiting his meaning as only a mother can, I pulled the blankets back up over him. He was lying on his stomach, and the next thing he said was, "Pet it." "It," as I understood it at this particularly sleepy moment in both our lives, could only mean his butt. So I rubbed his butt under the covers for about ten seconds and soon he was sawing little toothpick-sized logs again. A minute later Jack rolled over and snuggled his double raspberry sno-cone* of an ass right into my warm tummy. The acorn doesn't fall too far from the oak.

*This is the blue flavor, you'll recall.

2. As parents of a young child, we tend to have sex at weird times, and because Jackson is now occupying our bed noon and night, we tend to fornicate for non-procreative purposes in unusual locations as well. During the week, on days when Jackson's at school, sometimes we can both sneak home for a nooner in the big bed, but on the weekends we're waiting for Jackson's naptime so we can get our freak(s) on in his room (or I guess we should call it The Room Into Which We Throw His Toys), on top of the Spiderman fleece throw that I bought on sale at Christmastime. The thing about this arrangement is that I can occasionally feel a dutiful obligation to take advantage of the limited free sex time, whether I'm in the mood or not. Sometimes the force is with me; other times I have to kill a few Ewoks to find it. So a few weeks ago Jackson's conked out on the bed and Jack and I are all set up on the floor in the Toy Room with the blanket, and I'm kind of nuzzling back and forth on Jack's cheeks in this half-autistic, self-stimming way, just blankly fuzzing our cheeks together on one side, then the other, then going back to the first one. I wasn't particularly connecting with him, but I guess I was making some "mm-mm" lovey noises to kind of, I don't know, make it at least sound like this was a really sexy thing for me to do. After about, who knows, forty-five seconds of this yam-fisted* activity (Jack tends to lose patience with sex acts that threaten to go nowhere, as I suppose everyone but me does), he pulls his head back and says, "Am I in a Lifetime movie right now?"

*Ham-fisted seems a little strong here, but the sweet blandness of an orange root vegetable with eyes --and, I guess, fists -- has just the right frisson of je ne sais quoi.

A Long Post About Big Guns And Little Men, With Footnotes That You Don't Have To Break Into Your Reading To Read, If You Know What I Mean, You Can Just Read All The Paragraphs In Order, It Will Probably Make More Sense That Way Anyway

Yesterday, when I picked up Jackson from preschool, the woman who runs the school came over and told me that Jackson had been aggressive that day. Did he hit someone, I asked. No, she said, but he'd been doing a lot of pretend ha-CHA! fighting with Tommy* and sometimes it got a little out of control. And she must have seen the little flame of death, the imminent parental denial apocalypse of he's just a little boy and little boys don't play like little girls, you total fucking bitch behind my eyes because she hastily added that a little bit of play fighting was okay, just don't encourage it; don't use Power Rangers*** as role models. And I knew that she was essentially right, no one wants to raise a flipped out little squib who punches people in the face for fun, but when we came home and I told Jack what she said, he got that same expression on his face, that tired, fucked-off no one's going to tell me how to raise my kid expression, and he turned to Jackson and said, Hey buddy, want to watch some Power Rangers?

*Tommy** is one of Jackson's current best playmates; to see their faces in the morning when they meet at school, the big shy blushing smiles, is to see two people who are totally in love with each other and don't know how to hide it. But instead of kissing they go take turns hitting their heads against a wall and doing that ha-ha!-I'm-in-a-straightjacket-and-I-have-Albert-Einstein-hair! laugh. Laughing like insane little physicists. I think that's what I'll say from now on when people ask me if I have any children. No, I'll say, I live with my husband and an insane little physicist.

**One day we ran into Tommy and his mom at the toy store. Tommy was looking for glop, or slime, or something disgusting that makes a huge mess, and his mother seemed fine with that. We were looking for a gun. Yes, A GUN. And we told Tommy's mom what we were looking for and she said, Good luck. And guess what? You can't find a toy gun in a toy store, not in Santa Barbara at least; maybe we'll have to drive to Bakersfield, I don't know. The point is, we discovered that there's not much point in not letting Jackson play with guns, because he can take anything and pretend to shoot you with it: a tube of lip gloss, a bike pump, a vegetarian breakfast sausage, a Rubik's cube. Jack heard tell of a mom who adamantly wouldn't let her son play with guns, so the son would bite cookies into the shape of a gun and shoot her with them. I also heard Terry Gross interview Matt Damon once and he talked about how anti-gun his mom was when he was a boy, and then he grew up and made The Bourne Identity, an action movie where, you guessed it, he shoots, like, fifteen people. (Actors, yes. But are not actors people? Who speaks for the actors? Melissa Gilbert?!) So, what lesson can we take away from all of this? You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink unless you threaten him with a green plastic water pistol shaped like a luger, which is what my brothers used to do to make me get up and change the channel on the TV. Yes, I was born before remote controls, and we only had seven channels. And we walked to school in the dark, uphill both ways.

***One of the reasons that I thought Power Rangers**** would be okay for Jackson to play with is because they're all into being ninjas. Ninjas, as everyone knows, prefer deception to outright violence, charisma to belligerence, night to day, and, though philosophically opposed to actually starting a fight, they'll sure as shit finish one. So I think that's a good philosophy for a two-year-old. I mean, enough with Elmo. We are so far beyond that now.

****I would also like to point out that these big, tough ninja Power Rangers actually have names like Blake and Dustin and Tori, they take orders from a guinea pig, and they have prosthetic legs and wear Rockports.

Now that I've watched the Scooby Doo Movie at least twenty-four times, including cast and director commentaries, I can thoroughly and embarrasingly conclude that I always like the dumb guy.



The dumb guy is sweet. The dumb guy thinks you're awesome. The dumb guy has no idea how goofy he is, all he knows is that you're laughing and that's got to be a good sign. He is stoked about making you Bisquick pancakes with frozen strawberries in the morning, and even though they're heavier than the heaviest thing on the periodic table you are so touched that you eat them and think Hey! These are pretty good! The dumb guy's feelings are easily hurt. He watches what you want to watch on television. The dumb guy is great in bed.

Why don't you marry the dumb guy? Because after TV, sex, and pancakes, the dumb guy doesn't really "get" modern art, he idolizes Donald Trump, and he hasn't liked a new band since INXS. Naturally, he would go totally psycho when you try to break up with him.

Oh, well. Those were a great three months fifteen years ago, dumb guy, thanks!

Some other stuff we've done lately

Watched a house get torn down



Gave Jackson a haircut over the course of a week


Sunday: Now all I need is one of those Calvin pissing on a Chevy stickers


Wednesday: Prince Valiant with raisin bread


Friday: Phew!

Learned that Wonder Woman can do the splits, but then at least one of her legs falls off



Started a poultry farm in the bathroom



Went back in time



And learned that if you give Jackson the camera he will take pictures of you before the coffee's kicked in