the Napoleon of the stump Today we had a contentious, grouchy day, including a wailing fit in the library because somebody had already checked out the Magic School Bus DVD we were looking for.

(I wish somebody could tell me why my three-year-old is into Magic School Bus and nothing else--maybe something that doesn't have the life-death cycle and botanical science in it. Did we, like, skip the part with Dr. Seuss and silly phonics and stuff? Because I like that stuff, and my kid cannot possibly understand the freakish level of neurological detail in Magic School Bus Explores the Senses.)

To have a three-year-old is to be handcuffed to a person who absolutely cannot handle and will not accept anything you do. The light turns red, they want it green. You get a glass of water, they want to drink it. They want to help you put the groceries away but insist that the paper towels go in the fridge. They are the most contrary little shits in the world. You recognize that this is developmentally necessary for them and finagle (or force) their cooperation, but the object of their little game is precisely that: They just want to be pissed off at you about something because you're Mom.

Then you realize you are really a Parent. Even if you thought you were going to be cool and Not Like Your Mom and Dad, you're The Man now, dawg. You are to be rebelled against.

"Oh, God," I thought. Have we ever had a moment of harmony since this kid was born? Weren't we supposed to be all Madonna-and-baby-Jesus-painting with Proper Bonding and stuff? Our stages have been: Kicking You Inside; Emerging Backward; Puking on You After Every Feeding; Sleeping for Less than an Hour at a Time; Refusing Shoes; Running Randomly Toward Hazards; Eating Only Peaches; Twiddling; Whacking Another Child with a Tonka Excavator. Because I was at the Low Point of My Day, the point mothers reach episodically, I thought this. And because I am convinced, although some tell me otherwise, that there is a mass of people out there with Fully Animatronic Self-Raising Children who are remarkably mellow and occupy themselves peacefully with balls of yarn or something, and these people do not know what I'm talking about.

Anyhow, I was at this low point when upon the Lyra (which was on shuffle) came "James K. Polk" by They Might Be Giants. And suddenly everything was going to be okay.

"I want to hear that song again," Baldo said.

"The last one?"

"'James K. Polk,'" he said. Like, Yeah, the eleventh president? Hello?

"Okay," I said.

"The solo sounds very ghosty." Because it's a singing saw.

And then I plotzed. Motherhood is 25% plotz (or maybe less with a three-year-old) and 75% wanting to stab yourself so you can get off the cell block and into the infirmary, and the only thing that positively affects that ratio--I mean this--is They Might Be Giants.

in utero I said I was going to swear off celebrity cheap shots, but I just can't pass this up. So Tom Cruise told Entertainment Weekly that he's bought a sonogram machine for his house? I thought people who used those walkmans to hear the heartbeat were freaks. As somebody told me today, "I'm picturing Katie strapped to a table for the next five months while Tom crouches over her with that little wand."

That man needs a handler! Does he really just say everything he's thinking without any forethought whatsoever? I guess so, with the whole "She's my sister! She's my publicist! She's my sister!" bit. Even if you are a superfreak and you're going to just hop on the sonogram machine like a Stairmaster, you don't have to tell anyone that. Never in a million years would an interviewer try to pin a person down about a pregnancy by saying, "So, have you bought a sonogram machine yet?" And then you might have to say yes, depending on your ability to lie, but you don't have to volunteer it. When some flyweight entertainment journalists eventually ask him, "How did it go, Tom?" he's going to start rattling on about the mucus plug and how enlightened beings from the 11th Zootron Universe came in to cut the cord only after it had stopped pulsing, and Katie vomited twice during transition and has a small tear. He's like an imperfectly programmed robot who has no sense of social nuance. Do you think somebody could fix him in some kind of ceremony with twangy metal objects?

they'll love it, too! What Anne Soffee meant to say is that she's recommending Inconsolable to her MOM friends. Although it could be a big hit with the Maronite ladies. You just never know.

Mamazine.com Amy Anderson and I e-mailed each other a while back about Inconsolable. The resulting interview is up on Mamazine.com.

Call 1-800-MR-PLOW My son has decided that he wants to drive a snow plow.

I think that's wonderful, but I'm not sure of the basis for that decision because it doesn't snow where we live.

"I guess you might have to live someplace cold," I suggested.

It's almost like Cool Runnings. "A little boy dreamed of one day driving a snowplow..." And then he grows up and goes to Michigan or someplace with his bags packed and this hopeful smile, but all the other snow plow drivers laugh at him because this kid isn't plowing any snow, nuh uh. He's never even defrosted a windshield. So then he finds an old burned-out former famous snowplow guy who agrees to teach him, and they train in a warehouse with piles of slush, and that kid learns to plow! And then they go to, like, some big contest, like a Snowplow Invitational, and all the slowplow guys in their matching tracksuits laugh at him and his crap snowplow, which is probably like some metal siding welded onto a Ford Courier, but he shows them all because he's got heart!

thankful My mom doesn't have cancer in her lungs.

I opted out I'm going to have to go make breakfast for three people in a minute, but I'm hearing all this renewed chatter about Lisa Belkin's celebrated and utterly fictional opt-out bullshit (from the fashionably contrarian and specious elitists at the Sunday Times, who are now at least acknowledging that Mommy Masters of the Universe can't get back into the workforce after their kids start school). Martha Brockenbrough took them all to the mat a few weeks ago (I'd give you a link, but, you know, breakfast) so there nothing here that bears repeating.

I'll say one thing, though. You know why I quit my full-time job (at which I outearned my husband and had better insurance) to stay home with my son until he was school-aged? I did it because there's no way I could have kept my job. Late nights and Saturdays, sprung on me at a minute's notice. Sudden deadlines cropping up. Bad management that caused me constant crises, made me work overtime to fix the problems. I could not leave my workplace at a consistent, predictable time. When I told my colleagues about my pregnancy, they balked at my maternity leave: Three months? one of them shouted, incredulous. We were sitting at a meeting making out a project schedule, and people kept attaching my name to projects. "Marrit, that's you."

To get a clock-punching job I would have had to take a pay cut and give up my insurance benefits; I might as well have been freelancing, and so here I am today.

Listen carefully: I'm not really very invested in whether Muffy quits her job as a financier because she gets off on pureeing yams. (If she does, good for her, but she does not comprise a meaningful trend.) What is more important is this: When mothers give up their earning potential (and you never recover, if Barbara Ehrenreich is to be believed) it tells us that something is afoul in the American marketplace. If people have to choose between their employment and building families...well, that's kind of an unworkable situation, isn't it? Families need things from us. And the workplace doesn't like that, doesn't want to share.

Breakfast.

I'm amused by the way the universe sometimes gives you two messed-up things to deal with at once, the way our sewer overflowed when I was first home from the hospital with Baldo, and our tub filled with sewage. Yeah, that was great. That was really character-building. anyhow, I have that feeling again now. Not specifically with the sewer--sewer's fine--but with that other bit with the messed-up things.

Like when we went to MD Anderson on Wednesday and my mom got shitty news about her cancer, and then we drove out of the parking garage and went around the corner and became completely mired in this auto-pedestrian bedlam surrounding the Mexico-Bulgaria soccer game at Reliant Arena, which is right around there. Houston has light rail now, which I saw for the first time, and I got to see lots of shear tractors and mobile cranes getting ready to take apart Astroworld, which elicited this bizarre out-of-measure response from me because everything else was too big to deal with. My mom had moved her own mother to hospice care at the hospital the night before; my grandmother died Thursday night. I'd never seen soccer fans as such before, and I'm not going to call them hooligans because they weren't doing anything wrong, but my word, those are some boisterous people. It was like Oh man, I can't deal with these soccer fans everywhere. I'm going to have to get out of the car and start kicking some ass. Except I am not in any way prepared to kick anybody's ass; I mean to say that I can sort of get how people sometimes throw a spring around all that mania. You don't want to get stuck in that.

I got my mom to watch Arrested Development. Baldo got in on our excitement and has since been making reference to "A Rest of Development," which I swear is the only malapropism my kid has ever spoken. He also blurts out extemporaneously, "Steve Holt!"

every single one of us The doctor who delivered my mom's bad news about her MRI yesterday was pregnant. We--and likely she--are all so screwed. People have to stick together because at one time or another we all take it up the butt from the cosmos.

about a boy My pedagogical and parental instincts are clashing.

When you are entrusted with the emotional, social, cognitive, behavioral, and motor development of another human being (and bear in mind that when you meet this person, he's all saggy and newborn), the parental side wants this person to flower in all directions: I want you to love music and dance and use scissors and be visually perceptive! The educator side will want to adjust your curriculum to suit your kid's apparent learning style. (The educational instinct is not always touchy-feely Dead Poets stuff, but the categorization of the phenomenal world according to a series of concrete and logical objectives met through guided practice and assessment: I could perhaps be accused of living according to this instinct generally. It's just so handy.)

Anyhow, whoever said a mother is her child's first teacher (like that's not a tautology) didn't consider that perhaps the mother is a teacher anyway and has to sit on her hands like Dr. Strangelove to keep from being...teachery. Okay, we have five minutes until supper, and we're going to put all this playdough back in its bag and close it. Okay? Agreed. That's our objective. As you can see, the bag closes in this direction. Do you want to try it? Okay. I'll give you a one-minute reminder. Do you understand? Any questions? Now I'm going to write a rubric for assessing your comprehension of Pre-supper Playdough Removal and Containment that is consistent with the state standards. We have a kinesthetic task, we're learning timekeeping, check off "Anticipates Mealtime..."

Gross.

Then again, if my kid doesn't really want to use markers to mark on things maybe he doesn't have to. For real: I worry that he's not developing a pencil grip. This is not just me being insane. Unless you are a radical unschooler living off the grid (and if so I salute you, but this doesn't apply) people will begin asking in some official capacity whether your three-year-old is developing a pencil grip. "Does he have a pencil grip?" I have no idea. "It doesn't have to be perfect, but we like to see kids his age start working on it." My kid has just mastered wiping his own butt. Can't we just enjoy that for a while? And from this you can probably gather what I think of the Bush administration's plan to require standardized testing "accountability" as part of Head Start funding: Three-year-olds are accountable for wiping their own butts, and that's about it. If they hold a pencil, great. If they want to build a fire truck out of pillows, perfect. They don't have an inner checklist yet. That living hell comes later.

I took a quiz that was supposed to help me discover Baldo's intelligence type. Of course I didn't need a quiz for that: My kid can say "phytoplankton" but sometimes falls over walking. One of the questions asked me what my child does when presented with crayons. (No, "eat the crayons" was not an answer.) One of the answers matched him: He reads the labels of the crayons. He is as kinesthetic as water vapor. I feel like I should be encouraging him to use his limbs sometimes. One afternoon I got all smarty about it and asked him to tell me which of the colors were named for plants. He picked up each crayon (in a giant tub of stray crayons from various packages) and asked me, "Is violet a plant?" (Yes.) "Is cornflower a plant?" (Yes.) Is yellow-green a plant?" (No.) Then he placed them in two piles, Plant and Not-Plant.

He did not at any point display any particular reaction to the colors of the colors. He's a Vulcan. Or worse, he's an educator.

Some of his youthful friends get so into art, and I used to be envious of that because they seemed to be experiencing the primal jouissance people do not receive from definition and categorization (or do they?). I don't want him to be a joylessly logical automaton like his mother, and don't even get me started about his father's sorting habits. I have realized that my kid does in fact draw and has apparently even used glitter once--but never around me, only with other people. Me he wants to read to him and to talk and talk.

now I don't believe in anything Arrested Development is cancelled. Take me with you!

my mother, myself Sometimes my pharmaceutical youth comes in handy. My mom, who like me tends to get stuck in the details rather than thinking about what's next, seems very concerned about taking Xanax before her next procedure. Of course, this is just my end of the experience. But so it seems.

"You took that, right?"
"If by 'took that' you mean 'was hooked on it,' yes."

Mom, it's okay to take the Xanax. I promise it won't make you all Reefer Madness.

I talked to my dad, and he asked me lots of questions about The Boy and engaged me in a quasi-philosophical discussion about These Kids and How We Raise Them, and how We All Get Through It Somehow, which was cool, but it felt like he was keeping me talking so he could have something upbeat to say. I always feel like such an asshole in those moments: when somebody needs good news, so they kind of glom onto your mommy-and-kidness to try to glean some sense that the world is really okay. You have to try to give it to them, so you tell them some weird thing your child said or something amusing yet resonant that happened, and if they are my dad they say, "Well, we all get through it somehow," and I sense that I gave him something he needed right then, but I also feel like a crappy child because my mom is getting screened for bone cancer on Monday, and all I did was talk about us.

behold! The estimable Stacey Greenberg interviewed me for hipMama.com.

dad-watching at HEB When you go shopping without your preschooler, you can really focus and get a lot done. Nobody's trying to put their hand down your shirt (or at least not my shirt at my HEB) or sneak weird canned vegetables and coloring books into your cart. So you get hyper-aware of your shopping experience, like you're a shopping ninja or something; you know what everyone else is buying, you can anticipate what's coming on the in-store PA next, you instinctively reach for That Which Is On Sale.

I like to establish telepathic connections with the other shoppers. We're all having the same mercantile experience, and it could be sociologically significant, right? I suspect this is annoying to other people, but I really don't care--I'm pretty down-low about it.

Today was a Day of Dads with Babies. I don't fall all over myself praising fathers for parenting their children because this is simply what people do for their kids. You don't get extra points for your testicles. That's my feeling, anyhow. I've talked to several dads who are annoyed when strangers praise them effusively for just doing what they do. I am not, for example, going to freak out on my checker for scanning items and ringing me up, like, "It's so great that you pushed that button! You must be a wonderful person!" That would be weird, right, and most likely patronizing? Not to mention that mothers in public have the opposite experience: people breathing down your neck, waiting for the chance to tell you how you should parent or that you "shouldn't feed him that."

But today's dads merit a mention. One guy was wearing his undershirt and flip-flops, and I related to him instantly as One of My People, the Slobby Parents. I wanted to party with this guy. The other guy was more shorts-and-a-beltsy, but that's cool, too. He can hang out with us. We're not exclusive. They both had babies. They both looked pretty wall-eyed. And wall-eyed parents in public trigger my PPD Survival Person with Cancer Rising Caretaking Urge, which I admit is pretty presumptuous and intrusive. Should I try to say something to these people? "My, that's a small baby you have there, and some pretty grungy flip-flops." How do you approach wall-eyed at-home fathers without being patronizing or bizarre? Is it possible?

I guess you do it the same way you approach wall-eyed mothers. You ask them how they're doing today, and you really mean it.

Maybe, I wondered, it kind of sucks to be a dad. You don't get to take anything for granted anymore. You have to figure yourself out all the time. Do people hate on you for being out with your baby instead of doing something appropriately manly? I really don't know. I think about this stuff not only because I am surrounded by men (seriously--even my cat is male) but because I am raising a small one and I'm going to have to help equip him for dealing with his own variety of gender bullshit. I think women get most of the shit for trying to break the rules, but men certainly get theirs too. And I don't even believe that "parenting a child" and "being manly" are mutually exclusive states of being, but yeah that attitude is out there. I made the mistake of reading Garrison Keillor's column this morning, and it's all like, "I am a Big Man, and I need a shack in my backyard full of bourbon and softcore porn!" which I don't find funny or even particularly truthful, because according to that dialectical logic, I as a woman would like....what....Pampered Chef parties and manicures and poufy furniture and lifestyle magazines? I hate all that stuff, and Garrison Keillor very nearly convinced me (though I am sure this was not his intention) that mothers of young children are the people who require backyard shacks with bourbon and porn. I was like, "Hell, sign me up for that." If I could hang out in my booze-and-porn shack for twenty solid uninterrupted minutes a day, I'd be a better person. I could probably get off Lexapro. I'd be a more patient parent, a nicer spouse, a better teacher.

Of course, there are problems with the booze-and-porn shack: namely, it is totally incompatible with parenting alongside a spouse with full-time traditional employment. You have to go get cheese and juice. You have to wash the barfed-on apparel, you have to clean poopy butts. You have to induce naps and deal with the teething. You have to teach a small person to recognize his colors and use a toilet. You can't do these things when you're drunk and masturbating (or can you? I wouldn't even think to try, but please correct me if I'm mistaken) in a shack in your backyard. Also, the booze-and-porn-shack has the tendency to make your dependents feel alienated and resentful because you're always escaping from them; they grow up and go off into the world and pull some bizarre shit like becoming Scientologists or Shriners or carnival geeks because they never had community at home, and finally it all comes out in a tearful confrontation: "You were always in your porn shack! You don't love me! And that's why I'm a carnie!" Naturally parents want to avoid this outcome.

Anyhow. I thought about all that when I was getting frozen grapes and paper towels today. And I thought about the dads.

way to go! Thanks a lot, my Texans, for amending our already labyrinthine state constitution with that goddamn Proposition 2. Thanks a whole lot for nothing.

I don't care that we look like a bunch of bigoted cowfuckers to the rest of the nation and probably the world. That's never mattered to me. What does matter to me is that y'all just made life harder for some of your own people. You made it impossible for some of us to form legally recognized families. You told your own people what they can and cannot do with their hearts and minds and bodies, and I do not accept that. It's not your business. What's so conservative about legislating (on top of preexisting legislation) something as personal as marriage? And yes, marriage is personal. Marriage and family life are personal matters in which government should not play a role--at least that's what mothers are told when we ask why our unpaid caregiving labor is unpaid, why it doesn't contribute to the GNP, why we don't accrue Social Security. "Oh, that's your personal choice, your personal business." Fair enough, but y'all have got to stop peeing down both legs about this stuff. If it's my personal business to marry and raise children, then I (and everyone else) should at least get a free choice. If you don't want to help families, at least get the hell out of the way and stop hurting them.

If you want to do what the Bible says, be sure you invalidate my own legal heterosexual marriage because my husband was married previously. Make sure you call my kid a bastard. Make sure you stop by my house on the Sabbath (Saturday or Sunday, whichever you like) and stop me from folding clothes or planning a lesson or writing an article. Make sure you get up in my business as much as you possibly can, okay? Make sure you confiscate all of my cloth of two fabrics (I love polyester blends) and take away my pork. But bear in mind that I might put up a fight over the pork.

And don't give me any bullshit about how you want a smaller government. I'm not buying it.

quelle surprise Mothers are less likely to be hired. And when they are hired, they're paid less.

It's a Boy! I am pleased to announce the publication of It's a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons. We are not male, but our children are: they frustrate, perplex, astound, and delight us, and we wanted to explore the reasons why.

I have an essay in there--"Exile in Boyville," which originally appeared in the sadly defunct Mamalicious--but you'd want to read the book to enjoy the company of the other contributors, who include Faulkner Fox, Marion Winik, Gayle Brandeis, Katie Allison Granju, and Jennifer Margulis. (There are more wonderful writers, too; with these particular people I have formed a sort of mother-writer gang, and we are sure to be breaking kneecaps and tipping cars in a city near you soon.) The essay includes expert commentary on masculinity by my personal hero, Paul Feig, from whom I sought assistance when my son began acting strangely boyish. I don't know why, but I guess I thought I was certain to birth a little drama nerd in eyeliner. That may still come to pass. Who knows?

Anyhow. If you know a boy, parent a boy, live with a boy, were a boy, or are a boy, something in the book will probably speak to you in some fashion. And that's...everybody?

Here's more on the book from its esteemed editor, Andrea J. Buchanan, who kicks a lot of ass for a woman barely five feet tall.

perhaps Perhaps it is specious to draw essential conclusions about gender from the dating habits of rich people in New York City. Just a thought. (File Under: Maureen Dowd, cross-reference Sex in the City)

The Magic School Bus Gets It On (with Scientific Accuracy) Ever since he learned to say "proboscis," Baldo has been insane about the Magic School Bus. He is in Magic School Bus pretend-play mode all the time. "I am Ralphie, and you are Keesha, and now we will check the mail," he announces.

So I check the mail and find bills. "Oh, bad. Oh, bad. Oh, bad," I say.

"I knew I should have stayed home today," he says, as Arnold.

Then I realized the Magic School Bus is full of sexual tension. I'm not making this up. There's support for my reading in the text. If Ralphie has one more bizarre notion about vampires or superheroes, Keesha is going to spank him. (In the cartoon series, Keesha's grandmother is voiced by Eartha Kitt, so you know she's dangerous.) And then Ralphie's kind of asking for it, you know, like, "Hey, Keesha. I just got this new comic with vampires in it, and I think vampires are real."

Ms. Frizzle has myriad suitors (such as Mr. Seedplot--how resonant a name is that?) and Tim is giving a look full of meaning to Dottie Frizzle on the last page of that one book about electricity.

And I sat down to read Swims Upstream, half-caffeinated, and I don't know why I didn't see this coming in a book about fish sex but yes, I was surprised when the kids were excreted from the bus as eggs and then a male salmon swam by and spunked all over them. "What is that stuff?" Carlos asks. It's fish spunk, Carlos. You just got fertilized.

We have suddenly advanced far, far beyond Old Hat, New Hat. Suddenly animals are inseminating each other and preying upon each other's young, and all sorts of weird hard-to-explain stuff is happening. When your kid is a really self-motivated learner, what do you do? I always get two or three age-appropriate books at the library and sneak them into our stack. When you are helping a small and inquisitive person learn about death and hunger and reproduction and punctuated equilibrium (I do not read aloud the part of In the Time of the Dinosaurs when the giant meteor appears on the horizon because I am not giving MYSELF nightmares), you have to be able to take a break and do a phonics reader. But your kid just smirks at you and says, "Proboscis," and you throw up your hands: he's running past you now while you just drag your feet. This kid doesn't even pedal his tricycle, but he's poking at you about grown-up shit. You say, "Do you want to go to the park today?" and he says, "No, I want to go to Savers," and that's exactly what you do. He's afraid of his peer group and likes to hang out with your work associates. It's suddenly as if he sprang fully formed from your skull, like a little mini-me. Doesn't he want to be a kid at all? And then you remember that it was hard work being a kid, and that it was frustrating, and that you wanted to be taken seriously all the time, too. And you're going to have to give him the chance for that. You'll give him chances to be as big a kid or as little a kid as he wants to be in every moment. And sometimes you misread him--"But I am a LITTLE kid!"--and you back up and say, Okay, tell me what you need. That's what parenting is now for you. You listen and you play along and you guide and you step in only if something is really and truly unacceptable or dangerous. It starts much, much earlier than we like to think it does for children. You have to let him start figuring out what his boundaries are. You can't save him from his unpleasant feelings all the time. It's probably a little scary for him, but it's really scary for you. You don't want to tell him that the world of adults is a frightening place (because you started preparing him for it the minute he was born, whether you wanted to or not) and because you live there, too. But you have to be one step behind him to bail him out and to explain that it's not okay to take off your pants and throw them at people when you're angry. Pants are not for hurting (at least they shouldn't be, if they fit properly).

And now you really understand why parents are so affected by their own families of origin, why we repeat our patterns. Having a kid makes you feel like one, too--it puts you right back in there, into that place you've been trying to outgrow.

Why we really teach Reading a really fantastic student paper is a total rush.

and now you find yourself in '82, or how Asia saved my marriage I make no bones about how being the Mom sucks ass. And part of that is being married to Dad. "Marriage is hard work," people tell you, but you don't know what that means--you think it's comparable to "Cleaning out the gutters is hard work," not realizing that gutters can't really do very much to hurt you besides fill up with leaves. People can hurt each other, and they do; your job is to ask for it to stop and quit playing your part. And if you can't do that then you have to make it stop some other way.

So we were at one of these crossroads about a month ago in the car.

I had my Lyra, which is a big deal for the OCD-haver: all my files are pirated and mislabeled and mixed up; some are corrupt, some cut out. I was so fixated on our shit that I failed to prevent my shuffling player from cueing up Asia.

Yes, I like Asia. And I always have.

J. stopped the car. "Are we listening to Asia?"

"Okay, go ahead and make fun of me," I pouted.

It wasn't just any Asia, it was "Don't Cry"--the most bombastic Asia you can get. (I will also take "The Smile Has Left Your Eyes" as an alternate.)

"You hate my Lyra," I muttered.

"I didn't know you liked Asia," J. said.

"Like I'm going to be telling people about it."

"I like Asia, too."

"I hate Asia!" Baldo yelled from the backseat. "I do not like this Asia! Never!"

"Stop fucking with me," I told J.

"You said a swear-jar word!" Baldo hollered.

"I'll pay the jar," I said. The jar is really, really full. "Do you seriously like Asia?"

"Yeah. You want me to prove it?"

"You don't have to. I believe you." I'm really skeptical about everything, and that's a problem. There are other problems, too. There are always a lot of problems because none of us is in factory-showroom condition. But if you can be with somebody for eleven years, have a child, and never know about the Asia thing, then maybe you can learn about other things, too. I don't know.

the fossils Is it just me, or is this news report of fossils getting it on kind of hot?

goodbye, AstroWorld Just when I thought Houston couldn't get any worse, AstroWorld closed.

"In assessing the performance of this property relative to the significant increase in real estate values in the Houston market, we concluded that the best way to unlock this value for shareholders was to pursue a sale of the property," said Kieran Burke, chairman and CEO of Six Flags.

Congratulations, shareholders.

AstroWorld was the real deal: A terrifying family amusement park for the people of greater Houston. It wasn't as slick as Six Flags. It was grungy and lovable. Many of my memories there involve sudden torrential rain. It was the place to grow up (which you did by riding the Texas Cyclone, preferably the back cars) and try new things: the suspension coaster (XLR8), funnel cake, and dating. For a child there was no cooler feeling than finally seeing that globe fountain on the horizon--after you'd battled the 610 Loop and your parents were already yelling at each other, after you'd taken the tram (our closest approximation to public transit), after you'd dragged yourself across the giant (or so it seemed) freeway footbridge. Your nine-year-old energy reserves automatically replenished themselves. We always started with the Bamboo Shoot, which was the flume ride. Later on in the park's history there'd be a bigger, better, faster water ride but it wasn't as cool as the Bamboo Shoot. It was stupid and noisy and overhyped. The Bamboo Shoot had style.

The corporation was always trying to make AstroWorld competitive and respectable, but it just wouldn't obey. The water park went in next door. The outdoor ampitheatre went in. (I wanted to see New Order there on the Technique tour, but my boyfriend talked me into going to the band banquet instead. God, that sucked.) But AstroWorld didn't pretend to be The Happiest Place on Earth. It didn't entreat you to Come for the Rides and Stay for the Shows. AstroWorld didn't really care if you were having fun. You did or you didn't; it was all the same to AstroWorld. When you rode the little coaster, Excalibur, with your friends from choir, you'd be left wondering if some girl's long hair was going to drag in the grass and give her whiplash, or maybe even decapitate her--not because the park was unsafe but because you had a kid's naturally macabre imagination, and AstroWorld liked to play along. AstroWorld was slightly anarchic, like nothing else in my suburb. AstroWorld made your parents miserable, and you liked that. It was For You. Nothing in Houston is for children. (Except maybe the zoo train at Hermann Park, and you outgrew that pretty rapidly.) Everything in Houston is designed to get your parents out the door and downtown to work. If you're like me you got left behind in Spring or Katy or Kingwood or Alief or Pearland, where you went to a highly regarded but Procrustean school, and when you were done with that, maybe you got to go to Olive Garden. If you're not like me you probably got worse, and I'm sorry about that. But children are not cost-effective; they don't make money for wildcatters.

Now I'll never take my own kid to AstroWorld. Those were different times. Our sports stadiums weren't named for corporations, and displaced people didn't live in them. Except for in Brewster McCloud. I love that Bud Cort.

the magic school bus goes to sleep Small Boy likes to read the Magic School Bus books now. We've Gone Batty, Gone to the Waterworks, Been Eaten, Gone Upstream, Gone to the Arctic, and...?

I feel fortunate that he's starting to read on his own because reading Magic School Bus to a preschooler is a lot like performing Beowulf with a harp in the original Anglo-Saxon, and I am no scop. I need coffee. I got a couple of library books with short, simple sentences, and somebody will not even let me open them. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! Not the Eric Carle books (not even the click-beetle book). Only the science books for the primary grades. I got to explain what subatomic particles are. "Look, honey! Here's the nucleus! The protons are positively charged!" I need help, help from my science people. Dave? Anyone?