I’m having another wardrobe crisis, people. This means that once again I’m threatening to set my closet on fire and wear nothing but skateboarder t-shirts and these fantastic new jeans I got at the Levi’s outlet in the “Husky Girls” section that bow out and make my legs look like I’ve been riding a pony all day. For shoes I’m thinking of strapping some bits of tire tread to my feet with electrical tape, or possibly organic hemp rope for a touch of Masai warrior chic. And it’s all because I work in Montecito. I can’t go to the goddamned post office without running a gantlet of plastic surgery victims tiptoeing up to the Montecito Market for their lunchtime bottle of Dom Perignon. In their context, suddenly everything I own, wear, carry, and drive feels like a statement. The dirty Volvo bought out of paranoia now makes me feel like a prep school mom. The sturdy Coach bag, once a practical investment, now feels expensive and showy. Women look at my fantastic, spiritually-superior yoga muscles and ask, “Who’s your trainer?” Or, “Pilates?” And God knows what they think of my crow’s feet, my jawline, my unBotox’d forehead. I’m so tired of feeling examined. But next month we’re moving our office to downtown Santa Barbara, into half of a gallery space next to a tiny barber shop and across the street from that Mexican bar where all the local softball teams go to get plastered after the game. Hence I am hoping that my highly professional husky girl jeans, goofy t-shirts, and third-world footwear will propel me into ninja-like invisibility for awhile. I need a selfconsciousness break.

Here’s a delightful post by woman who lists 100 things she is grateful to have learned from her mom. Naturally, this has inspired me to write a list of things I have taught Jackson*.

1. It’s okay not to bathe for several days in a row. Like, three. Five is pushing it, but if it’s after 10 p.m. and your fingernails are clean and you aren’t developing one of those dirt neck rings, let’s go see what’s on the Cartoon Network.

2. No, you can’t have gum for breakfast, but Ritz cracker sandwiches with fake cheese filling from last week’s birthday party goodie bag seem to be okay, especially if we’re late for school.

3. You want us to spend your college money on Power Ranger toys? SURE!

*Don’t worry, I put a dollar in his Therapy Jar every day.

Janna did this smart-guy post about choosing five famous living or dead people she’d invite to dinner. And I was like, Hmm, should I go the Abraham Lincoln, Jesus route? Or should I do the same list I did when I was, like, 12, and the first person on my list was CALIGULA? And my brother was all, “You know, Mrs. Kennedy, the real Caligula probably wasn’t anything like John Hurt.” At the time we were white-knuckling it through the first American run of “I, Claudius” (or, as we called it, because of the limits created by trying to mosaic and/or chisel the alphabet, “I, Clavdivs”), and I found Mr. Hurt’s Caligula devastating. So seductive; so willing to slit open your belly, tear the fetus from your womb, and smash its head against a tree. Which is what my brother was trying to get at. Still, a Roman emperor, after enough good wine? I think he’d have some stories.

Did I ever tell you about the time I met a real live Nazi? During Easter break during my year at the University of Edinburgh, my parents got on an airplane in Denver, and I took a few twisty train rides south (remind me to tell you about that some time), and we all found each other in the Frankfurt airport. Good luck on my part because after I managed to find the airport I realized that I had no idea (1) what time my parents’ flight was due in, (2) what airline they were on, or (3) how to speak German. In my been-sleeping-sitting-up-in-a-coat-that-stinks-of-cigarettes-for-three-days state of mental dishevelment, I just happened to shuffle past the baggage carousel, and there they were.

My father is an absolute nut about World War II, to the extent that he reads endless volumes of World War II German army division histories, in German. When he runs out of new ones he rereads the old ones, even though, unbelievably, new ones are published every day. He occasionally corresponds with the authors of these histories, and he wrote to one author, named Otto Weidinger, who went so far as to supply my father with an autographed photo and an invitation to tea at his house. In Germany.

We showed up at a tidy middle-class house in Aalen, and were led to seats in a somewhat formal sitting room where the author’s somewhat formal wife offered us tea and cookies. Unfortunately, the limits of my vocabulary force me to describe Herr Weidinger as dapper, as I guess I would anyone of a certain age who combs his hair with Brylcreem and wears a suit to his own living room. I could tell my father was nervous (certainly we all were underdressed — Americans! tromping down the Rhine in Reeboks), but I wasn’t sure how to encourage him. His German was great when it came to chatting with taxi drivers and Chinese immigrants*, but sitting there with a native speaker while a million questions rose up and then fled from his head, well, we had more than one awkward silence. Somehow it came out that he was seventy years old, a fact that my father repeated politely for my mother and me. “You’re SEVENTY?” I shouted. I thought he was, like fifty. (This was 1985, so if he was fifty then, that means he would have been leading the Der Führer Regiment out of Oradeur at the age of ten. Yes, my grasp of living history was THAT STRONG.) Anyway, you should have seen his face light up. Nothing flatters a man more, apparently, than a young woman with no grasp of the historical timeline of the twentieth century. Then we hit upon the fact that Herr Weidinger spoke French, as did I, and the big spotlight swung over to me. Suddenly everyone looked at me expectantly, as though a hidden aquifer of sparkling conversational French would suddenly bubble over and drown the kitten of my father’s shyly inadequate college German. Unfortunately, I did what I always do when under pressure: I underperform until somebody says it’s okay to quit.

It wasn’t until we were driving away in our rental Ford Escort that the 40-watt bulb that powers my brain finally flickered on. “Dad, was that guy a NAZI?” I asked. If there’s one tiny flaw my father has, apart from his occasional but alarming alignment with the paranoid right, it’s his belief that the holocaust absolutely did not happen. Kidding! It’s his ability to defend an indefensible position with academic clarity. With footnotes, even. “Well, not everyone in the German army was a Nazi,” he began mildly, and wah wah wah until I saw that by not answering my question he had answered my question, and I was left staring at the passing scenery with a fat gray cloud over my head, and the uncomfortable feeling that I had just eaten a bunch of cookies made from the ashes of thousands of G.I. Jews.

And the other people at the table would be Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Betty White, and Al Franken.

*At some point in the trip we went to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, and I was shocked, shocked! to discover that Asian people emigrated to countries other than America, and struggled to learn a second language other than English. My father actually pieced together a conversation, in German, with the owner’s Cambodian wife about the killing fields, and both of them were nearly in tears. If there’s one thing I need to learn from my father it’s knowing when to lay off the ghoulish interest in the details of other people’s tragedies.

Can I blame the previous post on hormones? Sure! And while I’m doing that I’ll go ahead and blame this whole Web site on hormones. Rare moments of miserable introspection sandwiched between endless amounts of egomaniacal white bread, making one big LOOK AT ME AND HOW GREAT I AM sandwich. Honestly. Therapy would be more efficient, but for some reason it’s a lot more entertaining to blab at a bunch of people I can’t see than to blab at one who kept smoothing her trousers and unobtrusively checking the time, who I couldn’t figure out if she was a lesbian or not, whose name was listed in the phone book with another woman with the same last name, who who who who.

My skin’s breaking out, my tits feel like someone’s been using them for punching bags, and for about 24 hours there everything Jack did made me want to run around naked with my hair on fire screaming IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY WHY DON’T YOU TAKE YOUR SON TO THE PARK SO I CAN LAY HERE ON THE LAYER OF CRACKER CRUMBS WE CALL A CARPET AND CONCENTRATE ON THE LITTLE SALTY RIVERS STREAMING DOWN MY TEMPLES AND POOLING IN MY EARS.

And while we’re at it, honey, can you quit taking care of everything? Because since the moment the Nut was born I have been acutely aware of my total dependence on you. I have no more money of my own, I can’t cook, I have less marketable skills than the average middle school graduate, all I can do is feed spearmint gum to a little boy who thinks the height of comedy is to bend over and fart.

So, yeah, normally I can sweep all of this under our disintegrating nylon Home Depot faux-Oriental rug, but for some reason, with the tits and the zits and the hard look at my total lack of direction and purpose, yes, tears, and the inappropriate sharing of drunken self-portraits. When I start posting song lyrics, feel free to shoot me.

Kind of not thinking today, due to unexpected hormonal wig-out!! — but here are a few things to chew on all the same.

1. This morning Jackson began calling G.I. Joes “G.I. Jews,” but I felt, sort of regretfully, obliged to set him straight.

2. I’ve spent every spare minute of the last two days trying to fit three years of badly stored photo negatives into archival negative sleeves. And in the process discovering, well, this stuff.

August 1995, DRUNK OFF MY ASS and wearing my Zubin Mehta t-shirt. The summer I met Jack. This at his mom’s house, while his step-dad was dying of cancer.

October 2000, HOO-BOY, THE SECOND HONEYMOON IN ZIHUATENEJO. Can you tell that I didn’t know I was pregnant here, but spent the entire week weeping and going to bed early? You have to click on it to really feel the icy chill of my “Don’t Touch Me” force field.

WARNING: BABY PHOTOS

July 2001, This picture always makes me think of Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.

AAAAARGH!

About ten years ago my friend George wrote and directed a play about Carlos the Jackal. International jet-setting terrorists aren’t really my bag, baby, but George is a talented guy so I did the drive down to Ventura for a performance, wearing, as I recall, a pleated plaid mini skirt. The only reason I mention that is because (a) it was the first time I met George’s wife and I’m not sure how pleased she was with me looking like that and kissing her husband, and (b) to admit as an aside that I used to be kind of a jerk around wives and girlfriends, but (c) fortunately I seem to have grown out of it.

Anyway, if you don’t feel like clicking on that link, I’ll tell you that Carlos the Jackal was renowned for dodging Johnny Law (or, I suppose, Juan la Ley), and he slipped under the eagle eyes of justice many times by doing drastic things to modify his appearance, like plastic surgery and liposuction. [I hope you noticed the internal rhyme of drastic and plastic in that last sentence. You did? Awesome.]

Between acts the house lights came up and an astonishing (to me) song came over the loudspeakers. George meant it as a humorous comment on Carlos’s liposuction, and the song was called, ha ha, “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy.” And I was sitting there in my little Catholic-schoolgirl-gone-bad outfit thinking, Holy shit, I never knew a man whose larynx was made out of sandpaper could seduce women by singing through a broken radiator filled with potsherds.

I drove back up to Santa Barbara and found Jack sitting on my couch watching television, and I said, I just heard the most amazing song, and Jack was all, You’ve never heard any Howlin’ Wolf before? I pretty much think of those first six months of our relationship as The Very Long Summer of Howlin’ Wolf, with a few weekends of Etta James thrown in there for some rusty-voiced yin. There’s an extremely embarrassing photo of me at the Bushmills-fueled ass-end of one of our record parties dancing to “300 Pounds”; I look like a lily-white but drunken bookstore clerk doing some kind of Frug variation whose energy and appeal absolutely did not translate from the lived moment through the eye of an idiot-proof one-shot camera and onto a cold, hard 4 x 5 glossy Kodak print.

Last Monday I was driving to yoga at 5:50 a.m. when Hello NPR! They’re doing a story on, say it with me: Chester Burnett*, the boy raised 100 feet from the railroad tracks who grew into the man who made the incomprehensible leap from Delta farmer to Musical Force of Nature whose deeply religious mother rejected him for his secular success and broke his heart forever.

It actually turns out to be a good thing to have “Smokestack Lightnin’ ” going through your head as you coax your body through several early-morning surya namaskaras. It beats the hell out of Sting, or Krishna Das, or whoever’s doing the Anglo-Indian popstar chanting these days. So now I must I give thanks for the cultural bridges of George, NPR, and my husband, bringing races together with respect, intelligence, peace, and harmony. But it takes a weirdo like me to roll up Howlin’ Wolf in a yoga mat for you like a gift. A gift that smells like my feet.

*That’s his real name. I just thought maybe you were sick of reading “Howlin’ Wolf.” Those apostrophes can be downright exhausting.

Yesterday I had the most terrifying food experience of my adult life. Jackson and I opened a box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. I have no excuse for this $1.99-for-fifteen-jelly-beans extravagance, except that I’m one of those Harry Potter-reading idiots. Last summer I started the first book in the series as mindless beach reading, insisting to all those within earshot that I needed to vet it because Jackson would probably want to read it someday and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t pure trash, or, as certain exceedingly Roman Catholic members of my family seem to think, full of the wicked magical temptations of a Satanic Beastmaster. With each new volume I shed my reluctance like so much sweaty lingerie, and I raced through the first five books in the series, pronouncing them excellent indeed. Almost everyone with whom I shared this revelation excused themselves to go vomit, with the exception of several homeschooled eight-to-thirteen-year-olds. (I sent the Harry Potter books to my smartyboots Ph.D.-candidate sister-in-law for Christmas, and was gratified to find that sometime around the third of January she was drafting a letter to J. K. Rowling demanding that she write and release the sixth Harry Potter book this instant. This proves nothing other than that I am insecure about my latent affinity for adolescent fantasy fiction, and need to have my tastes propped up by associating them with people smarter than me.)

ANYWAY, I bought a couple of boxes of the aforementioned Harry Potter-inspired jelly beans thinking that it would be fun for Jackson and me to pick through the pleasant tastes of grape jelly and toasted marshmallows and spaghetti and grass. I was kind of only half-processing the fact that other flavors included in the box were vomit, booger, soap, dirt, earthworm, earwax, and sardine.

And guess what? THE FUCKING THINGS TASTE EXACTLY LIKE VOMIT, BOOGERS, SOAP, DIRT, EARTHWORMS, EARWAX, AND SARDINES. Soap? Actually, it’s rose-scented soap, and as it was one of the first of the more dangerous flavors I tried, the fact that it was halfway palatable gave me the courage to continue. Naturally, I didn’t even know what earthworms tasted like until I popped one of those fuckers in my mouth and said to myself, Yes, that’s pretty much what I’d expect an earthworm to taste like: a heady blend of dirt and the smell of squished worms on the wet sidewalk after a rainstorm in front of my house when I was five years old. Earwax was nothing, but I seriously almost puked after a bite of sugar-coated sardine. The only flavor they’re missing at this point is Abyssinian cat shit.