advice for those not yet with children If you are planning to have children but have not yet, or if you're not planning on having a child but you're unlucky, I have advice for you: play it by ear.

My people do not play it by ear. We may be the most compulsively planning parents in the history of civilization. Raise your hand if at any point you had an Excel spreadsheet comparing cloth diapers. Go on. We had some Kissaluvs all-in-ones that really knocked me out, fit so well. I was sad when they were outgrown. But why in the fuck wasn't I playing it by ear? Why are we so driven by anxiety? Maybe when the world's all in the shitter you get overinvested in your individual choices because you can't control anything else in the world but your individual choices. Collective action seems useless. Invariably you fall short of perfection, so you get anxious and depressed. And there's your grand unifying theory of politics and mental illness with side order of unpaid labor class.

And to those who have not yet spawned: Don't make a spreadsheet of diapers. Don't plan how everything will go, from labor to birth to eating to discipline to education. Develop instead your ability to think on the fly, to accept and process new information, to go forward in a timely fashion and execute all necessary action in the solving of problems. That's what you'll need most as a parent.

Although I will say that I am actually nostalgic for cloth diapers, which proves that motherhood induces amnesia, or at least misremembrance.

that was fun I got to interview Janeane Garofalo a couple of weeks ago. It was a riot. Didn't take much to get her going off about Fox News.

maybe she's not even real Maybe Paris Hilton would cease to exist if we all stopped looking at her. I think if we all stopped looking at her we might feel a lot better about ourselves. (Yahoo! I'm looking in your direction.) Let's all hold hands like Red Rover and wish her away.

if it's naptime, there must be a fever Sure enough.

please Dear God,
Please put massive amounts of nutrition into bagels.

Mothers thank you.

anyone for president Several people I know have crushes on Obama or are in some other way deeply invested in the candidates. I will say right here that I don't give a shit between Obama or Clinton or anybody else as long as they are at all removed from the Worst President Ever and his legacy. We're in a goddamn mountain of suck, people. You just tell me the day of, and I'll go vote for The Other One, the one who won't veto stem-cell legislation, restrict access to reproductive science and information while requiring little girls to get Merck vaccines, and create terrorists where none had previously existed as part of a "war on terror." I don't give a shit who the Other One is. I'd settle for 12% improvement. Ron Paul is starting to look good to me. We're all in a desert of suck.

monopoly New column.

use your words A fascinating study about how verbally expressing feelings has a calmative effect on the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and anxiety.

The researchers (from UCLA) suggest that talking about painful feelings can actually reduce them. This is true of talk therapy and a "sympathetic bartender," but I would argue it's true of mommyblogging, as well.

suited up I bought a suit today.

I did this because I may or may not need one in The Next Phase of Life, and because I think a woman should have (1) a Ball-Buster Suit and (2) a Kicky Pantsuit, every woman. BBS goes on the first interview, KP on the second (it can double for a wedding if you're a soft butch like me). My BBS is ten years old. It needed updating. It had a wraparound skirt. My KP now gives me donkey toes. I put it on today, and while the ass side seems normal something about the front ain't right.

My usual shit turned nothing up (Savers had something ok, but it was too small) so I had to go to a Real American Department Store in the mall. I had a $50 gift card at Macy's, and I found a rather ball-busting BBS marked down to $79 almost immediately. I found a KP but I didn't get it, although now I'm wondering if I should swap the two. (My KP might be worse. In addition to the donks I got an issue with being somewhat more tattooed than before.) Instead I got a second jacket, one that was sassy and can be teamed with neutral pants for Kicky situations, works well for the redhead. I may or may not actually hate it. I haven't decided yet. I have to schedule time to get a big picture on things.

I mean, I don't know how to dress like a girl. I went to a dinner with the provost of my college once wearing pajama bottoms. Here along you get to be a mother and if you're like me you're isolated and people don't see you (nor look at you when you are there). There was a time when I never left the house without eyeliner (and a copy of The Cure's "Disintegration") and I wore elaborate shoes, but now I am a flip-flop wearing yoga-pantsed lazy ass person. Most of my clothes are smudged with Elta creme from the boy's rash treatment. If I don't have something crusted on me, I'm happy, although that got a lot better after the introduction of solid table foods. We have this horrible green Shrek yogurt that I consented to buy because it has at least one nutrient and I'm sure it will actually get eaten, and sometimes I wind up with that on me. Don't ask me how.

Mothers should be allowed to get girly. As girly as you want to be. Maybe that's not so much, maybe that's a lot, but you should have an aspect of yin in your life. My house is all yang, down to the boy cat, who is big and jonesing for shrimp-flavored cat crack J. gave him the other day because the bottle toppled off the high shelf upon which I'd laid it, spilling it on the floor by Jake. "Hey, Jake, eat that." And now he's off the wagon again and crying for his cat crack. I need some fucking toenail polish. Mothers of sons, I'm looking in your direction particularly.

happy happy father's day Love to my Pops and to J.

t-shirt heaven I've gotten two shirts as presents recently. The shirt below is from a special geeky someone who thinks I blog too much. The other is from my awesome cousin and is a genuine official T-shirt from the Secret Service. Cool.

Texas in summer It's heaven when it rains.

he's a cheeky (and lead-based) little engine Holy crap. Let's hear it for "nontoxic" wooden toys made in China.

it ain't no lie, baby I'm fascinated by the downfall of Lou Pearlman, the many-chinned empresario behind boy-band sensations 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys. I remember Lou best from Making the Band, which I watched religiously. Tapes of the show (provided by Aunt K.) buoyed my postpartum spirits with quasi-celebrity schadenfreude: watching other people screw up had a tonic effect on my constitution, I guess. Now I have a sense of things being right with the world after all.

a pilgrim's progress Today my son got his first skateboard. He put on pads and a helmet and magically became a seven-year-old, practically.

Today at Target a fellow shopper stuck her head around an aisle to observe the rapidly yammering Baldo, and she said, "I expected a kid twice as big."

He really is going to kindergarten at the end of the summer. I keep expecting the school to call and say the deal is off. Instead they called wanting another copy of our proof of address.

I am now experiencing fully the pangs of separation. He's ready for all this. He's an awesome child. He's growing up beautifully. But god it hurts. This must be the reason people continue having children.

Just as he reinvents himself apart from me, I begin to reinvent myself apart from him. He's done with early childhood. So far I'm pretty much flailing, the way he did when he was a baby. But I'll grow, too.

a dedication This is for my friend who's got a severe case of the postpartum whim-whams.

(What are whim-whams? If you have to ask, you haven't had them.)

Sometimes I think I still have the postpartum whim-whams, but I swear to God it does really, really does get better than it is when your baby is tiny and vulnerable and reddish and you are hormonally boomeranging worse than during puberty.

I will take night terrors or "I hate you, Mom!" any day over the postpartum whim-whams. Squabbling in the peer group. "Girls are stupid." Weird food desires and aversions. Even the continuing saga of pediatric eczema. It's all an improvement over lying awake while the baby is sleeping, and you're obsessing, seemingly unable to shut down the spiraling thoughts. Instead of you having the thoughts, the thoughts are having you, corroding you from the inside.

When I had the postpartum whim-whams I would retort, "Exactly when?" every time someone told me this too would pass, or that it gets better, or that the way out is through. We never have the satisfaction of realizing when it gets better, except retrospectively. You realize the biting has stopped, only it's been replaced with "you bootybutt" or "you poopyhead" or you're being karate-chopped instead of open-handedly slapped. You realize that instead of zero minutes of self-directed play you had twenty. (Of course you spent those twenty minutes gaping in disbelief, then scrambling to utilize what remained, only to realize that no task of significance can be accomplished in under twenty minutes.) Things improve when your child stops soiling himself. Of course, by then you're building a lot of forts and answering lots of "Why?" questions and someone is still always throwing up--you, your partner, your child, your animal, someone, and you're still wiping it up, and there are still MegaBloks to be stepped upon and pointless demands that mean bupkis to you but everything to your kid--going home via the route with construction, using the cup from Chuy's with a top, wearing the camo pants because they're just like a certain other kid's.

But you don't have the postpartum whim-whams. Yes, of that you are certain. You are still at risk for other types of whim-whams (unemployment whim-whams, family of origin whim-whams, &c) but by now you know that postpartum depression is the absolute worst kind of crazy a person can have.

ditto, beth I think it's radical as all hell that Beth Ditto is naked on the cover of NME. I think it's fantastic.

So why don't I like it when the chick from The Office is naked on the cover of Wired?

Totally different scenario with a totally different meaning. Beth Ditto is an empowered fat chick, and that's not insignificant. I don't mind looking at naked people (men or women 'cause that's how I roll) as long as the images aren't oppressive or (even worse) boring. Completely unexceptional. Standard. Thin white blonde naked woman. Blah be blah. You know? With the same styling and the same body and interchangeable names. I like risk-taking people with an agenda. People who choose to exhibit something of themselves. People who are unique and interesting in their sexuality. That's the critic in me.

The feminist in me says you bet your ass Beth Ditto is a sexy woman, and it's not in spite of her size or "at any size" but because of everything that she is, including her size. And she is delighted to give a big fat fuck you to fascist beauty standards, oh yes.

pinch me So Scooter Libby and Paris Hilton are both jailbirds. Is the world starting to make sense after all?

all y'all that's from china Happy June 4th.

carrie the caregiver I'm fascinated with Carrie the Caregiver but I can't quite bring myself to play it because I'm afraid I'll get triggered and freak out. I just want to know if one of the "six unique types of babies" is going to be the constantly screaming kind.

not exactly I read the headline "Knowles Postpones Kids for 10 Years" and assumed it was Harry. And that gave me a weird feeling I'm not sure there's a word for.

What if Beyonce and Harry had kids?