Get out of here/with your flavored kefir/all that sugar ain’t good for ya insulin could appear/plain is where it’s at/don’t make me get my gat/gut bacteria we ain’t feared of ya (real G’s say: true dat)

• (That is kind of weak but I can’t remember the acidophilus/flaccid waffle bus part. At some point my freestyle protagonist persona went a bit off the rails with the random nouns.)
• I was walking near all the Northwestern Hospital construction and waiting at the light with me were all these burly construction workers.  Really typical-looking construction workers right out of Richard Scarry (well, except for being human and not raccoons in overalls)—boots, jeans, t-shirts, muscles, hard hats, etc. They were talking loudly right behind me and from the dance-club names they dropped and the anecdotes they related I realized that they were a group of gay construction workers. Hooray! Someone’s sex dream just came to life! I mean duh, of course there are gay construction workers just like there are gay accountants and gay zookeepers and gay phlebotomists, but being gay in a profession literally represented by a porn trope must add an extra layer of fun.
• In addition to hockey, Nora just started track (specialties so far: standing long jump, 400, and 4×400 relay), and watching her at practice the other day I realized: she is a coach’s dream. If you yell, “Huddle up” or whatever, she RUNS to comply. Granted, she runs just about everywhere, but man, coaches love it when you run. I feel like I should get used to bleachers and duffle bags.
• I had a nice time in Montreal and a good conference with a bunch of other science publishing nerds. My hotel room was a bit worn and dinged-up but the bed was lovely, good-quality sheets and so many pillows that I could build a set of comforting ramparts around me every night. And the city is pleasant although there was a sick and wrong and prejudiced part of my brain that got slightly weary of people speaking French all the time. That thought had never once crossed my mind in France, China, India, or the Middle East—but something unsavory like, “Come on man, this is CANADA” kept sneaking into my mind.
•  Unfortunately, Montreal was not a respite from all things medical. The radiologist who did my last CT scan had posted the report on the system, and I read it, and it mentioned a thing, a mass, a very small tumor of some kind. I messaged the gastro to say, “Uh…what?” He called me and explained that yeah, there is a thing there, but it’s nowhere near the sites of any of my obstructions, and to be frank he is downright annoyed because this growth is likely a side issue and has nothing to do with any of my problems. Modern medicine: the more you look, the more you see! Regardless of its relevance!
• However, if you do look and there happens to be a goddamn tumor right there in front of you, it would be irresponsible not to follow that to its conclusion. So basically we are on parallel diagnostic tracks here, doing more investigations for this whatever-it-is, while also continuing to try and find out why I end up in the hospital all the damn time.
• Monday and Tuesday I have the incredibly time-consuming two-part cancer scan. Would you like to hear about it? Sunday I get to not eat and take a bunch of laxatives, yaaaaay. Monday I go to the hospital, get an injection, go home and sit around radioactive for a few hours. Go back, get scanned. Take a bunch more laxatives and starve a little more (for crying out loud, I’ve lost 12 pounds since January and already none of my pants fit) that night. Go back to the hospital on Tuesday for a THREE-HOUR series of scans. Find out eventually if I have cancer or just plain old Mystery Guts.
• Surprisingly I am not freaking out about this as much as one might expect. I am worried, and annoyed, and very, very tired, but perhaps we can thank my teeny dose of Lexapro for the fact that I am not following the threads to Conclusions of Doom every minute of the day. I still pull an Ariadne in the dark of night sometimes, which is where Ativan comes in.
• One last thing about this nonsense: the radiology report describes my lumpy gut-thing as “stellate” (Latin for “star-shaped.”) I have a My Pretty Pony tumor! Are we sure I didn’t just swallow a sequin?

—mimi smartypants, intriguingly intestined.

1. I got to have drinks and bar snacks with Alexa Flotsam. I guess I call her “Alexa Flotsam” in my head because part of me assumes that everyone must have a dumb pseudonym based on their blog. 1999 FOR LYFE, KICKING IT OLD SKOOL. In actuality she has a regular name and is a Real Writer and an interesting person. One of the better Tuesday evenings  I’ve spent.
2. I arrived at the bar first, ordered a glass of wine, and started my usual bar routine of reading/scribbling/staring into space with the glass in front of me all lovely and red and full of possibilities. Too soon the bartender came back and said, “How’s the wine?” and too quickly I said, “It’s great, thank you” even though I had not tasted it. I do not know why I lied, it was a reflex. I think the bartender knew I was lying but she chose not to call me out, and we both silently agreed not to let it ruin our relationship.
3. The following week I had another acute emergency out-of-freaking-nowhere bowel obstruction! I whined about my hospital admission on Twitter but apparently I am not done whining about it yet. It involved the sacrifice of yet another bathroom trash can (the ER nurses always very politely offer to wash the vomit out of my receptacles so I can take them home, and I always very politely tell them “no fucking way”), a ridiculous wait for triage while I writhed and puked and intermittently fainted onto the floor (I was too out of it to care, but I could feel LT vibrate with anger every time some mildly injured person walked in ahead of us), morphine, Zofran, “clear liquids,” an overnight stay (hospitals = least restful places in the world, with all the coughing and screaming and people verifying  your signs of life every five minutes), and a bedside visit from my very nice gastroenterologist, who came close to missing his flight to a conference in order to come discuss the state of my baffling guts.
4. The unsatisfactory medical conclusion is that we still don’t really know anything. I have had another, fancier CT scan (my contrast “drink” tasted a lot like dollar-store margarita mix without any alcohol), and soon I have a consultation at U of C for a double-balloon enteroscopy. This is sort of like a colonoscopy on steroids. It supposedly takes hours under heavy-duty anesthesia, can get completely through every bit of your small intestine (as opposed to the colonoscopy, which apparently peeks at the first couple feet and calls it good), and, get this, takes biopsies and TATTTOOS any bits that are diseased enough to need removal later.
5. It’s possible I could have a tattoo on the inside of my small intestine, folks. I either want a wolf head or Calvin peeing on the Green Bay Packers logo, I have not decided.
6. I do not particularly want this next test, and I do not particularly want surgery, but I will do just about anything to avoid another pain/vomit crisis and hospital episode. I read the report from my pill-cam study and it was somewhat dire: words and phrases like “bleeding,” “ulceration,” “erythema,” “fucked beyond belief,” and “like your intestines are a Dutch hotel room and Mayhem stayed there during their tour.”
7. While I was bored to death in the hospital, I watched part of a show called “America’s Worst Tattoos,” about people who wanted their tragic ink covered up or improved. The bit that was on when I flipped to the channel involved a young woman who had a Frankenstein* scrotum tattooed on her ass. Green, cartoony, stitched together,** etc. Your basic disembodied Frankenstein nutsack.
8. *In college I studied/wrote papers on Frankenstein in some depth, and I have the usual knee-jerk reaction whenever people use “Frankenstein” to refer to the monster, but I think all of us pedantic types might just need to get over that, because clearly there is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and there is the pop-culture Frankenstein, and the latter comes up much more often in conversation. And in tattoos. And in nutsacks.
9. **I have to confess I do not understand the mechanics of this, because wouldn’t the mad scientist just harvest a whole nutsack from a dead guy? I can see maybe having to stitch it ON, but I don’t get why you’d have to stitch it TOGETHER.
10. The woman on the show “explained,” although it was no explanation whatsoever, that her boyfriend’s nickname was “Franken-Nuts,” and that it was his honor that she had commissioned the Frankenstein scrotum to be depicted on her skin. She did not say that this was a lost love or a bad breakup or anything, so it’s possible that she simply no longer wanted to have the Frankenstein scrotum tattoo. Huh, go figure. I did not see the cover-up portion, probably because yet another nurse came to extract or inject something else from or into me, so I will never know how it ended up. Such a shame.
11. I was discharged the next day (a Thursday) at 10 pm, blew off work the next day in favor of sleeping with my cats, and decided not to run the 5K that Nora and I were signed up for on Saturday. I felt super crazy guilty about that—which is ridiculous, as people scratch races all the time for any number of reasons—but part of me was just all “come on you loser it’s only 3 miles.” But every time I thought about the crowds and the hoopla I just wanted to cry, plus I had not been eating and maybe running 3 miles after a 24-hour intake of 5 bites of mashed potatoes and half a banana would not have been very fun.
12. I will wrap this up now, as we are well over my 1000-word limit and HOLY HELL MY OLD –LADY MEDICAL PROBLEMS ARE BORING BEYOND BELIEF. If you have not deleted my site from your bookmarks and feeds with extreme prejudice by now, next time I will write about other things, possibly (no guarantees) including my trip to Montreal, why vegans are terrible at measuring things, some sappy stuff about parenting, and an exploration of why that Ke$ha person insists on gluing glitter and sequins and other shit all over her face.

—mimi smartypants: hogging all the health care.

1. A mysterious revulsion at the very idea of communicating (and thus shaping) my thoughts. A desire for a return to some mute shadowy realm of Platonic forms.

2. BRB: need to chain-refresh Twitter and reddit following all the holy-shit breaking news.

3. Legit busy. Never-ending work project (the worst MIGHT be over by JULY), kid has a billion things going on, meetups with friends, the usual feeding and shopping and laundry.

4. So many books! I read this crazy (translated from French!) history/anthropology thing about bears, which made me want to be a medieval duke with my own bestiary, I read the biography of DFW, which led to a lot of strange/sad musings about the construction of a personality and how it differs from the construction of a self, and I got super-excited to learn that we get a new Margaret Atwood in September.

5. Speaking of stuff to read, here is an article about Tori Amos and professional wrestler Mick Foley.

6. Chicago’s never-ending rain could manage to depress even the most diehard denier of the pathetic fallacy. Since it doesn’t look like we are getting spring, I will just get ready for summer. Chicago summer as described by Benjamin Hale (The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, which you should totally read):

It should be noted, however, that during the summers Chicago for some reason elects to discharge a battery of fireworks into the sky from Navy Pier every single Friday and Saturday night, and thus Chicago is a city spoiled rotten with fireworks, like a silly child who eats her favorite food every day until she loses the taste for it. So on the Fourth of July they compensate simply by shooting off lots and lots of fireworks!—which is admittedly an uncreative solution to the problem of pyrotechnic desensitization that arises from that city’s powerful thirst, her loving greed to smell the sulfur in her nose and to hear these ballistic hosannas and to see these wildflowers of energy blooming in the sky and reflected on the surface of her lake. I have said earlier that Chicago is curmudgeonly in the winters. Yes, but in the summers—perhaps, in fact, in order to amend for her frigid behavior most of the year—in the summers Chicago is no longer Chicago-that-somber-city, but instead is a wild rich child of a city, who demands to eat her cake and ice cream every single day—and the weakhearted people of the city give it to her, they give it all to her because they love her, they spoil her, just because, even if she doesn’t deserve it, they love to see the beautiful look on her face when she gets what she wants.

But in the meantime: rain! Flash floods! Yo, check it: this happened!

I worked from home the day of the worst rain (although it’s been raining for approximately 79 weeks now) (approximation based on Emotional Time©), because I had the headshrinker appointment (finally, right?) It seems to me that we are doing this a bit backwards—it was suggested that I see the medication lady first and she would refer me to a therapist—but maybe I am just a secret hippie. Anyway, the psychiatrist did her thing and ended up recommending a very small, practically placebo-level dosage of an antidepressant, and also handed me a ‘scrip for something in the benzodiazepine family. That was kind of a surprise. I am an adult and not particularly drug-seeking (these days) but whoa, hey, rather free with mommy’s little helper there, no? Then again, I am pretty textbook with the panic and the whole staying-up-all-night-chewing-on-my-brain thing, so perhaps I should assume she knows what she is doing.

Brief communication snafu when LT asked via text how the appointment went.

Me: okay. Prescribed some meds and referred for CBT.

LT: I don’t recommend that at all, I personally think that’s a bad idea

Me: Huh?

LT: oh wait, maybe CBT doesn’t stand for “cock and ball torture” in this context

Or DOES IT? I don’t know exactly how cock and ball torture could be therapeutic for me, but I am keeping an open mind until the appointment.

My parents are out of town so I had to drive like a wet bat out of a very flooded hell right from the appointment to pick up Nora at school, instead of walking from home like I normally would. On the way home there were cops and standing water everywhere, traffic was ridiculous, and I could not tell until I crept up to the intersection that the police had blocked off pretty much the very street I need to get to my house. Thus began a long and tortuous detour while Nora made “helpful” navigational and deep-water driving suggestions from the back seat. OH MY GOD SHUT UP. Hey, maybe I will take one of those benzos now, thanks a lot.

Last thing. We live in an amazing time. It is often a very upsetting time, and often I want nothing more than to yell OH FUCK THIS, go back to bed, and wake up in the Middle Ages with nothing to worry about but plague and famine and ancient pagan bear cults.

But then there are the times when you realize that you can be in your pajamas with a cup of tea, cozy in your own home in front of your own computer monitor, and watch a Canadian astronaut (who looks like he really should be a New Jersey firefighter) wring out a washcloth in space. That should make you glad enough to live in crazy internet world. Add a few kitten videos and you’ll be all set.

—mimi smartypants, space oddity.

I just put eye cream—cream formulated specifically for eyes—all over my face. It felt nice and, well, creamy, so I just kept going with it. Yeah that’s right, EYE cream on my FACE. Call the cops, I don’t give a fuck!

(Lately I am addicted to saying, “Call the cops, I don’t give a fuck” in response to just about everything. I need to stop doing this though, at least before the next time I move beyond Mr. Thirdbeer and bring along his tequila-shot companion. Because if I yell it all intoxicated in public someone probably will call the cops, and I will definitely give a fuck.) (Bail me out, internet!)

The eye cream was a free sample from Bobbi Brown, and it was the least she could do after irritating me with the “i” on the end of her name. And after enticing me to drop nearly $100 bucks on skincare shit. I have used Bobbi Brown’s particular goop ever since the day I showed up at Nordstrom, selected the counter with the least fussy/intimidating packaging and salespeople, and said, “Look, I’m old and I need better stuff for smearing on my face and also I would like to start wearing actual makeup once in a while.” Because except for the lengthy goth phase in which it was all about theatrics and Wet n’ Wild black eyeliner pencils, I had never actually worn “regular” makeup. You know, “I just want to look a bit less blotchy and a bit more professional” makeup.

That Bobbi Brown salesgirl had some highly tuned radar because she joked with me about books and wine, gave me wildly unnecessary compliments on my skin, and sold me a whole bunch of stuff that I love to this day. I am a Bobbi Brown fan. Even if she does share a name with a coked-up loser who liked to hit Whitney Houston and put songs on the soundtrack of the execrable Ghostbusters II.

(Should go without saying, but not a sponsored post. I don’t play that way.)

DON’T CALL THE COPS

The other day I got up insanely early (what else is new) and decided to make a fancy veggie sandwich to take to work. Then I dropped the mayonnaise jar. (That should be a cool way of saying you told somebody an uncomfortable truth, sucked at your comedy open mic, or got your girlfriend pregnant, but I literally just dropped the mayonnaise jar.) And then…burglar alarm! Shrieking at deafening volume in my house, waking up my sleeping family.

Burglar Alarm Lady on the Phone: We have a glass-break code here. Everything all right?

Me: Uh, yeah. I dropped the mayonnaise jar.

BALotP: Say WHAT? That bitch is PREGNANT?!??

BALotP: Did it break?

Me (wondering why she’s so interested in the state of my mayonnaise): No. But it was kind of loud.

BALotP: Well, the alarm listens for the frequencies of breaking glass, so maybe that was enough. If everything is okay I will cancel this.

Me: Great.

So all is well, except I never knew my alarm was that sensitive and now I am a bit paranoid. What if I want to have a plate-smashing good time in the middle of the night? I will have to remember to turn the alarm off first.

THEY OFFERED ME THE OFFICE, OFFERED ME THE SHOP

There is an off-site work person that I am really starting to hate, and I have to talk to this person frequently on the phone. I dislike this person so much that sometimes I worry that it comes through in my voice, and that I am getting snippy or brusque in response to said person’s VERY TEDIOUS QUESTIONS and INABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE SIMPLEST THINGS.

But thank you, Breaking Bad, because now I just pretend I am Gus Fring. Calm, polite, hospitable, homicidal. (What does a mid-level managing editor do, Walter? A mid-level managing editor provides for her family.) It works to keep me level. It is just business, after all. (I will kill your wife. I will kill your son. I will kill your infant daughter.)

I even say, “Enjoy your day,” before hanging up. It totally works!

—mimi smartypants, in your grocer’s freezer.

Why doesn’t Starbucks sell Purple Drank? Sizzurp? Lean? They would probably want to rebrand it in some special Starbucks way, maybe turn the mermaid on her side and give her x’d out cartoon eyes and some Lil Wayne-style face tattoos, but if we could get a whole demographic wedge of yuppies hooked on a codeine/Sprite/Jolly Rancher combination the world might become a more interesting place.

SHHHHH

I do not have very much to say, which is why there is nothing new here. In the past, not having anything to say would not have stopped me from saying a whole damn lot. I don’t know, lately I have a sort of WHY BOTHER attitude toward communication. Which is not great for someone considering starting therapy. Or for someone who works in the publishing industry. Or for someone who would like to maintain her family relationships and important friendships so as not to die scared and alone. Or for any human being, actually.

Hey! That was depressing! Some bloggers apologize for not having updated by giving amusing little rundowns of their hectic and busy lives; I do so by making you contemplate the futility of human connection! I will stop now before I textually flounce off to my room like a teenager, turn Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death” up loud, and draw pictures of gut-shot bunnies in a Moleskine notebook.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM

I may as well “close the loop” on the very tedious story of my strange guts.

Wait, time out for some Gastrointestinal Depeche Mode!

Straaange guts

Strange ebbs and strange flows

Straaaange guts

That’s how the food flows

Strange guts

Please digest it for me

Anyway, the gastro guy called me with the equivocal results of my pill-camera test. Yes, there are more ulcers in the ileum than other diagnostic stuff showed. No, we don’t really know why. It’s Crohn’s-like, but he doesn’t think it’s really Crohn’s, because I should be a lot sicker and I’m too old and the presentation was too dramatic blah blah. He thinks it’s all very INTERESTING and something we should KEEP AN EYE ON and I’m over here going what do I dooooooo? What do I eat? What do I not eat? Maybe forget eating altogether to stay “safe,” how about that? (I’ve been doing that, uh, rather more often than is healthy.) How about interpreting every twinge or slightly unusual bathroom trip as holy fuck here we go again everybody keep your shoes on in case we need to drive to the hospital? How about taking so long to fall asleep each night that I start to think might as well stay up?

So you see why I finally (finally!) have started putting the HMO’s slowly grinding gears in motion toward getting an anxiety doc. It took a while, not only for me to decide to do it, but also for anyone to respond to me. After a week I considered using the doctor-messaging system to say thanks! Although I did not get a chance to talk it over with a mental-health professional I decided on my own to go ahead with that machete murder after all! But that probably would have been a bad idea.

Who knows, therapy could be a terrible experience. In which case I will just go full-on Lil Wayne with the sizzurp and the tattoos. Except for the seizures, he seems to be having fun.

This weekend I need to take Nora shopping for hockey helmets. Over the past few months she has slowly logic’d her way into contact lenses (better peripheral vision for sports), a used Chromebook (tons of her schoolwork is online and self-paced), and now some used hockey gear (the rink helmets don’t fit right). Many of these circumstances are true, she’s far from being spoiled, and these are things we can afford: but damn if ten-year-olds aren’t expensive in their wants. And damn them for offering reasonable, cogent arguments for the things they want! Toddler tantrums are so much easier to ignore.

—mimi smartypants is still the thug you love to hate.

Not 100% sure why I bother anyway, especially in the winter when I can cover up any unfortunate nipple action** with a hoodie. I guess it’s a bit of a “just in case” thing. If paramedics had to access my chest my unconscious self would probably appreciate the gawking bystanders seeing bra instead of boob. Or  what if, in the middle of Target, someone walked up to me and said, “I will give you a thousand dollars*** if you strip down to your underwear and put on this frog costume, but no dressing room or anything, you gotta do it right here in the cat-litter aisle.” I’d like to be able to collect that cheddar without flashing the whole store. I’d also really like to wear a frog costume in Target, come to think of it.

Faker footnotes (because who wants to fiddle with hyperlinks for some goddamn footnotes?),  in reverse order:

***I almost typed some ludicrous cash amount, like twenty million or something, but that doesn’t work because let’s face it, I would probably totally show Target shoppers some brief changing-into-frog-costume boobs for twenty million dollars. I would probably also keep shopping at that same Target afterwards. I don’t give a fuck. (It is a good thing I’m not some whore blogger who longs to do a Target-sponsored post, because they are probably not going to come calling after I publish this mess.)

**I guarantee you that LT will object to my choice of adjective here.

*Oh man you guys. Hockey is going so amazingly. Well, it’s going amazingly for Nora, less so for my bank account, because she very politely makes the case that she needs her own gloves that fit, and maybe better shin guards than the rink provides, and should we look into getting contact lenses? Because that might work better under the helmet? Nora is not a kid to just randomly ask for stuff, so I know she really likes the hockey thing right now. And the balance! The coordination! The sheer bad-assery! The other night the coach asked her to demonstrate some skill, and I believe the quote was, “Nora, please show these boys how it’s done.” Every time I sit down in those bleachers I think YAY TIME TO READ and yet every time the book stays closed while I just watch her in awe.

Speaking of the monetizing-your-blog crowd—or at least I was, up there somewhere, in the middle of  frog costumes and naked breasts—I was recently mystified by tweets  mentioning something called “Blissdom.” I figured it was a conference of some sort, but that made-up word was new to me so I went to pray on it (that’s how I refer to using Google). Get this, friends: the “Blissdom” conference has “Life Development” workshops. You no longer have to read narcissistic self-help drivel solely on the internet or in Oprah’s magazine. You can pay money to sit in a hotel ballroom and listen to it, live! We truly are lucky to live in such an age. A while ago, people used to have to “develop” their lives all on their own! Even longer ago, people had to simply get on with it and not be such navel-gazing little shits all the time! Barbaric.

Here is something that is not barbaric, but rather very sophisticated and pleasant: an article about stamping designs onto cookies. I do not care for Oreos but more food should be embossed. Emboss everything! Embossing rampage! I’ll emboss your face!

—mimi smartypants guarantees superior resistance to abrasion.

This probably isn’t funny to anyone but me, but while composing a ranty email about the stupid tourist restaurants in my office neighborhood, I accidentally typed “Webern Grill” instead of “Weber Grill.” (Yes, it’s no longer just a metal orb that cooks your hamburgers in the backyard: it’s also now a crappy chain restaurant!

I wish the Webern Grill really were a chain restaurant. The burgers would have really precise grill marks and you would probably be served each component—bun, lettuce, tomato, etc—separately. Who wants cheese? Wait, we’ll use a twelve-tone palindrome to determine who gets cheese! Okay, I will stop now.  It is really not that funny, but 20^th-century-composer jokes are somewhat rare, so we need to pounce when they appear.

WHATEVER THE WEATHER

Chicago got some snow, a completely normal amount for winter, and now my eyes hurt from rolling at all the suburban school closings and office-elevator whinings. Oh god, Joe, when will winter end? I know Bob, the commute was terrible and I had to shovel my walk and you guys do realize you live in the Midwest, right? Seasons: We Have Them.

Nora on the other hand was thrilled to see accumulation and we walked to school critiquing people’s shoveling and snow-blowing jobs (our street: A+). But then she said, “I actually like it when people don’t shovel, though. It’s like hey: free leg workout!” And then she ran ahead like in the opening sequence of Rocky IV. WEIRDO. WEIRDO FROM SPACE.

MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY

Me and LT, your hosts. Nora will make a brief, charming appearance, solely for the purpose of you being able to tell me later how delightful she is, how articulate for her age, etc. Then she will take herself off to read in bed, and will acquiesce gracefully when I come upstairs to say “lights out.” Not a peep will be heard.

We will have lots of wine! I will plan and cook everything myself, and of course it will magically and deliciously come together with no disasters or timing issues. I will not have one before-dinner cocktail too many and do something boneheaded like starting an entire stick of butter melting on the stove and then walking away and forgetting about it entirely. No, of course not. That has never happened.

Guests:

You and your +1!

Madeline Albright and spouse. (I thought about Bill and Hillary, but I’m not sure I want Bill sucking up all the oxygen in my dining room. LOOK AT ME I’M BILL CLINTON. I think he’s more suited to Very Large Events.)

David Bowie and Iman.

Dan Savage + significant other.

Lorrie Moore and whoever she wants to bring. (It would be funny if she were dating a really cheerful, upbeat guy. Also, I think I want Lorrie Moore to stay late and help me with the dishes in a awesomely dark and sardonic way.)

Amy Poehler and Will Arnett DAMN IT DON’T REMIND ME.

Kathleen Hanna and Ad-Rock.  (Corin Tucker was briefly considered and rejected, as I’d be too busy trying to figure out ways to kiss her to attend to hostess duties.)

I have more, but that is probably enough for dinner. Maybe I’ll have a larger fantasy party with a larger number of famous folk some other time. BBQ? New Year’s Eve?

I AM A MONSTER

Recently I received a rather amusing (to me) email taking me to task for wanting to find a head. Because that’s horrible, and insensitive, and the rightful owner of the head was murdered!!!  Won’t someone think of the severed heads!

I have not yet responded, but I would like to publicly point out that I am not suggesting anyone be murdered and decapitated for my own excitement and longing for novelty. I’m not Uday Hussein over here. If I find a head sticking out of a garbage bag or rolling gently in the surf on a Chicago beach,  or if some other person finds a head under a bush in the dog park or half-buried under the monkey bars, the owner of the head will not be any less dead nor his or her corpse any less desecrated. You may call me ghoulish—I’ve been called worse—but you cannot call me a murderess-by-proxy (as the emailer came perilously close to doing). THUS I SPAKE.

STUFF YOU SHOULD READ

Everyone has gone ape over the awesomeness of Tenth of December, but in this case everyone is right.

This Wells Tower  (whose own short story collection I found underwhelming) article about Burning Man is fantastic, and not just for the phrase “penises with which I suppose I can cope.”

The Beheld blog. Subtitle: “Beauty and What It Means.”

Natalie Dee interview. You should read the whole thing, but there is one paragraph that I just want to send to everyone who is all like “ooh, I want to blog and make money.”

You have to do it because you love it. If you don’t love it enough to do it, whether people are paying you enough—or paying you at all—then you don’t love it enough to take it as far as you’d need to in order to make it a thing. If you don’t love it enough to do it 500 times, then fucking don’t do it ten times and quit when you don’t immediately get high-fives from everyone who looks at the Internet.

SOMETHING I WISH I COULD READ

I forget where I stumbled upon Space Cat—a deeply odd, out-of-print series about, well, a space cat—but I have quickly become obsessed.  I would do a lot of things (short of murder and decapitation!) to own the entire series for my weird book collection. (They are available, but at “real book collector” prices, whereas I lean more toward picking up 1950s Christian puberty manuals at the thrift store.)

Even more than the books themselves, I desperately want good-quality prints of the different covers. I mean, just look! My whole house needs to be Space Cat-themed!

—mimi smartypants explores Uranus.

Confession: While not a Tiger Mother, exactly, I tend to fall on the COME ON! TRY IT! side of parenting. I will admit to not having a lot of patience with overly fearful kids; although, if I had one, I like to think I would adjust and be respectful and compassionate. You parent the kid you have, after all, and it just so happens that Nora is usually the kid who needs to be told to “be careful,” not the one who needs to be told “you’ll be fine.”

She does have her issues, of course, and one of them is sleeping in a familiar spot. Grandma’s house is fine, hotels are MORE than fine since she usually gets to squash herself up next to me, but slumber parties are unfamiliar territory. The very nice kid on our block extended a birthday invite, and I thought hey, perfect opportunity, close to home. Nora was excited about the party, but was also pretty firm about the fact that she would get picked up (“late, Mom. I want to stay up REALLY LATE”) and go to bed back at our house. She wasn’t upset or concerned about it, but was just like, “Nope.” Several times I mentioned that maybe it would be super-fun, and she would want to stay, and instead of picking her up I could just trot on down there with a sleeping bag and pajamas whenever it was time. Nope again. This kid sleeps in her own bed.

I found this sort of tricky, for a few reasons. I knew the birthday girl was a good egg, but what about the rest of the guests? Kid-me would have been mortified to be the only one leaving a slumber party early, even if I really wanted to, because what if they talked about me afterwards? What if they thought I was a lame-ass kindergarten baby, fit for nothing but sticking her head in gravy? Nora appeared to have never considered this possibility, which hell, good for her—I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. Because kids SHOULDN’T make fun of each other, and you SHOULDN’T do something that makes you uncomfortable just out of worry about what others will think.

Maybe kids are legitimately nicer these days (or maybe they always were pretty nice and I just had too much social anxiety as a child), but I really doubt anything was said about Nora’s early departure anyway. We texted a bit while the girls were watching their final movie, agreed on midnight as the latest-possible pickup time (and oh man it was still excruciating for my three-beers-with-dinner self to survive until that hour, especially without punk rock or a raucous tavern to distract me), I walked down to the neighbor’s house, Nora put on shoes and coat, we said warm, sleepy goodbyes, and went back home. To sleep in our own beds. Nora even ended up going back in the morning for pancakes and playing, having designed her own unique two-part sleepover, and nobody seemed to think anything of it.

Not that it’s so very important that one attend slumber parties at a certain age, but part of me wishes she had branched out a bit and given it a try (see my default setting, above). But another part of me thinks it is cool that she is self-aware enough to know what just won’t work for her. I guess we don’t have to have that “peer pressure” talk. Not yet, anyway.

I don’t really remember what scary dealbreakers I had when small. Except of course sitting through this segment of Sesame Street, which reportedly used to make toddler-me scream and cry and run out of the TV room to find my mom. I still find it kind of unsettling, to be honest.

Another unsettling-to-me thing, which may not seem so at first glance: corgis. What is it about these dogs? There are all sorts of corgi-focused websites and whenever I see them I go “awwwww” at first. But the more I look at corgis the more I find them sort of creepy and Uncanny Valley-ish. They’re just always Looking At You and Making A Face in a way that other dogs aren’t.

I also recently had an experience with an ill-behaved corgi, which may be coloring my perception a bit. I hate it when people have ill-behaved dogs and then THEY give YOU instructions on how to make the dog stop being a pain in the ass. Turn your back on him! Use this hand gesture and tell him to sit! Blah blah blah my dog sucks and I’m making it your problem! Uh, I came over here to drink wine, not to be your goddamned dog whisperer. Put the dog in another room and aerate the shiraz, asswipe.

OH SNAP

Me: I don’t like Caitlin Moran so I hate that she said something smart on Twitter about the Hilary Mantel/Kate Middleton flap that was just published in the London Review of Books.

IM Friend: Man you are the biggest dork

Me: As soon as I typed that I realized it was true

Me: I am sad now

IM Friend: (just kidding I have a Guardian piece about that whole thing saved to read later)

Me: BUSTED.

SPEAKING OF BUSTED

What could cause my last several entries to not show up in RSS feeds? Several people have mentioned that, but I am a time traveler from the year 2000! Witness my hotmail account, my long list of browser “bookmarks” that I drop in on from time to time, my inadvertent publication of an actual paper book! I do not use RSS feeds, so I don’t know how to fix this. Sorry.

—mimi smartypants is always sorry.

Hey yo yo. I am in a better frame of mind during this timed typing session (working title: Post Something In 30 Minutes Or GTFO!), mainly because of food. Calories, they are good for the brain. Although I had someone write me and say something like “you should fast more often because that was really funny” and I don’t know what to say to that except maybe DIE, FUCKER. Except I don’t really feel like saying that anymore now that I have had some food and am calm and forgiving. So maybe I’ll just say “thanks for your input.” Which can sort of have a DIE, FUCKER subtext, particularly when I type it at work.

I do not know any intestinal-camera results yet. I like to think that is because they have to edit the video, fix some things in post, add music and voiceovers (can I get Morgan Freeman? That would be cool), and make the blooper reel, but it is probably just because doctors are busy. I still get anxious when I think about all this weird intestine stuff, but I’m not really anxious about the test showing something terrible. I am mostly anxious that everything will show up rather ho-hum, and adorable young Asian gastroenterologists will say, “Well, we really don’t know why every year or so you end up in the hospital after a long night of unbelievable pain and vomit, hope it doesn’t happen again, good luck to you.” I don’t want to continue fretting that someone has planted an unreliable IED in my ileum. I want to forget all about this!

HAPPY WHATEVER DAY

It’s so “cool” to hate Valentine’s Day that it has become downright uncool to do so. I actually don’t have strong feelings about it, although it bugs me to see the lavish crafts and heart-shaped foods on various Competitive Mothering blogs—it seems very strange to smother your kid with commercialized symbols of love on what has traditionally been a day focused (however misguidedly) on romantic attachment. I remember getting a flower or a little chocolate heart from my parents on Valentine’s, but nothing like the red-and-pink explosions I see on Facebook or Pinterest.

I did make a “special” breakfast for Nora, though—chocolate croissants from Trader Joe’s, microwave bacon, and apple slices. Nothing says “I love you” like bacon and chocolate, right? (The apple slices were to make myself feel better about the bacon and chocolate.)

WHY NOT JUST “WOMEN”

It’s in some ways a small thing, and I think “misogynist” is too big a word to use here, but I have to agree.

SORRY FAMILY

Shhh, don’t tell LT or Nora, but I am trying yet another “meatless meatloaf” recipe tonight! After the chocolate and bacon breakfast, I think they need a bit of a comedown, don’t you?

—mimi smartypants is all about balance.

I am going on hour 20 of not eating anything besides “clear liquids,” and I have had it up to here with Sierra Goddamn Mist and green tea and water. Supposedly I am also allowed “broth.” Who the hell wants broth? Oh yay, broth! Bro, you brought broth! Hey everybody, there’s broth in the break room! These are phrases you do not hear. Fuck broth. Fuck it to death.

Tomorrow at a stupid hour of the morning I go to the lab to swallow the magical robot pill camera, and get hooked up to electronics that will transmit its photos of my insides to an enthralled audience. At least that’s how I imagine it, a moodily lit Pentagon bunker, giant screens everywhere, and my gastroenterologist frowning earnestly at a monitor. Probably with a cup of broth in his hand, the fucker. In reality I’m sure it is all very boring and hands-off, and he will download a .zip file labeled “MIMI’S KICK-ASS INTESTINES” in about a week, blah blah blah.

I was not told about the not-eating part. Oh, I knew I couldn’t eat on pill-camera day, because poor little pill-cam probably can’t navigate around a giant roasted-vegetable-and-goat-cheese-sandwich on focaccia bread dear GOD I would happily touch a camel’s penis if you would give me that right now. But not eating the entire day prior? That was news.

But wait, it gets better! When I called to get the no-eating instructions, the nurse was like yadda yadda the bowel prep…say what? Oh yes. In addition to not eating, I get to drink all that disgusting medicine and poop all evening, just so I’m nice and suicidal by the time I actually arrive at the lab. All the fun of a colonoscopy without any of the good drugs! It is RIDICULOUSLY UNFAIR. I stuttered something on the phone about, “oh, that’s not what the internet said” and the nurse said, “Yeah, Dr. [redacted]’s protocol is stricter than most. He’s an overachiever. Ha ha!” Yes he is. An overachieving, broth-drinking, son of a whore.

So yeah, this day seriously sucks. I am in a state of murderous rage and too weak to do anything about it. The only bright spot was when I went to Target and some people were struggling in the parking lot, like just get your shit together and park already, and I said out loud, “You all are some low-skills motherfuckers” and that kind of made me smile. A little bit.

Nora and I had the flu, and we are just now getting healthy again, except you know what healthy people do? They EAT NUTRITIOUS FOOD. So there goes that. She is finally back to school after missing three days—perfect attendance since kindergarten blammo, undone by a virus. Poor kid was really ill though. Pale napping Nora? Not normal. I stayed home two days but was at my worst on Sunday with a high fever and aching all over. I watched part of the Superbowl before going to bed. The fever combined football with that Brad Pitt movie trailer about the very fast zombies,* and for hours I lingered in a half-conscious netherworld where little tiny CGI Ray Lewis-es swarmed all over the place like locusts. I don’t know why the Ray Lewis-es were tiny. It would have been better if the tiny Ray Lewis-es had tiny little knives and tiny little bloodstained white suits that have never been recovered, but that was not part of the fever dream.

*Hey look! It’s the sexy detective from The Killing! They should make another season of that. It was the rainiest show in the history of television.

In conclusion: people who fast for any length of time on purpose—and I’m talking straight-up liquids, not your faker “juice fasts” where you get juice and salads and stuff—are crazy. Cray to the fucking zee. Maybe you say your god wants you to, maybe you have some political agenda, maybe you literally have a mental illness that makes you unable to eat, but it all boils down to a form of crazy, no? Yes, I realize I am calling Mahatma Gandhi crazy. What’s he going to do, fight me?

—mimi smartypants hates everything.