Garment Of Danger.
Topic: Rants
A trench coat is a rather ominous garment. Think about it. When someone gets up in the morning and puts on a trench coat, usually they're about to either expose themselves in public or shoot up a school.

The boys are watching that old Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen video again. The girls are wearing trench coats throughout much of the film. It freaks me out either way.

Blind Items.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Evil Things
Item! WHICH popular, nationally known blog appears mysteriously to have jumped the shark of late? I can't put my finger on exactly when it happened, but suddenly I just don't find it readable anymore. I hope it comes back from whatever strange place it's got to. I don't know where that is. I only know that I don't have fun going there. Note to people who may be friends of mine: It's not you. It's someone else. Just making sure you realize.

Item! WHICH popular, nationally known hosting website, whose EZ Blog Builder Lite offers highly peculiar and apparently arbitrary "mood" icons to idiots who don't know enough code to create their own, doesn't know how to spell mischievous? That's M-I-S-C-H-I-E-V-O-U-S, boys. The letter i appears twice. Not three times. Do y'all have spell check, or what? I'm just asking.

Do Not Adjust Your Television Set.
Topic: Miscellany
No, you are not hallucinating. Well. Maybe you are, but don't decide yea or nay by looking at this blog. If you believe it has changed color, you are correct. Now check and see if your walls are breathing. If so, you are hallucinating. Either that or it's time to raise holy hell with your home warranty people.

My friend Anna Beth complained a while back that my red and black color scheme had made her go blind. (To which I responded Nah, that was from masturbation.) I do like the red and black for some reason. It evokes, oh I don't know, the Georgia Bulldogs or London double-decker buses.

But I don't want AB to go blind, and now it's starting to happen to me too. (No, I haven't been. Shut up.) So I give you: Earth tones. If you're still seeing red and black, refresh your browser, clear your cookies and temporary files, and if that doesn't work, you are hallucinating after all.

Can I Borrow That Stick? You Know, The One That's UP YOUR ASS.
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Rants
You want to know how to tell everything you need to know about a girl? Look at her face in repose, when she's off her guard. Check out her natural facial expression when she is neither interacting with someone nor conscious of being watched, and that's when you'll see the real story of what goes on inside. A girl can and will turn on the smile and the charm, but sneak a look at her when she doesn't know you're looking. That's when you can see who she is.

Today I came home from work early, toward noon, and along the way ended up stopping off at the neighborhood health food supermarket to pick up something nutritious for lunch. You know, on account of the fetus. The place was pretty crowded, which surprised me; it isn't often I rub elbows with the housewife crowd, what with the career thing and all. Must be more than two years now, since maternity leave with Matt. And I couldn't believe my eyes.

With very few exceptions, these broads were the biggest bunch of sourpusses I ever saw in my life. Most of them didn't just look neutral or expressionless -- they looked actively pissed off. I couldn't divine any reason or excuse for it. It wasn't like I was in a Newport Beachy section of Newport Beach, or like they were some incredibly beautiful MAW types (MAW = So Cal shorthand for model, actress, whatever) and therefore had some excuse, however ill-founded, to come off snooty and repulsed by the denizens of Mother's Market. They just looked like regular housewives, except that none of them had any kids in evidence -- and they wore these horribly disgusted, pissed-off looks on their faces, like someone had given them a Dirty Sanchez on the sneak and they constantly smelled shit as a result.

For the life of me I can't fathom it. LADIES: WHAT HAVE Y'ALL GOT TO BE SO PISSED OFF ABOUT? LOOKS TO ME LIKE YOU DON'T GO TO WORK, BUT SINCE YOU ARE OUT SHOPPING, PRESUMABLY YOU ARE DOING IT WITH MONEY SOMEONE ELSE IS EARNING AND WILLING TO SHARE WITH YOU. IT'S A BEAUTIFUL WARM DAY, THERE IS INTERESTING MUSIC, THERE ARE COOL THINGS TO EAT, AND YOU'RE NOT IN SOME HIGH-RISE BUILDING DEALING WITH A BUNCH OF LITIGIOUS ASSHOLES. WHAT THE HELL IS SO BAD ABOUT THAT?

Most of them are terribly rude, too. (Don't you ladies watch Martha Stewart, when she's not actually incarcerated, I mean? Doesn't Oprah occasionally have Emily Post or Miss Manners or whoever?) They don't respond to niceties like Excuse me or Have a good one or Could I just squeeze through real quick? Not a nod, not a faint smile. Not even a Fuck you to death, which would at least be interesting. Just the stony stare. What is up with these chicks?

Here I was walking around happily pregnant, humming and having to smile from time to time at a thought or a song on the radio or a friendly dog walking by. Didn't people used to smile at pregnant women? Not any more. They don't treat us with any common courtesy anymore, either. Always with the sour puss firmly in place, these broads will instead shove past me or bump me with their shopping carts if I move too slowly or if my big belly is blocking the soy cheese. What's that about? A Newport Beach thing, a housewife thing, or just a matter of some women being basically miserable people?

You have to feel for their husbands. You know they will never make these girls happy; people who walk around looking so grim and disgusted with the world in general will never be happy, even if you hand them all the spa weekends and black SUVs and tennis bracelets on earth. Even during sex -- maybe especially then -- chicks like that will still wear that wrinkled-nosed What's that smell? face. In fact, today I may have witnessed the beginnings of one of those blessed unions right there in the store. I was taking down some kimchee when a well-dressed couple walked by, and I heard the guy ask his date Do you like kimchee? And she, in a tone dripping with ice and revulsion, replied Neau. I deaun't. As Ben would say, Danger, Will Robinson! If she sounds that pissed off and disgusted in the early dating, imagine how she'll sound after two years of marriage. Poor guy. I shuddered and moved on to the next aisle, but his nightmare is just beginning.

One of the first lessons Ben and I are going to teach our sons, when they get old enough to tangle in any meaningful way with the fairer sex, is how to spot a basically happy girl and how to avoid a basically miserable one. A happy girl, since it comes from within, won't depend on you to make her smile, although she will laugh with you whenever possible. A miserable one will always be miserable no matter what you do, and will eventually drag you down there with her, given enough time. Sam and Matt: I'll teach you to tell the difference, and the girl who tries to make one of you miserable? I'll teach her the real meaning of misery.

Really No Excuse.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Evil Things
There is a three-person team of local talk radio personalities, Frosty, Heidi and Frank, who end each show with a list of apologies to anyone they may have offended during the day's broadcast. In that spirit, today I would like to apologize to Catholics, pot smokers, adolescent girls, crickets, and the sour divorcee next door.

* * *

A 12-year-old boy gets hit by a car while riding his bike. The paramedics arrive at the scene and see that his injuries could be life-threatening. Concerned, one of the paramedics leans down and whispers Kid, do you want a priest?

The kid looks up and whispers back, How can you think of sex at a time like this? (Thanks to Mark L.)

* * *

A father takes his 11-year-old daughter to the doctor for a sore throat. While you're at it, doc, he says, why don't you throw in some birth control pills? The doctor, shocked, asks, Do you mean to tell me an 11-year-old girl is sexually active?

Nah, says the father. She just lays there, like her mother.

* * *

See? I told you. Appalling. But I'll bet you tell at least one of them to someone today.

The Trouble With Being Parents These Days.
Topic: Rants
My 20-year-old daughter smokes pot in her bedroom. I don't have a problem with her smoking pot. To me, it's preferable to her getting drunk; stoned people don't usually wreck their cars or get into fights or especially wind up pregnant. You know, they mostly want to eat ice cream and listen to music. So that's not the problem.

The problem is that there is an absolutely strict rule against anything whatsoever being smoked in our home. We live very close to some nice sheltered outdoor locations, such as my friends and I would have used in a heartbeat, as teenagers, as places to get stoned. An unused church parking lot surrounded by trees and shrubs directly across the street, or if you want a prettier, more spacious setting, you can walk across a larger road to the Upper Newport Bay Ecological Reserve.

Erika knows the rule, and we've told her Look, go ahead and get high if you want, but do it off our property. It seems a reasonable request. The yards here are small, and we don't want her smoking out the neighbors. Not that nice retired couple on the east side, not that sour divorcee on the west. My husband is, after all, an officer of the court, and we don't want obviously illegal goings-on about our property. When she moves out in less than a month, her bedroom is going to be revamped for the boys to move into, and we would prefer not to have to spend six months painting and airing the place out.

That's the problem with parents these days: We know what the hell is going on, and it's much harder to get stuff by us. I remember when I was a teenager; if you had the least bit of finesse, you could get away with it. They'd sometimes get suspicious, but they really didn't know what pot smelled like or what was going on. My parents were from the Rat Pack era and were well acquainted in their day with martinis and highballs, but as for anything beyond that, they just had no concept.

By contrast, Erika can't get away with jack point shit, because I can take one look or whiff and know exactly what she's up to. We've been having a real ongoing battle about her smoking pot in her room. The bit that cheeses me off is that she adamantly denies that she does it, and even gets angry with me for accusing her so unjustly. This when I knock on her bedroom door, she takes a full five minutes to open it, and when she does a cloud of pot smoke rolls out and practically sets off the smoke alarms.

Last night she disappeared into her room after the family went to dinner and shopping, and when she came downstairs a little later, she made a beeline for the kitchen and the pint of Cherry Garcia in the freeezer. When she walked past me, it was like sticking my nose into a baggie full of roaches. "Goddamnit, I told you not to smoke pot up there," I said. And once again she angrily denied that she had been smoking pot, and got quite self-righteously furious about being so accused, and ended up marching out of the house. (She just got her first car back in January. If you're going to get angry and dramatically stomp out of the house, transportation is a real plus.)

So, that's the thanks we get for being hip, understanding parents -- she smokes pot in our house, leaves her gigantic bong sitting around her room in open sight, and then denies that she's smoking pot. At least we had the decency to smoke pot sneakily, behind our parents' backs.

When she moves out and I walk into her empty bedroom, I'm probably going to cry. Maybe because my first-born is leaving the nest. Maybe from the pot smoke.

Confession.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Evil Things
I am not ordinarily a cruel person, unless Michael Jackson is involved, but I must confess I sort of enjoy feeding the tarantulas, whose diet consists of live crickets.

I don't bear the crickets any ill will, but there is a guilty kind of fun in dropping them into the cage and watching the realization dawn: Holy shit, there's a FUCKING TARANTULA in here!

Shit. Now I feel terrible. I must do penance. That's ten Bloody Marys and ten how's your fathers. *

* I totally stole that. It's the title of Elvis Costello's 1980 UK compilation release of non-album cuts and B sides. Credit where credit is due, and all.

Here Be Skeletons.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Evil Things
Not long before bedtime last evening, the family unit was watching Daddy Day Care. The boys love that movie, except (1) don't let your kids watch it before bed, because it's worse than caffeine, and (2) find a way to bleep out the word "butthead" unless you want to hear it in nonstop stereo for the next three days.

The soundtrack includes ABC (1970) by the Jackson Five (actually, I believe the official band name was The Jackson 5ive). "Hear that?" I said to Sam. "The guy singing that song is Michael Jackson, back when he was pretty much a kid, back before he turned into a skeleton."

"Wow, it is?" Sam said. He was impressed. I am evil.

Not With So Much Cussing.
Topic: Miscellany
If you're sick to death of long-winded rants, offensive topical humor, and cuss words, and especially if you miss Dave Barry's humor column -- did you know he blogs? (Well, mostly he links and collects comments, but at least he's still present, presumably with a doob or a cocktail in his hand. I mean, what is retirement for?)

Dave Barry's Blog

The Miami Herald still keeps him pretty tightly under wraps -- he will always talk about boogers and doo-doo, but that's about as crude as he gets. (I'm a little disappointed; I sort of hoped that, like Bob Saget after Full House was cancelled, he'd start working blue.) Still, the guy is very funny and an inspiration to me. His field experiments involving the interplay between Rollerblade Barbie and fire, and strawberry Pop-Tarts and fire, are legend.

He is also in a band. I'm not sure if they suck or not -- you would think they would, but you never know -- and that's cool too. Bastard, he's living this girl's dream, except with less cussing.

Serenading My Quoniam.
Mood:  flirty
If you must fuck up your life so that you spend your leisure time working your ass off, for God's sake do it alongside your best friend. Last night I was out in the yard bagging up terrarium substrate, and Ben, who was working around the kitchen, slid the window open so he could keep me company.

"Shall I sing Porgy and Bess to you?" he asked.

"Why?" I asked, a bit taken aback.

"Why not?"

Why not indeed. The guy slays me. There is nothing under the sun that can surprise me -- actually, that is not accurate; a lot of the goings-on in the world shock the shit out of me -- but no one has ever offered to sing Porgy and Bess to me before. He even offered to put on blackface. (I'm SORRY! Please, not with the hate mail! That opera was written in 1934. People used to DO that!) I demurred on the blackface, being pressed for time, and then surer than shit, my beloved husband proceeded to sing me an overture from Porgy and Bess.

I came inside as he sang the closing bars and we started talking about the Wife of Bath. Of course, The Canterbury Tales is well known for the dirty parts, but that's not why I'm rereading it; Ben and I quote the dirty parts to each other often enough that I don't need another reading. But the Wife of Bath is a piece of work -- conniving broad, and she usually got away with it, but some of those guys really had her number, and they told her just what a treacherous bitch she was. I like her because she's forthright and unafraid to admit she loves to fuck, even though she is also an aging, scheming, golddigging twat.

Can I say that word? I don't like most words for the female apparatus; I don't like the C word. The Wife of Bath (let's call her Alison, for that is her name) referred to hers as her quoniam or her belle chose. The latter means beautiful thing, which I find charming. I can't find the etymology of quoniam right off and don't have time to research it well, but Ben and I assume it was later shortened to quim, which is also a charming word. It's cute and friendly, as all good quoniams (quonia?) should be.

We're definitely going to use those. Doesn't effing quoniam sound better than fucking c___? Better, and incomprehensible. Ben and I have a sort of secret language, a verbal shorthand we use for talking about strangers in their presence, and the next time some female is behaving toward us in a particularly insufferable manner, I will just turn to him and say conversationally, "Quoniam." Unless Middle English as a second language suddenly catches on, we're golden.

Footnote: Speaking of talking about people within their earshot, we hit upon a stroke of pure brilliance over the weekend in the form of Matt's Magna Doodle, which is sort of a cross between a "magic slate" and an Etch-A-Sketch. In short, you write things and make them instantly disappear. We spent a giggly lunchtime at an Italian restaurant passing Magna Doodle notes to each other about the diners at adjoining tables. If you don't feel like learning Middle English, we highly recommend it.

Good As They Need To Be.
Topic: Rants
This morning on the Howard Stern Show, they played a "best of" segment featuring a 1997 phone call from a woman who believed Robert Redford and Robert Urich were plotting to kill her. The girl wasn't kidding; she had clearly gone on a shopping spree at Delusions "R" Us. Howard and Robin drew her out on the topic, and the woman explained the conspiracy at length for a good 45 minutes.

(Note: If you're planning to e-mail and lecture me about the plight of the mentally ill and my staggering lack of tact, let's take it as read, okay? You're right. I am an appallingly tactless, callous person. News flash: Life is funny, even the tragic bits. Maybe especially the tragic bits. Political correctness may be many things, but funny is not one of them. Thank you.)

Anyway, Howard got her husband on the phone and asked him (surprise!) if the sex was any good. To no one's surprise, the guy replied that yes, it was. It's well known that for a guy, the thing about being involved with a crazy broad is that it's the best sex he'll ever have in his life. Los Angeles talk radio personality Tom Leykis has mentioned this fact many times on the air. My husband, who has had more than his share of wack jobs (two stalkers that I know of, one of whom used to call him repeatedly, back when we were first dating, while I was lying in his bed in the mornings, and also a genuine diagnosed schizophrenic), says it's completely true. Although he is a true gentleman and thus does not mention names or details.

I wonder why this is. Perhaps it's the product of a wild imagination and a lack of inhibitions or any grasp on reality. Maybe it's schizophrenia's way, since the disorder is heredity, of assuring its own perpetuation. Possibly it's just that crazy girls need love too. I can't tell you if the same holds true for nutty men; I've known an odd duck or two in my time, but no one certifiable. So I don't know. If you're female and have slept with a truly wacky man, drop me a line and let me know how it was.

Spider Mom.
Topic: Miscellany
The simple truth is that Ben and I really fucked up somewhere along the line. I've just sat down for the first time in nearly two hours. Since sitting down to write, I've jumped up once to throw the laundry in the dryer, again to comfort crabby Sam and persuade him to try the nap thing, and a third time to find Matt's misplaced toy. And that's just in the space of two sentences. Somehow, I told Ben, we've managed to arrange our lives so that we work a hell of a lot harder during our leisure time than we do in our careers. We really fucked up at some point. And he had to agree.




To give you an example of my insanity and gluttony for punishment, I'm the self-appointed keeper of two tarantulas and a leopard gecko. Like I didn't have enough to do? I'll save the gecko for later, because I am too tired to set up the photograph I have in mind, but the tarantulas are a Costa Rican Zebra named Beast Boy and a classic Mexican Red-Knee called Arachne. That's Beastie on the left and Arachne on the right. I got them both as spiderlings last October; each of them, including legs, was about the size of a dime at the time. As you see, that has changed. It seems I have a sort of green thumb for tarantulas.

You would think that spiders would just hang around like bugs, but I've spent time observing them, and they do have distinct habits and temperaments, just as Sam and Matt do. Beastie is rather solitary and wary, but sweet in a standoffish way. Arachne is more forthcoming, full of piss and vinegar. I haven't yet learned how to sex tarantulas (Don't say it. Just don't say it), but I figure her for a girl because she has pretty legs and is charming but a bitch.

Despite having been on my feet all day (much of the time carrying a napping two-year-old), due to their prodigious growth I spent the late afternoon moving the spiders into bigger terraria. They seem quite happy in their new homes. I would be happy too if I could get a bigger house for $20, especially if someone else was buying. Meanwhile, I am shaking my head at my own insanity; I am not only deranged enough to keep tarantulas in the first place, I am also bughouse (ha!) enough to take on the extra responsibility of additional living things to whom I did not give birth and for whom I absolutely do not have time. Who the hell appointed me keeper of the life force? Apparently it's a compulsion. As with the kids, I enjoy looking at them and thinking Isn't that a fine specimen of a living thing? I helped that life along, there. A born masochist, I mean mother.

As a footnote, I would like to point out that spider shit is very similar to bird shit; I'd be hard pressed to tell the two apart in controlled conditions, although presumably if you were dealing with spiderlings and eagles, as opposed to bird-eating spiders and sparrows, the size of the dump might be a useful clue. What all this means I have no idea. Perhaps a zoologist could enlighten me. But I don't think even they spend as much time thinking about shit, and dealing with shit, as I do.

My Husband, The Prick: Coda.
Mood:  irritated
Topic: The Tao of Ben
My husband read all about the fact that he is a prick, and the statement that his IQ was measured at 154. "Actually, that's not right," he told me.

"Oh? What is it then?"

"What they told us was that my IQ was at least 155," he said.

Prick. If they awarded IQ points for assholery, it'd be 387, you prick.

Grapefruit Juice As Public Relations Device.
Mood:  mischievious
Many mornings, I get up before my family and squeeze fresh juice for my husband by hand. I know; I am so not that type. But really it only takes a few minutes, Ben enjoys it, and it sounds so good on paper. It was mentioned in passing yesterday, and I could tell my mother-in-law was thinking Well, she may be this tremendous bitch who dares to have opinions I didn't give her permission to have, but at least she squeezes fresh juice for my son.

The juice recipe is very simple: For approximately eight ounces, squeeze first one Coachella Valley grapefruit, then one tangelo, then another grapefruit. The tangelo cuts the acidity of the grapefruit and adds a sweet note, plus my husband has an inexplicable affection for tangelos. Just be sure to cover the juice before you refrigerate it, lest it end up with a garlic hummus top note.

Meanwhile, Matt, who rose early with me, is hypnotized by one of Erika's old Mary Kate & Ashley videos from the early '90s. So funny to watch. Batten down the hatches, girls: There are a whole lot of nightclubs in your future, a whole lot of not eating, and a whole lot of photo shoots with pouts on your faces and your arms around each other.

Reading List.
Tonight, after dropping my mother-in-law off at the train station, we went book shopping at Borders. Which was a welcome relief, because my mother-in-law routinely tests my patience to the limit, especially when she brings with her, and insists upon discussing with us, a stack of articles she has carefully cut out of periodicals because our very lives, and those of our children, depend upon us reading these articles and taking to heart every bit of information and advice they contain.

At times like this I long for a mother-in-law like Joan Plowright in I Love You To Death or Brenda Fricker in So I Married An Axe Murderer, raptly perusing the National Enquirer and Weekly World News for enlightening information ("Look at this. Space alien marries two-headed Elvis clone.") -- but no, Ben's mother isn't that entertaining.

"Here is this article that talks about how you should always wash your hands," she tells us. "Everyone up where I live [faraway, exotic Ventura County] is talking about it. It's VERY important," she tells us. And meanwhile Ben and I are thinking Shit, and here all these years we've been sticking our fingers up our asses and then making sandwiches for the boys. Who knew? I mean, I ask you. Sometimes, after a day of this, I'm sorry I don't drink anymore and haven't smoked pot in years.

Following an afternoon of being educated by Mom, the idea of something pleasurable to read is enticing indeed. I had a very specific book in mind, namely a copy of The Canterbury Tales which included both the original Middle English and a modern translation, but without the migraine-inducing alternating line format. (Got that?) While poor Ben grappled with the boys, I checked out both the Literature section and the Poetry section, but came up empty-handed. What the fuck? I thought. (Our local Borders is about the same square footage as our house.)

I approached the Customer Service desk and came face-to-face with a tall, pale, pimply girl who looked like she hated George Bush and loved to recycle. She asked if she could help me. "Chaucer?" I said.

She stared at me as though I were speaking Middle English.

"Geoffrey Chaucer?" I tried. Again the blank stare, this time with a rising element of panic.

"The author?" Fortunately for our young friend, who looked ready to dive under the desk and start gibbering, a salesperson about my age came to our rescue and led me to Chaucer, who was inexplicably stashed in the History section. To my delight, there were six or seven different editions of The Canterbury Tales, and I was able to find exactly what I wanted for the bargain price of $5.99, which wasn't much more than I paid for my caramel latte. Happy day. (I do feel bad about frightening that poor girl so terribly, though. Poor kid just didn't know what to do about someone who didn't ask for John Grisham or Dr. Phil.)

I also came home with a copy of The Water-Method Man (1972) by John Irving, to replace my old copy which had summarily fallen apart, and a remaindered 1999 edition of National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I've just bought a second bird feeder for the back yard, and it'll be fun identifying the little fuckers in between scrubbing their shit off the patio furniture.

If we're able to stay up later than the kids tonight, we'll . . . well, I mean if we're still awake after that, we've got some tasty stuff to read. But before we do, we'll pull our fingers out of our asses and wash our hands. Because it's VERY important, is why.

Listen To This.
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Music
It must be the day for listening to early '80s music; I went from Joe Jackson to Squeeze's Eastside Story (1981), which is another fucking brilliant album. (Trivia: If you listen carefully to the backup vocal on the second verse of Tempted, that's Elvis Costello affecting a basso, that sneaky little shit. He produced the album.)

I've also brought Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, which came out in 1979, and Crowded House's Woodface, which didn't come out until 1991 -- but it's all of a bunch, witty underrated British pop.

Perusing the Eastside Story album cover, I was struck again by lead singer Glenn Tilbrook, who had the market on the innocent child-man thing cornered back there in 1981. (That's him second from the right on the album cover, and in the middle in the publicity still. Want a piece of candy, little boy?) In fact, he was a little boy -- he was twenty-three. These days, he just looks like a nice middle-aged man. I suppose it's happened to most of us.

If you're not familiar with this tasty stuff, and if you get the chance, do check it out. I didn't discover it till the early '90s, so you needn't feel like you've been asleep at the switch. Production isn't everything, but you need to have some. Lyrics aren't important, unless they are truly witty -- Difford and Tilbrook are very deft, and Elvis Costello is the master of multilayered wordplay. Edge is overrated, but the cheek should contain a tongue. The tune's gotta bounce, but not too hard. Restraint is a virtue. This has got all that. Compare it to the jump-rope chants that pass for lyrics these days, and the banging on trash cans and recycled disco that passes for music, it's fucking Mozart.

Harry Potter, Tobey Maguire And My Insane Hormones.
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Rants
Because I am both a mommy and a nerd, I have a Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban day-by-day photo calendar on my desk. I don't want to admit it, but I have to: Those boys, who are now around fifteen, are getting intriguing looking. Daniel Radcliffe himself, that redhead who plays Ron Weasley, even the evil blond kid. I should probably go to jail for even thinking this. Call me the Wife of Bath.

For that matter, there is always something intriguing about that little-kid look. Tobey Maguire has always been fascinating to me; he's of age, but has that wide-eyed Oh my goodness, I've never seen a boobie before look. You just want to persuade him to do dirty things with you.

Shit, could someone please dump a bucket of water on me or something? Damn these pregnancy hormones. Four children and they have never clobbered me quite this hard before. And now I am off to ponder the intricacies of the United States Code, which is this girl's substitute for thinking about baseball.

Thoughts On Joe Jackson.
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Rants
He's done some brilliant stuff. For three days I've had Is She Really Going Out With Him? stuck in my head, so I brought his 1996 Greatest Hits collection to the office today. It also includes tracks from his 1982 release Night and Day, which is an amazing album.

But: good Christ, that guy is a gigantic fairy. I mean he is just the gayest thing I have ever seen in my life. Or, should I say, I have ever heard. Corporeally, I have always thought he looked like a sperm, or maybe a fetus. The Reproductive Fairy.

My Husband, The Prick.
Mood:  crushed out
Topic: The Tao of Ben
There are those who have expressed shock at my reference, in this blog, to my husband as a prick. That is your chosen mate and the father of your children, they say, or words to that effect. How can you say such terrible things about him?

It's true that Ben is an absolute masterpiece of a man and that I love him very dearly. However: He is a prick. (Hi honey! Kisses!) I am not just saying this, either. I have solid proof, to wit:

He is smarter than I am. Intelligent men aren't ordinarily a problem for me; with the exception of that commodities trader I dumped to start dating Ben, I've tended to gravitate toward brilliant men. However, he is brighter than I am and has the statistics to prove it: According to standardized tests way back when, his IQ is 154 and mine is only 145. That's nine whole points, you prick. Of course, we have to account for some of the pruning of brain cells we did in the '70s and '80s, which might have equalized things a bit, but according solely to the numbers, I'm his mental inferior.

Of course, you may be thinking. He's a lawyer, isn't he? You should expect him to be very intelligent. Well, no; that's not accurate. The California Bar is populated with a startling percentage of abject idiots, and as for the rest of them, for the most part they aren't so much intelligent as they are cagey.

However, I first met Ben when he was my boss for two months on a temp assignment, and it's true that he was pretty much the first attorney I'd ever worked for where I didn't secretly think I was smarter than he was. For once I wasn't thinking You should be sitting in here drafting my points and authorities, and could you please, please try to grasp the proper use of the comma? So I guess I should have seen it coming. What I didn't see coming was what an insufferable know-it-all -- insufferable prick -- he can be. Worse, I'm probably not much better.

He is more well-read than I am. This is particularly goading because my bachelor's is in English literature, whereas he majored in something reprehensible related to business or economics, and his postgraduate degrees are an MBA and a JD. Not a liberal arts degree in sight. Yet that prick is far better versed in history and literature than I am. It's true that he's a little weak on modern American literature and to some extent on Shakespeare, but he's well versed in Chaucer and has plowed through more DH Lawrence and Tolstoy than I ever managed to do.

However, being well-read doesn't make him a total prick. On our first date, Ben completely charmed me by announcing that James Joyce's Ulysses was "gibberish". I squealed with delight. "That's exactly what I've always thought!" I crowed. Do you know how much time I spent, as an undergrad in English, listening to people have on about how brilliant and profound Joyce's works are, and Ulysses in particular? The entire time, I was thinking what a bunch of incomprehensible bullshit it was; but Ben was the first person I ever met who dared to say it. Besides, a guy who discusses Joyce on the first date instantly makes a girl like me weak in the knees. I vowed immediately to have sex with him whenever possible and to spend a ton of time with him, even though he is absolutely not meant to know more about literature than I do, and therefore he is a prick.

He is instinctively condescending. This must be a corollary of being smarter than everyone else; during conversations with me, even after all these years, he will automatically launch into explanations of the most axiomatic concepts of science or sociology. Well, maybe not axiomatic to the coke-addled trust fund babies he hung out with at Beverly Hills High, but axiomatic to anyone with the mental wherewithal to think beyond series TV and French Vogue. It makes me nuts: Don't you condescend to me, you prick, I tell him. I don't have big enough tits to be a bimbo. And then I blow him a Bronx cheer, flip him the bird, and kiss him, and we continue our conversation.

He invariably beats me at backgammon. In my undergrad days, I was pretty damned good. Scott and I used to play everyone in his dorm, and although I would lose a few games from time to time, I could beat all the guys fairly routinely. That is, until that prick Ben came along. It's not that I lose to him once in a while -- he beats me every single goddamned fucking time, without exception. Clearly there is some sort of bad magic at work, there; you could play a series of games with a chimp, and statistically speaking, at some point the chimp would have to win. It drives me absolutely insane, and I have been known to pout and say I'm not playing anymore and stomp off like any three-year-old. Because I am just not meant to lose like that, is why.

His sense of humor is even more offensive than mine is. And that is really saying something, because I have an appalling sense of humor; I have had female acquaintances who have completely stopped speaking to me because of some obscene and/or misogynistic joke I've told. Which is stupid, really; as Steve Martin's character pointed out in the movie My Blue Heaven, most people think they have good senses of humor, but they don't, really. Anyone who would be offended by a joke about how a pregnant woman is different from a light bulb (you can unscrew a light bulb) just isn't made for this world and should go hide in a shoebox.

Ben, though, has some material so shocking that he can make even me howl in protest: Honey, that is just plain wrong, and no one should ever say that. I mean, you are talking about actual sex with animals, for crying out loud. Does this stop him? It does not, because he is a prick, and part of his amusement in telling these jokes is in watching people run screaming for the exits. (In fact, he confessed to me that he used to deliberately say appalling things on first dates, in order to screen out girls who would find his sense of humor intolerable. Which turned out, he says, to be almost all of them.)

A large portion of his material is original, and almost all of it is pretty startling. These are a couple of the cleanest, most printable examples I can think of:

One day he burst into song, his own take on that little Peter Paul Mounds/Almond Joy advertising jingle. You remember. Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't. Except Ben's version was:

Sometimes a dick's in your butt
Sometimes it's not.

Do you see what I mean? People just don't go about saying things like that. They certainly don't expect to hear other people say them. And Ben, that prick, enjoys playing these things for shock value.

Another story I found appalling was a famous prank he and his friend Bob (whose sense of humor is so disgusting that he makes Ben look like a Sunday school teacher) played on another guy. They gave him the Elephant Walk. I don't know; maybe all guys do this; but it involves turning both your front pockets inside out, opening your fly, pulling out your unit, and walking menacingly toward someone. You see? Pockets = elephant ears. Penis = trunk. Horrifying.

Worse, as you see, Ben's shtick tends to be terribly gay, which also raises disturbing questions. My husband is as heterosexual as they come (except for a suspicious affection for Rock Hudson/ Doris Day movies), but he knows the shock value of appearing gay, and he isn't afraid to do it, and he loves how it makes people uncomfortable. See? Total prick.

Finally, I can't stay mad at him for more than a minute. This really cheeses me off. Several times I've had good and righteous reasons to be extremely pissed off at him, like the time he stood me up for a dinner date and went and sat in a bar for two hours before he remembered to call me, or the time the first year we were married when he went away to Lake Nacimiento for the weekend and didn't tell me until I saw his water ski in the back of the car, whereupon he announced that he was leaving in ten minutes and that I was staying home to feed and walk the dog and let in the repairmen.

You see? Real prick maneuvers. Yet on each occasion, just as I was asserting my righteous indignation, he said something to totally crack me up and charm me. "Fuck you," I used to tell him. "I'm so fucking pissed off at you right now, I'm going to go off and start making voodoo dolls. Now could you please stop being so fucking endearing for a minute so I can get on with that?" Prick. And then he would grin at me, and say something funny, and kiss me, and thus get himself completely out of trouble.

I think you can agree he's a prick. But, you know, it's like I said. All the really good ones can be pricks at times. It's all a matter of whether they make it worth your while.

Bangui Aplomb Detroit Beltsville Assimilable Attentive Blurry Beret Contrariwise Affirmation.
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Rants
This was the actual subject line of a home loan solicitation e-mail that landed in my Spam box this morning. Clearly the ravings of a lunatic. I thought I was starting to hallucinate from sleep deprivation.

The more I look at it, though, the more it makes sense. I have definitely been in the Attentive Blurry state -- am now, in fact -- and have made a Contrariwise Affirmation or two in my time.