I Am The New Birth Control

I've been thinking about teen pregnancy and how it seems so difficult for people to find a way to dissuade young people from getting knocked up. We seem, as a society to want everyone to wait to have babies until our sperm and eggs are arthritic because then we will have the emotional stability to handle having a baby. (Although it's my personal view that you can live to be a wise old bat and still have the emotional maturity of a fourteen year old.)

So how do we discourage teens from having sex unprotected sex? I've come up with a plan: send them to me. I think I can tell them stories that will make their breasts and balls shrivel up into raisin sized sacks of fear. The real problem is that they're not scared enough yet. We've made such a big worshipful ideal out of babies and children in our country that all the celebrities are doing it. That tells teens that having babies, even if you have the first one by "accident", is cool and makes life complete.

I know that there are plenty of women out there who had blushingly wonderful pregnancies and deliveries who are still wearing their rosy glasses that allow them to forget some of the less savory details of the business of having babies. I hate you. I am not one of you. My brain won't let me wear rosy glasses no matter how much I have pleaded my case. Many other women, it turns out, didn't get rose colored glasses either.

So here's the dark side of the coin:

• Nine months my ASS! Pregnancy really lasts forever. You think it will go by fast and before you know it you'll be drinking cokes in your bikini by the beach while a nanny watches your angel sleep. Nine months is a long time to: not drink caffeine, not eat trash, not drink alcohol, not smoke cigarettes, not be in control of your bladder, not get in bitch slapping fights, and to be lonely because your non-pregnant friends are busy doing non-pregnant things.

• Your sex drive will spike. This might seem totally cool at first. Because who doesn't want to be horny every hour of the day that you're not napping like a grandma? But for many it burns strong and bright right before petering out FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

• You will never be able to do whatever you want again. You will be beholden to a little despot who needs you all hours of the day and are very vocal about it. You will never spend another moment of your life without listening for cries. Even when you finally have a little time to yourself you will not be able to turn off your mommy radar.

• You may think you only have to get through the first few months of not sleeping. It is perhaps true for a parent or two out there, but for the rest of us? It's more like five years of no sleep. By the time your kid is letting you get sleep they start doing things like staying up later than you and getting up earlier. Five years is a long time to not get a proper night of sleep. Not getting sleep because you're partying is a lot more fun than not getting sleep because your kid won't let you.

• Having a baby will rip your vagina up. That's right, it will stretch it out and if it doesn't tear you may have to have it snipped and I can tell you from personal experience that either way TOTALLY SUCKS. You think a baby's head is so small when you're holding one in your arms...but when you are having to push it out of your cervix it feels like you're pushing out a Zeppelin. You will fear going to the bathroom for weeks, possibly for months.

• It's expensive. Having babies is more expensive than having a twenty year drug habit, which, by the way, you'll want to start in on right after giving birth if you didn't already have one before. You can have babies and be terribly poor but I promise you that it will be the most dismal ride ever.

• You will never want to have sex again. After all the hormones finish wreaking their havoc, (IF THEY EVER DO), and your vagina has been ripped and stretched, leaked for weeks, and has finally returned to some semblance of normal, you will be so tired from taking care of your Zeppelin baby that you will much prefer to get close to pints of ice cream every night rather than have yet another pair of needy hands grope your body.

• No matter how much time passes you will not forget how painful giving birth was. You will have nightmares about being pregnant again. You will wake up in cold sweats and want to cut off your partner's penis to prevent another pregnancy. You will have dark circles under your eyes from the memory of that awful tearing and all the blood...so much blood! Now look, I think it's important that I remind you all that I broke my hip and while that was so painful I cried every time I had to go to the bathroom for the first month (and I didn't take any pain pills besides Advil), giving birth was worse. I had an epidural near the end but even so, it was worse. And if you think I have a low thresh hold for pain let me just repeat what my doctor said to me after she saw my hip x-rays "You must be one hell of a stoic person!".

I think that should do the trick, don't you? With everyone always talking about babies like they're some dreamy easy accessory to life it's no wonder so many teens are careless. Send them to horrible Aunt Angelina! You just wait and see if your darling budding sexual babies don't come begging you for a chastity belt.

That conclude the public service portion of my day. Next up? Something light and fluffy.

Guilty Pleasures

At what point does a guilty pleasure cross the line into a compulsion or an obsession? How strange or dirty does a guilty pleasure have to be before it stops being a guilty pleasure and becomes pathological, illegal, or just plain antisocial? What makes a pleasure a guilty one surely depends on our level of embarrassment in our enjoyment of the pleasure. But, is a guilty pleasure only good because we are embarrassed and enjoy it in secret? Have you ever lost your inappropriate pleasure once you found out that lots of other people share it?

I think what makes a pleasure a guilty one depends on our expectations of how other people perceive us, on our expectations we cherish for ourselves, and how we each see ourselves fitting together in this mad world. Mostly I think it has to do with how we WANT other people to perceive us and how some of our pleasures are like a huge contradiction to everything we want other people to believe about who we are. Or maybe it's just that some of the things we find most delicious are embarrassing because we want to be someone we aren't.

Let's take a look at a few of mine:

I am a magazine whore- I mostly look at magazines for the images. The pictures-not the articles. The fact that I sometimes find excellent writing in fashion magazines is just a bonus. Magazines are a glossy view into other people's lives. You don't open up your life to me enough so I have to go and pry into the lives of people who are motivated to be seen, heard, and paid to be public. Magazines are like candy. They feed my body color and most important? Hope. Yep, hope. Hope that maybe life holds more than dirty socks for me. Hope that maybe I'm not the most idiotic stupid person alive. Hope that I'm not the fattest, ugliest, meanest, and that some day I will look around me and I will want for nothing. Intelligent people supposedly seek out only quality entertainment and don't indulge in such plebeian amusements. A lot is expected of smart people.

Peanut butter and honey- on a spoon. But never just one spoonful. I can quietly consume half a jar of peanut butter. I fill a spoon half full of peanut butter and then pour the same amount of honey on the spoon and then I carefully attempt to take in equal portions of each in my mouth. I will do this until I feel kind of sick. I don't do this in front of people. Not even in front of Philip, though I'm pretty sure he's very aware that I do this. It's a little like sucking on a pacifier. Which I never did because my mom wouldn't give me one so instead I sucked my thumb until I was seven and apparently caused myself (according to my mom) to require a retainer to tame my wild overbite.

Imagining my oldest nemesis in various deflating scenarios- It's been just about thirty years since I was pushed out of my chair, threatened constantly, teased, dissed, and shunned by the most popular girl in Briscoe Elementary during my time there. Let's just say that I have good reason to see her as a blousy aged blond single mom with six kids and very wrinkled flesh from all that sunbathing she used to do. I don't have to say why this is such a guilty pleasure. The underdog must entertain such fantasies. We all know she's probably a wildly successful and happy person who wouldn't hurt a fly now that she's seen the light of Jesus.

See's Candy- Having such great appreciation for high quality food it is reasonable to expect me to like fancy quality chocolate better than the evil corporate See's. Well, what can I say? There's nothing quite like the experience of opening a box of See's and rooting around for the best flavors and leaving half of them bitten into and left behind. It is way too sweet, it makes me want to drink an ocean of water right about the moment it's too late to save myself...yet every time I come across a box of See's I feel excited.

Yellow Scrub Sponges- I believe they are made of artificial materials, which is bad. I like to use a new one every week or two. I've been trying to stretch it out as long as possible because I know that eventually my conscience will demand that I give them up altogether. I want to make good choices for this planet of ours. I want to help it heal not just for me and mine but also I think about the rest of you too and how all my choices impact ALL OF US. I'm so sorry. I just haven't been able to give them up yet. I love how they work. I love when they're new and don't smell or shred and they soak up that soap and I get this indescribable frisson of pleasure doing my dishes and working out the initial stiffness of the new sponge.

Sleeping alone- When sleeping alone was all I ever did I didn't particularly enjoy it. Once married I found myself missing the autonomy of the mattress. I love my husband more than I think it seemly to say publicly, but I don't like to snuggle when I sleep. Body heat against me when I'm trying to sleep is uncomfortable. I also can't sleep facing another face. I can't sleep when I'm being breathed on. I think the perfect set up is the Nick and Nora set up where they each sleep in their own bed and when feeling amorous they can get together as they please.

Happy Endings- I know that as a worldly woman who has razored her own skin, begged food from friends, been mistaken for a prostitute, abused, overlooked, lived with cockroaches the size of rats, watched people shoot up in alleyways out my window because I didn't have television, accidentally seen a guy named Ahmed get a blow job, befriended prostitute boys on Polk street, and peed on the last bus from San Francisco to Marin I shouldn't care about happy endings. I'm cosmopolitan. I'm sophisticated. I know what the real world is like. Right. I know what reality is and that's why I love a happy ending. It's nice when the happy ending isn't arrived at clumsily, but the truth is: I'll take happy endings however they come to me.

Romance- I've actually mentioned this one before. I've attempted to out it. In real life I dislike public displays of affection. Sex is sex is sex. Sex isn't romance. Sex is fun and satisfying and important and natural but romance is elusive and not particularly real for people like me. I'm devoid of that ability to act it out in real life. There is something (probably a malfunction) in me that will not allow me to be romantic. In real life it makes me uncomfortable and itchy. In real life I'm more like a man in the romance department. Grudging, inarticulate, and bumbling. I can only show my love in my fidelity and the life I plan with my man. But in secret I enjoy romance done well. Nothing tragic. Tragic love doesn't interest me in the least. I enjoy the following examples of romance in film and story: The Thin Man, North and South, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca, My Brother Michael, and The Tennant of Wildfeld Hall.

I don't want the bodice rippers. It has nothing to do with sex. It's all in the communication between men and women, the flirting, and the manner in which love is discovered. I want the fade to black for the steamy bits. As a mature adult I'm supposed to want the passionate part, the mature content, the real hard edged stuff...right? Wrong. That's everywhere in real life. I want the other stuff, the stuff that isn't really real. I can't even use the real words that would apply here because it makes me so uncomfortable to reveal this. That's why I've written more on this one than any of the other ones.

Receiving Presents- There is such an expectation that intelligent, earth conscious, quality minded people disapprove of gifts. Of giving them, of receiving them. I like them. I look forward to them. I love homemade ones, small ones, expensive ones, and thoughtful ones. I don't care what they cost. I love them all. That's not true, I once received a "Precious Moments" Christmas ornament that freaked the fuck out of me and I had to hide it and when we had a fire in our house it obligingly "burnt" up in the fire.

I have left out ones that might hurt the people I love but otherwise I have been completely candid. I think that what makes most of my guilty pleasures guilty is that they aren't the things I'm supposed to find pleasurable. I should have a shoe fetish or secretly have a crush on Regis Philbin or love to watch porn. Instead my guilty pleasures are PG-rated. Suitable for family viewing. Candy and romance. Which makes me wonder- who the hell am I anyway?

What are your guilty pleasures? Do you dare to tell? Will it offend me? Will it frighten your mother? (If it would put you in jail and cause injury to others then don't tell because I will want to maim you for life. Anything else is probably alright.) Go ahead...tell it here.

Partnership With Complications

(advice from a happily married woman)

One thing that never ceases to annoy me is when people talk about having babies as though it will "cement" their love for each other. Or when they think that having babies will fix the problems they already have. There is nothing guaranteed to make things more challenging for a couple than having a baby. Already have a baby and having some marital problems? Having more babies will simply make whatever problems already extant even more amplified.

I'm not saying that children can't remind parents of their love for each other. I'm mostly saying that if your marriage is already troubled, bringing in another human being into your relationship who's going to have a hundred urgent daily needs to be met is not going to make life get smoother. I'm also saying that loving someone is not a good enough reason to have a baby with them. Women have been known to love the most unsuitable men who would make the most deplorable parents. A man who is good in bed and makes your heart do somersaults isn't automatically going to deal well with no sleep, and boobs that are no longer his, and having a baby's needs come before his.

Choosing a spouse that fits your needs is as important as any life decision you can make. Here are some criteria that I think are very important when choosing a spouse:

• He/She should be a good companion. This is the number one thing I think is important. Romance is all well and good but will ebb and flow, maybe fade altogether into something more permanent and solid. Sex will also experience that ebb and flow, even for people with normal sex drives. What should be the steadiest thing between you is your desire to hang out together, to talk, to share experiences, especially the "mundane" every day experiences. So he/she should be someone you would consider your best friend.

• He/She should be flexible with life plans. Life rarely goes as planned. If you marry someone who has one very rigid idea of what will make them happy, chances are they will end up disappointed and you will both feel it deeply. If the only thing that will make a person happy in life is to have their own biological child, well, that's not an unreasonable desire unless it turns out that fertility is an issue. Then what? Will this person be willing to adopt? Or find other things to satisfy their desire to be around children? If this person's only ambition is to become president of the united states and they've never even gotten an acting job before?* What happens to your life together if they don't become president? Flexibility in navigating the twists and turns in life is an essential ingredient to finding happiness.

• He/She should not be a jerk. Yeah, because as surprising as it seems, getting married doesn't turn toads into princes. A marriage license is a lot less like a magic kiss and a lot more like an invitation to get more comfortable farting in front of your partner. So if he/she is a jerk already, getting married just means that you will be legally bound to a jerk. And no, a good woman cannot change a chauvinist pig. I don't care if your hoo-ha is made of solid gold, only a jerk can change themselves into someone decent and it won't happen as long as there are plenty of solid gold hoo-has that will take them just as they are.

• Being good in bed is NOT the next most important thing in choosing a spouse. It is more important that you choose someone you can (and already do) respect because living intimately together for all eternity will test your mutual respect like nothing else can. If the respect is solid then you can weather all kinds of indignities with kindness and with love. If that respect is like a thin cheap veneer, it will snap the first time your spouse experiences incontinence after having a baby or becomes a complete baby when struck down by a cold.

In fact, being good in bed isn't important at all because if you find your prospective spouse attractive and you have all these other great feelings for each other and your communication is great, you can both become exponentially better in bed as you navigate each other's very private preferences. Being good in bed is a skill and if the person you love isn't good in bed, that's no reason not to marry them because most people are motivated to improve in this area if it means they might get more sex. There are books and videos that can help you with that. It might be a good idea to find out (before tying the knot) if either of you have fetishes or fantasies that the other one finds repugnant.

• I have said before that I am not into S&M or any other kind of kinky or dangerous sexual practices and it would go very hard for me if my spouse could only really be satisfied by a woman wearing a French Maid's costume brandishing a horse whip. So as a last point I would say that in choosing a spouse, be sure to have some very intimate talks about the kinds of things that get you off. And also? If you're not gay, you might want to make sure they aren't either.

Wait...one more thing...if you don't really want to get married or your prospective spouse doesn't really want to get married? I think you should not get married.



*Ha ha.

The Breakfast of Champions

Max recently asked me if he could get Lucky Charms cereal. I think Lucky Charms cereal belongs to a class of food in which you will also recognize sparkling greyish-white mirror lines of meth, cocaine, and crack. The real breakfast of champions!

I should know. I have a fairly checkered past. I can prove it by having dated a very short dread-locked Australian man who alarmed me dreadfully when stripped down to his briefs at which point I wondered what the hell I saw in him in the first place and the only answer I could conjure up was that he had looked quite fascinating in the strobe lights at the Underground Club. This was the only boyfriend I ever "cheated" on. I say "cheated" because we never actually decided we were going out for real. I confess that I was shocked when he expressed unhappiness at having found out I went out with another guy.

Considering that I didn't put out for him I figured he'd be just as happy being set free. Even though he was never really going out with me. Men are a fucking mystery. I am still frightened by the memory of him in his skivvies.

Just for the record, and because I'd like to get this off my chest for posterity's sake- I had a total of fourteen boyfriends before I married Philip. I have only slept with four men. So you can see that I frustrated a lot of young men's fancies and drove a lot of balls to that quaint state of blueness so easily fixed by heartier gals than myself. I didn't tease men to be an ice queen nor did I think I was some precious china doll waiting for some perfect moment.

You know I wasn't waiting for God's approval either.

The ugly truth is that sex seemed like a serious invasion of my personal space and there are few things in life I have come to value quite as seriously as my personal space. It was one of the very first things I remember finding value in.

What interests me more than my early sex life is my history of drugs. Compared to people like Bill Clinton who never inhaled, I am like an old rock star. Compared to my immediate family I am like a pure unpoisoned angel of abstinence. What's deeply ironic is that while most of my immediate family were unabashed potheads, they seemed to have worried that I might have become a speed-freak. We discuss these things fairly freely amongst ourselves and there is no shame in having had, at any point, a relationship with narcotics, always supposing it isn't running us ragged or inspiring us to live a life of crime. I was surprised, never the less, to find that the general view at one time was that I was over the edge for speed.

It's true that I had more than my share of the stuff. Yet I have to say that most of the time I did it was either to help me pull all nighters in which I drafted patterns for school into the wee hours or because my friends had it. There was never a point at which I longed for it or sought it out because my blood ached. The only two narcotics I have ever had a weakness for are cigarettes and beer.

It is my belief that Lucky Charms cereal is a gateway drug.

First it's Lucky Charms with those brightly colored stiff weird "marshmallows" and the next thing you know you're dusting it with crack powder.

Max and his friend seemed to have had a disagreement about the damage capability of a nuclear missile. So Max wanted to know if you could blow up a car with one. So I explained that you could blow up a whole city with one and kill lots of people beyond the city as well through the heat and the acid rain and the awful fallout. It reminded me what terrible beings we humans can be. My boy is a warrior and he wants to know about these things. I am more like a monk or a Buddhist. It makes me wonder how a woman can give birth to a weapon wielding warrior? Surely that must be the eighth wonder of the world? It's weird enough that my body knows how to make a perfect penis in my womb without asking me to think about it at all. We can give birth to our opposites and, I suppose, our enemies. What torture it must be to stand across the line from her own son in war or political division.

Just like the torture it must be to see a daughter sold off to a country to quell rebellion.

He's going to remember that I wouldn't buy him Lucky Charms. I should know. My mom wouldn't buy them for me either. She might have agreed to buy me hemp cereal but there was no way she was going to pollute my body with kid-crack.

It is very late at night. I both love and hate this hour. I love it because so few people are awake. It's quiet out there in my hemisphere. When every one's awake I can hear them all. All the time. Loud like a thousand minor birds. I don't want to go to bed because it's the only time of day that no one needs anything from me. Husband sleeps. Child sleeps. I sit and ramble to self in the dark quiet hours. I have hated this time also because I have woken up so often at this time and been the only one awake in my unfading nightmare. I still have them. But they are exponentially worse when you have had very little sleep in many weeks. I hate being awake at this time when woken from a nightmare.

I am stealing some one's wireless connection. The only place in the house where we can steal the connection is at the top of the stairs. So that is where I am sitting. Most of you are asleep right now. Or awake, probably doing things I don't need to know about. Except Riana and Jo. They are probably waking up now. For them this is a time of crisp eastern light.

I like that our days cross at strange hours.

I would like lullabies to be sung to me at all times. Would you like fairy lights to be lit and a lilting song to be sung to you in your mother tongue with love, ripe with wishes and that peculiar warmth that only your mother's eyes and arms can impart?

Philip asked me if my recent nightmares have included any of the usual lions or leopards. My nightmares have nearly always featured really dubious bathroom situations or circling lions of which I am quite fearful. Or tests I haven't studied for. Or serial killers. A lot of serial killers. And hunts for me.

The nightmares have been different. But I can't tell what that means.

Right at this minute I am feeling all of your spirits out there. I am blowing kisses into your dreams. I am blowing peaceful thoughts across your brow.

Everything Good In One Post
(food, sex, secrets, sarcasm, self righteousness, and fresh mozzarella)

A very local meal: rosemary focaccia with homemade pesto (from the freezer) sauteed onion spinach and mushrooms...all crowned with some local mozzarella which is so good I almost ate an entire expensive container of it myself. This meal is not acceptable for my dieting efforts but is so good I am willing to eat gruel for the next two days to make up for it.

A big question with canning is always whether or not you will eat the things you make. These are a part of the growing collection of empty mason jars that were previously filled with all kinds of good fruits and pickles and jams. If you are not making a dent in your canned goods by this time in the winter then you either didn't can things you actually like to eat, you have no confidence in your canning abilities and are afraid of what's in the jars, or you canned so much that you are going to have to be my canning guru. There are big holes in my pantry now where there used to be tons of peaches, pickles, jam, and marinated two bean salad.

The piccalilli remains untouched as it is likely to do until the end of time. Or until I dump it all out and actually admit I'm never going to eat it because it scares the pants off me and not because I'm worried it isn't safe.

Since starting my local challenge I have had almost no mozzarella and it's kind of hurt. Being left out of mozzarella usage is very sad. We tried the only kind we could find which is made by Tillamook and I hate to report that mozzarella is not something they make well. In fact, it was awful.

These mozzarella curds taste just like the kind made by the "Precious" brand, only better. Fresher! I bought them at the Hillsdale farmer's market. I believe they were made with raw milk and there is a slight after taste that is a bit rangy, the same kind of after taste you might experience from goat cheese if you were me. Which you're not and are probably feeling pretty happy about.

Still no tender lettuce mixes at the farmer's market. Well, no lettuce mixes at all yet. There was one calling itself a "lettuce mix" but it was just baby winter greens like kale, chard, and beet greens. I was fooled into spending lots of money for that mix last time they had it and it was quite tough to chew. We got to the farmer's market early enough to snag some fabulous greens. I got two huge bunches of spinach and three bunches of collard greens. There were long lines at most of the produce stalls and even though it was reminding me of Eastern Europe in the eighties, it also made me excessively happy to see a market so well attended and supported.

I'm sure there is no farmer who would be sad to find themselves selling out of every green thing they grow within thirty minutes. As a farmer I'm thinking you always want to find the demand for what you do growing rather than diminishing.

One lady I waited in line with was asking me about my local eating challenge and raised her pert brows and said "So you're doing an eat local challenge and driving a long way to get your food? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?" Pert ho. Of course it doesn't defeat the purpose! I can drive 20 miles north to the only open farmer's market with a friend (car pooling is good) or I can go to the markets in my town and buy produce that has traveled anywhere from 600 miles to 3000 miles to get to me. That's not difficult math to do.

I'm getting really tired of people who seem to think that if you're trying to make any effort at all then you must make extreme sacrifices. All or nothing. C'mon people, every effort counts. Getting spinach from 20 miles away takes less gas and refrigeration than is used to bring me spinach from central or southern California over 600 miles away. That's 580 miles of gas use saved. (In case anyone had trouble with that math).

Can we please all stop worrying about being purists and just make some effort to make change? If a million people saved 580 miles of road travel buying one bunch of spinach we would collectively be saving 580 million miles of road travel. That's it in a simplified nutshell. You can go make it more complicated and pull this paragraph apart for it's flaws but people are living in this country by the millions, like busy little ants, and if every single one of us made some efforts, even "small" efforts, we could make a huge environmental change.

So all you pert hos and snarky pimps out there just waiting to pounce on anyone who is attempting to adjust their lives into being more thoughtful, I will bite you. (And that means YOU, anonymous commenter on Cindy's blog "Figs, Lavender, and Cheese". You really need to go sit on your own personal trash heap and ask yourself what you're doing to make change and stop heckling people about what they're doing.)

I need to take care of a couple of memes I've been tagged for. I'm not going to reprint the rules or anything like that. I'm very uncooperative that way. The first one is from my new blogging friend Cindy over at Figs, Lavender, and Cheese:

List Five Things About Yourself:

1. I really want to raise quails so I can cook tiny eggs but I'm afraid I won't actually like quail's eggs. But jesus! Have you seen how flippin cute quails are? I've seen a button quail come out of it's dime sized egg and almost passed out from the cuteness. I could have bought some quail's eggs at the farmer's market this week-end but didn't think of it until too late. Perhaps next time?

2. I think bone marrow smells like death. (Thanks, Chick, for giving me the gift of smelling raw bones which I would otherwise be oblivious of, being a life long vegetarian.)

3. The second Mr. Thornton loses his taste for beautiful wasp waisted females and develops a relish for tubby gals with blood shot eyes, my marriage will be in danger.

4. Something that makes me tremendously happy is having my house filled with flowers cut fresh from my own back yard. I get a special delight when most of them are strongly scented roses. The whole happy effect is enhanced even more when the walls of all the rooms in my house are painted the kinds of colors that set my cut flowers off to great advantage. If I could have cut flowers in my house every week of the year I would.

5. I love having philosophical discussions with my seven year old who thinks this whole "God" thing is a fairytale. (I never called it that, in case you were wondering and considering the merits of working up a good indignation about it.)


The second meme comes from my old blog friend Tracey from The Everyday Unitarian:

1. What's one thing you do every day?

Drink 3 cups of black coffee that is 2/3 decaf and 1/3 regular. I am only allowed one cup of caffeine per day because I am a delicate flower with heart palpitations. I've done the stress test for old people (for which you have to sign a form saying you understand that the test can cause a heart attack), I've been shoved in that claustrophobic imaging machine to take pictures of my heart, I've worn the 24 hour heart monitor, and I've seen my heart with ultrasound and while I came to the conclusion that one should never see their own heart under any circumstances, the doctors came to the conclusion that while my palpitations were vaguely worrying, there would be no real answer unless something really bad happened to it to give them more clues.

2. Name two things you wish you could learn.

To be silent once in a while when it really counts
To make my own cheese.

3. Name three things that remind you of your childhood:

Hearing Simon And Garfunkel.
Hearing married people bicker.
The smell of sun ripened blackberries.

4. Name four things you love to eat but rarely do:

donuts
marinated mushrooms
brie cheese
plums

5. Name five things/people that make you feel good:

my family (you knew I'd say that, huh?)
having a waistline (I don't have one right now, sadly)
baking bread and making soup on the same day
snow
my chickens

6. List six facts about yourself:

I love being a housewife.

If I had more kids I'd die.

I love winter best of all seasons even though I like the other three quite a lot too.

I have thousands of half written letters floating around in my head.

I have an unholy love for office supplies. I especially love green graph paper and Papermate "Flair" pens in black.

I am not at all kinky. Not even in my most private fantasies. In fact, I don't have sexual fantasies at all, I have romantic ones. I think this is because sex is a fact of life and it's practical and very nice but romance, to me, is the real elusive monkey. You know the last scene in "North and South", the one at the train station? That would never happen to me. Not only because I'm not a wasp waisted Victorian chick but because I'm very uncomfortable with romantic moments and even when they have come my way in real life I botch them up by making sarcastic comments or delivering a real hit of bathos to the moment. Because of this, romance holds a higher place in my fantasy life than sex does.



There you have it. Does it make me narcissistic that I love these kinds of memes? No, I don't think so (to answer my own question) because I adore it when other people do it too. My favorite of all time is reading people's "100 things" lists. Many of you have not yet done a "100 things" list and I think you should. Just for me. Just so I can sit down with my cup of coffee and hear you deny that you can come up with that many things and then see you totally do it.

Well, I'm off to get a little work done for my part time job. If I don't do some work it will become the no-time job in which I've greatly disappointed my good friend Angela and also failed to make enough money to cover all my garden purchases of roses and fruit. Have a great Tuesday everyone!

People really do like sex

I just looked at my site meter and I can't help but notice that lately my site has been lower on visitors than usual and then when I mention Lindsay Lohan having loud sex in my dream it spikes up quite a bit. Is that because many of my Internet friends just coincidentally came back from various breaks and vacations abroad, or that random people stopped by to hear about Lindsay and raunchy dreams? (So disappointing, I know. Quel drag!)

I'm not blogging for the numbers, in case anyone is wondering, I do it for other way more serious and important and noble reasons, but I can't deny that watching your numbers can be very addicting and fascinating. Plus, in my new stage of poverty I am more than ever seriously thinking of adding ads to my site. Not to annoy you all, but to bring in a few extra paltry pennies, which is what I'm afraid it would amount to with the small traffic I get. Can you blame me for wondering how Dooce managed to get so much traffic that she supports her family by blogging? Do you realize what a total dream that would be for me to achieve? That right there is the dream life. I would way rather blog for a living than try to get articles of mine printed elsewhere. I think blogging is way fresher and immediate and, do you get it yet? I'M A FAN.

Future Girl said she thought that in the beginning there was quite a lot of mention of sex and then when she got fired that created even more interest...well, that won't help me. You can't get fired when you aren't technically employed, and being all boring about sex (like not engaging in it all that frequently) and being more likely to talk about other people having raunchy sex than myself, that doesn't seem like a good option either. Mom O Matic has the best in-bed dialogs with her husband that totally crack me up and she has a lot of traffic too. There seems to be something in that.

Would anyone around here mind if I became a career blogger? Another person who's taken her blog really far and has a whole lot of traffic and now even has a book out is Crazy Aunt Purl. She hardly ever mentions anything racy and yet she is doing very well with her writing. But you know what the hugest difference between Dooce, Crazy Aunt Purl, and Mom O Matic is with me and my writing? They are always funny, I am not. They are consistently funny ladies.

Ah well. They also don't climb quite as deeply into life's shit as I do. They don't drag people through Falkner-esque land. People like to avoid feeling like they're sinking into a Carsen McCullers life where limbs start mysteriously shriveling and everyone is dating the same Catholic Priest. Or if they find themselves trapped in dusty desperate landscape, they want to be able to find the laughter there, or at least be relieved with some honest racy talk. That's a real gift. I have my moments of laughing through the dust, but it comes and goes randomly. There are posts I've written that can still crack me up every time I read them, even though I wrote them myself, but more often than not I just think "Oh lord, here we go again..."

Even if I never get to blog for a living, you wanna know what I love? I love my little world here. I look forward to hearing from all the blog friends I've made, and in fact, I get pathetically sad when I don't hear from some of you for long stretches while your own life demands the attention it deserves. I am amused at how much my mom doesn't get how I can spend so much time here with people I've never met.

I'm in danger of getting very unattractively mushy and I can't stand that. It makes me feel kind of queasy to get all gushy. So with that, do any of you mind if I make up salacious stories about you publicly whenever I feel like it? (That should restore the balance of piss and vinegar to the sugary sentiments I came dangerously close to spilling.)

Damn, I'm still in my pajamas and my friend Lisa E. will be here any second to make ratatouille.

Get off the bridge you lonely hearts!

So here we are again...landed on the great day of LUUUUUUUV. So many millions of flowers, cards, candy, and ounces of bodily fluids such as spit and other fun stuff will be exchanged in a great show of emotional solidarity. This is the day we can all just unload our love on our sweethearts, which if unloaded on any other day, just isn't OFFICIAL enough to count. Everyone who has a romantic partner or a date is sighing with relief because it's like the mark of an outcast, an unlovable human being, to be alone today.

Those without anyone to celebrate and get funky with are out on bridges all across America asking themselves what they have to live for on a bleak February day like this with no prospects of romance. Either that or they are, at this cheerful hour of the morning, already headed for their local dive bar with the blacked out windows to start in on their sob fest.

I am not a romantic person. Romance and sentimentality make me extremely uncomfortable. If Philip leaned across the dinner table, looked lovingly in my eyes, and said "You are so beautiful my love! Shall we do a slow dance my darling? I've just put on our song..." I would probably instantly regurgitate my last bite of food in total shock. This is the stuff for romantic scenes in movies or books. I don't mind some sappy romance in books and movies, because they aren't real. I can enjoy them for the lovely fantasy.

I have the heart of a grumpy old man. It doesn't get less romantic than that. I played at being a romantic person when I was a teen. Sighing and pining for stupid-ass boys who I thought might be Prince Charming. I wrote romantic letters to them. I ate up the pretty compliments they fed me like "You are the best thing since sliced bread...". I once ate dinner at the house of an older man who pulled out all the wooing stops. He made dinner, which he was very proud of for some reason, and leaned over the candle light all evening to tell me over and over again how beautiful I was. Which felt exactly like being coaxed into a tender stupor so that he could jump my bones. Which is exactly what all romantic scenes like that are about. It feels cheap and tawdry.

Wooing is not love. Courtship is all about closing the deal. It's sex wrapped up in pretty paper. Sex is all well and good, generally enjoyed by all who engage in it, but sex is not romantic to me. Sex is primal. It's funky, it's kind of gross, it strips us of pretension, it puts us at our most vulnerable. Plus is makes you feel pretty great. But it's not love.* I would say it gets mixed up in the whole love melange of a relationship, but it is only a small reflection of the real thing.

Real love isn't about hearts and all things tender and beautiful. To me, real love is when you live with a person day in and day out and even when you are annoyed by them you can't imagine living with anyone else. Real love is looking forward to seeing your partner every day. Real love is not fluttery and light. Real love is visceral and weighty. It's earthy and connective. Real love is not minding giving your just operated-on spouse a sponge bath every morning for a week. Real love is being a team of two. Enjoying sharing things. Developing a common language between you. Real love is not something I think you can express in a card or even in words. Certainly not with candy. It's expressed in the action of living.

For any of you out there not hooked up, I would say, so what? Get off the damn bridge! There is rich enjoyment for you out there. It may be hard to be solitary at moments, since we humans are social creatures, but there is also so much fun and benefit to exploring the world solo. I spent most of my time, before marriage, being single. Since most of my women friends were almost constantly hooked up with men (or women in some cases), I know what it feels like to be surrounded by dating cooing idiots. Life is not just for lovers, it's for everyone. Go out there and be fabulous. Chances are pretty good that you will get hooked up eventually, and when that happens, you'll be so much better for having spent your solo time enjoying yourself and your life. No more excuses, no more sobbing.

As for us, here at the Williamson Ranch...we'll give candy to Max who thinks that's the point of Valentine's Day. We'll probably give each other some fancy chocolate, but not to be sweet, just because today is a great excuse to eat fancy chocolate. Valentine's Day has become more notable for the fact that it is the birthday and wedding anniversary** of my very close friend Chelsea:

Happy birthday you crazy chick! And happy anniversary to you and Jeff!!!

Note: Sorry Chelsea! I always do that! Happy Anniversary in FOUR days!

*Which doesn't mean you can have sex with anyone you want when you are in a committed relationship.

**This is something we have in common. She got married on her birthday and so did I.

Two of the oldest professions

I really like this picture of myself because I'm wearing my mom's first wedding dress which was a gorgeous black silk sari with silver embroidery. She gave it to me years ago. It has one huge rip in it, but I have worn it a few times, artfully, so my ass doesn't hang out. I also like this picture because it shows my hair down when it was long. It was irritating the bejeezus out of me at that time so I cut it all off shortly after this picture was taken. Max is four months old in this picture. This is when the super dark hair he was born with started falling out, being replaced with the pale blond that he's had ever since.

Is it my imagination, or is he flipping everyone off?

I would love it if, just once, a celebrity famous for her or his sex appeal would say something like "I'm just not a very sexual person." Because I find it really tiresome to hear people like Jessica Simpson say "I'm a really sexual person. And I'm comfortable with that." And Scarlett Johansen said the exact same thing. Would a publicist let any star admit to not being all that interested in sex? I just love it when stars go and bust our assumptions rather than pander to them.

The actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers says he could never go out with a housewife. He says he can only date women who have their own careers. While I think that's just fine, it does surprise me that he specifically won't date a housewife. Does he mean he won't date other men's housewives? Or does he mean he couldn't marry a woman who wanted to become one? Since when was being a housewife not a career? Not all housewives are created equal, but a good one does all the work of a professional chef, launderer, landscaper, house cleaner, baker, and interior decorator. The only difference is that she does it for people she loves and doesn't get a salary.

I want an answer to this question right now: between a professional chef and a housewife who cooks just as skillfully, who do you respect more? I want to know why too. When you meet a "professional" interior decorator and a housewife who takes great pride in decorating her home, who do you respect more? I'd be willing to bet that most people would respect the person who's getting paid in money. Do people think it's more impressive to do a thing when other people are willing to pay you for your services?

Interestingly, this doesn't apply to sex. Everyone is expected to give sex away for free no matter how good you are at it. When everything else a person can do skillfully is considered career potential, this is the one thing that must never ever be sold. I think it's a little bit twisted that modern society values people like Lindsy Lohan and Paris Hilton, who've between them screwed almost every man in Los Angeles and Greece, yet we look at prostitutes and disrespect them because they are getting paid for what Lindsy and Paris are giving away. If we think Lindsy is so hot, and so sexual a person and we're OK with the fact that she apparently has a new guy every other week, then we aren't actually bothered by people being promiscuous. As long as they don't get paid.

Money is much too tangled up in the estimation of human worth.

Prostitution is often called the oldest profession. I think housewifery is just as old. I've never thought about that before today.

I don't look at people and how much they earn as an indication of worth. Nor does money have much to do with my feelings about my own worth. I need to earn money now. Philip and I are working very hard to make a living. So it isn't that I don't care about money. I do. It's just that if I don't make any and have to do something else, it won't make me feel like less of a person than anyone else who has made more than me. I will feel good about myself for having been willing to take risks; to follow my dreams. I value hard work. I value skills. I value other people who work hard and have skills.

In a way I admire prostitutes. I mean, I don't really approve of prostitution, but not because I think it's dirty and immoral. If Lindsy can give lots of it away for free, I don't see why someone who doesn't have millions of dollars and needs to sell it for money shouldn't. They're both doing the same thing, it's just that one of them is making money doing it. In all other professions we would admire the person making the money. I think if it was made legal everywhere and the women selling sex had a lot of protection against the abuse they so often come in for, I say, why not? What I kind of admire is how hard they work. I couldn't do it. For a lot of reasons, the least of them being the question of morality. Athletes work hard with their bodies for our collective pleasure. We enjoy their feats of speed, strength, and/or agility. We admire how hard they work, the way I see it, prostitution must be very hard work.

I didn't mean to bring up prostitution. I'm just following my mind where it's going.

I am working up to something here: it's interesting to me that, in general, housewives are only marginally respected more than hookers. I know a lot of people who would say they respect housewives WAY more than prostitutes. But from personal experience, I haven't run into very many people who were at all interested in me when I was a housewife. As though what I was doing couldn't possibly be worth talking about. A lot of people view housewives as women who stay home watching television and leaching off of their husbands. This is, in my opinion, the dark side of the feminist coin. We got more rights, we all got to join the outside work force. Being a housewife went from being one of the most respectable and expected life choices for women to make to becoming the job that's too demeaning for any self respecting woman to choose.

Now that I'm a business owner I get a lot more respect from people, women especially, than I ever got staying home.

The biggest surprise to me, in my life as a housewife, was how deeply satisfying it is. I have never had a job before that gave me so much room for self discovery, growth, finding hidden talents, and that made my quality of life so immensely improved. I miss it. Whatever happens in our future, I will always love that time in my life most because it unveiled a lot of passions that were latent in me. It gave me spiritual peace. It gave me gardening, cooking, home baked bread, a routinely clean house (pre-kid), canning, and time to sew, build, and write.

I will end with this: the best food I have ever eaten was cooked by my friend Chelsea who, if she wanted to, could kick Ina Garten's ass in the kitchen. She cooks better than most professionals for her family and friends. For free. If you had a choice to go to a restaurant and pay someone to make your food, or go to Chelsea's house and be treated to her food for free, you will choose Chelsea's food. But not because it's free. You will choose it because it's better. How can anyone not admire that and envy her husband Jeff the world class cooking he gets every day?

I think Jonathan Rhys Meyers is an idiot.

I wonder if he's ever paid for sex?