Last night I was at the stove stirring risotto (all Jeff Smith risotto recipes require that you not merely boil your arborio rice but stand at the stove stirring thoughtfully — and, in my own special twist on the classics, drinking buckets of pinot grigio — for half an hour) when Jackson wandered into the kitchen and asked me to pick him up so he could see what was cooking. I stooped down to put him on my left hip, and as I started to straighten up holding thirty-three some odd pounds of boy I got this awful pulling sensation across my abdomen, like my uterus was about to detach from its tendons. As I gently replaced Jackson’s feet on the kitchen floor, I felt the hot wave of adrenalin-fueled hypochondria start to claw its way up my spine, and for the thousandth time in my life I began to run down my Checklist of Sudden, Possibly Life-Threatening, and Definitely Painful Diseases That I Probably Have.

Symptom:

Generalized lower abdominal tenderness.

Possible reasons to panic:

1. UTERINE PROLAPSE!

Who cares if it’s been two-and-a-half years since I gave birth. Or perhaps I’ve just been reading too many web sites of people who just had babies.

2. ENDOMETRIOSIS!

Check calendar — the time is right for ovulation, though this would be the most dramatic dual-ovary synchronized egg release ever in my personal experience — but there’s no time to Google endometriosis before Jack suggests it’s a . . .

3. HERNIA!

Lower intestine suddenly pops through abdominal wall while person is in the act of lifting heavy object — lift up shirt, pull down waistband of pink velour pants — see any lumps of intestine straining through skin? Negative. Still, though. But wait! What about . . .

4. APPENDICITIS!

Oh my god! I once had a friend who, after an emergency appendectomy, said that his only symptom before fainting in the emergency room was that it had felt like he’d been doing too many sit-ups. Lightheadedness ensues. Order Jack to stay at the stove and keep stirring while I stagger away to collapse on the couch. But wait, is that a gas bubble I feel traversing my colon? Could it be . . .

5. THE TWO FIVE-DAY-OLD CHICKEN ENCHILADAS I ATE FOR LUNCH?

The True Story of My Miraculous Self-Healing:

While Jackson stood next to the toilet shouting “Pee-WEE! MOMMY FARTED!”, I closed my eyes as if in prayer and took a big orange-colored five-day-old-enchilada shit.

And then we had osso buco.

Alright, no one cares, but two big thumbs up for Courtney Love’s new album. I guess it’s actually a CD, forgive me, I have Mad Cow Disease, plus I still own at least five linear feet of vinyl recordings meant to be played on a turntable with a sharp little diamond stylus, and God Help You if it gets dull and you need a new one, it’s like looking for typewriter ribbon. A girl came to my door a few weeks ago selling magazines — yes! a door-to-door magazine* salesperson! She had a nonselfpitying tale about being a young single mom with an unpottytrainable son six months older than Jackson, my wee Casanova, who stood at my feet doing his come hither, fair damsel, and let us make like ninjas together whilst we woo routine, and she saw the long bookshelf in our hall filled with records and, awestruck, she asked, “Are you a DJ?” She really had me stumped for a few minutes, trying to imagine myself in some Ms. Mixalot situation with a bag over my head to diguise my decrepitude, doing a tricky Tommy Bolin – to – Heart segue.

Anyway. What was I saying. Oh, yeah! So here’s an opportunity to once again scan and link to a favorite Matt Groening cartoon! I miss Life in Hell, but if I was riding the Simpsons gravy train I’d probably retire the snarky weekly panel cartoon, too. My point, dull as it may be, is that the phrase “thumbs up” sets two adorable little thought trains in motion. First comes the Roger Ebert train in a rusty heather Shetland crew neck sweater, beaming happily, with a projector’s bright light mounted on the front of his engine. Then, from the opposite direction clickety-clack comes the black-and-white Matt Groening cartoon train with Conductor Binky waving from the caboose, which is painted with that one “Thumbs up!” guy from the cartoon** about how to be a film critic. And then here comes Stationmistress Courtney with her cute conductor’s hat and half-buttoned conductor’s coat and no panties, waving two bright orange Jimmy Choo shoes, directing both trains onto the same track where WHAMMO! they collide at forty miles per hour, right in front of the platform, spectacularly maiming hundreds of Roger Corman fans.

So, thumbs up, Courtney! Wow!

*Which reminds me, we have yet to receive our first issue of Nick Jr. Magazine that we ordered from her. Hmmm! Well, if it was a scam, she put a fuckofalot of work into getting my twenty-eight dollars, she bent my ear for almost half an hour. She wore me down. I wrote her a check just to get her to leave.

**Don’t forget to click on the film critics to see the whole cartoon

I love how when a kid poops his pants we say he had an “accident.” Like, the responding officer reported that the driver of the red Ford Explorer thought it was just going to be a fart.

Thank you, that was your Pseudo-Paula Poundstone* moment for today.

*Poor Paula! Drunk Driving Mommy, okay, but honestly! Who believed the molestation charge? I guess it happens, though. I mean, Anne Sexton, right? Blurg. There’s your lesbian incest moment of the day, too. You’re welcome.

Letters to the Editor: “I fail to see the harm to anyone.”

Photos by Derek Powazek: Justly Married

link via superfudgechunk

Here’s half a picture of a woman on her honeymoon in Mexico. She’d been drinking an awful lot of good tequila and sleeping like she’d been hit in the head with a brick, despite the toe, broken on a concrete step her first day there.

There I was, hungover and somehow sunburnt only from the neck up, pacing myself through Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club. It’s a terrific book, scary and comic, exactly the way I felt about being married, after having been at it for less than a week. There’s a lot of drunken, blinding sunlight in the book, too, so mentally, at least, I felt right at home.

“Mother’s bleach job put me in mind of an obituary picture I’d seen of Jayne Mansfield, who apparently got her head cut slap off in a car wreck. I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield’s head — still wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges — all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball.

Here’s a poem of hers that was in a recent New Yorker. It makes me hope we can all weather a certain person’s coming adolescence with good grace and snappy comebacks.

My grandfather liked burnt toast for breakfast. Basically, a shingle of charcoal. If he went to a restaurant and the waitress brought him anything less than a serving of smoking brimstone, he would crumble it up in his fist, scream, “THIS ISN’T WHAT I ORDERED!” and throw it across the room. I mean, really, A little anger management, sir? is what you’d say these days, but then? Did people just go, Tch! Cookie’s asleep at the grill again! and go back to gossiping about the town slut?

This obituary got me thinking. This quote in particular:

“By the turn of the century, you know, we didn’t have the mass communication and mass transportation that exist nowadays,” Jones recalled. “We didn’t have as much schooling, either. As a result, people were more unique then, more unusual, more different from each other.”

Maybe people really were a lot more different way back when, or maybe they were just less self-conscious about being alcoholic/bipolar/anorexic/major flaming assholes. We’re all much more aware of these things as failings these days. Yet the Catholic Church turned at least one woman who drank lepers’ pus and treated bloody scabs like communion wafers into a saint. And then there’s Wuthering Heights. It contains one of the meanest, least-evolved, clinging-to-their-neuroses set of bastards you’ll ever read about short of the Third Reich. That whole novel is one big fuck you to mental health*.

So, this is why I’m going to quit shaving my armpits. Who’s with me!?

*This sort of in-depth literary analysis earned me a C in Eng. Lit. 101.

Where did that $100 of birthday money go?

1. Pin — $17 (now that I’m 40, I can’t leave the house without a pin on my cloak, a silk scarf over my bouffant, and making sure I radiate Chanel No. 5 for at least fifteen feet in all directions).

2. Two essential Bill Murray movies (Kingpin and Groundhog Day) — $30.

3. Muted safety orange down vest, stone cropped low-riders, and electric cranberry velour pants from the Gap sale rack — $45.

4. Finally getting my vibrating pink gel dildo repaired — priceless.

I was vaguely concerned about joining the pink velour pants brigade, which seems mainly to be comprised of UCSB girls on their way to or from Starbucks. I guess if I start wearing them with flip-flops you can take me out with a pellet gun.

My other weak, half-hearted concern is for Ben Affleck, who is all up in arms about this new player deal for the Yankees (Jack came up with a good headline this morning: “Affleck Apopleptic”), but I’m reserving my special edge-of-panic concern for HELLO!? Mad Cow Disease! The New York Times keeps publishing these windy, midsize, no-one-wants-to-be-the-first-one-to-admit-that-they-think-there’s-an-enormous-problem articles on page 17 about how the USDA tests only about 40,000 cows out of bajillions each year, and how witnesses report sick cows stumbling up the ramp to be slaughtered, and how brain and spinal tissue sticks to the machinery and potentially gets mixed into food product meat, and how even if the machinery is clean the carcass parts with infected prions get rendered down into stuff like gelatin, which is made into those gelatin capsules, implying that even if you’re a vegetarian and you take supplements or medication contained in gelatin capsules, you can still contract your distinctly human but still crippling version of Mad Cow Disease. And if cows have been Cannibal Cows with twisted prions starting ten, twenty, thirty years ago? Then we all have it. Is what I’m thinking. Is anyone else half-panicked about this, or is it just me? Because I forgot my own phone number the other day.