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Back when I was pregnant I found it impossible to imagine what having a baby around all the time would really be like. I hadn’t planned on becoming pregnant — indeed, I’d never imagined myself to be mother material at all — so I didn’t have a lifetime of preparation that some women seem to get, starting with diapering their baby brothers/sisters and moving on through babysitting, baby showers, Pottery Barn catalogs, etc. And having strangers come up to me, pat my belly, and say, “Get your sleep now, while you can!” was irritating, not instructional.

Nobody can really tell you what it’s like, but for every child-free person who has ever wondered what’s the big deal? I have developed this simple visualization exercise. Find a comfortable seated position, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and we’ll begin.

Imagine you have a roommate

A roommate who communicates in cries, grunts, laughter, and blank stares

A roommate who needs you to carry him everywhere

Who grabs the remote out of your hand when you’re watching television and then starts randomly selecting channels and volume levels

Who needs to be dressed, sometimes three or four times a day because he pukes on himself

Who swats the cup of hot coffee out of your hand

Who bangs on the keyboard while you’re typing

Who pulls your hair

Who falls asleep on your shoulder while you’re vacuuming his room

Who cries when you leave him, and ignores you when you come back

Who is so magnetic that relatives will travel thousands of miles of just to ogle him, and then plead for new photographs weekly, saying “It only takes a second, just pop some in the mail!”

Who wakes you up at 3:30 a.m. crying/wanting to play

Who wakes you up at 5:30 a.m. wanting to suck on your nipples

Who would rather be naked than clothed

Who stuffs fistfuls of Cheerios into his mouth, and then coughs until he turns bright red

Who cries when his grandma tries to pick him up, and stops crying when you pick him up, thereby insulting grandma in the most personal way possible

Whom you both love sometimes, secretly, more than each other

Is it a neurosis of modern life or is it my reading list? — you just don’t find truly cruel characters in novels any more. But go back into the nineteenth century and whew. People are torturing kittens and beating horses to death and living lives totally devoted to spite. It’s so refreshingly unevolved! If you were feeling as though God had turned his face away from you, you were free to shamelessly follow the path of darkness.

But these days, everyone’s trying to be so nice.

Except the guy who used to have my phone number. Jack got me a cell phone so that I can be tracked down to the farthest corners of Babies R Us, but the number I’ve been assigned used to belong to some guy named Chris who, it seems, is in the process of burning some bridges. I am constantly taking calls from bill collectors, angry men with whiskey voices, tattoo parlors, and video stores trying to reclaim overdue rentals. It’s a real hoot.

THANKS 1,000,000 to Chris for the quick, cheerful, and unselfish help with my template problem.

Doesn’t everything look better now?

Can you remember what Fussy used to look like? That big ugly striped useless cell on the far right?

It’s gone now.

Well, I’m excited about it.

If you haven’t read it in a much-forwarded e-mail yet, here’s the story of the cat who got its head caught in a garbage disposal.

In case, like me, you need a reminder of when to use “lay” and when to use “lie,” go here.

Which reminds me, here’s yet another picky, anachronistic but useful entry from Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Second Edition (1926):

Parthian shot. It seems to be a coincidence that the popular corruption parting shot, which no doubt owes its origin to the similarity of sound, has a meaning akin to that of the parent phrase. Parthian shot refers to the tactics of the Parthian mounted archers, who would discharge a volley into the enemy while moving smartly out of range of retaliation; parting shot is ordinarily used to describe a ‘last word’ fired by one of the parties to an argument at the other before breaking off the verbal engagement. Although the Parthian tactics were undoubtedly formidable, it is a MISAPPREHENSION to use Parthian shot to mean merely an attack that strikes home; the essence of it is that the attack is made at the moment of retreat.

First off I will say that I have a great dentist, I’d recommend him to anyone. I had to get a broken crown fixed, so I went to his office a little early for my 4:00 p.m. appointment and was whisked straight in to a chair before I could even take off my jacket. The assistant pinned a bib around my neck and Cooper comes in, says Howyadoin?, sits down, pulls out a drill, says Turn toward me a little, and starts drilling my tooth! No novocaine, no reassurance, no nothing. I was like, Hey! Stop it! Which is hard to do with a whirring drill inside your mouth threatening to turn your tongue into hamburger. So he stops, and looks at me patiently, and finally says, It’s a nonvital tooth, you won’t feel anything, but that light’s pretty bright, here’s a pair of sunglasses.

So I sat there wearing old scratched-up sunglasses while he broke up my old crown with what felt like a jackhammer. Every time a new chunk broke off he’d say, Don’t swallow! and he’d reach in with little forceps and fish another piece of porcelain out from under my tongue.

But he’s fast. I had a temporary tooth in no time, and an appointment for the replacement crown in two weeks (gold this time — apparently I bite too hard for porcelain). Then I spent fifteen minutes talking to Brooke, a dental assistant who had her baby the day after Jackson came. Whenever I’m swapping birth stories I always try not to get self-righteous about the fact that my labor was relatively quick (six hours) and that we did the whole thing at home, safely and quietly (well, again, relatively quietly). Brooke, on the other hand, was in labor for thirty hours and after all that had a c-section. She’s forty pounds overweight and she’s ready to do it all over again! The confidence of some women just amazes me.

It’s time once again for me to ignore the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It’s not like I have an attitude about it — like, ooh, it’s so Hollywood. No, it’s just that every year the second week of March rolls around and I think, oops, forgot to go to the film festival again. Forgot to even pick up a schedule. It’s hard to tell anything special is even going on downtown — there’s still plenty of parking and you can get a dinner reservation for Saturday night — except that every couple of blocks you see a small group of middle-aged L.A. types with laminated badges strung around their necks. (Badges for unlimited screenings cost $750.) It’s certainly not all film-school shorts and other rinky-dink stuff. Last night they were honoring Angelica Huston, and tonight Kevin Spacey is giving an award to Sean Penn — all people I’d pay to see.

Except that we’ve hired a babysitter tonight so we can go out to dinner with friends. This will be the second time we’ve gone out in eight months. Yes, I’m nervous about it.

When I was at Connecticut College I had a radio show. I was on Sunday nights from midnight to 3:00 a.m. and I had a minimalist thing going: lots of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and whatever else I could find that was trance-y back in 1985 (Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins).

The art students loved me, I’d get calls from the painting studio at two in the morning thanking me for all the little butterflies I was sending through the airwaves, it was great music to zone out and paint to. I was also used to guys from the submarine base across the river calling up and hooting at me and asking me to play Jimi Hendrix or Deep Purple. I didn’t think twice about ignoring their requests — that kind of thing just didn’t fit in with the vibe of the show.

But one night this really tired-sounding woman called the studio. It seemed like it was a real effort for her to even talk to me, and she told me how she’d just finished fourteen hours of work and come home to an empty apartment, and it would really lift her spirits if I’d play John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” I felt sorry for her, but I was also a little annoyed with her — why was she calling me? Wasn’t she listening to the show, couldn’t she tell that I wasn’t playing stuff like that? John Lennon was just not going to fit into the gestalt of my sacred three hours of airtime. So like the spoiled little weasel I was, I ignored her request.

Now every time I hear that song I cringe inside for what I did.

Other fun things that happened at the radio station:

One night I decided to devote my entire show to playing Philip Glass’s epic opera “Einstein On the Beach.” About halfway through I got a call from a guy who just started yelling into the phone, “This is shit! This is SHIT! THIS IS SHIT!” The next day at lunch I was in the dining hall of my dorm when I overheard the antisocial nervous guy from my hall at the next table telling one of his pals, “. . . So I called up and yelled into the phone, ‘This is shit! This is shit!’ It was great!” I didn’t say anything, but I smiled on the inside.

Another time I got a call from someone with a really nasal voice telling me how much he liked my show and would I play this song or that song, who kept wanting to talk while I was putting records on and it was freaking me out because I needed to concentrate on what I was doing but I didn’t know how to politely hang up. Finally he started getting frustrated because I wasn’t getting the joke — it was my friend Brian calling from Ohio.

Today is Jackson’s eight-month birthday so I thought I’d burn him a CD of his favorite sides. He seems to like Pink, parts of the O, Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and the Beatles (especially “Across the Universe”). He’s a little lukewarm on Oasis and P.J. Harvey.

Jack has already given Jackson one of his electric basses — he lays it down on the floor and puts Jackson’s hands on the strings and lets him make random noises. They both really light up when he hits a note.

Now:

Mary J. Blige, P.J. Harvey, Bjork, Radiohead, Beck

In 1992:

Throwing Muses, Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, Nick Cave

In 1982:

Pretenders, David Bowie, Specials, Police, Clash, Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Prince

In 1972:

Stevie Wonder, Beatles, Jackson 5, Cher, Chi-Lites, Elton John

You know, I don’t want to be a spoiled brat, but this dishes-and-laundry thing gets old some days. Today I arranged Jack’s polo shirts by color in the order of the visible spectrum.

Lance Armstrong was in town last week, riding around with Fastrack Dave. Lance comes here to train sometimes, because of Santa Barbara’s temperate climate, plus the combination of hills and flats makes for good cycling. I’ve been reading his book and sometimes it puts a lump in my throat.

Jack and his friend Dennis just went out for a ride. When Jack told Dennis that Lance Armstrong was in town, Dennis put on this real low, mean voice and said, “Tell him I’m looking for him.“