The Nut’s nine-month birthday! Right now he is napping peacefully, but in an hour he’ll be at the doctor’s office having needles jabbed into his thigh, all because I’m hippie enough to let him be born at home, but not hippie enough to let him grow up without polio vaccine.

I am so technologically backward sometimes that I want to hit myself in the head with a brick. Then I remind myself that I am old enough to be planning my midlife crisis. So old that when I was in college, no one had a computer, but there were extra typewriters in the library basement. At my first job in New York I had an IBM Selectric and carbon paper for copies, and we sent books to be typeset on big linotype machines in Pennsylvania.

Basically, if it weren’t for Blogger, I’d be watching General Hospital and drinking a twelve-pack of Schlitz right now.

Let me speak, for a moment, about Chakra Chips.

Back in the dark ages of my former job, when everyone in the office was far less intelligent than the people who work there today, we were so desperate for advertising dollars that the editor in chief/sales manager (conflict of interest? naahhh) would do anything to sell a page of advertising.

So there was this “doctor” from Brooklyn, NY, (I think he was actually a dentist) who had developed these things called Chakra Chips. They were little bits of colored plastic that looked like the remains of a three-hole-punch party, and the “doctor” had allegedly infused them with magical “biomagnetic” energy that would realign the seven chakra centers of the body. All you had to do was tape them onto yourself at certain points — as I recall, under the belly button was one power spot, and another was the bottom of your foot.

The thing is, in order to get $2,000 out of these people (for a two-page spread), my editor/sales boss promised that we’d also write a nice big article about them, explaining the benefits of their product and telling readers how they could obtain these magical chips.

I should have quit right then, but I wanted to write the article. I did a brief interview with the dentist’s assistant, an extremely paranoid and bombastic woman, and I had Auto Man, one of my boss’s friends, wear some of the chips for a day for an objective report. I also taped some on myself.

The effects of the chips were, of course, nonexistent. Auto Man told me that he had worn the green chips on the bottom of his feet for three days (the green chips were supposed to help you heal your relationship with money), but that at the end of 72 hours he was still a poor sonofabitch and if he had actually spent money on these things he would demand a refund. (Maybe that’s how you make money with them.)

I had a ball writing the story; I wish I still had a copy of it.

Naturally, part of the ad contract stipulated that the “doctor” and his assistant be able to review the story before we printed it. (Why didn’t I quit now? I didn’t want to go back to being a professional bookstore cashier.) So I faxed it to them, kind of blithely hoping that they’d take it in the Esquiresque spirit in which I’d written it.

Wrong. I can count on one finger the times that someone has been so absolutely spitting mad at me. It was the assistant who yelled at me; at one point I think she even told me to go sit in a corner and think about what I’d done. It’s taken me a while to realize that people who go absolutely mental on you are exactly that: mental. You’re not required to take it personally. And anyway, what should I have expected from a nutcase who worked for a guy who’d invent such a goddamned stupid thing?

After my boss calmed her down (I’ve got to hand it to him, he wasn’t mad at me at all), together they came up with a brilliant solution to my inability to write what amounted to ad copy (also known, sickeningly, as “advertorial”). My boss not only agreed to put a picture of the dentist on the cover of the magazine, but he also went and let them write the article! Of course! Since they know so much about the Chakra Chips, only the developer and his unholy bitch of an assistant could give the chips the editorial treatment they deserved.

I still treasure my copy of that issue of the magazine. Here’s one of the most brilliant paragraphs in the whole piece:

Any misconceptions about reality will stagnate and deviate the energy flows in issues of money, health, love, etc. Most of the BIOMAGNETIC CHIPS were designed to deal with the conceptual reality of these flows like prosperity and romantic love. They facilitate the change in perception in these areas and the release of erroneous belief systems.

I should have copyedited that better, but I really just didn’t feel like it. And that’s only half the story, the art department had to design their ad. I don’t think they ever got paid for the work, either.

Releasing the story of Chakra Chips after so long is like lancing an infected boil on my soul. Of course, I’m still going to hell for working at that magazine for four and a half years.

I keep thinking about this, so I, too, shall link to it.

When I see design like this (via dooce) I re-realize the crazy creative potential of the Web. Do brilliant design and verbal content (not just pretty pictures) merge anywhere to form some ecstatic Joycean pixel bomb? If anyone can point me in that direction, for God’s sake don’t be a selfish bastard, share.

I have decided to sell all the books, CDs, and VHS tapes I no longer have any use for on Amazon.com. It is such a rip-off to bring this valuable stuff to my local purveyors of secondhand intellectual laundry. I took probably $300 worth of books down to the Book Den a few weeks ago and the bastard gave me $26. And I took it! Gratefully! I am tired of being an accomplice in my own abuse. A mother needs beer money, after all. Of course, along with all the other fantastically important things I’m trying to do right now, it’s going to take me about 3,000 years to get everything in a pile and then get myself organized online. So if anyone wants a used copy of Mary Karr’s Cherry in hardcover (originally $24.95 retail!), the price is, oh, how about $5? It’s worth at least $3.72.

Bad Mom Moment Number 33

2:12 p.m.: The baby smells like cat food. Why? Because ten minutes ago, as I was doing dishes and had my back turned, the baby was eating cat food, handfuls of Nutro Max Cat Senior triangle-shaped kibble. It gives every little burp the aroma of chickenfishbeef!

There has to be a better caption for this. And why does Jesus look like a cross between Kevin Smith and Jack Black? (via bitterpill)

Oh, the torture I put him through to get that banner picture.

Actually, it was just nap time this morning.

Nicknames for the Nut, Part II

Booger (though his “pincer grip” has improved greatly, Kleenex has yet to be mastered)

Sugar (this is one sweet-ass baby we’re talking about here)

Sugarbooger (unlike his father, I neither encourage nor condone the eating of boogers)

Mr. Sleepybiscuits (normally used only when the little bugger is so tired he’s crosseyed, but he won’t go to sleep)

Skillet Head (used only by his father, after I have inadvertently clonked the baby’s head into a doorframe, hanging pot, open refrigerator door, or other such obstacle, and the clonking has given the baby a quizzical expression but not caused an outburst of woe)

I am taking my little bits of free time and teaching myself HTML. You can keep track as my design skills progress from pitiful to laughable by visiting here from time to time. Today I’m experimenting with tables and making a complete mess of it.