I know a guy who, rumor has it, used to write about professional wrestling, and then he moved to California and did what all ex-wrestling writers do: he asked his fairy godmother to turn him into a yoga teacher. Specifically, he asked his fairy godmother to turn him into the type of yoga teacher who requests that no hard alcohol be brought to class, just beer and wine. And he gave me a diabolical idea that’s been stuck in my head for a couple of days: love everyone and tell the truth. This is virtually impossible, of course, but I tried it anyway. I tried loving the guy in front of me at the grocery store buying sixteen packs of turkey hotdogs with an expired rain check. It kind of worked, even though he looked like he might be going home to cook turkey hotdogs for his blind, incontinent chihuahua while a kidnapped girl with baggy skin brooded in a pit in his basement.

That’s just one example.

There are so many people to love.

The point is, I’m taking a plane tomorrow with my husband and wee son to visit my parents, and for the next six days I’m going to try to put into practice the philosophy of an ex-wrestling writer who, rumor also has it, once snuck onto the infield of Yankee Stadium to sprinkle his grandmother’s ashes down the first base line:

I’m going to try to love everyone and tell the truth.

Bwa ha ha ha ha! Just kidding! I’m really going to spend all my time trying to keep Jackson from being forcibly baptized into the Catholic church.

Note to self: next time, buy the washable nontoxic green-ink stamp pad before he covers himself in the Chinese character for “Spring.”

How to look waif-like in 10 rather complicated steps.

1. Be born to at least one parent who carries the ectomorph gene.

2. Spend your high school and college years pretending not to be bulimic.

3. Get pregnant. Eat like a ravaged teenage boy. Ravage a teenage boy. Balloon like a baleen. Go ahead! Spend your last trimester eating a pint of Haagen-Dazs a day. (Any flavor.)

4. Give birth. Immediately lose thirty pounds. Where did it go? “It was just fluids,” says your midwife. Fluids? Uch. (No relation to Uch.)

5. Breastfeed. Spend every minute for the next nine months tending to the unpredictable needs of a nursing infant.

6. Spend those same nine months forgetting to feed yourself. This is key. So that when your husband comes home, looks into your woozy eyes, and asks you what you’ve had to eat today, you can in all honesty tell him, “Some toast, I think,” before you pass out. When you come to, stagger to the doctor for a checkup. Congratulations! You’ve lost all your babyweight, plus an additional ten pounds.

But wait! There’s more!

7. Get a botched haircut, then grow to embrace the fact that you look like a child whose parents are worried about lice. The haircut magically makes your ginormous head look smaller, making hats seem bigger. Waifs always wear big hats.

8. Get a sinus infection, or something head-cold related that muffles your senses of taste and smell for at least two weeks. Watch as food, though plentiful and well-prepared, becomes an unenjoyable nuisance. Because your system is so full of antibiotics that you’re sick to your stomach most of the time anyway. Say, “Is it just me, or is the room tilting sideways?” When your husband looks into your pinwheeling eyes and asks what you’ve had to eat today, say, “Some toast, I think.” Get your husband to remark, “The phrase ‘low blood-sugar’ suggests itself,” and hand you a wildly overpriced fruit juice before you pass out. Have him then revive you by slapping your face repeatedly with a wet paper towel.

9. Drag your sorry ass to the bathroom scale. Look! You’ve lost another ten pounds! That you didn’t really want to lose! You are indeed skeletal! And you can’t complain about it because everyone thinks you look just great! Spend the next week eating only yogurt for lunch, wondering whether you should go ahead and get weird about food so as to defend these new proportions, or return to not caring how many calories are in a triple-fudge frosted brownie from Jeannine’s.

10. Just a couple more things to complete the sought-after Dickensian poor-and-underfed look: ill-fitting Levi’s, a t-shirt that hangs on you like seaweed and that’s older than half the clerks at Abercrombie & Fitch (and it’s been to college, too), and some flip-flops, and congratulations! You have finally achieved your lifelong goal of looking like a middle-aged, over-sharing Grim Reaper.

Every day when I drive home from work I have to dodge through a tricky little section of road to get onto the highway. You have to sit there blink-a blink-a blink-a pleading with constant nonstopping oncoming traffic to slip through to make a left, but it’s not just a regular perpendicular left, it’s like a 170° hairpin left turn at FULL SPEED to get onto the on-ramp, because oncoming ramp-merging traffic coming down the hill won’t slow down, it has to ride right up on your bumper just to remind you how rudely you’ve interrupted its mystically-perceived divine right to unimpeded ramp-merge acceleration.

So yesterday I’m sitting there blink-a blink-a quietly letting the adrenaline build up in my heart as a parade of entitled oncomers hits the ramp car, car, car, truck, truck, car, car, sherman tank, amphibious armored personnel carrier, and I glance in the rearview and I’ve got four or five cars waiting behind me now, wondering what the fuck is taking me so long to turn, thinking obviously I have no balls! So there’s pressure building up behind me. Pressure to grow a big hairy hanging scrotum. And I’m watching, I’m watching, I’m watching for a gap, just the tiniest one, and then I see it. A UPS truck at the top of the hill is taking just a hair’s-breadth longer to crank it up to speed, giving me precisely 4/5 of a second extra to haul my ass around and get onto the ramp. I’ve lost everyone at this point but I’m going to keep going because there is a reason for this godforsaken story, and it’s really fucking cute worth a chuckle, if you enjoy my self-mockery.

I slam my foot down on the accelerator because I don’t want a UPS tailpipe enema, and I totally peel out. There’s that miserable lag where you’re sitting there with your foot on the floor but you’re not moving. You’re just sitting there, waiting for your tires to quit smoking and connect with the pavement. You’ve lost that 4/5 of a second that you had, but! You’re also totally laying a patch. Fishtailing, tires squealing, burning rubber. In a Volvo. A forty-year-old woman with hedgehog hair and blue-cheese-toned skin and red Chanel sunglasses is making her tires squeal on Coast Village Road, Buffy, come look! It’s a Big Daddy Roth gone horribly, horribly awry, but also, you know, I laid a patch!

So that’s my story. Is it cute yet? Because then, as soon as I got off the highway I had to go through a roundabout. Santa Barbara was big on roundabouts for awhile — they were part of a now-abandoned citywide push for traffic calming measures. But you should see the people in their cars getting off the highway, going Whatthefuck is this? Why is everyone driving around in a circle? How in God’s name do I get through this flaming hippie traffic experiment? I’ll tell you how. You fucking peel out! Just slam it down and go! Fuck it! Fuck calm traffic! Wheeeeeeee!

And then I went home and Jack was there and I didn’t have to pick up Jackson for another forty-five minutes so my husband and I had mutually fulfilling sex within a respectful and loving marriage.

AND THEN I TOTALLY PEELED OUT!

Occasionally I take down a link to someone’s blog because they’ve stopped posting for various reasons: need a break, family crisis, don’t care about having a goddamned Internet presence anymore, everybody Just Fuck Off!

Usually I’m adding links, though, and about a month ago I added waistdog. He kindly reciprocated by linking me and we exchanged a few friendly comments, and, you know, voilá! Internet friends: just like real friends, except so totally not.

So, he died. The guy behind waistdog. He just died the other day. And suddenly strangers are posting on his site and putting up pictures of him and now I know what he looks like and he seems so young for a heart attack.

And there will be no more sad funny posts about being snubbed by teenaged girls at Rite Aid. But I’m going to leave his link up for awhile, just in case you need a sad funny post about a guy being snubbed by teenaged girls at Rite Aid. Because sometimes that is just the thing you need.

Yes, the fun just never stops here at Camp Fussy. Let’s see, what have we done today? Hung up some wrinkled shirts. Thrown out the usual astonishing array of empty bottles and cans. Dumped all the toys on the floor and, later, picked them all up again. Relatively little, on a global scale, yet all with Jackson walking around like a midget with Tourette’s (“fucking shit!”). Admittedly, we never left the house. It’s our right, as citizens of this sun-drenched state, to ignore the weather’s usual smarmy invitation and nurture skin tones remeniscent of cave-aged bleu cheese. When Jack rolled in at five o’clock he noted the flower-drenched, unopened-window thickness of the local atmosphere, and the fact that I was still in pajamas, and asked, “Are we now a petri dish? Is Jackson not a child, just some sort of ambulatory fungus?” It’s Tuesday. Tuesdays Jackson and I have off from preschool and work. Jack is relentlessly expressionless. “Are you having fun?” Jackson is creeping up on the third hour of his nap and I’m reading a Patricia Highsmith short story with my feet up on the couch. “You could be working at K-Mart, you know.” The book falls from my hands, my eyes roll up in my head as a thin stream of drool begins to flow from the corner of my mouth. He remains hinged. “You are SO LUCKY that I love you right now.”

As far as the local gentry goes, John Cleese is the only one who both warms my heart and reminds me somewhat of my dad: tall, dark, and angry, but making the effort to tone it down somewhat in the golden years. This interview isn’t particularly hilarious (you can read the whole thing here), but it’s worth a look, especially if, like me, you are a person who could quote a Python line for almost every occasion, but choose not to.

Cleese I get lots and lots of funny ideas. And I think to myself: what am I going to do? I don’t have a show. So it seems to me the best thing I can do is to buy a little camera, write funny things, and then perform them very, very simply in front of this camera, and put it on the Web site the next day. Apparently, there are people who will pay 50 cents a week to download bits of funny material.

Senior What will it be called?

Cleese Well, it can’t be John Cleese because some pest has already taken that. So let me just ask my dear assistant. [Speaks to someone in the room.] Oh. Thejohncleese.com.

Senior Would you also want to include a blog?

Cleese Yes. There are all sorts of things I’d put in. I’ve been thinking of a funny greetings card. I can never find very good funny greetings cards anymore.

Senior Such as?

Cleese I’m sorry I ate your gerbil.

Senior Right.

Cleese I’m extremely sorry I murdered your aunt. I really shouldn’t have done it.

Senior Would you collaborate with others on this project?

Cleese Oh yes. I mean, I did think it would be rather funny to do a film about the War of Independence and call it “1776 1/2″ and shoot it all at the ranch with three people in each army.

Senior Who would play General Washington?

Cleese My teeth are sufficiently bad. I think Washington would be a doddle to play.

Senior A what?

Cleese Doddle. It means something extremely easy to do. As in “The Life of Brian” when the old man says, “Crucifixion’s a doddle.” It’s one of my favorite lines in all the Python films.