My other new food obsession is iced coffee. What the hell am I doing drinking iced coffee? What happened to tea? I’m the OG of steepable leafs/making you change your beliefs/bitches lookin’ good in their thongs bring me oolong! I have TEA LIFE tattooed in gangsta letters on my abdomen! Yeah I don’t know either. I bought an insulated cup and everything (we can’t keep putting this shit in the landfills, yo) and now I’m walking around every morning like Nancy Botwin. Except lots shorter, lots more work ethic, and lots less dependent on booty shorts and bedroom eyes to get what I want.

PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING ME MAD

1. People at work who don’t bother to ask anyone about anything before sending a huge group email detailing changes in the way that things are done—changes that are not necessary, not authorized, and frankly rather crazy—and that result in a lot of worry and panic and cross-communication. Then I have to clean up the mess and send out the EVERYBODY SETTLE DOWN email, and inevitably some of the recipients will still be twitching in mental defibrillation like a bunch of tasered poultry, and will follow up several times in bewilderment that they don’t actually have to change anything at all. Do you see how this could all have been avoided? Because I do.

2. The (thankfully) outgoing principal at Nora’s school, who suddenly decided that I need a TB test in order to continue coaching girls’ track one day a week. I have been doing it since the beginning of March, so if I have TB then so do a lot of third- through fifth-grade girls. The volunteer form clearly says that you only need a TB test if you’re at school more than five hours a week (which I am not), there are exactly four practices left this season, and I am convinced that her insistence on this stupidity is a sad little power play in the waning days of her administration, sort of like Nixon wandering the halls and talking to portraits. I have liked that woman less and less with each passing year, and the forcible Mantoux test is only the latest injustice. Cannot wait for her much more reasonable successor to ascend the throne.

But! Fine! I will play her silly game! I went to some downtown urgent care clinic for the TB test, fully expecting it to be unpleasant, but it was surprisingly painless. I did have to fill out a ton of forms, which is to be expected for a public-health thing like tuberculosis, but I only waited for about ten minutes and paid about five bucks more than a co-pay at my regular doctor’s office. Plus I got to ride the El all the way around the Loop, which I rarely do, and look at:

(a) the Chicago River in all its groovy industrial glory. I’d pick it as scenery over the lake any day.

(b) the triangular city jail with its slitty windows.

(c) a big fake owl on an office window ledge. Probably for scaring pigeons but pigeons were sitting and pooping right on it. Pigeons don’t care.

(d) a guy who still had the size sticker on his pants leg. Brand new pants sir? Congratulations.

And so far, no TB! Lay down, little tuberculin patch. Lay down flat. We’ll check you in a couple of days.

PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT MAKING ME MAD

1. Nora, for lots of reasons, but also because she is reading Harriet the Spy. I have such a weird love for that book—it was probably the first book I read as a kid that I didn’t feel was talking down to me. Harriet was a complicated person with complicated responses to many complicated situations, and Louise Fitzhugh makes her readers work to understand it all. Marvelous. I also remember being in total awe of the life so totally unlike my own. Harriet has a live-in nanny (who apparently started out as a live-in baby nurse), goes to a private school, rarely sees her parents, and has more or less total freedom to run around Manhattan and sneak into apartment buildings. It blew my little nine-year-old mind, and now it is blowing Nora’s.

2. An unknown character on Real Housewives of Atlanta. Although I am shamefully dedicated to Beverly Hills, OC, and to a lesser extent New York, I do not watch the Atlanta version. Except my TiVo, set to record some equally shameful Bravo show, fucked up and got RHOA instead. I had had some beer so I watched it, fast-forwarding during the boring parts, and I heard someone say this: “She needs to get a hobby. Besides ho-ing.” Some things are just so perfect with certain accents. Like “fucking hell” if you’re Irish. Or “She needs to get a hobby. Besides ho-ing” if you’re an African American lady in the deep South. It pleased me.

SMALL FURRY PRESIDENTIAL

I keep having dreams featuring Barack Obama and small animals. Once it was a leaked home video of the President putting hamsters in a cardboard box and shooting the box with a handgun. Everyone was rightly outraged and it was a huge story (in my dream). The other dream was more detailed, and it was about how the Obamas were breeding cats at the White House, and the President was very excited about a certain litter that was about to be born. One of the kittens was born with no real face, just a mouth and then blank fur where the rest should be, and he held a press conference where he showed everyone the messed-up kitten, which mewed adorably into the podium mic. A reporter asked if it should be put down and Barack was all “awwww no, it’s still cute” and demonstrated how it could eat and breathe and walk around, even lacking a face. I do not believe in dream analysis, but even if I did I think “no-face kitten,” “Barack Obama,” or “random hamster handgun murder” might just defy interpretation.

LEFT COAST

I guess I should start packing for this Seattle trip. You guys got blackberries there? And iced coffee? You want me to bring you some Chicago-style NATO rioting? Not a problem.

—mimi smartypants roused the rabble.

And everything is normal. Yay, no massive bleeding intestinal tumors; boo, I still have crappy blood and no one knows why. It is up to the internist now to probe further (please no: endoscopy + colonoscopy was PLENTY OF PROBING)* or prescribe me a steak a day or whatever. This had better not be anything serious because I really do not wish to be a medical journal case report or a Lifetime Movie of the Week. Would much rather remain a dull, regular-folk, blogging-for-free-like-it’s-1999, reasonably healthy, relatively sane individual. Thanks.

*Not that I really remember any of it. I have a vague recollection of being unhappy with something in my mouth (frat party joke goes here), and I do have a bit of a sore throat like something poked me, but beyond that it’s all blank. Mercifully blank, in the case of the colonoscopy portion, I am sure. Apparently I hummed a lot in the car on the way home, then went upstairs to bed. LT woke me up an hour later for a grilled cheese sandwich and then I went back to bed. I was lucid by the time Nora came home from karate, and then we ordered pizza** and watched the Bulls suck. In between quarters I worked frantically on a work project that is so FUCKING ANNOYING I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT. A girl gets a camera shoved up her bum and she can’t even take a proper day off, because OMG MEDICAL PUBLISHING WORLD FALLING APART EVERYBODY DO ALL THE WORK RIGHT NOW. I guess I did end up talking about it. Fuck.

**Does anyone else find it hilarious that I whined and moaned about all the crap I was “allowed” to eat during bowel prep, and how it was light-years from my normal healthy-ish diet etc, and then I come home from the hospital and have grilled cheese and pizza? I guess the melty floppy anesthesia made me want melty floppy food. I am back to my usual oatmeal-almond milk breakfasts, quinoa-bean lunches, and wine-fueled dinners now.

I am supposed to keep getting my blood suctioned out of me at regular intervals, and if said blood continues to be thin and wan they are threatening me with a “capsule endoscopy,” wherein one swallows a magical robot camera that goes on a fantastic voyage through your intestines and blah blah blah. DO NOT WANT. However, I remember a Joan Didion essay where she talked about having the same test. That comforts me somewhat. I shall tell my doctors: don’t give me anything that a National Book Award winner hasn’t had.

FUNNY (TO ME) PHRASES FROM THE MAY ISSUE OF VOGUE 

1. Witty felt-and-velvet creation
2. Today’s radical brides
3. Imaginary jabots
4. Those hamsters were sterile by the third generation
5. Beige boring?
6. This look is meant for dry land only
7. Legless turkey
8. Over a micro-sandwich
9. Monkey and banana prints
10. Black shiny bugs on orange tweed

THINGS I DON’T CARE ABOUT

1. The May issue of Vogue
2. The Presidential election (dear god, make it stop—I will vote for whoever is less likely to fuck over women and poor people and I will decide who that person is more or less on my own, no need to make like a foie gras farmer and force all this fatty propaganda down my throat)
3. Space (sorry astronomer friends)
4. Knitting (sorry yarn friends)
5. Baseball (sorry boring friends)
6. The theater (sorry dramatic friends)
7. Traveling to Australia (if you give me a free ticket I will certainly go, but it’s not high on my list of places to see)
8. Running a marathon (running is medium-fun but that is too far)
9. Micromanaging my kid’s homework (some of the parents on the school email list are insane)
10. This meeting (see below)

WEEKEND NOT STARTING WELL

I am posting this from a work meeting, yes on a Saturday, and this only happens once a year but somehow it always sneaks up on me and makes me resentful. If you’ll turn to Tab M in your agenda book you will find your managing editor, slightly hungover, trying her damndest to give a damn.

—mimi smartypants really is trying (your patience).

I will save the details for my literary agent (or I would if I had one), but last night I dreamed an entire script of a play. It was an existential fable starring Bart Simpson (we may have some copyright problems), who more or less just wandered in the void and said strange things while becoming more and more despairing. One memorable line of dialogue:

Oh no, they seem to have been transformed into two wobbling sacks of flesh. [pause] Oh well, a wobbling sack is a wobbling sack!

MEET YOU IN THE CHERRY ORCHARD

If Chekov isn’t in here I’ll punch someone. Chekov was hot.

I BET EVERY HAIR IN HIS MUSTACHE HURTS

Oh how I giggled (quietly, to myself) at Target today, where I witnessed the most hungover Hipster Dad ever. He was ferrying an exuberant, happy-shrieking, proto-linguistic-babbling toddler in the shopping cart, and dude was just in seriously shitty shape. (The hipster, not the toddler. The toddler seemed in fine form.)  You have to go easier on the PBR when you will be Solely Responsible the next day, sir. You also have my permission to ignore the AAP recommendations for today and put that baby in front of some educational television for a while. Oh I forgot, you don’t have a TV, so put the baby in front of Netflix or Sesame Street YouTube for a while and remind me again how those are not the same thing? Anyway.

THAT’S NOT WHERE THE TUBE GOES

Curse my excellent health insurance! Curse the professional consciences of doctors who want to be really, really, REALLY sure that I don’t have colon cancer, a bleeding ulcer, or some kind of intestinal gremlin that could be causing my lousy blood count and drastically dropping hemoglobin levels! I must be the weirdest gastroenterological patient that the gastroenterologist has, given my complete absence of gastroenterological* symptoms, but nonetheless he has decided that the blood thing warrants both the -oscopies! So next week the tube will go up my butt and down my throat—let’s hope they don’t use the same tube—and I will get the good sleepy drugs and have a free pass to nap and lounge around for the rest of the day. Unfortunately I also get to spend the day before** in the least fun way I can think of: not eating,*** drinking horrid laxative liquid, and visiting the bathroom a lot. I need to stock up on flushable wipes and reading material. And possibly install a wi-fi repeater on the side of the toilet.

OH IS THAT MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW? WELL TOO BAD.

*I really enjoy typing that word. People who wuss out with “GI” must not love typing as much as I do. Of course I am the freak who takes typing tests for fun.

**I was planning on going to work the day before, and only taking the actual procedure day off, until I got the prep instruction sheet.  I don’t think I want to take a bunch of laxatives and get on the El.

***Or rather, having only “clear liquids,” which is a list of horrid junky foods. Jell-O, Sprite, popsicles, broth, hard candy. I try to be relaxed about food and fight my natural orthorexic tendencies, one fiber-free sugar-filled day won’t kill me, and of course I understand the purpose. But still, blah.

—mimi smartypants: seriously, blah.

I cannot decide exactly what the library book smells like—it smells musty, and kind of moldy, and sort of like a pet store or a cat shelter—not strictly an animal-urine smell, but definitely a fur/bad breath/stress hormones/cat food smell, with possible undertones of urine to boot.*The book has been home from the library and in my house for several days but it was in a stack of other books, which I guess were keeping the terrible smell from escaping. Then I started reading it and wow. So far I am soldiering on, because if Gerda can survive death camps I can surely survive a smelly old book (or so goes my demented thought process), but I don’t know how long I can last.

*(Urine To Boot! A small Cape Cod boutique selling…well I don’t know exactly!  Previously peed-upon galoshes for a specific kinky population?)

POTENTIAL SMELL

Yesterday, when I went downstairs at my usual crack-of-dawn time, the backyard motion-activated security light was on. But when I looked out the window, expecting to see the shadowy Garage Killer from the last entry, I only saw an enormous skunk, rooting and snurfling around the lawn. It was too dark to get a good picture, especially through the window, and I did not want to open the back door and startle it for obvious reasons, but I got to watch the skunk dig little holes all over my grass. Looking for worms, treasure, something. Best of luck to you, skunk.

MY PRANKS ARE LOFTY

Idea: infiltrate a major men’s underwear maker and change all the pattern specs to make the fly opening a lot smaller. It could even be a gradual thing—with every other manufacturing run, the opening gets a few centimeters smaller, until eventually it is only big enough to get a pencil through. Men all over the world will be struggling, and no one will really want to return an opened package of boxers to Target with the explanation, “I can’t get my dick through the fly. It’s too small.” Oh yes, of course it is sir. Or perhaps your wiener is too large, am I right?

It would take a while for Hanes or Jockey or whoever to amass enough complaints to investigate, figure out what had gone wrong, visit the foreign factories, correct the problem, etc. And the full-page apology in the New York Times would be epic.

Or wait, maybe the product is inspected for fly dimensions right at the factory and the pencil-dick pants would never make it to consumers. That is less fun but would still fuck things up immensely. I do not have any vendettas against underwear companies, but those of you who do are welcome to appropriate this scheme for yourself.

MARRY ME

This is my kind of lady.

IT’S A SERVICE THEY PROVIDE

—mimi smartypants got the bottle, you got the cup.

Recently I have seen more than one person buy a bagel and then tear out the inside of the bagel, leaving a bread shell. When I spoke of this odd behavior, my coworker said that it was called a “scooped” bagel, and that in fact at some bagel shops you can order the bagel thusly, and the bagel-wallah will mutilate the bagel per your request.

Why? What miniscule percentage of carbohydrate calories are you saving by doing this? If you consider bread and grains to be bad for you, how about not eating them? Or wait; maybe it’s not a health thing at all. Maybe you are making a canal to fill with MORE delicious fatty cream cheese than could otherwise fit on the flat surface of the bagel. In that case, I approve.

THIS PROBABLY WON’T HAPPEN

I live very close to my gym, close enough to walk or bike, although the times when I go there at 5 am (not often) are not the times when I feel like walking or biking. So I drive, but I have a weird amount of Garage Fear at 5 am, such as that someone is going to be hiding in there, or that a ghostly voice will speak to me from behind the rakes and leaf-collecting bags, or that when I hit the button to raise the garage door a murderer will be standing there. I suppose it would have to be a paranormal, Freddy-Kruger-style murderer, who somehow knew that I was going to the gym at 5 am that day. Or else a very patient, regular murderer who was willing to stand there all night on the off-chance I might get an early-morning gym jones.

SPEAKING OF ANAL DRIVING

Remember the Anal Game? (Do I ever, you say. Whew. Oh wait, a clickable link, let’s see what that’s all about.) I have recently driven by some newer-model cars that worked great with that game. My favorites were the Anal Compass (where are we? oh yes, the anus), the Anal Endeavor (onward!), the Anal Enclave (so private), and the Anal Armada (grande y felicisima!)

A LONG AND UNNECESSARY DISCUSSION OF “VEGETARIANISM” AND FAST FOOD

I stopped eating meat the minute a parent stopped cajoling me to do so, and these days my not-eating-(very-much)-meat is a weird combination of the following:

(a) I don’t like it. (Although see weaselly loophole below.)

(b) I do think it’s wrong, on a strictly utilitarian level of “why does a desire for tasty protein trump an animal’s desire to NOT DIE.”

(c) It has been a long time since I have considered meat “a thing I eat.” (I guess you can refer to the WL for this too.)

(Weaselly Loophole: I eat salmon, sushi, or fishsticks probably a few times a year. On Chinese New Year, I also eat the spicy popcorn chicken thing at my favorite Chinatown restaurant. I try to pick the pieces that are mostly breading, but yeah, I’m eating some chicken. Sorry chickens. That restaurant makes you too damn delicious.)

I don’t know why I started typing about this. Oh yes! The other day Nora and I were starving before her haircut appointment, and we had some time to kill, so we went up the street from the salon to this hot dog joint. And what do you know, they serve a “Treehugger’s Special” which is a vegetarian hot dog, fries, and a soda for five bucks.

Oh man. I am not a person who misses meat. However, I think I had been missing condiments. A (mostly) vegetarian diet has a slight lack of things to put mustard on. And this place further dresses up the faux dog with the typical pickle, celery salt, onions, neon-green relish, all of it. And I gobbled up that thing like it was the last food on earth and am already scheming about when I can go back for more Chicago not-dog goodness. Is this the slippery slope to the faux gyro, the fake Italian beef, the fraudulent chorizo burrito? Probably not, but still: so good.

PRESCRIPTION: VEGETARIAN HOT DOGS (I CAN HOPE)

I have boring health “issues.” On the one hand, I realize that I am lucky that they’re boring. On the other, I’m bored.

I have a dramatically dropping hemoglobin/red cell count that has my doctors a bit freaked. It’s been at least one point lower every time I have had blood drawn, which, because of these abnormal results, has been about once a week. (STOP TAKING ALL MY BLOOD!) Because this is happening right after the Vomit Episode (see last entry), I have to go see a gastroenterologist. Who is going to be super-annoyed with me, because I have no gastroenterological symptoms at all. I will say hey, not my problem, the other doctors sent me here. I guess.

When I got cranky and asked my main doctor why I have to see the gastroenterologist despite the complete absence of related problems, she said something about ruling out internal bleeding. I asked the obvious question—whether one could really have internal bleeding without knowing something about it and the answer was a very CYA “possibly.” I find that disturbing, that your body could just quietly do something dramatic and lethal on the inside and not bother to tell you about it.

Pretty sure I do not have internal bleeding. I probably just have crappy blood. Terrible, awful, second-rate, shoddily constructed blood. Maybe I should put a “Donate” button on my site, but for blood instead of cash. Can anyone PayPal me some blood?

Although it’s slowly improving, LT is also having a recurrence of his back thing, so he never wants to sit down ever. He has rigged up a standing desk and we have some strange meals at the kitchen counter. It is a good thing we live in the city and almost never have to drive, that’s all I can say.

WELCOME TO OUR UNWHOLESOME DAY CAMP

However, LT does not need to sit down in order to have spring-break sexytime, which led to an odd marital encounter in our bathroom while our child was outside using the pushmower on the back yard. I think that counts as a major parenting win.

Juvenile spring break activities have included playing with neighborhood children, hanging with both me and her sitter on alternate days, the zoo, rollerblading, nature walks, and fighting the power. Or at least looking grumpy about the power.

And on one less-than-stellar weather day, she tied an elastic exercise band to her ankles and used it to launch stuffed animals. Fun is where you find it.

—mimi smartypants says go find something to do.

This is clearly too much information, but I want to be clear about what “many” means in this context. I threw up about every ten or fifteen minutes for the next five hours. Of course after a while one has nothing left to throw up, but that did not stop me! I’m an overachiever! I reached for the stars and managed to throw up scary, should-be-on-the-inside bodily fluids, sips of water and Gatorade, and parts of my own digestive tract.

Vomiting is wrongness itself. However, its only redeeming feature is that you usually feel better after doing it. How unfair was this: I did not feel better. Ever. The pain was still more or less always at a frowny face on the pain scale, and sometimes (usually the right-before-vomit times) ramping up to the crying-hysterically face. All the fun of vomiting and none of the relief! After who knows how long I became dizzy and (according to LT) incoherent, so he talked to the dial-a-nurse, Googled WHY IS MY WIFE POSSESSED BY DEMON VOMIT, called his sister to stay with the sleeping Nora, and decided to take me (and my puke bucket) to the ER.

Oh the ER on a weekend evening! No, wait…the ER on a ST. PATRICK’S DAY weekend evening! It is a magical fairyland of warmth and good feelings. I registered all the loveliness only dimly, as I was kind of busy passing out and throwing up and writhing around on a waiting room bench, and the upside to all of those dramatics was that they triaged me fairly quickly. I guess sick and injured people were not made to feel any better by the sight of my violent, noisy vomiting. I was soon put in a room where I could writhe and heave in relative privacy, and overhear all sorts of ER amazingness, like head-injured drunks attempting to pull off their cervical collars, the moans of the dude who had tried to yank his own rotten tooth (it didn’t go well), and guys with spiderweb tattoos on their necks insisting they needed a very specific dosage of a very specific painkiller. Weekend ER personnel, you have the patience of saints.

And especially sainted was my very own ER attending,* who hooked me up to an IV bag with fluids, some anti-nausea stuff, and morphine. I felt like Kurt Cobain with my opiate stomachache, but it really worked and had the lovely side effect of making me think I saw cats everywhere. Not true hallucinations, just seeing something move on the floor or jump up on a cabinet, and I would think, “Oh it’s a cat” before slowly registering that it was unlikely this hospital was swarming with cats. (New mashup show! “Hoarding: Life in the ER”!) The differential diagnosis included small-bowel obstruction, which really freaked me out because hello, surgery. They did a bedside ultrasound and made me drink two Big Gulps of contrast medium for a CT scan, and it was all kind of inconclusive, so I was told I had to stay. By this time it was five in the morning so I sent LT home and tried to make the best of it.

(*One of the first questions this guy asked me was, “By any chance do you smoke a whole lot of marijuana?” I said no, because (a) hardly ever, now; and (b) even back in the day my “whole lot” was nowhere near other people’s “whole lot,” but that is a liberal-arts college for you. Later I asked him to elaborate and he informed me about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which was a new one on me. Weed abusers, you have been warned.)

Really, once the morphine, nausea meds, and bag #3 of saline had interrupted my ghastly pain-barf cycle, I felt better. I was mysteriously put onto a pediatrics ward with a whole lot of sad coughing babies. (Nora: “Why are you on the kids’ floor, mom? Because you fit?” OUCH: ICE BURN.) My door had a sign on it that said, “NOTHING BY MOUTH” and a cartoon of a crossed-out fat dude with a hamburger in one hand and a soda in the other. Nothing by mouth. Also, no visitors eating like J. Wellington Wimpy. I hung around more or less all day with my IV pole and games on my iPhone. LT and Nora brought me some books and some cleaner underpants. The only excitement was more doctor visits and getting to go down for an X-ray, which was sort of a sci-fi process. The doctor “calls for transport,” a dude shows up with the gurney, you get on it, he scans your ID bracelet, and then once out in the hall he lifts a phone and says, “Initiating transport.” When you get to where you are going he lifts another phone and says, “Transport complete.” Man I loved that.

Mostly I just really, really wanted to go home. I mean, I wanted to know what was wrong with me too, but that concern was way secondary to the idea of a shower and my bed and my kid. So when the nurses came to tell me that I had to spend the night (AGAIN, if you count the never-ending ER purgatory as a “night”), I kind of freaked out on them. I kind of cried a lot. I asked what was the point of devoting all these resources to watching someone not eat. Embarrassing, yes, but in my defense it had been a rough ride and possibly 36 hours with no food was causing me to lose control of my emotions a bit. They were sympathetic but unmoved, so after a few more tears on the phone with LT and my mom I gave up and went to bed. So restful, sleeping with an IV needle taped to your arm. And people coming in every hour or so to make sure you’re alive. And needing to pee constantly because of the insane volume of fluids being administered. And ambulance sirens, and coughing babies, and thinking about my own baby being sad and worried at home.

In the morning I got a very non-vegetarian tray with Jell-O, “sorbet,” a can of Sprite, apple juice, and chicken broth. Sugar, sugar, sugar, and MSG. Hospitals make people well! The doctor came and quizzed me some more, including the obligatory question about passing gas, which I answered in the affirmative and got a thumbs-up. That will probably be the last time anyone is so enthusiastic about my farting. I got home Sunday afternoon, showered, lounged around, and called in tired to work yesterday. I probably could have gone to work but I just wanted some time in my house, to be honest.

So hey. If it wasn’t a bowel obstruction, what was it? I am going back to the doctor on Friday to be a Worried Whiny Wendy or Hypochondriac Harriet and make sure it is not any of the dreadful things Dr. Google has come up with. I mean, I have had two expensive imaging studies, so you would think all the dreadful things would be ruled out, but I am a giant baby and want reassurance.

And I want to never throw up again. I have earned that right. I have vomit credits for a lifetime.

—mimi smartypants respectfully requests.

I just came back from my first run after totally breaking myself at weightlifting class. For almost two full days I made oofing noises when going down the stairs or lifting my arms, and even had to do that thing where you freefall the last few inches to the toilet seat because the quadriceps say NOPE, WE’RE DONE. You can think you’re all bad-ass because you run three days a week and do yoga for the other four, but all it takes is a barbell and some plates to show you what a pantywaist creampuff you really are.

The class was fun, and it would be cool to start doing more weightlifting, but I was a little put off at the end of class when one woman said to me, “I had a lot of trouble with lunges when I started too.” First of all, creepy that you were watching me that closely, creeper. Second, fuck you man I wasn’t having “trouble”! Well okay a little. But see point one!

I made polite friendly noises and she added a bunch of slightly odd, AA-inspired stuff about the class—like, “This is really worth making time for” and “Keep coming back!” I know, I know: I should not be such a crab, she was just being encouraging and nice. But encouraging and nice makes me uncomfortable. Aren’t I awful? Deficient in decent human spirit AND weak of limb.

MY STUPID ACTIONS

Another thing I just did—I thought my electric kettle smelled kind of strange. So right after I poured all the boiling water into my tea cup I lifted the kettle’s lid and took a big sniff, getting a full blast of face-steam and foggy glasses in the process. Good for the pores, bad for the vision, and how could I have not anticipated that? Lactic acid has gone to my brain.

STUPID FINANCIAL DECISIONS

Well, maybe more sad than stupid—I saw an ad on the train that asked if you were “in too deep” with payday loans, and offered a consolidation service. Holy cats. Don’t people in that kind of trouble just default on those anyway? You can’t be all that concerned about your credit rating if you’re haunting the payday loan places.

NOT THE LEAST BIT STUPID

I need to brag on my kid a bit. After her first Girls on the Run practice, she was raving about how fun it was, and she said, “I like it so much! Thank you for signing me up.”

I got kind of misty about that because: niceness! And not just nice, smart enough/old enough to realize that a parent was the one who really made it happen, with a consent form and a check for an enrollment fee, and to remember that and give thanks for it just seems unusually considerate for a nine-year-old. Although this is my first and only nine-year-old, so maybe I’m wrong.

I may just be high on Nora right now because for some third-grade thought experiment about “If You Ran For President”* she answered the questions, “Who would you pick for your speechwriter? Who would be your campaign manager?” with “My mom for both because she is good with words and very organized.” Why thank you!

*Nora cannot be president anyway, of course, as she was not born in the United States. I think that should probably be changed, but let’s all wait until Schwarzenegger dies, yes?

Here is President Nora demonstrating how a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed:

That was at a fishing expo in some suburban outdoorsy store. We bought her the hat but not the gun.

—mimi smartypants hit the trail.

2. I always push the “double speed” button during all the little in-between musical bits of podcasts, and I almost always think the music sounds better that way. I make fun of LT and his love for hyperactive cocaine ukulele jazz from the 1930s but maybe he is on to something.

3. Can you just have “qualms” or do you have to have qualms about something? Can qualms be intransitive? Can’t I have just plain old qualms? One side of qualms, please.

4. I did not realize until I started comparing notes with my parent-friends just how many schools say the Pledge of Allegiance in an organized way, all in a group. Nora’s school does not and I am thankful for that, because something about professing allegiance in a group gives me hives. It is not just the “under God” part (although that gives me DOUBLE HIVES); it is more that group pledging is very, very close to group prayer.

5. And the thing is, I *do* pledge allegiance, if not literally to the flag (I get that the author was speaking metonymically, but it still seems like a weird phrase), but to the idea and reality of America, which for all its shitton of fuckedupedness is still, in a deep and real and complex way, mine.

6. For example: my crazy cat Rocko, who seems like a really terrible, nasty, and inconvenient animal, but he’s mine. Which sounds like I’m saying, “Oh once you get to know him you’ll see his good points,” which is true but also sort of a side issue since his bad points are pretty damn bad. But he is still my cat. Rocko IS America!

7. Do you love me like crazy? Are you going to say some things, and then I’ll say some things, and then we’re done? Okay then, let me tell you the story of how I finally left behind my Diet Coke addiction.

8. I was down to only drinking one Diet Coke a day, but that one-a-day was the most shameful one of all—the morning Diet Coke. I don’t know why that bugged me so much, except maybe that I felt like I had no control over it. Any other time of the day I had no trouble with “just water, please” but mornings— my mouth all sleep-gross and my eyes barely open—always found me padding down to the basement (oooh, metaphor!) fridge to get that cursed can. Even if the night before I had sternly told myself that I would make tea or drink juice or grab a beer (kidding), or do anything but pop the top on the container of caramel color + neurotoxins, the morning would come and I could not help myself.

9. None of the accepted stop-drinking-soda wisdom (fizzy water! green tea! diluted juice! blah blah!) ever worked for me until it clicked that what I wanted from Diet Coke was acidity. Carbonation and caffeine are entirely secondary to the blast of acid that cleaned out my mouth like the 5-0’s jump-out boys clean up a drug corner.

10. (I want to take that comparison a LOT further, and craft a highly-acclaimed cable television drama about the war between oral bacteria and the forces of fluoride in a troubled city called Mouth, and how acid substances like coffee and Diet Coke seem to vanquish bacteria temporarily but are in actuality bad for the teeth [read: ordinary citizens, moral fiber], but the bureaucracy goes for the quick fix over long-lasting dental health. Do you think there might be intellectual-property lawsuits there?)

11. Anyway, once I figured that out I started drinking a huge glass of water with a LOT of lemon juice squeezed into it right after getting up and, three days later, no more cola-flavored monkey on my back. Plus I get to feel all smug and faux-healthy, like I am doing some ridiculous Gwyneth Paltrow-esque “cleansing” ritual when I get my easy peasy lemon squeezy on. For a while I was even drinking this crazy Whole Foods apple cider vinegar/honey beverage made by Bragg’s (with their irritating Christian fish symbol right on the bottle and everything), but then I started feeling stupid because it has three cheap-ass ingredients and surely I can make it myself. I have not yet gotten the proportions right but I will keep trying.

12. So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And as long as I am being opinionated about the Pledge of Allegiance and bathroom etiquette notes and acidity as THE ONE TRUE WAY TO GET OFF DRUGS, I will also be opinionated about music and say you should listen to The Grates, Ni Hao, early Cars, Couch, Mogwai, Eat Skull, the David Bowie album “Reality,” Wild Flag, The Phenomenal Handclap Band, Cypress Hill, and avant-garde cellist Okkyung Lee.

—mimi smartypants wants to know: are those Bugle Boy jeans you’re wearing?

Are there any dental hygienists in the house? Because I have a question. Are we sure that in The Year Two Thousand And Twelve there is no better way to give someone a tooth-cleaning than with a little pointy scraper? There is no hypersonic ultrathin propulsion thingy that can do the job as well as an Eastern European lady with a sterile crochet hook? It certainly seems we should have better technology by now. It also certainly seems that we should not be subjected to John Cougar Mellencamp while undergoing the pointy scraping, but that is another matter.

ELEVATORS (ME AND YOU)

The elevators at my office have been broken this week in a very strange way that meant you could not go down from our floor. Signs advised people to take the stairs or go a floor up in order to go down, and that last piece of advice annoyed me in two ways—first, it had me singing Coolio pretty much all day (get your woman on the floor, gotta get up to get down) and second, the fact that some people actually did get up to get down. That made my brain ache because it is INEFFICIENT. I used to get similarly irked to see people walk to the previous stop to get on the bus earlier. I know, it is not up to me to Taylorize the whole world or distribute productivity apps on the street. Sometimes I forget though.

I WILL RESCUE YOU

Next month, I start being a Girls on the Run coach. I went to training last week, which was about being supportive and encouraging and so on, and NOT about how to run as fast as possible, as Nora thought. When I was getting ready to leave she asked me all kinds of leading questions about my fastest mile and if I felt ready. Eventually I had to say that I was not getting time-trial-tested, for heaven’s sake, I was going to watch a PowerPoint presentation and learn some group-management skills.  I think she and I will both enjoy Girls on the Run, and the curriculum is good stuff overall, but I hope Nora is not disappointed that it is more like “Girl Scouts With Exercise” than the hybrid of CrossFit/Warrior Dash/Special Forces boot camp that is the extracurricular activity of her dreams.

Getting CPR certified was one of the coaching requirements. I think I have done this about three times in my life now, because I never remember to recertify before the card expires. My favorite bits are the flat spots on the back of the baby dummies’ heads (that’s some serious craniosynostosis you got there, baby) and the yelling HEY ARE YOU OKAY for the adults. I love that part. Hey are you okay. I mean besides the no arms no legs just a torso problem.  And the weird plastic dental-dam thing hanging out of your mouth hole.

ALMOST FORGOT

I think I promised to wrap up the Bloomington-Normal blog reading thing but there is not too much to wrap up. Nobody died, threw up, or screamed in terror and fled the room, holding their hands over their delicate college-student ears, when I took the stage. Or platform. Or whatever the hell it was. There was some crazy professional theater lighting though, so I think it counts as a stage. I felt a bit like a rock star. A very short, middle-aged, foul-mouthed rock star. A rock star who responsibly drank red wine at a post-reading reception, foreswore any college-girl bathroom makeout (responsible!), and was responsibly driven back to her Hampton Inn enclave at a responsible time of the night. I put the espon in responsible, man. Or something like that.

THE THING I HAVE NOT SHUT UP ABOUT FOR WEEKS

Oh my god, therapy penguin! How sick do you have to be? I feel an attack of some sort coming on. Roast Beef, help me! (Is the name a web comic shout-out? I wonder.)

—mimi smartypants can’t complain.

After a weirdly restless night my 5:30 am taxi arrived, and I struggled to avoid peeing my pants in terror at the driver’s skills and attitude toward safety, which were reflective of a man who firmly believes in the afterlife. It was definitely Mr. Khan’s Wild Ride.

Union Station is somewhere south of “Soviet-Era” on the Inspiring Architecture Scale, and its interior seems to be mostly made of plastic. Four people in the waiting area were relatively normal (I am generously including myself in their number), two were shapeless sleeping bundles of stained clothing, one was loudly talking on a cell phone about which of his acquaintances were in jail and for what, and one family was having a conversation about the death of Whitney Houston.  I eavesdropped on this for a while and learned of their belief that she was murdered in some kind of conspiracy to kill black entertainers (Michael Jackson was cited as corroborating evidence). Elvis, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin:  those were all  just sad people with drug problems, but Whitney Houston was clearly in fine shape right up until the point Evil Whitey slipped her the fatal dose. Gotcha.

The train itself was an improvement over all that led up to it, and I enjoyed my huge cushy “business-class” seat and looking out the window at all the excellent trackside spots in which to dump a body. That is just about all I can think of whenever I am on a train. Don’t know what that says about me.

TIME OUT FOR SOME STAR WARS CUISINE

Nora was reading an issue of Food & Wine at the kitchen table while I cooked, mostly out loud (arrggggh), and I heard her mispronounce the word “Tuscan.” She said it with a long u, like toucan or super or foolish. (Super Foolish Toucan! One night only!)

Me: It’s “Tuscan.”

Nora: Tuscan? No. This is a recipe.

Me: Yeah, sure. Tuscany is a region in Italy.

Nora: Tuscan KNEE?

Me: Yeah.

Nora [kind of muttering to herself]: Tusken raiders.

Me: It’s a region in Italy.

Nora [quietly]: It’s a region in TATTOOINE.

NOW WHERE WERE WE

I made it in one piece to Bloomington-Normal, and am currently parked at a coffeeshop taking advantage of their hospitality and free wireless. Shouldn’t Main Street also have adorable little diner/cafes where Wesleyan students can take their moms to breakfast? I have not noticed any. I could forgo nutrition in favor of getting completely wrecked on caffeine and delivering a blog performance of messed-up-rockstar proportions, but that might not be the best idea. I will write up a report of my downstate frolic regardless, unless it is such a disaster that you hear about it on CNN first.

—mimi smartypants is going to be the next Canadian Dracula.