I am desperate to go shopping, yet all I’ve done is to go online and buy t-shirts for Jack that I don’t have the nerve to wear myself.

It’s a cat, licking its butt! It’s from the Museum of Menstruation, and it says, Not feeling fresh? He’ll love it.

Also, this one is perfect for gigs.

It’s from the big brains at Mighty Girl. Because Jack just does not get enough attention from women. Plus, he already has this one:

Can you read that? It says “Hot as FCUK.” Dyslexic people always have a good chuckle when they see that one.

And everyone likes the one that says, “I don’t get out of bed for less than a grand,” but I had to restrain myself from actually pulling it out of Jack’s drawer and taking a picture of it. I mean, this is a blog and all, but I had to ask myself: does a sane woman post photos of things she finds in her husband’s underwear drawer? No.

BUT A SHAMELESS EXHIBITIONIST DOES.

See! I left it in the drawer.

In case you’re interested in another James-the-Non-Pledge-Sayer story, I got an e-mail from my dear friend Brian who, surprisingly, knew the junior high school version of James.

“Seeing that picture was a real trip down memory lane . . . which in this case is called Cinder Alley [a ye-olde-timey Denver mall-within-a-mall that no loger exists]. I remember running into James there at least twice on my way to Zeezo’s Magic Shop. He’d be in the funny little game store that sold D&D; stuff and classy pewter chess sets. I also remember a science fair where he made a Tesla coil that was an absolutely gorgeous object, copper wire wrapped around glass. Clearly the coolest thing there, he didn’t win because the teachers suspected that he had help from his dad. The irony is that it’s easier to make a Tesla coil than it is to get a Dad to be interested and involved in a science project.”

We were both also able to successfully Google James and found his home page, which I really do not want to link to for fear of repercussion, but I’d like to note that he’s now a philosophy professor at a respectable university, with four unfilmed Star Trek episodes to his credit! So once again, bravo James, you unstoppable force of geekdom!

God, I love it when people say funny things about Jesus. In this current climate, I think we should just keep a long line of those “I can see your house from here!” jokes coming. And, please, I love Christians, I love Jews . . . how could I not love anyone who can knowledgably QUOTE GOD? There’s so much wisdom there, and yet I just nod off in front of the Koran every time. I nod off in front of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, too, I don’t discriminate. I am just missing that Bible-study gene. I mean, I can be filled with all sorts of holy feelings while reading Auden or Yeats; once I burst out into uncontrollable sobs in that part of Westminster Abbey that looks like the tomb of every major male white Western poet who died in the last 500 years. That’s my religious experience. Plus all that time on the ouija board. (Like, why stop at quoting God when you can channel the other side.)

So now that you’re moderately horrified, I must link you to two other people who are also going straight to hell:

The Gospel of Debbie by Paul Rudnick

And I’m like, Mary, are you dating Jesus? and she says, no, he’s just helping me, and I’m like, you mean with math? and she’s like, no, to not be such a whore.

What Would Jesus Test-Drive? by Jesse Lichtenstein

Jesus: What if I want to peel out at a stoplight?

Sales Associate: Well, it starts out with the electric motor, so …

Jesus: I see. Suppose some kid in a Corvette cuts me off, then floors it and starts to pull away?

Sales Associate: Well, I mean …

Jesus: Because it sounds like you’re trying to sell me a shiny new golf cart.

I laughed, I cried, I wrote some of it.

Plus, it has a monster on the cover! RRRRRrrrr!

Greg explains it better.

So click and buy! It’s far less exhausting than combing through the archives of a dozen weblogs far more scandalous than mine.

/self-promotion

When I was in sixth grade, we said “one nation, under God, indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance, much like the rest of the nation. Dr. Michael Newdow’s argument on the subject before the Supreme Court on Wednesday is excerpted here. The fact that Newdow thinks that too much social pressure would come to weigh upon the tiny shoulders of any little kid who decided to just shut up for a second while everyone else in the room said “under God,” well, this Newdow guy should have met James. James was a fifth grader in my class. He wore his NASA t-shirt for the class photo and was always on the lookout for ingeniously appropriate ways to quote Mr. Spock from Star Trek. On top of that, he boldly proclaimed that he didn’t have to say the Pledge because it was against his (Jehovah’s Witness?) religion to pledge allegiance to anyone/thing but God. And after awhile we’d all had about enough of James’s pointy-eared “you’re being an illogical human” persona, so I don’t think anyone really cared what he did during the Pledge. He was just borderline exasperating-but-still-(to me)-funny enough to convince us that he didn’t care what we thought (maybe he’d already taken so much shit anyway), and he seemed to have no problem just sitting at his desk drawing Klingons on his PeeChee while the rest of us said a bunch of words we didn’t understand.

It’s twenty-eight years too late, but bravo, James, for being relentlessly Spock-like!

Last night Jackson actually said to me, with proto-teenage irritation, “MOM, I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Jackson, you’re two-and-a-half.”

*not sure what this means*

*pouts*

This will interest no one but me, but here are two of Jackson’s latest original (as opposed to the above, must-have-heard-it-on-Dexter’s Laboratory quote).

1. (Sitting in his carseat, thoughtfully licking his upper lip) “Boogers taste salty.”

2. (Sitting in his carseat, perhaps contemplating his upcoming ride in a cold grocery cart) “Kids like to stay home.”

I guess he does his best thinking in the car while we’re listening to Poor Little Critter On the Road.

This morning I was lying on my yoga mat doing what I think is probably Mary Roach’s favorite pose (corpse pose! Get it? Hey! I made a Mary Roach joke! Yay to the three people who care!), and I overheard my teacher giving a little impromptu Sanskrit lesson to the woman one mat over. He said that the Sanskrit word bhaga means strength, but that if you pronounce it wrong (i.e., without the H, so it’s more like bugga) it means anus. Wow, way to trip up those Sanskrit-as-a-Second-Language students, right? But since I’m lying there at the end of practice all corpse-like and such, I start thinking about how the British spent buttloads* of time occupying India, and what’s that most favorite of British occupations?

Yes! BUGGERY!

Pretend you’re Hugh Cary Grant and say it with me: Bhaga off!

It makes perfect sense, right? Anus, bugger, all those limey twits doing what they do best when they’re far away from God and country and the misses’ fuzzy little yoni (bonus for clicking on that: you get to see the wondrous vulva puppet).

So I come home and manage to find a little time to Google bhaga and bugger and Sanskrit and bloody fucking Typhoo Tea and I get absolutely nowhere with this hypothesis. I get fuck all. Dick. Squat. Worse than squat: I get stuff like this, which is “worse” because it completely ignores my Important Linguistic Discovery.

However, I am utterly, completely, hypnotically convinced that I am absolutely right about this. I just need to unearth a few nineteenth-century pornographic Royal Navy recruitment brochures hygiene pamphlets and I. WILL. PROVE IT.

*Heh.