The Gay Divorcee Goes to Lowe’s

It was because of the rabbit.  

Our pet rabbit managed to escape into the back yard where it was so overgrown, she was able to hide from us for about 8 hours.  Using a stick to prod the underbrush in the far reaches of the yard in an unsuccessful attempt to flush her out, I was forced to face what I had successfully avoided since my divorce three years ago: yard work.

One of the benefits to living in the Pacific Northwest is all the gorgeous greenery.  One of the disadvantages is that, if left unchecked, the greenery can quickly overrun your home like that abandoned hospital on the leper island off the coast of New York City.

I’ve spent a number of minutes over the last three years gazing out at the tiered and complex landscape of my backyard, a yard which I would never have owned on my own, having a black thumb, but which my ex-husband insisted upon.  Now that yard is mine, along with my continued interest in not dealing with it.  But as I watch a third Spring unfold, it’s becoming more and more apparent that somebody has to.  And there are no other somebodies here except the one smirking at me in the mirror.

I started with the baby step of buying gardening gloves on Amazon which gave me a false sense of accomplishment for a few days, but I guiltily suspected there was more to this gardening business than online shopping.  I think gardening is a lot like learning to swim – you are afraid to try it, you put it off as long as you can, and you’re pretty sure you’ll die.  But eventually, you just have to jump into the deep end and figure it out.  Ultimately I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer.  I was going to have to go to Lowe’s.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve been to Lowe’s before.  I had to get a weird light bulb there once, and a couple times I had keys made.  I mean, I knew where the store was and all.  But I hadn’t ever ventured into the gardening section and had no idea there was a whole sub-culture going on there.

The Lowe’s parking lot on a sunny Saturday resembled a tailgate party.  There were people in the parking lot eating, socializing and walking their dogs.  A lot of dogs!  Did people come to Lowe’s and stay all day, just to meet other weirdos who over-obsessed about their yards?  It took me forever to park, and I almost ran over a dog too small to see and, boy, did the guy walking the little fucker give me the death look, like I was the one wrong for driving through a dog run!

I finally found a spot in Siberia and, armed with the knowledge of my gardening gloves – “Hey, I’m totally one of you guys!” – strutted confidently across the lot, grabbed a cart and, in my haste to get into the giant greenhouse structure on account of I saw something pink, accidentally went out the in door.  Panicked, I remembered my training in corporate America for successfully maneuvering through any hairy situation: I simply looked at the people blocking my way with a harried and irritated expression, leaving them to believe (I thought) that I knew what I was doing so much that the rules of in and out didn’t apply to me.

The first thing I came across was dirt.  Did I need dirt?  Lots of other people were buying dirt.  I knew I had approximately one billion trillion dead leaves to remove from my yard and once cleared it would probably be pretty bald and maybe I should get dirt.  But why would you put dirt on top of other dirt?  If you just, you know, dump dirt on top of the ground, doesn’t it just get washed away or tracked by squirrels into their squirrel homes where their squirrel mothers would yell, “I just washed that tree hole floor!” or wherever squirrels live?  I wasn’t sure, but I was fairly certain I needed dirt, based on Lowe’s clever marketing campaign of having a shit load of it right out front for easy grabbing.

What’s weird is that a) you have to pay for dirt and b) there are different kinds of dirt.  I didn’t know what kind of dirt I needed.  Should I get the most expensive dirt?  What differentiated the expensive dirt from the cheap dirt?  Did it come from a more privileged background (or just “ground,” as it were)?  Whatever, just pick some dirt.

Dirt is heavy.  See the gay divorcee casually lift a bag of dirt while trying not to appear as if she weren’t at all prepared for the weight and was planning to crumple to the ground all along because everyone knows this is the new safe way to lift things.  I heaved 3 bags of dirt into my basket, having zero clue as to whether that was how much I needed, but defaulting to whatever could fit in the cart.

Then I wandered down the rows and rows of flowers, eavesdropping on others’ educated and spirited discussions about their yard plans, spying on their carts so I would know what to buy without having to actually talk to anybody. 

An aside: doesn’t “perennial” sound like another word for asshole?  Maybe it’s just me.

Wandering around Lowe’s was a humbling experience.  I tried hard to fit in, but something gave me away.  I don’t know what.  Maybe my sequined shoes?  I kept waiting for that Pretty Woman moment where someone would come up to me and say, “We don’t have anything for you here.  Please leave.”

The cashier was very friendly to the couple in front of me who clearly knew their way around a backyard, but when I stepped up she looked at me like I came from that overgrown leper island.  Maybe I got pretentious dirt?

I got all the stuff loaded into the car, drove it home, carried it up my extremely steep driveway (my driveway is the subject of many of my friends’ jokes, and another blog subject entirely), deposited everything in the backyard, and contemplated dying instead of doing anything more because I already had sweat dripping off my nose.

It was at this point that something just went click.  Up until then, I had been cowering in my insecurities, trying to pretend I knew what I was doing when really not only did I not, but I didn’t want to.  But something happens to you when you’re out in public and sweat is dripping off your nose and you can’t even wipe it away because you are wearing those stupid gardening gloves covered in dirt: you stop really giving a shit.

So I embraced it.  I went for it.  I went Joan Crawford on that backyard (“TINA!  Bring me the ax!”) and cleared out years of debris, sweat pouring from all of my body parts now, and blood too, because another great thing about the Pacific Northwest is all the black berry stalks covered in small knives.  But I embraced that too.  I was fucking bleeding and sweating and I smelled like a man and I had the time of my life, even though I knew I would have to wash my bra afterwards, something I normally only do every six months, whether it needs it or not.  It was therapeutic, and endorphin-releasing, and filled me with a sense of accomplishment that physical activity rarely did.  I enjoyed myself.  When I finally cleared out the forest of weeds that had choked a flower bed I announced breathlessly to the tulips, “My name is Karen Bertiger!  I’m here to rescue you!” and then I laughed and laughed, by myself, covered in sweat and blood, high on my achievement of freeing those tulips.

Today my everything hurts.  I have cuts on my arms and legs and there are probably still twigs in my hair even after a shower.  But let me tell you, thanks to those gloves my hands are fucking soft and lily-white.

Back On the Horse In the Pool with the Fish

I'm freshly divorced.  That sounds so odd.  I'm divorced.  Divorced.  Even though my ex and I were together for twelve years and had two children, I still hadn't gotten completely used to the idea that I was married. Maybe by 2035 I'll be used to being divorced.  By which time maybe I'll be married again, so I'll have to get used to that.  Although frankly the idea of ever getting married again sounds about as appealing as going to a football game in the rain, which is to say, not at all.

However at some point, likely in the very near future, after the ink on the divorce decree has dried, I will want to seek out some form of companionship.  Ideally, this "companion" will fall out of the sky and land on my doorstep at a convenient time such as the hour in between the kids' bedtime and my own, or on one of my every-other-kid-free weekends, and he will be 6'3" and the Sean Connery kind of middle-aged, fully insured, with a healthy 401(k) and a desire to travel.  I'll give that approach a couple of years to see if it pans out and then will, very reluctantly, have to consider jumping back into the dating pool.

I don't want to.  I hated dating.  Even when my ex-husband and I were at the height of our misery together, when we'd fight in furious whispers before the girls were in bed and at full volume afterwards, when every little thing he did, like breathing, made me want to take my own life or his, I could still say to myself with smug satisfaction, "At least I don't have to date anymore."

You might think I'm being a bit overly dramatic, or that my attitude is a simple matter of deep-seeded insecurity.  Both are true, but also true are my battle scars from the first go-around.  Here I will share with you the only positive side-effect of dating, which are the stories you can use to entertain your paired friends.  Allow me to entertain you here with some stand-outs from 10 years of dating:

1) The spitting hunchback.

You think I am kidding?  Tall, scrawny guy who stooped aggressively when he sat and despite the lack of any mouth hardware had a tough time keeping his saliva to himself.  Why did I go out with him?  He was a writer for Comedy Central.  He was fucking hilarious.  But I kept having to scoot my chair back from the table to avoid the precipitation until I ended up on the other side of the restaurant.  At the end of the date he said sadly, "I had a really great time and would like to do it again, but I don't get many second dates so I understand if you don't call me."  Shocker.

2) The Matt Damon Lawyer, also known as 50 First Dates.

He was a lawyer.  Who looked like Matt Damon.  Happily ever after, right?  No.  There was absolutely no chemistry between us.  He was still hung up on a shiksa he'd fallen in love with, but his family wouldn't allow him to marry outside the Jewish faith.  I counted as suitable, even though I couldn't tell you what any of the Jewish holidays mean, and we both seemed like someone the other should fall in love with, so we kept going out.  But we never got past the stilted, awkward conversation of a first date.  We didn't go out 50 times, more like 7 or 8, before I grudgingly admitted that, because the fates have a sick, twisted sense of humor, I wasn't attracted to him and he wasn't attracted to me.

3) The Guy Who Couldn't Find Chocolate in February

Cute guy.  Can't remember what he did for a living.  Great idea for a first date - the Met - but when I met him on the steps of the museum he handed me a grocery bag.  In this grocery bag was a box of nondescript cookies.  I looked at him, puzzled, and he explained, "I wanted to get you chocolates but I couldn't find any."  It was the first week of February.  You couldn't make a move anywhere in the city without knocking over a Valentine's Day display.  So I had to assume either he had this box of cookies sitting around his apartment that he wanted to get rid of, or he was blind, or he was a complete fucking moron.  

4) The Simpson's Guy

He was a screenwriter.  Score!  Except screenwriters are jittery, socially phobic introverts.  At least, this one was.  If I remember correctly he had something to do with one of the Scream movies, but after most of us had moved on from the genre.  Maybe the third one.  Or was there a fourth?  In any case, this was the only thing he could talk about, not in a bragging way, but in a "I don't really have any other personality trait" kind of way.  We met at a bar, and over the bar was a television on which played a muted Simpsons cartoon.  He spent the entire evening watching the Simpsons over my head and occasionally throwing in some Simpsons trivia for my enjoyment.  I got the feeling the Simpsons were his security blanket, and maybe he'd tipped the bartender to put it on so he wouldn't have a panic attack during the date.

5) The Guy on Drugs

He called on a Tuesday night around 7 and asked if I was free.  I thought, why not? He was already seated at the bar when I got there, and seemed very nervous.  Like, the FBI are going to find me here any minute kind of nervous.  He was practically vibrating.  He kept drumming the table.  His knees bounced up and down so rapidly they were a blur.  When I asked if he was all right he replied, wild-eyed, "Oh man, I just did a LOT of drugs."

There are so many more.  And I know I was a story in some of their repertoires as well.  Like the time a blind date took me to the Four Seasons for a drink and I tried to sip my Diet Coke out of a glass stirrer because I was twenty four and had never been anywhere fancier than the Hot Wings for 10 cents place back home.  And the guy I met for a beer whom I apparently offended in some incredibly grievous way because he abruptly cut the date short and then wouldn't walk me home.  It was New York City, it was late, and a neighbor had recently been attacked by a serial rapist in her vestibule.  Even an asshole's company was preferable to walking home alone.  But apparently he thought this was a ruse to have sex with him, on account of he'd been so charming all evening, and resisted until I decided my mace was the only gentleman I could count on that night.  On his list, I was probably That Offensive Woman Who Tried to Get Me to Sleep with Her With a Bullshit Serial Rapist Story.

I don't think my self-esteem could take another round of this at my advanced age. Or rather, at my advanced age I no longer have the patience for another round.  But there are many fish in the sea and every pot has a lid and you have to get right back on that horse.  

But first I'm going to wait a little longer for Sean Connery to fall out of the sky.

Theo - December 31, 1995 - October 19, 2011

When I graduated from college I had 3 goals: get a job, get an apartment, and get a dog.

After securing the first two, my friend and I drove way out into the Tucson desert in response to an ad for Lhasa Apso puppies for sale. There were 3 puppies, only one of which was female. I asked the woman which was the female and, when I laid eyes on the little brown and black Ewok lookalike, I fell instantly in love. When the woman corrected herself and told me the one I held was male, I didn’t change my mind. He was mine.

My friend held the wriggly, furry mass in her lap as we pulled away from the house and retraced our path down the unpaved road. I’d only gone a few hundred yards when I suddenly slammed on the brakes, looked at my friend in panic, and said, “What am I doing? This is a HUGE responsibility! I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

My friend held up the puppy so I could see his cute little button nose and big, eager, friendly brown eyes and said, “You want to say no to this? Turn around; we’ll take him back.” Of course, I couldn’t.

I named him after Theodoric of York, for the perfectly logical reason that when I was a kid we had a Lhasa Apso who was named Roseanne Roseannadanna.

Theo and I lived in Tucson for about 6 months before I was transferred to Flagstaff, Arizona for my job. That was the first of many life hurdles Theo got me over. I didn’t know anybody there; it was just me, and Theo. I didn’t like it there much, but Theo had a fantastic time bounding through the snow which, I was pretty sure, reminded her of her native homeland of Tibet.

Did you know Tibetan monks used to give Lhasa Apsos as gifts to visiting foreign dignitaries? They believed when you died, your spirit went into the Lhasa Apso. Theo has a very strong heritage of nonsensical traditions, but it has never seemed to bother her much.

When Theo was a couple months old I took “him” to get neutered, which is when the vet informed me, with wide-eyed skepticism that anybody could be this blatantly stupid, that Theo was a girl. I thought she was a boy who peed funny. I never bothered to part all that hair between her legs and confirm when the woman told me she was a boy. I will never, ever, EVER live this down with my family. Ever.

When Theo was almost a year old I took her to the groomer for the first time who held up Theo’s entire pelt, so matted that it stayed together in one piece after it was shaved off, and said sternly, “NEVER do this to your dog again.” I never did. Man, was Theo pissed at me, though, for losing all her hair. She stayed under the bed for 3 days, embarrassed by her nakedness.

I didn’t make any friends in Flagstaff for the year I was there. I did date a guy for a while who was absolutely no good for me. Theo knew it. Once while the guy was over Theo shat on the bed – first and last time she ever did that. Theo has always had very strong opinions. She’s my kid, after all.

Theo loved chasing toys that squeaked, and she had a lot of them. The first one was a stuffed toy in the shape of a man. I named it Alfred, and Theo erroneously equated “Alfred” with “toy.” So Theo did not have toys, she had Alfreds.

After a year of misery in Flagstaff I decided it was time to take a leap. Make a huge change. Start really living my life and exploring the world. I decided to move from Arizona, where I’d spent the first 24 years of my life, to New York City – but I never would have had the courage to go through with it if I didn’t have Theo with me. She was my furry, walking, barking security blanket.

I set a world record for how fast I found an apartment in New York. It is seriously one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever faced. But I was driven by two things: one, I didn’t want to impose on my uncle’s family for any longer than necessary but, more importantly, I missed Theo, who had had to stay behind with my parents until I found a dog-friendly building. Not easy to do in NYC.

It took a while for Theo to become accustomed to the city. She never did like avenues. She was okay with streets, but as soon as we turned onto an avenue her tail would go down and she would skulk as fast as she could to the next street.

However, overall, Theo was the newest member of New York’s A List – or at least, the Upper East Side’s A List. While I remained fairly unknown on the block, everybody knew Theo, and would want to talk to her on her evening walk. I was forced to stop, hold her leash and try to look engaged and pleasant while the neighbors cooed over my dog. There was one guy, Mitch, who lived in the building next door and whose job was, apparently, to sit on his stoop 24 hours a day. Mitch was Theo’s favorite. Theo would bound up the steps to the top of the stoop, plop down next to Mitch, and the two of them would hold court with the rest of the neighborhood, laughing and joking and having a good time, while I stood at the base of the steps, ignored until Theo decided it was time to move on.

Theo and I toured the city together. She was my best and, for a long time, only friend. Theo turned her nose up with disdain at the dog park, but highly enjoyed all the places people went. She was offered a job at our local Barnes & Noble on 86^th but felt working was beneath her. She could balance on the subway like a pro. (She wasn’t technically allowed on the subway, but we felt this was a stupid rule. After all, Theo was better behaved and had more bladder control than most of the human passengers.)

Theo’s vacation destination was Uncle Clem’s in the Village. Uncle Clem had two young kids who dropped a lot of food on the floor. Whenever I asked Theo if she wanted to go to Uncle Clem’s her face – her entire BODY – would light up, and she’d start jumping in the air with glee. She didn’t even care that I had to stuff her in her travel bag in order to sneak her past the subway monitors or into a taxi.

When I started making a bit more money, Theo acquired staff in the form of a dog walker who was extremely reminiscent of the character who walked Murray on Mad About You. He was polite towards me, but he and Theo really got each other.

I had two long-term relationships in New York. The first was just awful. I mean, a true waste of time. You know how well-adjusted people say they never regret any of their relationships, because each of them taught them something? Well, I regret this guy. Theo wasn’t too keen on him either, I could tell, but she knew I was lonely so she put up with him. She was really good about it, but I could tell she really didn’t care when I finally wised up and kicked the guy out of our lives.

The other relationship was much more positive although, ultimately, not meant to be. Theo LOVED him because he was a really, really good cook. She loved him even though he had a Cat from Hell who hissed and attacked both Theo and me whenever we came over. Theo never lost her optimistic assumption that EVERYone wanted to be her friend. Every time we visited she’d try again to win the cat over, and get a scratch on the nose for her efforts. She and I both mourned when that relationship ended.

Then I went and fell in love with some guy who wound up in Alabama. So Theo and I packed up our apartment and flew South. It was one of those tiny planes with two seats on one side and one seat on the other and because it was so small, Theo’s regulation travel bag didn’t really fit under the seat. So I just shoved her in there, and she had to lie curled up in a tight ball, and panted with anxiety the entire flight. By the time we landed we were both a bundle of raw nerves.

Theo loved Alabama. She had grass and trees and now two people to take care of. She had a whole house to chase Alfreds in. We bought a little carriage meant for kids that I could pull with my bike so Theo could come with us on long bike rides. She’d sit in that thing and just watch the country go by and sometimes, when we ran into other people on the trail, she’d emit a sudden volley of piercing barks that would scare the SHIT out of the other bikers, who assumed there was a human child in there, and send me into convulsions of laughter.

Then we all got married and decided to move to Seattle. This would be the fourth state both Theo and I had lived in. We drove across the country with Theo wedged in the back among all the possessions we didn’t trust the movers to haul for us. Theo loved road trips. When it was just the two of us, I had her trained not to jump into my lap until the car was in park and I’d pulled the brake. As soon as I did that, she’d leap into my lap.

In Seattle, at the age of 12, Theo finally got her own yard. She didn’t know what to do at first. It felt unnatural to her that someone wasn’t standing over her with a plastic bag when she was ready to take a dump. But she caught on really fast.

Then, the dark days arrived, in the form of a very tiny, very loud, very smelly creature that seemed kind of human, but mostly not, and gave Theo tremendous anxiety because she didn’t know how to interact with it. She eventually settled on indifference laced with irritation. Things weren’t the same after that.

Theo started to develop a lot of health problems. One that was particularly notable was the ruptured anal gland – what I affectionately called her second asshole – that required our head-coning and diapering her for a couple days. This resulted in the world’s greatest picture ever taken of a dog.

Theo was my best friend for almost 16 years. Her health and interest in life have deteriorated significantly in the last couple of years, and sometimes it’s hard to remember the younger, vibrant Theo who had the agility of a mountain goat on our hikes, and, as an 8 week old puppy, licked my face when I cried in the car after running into my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend at a coffee shop. I was an aimless 22-year-old when I met Theo, and for all intents and purposes, really still a child. Theo raised me in my adulthood. With her by my side I tackled New York, I got married, I had a child and I found a career. And now I’m all grown up. Maybe it was time for Theo’s soul to depart; maybe, if I can indulge my own fantasy, she’s gone on to help another lonely, struggling young woman.

Goodbye, Chickabee. And thank you.

"Terrible" Is An Understatement

When I was around nine or ten years old I discovered my female hamster, Daisy, eating one of her babies. She was crouched over the slashed-open belly of one of her young, chowing down with both front paws.

I will remember that moment for as long as I live. It was one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen, including my husband's toilet when he was still a bachelor. It has literally haunted me. I already lacked any fondness for Daisy, and had in fact put her in solitary confinement (with her young, whom she was supposed to be CARING for) because the father hamster, whose sex was unknown at first and was thus named Tootsie, had been terrorized by that bitch for months. Every night she'd chase him around the cage and he'd finally scamper up the side and wedge himself against the hamster wheel and dangle there all night to escape her. She'd march around the bottom of the cage, eating the tastier pickings out of the food bowl, waggling her fat ass pompously while Tootsie hung there for 9 hours. Sometimes Tootsie's balls would swell up to the size of two Clementines, and they'd hang halfway down the side of the cage, where she could reach them. One day she took a chomp and that was it. With my allowance I got Tootsie his own digs, a small but safe and comfortable bachelor pad.

Given all this, given the fact that Daisy was the female hamster equivalent of Stalin, you can understand the severity of my situation when I tell you that this weekend, I actually feel a tiny bit of empathy for Daisy. After spending the last 48 hours with my toddler whose head I expect, at any moment, to start spinning 360 degrees while emitting a torrent of pea soup, I can kind of understand why Daisy went a little bat-shit crazy.

And she had 6 of the little fuckers to deal with. SIX.

I don't know what happened to my sweet little girl. Every once in awhile, my husband or I will lift our weary head and offer a hypothesis - "Ear infection?"- before collapsing again in misery, or wiping her streaming nose, or coughing up a lung, or fetching more water or another snack or a suddenly fervently missed and required toy. But there is no point in guessing, because it really doesn't matter what the problem is. Knowing the problem would, for some reason, make my husband feel better, because he's one of those people who has an urgent need to know WHY, but knowing why she is being the world's biggest pain in the ass isn't going to make her any more charming. And chances are the only "why" is because she's two.

The littlest thing will set her off. It's like living with Anna Wintour. We scamper around like minions, terrified that if we don't have the milk and snack waiting the MOMENT she steps from her royal bath all hell will break loose. Because it will. And very often all hell breaks loose anyway, despite our fervent commitment. The oddest, most unpredictable things will set her off. Like, I put on a sweater because I was a little chilled and the next thing I knew my three foot daughter was making a sound akin to an air raid siren. "NOOOOOOOO Mommy NO SWEATER!"

Once she's off, there's no rhyme or reason to what will stop her. It's a lot of trial and error. Sure, the immediate reaction is to take the sweater off but really that's locking the barn door after the horse has escaped. She's off and running, tears plopping, snot dripping, hair popping out of her cute pony tails like a mini Medusa. My husband and I scamper around with humble offerings of toys, books, snacks, an empty water bottle, because that worked once, three weeks ago. Eventually, just before a vein pops in my neck, I'll hit randomly on the magic solution. "Do you want to draw with chalk outside?"

And like a light switch she'll suddenly beam angelically through the snot and tears, throw her hands up, and cry with unbridled delight, "CHALK TIIIIIIIME!"

And you can see behind the malicious glimmer in her eye an expression that says, "It was so simple. What took you cretins so long to figure this out?"

I'm not big on cannibalism, so no need to call CPS (or "CPA" as my husband mistakenly referred to them when, in response to the latest freak-out, I sobbed, "Alcohol tiiiiime!" which my two year old latched on to and repeated, alternating with "I want alcohol!" until I was able to distract her). Nor would I ever harm my child - certainly I would never do to her what she is doing to me, namely, psychological torture. However I am starting to wonder if boarding schools take them this young.

If all else fails, I'll move in with Tootsie.

Hellooo Blogger, Well Helloooo Blogger....

Welcome to my new blog! I decided to fire my web maintenance guy (oh, wait, I didn't have one) and discontinue the old site in the interest of simplicity and coding ignorance, and also it was really broken. So now I have a brand-new site to not write on!

I haven't written much the last few years. I'd like to blame it on having a baby but that would be a) a lie and b) kind of shitty. Instead it's really c) I don't have many brain cells left after a day of work and mothering to make up funny word string usages. It really hit me how much I've let the blog slip when I started copying over the archives to this new site. It didn't take long before I had gone back to 2007. Like, 5 minutes. That's just sad.

Oh, wait - I thought of another excuse why I'm not blogging! I'm working on my novel! Well, not exactly working, as in putting words on a page, but sometimes, in my head, I hear dialogue that I'm pretty sure is part of a blockbuster struggling to come out, or perhaps a psychological disorder that maybe I shouldn't be mentioning here.

My fans, both of you (Hi Mom, Hi Dan) are probably wondering how I've been! I'll skim over the assumption that my mother would know this regardless of an up-to-date blog and tell you I've been just fine! So now we're all caught up.

So! On to some blogging... give me a minute... I'm thinking... let me get back to you on this.

Why I Wish I Was More Like My Toddler

You may be saying to yourself, "Karen, if you want to act more like a 2 year old, I'm going to have to re-evaluate the true value your friendship brings to my life." Which is totally fair. I am not saying that behaving like a 2 year old would be pleasant to those around me, but it would be incredibly nice for me.

First of all, I wouldn't care that I had a tummy that sticks out like a basketball. For one thing, by the morning it will be gone (reminiscent of the famous Churchill quote). For another, the tummy would be so cute it would actually add to my appeal.

I would be able to throw tantrums whenever I felt like it, regardless of how unreasonable the trigger was. Cafeteria is out of wheat bagels? I would burst into tears, run to the wall, fling my head against it and wail wholeheartedly for about 90 seconds and then turn around, smiling, tears still on my face, and go about my business.

I really wouldn't give a rat's ass what you thought about me, my appearance or my interests. I would be able to set aside any difficulties of the day to pay full, 150% attention to a Disney cartoon and get MORE delight out of it every time, no matter how many times I watched it.

I wouldn't eat my vegetables. You couldn't make me and, what's more, the fact that it was The Right Thing To Do and Good For Me wouldn't factor into my decision at all. I just wouldn't do it. And if you tried to make me, I would bawl like you were tearing my fingernails out with rusty tweezers until the MOMENT you stopped bothering me about broccoli, at which point I will instantaneously be happy again because I got what I wanted. I wouldn't just be halfway happy because I was harboring a little grudge, or because I still had that whole potty-training thing hanging over my head or a doctor's visit the next day. I'm completely unaware of those things until the moment they are happening to me, anyway. It would be like a switch: broccoli = unhappy, no broccoli = happy.

A bit of chocolate would solve pretty much any problem.

I could spend a good portion of my afternoon napping. The longer I napped, the happier the people around me would be.

I would never look in the mirror and make judgments. What I saw there would utterly fascinate me, and yet I'd really have no opinion about my reflection one way or another. If I discovered a booger hanging out of my nose, well, that would just make it all the more interesting. It wouldn't occur to me to wonder or care how long it had been there.

I would get a SHIT TON of presents at Christmas.

I wouldn't care if you took a picture of me naked. In fact, I'd look so freaking cute naked, even if I understood society expected me to be shy about my body I still wouldn't care.

If my boss asked me to take on a project that was unappealing or too menial I would stomp all the way back to my office, back rounded, arms swinging loosely, head flung back and whining at high volume, "But I don't WANT TO!" over and over until I lost interest in expressing myself.

...and the number one reason I wish I could be more like my toddler is:

I could announce proudly to everyone within earshot my simplest accomplishments, such as, "I made a poop!" and be met with applause.

The Inaccessible Toilet

In the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, my 2 year old surreptitiously left the room, went around the corner where she thought she was alone but where she was in fact in full view of everybody, squatted, and took a dump. Luckily she's still in diapers, or this story would have been completely different. My brother said, "That's so funny how she goes around the corner to do her business."

Actually, the online articles say, this is a sign that she is ready to be toilet trained. It's not the first sign she's shown, either. Others include announcing the need before she actually goes, giving me plenty of time to get her installed on a potty. We've had an Elmo potty for about 3 months now, but I've yet to break it out, despite the Signs.

Why, you ask? (Because I'm sure you're dying to know the details of my potty training theory) It's purely projection on my part but, frankly, if I had the ability to go whenever and wherever I needed or wanted to, I would be loathe to give up that freedom. The moment we potty train, we are slaves to the location of every bathroom on the planet. I am one of those people who has fairly high toilet standards, which makes it even worse. Not only do I need to make sure I remain close to a bathroom at all times, but it has to be a bathroom I consider worthy of my waste and delicate parts.

I pay a lot of attention to toilets, and I remember where the good ones are. The ones in Macy's on Fourth Avenue are lovely. Each stall has its own counter space, kind of a half-bath, and nice wooden full-length doors. The toilets at the Bellevue Mall are really nice too, very spacious, also with full-length doors. I was incredibly impressed by the toilets in the Chicago airport, which automatically apply a new seat liner for you by waving your hand before a sensor. I greatly admire any bathroom in which I do not have to touch anything. Auto flush, auto faucet, auto soap dispenser, auto seat cover installer all earn big points in my toilet book. If they could install doors that automatically open and close that would be awesome.

On the opposite end of the spectrum (is there a butt joke in there?) are toilets that embody my own personal hell. A hole in the ground with tread marks indicating where to place your feet as you squat over it - this is not acceptable. And common in Europe. Which means that when I travel there, I don't drink much. A stall with no doors is equally appalling. I won't do it. Going to the bathroom in front of someone is a recurring nightmare of mine.

Speaking of nightmares, that's another thing I don't want to subject my daughter to by potty training her. The Inaccessible Toilet Dream. Now I understand from some vague and spotty research I've done (i.e., mentioning to friends in passing conversation that I have them, and getting the "wow, you're even crazier than I thought" look) that this is not a nightmare that plagues everyone but it does plague my mother. So clearly, like a fear of bumpy things, it runs in the family on one of those DNA strands or something.

The Inaccessible Toilet Dream is one in which, for hours or weeks in dreamland-time, you search in vain for a toilet that is acceptable enough to pee in. The toilets you find, however, are either the ones that you'll find in real-life in Europe or the Middle East, or are two stories tall and you don't have a ladder, or someone sealed the opening over so that if you sat and did your business it would run all over you, or is set on a pedestal in the middle of Yankee Stadium so that in order to relieve yourself you will have to do so in front of thousands of people.

Now, the Inaccessible Toilet Dream actually serves a practical purpose, which is to prevent you from peeing in the bed. However, it would be a little more practical for my clever subconscious to just WAKE ME UP so I could use the bathroom and resume more pleasant dreams.

If I wore diapers, I'd just go. No wet bed, the brilliant science of modern diapers would wick away the moisture from my bottom, my dreams would remain untroubled, and I'd sleep happily on.

What kind of sadistic mother would take that away from her child?!

Also, I'm just too lazy to potty train her. Maybe her roommate in college can fill her in.

Another Saturday Night

My husband and I don't have much of a social life anymore. We expected that; we'd been well-informed that having a baby would do this. And while we don't love it, most of the time we don't mind. We've always been home-bodies for the most part anyway. But we do have our limits, and they were severely tested this weekend.

We had just sat down to our usual special Saturday dinner treat: pizza that costs its weight in gold. With a baby in bed by 7pm we don't have the opportunity to dine out very often and thus not much of a way to distinguish Saturday nights from every other night other than pizza delivery. But this Saturday night was to prove extra special in oh so many ways.

It started right after I'd taken my first bite of gold pizza. The dog had been making a nuisance of herself all day by licking her private crotchal area. This is something she has always done with some frequency, so other than getting incredibly irritated - really, the sound of that can catipult me into a bad mood faster than you can say "that pint was supposed to serve four" - I mostly ignored her. But Tom, who apparently pays a little more attention to detail when it comes to the dog's private crotchal area ministrations, noticed something different this time: namely that she really, really would not stop.

Now, if it were still just me and the dog, like in the old days, I probably would have spent another 24 hours or so yelling at her every time she went crotch-diving before it occurred to me something might actually be wrong. Tom on the other hand leapt to attention and grabbed a flashlight in a resourceful and Boy Scout-like manner. I sighed heavily. I generally don't like my meals interrupted, especially to shine a flashlight up my dog's ass, but I couldn't let him do this alone so I joined him on the floor and held the dog still while Tom did the honors.

Oh. My. God. What was going on with my dog Down There made giving birth look pretty. There was oozing. There were several non-solid substances providing varying levels of olfactory insult. It was the Battle of Normandy, if the soldiers had been covered in fecal matter the consistency of tar.

The sight knocked me completely senseless. I held the dog and felt dread sweep through my body. "What do we do?" I whispered in utter horror as Tom clicked the flashlight off with a grim expression.

We gathered Theo up in an old towel and Tom carried her through the rain to the car and to the emergency veterinary clinic where they diagnosed what every couple longs to hear on a Saturday night: "impacted anal gland." "Yeah," they elaborated completely unnecessarily, "those get pretty nasty pretty quick." In fact, they wouldn't even let Tom stay in the room while they treated Theo, for his own protection. While I was upset at the thought of Theo going through this without us there, I recognized that had Tom remained, he may never have had a good night's sleep again.

Theo arrived back home around 11pm, thoroughly drugged and accompanied by a dozen different medications and instructions. And, for the first time in her 14 years... yes. The dreaded Cone Collar of Shame.

I couldn't do it. I looked at my poor dear friend, drugged out of her mind, miserable, scared and shaking and simply could not force this further indignity upon her. She was so drugged, I reasoned with my skeptical husband, that she wouldn't be inclined to lick anything anyway. Let's just leave her be and let her sleep.

Of course I was awakened a couple hours later by that insanely irritating sound of ferocious crotchal area ministrations. With a sigh, I wrapped the Cone Collar of Shame around my miserable little dog and went back to sleep as soon as I was assured she had drifted off.

I was awakened again an hour later. She had managed to crane her neck far enough around the cone to continue her mission. With a cry of frustration and fatigue I pulled Tom out of bed who thought for a long while (he really likes problem-solving, and is fairly good at it, so long as you're patient). "Maybe we should diaper her," he said.

And here I couldn't bear to put a cone collar on her! But it's amazing what you'll agree to do to your best friend when your best friend's ass is leaking something indescribably heinous on your bedroom rug.

So we diapered the dog. How handy we happen to have an 11 month old baby who is, apparently, roughly the same size around.

Diapered and coned, we all fell back to sleep for a few minutes before the baby awoke at her usual Oh My God It's Early hour. I got the baby, and Tom carried the drugged dog upstairs to get her settled on the couch for the day. As soon as I brought the baby upstairs and she saw the dog - I swear this is true - she started laughing. Even our 11 month old daughter knew the dog looked utterly ridiculous.

The indignities were not over. For any of us. The day found us juggling a very curious and mobile baby with the diapering and cleansing of our dog's extra ass hole. I won't go into any more detail on that. Just suffice it to say that I feel like I need a shower along the lines of the one they gave Karen Silkwood. And I may never eat pizza again.

But one thing's for sure: I will never again complain about a boring Saturday night.

He had a charming way that appealed to all the kids...

"Do you like kids?"

What a dumb-ass question. That's like asking "Do you like grown-ups?" Well, some, sure. Most? Not really. Besides, when a person asks that question what they want to know is either, "Do you intend to procreate?" or "Are you comfortable with kids?"

One of the great side-effects of having children is that you don't get asked this question anymore. Which is really silly, because it indicates that people assume that, because you have one or more of your own, you like all of them. In my case, that's a completely false assumption. I still like kids like I like grown-ups - that is to say, not very many of them - and I am still extraordinarily uncomfortable around them, because they are weird.

My daughter is, of course, an exception - that is, she's just as weird as the rest of them, but she doesn't make me uncomfortable because I've been around her enough to understand her alien behaviors. It's like with dogs. If you don't know the species, you may misunderstand the baring of the teeth as a friendly overture when, in fact, you're about to lose a finger. Toddlers are extremely similar, but if you spend enough time around one of them, you can at least identify the warning signs and know when to flee.

So I'm slightly more comfortable with children who are exactly my daughter's age, or up to six months younger (beyond six months ago, I don't remember so well). If they are a day or more older than she, they make me uncomfortable with their unfathomable ways. This makes daycare pick-up pretty tricky, because there are lots of those buggers crawling around.

Usually I take a few seconds to untangle my kid from the fray and then high-tail it for the car. But yesterday this little blond-haired demon child, ala Children of the Corn, cornered me, literally, and started, like, interacting, while I looked around for an escape that wouldn't be too obvious. I didn't want to hurt the kid's feelings, after all, because everybody knows that children possess a telekinetic ability to sense whether a person is good or evil, and as much as children creep me out, I still don't want them to think I'm evil. Luckily most of them give me the benefit of the doubt, with a wise, sage-like twinkle in their eye that indicates they are both slightly amused by my discomfiture, and at the same time graciously forgiving and understanding of it; thus I am generally dismissed not as evil, but as just one of your everyday imbeciles.

But this kid was freaky, and I suspected that rather than benevolently letting me off with a sympathetic nod of dismissal, he would pulverize me by shooting red lasers from his eyeballs if I didn't watch my step.

"My dad's name is Larry," he told me, shifting slightly left and right to keep me from escaping, so I felt like a lamb about to be slaughtered. His blue gaze was steely and unwavering.

"Oh?" I said, because this is my typical response when a child tries to communicate with me. Meanwhile, I was clutching my two-year-old daughter while she gazed down, undisturbed, at the boy-creature. Clearly she, sharing some sort of wavelength with him, understood she was in no danger.

"My mom's name is Mary, and my dad is going to pick me up AFTER dinner today."

"Oh?" I said again, because that's the kind of creative person I am under pressure.

The boy did not let up. "He'll be here at 6:00 and not later."

Was this a threat? Would something happen to me if Larry did not show up by 6:00? Will I be trapped in this corner until then and, if the father failed to appear at the promised time, would I be annihilated? Should I attempt now to toss my daughter to safety, bravely and selflessly sacrificing my own welfare?

"Oh?" I said, because the response hadn't, technically, failed me yet - I was still alive. "Er, and what's your name?" I asked, in a burst of inspiration.

"George and Harry and John," he replied.

This was the most disturbing thing he'd said so far. I didn't doubt he was three people - perhaps he'd eaten the other two? - but felt keenly that my response to this utterly bizarre statement would decide my fate. "That's a lot of names," I said, because it was.

For some reason this seemed to throw him. I could see little sparks going off in his silvery blue eyes, as if his brain were undergoing a severe malfunction. Perhaps he was a robot. In any case, it afforded me that split-second I needed to escape his steely gaze and hurl myself and my daughter out the back door.

God, I hope he isn't there again today. I'd better be prepared, just in case. How does one fend off these things? Garlic? Jelly beans? And today they're all dressed for Halloween - not that that one needs a costume to scare the shit out of me. What if I don't recognize him in time?

If you don't see me on Facebook by this time tomorrow, send help.

Our Wooden Anniversary

My husband and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary last weekend. I'm really excited about hitting this milestone because, in my mind, once you hit five years you officially don't have to return the wedding gifts if you end up getting divorced. Five years definitely gave your friends and family their money's worth. Also, five years is longer than I've ever committed to anything before, except for my rent-controlled apartment in New York, where I lived for six. But really if you are lucky enough to find a rent-controlled apartment in New York it isn't a matter of choice to stay or leave - not like with marriage.

So in honor of this grand occasion, my husband and I turned our noses up at the traditional five-year gift of wood and instead treated ourselves to an Evening Out.

Such a thing would not have been any big deal a few years ago. Certainly not worthy of a five year wedding anniversary. No, a few years ago such a momentous occasion would have been celebrated with a trip somewhere exotic in whose description appeared the words "swim-up bar." But we have a toddler now, so leaving the house after dark is about as special as it gets, and our options were limited to whatever we could find in our own city. So we opted to go with a dinner show that was the kind of thing you would only do on an occasion like this, on account of it cost more than a mid-size luxury sedan.

No, not really. And, no, I would not have knowingly spent that kind of money on a single evening. The ticket cost seemed extravagant, yet reasonably so for a special occasion. But then you get there and they say if you want a knife and fork with which to eat your steak, that will be extra. If you want bread it's extra, and there was a $10 per person "serving" fee which, it was explained carefully to us by our waitress, was not actually a tip, she didn't see a penny of that, no sireee, and she's not just bringing you your food, she's actually DANCING it over to you, which adds a nice dollop of whipped-cream guilt to your guilt pie.

Then there's the babysitter (turns out they don't work for 50 cents an hour like I used to) and parking and drinks and when all is said and done, maybe not a mid-size sedan but definitely one of those smaller ones that's a bit cramped in the back but no big deal if the kids are still small, they'd fit just fine.

But worse than the cost was the evening itself, which turned out to be one of those "audience participation" deals. This large and obnoxious woman would come out periodically throughout the evening, instigating simultaneous pangs of nervous nausea and excited anticipation. The first because her act consisted of pulling some poor sap from the audience and making a joke out of him for 30 minutes; the second because this was always followed by the next course. So the evening went: fun act, obnoxious woman, food; fun act, obnoxious woman, food. For five courses. I became like a Pavlovian dog, except instead of a bell it was an obnoxious woman and instead of salivating I'd get anxiety and a stomach ache.

I am terrified of being in the spotlight. The only time I find being in the spotlight acceptable is if it involves my getting a lot of gifts. Baby shower, wedding, birthday - that's fine. I can endure because I get stuff for my trouble. But if I am the one forking over my daughter's college fund in order to be fed and entertained, I expect someone ELSE to do the entertaining, not me. So I spent the majority of the evening on the verge of throwing up for fear the obnoxious woman would pick on me. I channeled my energy into throwing daggers at her with my eyes, sending silent bat signals of "Don't you DARE even LOOK at me, obnoxious woman! If you do I will barf on your ginormous sequined bosom and SUE you and THEN you'll be sorry" to the extent that I was utterly miserable, didn't enjoy much of the show and wasn't able to stomach any of the food. On the bright side I wasn't able to drink much which was good because drinks were the most extra of all the extras.

All in all the thing I liked most about the entire evening was the gift shop where pretty much every item consisted of sequins or rhinestones glued to various things you wore on your face or head, which was right up my alley. Nothing made of wood though, which would have been the only justification for parting with even more money.

Silly Tom couldn't understand why I was sputtering with indignation as we left. First of all, he doesn't mind that audience participation thing. He thinks it's FUN. Seriously! So he had no anxiety about the possibility of being plucked from the safe and comfortable darkness into the spotlight and was able to relax and enjoy himself. Also, he didn't know how much the tickets cost because I had made all the arrangements. When I bitched about the high price of our evening he conceded it was a "bit high" but not unreasonable for a special occasion until I clarified that the check he'd just signed was for the EXTRAS and didn't include the larger cost of the actual tickets.

I guess a nice anniversary gift would have been to keep that bit of information to myself, rather than ruin his night, too. But then, it wasn't made of wood anyway.

P.S. for those of you anticipating a joke involving giving/getting some wood on my anniversary, don't think I didn't IMMEDIATELY go there in my head. I just thought it was a little too obvious to actually write.

Y-M-C-Zzzzzz

So I was talking to a friend the other day who asked why I hadn't been writing much lately. Was it because I was too busy now that I'm a full-time working mom? Well, no. I mean, yes, I am very busy, in the way that I used to wonder was just an excuse when my friends who became parents claimed they could never, ever find the time to reply to my emails anymore. Can anybody be THAT busy? Yes.

But no, if I really thought I had something interesting to say I could make time to say it. In fact, several times I have thought, "That might make a good blog," but every single time it broke my no "cute things my kid did" rule. As I mentioned before, I do not want to become one of those people who bores everyone around them until they look around one day and realize they have no friends left because they have all hung or stabbed themselves, ala Ted's seatmates from Airplane!

Anyway in response to this, my friend said, "There are lots of parents out there who might actually be interested in what you have to say about parenting."

Well that was an interesting thought. There ARE a lot of parents out there. My parents are parents, for example. And so are theirs. That's... uh... six people already who might read these blogs? And God knows my friends are all procreating like slutty little rabbits lately. Instead of our own hard-partying-induced vomit on our clothes, it's now our offspring's. My favorite hang-out has become IHOP because they are open 24 hours, not for the reason I USED to love IHOP, which was also because they were open 24 hours, but the OTHER 24 hours, the ones where it was dark because it was 4am and I hadn't been to bed yet, not because it was 6am and I was up already. And also I love pancakes.

Wait, what was I talking about? Right, my parent friends who might get the IHOP bit. But by focusing on these sorts of issues in my life (not that pancakes are an issue, per se, no matter what time of day, because any time is a good time for pancakes) will I alienate those who do not have kids, or are still kids themselves?

Yeah, probably. But, I reason, my old blogs probably alienated my parent friends, so it's really their turn anyway.

However, if you don't have kids, I appeal to you in this manner: continue reading this blog, so it may serve as a warning to you. Heed! Having kids FUCKS YOU UP, and I will tell it like it is. So I will keep my non-parenting fans, whoever you might be (because I know my mom, the only die-hard fan I'm aware of, isn't a member of this group) by making you feel incredibly superior, not to mention fortunate, for your childlessness.

For example, a couple weeks ago we had a rare opportunity to go out sans toddler to a friend's wedding. Weddings are generally not something most people look forward to, what with the dressing up and requisite YMCA rendition, but I was totally stoked because a) I'd be out of the house past dark and b) there would be booze. I got gussied up and practiced talking in my grown-up voice and was all set to get down with my bad self, but of course I had two glasses of wine and started to fall asleep on my plate. It was 8pm. No, seriously. 8pm. We had to say our goodbyes quickly lest it become necessary for Tom to carry me over his shoulder to the car. My friend said the next day, "It was so cute how you got tired in the middle of dinner."

No, it was not cute. I miss the days of partying till dawn (stop laughing - I really did used to party till dawn. I DID). But now I have a schedule run by a three-foot dictator who is not, despite genetic predispositions, a late sleeper. When they say that you love your child so much you forget what it was like before? So much that, when you're leaving a wedding at 8pm just as the DJ turns on the strobe light and kicks it up a notch for the young folk who stay to party while the older generation shuffles out complaining about gassy bloating, you consider yourself one of the lucky ones? Don't buy that for a minute.

But hey, there's no wait at IHOP at 6am!

This one time, my daughter...

I haven't written in a long time. This isn't because I haven't had anything interesting to say. In my opinion I've had TONS of fantastic stories to tell you. However I've been in self-imposed exile because I swore I wouldn't become one of those parents who can't talk about ANYthing except the latest adorable thing their offspring did. And frankly there is nothing in my life remotely as interesting as the consistency and regularity of my daughter's bowel movements. I am just barely cognizant enough to understand you may not agree with this.

So, to amend my earlier statement, I could have written TONS of stories you would have found interesting - unless you happen to not be me.

I've managed to extrapolate, however, a few random thoughts that, while mostly still linked in some way to my daughter, are not actual "this one time, my daughter, she did the most ADORABLE thing," stories so I don't think they count. However if you're not a parent or me, I warn you the following column (and probably all subsequent columns for the next 16 years or so) may not be of particular interest.

"B-E-D-T-I-M-E!"

Every night at 8pm, my father would call these letters out with undisguised glee. As a kid, I was completely baffled by this. I recognized the emotion - joy akin to what I felt the night before we were going to Disneyland - but I absolutely could not marry it to the reality of "bedtime," which was, in a kid's mind, the WORST word in the world. "Bedtime" is ritualistically followed by begging, pleading, resorting to simple tricks of bathroom and drink requests, ANYthing to prolong the inevitable necessity of lying flat in our beds with no books, no TV, no stimulus and the order to fall asleep.

How could anyone be so happy about the most miserable part of the day (assuming no doctor visits)? I just didn't get it.

But now? Oh, do I get it.

Every morning brings with it the joy of seeing my daughter again after a long night of separation. As the day wears on, the joy wears off, in equal relation to the crankiness that grows as bedtime approaches. By the end of the day the entire family is worn down to a nub, and my husband and I watch the clock's slow countdown to our daughter's bedtime with a desperate eye. At a quarter to eight we turn to our daughter and announce, "Bedtime!" with very little ability (or attempts) to cover up our eagerness to get her into bed. I don't spell it out, but I am known to sing, "It's the most won-der-ful tiiiime of the daaaaaay," as I carry her to bed.

When she's older I'll probably just hum it.

VIVA LAS VEGAS - SERIOUSLY

I have never been a huge fan of Las Vegas. I thought it was titillating when I was 21 and went with my boyfriend and another couple during college. We were so poor it was pronounced "poh." We shared a hotel room that cost about $45 a night, and when they tried to charge us $55 we staged a massive retaliation campaign consisting of us all whispering angrily in the lobby and then shoving forward the largest and most well-spoken of us to argue the bill. I think what impressed us most about the entire weekend was the free drinks on the casino floor, and they were shitty drinks at a shitty casino.

When I was in my early 30's and married and childless Vegas held even less appeal. Having finally paid off all my debt, I had developed a medically-confirmed allergy to gambling, and I generally preferred to get drunk somewhere a little less seizure-inducing. I much prefer a vacation that introduces me to new cultures, new ways of looking at the world, potentially the opportunity to get mud in my underwear. My feeling is that I have a very limited number of vacations in my lifetime, and certainly a limited budget to spend on them. I want to make sure I experience as much of the world as possible given those two limitations. So Vegas, a place I've already been and didn't really "get," was pretty much off the list.

But then my best friend Katy, for reasons I cannot mention in this column because she still reads it occasionally and owns a gun, managed to secure a free room, dinner and show in Las Vegas for Fourth of July weekend. For this sort of bargain I might consider vacationing in one of the states whose name begins with a K. Probably not, but maybe. Plus, it was my turn for a baby-free vacation. Tom got one when I went to New York for a week, and another when he went to a business conference in California, which I still totally think counts because most geek-related conferences have beer running from the water fountains. If you're drunk, it's not work.

I boarded the plane to Vegas with a feeling of "Oh, well, if nothing else I'll get some extra sleep." Yeah, who goes to Vegas hoping for sleep? Me. But on this trip, my eyes were opened wide to the benefits of Las Vegas. Because this was the first time I was experiencing it since becoming a parent.

When you have kids you have an extremely limited amount of time to cut loose, and even when you do cut loose, you are still half-listening for a 2-foot-person's unrelenting attempts to commit suicide. You cannot let your guard down for a second, even when they are sleeping or at someone else's house. You are always responsible, always alert, and always guilty if you so much as have half a glass of wine, definitely if you accidentally polish off the whole bottle which seems to happen fairly often these days.

In Vegas, time has no meaning, drinks are free-flowing, nobody knows you and everybody is there to have a good time. It is the absolute best way to cram as many sins into a finite amount of time. It is, really, the most efficient vacation one can take, and when it comes to a full-time working mother, efficiency is not THE word, it is the ONLY word. I crammed a year and a half of irresponsibility (stopping short of anything illegal... mostly) into 3 days. It was wonderful. It was liberating. It was just a little bit nauseating but not nearly as bad as being pregnant.

Fuck culture. I'm going back to Vegas, baby.

SuperSenses!

I have a Super Power. It's not anything fancy, nothing that will save the world from Alien destruction or help us achieve our quest for World Peace, but it definitely has its advantages. Keeping it a secret is unnecessary so I will tell you: I have a really super keen sense of smell.

My step-dad used to say if someone farted in Mexico I would complain about it. This is a bit of an embellishment but it illustrates how much envy (irritation?) my super sense has garnered over the years. And luckily my sense of smell has not diminished as I have aged since it comes in handy multiple times a day. Take today for example. I microwaved some popcorn at work. As everybody knows, microwaving popcorn is a real delicate operation. Three seconds too long and a huge section of the middle is burnt. But stop it 2 seconds too soon and half the bag is unpopped kernels. Okay so maybe this isn't a big deal to SOME people but it is to me. Luckily, my nose will tell me the precise moment a single kernel starts to blacken and I can hurl myself at the stop button and come away with a perfectly popped snack. I mean, that's pretty handy, don't you think?

I can also walk into the house and know from the front door if the baby has a dirty diaper. Tom will have spent the entire afternoon with her completely unaware and within a nanosecond I'm yelling "baby pooped!" Or "Something in the fridge is rotten!" or "Our neighbor didn't shower today." Okay not that last one.

If you lived with me you'd probably start to find this a bit annoying. But believe me, sometimes this super sense can be a real curse. Like when Tom eats this God-awful turkey chili from a can, which smells like a bowl of salted barf, I can't be in the same room with him or stand to kiss him for, like, a week. And I can't walk by the Starbucks storefront downtown that, for some reason, the entire homeless population likes to use as their outdoor urinal because the stench literally assaults me. I have to go all the way to the next Starbucks, around the corner.

Also, to make absolutely sure I don't get a big head about my sniffer, fate has bestowed upon me atrocious eyesight. That way things are evened out. Luckily I was born in the latter half of the previous century in which contact lenses were invented. (Can I just point out how creepy it is to say I was born in the previous century?) If I had been born a couple hundred years ago my parents would have had to leave me out on a hillside to get eaten by wolves, because I wouldn't have been able to FIND the field that needed to be tended, let alone tend it. Actually, no, by the time they discovered how bad my eyesight was I would have wandered under the wheels of a carriage and saved them the trouble. Even the first half of the twentieth century wouldn't have been any good. Sure, I would have had a better chance of basic survival but it wouldn't have been much of a life, since I would have been that chick sitting in a corner with glasses the thickness of a phone book, my eyes magnified twenty times, making me look perpetually half-witted. Certainly nobody would have been inclined to procreate with me, not even on a bet.

Speaking of which, all of this leads me to wonder what I have or have not bestowed upon my 13 month old daughter. Evidence thus far would seem to indicate she has no sense of smell, since she is perfectly content to cart around a load of odoriferous nastiness for however long it takes one of us grownups to notice it and do something about it. Which, for now, is definitely on the "blessing" side of things because with both of us constantly bitching about the stench Tom would go out of his mind. But hopefully as she grows older her sense of smell will improve, because burnt popcorn can ruin your whole day.

Guilty

I feel awful that I haven't written anything in so long. I know all my fans (both of you - hi, mom) have been really disappointed in me. When I tried to log on this morning I actually had forgotten my username for this site, which has never happened before. I feel horribly guilty for neglecting my writing.

In fact, I feel horribly guilty in general. Everybody warns you that having a child means feeling guilty pretty much all the time. If you're at home you feel guilty that you aren't at work, and if you are at work you feel guilty that you aren't home with your child. The once a month you go out without your child you feel guilty for dashing out the door, whooping with glee.

You feel guilty for forgetting her hat when it's 30 degrees outside.

You feel guilty for skipping the park one day because you know one of the mothers you can't stand will be there.

You feel guilty for letting her nails get so long she shreds the furniture like a cat, and for having bought a house with wood floors so that she gets bruises on her little shins from crawling around on them.

And you definitely feel guilty about stuffing her with food to the point that she covers everything within a ten foot radius with projectile vomit.

Those few devoted readers I have will recall my extreme fear when it comes to vomiting. And while I don't really concern myself with other people's vomit, the smell is another story, because that can make me wretch. (Aside: what was Chef Boyardee thinking, making spaghettios smell EXACTLY like puke? Am I missing something here?)

However this is where I found guilt to actually come in handy: I was so busy feeling incredibly horribly guilty about force-feeding my child that I was able to get through the whole ordeal without one thought of adding my dinner to hers on the dining room floor.

"You FORCE FED YOUR CHILD?" I hear you asking, your mouth twisted in disgust and abhorrence. As well it should be; your mouth is absolutely right. But let me explain.

Lately, my beautiful adorable brilliant wonderful baby girl, aged 13 months, has decided to make every bedtime and every mealtime into an ordeal. She doesn't want to eat, she doesn't want to go to sleep. She has reduced us to performing any number of trained-seal-like tricks to get her to do one or the other. When it comes to eating, we are forced to perform "Staying Alive" ad nauseam (ha. literally). My daughter LOVES this song. She sings the "ah, ah, ah, ah," part. And when she opens her mouth to join in the chorus, we take the opportunity to shove a spoonful of food into her yaw.

The trick of feeding her leads directly to the trick of getting her to sleep - and stay asleep - which, in turn, leads to ME getting sleep, which is heinously selfish of me to even think about and I feel very guilty about that. But if she doesn't eat enough then she'll wake up a couple hours later - after having spent an hour or two trying to get her to sleep in the first place - because she's hungry. And then she'll figure as long as she's up we may as well read a book or twelve. And next thing you know, the night has gone by and she has slept maybe a total of 7 hours which is about 4 short of what she needs, thus leading to an excruciatingly long and cranky day during which she is too pissy to eat anything, thus contributing to the cycle.

So we've made it our mission to stuff her as full as we possibly can.

In our defense, this has been going on for a couple weeks now, and we didn't really get it when she started to cry and squirm in her highchair that she really MEANT it this time, she didn't want to eat. We kept bellowing Staying Alive and she kept opening her mouth and we kept shoveling it in. And then all of a sudden our gorgeous little girl spewed a torrent of orange and green vomit that would rival the output of the Colorado River should the Hoover Dam ever crack. Except way smellier.

I was horrified. This was the first time she'd ever really vomited. This was not sweet-smelling and gently dribbling spit-up. This was a torrential downpour of foulness and it was EVERYwhere. It was all over her and me and the high chair and puddling on the floor. I had to reach into those puddles in order to scoop up my sopping daughter. But I didn't cringe because of the vomit, even though I could see out of my peripheral vision that there was some in my hair, likely a bit of carrot if one was to judge by the color. I cringed because I felt AWFUL. I still feel awful. My eyes fill at the thought of my abusive awfulness to my innocent daughter who has no way to protest other than crying, and I didn't listen, and I shoved her so full she literally burst. It was that awfulness that dominated every fiber of my being as I hugged her tight and hurried to get her undressed and comfortable.

The thing is, as soon as I got her out of the chair and cleaned up and into the tub, she was happy as a clam. She sang and babbled to herself as usual, totally fine and happy, while I sat on the edge of the tub and pulled out chunks of my own hair as a form of self flagellation.

It's true, she's fine. She's over it and has moved on. Chances are good she won't need therapy as a result of this but me? I'm going to need intensive therapy probably for the rest of my life.

I feel really guilty about that.

Cover your mouth when you do that. In fact, cover everything.

Today I discovered that, like a miracle, overnight, new sensor-flush toilets were installed in my office building. I am REALLY excited about this.

I've never been a major germaphobe. I am generally of the opinion that while you shouldn't go around licking other people's keyboards, nor should you get all Howard Hughes about avoiding germs.

But with all this H1N1 craziness, only some of which I am not convinced is a government conspiracy - although why the government wants us to get the flu is not altogether clear just yet - I can't help but become a lot more diligent. After all, I have a baby at home, a baby who is in the High Risk category. I don't care if I get sick, but I cannot let her be exposed to this. So that's why not having to touch the toilet to flush it is so important to me. That and because I've never liked having to touch anything in a public restroom. A restroom with an automated door, automated stall lock, automated ass-wiper, automated flushing toilet, automated stall unlock, automated water faucet, automatic soap dispenser and automated paper towel dispenser would completely bliss me out.

Anyway my point is, I don't want to touch anything right now, because I haven't been able to get my baby vaccinated, and not touching things is the only other thing I know to do to keep her safe. Why hasn't she been vaccinated? Well, because like everybody else except people who work for big important banks whose status has, unaccountably, warranted more doses of the vaccine than hospitals, I can't find the stuff anywhere. Not that I've decided she should definitely get the vaccine, because the waters are further muddied by the controversy surrounding additives found in the H1N1 that are not in the more generally-accepted regular old flu vaccine that we all know and love. Apparently the vaccine could either completely paralyze you, or give you autism or, if you're lucky, prevent you from dying. If you listen to the dissenters, it's kind of a crap shoot which outcome you'll get. Who do you trust?

I could live with my daughter having autism; I could not live with her being dead. So I guess if someday, likely after this thing has completely run its course, someone offers me the vaccine for her I'll take it. But so far the closest we've gotten is our doctor's nurse telling us they finally received five - just five - baby vaccines and would we like one? We said yes, but then she recanted, because apparently there is a Higher High Risk category to which our daughter does not belong. I felt simultaneously as if I'd dodged a bullet and signed my daughter's death warrant.

There's a possibility that after both my fans (hi Mom) read this, you will be driven for perhaps the first time to comment on my blog because this is such a heated issue. But I beg you: please don't. If I read anymore opinions, or even, dare I say it, facts, about this situation my head will implode. Which is arguably worse than autism, but would at least negate my need for an H1N1 vaccine.