The Dog Must Go

Tom's dog annoys me. For one thing, she burrows under my covers, UNDER MY COVERS! The dogs are allowed to sleep above my covers and under the blanket I have laid out for them, but she insists upon getting between my sheets. And since she is disgustingly obese, and very talented at going limp, she is hard to move.

Also, she licks. Not in a "Oh I seem to have a spot of something on my paw I'd better clean it off" normal doggie kind of way, but in a disgustingly slurpy slobbery loud sort of way, all night. She licks her paws, her crotch (ugh, like I need to hear that), the other dog's face, the inside of the other dog's ears, the blankets, whatever is nearby, and she does this all night. It is nauseating to try to fall asleep to the sound of dog slobber being slopped all over the room. And at least three times a night she wakes me up crying because she's decided she can't get on the bed without permission, despite the fact that this has never been a rule and that she hops up on her own all the time.

The dog, probably from being so obese (a beagle built like an eggplant, not pretty), farts. Horrible mustard gas dog farts, with no warning and a loooooong hang-time. It's like invisible fumigators sneak into my home for no reason, periodically throughout the day. It's an especially pleasant experience during dinner, the smell of doggie diarrhea permeating the room. And when she goes into heat, which Tom won't pay to stop, she bleeds everywhere because she is TOO FAT TO REACH HER OWN GENITALS and therefore can't keep herself clean. In my opinion becoming too fat to reach your own genitals should be punishable by death, no matter the species unless you are some form of water-life. Whales can get away with it, but the gods at least gave elephants trunks to compensate. And I don't overfeed the dogs, it's just that this one eats for all of them.

She howls. At nothing. I have hung tarps around the dog pen so she can't see squirrels or bunnies or stray cats, whatever it was that she was barking at. Now she barks at the crinkling and fluttering of the tarps. And when she howls, the other dog howls too. Yes, I have three dogs, but MY dog, the little unobtrusive dog I brought into the relationship, doesn't sleep on the bed and can only yip, not howl. And I do mean howl, a basset hound baying that carries throughout the neighborhood and gets me phone calls. (Remember Roscoe's dog on The Dukes Of Hazzard?) And when I open the back door and tell her to SHUT THE FUCK UP, she goes down into the dog pen and lays down. I refuse to think of what she might lay in.

Tom, if you remember (and I do), originally got the dog to ride in the truck. It was only when he found out that CFI charged a $500 non-refundable deposit to keep a dog in their truck that she ended up at the house full-time. But when he bought his own truck, he took the annoying dog away. Life was once again good, sleep was once again uninterrupted and slobber-free. And now he says he's not sure he's taking her back out on the road. It seems he doesn't like having to walk her, or listen to her cry, or smell her intestines die. Now, I am a dog lover; I think it's cruel when people leave their dogs outside all the time. Hey, if you're going to get a pet, make it part of the family! But this dog will not survive living at my house full-time. I will stop trying to prevent her from running out the front door EVERY SINGLE TIME THE DOOR OPENS. I will let her escape and then not try to catch her, not call her name out, nothing. I will simply hope that she doesn't wander into traffic, that she finds her way home like she always has without worrying obsessively that she won't.

Yes, I feel for Tom. He has this whole "a boy and his dog" thing going on where he is the happy white kid and she is his loyal beagle, but the happy white kid in the movies doesn't leave the beagle home with his sister for weeks at a time. If that were the case it would be called "a girl and her animal cruelty charge".

Come on, people. Wake up to the real threat.

Wish List

When I was eighteen I wrote out a list of things I wanted, which I have long since lost. It wasn't like an amazon wishlist, full of trinkets and gadgets and material things, although certainly it had on it some material things. It was a goals list, but without vague hard to define goals like success and health. It was full of things like 'husband' and 'children' and 'front porch', things that I wanted to acquire during my lifetime and which were at the time important enough to warrant being written on a list. Since then, of course, I have gotten many of the things on the list. I am married, I have a child, and I currently live in a house with a front porch. So now I am revamping the list, for a new millennium, hopefully not to be lost like the last one. So here it is, to be considered a constant work in progress and to be added to at random:

1) a front porch with a wood floor

2) a son, to even things out

3) a Prius

4) a soft chair all my own in a terribly ugly yet comforting pattern

5) a manuscript written by me

6) an anniversary ring, doesn't matter what kind, commemorating an anniversary higher than my parents achieved

7) a house with a tree

8) a full set of matching towels, every single one the same color

to be continued. . . .

I Have Become So Bitter

One of my favorite movie quotes ever is from a funeral scene, about a man who committed suicide and didn't leave a note. The preacher says, "Is not the satisfaction of being a good man among average men enough to sustain us?" or something close to that. I used to think that the satisfaction of being a good person was enough. In fact, I still firmly believe that the source of happiness is knowing that you are a good person. But now, I'm not so sure I am. I nitpick, and I judge. I have so little patience or tolerance. The neighbor guy across the street drag races and he spends whole afternoons revving the car up, I assume while working on it. Used to be, I'd close my door and turn up the TV and not care about the noise. It's the middle of the day and he has a right to his hobby. If I wanted absolute silence and solitude I should have moved to the country. And the guy is nice enough to wait until the afternoon rather than start at 8:00 in the morning. But now, I want to bomb his house. I have become bitter and bitchy lately, and I know why. It's a spiral. I want to move, to buy a house all our own in a city where a traffic jam doesn't mean a tractor. I want to have babies. I want Tom to get the local job he's been promising to get. I'm getting tired of waiting for our life together to start. I've always seen these first few years of our marriage as a short step. Someday I'll look back on them and they'll just be those rough times in the beginning when Tom was on the road. But I'm ready now for the rough times to be over with, thank you very much. Also, my novel isn't doing anything. I've stalled, and no amount of staring at a white screen seems to be helping, not that it would. Basically I don't feel productive, or useful. And I hate to go apply for a job and then have to leave in nine or ten months to have a baby. I plan to go to college when we move, to become a paralegal. I wait only because any classes I take here, in Illinois, won't be any good in Nebraska and no one here hires paralegals anyway.

So tell me, how do I get my satisfaction back?

A Nation Of Mental Progeria

I firmly believe that people in this country, as a whole, need to grow the fuck up. When I was a child I thought as a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man I put away childish things. -Corinthians I 13:11 The only bible verse I have ever bothered to memorize. I see middle aged men struggling to pay for their kids' college educations, yet they drive flashy convertibles in a vain attempt to recapture their youth. I see beautiful women in their forties wearing short shorts and halter tops and looking completely ridiculous, all because they want to be 21 again. These people need to grow the hell up. They don't have to wear appliqued sweatshirts with tissues shoved up the sleeves or play golf in a knee-brace, but they can give up the dream of reliving puberty.

That being said, I believe that some things exist solely to give joy, with no mature or responsible purpose at all. Games are one of them. Faith is another.

I have spent a good majority of my life living within a block of some grade school or another and I can tell you, when kids play they do it all the way. They scream. On the way down a slide, in the bounce at the top of the swing's arc, and while running away from whoever is "It", they scream. But when adults play, they don't scream anymore. They are too worried about looking stupid should they throw back their head and laugh with an open mouth. And they have so many rules. Organized sports are terrible things. Sports should never be organized, ever. They should be games played for fun in a park or an open field somewhere by people who agree in the beginning that referees are just bossy people who don't belong. Sports should be played by kids, no matter the age, not by professional businessmen more concerned with contract settlements and draft picks than with having fun.

I was raised by two parents with very little in common, except that they were both raised by parents who pushed upon them the importance of the church. As a direct result of this, my family never went to church. After years of reading about exotic belief systems and familiar doctrines, I have come to the conclusion that faith should be personal. Whatever it is that makes you feel connected to the universe is what's right for you. But when one man's method of connection gets written down, edited, footnoted, and bellowed into a loudspeaker in a building built just to house the loudspeaker, it somehow stops being personal. It starts being pushy, and condescending, and less about the joy. When religions have been organized, historically, they have gone from focusing on a connection with fellow man to focusing on the superiority over fellow man, and how to haul the fellow man kicking and screaming up onto a pedestal he may have no urge to mount. I believe that the only way to truly worship anything is to do it yourself, in your own words. How am I the one praying if I recite the words someone else thought up to describe how they felt? Does every single Catholic really feel an emotional connection to the Hail Mary?

I think the toys and the flings and the trends that adults cling to in an attempt to avoid being grown ups are about as ridiculous as if the same people were out riding bigwheels on the sidewalk. A little whimsy is nice, but when "Age is just a number" means you act thirteen rather than thirty, there's a problem. Some things are supposed to be innocent, and we corrupt them with rules and laws and grounds for disqualification. But the things that should be responsible and mature and adult, we seem to ignore. We are becoming, if we aren't already, a nation of tiny children in old creaking bodies.

New Floors & Shiny Gifts

Reason number three hundred fifty seven to hate the people who lived here before me: They glued down their carpet.

Reason number three hundred fifty eight to hate the people who lived here before me: They filled holes in the original hardwood floors with joint compound, and then glued carpet to it.

What are reasons one through three hundred fifty six? I don't have enough time to list them all but having to remove glued down and disintegrated-by-time carpet padding, some of which was glued to crumbling plaster, is definitely worth mentioning. But, aside from the quarter inch of bright yellow dust covering every semi-flat surface in my house, I am fairly happy with how the new kitchen floor looks. Ryan is of course disappointed that we didn't paint, which is what her limited experience with carpet-induced parental insanity has taught her should come next, but the kitchen looks nice. And the dust has given me the motivation to finally clean ten years of cigarette smoke off the kitchen walls. But Tom is hobbling around stoop-shouldered like an old man, and my flat feet are hurting more than they have in a long time and the curb in front of my house has a higher mountain of trash bags than any other house on the street. All in all, a productive couple of days.

On a lighter note, Tom seemed to like the new giant rolling tool chest I got him for our anniversary, even though it got wedged in the back of my mom's pickup truck and he had to provide the muscle to get it out, and then wrestle it down to his basement workshop. And I love my gift. A purse, a pair of gloves (three is the 'leather anniversary') and the black pearl ring that I have wanted forever. To hear Tom tell it, I have "been talking about that damn thing for the past three years." He spoils me so much.

What Goes Around Comes Around

Remember a couple months back when I got mad at my living room carpet? Well today Tom stepped on a wet spot in the kitchen. So tonight he announces, box cutter in hand, that the kitchen carpet must die. And I can't get mad at him for it, or point out how foolish it is to undertake such a project a day and a half before he leaves, because I know what it's like to get mad at the carpet. So this is the scene in my kitchen tonight:



PS- Today is our third anniversary. How fitting that we prove so compatible on such an auspicious occasion.

It's The Happiest day Of The Year

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Barnabus, You Dolt!

It's funny how you remember things years after the fact. My mom once told me of a story about a British lawyer's assistant who did amazingly good work but never left the office. In fact, she had read a story about a Wall Street lawyer's assistant who refused to work and never left the office. And how did I finally get the title to this masterpiece? From a reference I heard on the morning radio show I listen to. Ah, humanity.

Uncles

Four o'clock in the afternoon. Road construction on a busy US highway. I am driving, trying to beat my daughter home from Girl Scouts. I am buzzed, a combination of not eating anything yet today and drinking two beers. I hate myself.

My youngest paternal uncle is in town today. He lives in Florida and so my well-meaning aunt (married to my older, but not quite oldest, paternal uncle) chose to sync up our visits at the same time. He was stopping by while in town, I was stopping by to pick up some papers of my late father's. A little family reunion ensued, if by family reunion you mean two drunks, a middle-aged woman compulsively offering food to her guests, and me, the only available link to a dead man, sitting around a kitchen table trading stories. Ahhh, family.

My father came from a long line of drunk Archie Bunkers. If you were their color, religion, nationality, gender, approximate age and income level, and willing to buy them a beer, you were okay. To the rest of you high-falutin' blue-bloods, who needs ya! Being a non-racist inclusionary halfdyke like myself, I have always suffered some discomfort with my father's side of the family, especially since he died. See, they want to like me. I am Barry's blood, I'm all they have left of him. But I am not him, and that always disappoints. For many years I tried to be him; I slept around and I drank a lot and I pointed out the errors in other people's logic at the bar. But somehow the behavior one accepts from a middle aged war veteran isn't so well-received coming from a twenty year old girl. Also, the homophobe who applauds a hearty "Nice rack!" from a man won't always take it so well from a woman, not at the local VFW.

But still I try. I hate myself for it but for some reason, probably because these men are all that I have left of my father's blood, I try to find some common ground. So I laugh at their stupid jokes ("Want a bigger chest? Just rub some toilet paper between your boobs; it sure made your ass grow. Hahahahaha!") and I drink the beer they offer no matter the time, and I pretend for an afternoon that my father was the same man to me that he was to them, that he was a loyal and loving member of my immediate family and not some distant rarely seen face from my childhood. I try to pretend that I'm no longer angry with him when the most painful part of mourning him is my anger. And I really really try, harder than anything else, not to get a DUI on the fifteen mile drive home from the bar.

He does NOT have RLS!

TOM (lying in bed): I think I have RLS.

ME: You do not have RLS.

TOM: How can you know that? Do you even know what RLS is?

ME: Because no one really has RLS! In parts of the world where people actually know suffering, nobody complains about RLS! No one with any real concerns sits in bed at night going "Hmmm, I think my leg is twitchy." Get yourself some real worries and quit thinking your leg wants to kick something. Wanna know what it wants to kick? Your own ass, for being such a hypochondriac!

TOM: Nah, I think I have RLS.

E-Commerce At It's Finest

My mother only has internet at work. A week or so back she was rushing to work every day so she could go online, click the little link in her email, and track a package she had ordered. She so wanted this package to arrive. It was a purchase she had debated for months and she felt completely gluttonous for ordering it. So one day I got a call that she had rushed to work and clicked the link to track her package, which was due any day now, only to find that it had been outside her front door all night. So I had to drive across town in the rain to let the package in. All this for a fucking robot vacuum that almost choked to death on a dog turd last Friday.

May The Force Be With You

There is a force in the world for which I have been searching my whole life. This force, which only a few lucky souls ever connect to, is full of wonderment and joy and absurdity. I want to find this force, and connect to it. Sometimes I can feel it nearby, can almost touch it, but it never chooses me through which to emerge. This force is the line, the very fine line, which separates the ditsy (Joey Tribbiani) from the silly (Phoebe Buffay). It is a way of looking at things which embraces the obvious and then twists it, looking at in from a previously ignored angle. It is what makes people ask "Why not?" Most geniuses channel this force. Most successful inventors do as well, which is why most good inventions make the average consumer think, "Why didn't I think of that?"

Some people try to mimic the force, and they look so sad and obvious. The comedian who finishes every joke with "Huh? Huh?" waiting for the audience to laugh. The guy who does the funniest thing ever, a week after seeing someone else do it, in front of the same people. No, the force is what we love about fiction's greatest characters. Chris Knight, Shawn Spencer, Lucas, the people who say what we wish we could think of. The Jacks and Karens as opposed to the Wills and Graces.

I want that force. I want to be silly and fun, but not ditsy and flaky. I want to find that balance, channel that absurdist energy. I want to be campy and unashamed and outrageous. Oh, but to have a goal I could see.

I'd Hope They'd Change The Alert Name.

About a month ago a bunch of nuclear warheads went missing, flown around the country with no real security measures, and no one noticed for thirty six hours. Yep, nuclear bombs as strong as 60 Hiroshima bombs, floating around unsecured and not even missed, for over a day.

On a completely unrelated note, the Pentagon admitted a while back that it had entertained the notion of developing a non-lethal gay bomb. Yeah, see they'd drop this bomb (no doubt missile-shaped with a big purple tip) and it would simultaneously make the enemy gay and also release massive amounts of aphrodisiacs. So the enemy would forget to blow up us and just blow each other instead. By non-lethal I assume they meant that the effects of the bomb would never wear off. Because if the insurgents are nothing else, they do seem to be perfectly willing to kill themselves, and suddenly coming to with Achmed's cock in his mouth might be enough to push some guy in that direction.

Now, the gay bomb idea is offensive, sure. But more than that, it's hilarious. I bet no less than three dozen gay comics are pissed that they didn't think up the concept. I mean, the term "friendly fire" alone is a killer punchline. But come on, the premises on which this bomb idea is built are so laughably ignorant, it's hard to be offended.

1. We can make people gay. Because the fundies wouldn't have found the magical sexuality-switcher formula already, although in the Pentagon's defense, the fundies aren't really up on the latest science.
2. Gay people have no taste. So once the gay bomb goes off, they'll just screw whoever's nearby. Because when you think about it, it is the gay men and not the straight men who seem to exhibit less taste. That's why the gay men are the out-of-shape slobs and the straights are the perfectly groomed fashion divas. Uh, wait. . .
3. Somehow American troops are immune to "The Gay". That's how we know that the bomb vapors won't affect our troops on the ground. Wow, if a gay bomb had gone off in Cuba, the pictures from gitmo would have looked so much . . . exactly the same. (Btw, don't ever google 'gitmo pictures'. You get all sorts of war photos and small children with missing chunks of head are not that photogenic.)
4. The enemy will appreciate the non-lethal nature of a gay bomb and not be at all vindictive or bent of revenge just because we made all of them have lots and lots of hot gay sex. For the record, all gay sex is hot, even combat-sweaty stinky insurgent in the desert sex. Although, while under the effects of our mind-control homo-erotic bomb, they may be considered prisoners of war. And we've been assured by the current administration that we do not torture, or treat cruelly, any prisoners of war. So. . . we'd have to drop massive WWII-era propaganda bombs with single-serve tubes of KY jammed where the leaflets go. It's just courteous.
5. To avoid violating the Geneva Convention (again), we have to assume that somehow forcing people to have sex against their will is not rape, which historically has been considered a war crime. Sadly, current US laws see it differently. I mean, even if the people dropping the bombs aren't the ones getting laid because of it, it's still kind of a date rape drug.


Now, my question about those missing warheads is this: How much better security would the gay bomb have had? After all, nukes can kill you, but the gay bomb poses a serious threat. I mean, if I got my hands on a few of those, I'd be bombing those ginormous mega-churches on a Sunday morning. Take that, Promise Keepers!

And that's only if the Republican National Convention wasn't coming up.

I Am Not A Pot-Head Cat!

Tension Tamer tea, despite the wickedly cool medieval graphics on the box, tastes like Lemon Fresh Pine Sol. Or at least, it smells like Lemon Fresh Pine Sol, and it tastes the way it smells. I spent over $2.00 on a box of this stuff and not only is catnip listed in the ingredients, but it tastes like floor cleaner. Now, if I were a cat I'd be too baked to care what it tastes like, but I am not a cat and so I do care. But I'm too cheap to throw out a box of tea, so I'm drinking my Pine Sol calico stoner tea and building resentment with every sip.

On a brighter note, there's a girl named Chuck on Pushing Daisies. How cool is that?

Things I Didn't Quite Learn From MSNBC

Today I did the random link-clicking thing. I found a headline, on MSNBC, which looked interesting, and then just kept on clicking "related content" links. A lot of these articles, at least two, were on such common sense topics that I almost expected the end line to read, "And in conclusion, water is wet." So, I offer you a small list of articles I think didn't need to be written, because they are a complete waste of article-writer payroll.

1. Men sleep better next to their mates, but they snore so loud and steal the covers so women can't sleep so well next to them. Ehhh, duh? Has the writer of this "news" piece ever slept next to a man? No, because no one really sleeps next to a man.

2. If the TV is blaring Conan, you don't sleep as well. Really, you don't say? Who would have thought that a pulsating light show and noise could possibly affect sleep?


3. Stretching, or relaxing, some muscles can release pent up emotions. Ya think? Has any woman never cried after a particularly strong orgasm? And how often is the topic of the emotional trauma completely unrelated to the orgasm at hand? (No pun intended.) Tears, and shockingly embarrassing outbreaks of such, are the body's way of releasing tension, any kind of tension. Dr. Grafenberg taught me that when I couldn't find the wet-wipes through the tears. Please don't google the name, you don't want to know.

4. Exercise is hard and you can't get around that. I exercise, though nowhere near as much as I should, I know. But I do something, and I'm more flexible at least, because of it. But I don't get a high like a drug from it, and I don't let my one diet cheat day cost me a whole week's worth of work. What I do, though, is feel good that I'm more energetic and less depressed than before, and I eat on that day as if I had never heard the word calorie. I have to exercise, because flapping, saggy, soft muscles look ugly even without a fat layer. And also because the hundred calories I burned from doing a mile on the Gazelle tonight make me feel better about the beer I'm having right now. A light beer, with 102 calories. And to think, my dad always told me that drinking beer made women more attractive!

An Homage To Autumn*

I love autumn. Winter is nice, with hot cocoa, snowmen, animated Christmas specials introduced by a stop-motion Frank Sinatra (but I used to think it was Dick Van Dyke), and the big tree that always looks somehow magical when you turn off the rest of the lights. Spring brings warm weather and green trees and the beginning of gardening season, which is a big thing in my house. Summer has lemonade and swimming pools and longer days and sitting outside with a cold beer, and getting to spend time with my kid without having to periodically remind her that she's supposed to be doing her homework, and by periodically I mean every five minutes. But autumn is my favorite.

Autumn means the leaves get prettier and they crunch under my feet, and the breeze gets just chilly enough that I can dig out my cozy sweaters. I can switch to my plaid flannel sheets and my thick bathrobe. I get to go buy gourds and potatoes and apples at the pumpkin stand in Thomson and put baskets of mums in front of the house. Autumn means apple cider and bowls of candy and children in plastic masks held on by elastic cords stapled to the sides. Autumn means remembering to baste the turkey and brown the rolls and mash the potatoes and making yourself crazy trying to get it all done at the same time, and then sitting down and giving thanks that the oven did not break today. It means never getting to watch anything good on any Saturday, Sunday, Monday night, or occasional Wednesday, because it's football season and "it's only one day a week!" It means an all-out brawl on Thanksgiving Day over whether to watch "The Big Game" or The Macy's Parade, which really is only on once, and then invariably having the channel changed anyway if I do manage to win. It's the beginning of the holiday season, which is proudly secular in my home, as well as the anniversary of the happiest pain-free day of my life. I love autumn. It's my favorite time of the year.


* I know 'homage' sounds pretentious, but I googled 'ode' and those are supposed to be lyrical and versed and crap. So while "An ode to autumn" would have certainly sounded better, it would have been a lot more work.

Oops, She Did It Again

Yeah, I know, bad pun up there in the title. Sue me.

Britney's lost her kids. Just google the words "Britney" and "custody" and see all the crap that comes up. Me, I couldn't care less, as I am apparently just too high brow to worry about what happens to ParisLindsayBritneyOlsenTwins, but the damn articles are everywhere and some of them have seemingly deliberately misleading headlines. So when I click on something which seems at first glance to be directing me to an article on parenting, I instead end up tea-bagged by the media with K-Fed's balls. Yeah, it's that icky.

What I find interesting is the tone of these articles, or at least of the first few lines of them. Britney got what she deserved and, K-Fed gets what he wanted. Why is it about them? It seems that only the most condescending articles ever mention what may be best for the kids. Yes, any child support the father is awarded is likely to be substantial, and yes, Britney's recent and well-publicized actions do seem to warrant some sort of intervention. But custody is not punitive, or a reward. It's not about the parents; it's about the kids.

A few years ago a friend of mine lost custody of her toddler daughter. The judge cited her lack of 'stability' as the main reason, but it couldn't have hurt that the child's father (and by father, I mean father's new wife's daddy) hired the best lawyer in the county to go against a single mother of three. And yes, stability was not this woman's strong suit, as I had pointed out to her from the beginning. But just because the father was married and had a better job history, the girl was moved out of the only family she'd ever known, away from her two sisters and her mother, to live with a man who had never really shown an interest in her prior to filing for custody and his wife, a woman desperate for a child. Now tell me, how is being ripped out of your home at the age of three supposed to enhance your sense of stability?

Yes, there is obviously more to the story than this. And yes, the judge probably did make the best decision in the long run, if you ignore the immediate trauma to the child. But my point boils down to this. How would your parenting change if you knew that someone could come in and take your kids away just because your life went through an upheaval? Everyone I've ever seen go through a divorce has had a few months of going a little wild. It's a self-defense mechanism; you either sit home and cry or you get drunk with "He aint gonna ruin my life, dammit" freedom. What if those few months could convince a judge to take your child from her home? What if you changed jobs and moved to another town, even if it was in an effort to provide better stability for your child, and a judge took him away for it?

Britney's nobody's pick for Mother Of The Year, and K-Fed's probably no prize either. But the judge knows all of this and more, and he's the one who made the decision that's being judged by the tabloids. So next time you overhear someone talking about how messed up Britney is and how she deserved to get her kids "taken away from her", remind yourself that the kids were put in the best place available, not taken away from someone as some form of punishment, and that maybe Britney's not that much more messed up than any of us have been at times. What would the pictures have shown if your worst moments had been caught by photographers? Your absolute worst, closing time at the bar first night out since the baby moments, on film and at a custody hearing.

And don't even get me started on this being fat! After two kids in the past 3 years!

Now, Why Don't I have A Snoopy Doll In A Sweater?

A Traditional Thanksgiving.

See, why didn't I do this first? I've always wanted to do it, and every year I threaten to do it, but this guy actually did it. Maybe this year I will do it the next day, the day when nobody's really hungry enough for a whole meal anyway. Then again, maybe not. I only get one diet cheat day a week and I don't think I'm going to skip Thanksgiving just so I can eat jelly beans on a Friday afternoon.