This is what happens after you cough up $89 for a VillaWare Farmyard Waffle Maker:

Me (putting plate in front of Jackson): Here’s your waffle!

Jackson: (looks at plate silently)

Me: It’s a barn!

Jackson: (no response)

Me: A barn is a huge house where cows and horses and other animals live together and eat hay.

Jackson: Oh. (starts eating)

Ten minutes later.

Me: Ready for another waffle?

Jackson (pounding high-chair tray with fork): YES!

Me (putting plate in front of Jackson): It’s a pig!

Jackson: (lip trembling)

Me: What’s wrong?

Jackson: I don’t want pig!

(pause)

Me: It’s a cow!

Jackson (tears big as lightbulbs running down his cheeks): It’s a PIG!

Jack: Nice work, honey.

Moral: Pig waffles seek truffles. For trouble-free toddlers, offer square waffles.

I’m sure you have fantastic taste in music.

To me, that last Beck thing was kind of disappointing.

I’m indecisive to the point of narcolepsy about the latest Liz Phair.

Jack won’t take the new Jane’s Addiction out of his truck.

So I’m left deciding if I want to put the work into the last two Tom Waits albums that I’ve had for more than a year but haven’t listened to more than once, or if I should just download a copy of Nelly’s year-old hit “Hot In Herre.”

Help.

I went to have my eyes examined the other day because everything I read was all blurry and squinty and I was hoping I needed glasses. Because I’ve always wanted to wear glasses. People who wear glasses just look smarter than everyone else, and I could totally use an edge in the looks-like-she-has-lots-of-brains department. I have ALWAYS WANTED TO WEAR GLASSES AND NO ONE WOULD GIVE THEM TO ME! Sunglasses do not count. And I am not dork enough to go get frames and have someone put clear glass in them, because the person I would ask for clear-glass lenses would then KNOW that I am vain and childish and would snicker ruefully as he or she also noticed that my ears are at diferent heights. And I would then have to kill that person.

Opthamologists, having all that education, are reasonable people and will not prescribe glasses unnecessarily to idiots like me. But OPTOMETRISTS are a different story! Optometrists are prescription machines. Optometrists make you walk through an acre of Sally Jesse Raphael Fashion Frames just to get to the exam room.

So I took my AAA member discount card and went to the local mecca of cheap exams and ugly frames: Lenscrafters!

It was great. They gave me a little sterilized paddle to cover my eyes while I squinted and misread the chart. They had a machine that puffed air at my eyes. All kinds of crap like that. And what did I come away with? Yes! A prescription!

A prescription for reading glasses.

Good god, you perky Lenscrafter optometrist with the diploma from Berkeley on your wall, I don’t want fucking reading glasses! I want to look like I think for a living. I want to walk around looking like I’m on my way to speak with some authority at the 92nd Street Y. And what do I get? Well, in fact I do get to look like that, but only while I lay in bed reading Harry Potter books.

I think there must be a place on the Internet for people like me, people who wish their vision was slightly blurry. Like those people who only feel whole after they’ve had a limb removed. I won’t go so far as to burn my corneas out by staring at the sun, just some slight myopia would be fine. But no, me and my accursed far-sightedness. I see you there, walking around on the hot Egyptian sand, Mohammed. Your fly is open.

I don’t know about your blog, but one of the reasons this blog is so bulimically narcissisical and full of stuff that is probably only interesting to myself (hence the negative numbers in my site stats) (god, I could talk to myself for hours) (oh, wait, that’s why I got married) is simply because stuff happens, and when the Alzheimer’s really starts to kick in I’ll be able to save myself the embarrasment of repeating the alphabet over and over again (*true story, except my grandmother had the style to do it in Swedish*). Instead, I’ll just point to this site, assuming I’ve remembered to keep up the Hostway payments, and say, Voila, Jackson, your childhood in a bucket. On July 23, 2003, while sitting in your father’s truck and listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan, you, aged two, said, “I like this guy.” It was also reported that you spent the earlier part of the afternoon singing for your preschool mates, who stood in rapt attention around you. I had this fantasy that you’re some drama queen like Janice Joplin, come back in the body of a little boy. And why not? Can’t you just see her, laughing her fat white ass off, bossing around some big black-winged afterlife bat: “Make me into a little boy, motherfucker!” It might also account for the way you’ve taken, in the frustrating moments when the raisins slide off your milky cereal spoon, to saying, “Oh, goddamn it!” Although really, we have the two weeks you just spent with your grandmother to thank for that.

Adventures in Child Psychology of the Damned XIII

Jack: Want to go for a ride in the truck?

Jackson: NO!

(pause)

Jack: How about now?

Jackson: Okay.

Monkey See, Monkey Learn to Rap

(phone rings)

Me: Hello?

Jack (in background): Say it! Say it!

Jackson: I LIKE! BIG! BUTTS!!

(hangs up)

No Matter Where You Go, There You Are

Remember in Chasing Amy how she was all busy being this sexual rebel, making out with girls in public (::yawn::), and then she had this shocking realization that what she really wanted to do was hunker down and pick the nits out of The Uncool Affleck’s pubes for awhile? That’s exactly how I feel about my new Burberry Pants. I spent all my shopping time from age 17 onward scouring thrift stores for new ways to dress like a lefty punk-rock maybe-dyke, and I ended up being the worst sort of snob who labeled anyone who didn’t find their clothes in a Dumpster as a capitalist monkey Gap clone tool. And then one day I zipped up a $350 (on sale for $99) pair of well-fitting capris made out of the lining of Queen Elizabeth’s raincoat and let Jack take me out for champagne and an expensive, crap meal at a restaurant with a 26 Zagat rating (soon to be 24 as soon as I get my survey form filled out and mailed), and there was no turning back. I had turned into a Gal and I didn’t care who knew it.

The ghost of Ted Knight may need me to dig Mommy Blog ditches while others lunch with Binky Urban, but by God I’m going to look like Laura Petrie driving a backhoe and I don’t care how Republican anyone thinks my gardening clogs look.

If there was such a thing, Cowboy Sally would win Fussy Internet Crush of the Month.

“My adolescent mind fogged over. Porn or guns? PORN OR GUNS?!?“

I know that most kids enjoy repetition — Jackson has been known to ask us to rewind certain movie scenes four or five times in a row, especially if they involve oompa loompas — but I’ve realized that many grownups, though we claim to tire of the daily grind, have a deep, primordial impulse — nay, aching chasm of need — to watch Caddyshack over and over and over and over again until someone shoots us like the pestilential rodents that we are.

Caddyshack is one of those movies, like Citizen Kane and Boogie Nights, in which each new viewing reveals uncharted depths. And oh! how it resonates, its little balls of wisdom pinging off of leafy oaks and into the rough of everyday life. Just yesterday I was standing in line at Cantwell’s waiting for another brilliant chicken salad sandwich with avocado and sprouts on wheat to take back to my windowless office, and again I started chuckling — who is that woman standing in public snickering to herself again? It must be Mrs. Kennedy — because lately I’ve been wondering: when comes that portion of life where you get to do the thing you love for a living? And who but the ghost of Ted Knight strode up to my mind’s eye, as he did in that scene where the kid who has eleven brothers and sisters and can’t afford college is asking about the caddy scholarship, and grumpy, put-upon, ghostly, lama-like Ted says to both of us,

“Well, the world needs ditch-diggers, too.”

Okay, Gay World: I’ll give you Elijah Wood but get your mitts off Tobey Maguire.

I got this link and a friendly note from Caitlin yesterday (because unlike the rest of you, waiting for the death post to go up, she just assumed I was still alive and would respond to e-mail). At first I was horrified, and then she was like, Um, hey, Mrs. Kennedy? I think it’s fake? And I was all, But it’s on the Internet! It must be true! So I lose ten points for Fussy House, and have been assigned extra homework on the life of P.T. Barnum.

It also got me thinking how when Caitlin was little she was likely one of a few lucky girls with that nice Irish name, and how nowadays every other girl that pops out of the chute is named Katelyne or Catelynn, or, my favorite, Katelon. “No, I don’t go for those human children, my daughter is a Katelon 2000 with turbo boosted skip-rope action!”

I used to work with a woman who named her son Sabastian. She said, “I wanted his name to be Just a Little Bit Different.” And I could only think, No, different would be naming him Chuck or George, what you’ve done is to make sure that people will mispronounce and misspell his name for the rest of his life.

There was an interesting article about baby names in the NY Times last Sunday, and they were saying how the trend of naming kids after places (e.g., Paris, Dakota, Indiana, Burbank) is peaking and the next trend is likely to be naming kids after things. This theory prompted much hilarity between me and my Boss yesterday, wherein we constructed an imaginary dialogue between a parent and his two children, Table and Keyboard.

File under: Child, Genius A propos of nothing, I just found Jackson in the bathroom yelling, “Mom! Mom!” He had a bar of soap on the edge of the sink and then he let it slide down to the bottom and said, “Look! Skateboarder!”