better now, but still Sigh.

So I got these homeopathic lozenges that are supposed to help with the withdrawal symptoms. No artificial sweeteners--just lactose. (No, lactose and dairy proteins are not a problem for the rash--we've tested.) Anywho, these things would probably work really well if you crushed them and cooked them and shot them. Under the tongue, they're just like Oh, little sugary thing!

I want my gum gum gum gum gum back. I want my minty nicotine-rushing gum back.

It's very difficult to write and not smoke.

miscellaneous b So Ed Schrock is gay. Ain't that a kick in the head, Ed?

I tried to post pictures from our digital camera but the dog won't hunt.

I'd write more but we are in the midst of Eczemapalooza 2004. I can hear Baldo skipping his nap in there. He's got a head-to-toe sandpaper rash.

We ran out of Protopic. Well, not really. We have one refill left from the doctor, but it's for 20g and the smallest tube is 30g (we got a too-big tube before, and 20g is the balance). Maybe the pharmacist can squeeze 10g out of the tube and give us the rest?

The possibility exists that the sorbitol in my nicotine-replacement gum is causing it. (Headline: Cosmos Kicks Woman's Ass.) So I'm halfway like, What the fuck? My SMOKING didn't hurt him, so maybe I should do that some more!

But who knows? Our allergist--the one and only one in our HMO--doesn't think eczema and food allergies are related.

Again today I felt the urge to pick up and haul ass out of here. Know what? I'm sick of this shit. I can't be a mother to this kid. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of keeping him in long-sleeved footies in Texas in August. I'm tired of other kids in their cute little shortalls with their smooth skin. I'm tired of his bloody feet. I'm not enough of a person for this, especially if I can't smoke or chew gum or do SOMETHING. I'm tired of explaining to people. I'm tired of him screaming and flailing and crying.

I'm tired of looking for 4T cotton footed pajamas. They don't exist. I'm going to have to sew socks onto pajama bottoms. And then I'm going to have to sew the bottoms to the tops, or else he'll just undress and scratch all night. Maybe I should just graft cotton jammies onto his skin.

How will he ever learn to dress himself? The Other B., who is six months older, dresses himself in the morning, even his socks.

Please don't get me wrong: I do like my kid. I love my kid. But it's so frustrating dealing with his skin problems. Some days I just want to check out. Some days I long for a normal kid instead of an itchy, broody, bloody, supersmart one. I wish my kid go go barefoot in the grass or wear shorts in the summertime. He is truly special-needs, and it's apparent to no one. Nobody realizes how much we deal with.

haiku it's my birthday. woo!
I'm 32 years old now.
to the mac counter!

mmmmmm Nicotine-replacement gum tastes like baking soda and crushed black pepper.

I can blow bubbles with it.

I'm all set.

ugh And now, of course, the MP3 player is playing The Hives. Talk about a band I can't fucking stand anymore.

sesame street Other J., can you please ban the IP of the fuckjob who's spamming me with "cheap meds" bullshit? I don't have authorization to ban IPs.

Everyone else: Please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

We were eating meatballs last night (yes, they were premade), and Baldo busted out in hives. He started shivering and biting his hands furiously to the point where he couldn't eat any more food. Turns out they have sesame seeds in them. We gave Atarax and I cuddled B. on the couch until he felt better. Then we went to the ER on the advice of the triage nurse. Of course we had a giant row about it. Of course I probably overreacted. I'm just not used to seeing hives as opposed to eczema as opposed to redness as opposed to the regular furious itching. Of course I have no idea what the hell I'm doing as a parent, and I feel like any minute the real parents are going to show up and pay me for two years of babysitting.

I've been having panic attacks again.

To make this weird, my MP3 player has landed on "Drugs in My Pocket" by the Monks.

I'm going to go club our allergist on the head with an Epi-Pen Jr.

I'm going to go make a sandwich.

pix I'm afraid to even mention preschool lest I jinx it.

I will, however, mention that I take all kinds of pictures of Baldo, but not so much with my digital camera because my USB port has entered perimenopause and is refusing all congress with anything remotely resembling a prong. I have to switch out the mouse whenever I want to scan something.

It's all attributable to my Mojo. My Mojo is too powerful. Eventually it overwhelms all the mechanical devices in my force field.

donnie darko Today I got sent to review the director's cut of Donnie Darko. It brought back memories.

The first time I saw the movie, I was watching the preview 41 weeks pregnant. I was seriously unable to wear anything but a bathrobe, but somehow I managed to leave the house and go the three blocks to the theater. I brought along a giant bag of raisins.

Toward the beginning of the third act I started to feel like my abdomen was going to explode. I'm in labor!, I thought. How badass would it be to go into labor during this movie? Cosmic. Badass.

But of course it was just the raisins. I got home and farted the Fart of Farts. And then my mucus plug fell out. Which would have been cool but I still hung around pregnant for another week and a half or something like that, until I ate carne guisada and finally catapulted myself into labor. And then I started laughing and freaking out, and I wouldn't come out of the shower, except people pulled me out and sent me to the ER in a pediatric wheelchair (all the others were in use) and I had a horrible very un-cosmic delivery, and here I more or less am now. I'm sure that the last movie I watched before actually giving birth was something shitty.

So then the second time I saw Donnie Darko I was starkers with PPD and I don't remember anything about that experience except that J. and I went around for days saying, "I'm starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion" to each other, however we could work it in, which was actually not that frequent when you are two depressed people handing a screaming baby back and forth.

The third time is still good. I sort of miss being pregnant, because I was the kind of pregnant person who'd get really wound up and go off about things for hours, and the movie is good for that. I used to have all these revelations that were very profound, and then I'd get paranoid and snack a lot. My pregnancy was like a bad 42-week high.

The RNC loves me Must be something about my ZIP code that makes AARP and the RNC so interested in me.

I just got my RNC membership card in the mail! I gather from the misspelling that they purchased the Texas Monthly mailing list.

They were good enough to enclose a prepaid envelope. So I wrote them a letter:

Thanks for taking the time, effort, and money to purchase my name from the Texas Monthly mailing list. I appreciate your offer of membership, but I am an independent voter, and I do not support the Bush-Cheney candidacy.

I believe that the war in Iraq is morally unjust, that President Bush's tax breaks and corporate welfare hurt working Americans, and that the real partisan obstructionists are working to amend the Constitution in order to pacify and retain the support of religious extremists.

Please do not assume I support your candidate because I am a Texan. I am proud to think for myself, and I will be proud to cast my vote against your candidate in November.

Think the FBI will come to call?

I'm gonna barf My Little B. goes to preschool tomorrow.

shit I'm out of Craisins.

movies I think the nap is going kerplunk, so I may have to duck out suddenly.

You know what I saw today that rocked? Zatoichi.

You know what I think could be the movie I've been waiting for about marriage? We Don't Live Here Anymore.

You know what I think is the greatest sandwich ever? Soy-nut butter with Craisins. I may go fix another one. We are Craisin freaks.

attention vegans The next time one of y'all gives me something with nuts in it, I'm gonna freak out on you. You have been warned.

That goes for all y'all with gluten sensitivity too. You can leave out the wheat, but if you put nuts in your spelt brownies I'm gonna wail on ya. Check it: If you eat wheat you might get a stuffy nose and intestinal cramps. If I eat your fucking walnuts and pass them to my kid in my milk, he's going to the ER. Got it?

Just leave the goddamn nuts out, people. Nuts are optional. Please don't put them in to be all fancy-pants because your food contains no dairy, wheat, soy, egg, sulfites, refined sugars, or hydrogenated oils. Don't put macadamia nuts in it. Don't put silvered almonds in it. Don't put crushed pecans in it. Don't put any of that shit on it or in it.

Yesterday J. and I went on a date in the afternoon to the Drafthouse to see Coffee and Cigarettes, and it would have been lovely except for the waitress going on and on about how great their Good Morning Vietnam-ese Salad was with its precious peanut sauce. To us. To the people sitting next to us. To the people behind us. And I was about to grab that shit and stick it up her ass. Yeah? How's that peanut sauce now?

During the Fred Molina part of the movie J. ordered a slice of pie from the dessert menu. You want to know what kind it was? Pecan.

That Amy's burrito I tried to eat? Guess what it had in there. Nuts.

There's nuts in the goddamn $3.00 vegan cookies from Whole Foods.

I like the look I get when I ask somebody for the ingredients of the muffin at the coffee counter. "Does this have nuts in it?" I ask. They don't know. They can tell me it's made of organic spelt flour farmed in the shade by salaried workers who don't wear fragrance, and they can tell me it's exported according to a fair-trade agreement, but they cannot tell me whether there are nuts. It's a yes or no question, Jack.

Today J. picked up what alleged to be a bean empanada for B-Dog to eat. Nope--spinach. With pine nuts. Fucking pignoli. I think he threw it out the window onto the freeway.

Just leave all that shit out.

Posted by Marrit at 02:19 PM

I'm back We spent two days On the Farm and returned to find, in no particular order:

• a dead phone, including dead DSL
• a colony of ants living underneath B-Dog's booster chair
• maggots in one of the diapers

Freak. Out.

You ever get the feeling you're bailing out a sinking ship? That if you sit down for five minutes, insects will actually begin living on you?

The Farm is worse. When you are close to nature, Nature lets you know that you're her punk-ass bitch. There are "Chinese-writing" spiders as big as your head living on the porch. (And your head may be bigger than I realize, since I can't actually see you. Still I'm confident; these spiders are big.) There are mud-daubers in the garage. The sun goes down and the bug noises are so loud that it's difficult to carry on a conversation on the screened porch. These bugs are gonna kick your ass, man.

It's hard to describe, but in the past few weeks, Baldo has become--subtly--more verbal. And he stopped calling me Mom or Mama or Momna or the like. Now I am Marrit.

"Please, Marrit, I want this bagel," he says in the kitchen, and I'm all like, "What, are you going to go shave afterward?" The kid used to point, scream, and grab. Now he asks for things so specifically.

I could kiss him. In fact I often do. (Now he's still sleeping.) The kicker is that they ask for a lot more stuff once they have language. They're no longer frustrated and can give you very specific directions, like Please, Marrit, I want this juice in the Arthur cup. And an ice cube. And these crackers. And you've gone from being a janitor to being a barkeep, which wouldn't be so bad if fifteen seconds later there wasn't a big puddle of juice and the ice and the crackers on the floor.

And the music!

"I want 'Lor Morrissey.' It's a sweet and good song," Baldo proclaimed.
"Tell me again, sweetie?"
"Lor Morrissey."
"You want to listen to Morrissey?" (Secretly my parenting dreams have all been realized. But what about the guitar artistry of Johnny Marr and the buoyant bass of Andy Rourke?)
"Lor Morrissey."
"Ummm...who sings that?"
"Johnny Cash."
We went through all our Johnny Cash. Baldo identified four different songs as "Lor Morrissey." I have no idea what this kid is talking about.

And did I mention the maggots?

My life has been sanitized for my protection, so this was my first actual encounter with maggots. For that I'm thankful. I wasn't even really surprised. Oh, of course there are maggots in the diapers. (Flings them into the washer.) Some of the maggots fell off onto the side, and I cackled and flicked them into the spray.

j'adore FactCheck.org.

delayed reaction If I meet Ethan Hawke again, I'm going to dopeslap him. So watch out, Ethan.

Events in my life--none of them actually happening to me but to people around me, one by one, like dominoes--have conspired to bring to mind a scene from Before Sunset, which I saw recently. There's a moment in which Ethan Hawke's character bemoans the near-platonic state of his marriage: "I feel like I'm running a small nursery with someone I used to date." Yes, I thought, that's it exactly. And so when I interviewed the filmmaker and cast, I tried to press him on this matter. Partially because of the true-life aspect of it, but really because that is what it feels like.

But so what?

When a man feels that his marriage has turned passionless, that he has made too many sacrifices for his family, it is somehow a Great Crime Against the Self. A tragedy. He is Less Than a Person. A eununch sleepwalking through his life. It is grand.

You know what, though? Welcome to our world, buddy. Mothers live this shit, and we don't get a parade of sympathy with a brass band and the Kilgore Rangerettes.

You think I don't ever want to ditch the man and the house and the child and run off to Terlingua and write the fire in my belly? You think I don't ever want to time-warp back to being young and single and drunk (and hot, BTW) on the MBTA on the way to a free lecture by the Film Genius of the Week--Ulu Grossbard or Bruce McDonald or Comden and Green? You think I don't want to live a life of the mind instead of wiping up spills every fourteen minutes?

It's life. It's aging. It's choosing a relationship and a family. Of course you regret it sometimes, the way you regret not spending a semester in London or not buying that powder-blue car coat at Filene's basement, the one that made you look just like Tuesday Weld on the cover of Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend.

My point is that women have lived this shit for millennia. So at the very least please be aware, Mr. Hawke, that you are not making a philosophical breakthrough just because it happened to you.

And watch your ass.