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 mutally 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.

What the hell is that?



It's the jacaranda tree across the street! In case you've never seen one. They were imported to Southern California from Brazil, I believe, and they bloom every May. When you park under one it covers your car with little purple flowers.

If You Laugh, You're Doomed.

Jackson, in his car seat, while I drive him to school: "Fucking bullshit!"

Me: "Hey! Don't say that."

Jackson: "But I have to.

Me: "Ah, Jesus. No you don't. Where did you hear that?"

Jackson: (miffed silence)

Me: "Dahlia said that Sunday in the back yard, didn't she?"

Jackson: "Yes."

Me: "And do you remember what she said right after that? She apologized."

Jackson: (more miffed silence)

Me: "Sweetie, I know you hear those words at home, but you can not say them at school. You'll get in big trouble. Oh my god, your teachers will have a fit."

Jackson, pointing: "What the hell is that?"

Me: "Heck, what the heck is that. It's a jacaranda tree. They all turn purple this time of year."

Jackson: "It's fucking bullshit."

Me (desperately trying not to smile): "Kids don't say those words, honey, it makes grownups really mad. Remember when Caitlin told us that she got punished for saying a bad word at home, and then she didn't get a cookie after dinner?"

Jackson: "Fucking, fucking bullshit."

Me (becoming completely illogical): "And then Caitlin's mom started telling me how [another little girl] said bad words all the time, and that was really confusing for Caitlin when she's not supposed to say them, and then she started in on how it's the parents' fault, there's no consistent discipline. And I'm like, Oh boy, you should come to our house during basketball playoffs . . . Shit! There's a parking space!"

Jackson: "Fucking shit!"

Me (opening Jackson's door): "Okay, once we get out of this car, no more words like that. Got it?"

Jackson, standing on the back seat, aiming right at his school: "BULLSHIT!"

Tiny voice coming from behind the gate: "Jackson's here!"

Well, it's a sinus infection, I guess. I guess, or better yet, I guess.

Me: . . . nothing I've used seems to help so I thought it might be a sinus infection.
HMO "doctor": (looks in my ears) Hmm, well, it certainly might be! How about some antibiotics?

"Certainly might be." Not "definitely is." Just an educated guess! Just eight years of med school so I can work at a walk-in clinic letting people diagnose their own tumors and green sneezes! Yo ho ho!

Also, I just finished that Tom Perrotta novel about stay-at-home parents and their sad fantasies, and I came away with the overwhelming feeling that I'd read some sort of pre-novelization. Like the whole time he was writing the author knew in the back of his mind that he'd be turning this into a screenplay eventually, so why really work on fleshing out the minor characters? Let them be types, it'll be easier to cast that way.

But Perrotta also comes with mad Ivy League cred, so maybe I'll shelve the idea that he's incapable of greater depth and nourish the hope that he's actually some sort of literary master baker who's intentionally created this featherlight confection, and it's not his fault if I wanted a Thanksgiving dinner but got a meringue cookie instead.

I enjoyed parts of it, just like I enjoyed substantially fewer parts of the Ann Leary book, but I am still looking for the great parenting novel. If anyone has any recommendations, please share.

Much in the way that Sac promises to kick your ass slowly and unpleasantly with Tai Chi Chuan, I have foregone traditional over-the-counter medicines that are guaranteed to dry up the snot tornado still whirling through the trailer park of my head, and I'm now taking an incrementally efficacious Chinese herb formula called Tong Bi. For two nights I've reluctantly shelved the Sudafed and taken a nasty handful of herbs, and what's happened? Precisely nothing. If you're going to throw in with Mother Nature you might as well suffer cruelly for your naiveté. For two nights I've read Jackson bedtime stories in that comically nasal voice where M's become B's and N's become D's. Ad thed Bisses Pribb screabed, "There's a crocodile id the bathtub!" When my inner ears started throbbing last night, I knew another twister was a-headin' down Eustachian Tube Alley. But when I laid my head down on my pillow those herbs really started kicking in! Within three hours the one-third of a nostril that I'd been breathing through had subtly, ass-kickingly dialted to three-eighths of a nostril.

A few weeks ago I took Jackson out for date night. Jack had a jazz gig with just him on bass and Little Al* on guitar, on the leafy patio of a dance club downtown, and it was an altogether incredibly pleasant and civilized thing to do. Jackson just stayed in my lap eating french fries and listening to Blue in Green, and when it started to get a little chilly we said goodbye and walked down to Dahlia's bar so Jackson could get a kiss from the woman he loves. She wasn't in yet, though, so to siphon off the poison of his bitter disappointment, I bought him some ice cream.

There's a Coldstone Creamery just around the corner from Dahlia's bar. I'd never been there, but I had a dim memory of some interns at my last place of employment doing a little eye-rolling, lip-licking, "Ooooh it's so good look at me I have goosebumps just thinking about it" dance when someone mentioned the place. We went in, we got in line, we contemplated bins and endless bins behind finger-smeared glass of nuts and jimmies and cookie crumbs and coffee grounds and cigarette butts and things I personally would never want in my ice cream, like gummi bears. But I left it up to Jackson and he chose strawberry ice cream with peppermint patties mixed in. And right when our awkward teenager with a mouthful of braces was in the middle of paddling our products together, someone put a dollar in the tip jar. And all three teenage girls behind the counter slammed down their stainless steel scooper paddles on their refrigerated granite paddling surfaces and started SINGING AT THE TOP OF THEIR VOICES! BECAUSE NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED HERE AT COLDSTONE CREAMERY! Because you don't just apply for a job here, you audition. So we had to stand a foot away while the first, second, and third chair sopranos in the Santa Barbara High School Choir joylessly bellowed If You're Happy and You Know It for their .33 cents each.

And I haven't even gotten to the point of this story yet. So we're sitting and eating our ice cream at a sticky little kids' table that's about two feet off the ground when a girl about five years old comes up next to me. And I look up and smile at her and she gets this look of mild horror on her face. And of course I know what's wrong: my eyeball has once again slid out of place. I have a lazy eye, and it starts drifting center when I'm tired, or most annoyingly if I'm trying to eat and read at the same time. It's been years since anyone's said anything about it. I think it was maybe fourth grade when Mike diPietro stood up in the lunch room and shouted, "[THE FUTURE MRS. KENNEDY] IS CROSSEYED!" Grownups tend to doubletake and then politely ignore it**, but the more time I spend with the juice-and-graham-crackers set the more looks of utter confusion I receive. To the point where yesterday Jackson pleaded, "Mom, stop making your eyes scary."

* We have three Als in our life. Little Al was Little Al way before I met him; he's little, his name is Al, what can you do. Then we have Alastair, who is also a guitar player, but much more in the Shredding Lord of Rock style, so we call him Met-Al. As in Heavy. Heavy MetAl. Then we have Alison next door, and although I can't imagine a situation in which she'd be confused with the other two, she's British so we call her Posh Al. We were actually thinking of making a change to Sporty Al last week, but as I was in the midst of my Tequila Cleanse I'm not really sure what everyone agreed on.

** Jack claims that it was just this particular flaw that made him fall in love with me. So there you go, girls: if you ever want to lure my husband away, just look at him crosseyed and talk like Rosie Perez. I won't stand a chance.

I am once again testing the limits of sending holiday-deadline-specific gifts via the Internet. I thought Mother's Day was May 22; this morning, Jack informed me otherwise. MOTHER'S DAY IS SUNDAY, EVERYBODY. I am crossing all fingers and toes with the hope that gifts from various gift portals will arrive by Saturday, because I paid a bloody fortune for the let's-gouge-the-forgetful-shoppers shipping.

Also, everyone here at FussyCorp is in the grip of a cold. I was the last to get it. I had no concept of anyone else's suffering. How could I? No one whines enough. Jack is not a whiner. Once he had a bone infection in his jaw and when he finally got around to seeing the dentist he (the dentist) was like, Oh my GOD. You've had a bone splinter growing out of your jaw for two weeks. Most people would be in the hospital right now begging for heroin suppositories.

I don't think we're personally responsible for the plague of snot that has visited a certain preschool. Because I kept sending Jackson to school even though his nose was a little pink water faucet that you can't get to stop leaking even though you used Teflon tape. I don't think I created Typhoid Jackson. Jackson who is a whiner, who's been whining and drooping all week, and I've been idly picking the crust off his nostrils, which makes him cry because it hurts, but did I grasp and feel and knead his pain? No, I gave him another shot of cough syrup and a pat on the fanny and sent him back out onto the Play-Doh-covered field.

So, now I understand. Yes, when I woke up at 1:00 Tuesday morning with a sinus headache that not only covered the cubic foot that my head occupies, but stretched out to grasp everyone within a three-foot radius to include them in the misery, I understood why my little son is now addicted to Triaminic Cherry-flavored Cough & Cold syrup. Personally, I learned that Sudafed takes the aches and chills out of your body and plugs them firmly into your head. I have a dim memory of tasting my food, many years ago.

I'm sure you recall the scene in A Bug's Life where the ant, who is looking for some tough bugs to fight the grasshopper bully (who is named Hopper, and who kick-starts his leg and roars off with the sound of a chopper, and is played by . . . Kevin Spacey. Maybe Cyndi Lauper and Karl Popper were unavailable -- or, well, dead). SO, the ant goes into a bug bar and the first insect he meets is a drunken mosquito who sucks down a huge drop of O-positive and falls off his barstool. (Children's movies! LOVE 'em!) Then the bartender comes out of the kitchen and yells, "Who ordered the Pu-Pu Platter?" and a bunch of flies swarm over the plate in his hand, because -- well, you can see this one coming -- it's a poo-poo platter.

Jackson thinks this is about the funniest thing he has ever heard, and he rarely lets you forget it. He finds ways to weave the phrase "pu-pu platter" into the darkest corners of the spider-filled garage upon which rests our lives.

". . . W, X, Y and Z, now I know my ABC's, next time won't you HAVE A PU-PU PLATTER?"

"Bad girl, bad girl, what you gonna do? What you gonna do when a PU-PU PLATTER COMES FOR YOU?"

He sings that last one just like Eugene Levy.

Discursive possibilities between you* and me after you clobber me with a plastic sword.

*If you are nearly three years old

One
What I Say: "Ow! Don't do that!"
What You Say: "But I just did!"
What You Mean: Jesus, mom, why the fuck are you telling me not to do something I've already done? What, you want me to go back in time? Sorry, I left my Omega 13 Device back on Thermia.

Two
What I Say: "Hey! I told you not to do that!"
What You Say: "But it's fun!"
What I Say: "You can do anything you want unless it hurts someone. That hurt me. So don't do it again."
What You Do: Whack me in the back with your sword again.

Three
What I Say: "Goddamnit!"
What I Do: Grab sword and hit you between the shoulder blades with it.
What You Do: Stare at me in utter shock. Then cry.
What I Do: Hug you, but also feel like you deserved it and you're overreacting because I barely tapped you.
What Jack Says: "You hit mommy again and my foot will be so far up your ass you'll taste shoe leather."

Moral of the story
Mom will keep giving you another chance until her hacked-off limbs litter the living room floor, but don't ever fuck with dad.