It was an eventful week. Jack had a birthday, for one, but actually not "for one," as he seems to have leveraged his birth day into spanning an entire Birth Week. Last Monday night he said, "It's my birthday this week and I want steak tonight." Now, Friday night is steak night, not Monday. I mean, we're not weird about it, it's not like Tuesday is meatloaf and Wednesday is spaghetti and Thursday is pot au feu with winter vegetables and a nice beaujolais, rain or shine; no. But Friday is the end of the work week, a day on which Jack usually feels as thought his brains have been beaten out and his soul filled with concrete, so a nice filet mignon is one way he rewards himself for a job well done. You can also think of it as a nice way to flip the bird at my Catholic upbringing, if you're not yet tired of me complaining about the Pope and His Medieval Rules That I Do Not Agree With.

So. Monday night I picked up three steaks and he brought home a pricey-looking Chateauneuf du Pape. [That's French for Ninth Castle of the Pope -- that's right, it seems that the Pope used to have NINE CASTLES. And he was a DRUNK.] So Jack poured me a glass of Papist vin rouge and for the first time in my life I understood how all those wine people can taste hints of gooseberries and parsnips in a young burgundy, except I had a drink of this particular Chateauneuf du Pape and it took me a minute to figure out what I was tasting, and then all of a sudden I shouted "APRICOTS!" It's fun; I suggest you try it. And then naturally for the next few days any time I ate so much as a Wheat Thin Jack would shout "APRICOTS!" and as the week progressed we found lots of other things to shout at each other during dinner, like "CARDBOARD!" and "GASOLINE!"

Anyway, I seem to have this thing when I drink unfamiliar red wine: I get insomnia. And after this fancy-pants bottle of red I went to sleep as usual at around 10:00 p.m., then woke up at 12:30 a.m., and lay there in bed awake until 5:00 a.m. Honestly, can you think of anything more fun than that? What a delight it was to roll over and check the clock every twenty minutes for four and a half hours. I actually did read a little, with a flashlight tucked under my chin, but no matter what I do I seem to be always exactly halfway through this Norrell & Strange book and occasionally I get a little creeped out by it, so, you know, great insomnia reading! Let's stay up all night working that gray-tinge-of-death-always-hovering-in- the-corner-of-your-eye angle!

Tuesday was spent putting one foot in front of the other -- on four hours of sleep, small things are easily lost and it becomes very important to concentrate. Wednesday was back to normal, whatever that is, and woot! Thursday was Jack's birthday and it turned into SakeFest '05. As in five! Bottles! Of! Sake! Normally, as a parent, I don't sit around getting hooched all the time, and I think it's also a good policy that at least one of us remains sober enough for that trip to the emergency room so if I'm holding a bleeding, crying child I don't also reek of Old Crow. But woo-hoo, did I feel like shit on Friday morning. We were supposed to be getting ready to go up to Pismo Beach to visit friends for the weekend but instead of showering and packing I just lay on the couch like a corpse and watched Jackson absorb the horror that is Oobi.

That's when Jack introduced me to that ancient cure of the Kennedy Clan: beer for breakfast.

I think I'm going to stop drinking for a while.

Good morning, I'm humorless and resentful, as are many moms who blog. We overscrutinize our children's every excretion and whore out adorable anecdotes about them just to get attention for ourselves!

Also, you may have noticed, I have a name. I fully intend never to use it again and to continue hiding behind my husband, because I'm shy and delicate and need the kind of protection that only a big, strong, breadwinning man can provide.

What else? Lunchables! I feed my son Lunchables!

You know what, though: I can complain about it, but I got quoted in the New York fuckin' Times, baby, along with some of my very favorite Interweb pals, and that's pretty good.

So for some reason I decided that it was time Jackson knew a joke.

Me: Okay, when I say "knock knock" you say "who's there?"

Jackson: Who's there?

Me: Good. Knock knock.

Jackson: (silence)

Me: Now you say "who's there?"

Jackson: But I already did!

Me: Well, just say it again. Knock knock.

Jackson (god my mother is stupid): Who's there?

Me: Lettuce.

Jackson: Okay, come in.

Me: No, you say, "Lettuce who?"

Jackson (wtf?): Lettuce who?

Me: Lettuce in! Get it? It's like let us in. You see? It's a play on words.

Jackson: *sigh*

A few days later I remembered another one that my best friend in high school used to tell me when we were high.

Knock knock. Who's there? Dwayne. Dwayne who? Dwayne the bathtub I'm dwowning.

Those are the only two knock-knock jokes I can think of.

We needed new dishes. We'd needed them for years. A bowl had shattered; a salad plate bit the dust. Eating off a cracked plate isn't so bad, although I'm sure my mother would have something to say about the bacteria growing in that blackened vein. No, what eventually gets to you is the thirty seconds between loading this plate up with food and carrying it to the table, when you can feel the almost-broken edges grinding together beneath your chicken Marsala, that makes you curse (1) all the lost hours trawling the aisles of Pier 1 for replacement pieces of this discontinued faux-bistro ware, and (2) the fact that you can't just put on some safety goggles and take this plate and crack it in two with your bare hands, because even though there are three good plates and only three of us, we always need this fourth plate to hold a cake, or for the increasingly rare single dinner guest, or for some goddamn thing or another.



Impulsively, I bought a new set of plates, etc., online. It was only four place settings, but it came in two enormous, though not very heavy, cardboard boxes. Could something else be packed in there by mistake? Pillows? Basketballs? HUMAN HEADS?!*

*Astute readers will note that the desire to find a human head is not mine, but has been borrowed from Mimi Smartypants to achieve a humorous effect. The phrase "humorous effect" was borrowed from Alice.



No such luck. Just a buttload of packing peanuts (not even the good kind that dissolve in your mouth like Cheetos) and more of the lifestyle-porn/propaganda that got this stuff into my house in the first place.



This is the only box that says "Made in USA or China." Once again my feeble attempt to circumvent the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China in the purchasing of my cereal bowls has been cruelly thwarted. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the Dalai Lama for my inadvertent support of America's ruthlessly oppressive trading partner.



My GOD, each box is a perfect reduced-impact nest of quality bubble wrap. The ex-shipping and receiving clerk inside me swoons.



Did my love of magnificent packing materials transmit itself genetically to the next generation? You be the judge.



Wow, plates that actually have something stamped on the back. "Since 1901." Well, that's nice, and I certainly appreciate the Americana value. This reminds me that there's rumored to be a trove of vintage Fiestaware somewhere in Jack's family. However, I'm not the type to sit around waiting for someone to die before I can get my hands on some unchipped teacups.



I suddenly realize that these are the same kind of dishes my old roommate Eric bought from a restaurant supply house and brought to our apartment back in Brooklyn. Eric was from Buffalo, too. I am momentarily wistful.



These things are sturdy as shit. And since I'm poised to retire all of Jackson's sippy cups, I feel confident that even if one does break I can actually replace it (curse you, Pier 1).



So, goodbye dishes that Jack bought with his ex fifteen years ago, I will spare some of this fine bubble wrap to ensure your safe transit to the Salvation Army donation trailer.



Pier 1's still okay for candles, though.

Overhead by Jack on the bike path:

". . . so when I get bored I sit on my hands until they're numb, and then when I jerk off it feels like someone else is doing it. I call it The Stranger."

It seems that the people set O.J. free so that he could enjoy running around the municiple golf courses of L.A. frightening Australian tourists.

A while back I was out having dinner with Jack and my boss and his domestic fella and their girlfriend, T. T is sixty or so, with lots of elegant gray hair, and to powerful things she brings an immense power*. Seriously, she should just walk around in an ermine robe and carry a sceptre and orb, she's downright regal. Whenever she notices me she gives me these long, appraising, heavy-lidded looks, and the only thought there's room for in my tiny, rodent brain is "this woman could eat me alive without smudging her lipstick."

So, we were waiting for the first course and everyone was quietly talking about some Hollywood folk who were at the next table, and my boss asked me, "Did you know T was once nominated for an Academy Award?"

"For producing Norma Rae," said domestic fella.

Then T elegantly arched her cossack-black eyebrows and asked me, "Did you see it?"

And I thought, Well, I could lie, but I don't know enough about the film to fake it, so I bucked up and said, "No." And just like that I was banished from everyone's consciousness for the next ten minutes.

Being ignored at parties gives me lots of time for self-reflection, and while everyone discussed the other films up for Oscars in 1979 I realized I'd seen all of them, some even two or three times.

With a little tequila it didn't take me long to figure out why I'd never even wanted to see Norma Rae: I was raised by prefeminist cavepeople.

I am not blaming my ignorance on my lovely, lovely parents, who were born during the Coolidge administration and who, to the best of my knowlege, never lived in a cave, either together or separately. No, my dad's a with-it guy, and he never, ever told me there was anything I couldn't do just because I was a girl, although my mom's pleasantly submissive role-modeling taught me that staying home with the soaps and the laundry and mowing the grass and working part-time for the phone company wasn't a bad lot for a small-town girl. No, what really bent my brain was worshipping at the altar of my magnetic next-oldest brother. If he thought something was totally bogus then By God I'd cut my conscience to fit his idea of what a boss little sister ought to be.**

Yes, thanks to the overwhelming influence of Our Man Flint on my household, I grew up in the Triumphant Era of Gloria Steinem thinking that men knew everything and that it would be totally, incomprehensibly wrong if women were priests, flew airplanes, delivered babies, or, hell, delivered the mail. I still catch myself thinking that way sometimes, and it occurs to me that a post I wrote a while back about how I judged older men in retail jobs to be either experts in their field or managers or store owners was partly a product of a lifelong fear-based instinct to hand over all power and authority to men, and then to completely resent them for it.

Norma Rae is about a woman who works in a textile factory and who slowly realizes that she and all the other women who work there are getting treated like crap, and she organizes them and fights the power and wins an Oscar. People liked her, they really, really liked her. And I still haven't seen it. Is Burt Reynolds in it? I'll see it if there's a scene where Burt Reynolds drives a Camaro under a semi truck.

*Rilke.

**Bogus things: James Taylor, ballet, flutes. Approved manly entities: Ted Nugent, Corvettes, movies in which lots of people get shot.

Like most parents, it seems, we teach our three-year-old son lines from The Godfather. For example, sometimes Jackson forgets to say "please." Imagine! So, one day Jackson wanted some gum or something and Jack started coaching him. "Say please," said Jack. "Please," said Jackson with just that perfect touch of imitation teenage exasperation. "Please, Daddy, I love you so much," Jack continued, beginning to sound vaguely Italian. "Please, Daddy, give me the gum!" said Jackson. "Please, Daddy, I love you so much I'm-a gonna die!" said Jack. Jackson eventually kind of whispered the line, giggling with what appeared to be his first flush of parental embarrassment. Naturally we were pleased that we had successfully turned him into a little Clemenza*.

Jackson only said the line twice, as I recall, and then he said he wouldn't say it anymore because he didn't want to die. And suddenly it seemed to be time to talk about death. I was unprepared. Jackson asked me if I was going to die. I said not for a long time. The he asked if he was going to die. And I said not for a long time. Then he started getting really worried and saying he didn't want to die, at all, ever. So I started trotting out The Various Theories of Comfort. "Some people believe that we have a spirit inside us that never dies," I told him, and he liked that. "What's a spirit?" "It's your energy," I said, wondering if Jack was going to line up with me on this one. "Do mummies have spirits?" "They used to, now they're just dead bodies." "Why do they put food in mummy cases?" Argh. But then I thought, fuck it, let's go Buddhist on his ass, and I started telling him how some people believe that when your body dies your spirit goes into another body and you get to be a baby all over again, and he was all, "Whatever. Can we go to the store and buy some Bubble Tape?"

Then we were in the movie theater restroom taking a quick break from Racing Stripes** and in the echoey pink tiled bathroom he piped up reassuringly for all to hear, "We're not gonna die because we have spears inside us!"

My little holy warrior. I have to keep remembering that even though he can sing the entire alphabet, the age of reason is still down the road a piece.

* Clemenza's showing Mike how to make spaghetti sauce when Kay calls for Mike on the phone, and when they're done talking she says, "I love you, Michael," and Michael says, "Uh huh," and Kay says, "Aren't you going to tell me you love me?" and Clemenza knows exactly what's going on and he goes, "Mikey, why don't you tell that nice girl you love her? I love you with all-a my heart, if I don't see you again soon, I'm-a gonna die!"

**Don't. Just don't