A Hitch In Time

Pardon me if this column doesn’t make much sense; I am suffering from bridal-lag. Bridal-lag is similar to jetlag but without the fun of going anywhere. “Jetlag” is defined as “A temporary disruption of bodily rhythms caused by high-speed travel across several time zones typically in a jet aircraft.” But, in the case of Bridal Time Zones, all of which are located on a planet that exists on a separate but interactive plane with ours, no jet is necessary. Just a wedding date.

When I got engaged, little did I know that I crossed over to a parallel plane of existence in which the planet Planwed resides. In retrospect, this explains why those few minutes it took for my boyfriend to propose and for me to watch myself accept seemed to take one nanosecond. That’s how time works on planet Planwed.

Planwed actually has two incongruous time zones which exist simultaneously: Romance Time (RT) and Bridal Magazine Time (BMT). While you are visiting, it will seem time is crawling along at an excruciatingly slow pace, and then without warning it will suddenly speed up, resulting in panic attacks about finding an elbow-length two-tiered bridal veil with a one-quarter inch pencil edge immediately. Here is an example of how the complex physical properties involved can play out: I am not getting married for another five months, which, in Romance Time, is the equivalent of one decade. But I am having a wedding in five months, which is the equivalent of 3.024 seconds in Bridal Magazine Time. By their calculations I am teetering on catastrophic failure because I have not yet ordered the groomsmen’s boutonnieres.

Visitors to planet Planwed should be aware that while they are required to adhere to the two time zones simultaneously, residents of the planet are not. Each resident belongs to only one of the time zones, regardless of their geographical location (e.g. Wedding Cake Lake or Sparkly Ringland) and they expect you to adjust accordingly in your dealings with them.

When I approached the D.J. (who is from a very laid-back, mostly farmland area of Planwed) with a dog-eared list of carefully selected songs, he waved me away with a lackadaisical hand and scoffed, “Oh, you’ve got time!” But when I went shopping for a wedding dress the sales women nearly collapsed at the thought that I was just starting my search with a mere six months (BMT translation: 3.386 seconds) to go.

The BMT populace will have you believe that if you have not booked your honeymoon before anybody actually proposes to you, then clearly you are so unorganized and irresponsible you shouldn’t be allowed to marry, much less procreate. However, those dwelling in RT zones believe that if you dare to presume you will ever go on a honeymoon, time will expand exponentially until, despite all laws of physics, you will live for 350 years and spend them all dating scrawny guys with pocket-protectors who have a habit of spitting when they talk.

BMT was created and is monitored by a fairly sizable and wealthy country on planet Planwed similar to France in that its citizens all feel they are far more interesting and sophisticated than anyone else on the planet, but have very little evidence to back themselves up other than a snotty accent. The country is almost entirely populated by extremely thin women with blond highlights, sprinkled with a few effeminate men who wear a lot of hair product and say “fabulous” ad nauseum but have no literal translation in their language of “please” or “thank you.”

Wedding Dress Salespeople make up the largest population of BMT residents. These are the thinnest of the thin women and they are very high-strung and quite excitable. If they were animals, they would be hamsters – whiskers quivering, running like mad on their tulle-adorned wheels. Their tiny frames belie their immense strength, particularly in their upper arms, which are regularly exercised by pulling mercilessly at the corset ribbons of brides-to-be. Rewards are given to those capable of cinching a bride’s waist so tight that her back fat (which she formerly was not aware she had) splooges out the top of the dress, giving the effect of two extra breasts located in her armpits. Any means of causing a bride to faint is considered a sign of proficiency among this tribe; if the fainting is a result of successfully accentuating heretofore unknown back fat, you are likely to get a fabulous two-week vacation to Wedding

Cake Lake and an Employee of the Month plaque.

Caterers are a nomadic people who wander in and out of BMT and RT countries without regard. But mostly they are just a group of people whose accents – none of which are the same – are very difficult to understand. Often this results in having a dish at your wedding you did not know you ordered, and are loathe to eat, like Brussels sprouts in maple walnut syrup garnished with pepper-stuffed olives and rosemary. You thought he said, “roast beef.”

In addition to D.J.s, Florists and Bakers also live in temperate climes on the RT side of the planet. Florists live in a country where plants flower into picture-perfect blossoms no matter what the season, but if you try to pick any of them you are charged $150. Don’t even ask about the trees.

Wedding

Cake Lake is on a beautiful island and follows Romance Time rigidly. Here you are required to recline when sampling delicate cakes adorned with beautiful icing bows. The ensuing sugar high cuts off the flow of brain chemicals related to controlled spending, making the $1200 price tag for what amounts to, let’s face it, artfully arranged butter and flour, seem reasonable. Come to think of it, as lovely as the Wedding Cake People seem, they amount to no more than your average drug-pusher.

So you can see why, as I shuttle back and forth between the frenzied time zone of the Wedding Dress Salespeople and the dreamy, laid-back attitude of the D.J., I’m feeling a little deflated. My body and mind are having a difficult time understanding where or when I am anymore. But I am keenly aware that I have only 163 days left to plan, because no matter who I visit on this planet, this is considered the standard formal greeting. “Hi! Welcome to Patsy’s Floral Arrangements! Only 163 days to go! Well, there's just no chance in hell you're going to pull this off but we'll go ahead and humor you!”

Nobody told me about the existence of this planet before I became engaged. Maybe I was supposed to have been taken through special security procedures where the life of my future children was threatened should I leak any of this information to the happily oblivious women out there. Somehow I slipped through the cracks, and I feel it is my duty to warn you all. If you decide to go ahead and visit planet Planwed anyway, then all I can say is: May the Fondant Be With You.

The Cheeto Diet

While men have spent centuries beating the crap out of each other on the battlefield, women have spent centuries beating the crap out of themselves about their weight. Neither sex has the genetic disposition to understand why the other pursues their particular chosen battle. Women don’t give a damn who won what war so long as nobody they love died, and men boast a positive self-image even if they sport a belly that looks like they’re about to give birth to a keg.

It is one of life’s ironies that men, who don’t notice if they are eating filet mignon or shaving cream so long as they can do it in front of the television, can lose weight with ease, while women undergo a personality transformation and support a multi-billion dollar industry to lose two pounds in six months. As we women continue to pursue our centuries-old Battle of the Bulge, our men continue to baffle us with their irreverent attitude towards food.

My fiancé shovels upwards of 6,800 calories into his face opening at lunchtime, via Whoppers and French fries and ice cream sundaes, without paying any attention to the taste. Meanwhile I have not had a hamburger in over three years and if I ever do, I will promptly gain 5 pounds. Despite his regular diet of fried grease, my fiancé never puts on weight.

A friend of mine is trying the South

Beach diet. She carefully weighs, inspects and dissects every morsel of food before putting it to her lips. She serves her husband chocolate ice cream and sits down with a bowl of sugar-free Jello for herself. (Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think “watch it jiggle” is a particularly strong selling point for a dessert.) She has been overly generous making sure that her restricted diet does not affect her naturally slender husband in any way. And yet the other day when she proudly announced to him that she’d lost 4 pounds he responded, “Really? I lost six.”

“But you’re not even on the diet,” she managed to sputter, while mocking images of him eating potatoes, carrot cake and Cheetos flittered across her vision.

“Yes I am,” he responded, surprised. Hadn’t he gotten a single bacon cheeseburger instead of a double at lunch yesterday? Actually he’d ordered the double but was too lazy to return it. The point being that: a) he had not noticed that he consumed different foods from her at mealtimes and b) he did not notice that his meals were exactly the same as they’d always been, thinking he was automatically on a diet because she was. Just the assumption of a diet was enough to cause him to lose 6 pounds. Which proves theory x: Men lose weight just by being in close proximity to someone (usually a woman) who is on a diet.

But even if men do have to go on an actual diet, it is of little consequence to them, because they never cared that much about what they were eating in the first place. My father says things like, “I don’t think I want any breakfast. I’m still full from last night’s dinner.” What does yesterday’s food have to do with today’s? Today is a clean slate, and I’m not about to cheat myself out of a socially acceptable meal. Or he’ll say, “Hm, I’ve put on a couple pounds. I think I’ll lose some weight.” And then for the next two weeks he’ll just not eat dinner. It is inconceivable to me to skip a meal when it is all I can do to restrain myself from having extra food.

Just the thought of having to go on a diet will send me into a depression so severe that I start to lose my eyesight and hearing. I spend several weeks being so depressed that I eat even more, until I finally hit rock bottom when the scale no longer has the scope to accurately determine my weight. Then I will drag myself out of bed and with a heavy heart pull the much-used portion control measurements out of the cupboard. Normally portion control, to me, means I am done eating when the item is gone. This applies to a bowl of cereal, a chicken breast, or a one-pound bag of M&Ms. Then I start writing up a grocery list of things like “low-fat cottage cheese” and “fat-free sugar-free ice cream” and “low-carb whole-grain bread with extra fiber.” The list will be fuzzy from my tears, like a much-read letter from a loved one killed in war.

Then I embark on a battle that lasts approximately three weeks, which is how long it takes for my snail-like metabolism to catch on that I am on a diet, put the word out to the rest of my body, and start thinking about using some of those extra stores of fat it has socked away in various places, namely my ass, for a rainy day. For those first three weeks getting on the scale is a dangerous business. Both my fiancé and the dog have learned to keep their distance because it is very likely the scale will come hurtling through the air after my morning weigh-in. For those first three weeks I eat nothing but things that taste like sand, and I don’t see any results.

But right around the beginning of week four the scale will start to play with the idea of inching toward the left. It will toy with me for a few days. You lost 1 pound! No, two pounds! No, I changed my mind – you haven’t lost a damn thing! No, wait, just kidding – you really did lose two pounds. I mean four! Four pounds!

“Four pounds!” I will shout jubilantly to my fiancé and the dog, who are hiding under the bed. “I lost four pounds!” I will scream and cry, running around the house like a character from Chariots of Fire after the big race.

“This deserves a reward!” I will tell myself. Positive reinforcement is the best way to maintain a diet! “Everybody in the car! We’re going to Krispy Kreme!”

I may have won the battle, but the war has just begun.

Slip Bridin' Away

An unmarried woman over the age of twenty-one is such a rare circumstance in Alabama that it could be an X-Files episode on the Turner South Network. One of those really disturbing ones because the premise is almost realistic enough that you could imagine such a thing actually happening. As a thirty-something single woman, I have received a lot of unwanted attention from overly concerned, well-intentioned strangers. To avoid inappropriately lashing out at them, I’ve had to come up with a few creative ways to amuse myself when confronted with their distress.

For example there’s this fun little game that I play with the guy in my office who delivers our mail. It’s called “Why Aren’t You Married Yet?” The way the game is played is, every day he asks me a question, which he thinks is subtle enough that I will not understand its origin. He has narrowed his focus down to two possibilities: either I am not really as old as I say I am, or I have an indiscernible communicable disease. “How is it you’re not married yet?” is the main question, of which there are many variations, to which I respond depending on my mood: “Haven’t found the right guy!” or “Oh, just lucky I guess!” (that one really stumps him) and I’d been saving, “Because lesbians aren’t permitted to marry in Alabama!” for a particularly dull day.

My favorite question so far is, “Have you always looked like this?” No, I want to say. The reason nobody has married me is because up until just last year I weighed 350 pounds and had a problem with facial warts.

But alas my amusing little game is going to come to an end. I’ve got a surprise for the mail guy that will probably save him a lot of sleepless nights: I got engaged.

While my being engaged has caused the better part of

Alabama to let out their breath in a collective sigh of relief, it hasn’t really saved me any grief. Because now I get to be humiliated by an entirely new set of people: wedding vendors. For example, in the middle of a telephone conversation with a potential disc jockey the man asked, “Wait - are you the bride?” “Yes,” I replied, for some reason feeling as if I had done something wrong, and he clarified, “Oh, I wasn’t sure, since you sound so… mature.”

As if at the ripe age of thirty-two I will require a walker to assist me down the aisle.

To avoid this latest type of unwanted attention, I have developed a new game in which I adopt the personality of what I imagine to be the typical 19-year-old bride planning her wedding:

“Um? Hello? Is this, like, the caterer? Okay, like, I want only pink foods? So they’ll match my colors? Blush and roseate?”

Wedding vendors seem much more comfortable taking unreasonable demands from a girl just barely out of braces than discussing rational expectations with a mature, practical thirty-two-year-old. But that’s okay, because I can really have some fun with this.

“Do you know, like, the slip n’ slide? Okay because what I want is, like, a slip n’ slide down the aisle, and then, like, the bridesmaids will slide down it on their stomachs? Holding up the bouquets? Oh! And the slip n’ slide HAS to be pink or I will totally freak.”

So while getting engaged may have only increased the spotlight on my graying bridal head, it has at least provided me with a couple of interesting new hobbies. Another one is staring at my engagement ring, although that can be dangerous, particularly in heavy traffic. But the sunlight coming through my dirty windshield creates some really eye-catching effects that you’d have to be dead – or male – not to appreciate.

Any place we frequently visit has now been categorized as having “good sparkly lights” or “bad sparkly lights” and this can weigh heavily on decisions, such as where we will go for dinner. “Look!” I stage-whispered the other night in a tightly packed restaurant while flailing my left hand around over my head, “I’m making rainbows on that guy’s shirt!”

The combination of engagement giddiness, frustration with vendors, my resulting adaptation of an obnoxious nineteen-year-old’s persona, and the distracting sparkly of my ring has rendered me pretty much insufferable to most people. But ask me if I care. I’m engaged! I’m engaged! Like, totally!

The Martha Doctrine

Poor Martha. Our modern-day icon for the Superwoman Business Executive has been quietly ruminating behind bars for the past five months. Quietly – right. We still heard about or from her on a more regular basis than I hear from my brother. Then she emerged from prison to a new television deal, soaring stock prices and the possibility of a book about her cellular experience to the tune of five mil. I bet she sure learned her lesson!

I had about three degrees of separation from Martha, who is well known to be somewhat of a tyrant, when I worked for her PR firm in New York. Personally I can neither confirm nor deny said rumor, because she has an intimidating staff of attorneys who could reduce my life to rubble with one well-placed phone call. But I will say that the few times I had the pleasure of meeting Martha she scared the bejeezus out of me. She has this way of looking at you as if, like the Terminator, a stream of information detracted from your most private thoughts is running across her vision in green, squared-off computer language. I felt completely dissected in the few seconds it took to shake her hand and remained trembling in place after she had quickly dismissed my existence and moved on to more interesting prey.

You’ve heard about Martha’s menacing management practices because she’s a celebrity, but from my experience Martha’s style may simply be a learned byproduct of the female executive’s struggle to the top. I myself had more than my fair share of fanatical bosses. What I wonder is, are crazy people naturally more successful, or does being successful make you crazy? I am a terrible manager; does this mean I can safely consider myself stable? Is this just a New York phenomenon or is it a worldwide epidemic?

For example, my last New York boss was a Class A lunatic. Many of us completely unqualified to do so diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, and just generally being a nasty person – an extremely unpleasant mix of shortcomings. Her modus operandi was to treat you like a gift from God for the first couple months you were in her employ, thus luring you into a false sense of security before startling you out of reticence by turning into a red-eyed, boil-covered, nostril-flaring, spiked-tail-whipping, fire-breathing monster of a bitch. You would then spend the rest of your inevitably short service doing your best, which was never good enough, to dodge her easily incurred wrath. One instinctively tries to do a better job in order to avoid criticism; however, attempting to do the right thing is the fastest way to piss off a crazy person.

This particular boss was fond of reassigning, at random, various responsibilities within the organization to people who were not even remotely qualified for the job. “But I was hired as a mailroom clerk,” one might protest, when given the new title of Vice President of IT Operations after the former Vice President, in an effort to find an acceptable excuse for missing a few days of work had, during lunch, leapt out his 32^nd floor window. “The IT department receives quite a bit of mail,” she would rationalize in such a way that you felt foolish for having said anything. And then when the server blew up as a result of your incompetence, she would sue you for maliciously and intentionally misrepresenting your skills, thus putting her business in jeopardy.

Perhaps this particular boss is an exception and just needs to be heavily medicated or, preferably, strangled in her sleep. Maybe in most cases crazy bosses learned management skills from their crazy bosses and that’s how, due to the Domino Effect, New York psychologists can demand $250 an hour. At least Martha had the sense to become a billionaire. Because everyone knows that once you’ve made that much money, nobody would have the balls to call you crazy.

I know I wouldn’t.

Note to my current boss: This column refers to past bosses only. You are not at all crazy. In fact, you are the nicest, most reasonable boss I have ever had, and I love your hair.

Bedtime, Doggie Style

I absolutely love and worship my bed. It is a beautiful queen-sized sleigh bed made of a golden wood and equipped with a mattress about seven feet high which requires a small step ladder to access their pillowed top, somewhat princess-and-the-pea-like. This suits me nicely.

But alas my relationship with my bed is fated for a sorrowful end, thanks to the dog.

My dog, Theo, is the best dog in the whole world. You probably think your dog is the best dog in the whole world, but you are wrong. A 15-pound lap dog, Theo has developed a strange medical condition that causes her to expand to about three times her size during the night, thus relegating my boyfriend and me to the very edge of the mattress where we cling for dear life because it’s a long way down to the floor. Theo has also cultivated a strange old-man habit of smacking her lips incessantly as if anticipating the imminent delivery of a juicy steak, or as if she has finally, after all these years of snacking on excrement, discovered that she has “icky mouth.” This combination of smacking and expanding has resulted in many sleepless nights, punctuated by expletives, for us humans.

We have tried several ways to solve this problem without buying a larger bed. First we built a little fortress of pillows all around the edge so Theo could not jump up. But Theo assumed this was unintentional, and would kindly call attention to our error by sitting at the foot of the bed and whimpering all night.

We tried shutting her out of the bedroom entirely, which resulted in tireless scratching interspersed with panicked barking that translates as, “You’ve accidentally locked me out of the bedroom! I CANNOT ADEQUATELY PROTECT YOU FROM OUT HERE! You could be getting robbed AT THIS VERY MINUTE and there is nobody in there to lick the thief to death! And more importantly – are those cookies I smell?!?”

Next, we disassembled the couch, her second favorite sleeping place, and put one of the cushions on the floor, covered with a blanket she particularly favors, to create a little nest of bedding that would have made Marie Antoinette jealous. We then pointed to it and cried exuberantly, “Ooooh! We wish WE had such a luxurious bed!” and even crawled into it ourselves, curling up into tight little knots, exclaiming and producing little moans of pleasure. Theo sat and stared at us unblinking, clearly thinking, “My humans have some pretty bizarre habits – like voluntarily getting into that cube filled with water every morning - but this is particularly weird, even for them.” She then hopped up on the bed to watch the show from a better vantage point.

For several nights we stuck rigidly to the idea of her separate bed. It became a game of chicken, between the dog and us, to see who would weaken and give in first. Since Theo sleeps roughly 16 hours a day, she was the most rested at bedtime, and therefore had the most endurance. Our evenings quickly established a pattern:

Us: Arrive in bedroom to find dog already established in precise middle of bed, despite having no measuring tools available. Exclaim to dog in extremely chipper voice that it is time to go to her bed – accompany with arm flapping and gesticulating to indicate exciting nature of this suggestion - at which point dog flattens and plasters herself to mattress, expanding to the mass of a sumo wrestler. Using an intricate pulley system and grunting, transfer dog to her bed. Administer enormous quantities of praise while tucking 400-thread-count blankets around her and carefully arranging twenty-seven of her favorite toys in semi-circle. Retreat from dog bed - genuflecting is not inappropriate – while maintaining constant stream of enthusiastic “good girls” at the octave of a 6-year-old.

Dog: Wait five seconds. Leap back onto bed. Assume Uncomprehending, Extremely Cute expression when humans indicate displeasure. Repeat process roughly 15 times until people give up and go to sleep in the approximately 3 inches of bed space you’ve generously allotted them.

So I guess it can be said we’ve all arrived at something resembling a solution, in that we humans, the breadwinners with triple-digit IQ’s and opposable thumbs, have given in completely to a four-legged animal with a brain the size of a hamster poop. In the meantime we are all saving up for a king size bed, although at the rate Theo is going, given her inability to hold down a job, she’s definitely not going to have her share ready any time soon.

Valentine's Day Messacre

Like the majority of the population, I spent the month of December cramming Christmas cookies down my gullet as if afraid a gang of pterodactyls would swoop down out of nowhere and snatch them away from me before I could get them safely in my mouth. So I am now faced, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, with the challenge of losing those extra five pounds so my boyfriend will find me sexy and alluring enough to buy me a refrigerator-sized box of chocolates - which will slap those five pounds right back where they were.

But like every other woman I don’t want to actually go on a diet. So I spend a lot of time seeking alternative methods of weight-loss that do not a) cost thousands of dollars or b) have side-effects resulting in a tiny layer of hair growing all over my body. But then what?

Exercise? Don’t be silly. For one thing, the gym is too crowded with all the New Year’s Resolutioners. Plus, if you’re like me, you make only a half-hearted attempt at a “work-out” involving a treadmill you wouldn’t touch any other time of the year with a toilet bowl plunger. You have to claw your way through the crowds and fight for the machine in order to proceed with your 30 minute walk at the pace of, approximately, 0.017 miles per hour, before treating yourself to a McFlurry on the way home as a reward for your efforts. So forget the gym, because that kind of weight-loss regimen will only make your pants tighter.

Those miracle weight-loss pills they advertise on TV seem like a great idea, but you know if you’ve tried them that the effect is not so much turning you into a svelte supermodel, as turning you into an overweight psychotic on speed. Although I would not recommend them for weight-loss, I would recommend them if you have an urgent need to paint your entire house in one evening, or if you feel your moods are just too darn smooth and predictable for your taste.

So this year I tried, albeit not on purpose, a new form of weight-loss guaranteed to work: the stomach flu. The stomach flu serves two unintentional purposes: one, it causes you to violently remove from your body everything you have ever eaten, or thought about eating, in an efficient twenty-four-hour period; and, two, it tests, just before Valentine’s Day when you really need to know, how much your boyfriend really does love you.

Forget a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover’s. Any guy can do that. But will he hold your hair while you puke with great gusto into a trash can, even getting a little on his socks, and then, instead of crying “OH MY GOD THAT’S GROSS!” and fleeing from the room with his hand over his mouth (which is what I would have done), reach over and tenderly wipe a string of vomit from your chin? I mean, that is love, my friends.

And who needs a dozen roses when you’re lying in a pool of fevered sweat and sobbing because you’re, frankly, just a big fat baby when it comes to being sick, and he pokes his head in and says, “Can the towels go in with the sheets?” Because he is actually, unprovoked and out of respect for your inability to move even your pinky finger, tackling tasks that heretofore he has always categorized as Needless Chores Women Make Up Just to Torture Themselves.

But the best thing, better than a fancy dinner or a piece of jewelry, is when you are finally able to crawl out of bed, just in time for Valentine’s Day, and hobble weakly straight to the scale to discover that the trauma of the past few days was not for nothing: you have lost five pounds. And you tremble your way back to the bedroom and cry with a watery smile, “I’ve lost five pounds!” and he looks at you, the memories of fever and chills and throwing up and passing out with your head half in the toilet still fresh in his mind and says, “You were already perfect.”

What better Valentine is there?

Happy Valentine’s Day, SC! And thanks for washing out the trash can. That had to be pretty disgusting.

© Karen Bertiger 2005. No changes may be made without permission from the author.

Of All the Things I've Lost, I Miss My Friends' Minds the Most

Author's Note: This column generated my very first hate mail. I was quite proud, because it told me that at least my columns generate some kind of intense feeling, even though I would have preferred awe, joy or delight over anger. Oh well. At least somebody read it. And to him (yes, him!) let me just say two things: 1) One must exaggerate one's point to make the story more interesting and, 2) these are just JOKES, people.

Of All the Things I've Lost, I Miss My Friends' Minds the Most

“No, no! In the POTTY or no jelly beans! NO jelly beans! Karen, I have to-” Click.

This is representative of how most of my conversations with my best friend, who has a two-and-a-half year-old, end. In this particular case, she is attempting to inspire her young son, who received his first pair of Big Boy underpants for Christmas, to use the toilet in exchange for jelly beans. This seems like a very reasonable bartering system to me. I tend to agree with a lot of Zach’s principles.

However, having a lot in common with a two-year-old is a pretty good indication that I am not ready to have children of my own. I am too selfish. I would hoard all the jelly beans for myself. After all, I manage to go peepee in the potty every time, so who deserves those jelly beans more? But you don’t just lose jelly beans when you decide to raise a child. You lose everything. Time, perspective and, most importantly, your mind. Which is why I have remained childless so far. I need to protect what is left of my sanity.

For starters, I can’t afford the time it would take to have a kid. I am too busy lying on the couch doing nothing. If I wasn’t able to do nothing anymore, I don’t know what I’d do. I need to not do anything so that I will have the reserve energy ready should I be called upon to do something. Children, I have observed, are not very tolerant of this approach to life. From what I understand they require enormous amounts of attention, and most of it centers around disgusting liquids that have dribbled out of their various orifices. Mopping up another person’s body goo is not high on my list of ways to spend my time, and I frankly can’t understand why other people freely elect to do so.

These people, who were previously very clean, very presentable adults, are brain-washed by their own infants into becoming total slobs. I watched a stream of snot ooze from Zach directly into his father’s mouth while being tossed around in the air – a game he seems very fond of despite the fact that it often results in projectile oatmeal vomit – and Zach’s father just laughed and wiped it away. This was jaw-droppingly disgusting to me and I would have thought Zach’s father would share my sentiment. Before he had kids, I am certain he would have. Now, he seems to find his son’s inability to keep body liquids where they belong utterly charming.

So here we have a formerly fully functioning individual reduced to ratty hair and sweat pants, who is covered in oatmeal barf and snacking on baby snot. In this case it’s understandable that the next loss involves most of the five senses. For example, a mother manages to remain completely unaware that her three-year-old is running up and down the aisles of the grocery store in a swerving pattern that manages to block grocery cart traffic in either direction, shrieking at a decibel that has car alarms going off within a five-mile radius. Meanwhile the mother, with a distracted, pleasant expression on her face, will be reading the ingredients on a cereal box and whistling softly to herself. Clearly the woman has lost the ability to hear, and her sight is also growing hazy. The only sense that seems completely undisturbed – in fact, is heightened – is the sense of smell. Despite the fact that she has been totally oblivious of her child wreaking havoc on dozens of innocent shoppers, she will detect, from across the store and in the middle of a conversation with the butcher, that her child has “done a poopy.”

This brings me to my final and most important point, which is that I do not want to lose my mind. That distracted “I’m not really here, I’m somewhere nice in my head” expression that you see so often on parents of young children is frighteningly similar to the blank, contented stare of a mental ward patient. I do not want to become a person whose every nerve is braced for a poopy diaper. I do not want to be found wandering the streets, confused, unable to find my own mailbox because I have not slept in four months. I want to be able to remember the names of my friends when they call. I want to be able to talk to them in full, comprehendible sentences.

So I don’t think kids are right for me, not right now. Although if someone were to offer me some jelly beans, I might reconsider my position.

© Karen Bertiger 2005. No changes may be made without permission from the author.