How To Make Your Cat Skinny With This One Weird Tip!

Do you have a chubby tabby? Have you bought all the diet cat food in the world with no results?

I can help.

I’ve had a lot of requests to explain how I got my cats to lose weight. I’ve coaxed two lardos into the realm of the svelte.

The first subject: Moth. I went to the shelter and requested a “large male cat,” and they said, “Oh we’ve got one of those!” I went home with this:

He was 7 years old and weighed around 21 pounds. 6 months later he was under 14 pounds and jumping on top of cabinets.

The second subject: Foosa. After Moth died (at age 17) and my other cat was delirious with grief – or with the unpleasantness of being the only feline in the house, who knows with cats – I went looking for a cat I felt had a similar, um, spirit to Moth. Enter Foosa:

Foosa was one of those cats you sometimes see on the news. He topped the scales at 35 pounds, at which point his owner restricted him to one room of her house for a year to keep him from eating the other pets’ food but still only got him to lose 4 pounds. Her husband convinced her that he needed a new home, and I staggered away with him.

9 months later, Foosa was Half Foosa:

He went from being unable to jump onto a bed or clean himself to being, well, a regular cat.

So what’s the One Weird Tip?

Cats don’t have opposable thumbs.

If your cat is fat, it’s your fault. (Or maybe your spouse’s or your mother’s or your next door neighbor’s  – but the point is, it’s not your cat’s fault.)

Here’s what to do:

1. Start regular – not diet – wet food. Yes, wet. Dry food has too many carbs. It’s like feeding your cat donuts and potato chips. Okay not really that bad but think of it that way. Got it? REGULAR not diet, and WET not dry.
2. Get a kitchen scale and weigh the food before you give it to your cat. For a few days, just find out how much your cat is currently taking in.
3. Decrease the amount you calculated above by 10%, and feed the cat ONLY that amount every day.
4. Weigh the cat every other day (if you have a good human scale you can hold the cat and do the subtraction method). If the cat is not losing about 1-2% of its weight per week, decrease by another 10%. If the cat is losing faster than 2% per week, increase a bit.

(If you want a lot more seriously in-depth info, go here.)

FAQs

My cat cries all the time and it breaks my heart not to feed her.

Grow a pair! Your cat probably cried all the time when you DID feed her all day. You can have a yowling healthy cat or a yowling obese cat. And this is what cats are born to do: hunt. Not eat; hunt. Nothing wrong about a hungry cat looking for food.

My cat hates wet food.

He will get used to it if he is really hungry.

My other cat needs to eat! I can’t stop the fat one from stealing all her food!

So separate them. Get creative. You can figure this out. Simplest is to lock the fat one up (with litter box) while the skinny one takes her time. The skinny one may need to be offered food several times a day, but not ALL day. (If it’s really ALL day – which it’s not, but whatever – put the skinny one in a room with food and her own litter box while you’re gone.)

My cat wakes me up to feed him.

This is one of the only tricks you can train a cat to do: wake you to feed them. You train them to do this by feeding them when they wake you up. Fortunately, cats are not very good at remembering tricks, so if you don’t feed them when they wake you up, they quickly forget. Always do something else first besides feeding the cat when you get up in the morning.

My cat steals my food! I can’t turn my back for a minute!

Don’t turn your back. Clean up when you’re done making and eating food. Or, lock the cat up and enjoy your meal in peace. Buy earplugs if necessary.

Will this work on a dog?

No clue. I do know that dogs don’t have opposable thumbs either.

I hope you enjoyed this non-running, non-PTSD post! Perhaps there will be more. Perhaps not.

Addendum: I forgot the chart I made!

Pretty Ugly

(Started to put the following in the comments after Jess’s, but it got too long.)

Part of the reason I doubt I’ll ever give up this blog – despite a common view that FaceBook punctured the blogosphere (which I don’t think is true; it mainly pulled out the non-anonymous folks, though it did decrease blog comments, maybe because blog commenting is harder) – is how much I learn and grow from it, because of you all. Thoughtful disagreement is invaluable to me.

Answers to some questions: I was comfortable in what I wore to the party; other mothers were more covered up; and, a friend reported, Nana was wearing underwear. Nana did comment on FaceBook, “Why did I wear such a short skirt?” Suggesting there is some insight/struggle/insecurity there too, making me feel a little more ashamed. (A friend from the Pacific Northwest commented back that, well, it is hotter where we are ... )

I realized after my last post that I dress at opposite points on the spectrum for work and non-work. I am practically Amish at work. No bare legs! Errant necklines get the stapler treatment! Bare arms are covered before any patient contact! Occasionally if it’s really, really hot I’ll show toes, but I feel self-conscious about it all day. So for a recent dress-up event involving residents, I pulled the Ugly Pretty Girl move (you know, like in all those movies where the Plain Jane takes off her glasses and baggy clothes and appears at the school dance looking like Halle Berry and OMG, she’s pretty! WHO KNEW?). I wore a sequined silk fuschia halter dress that showed leg (below the knee), and heels, and put on contacts and eye makeup and pinned my hair up. And people seemed astonished. Comments included, “Wow, look at Dr. M, making it happen!” For days afterward residents were coming up to me saying, “You looked good. Like, really good.” Which felt nice.

Clearly I have a hard time with the middle ground, and I still haven’t seen a rule of thumb I can apply to myself. I agree in theory with the idea that everyone should be wearing exactly what they want to wear, and I mostly follow this at home and don’t care much what people think – although honestly? I’d like to be a nudist, and remember this post? Well, I have finally started wearing a shirt – but at work I don’t like wondering if I’m upsetting my patients. The distraction quotient does exist; there is one physician where I work who shows SO MUCH skin every single day that many, many people have asked many other people to “speak to her about it.” I partly like that she dresses that way, but I partly find it insensitive, not least because she is conventionally gorgeous and it seems like she’s showing off rather than being comfortable in her own skin.

I don’t mind being the Pretty Ugly Girl, but I don’t want to be the Mean Girl. Jacq, I think I won’t post her outfit next year.

(Updated!) I Already Wear My Trousers Rolled (Because I’m Kind of Short)

How did I not notice this? I HAVE GONE SILVER. Or white. Or gray. Or something really old-sounding.

When I look in the mirror, to me it looks more or less the way it has for the past five years or so — that is, light brown faded to dishwater blond in front, white streak across the crown, medium brown in back with a few highlights thrown in to minimize the Belted Galloway look. But I came back from vacation recently and the photos, to my shock, revealed what I show you here:

I’m not sure I can explain how I missed this, except to say that I am not a person who spends a great deal of time on her hair. I learned to use a blow dryer in my thirties, and I still don’t know how to use a curling iron.

My grandmother went snow-white in her early 20’s, and I always hoped that would happen to me. It was so dramatic, and my hair was always so boring. So I was thrilled by the emergence of my white stripe. It awakens! But the rest remained a disappointment.

Oddly enough, I didn’t feel especially attractive until I reached 40. It wasn’t until then that I really settled into my face, and though my body wasn’t significantly different from when I was in my twenties, something changed to make me feel much more comfortable in my own skin. Maybe I got shaken up by the experience of losing and regaining my body with pregnancy? And there is no doubt that much (if not most) of attractiveness lies in how attractive you feel.

But now … I am in my (big reveal!) mid-forties, and I begin to notice the slide. A softening and settling. I’m trying to wrap my mind around it and adjust my self-image. I’m trying to resettle into my skin. And actually I’m starting to enjoy it. Well, the hair, anyway.

And I’m really glad I run.

Update: I am inspired by Anon to say: I would love everyone (especially women, but men too) to be able to brag on themselves, or at least to acknowledge what they have that they think looks good. (I did not actually mention what I like about my body in this post, but I certainly have elsewhere in this blog.) The better you feel about what you have, the more attractive you are, and that spreads happiness in general. So give it up, and don’t be shy: What do YOU rock?

Uncharacteristically Multi-Themed

Running
Do you have any idea how often I have to remind myself to take my own advice? Confession: this winter I am barely hanging on to my running. Happens every winter, but worse this one. I don’t like cold, but even more I don’t like dark, and a lot of my running has to be in the dark in the winter. Then I usually get a chest cold or two, plus somehow my back ends up getting hurt during the winter, and before I know it, it’s days and days between runs. So I chant to myself, “Any run is better than no run,” “If it doesn’t hurt worse when you run on it, run on it,” and, believe it or not, I have to remind myself to slow down.

Nana
Thanks for the Nana advice, and TH will be perusing it. And yes, at this point HB understands that she is unreasonable and he is not likely to be permanently scarred by her, but I would like him to have some kind of relationship with her ultimately, and I don’t want that to be made impossible by her behavior now. Also, the aftermath of her visits have always sucked for us, with him having new fears (he’s going to have to go to her house alone, I don’t love him, etc.) and extra tantrums.

My own mother happened to make a connection I hadn’t realized. I was discussing it with her and she became very agitated. It’s unlike her to a) support Nana in anything or b) get very agitated about anything, so I asked her what the deal was, and she confessed that Nana reminds her of her mother, and she’s afraid that I feel like I was scarred because she left me with my grandmother often. And she’s totally right. Now, she had little choice—she was a widow with three difficult kids and no one to pick up any slack except her parents—so I do NOT blame her (and reassured her on this), but actually, my grandmother did scar me. An episode that haunts me to this day was when I was three and threw a tantrum because she made waffles for my brother but not for me (I woke up late and she’d already cleaned up). The tantrum was a typical unreasonable three-year-old tantrum, but for it she gave me the worst spanking of my life. I never liked or trusted her again, and I still flinch when I see anyone even close to smacking their kids.

Book Reviews
I recently read Keith Richards’s enormous autobiography, and since I finished it I actually miss him. I had no particular interest in him or the Rolling Stones before, but I adore him now, despite his drug-addicted parenting, his temper, and his cattiness about Mick Jagger. He is just so open-hearted, in this sense (and that clip is totally worth the 20 minutes, I promise you, and thanks to B for it), and funny, and unapologetic, and unexpectedly respectful of women, and loyal to people who treat others well, and honest about people who don’t (e.g. Brian Jones). And his love of music is enviable. At first the music talk bored me, but then I started pulling up the various songs he mentioned, and I got a great education and new appreciation for the Everly Brothers, Elvis, Chuck Berry, etc. etc. I still don’t like most of the later Stones music, but whatever.

I followed it up with Patti Smith’s book about herself and Mapplethorpe, which I liked well enough, but wished a) it was about her and not about Mapplethorpe and b) she had a sense of humor. Maybe she does in real life, but it didn’t come through in this book, which was earnest earnest earnest.

Music Reviews
I am loving running to The Dog Days Are Over (Florence and the Machine), Shake Me Down (Cage the Elephant), Bloodbuzz Ohio (The Nationals), Not Fade Away (early Stones!), and Tusk (Fleetwood Mac), which makes me laugh every time it pops up and which someone pointed me to because one of my forever favorites is the marching band version of This Too Shall Pass (Ok Go).

Other running, Nana, book and music recommendations welcomed.

File Under: Happiness, Miscellaneous Benefits of

I got in the cab (wearing a ridiculous outfit—I was traveling home and these were the leftover clean clothes) and chirped “Good morning! How are you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the driver slightly warily. “How are you?”

“Great!” I said. Then I used a line I’ve never used before that I’ve heard some of my favorite patients say: “Every morning you wake up is a great day.”

“You got that right!” he said, and we were off on a wide-ranging conversation in which I learned how much he loved driving a cab (“I’d truly do it for free if I didn’t have to pay bills”), how he spent his summers as a boy learning from his Cherokee grandfather how to survive in the woods, how some riders don’t talk, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad people, they might just be in their own heads,” how he got an insider trading tip from overhearing a broker on his cellphone and then invested in the stock and made enough money for a cruise around Greece …

As he dropped me off (and after I’d paid), he said mournfully, “I can’t believe what a great team we make! You are such a lovely person, I don’t want you to leave.”

!

The workshop—well, it went better than any workshop I’ve ever attended, much less given. I was nervous beforehand, but the room was full, nobody left to “answer their phone,” and at the end, they asked us to keep going. And applauded. One person confessed that she’d gotten choked up during it; someone chased me down at the airport to tell me again how much he liked it; I even got a job offer. (The topic included a lot of what I talk about here. How fun is that?)

Best of all, I did it with someone I used to work with and have sorely missed since she moved away. I suckered her into doing it with me and then after I got the grant left her to do a lot of the heavy lifting as far as preparation was concerned. Half of the time we were “working” on it I was chewing her ear off, because I love talking to someone who gets it, and I had forgotten how much she does — and with my “screen” gone, I have nothing holding me back. The workshop sort of felt like an extension of the conversation. (Incidentally, she is a also new Maggot, though she resists the designation. Welcome, B! Hope those knees are holding up.)

I churned through my recommendation letters, sat for my Boards recertification, covered for a colleague on vacation, and am pretty much through to the other side and can focus on the grant work.

I have bad hours and even days; my car got sideswiped ($1300), the garbage disposal cracked, HB wanted to punish me severely for going on my trip—and: every morning I wake up is a great day. Put it on a poster. With a cute kitty. But not a dog. (I was at a stoplight when I took that. I did not get sideswiped while using my phone.)

(Re HB’s knitting: he learned to finger knit at school, and as is his wont, insisted on taking it to the next level: needle knitting. Fortunately my mother is a master knitter and taught him on a recent visit. This is what he made for me to take with me on my trip for when I missed him and needed something to cuddle.)

More Helpful Hints

How to Sleep Better Without Pills

This is by request. A disclaimer: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking over-the-counter sleep aids. Heck, I used to take Benadryl every day as a child during allergy season; it’s not like taking Seconal or something. And drinking alcohol before bed is much worse on your sleep patterns than these kinds of medications. However, there are some relatively easy tricks for sleeping better—with or without medications. Most people know that you should have a quiet, cool, dark, comfortable place to sleep. Here are a few things that you may not know: Don’t watch TV in bed, even if you think it lulls you to sleep. Don’t read in bed if you can’t sleep; get up and sit in a chair. Don’t toss and turn if you can’t sleep; get out of bed and do something boring for a while. If you have a snoring bed partner, get a white noise machine. If your problem is waking up in the middle of the night, trying going to bed a half hour later than usual. And here’s one that many people resist: cover up your clock or turn it to the wall so that you can’t tell what time it when you wake up in the middle of the night. If you check the time, you get anxious, and then you really can’t get back to sleep. Finally, if you are taking something to get to sleep every night and want to stop, you should go cold turkey and expect to have 3-4 rough nights before you’re back to normal.

How To Childproof on the Fly

Releasable zip ties. (I have no idea if that’s a good website, I was just too lazy to get a good picture of them myself.) Discovering these was like finding the internet, only less exciting. With a little imagination, you can use these to fashion a way to keep a toddler out of all kinds of things when you’re in a hotel room, visiting childfree friends, etc. I used to keep a pack of them in my suitcase. I still have one around the knobs of the liquor cabinet. (I figure anyone who’s too drunk to operate the release has probably had enough. There’s plenty of beer in the fridge if you’re that desperate.) They’re also good for managing computer cables, keys … make your own magic!

How To Connect Almost Anything to Almost Anything

Non-releasable zip ties. These made it possible for me to put baby gates on our impossibly narrow stairs (gates that lasted years and endured much abuse without failing, despite my husband’s initial skepticism), and they are astoundingly strong. They also facilitated one of my most ingenious solutions:

How To Keep From Losing Tiny Remote Controls


Is this not cool? You can use anything large and squishy. (Note: I do not advise using a cat. A particularly well-trained dog might suffice.) I started out with rubber bands, but for some reason children must put asunder what a rubber band hath joined together.

How To Put Eye Drops Into Uncooperative Eyes

Some of us could pour a shot of Jim Beam into our eyes, but some—e.g., many children, my husband—blink and squirm and freak out over one or two drops of anything. The trick is simple: lie on one’s back with eyes closed, put the drops in the corner of the eye (making a little pool), and then open the eyes. (Gratuitous doctor’s soapbox proclamation: Antibiotic drops for “pink eye”? 99 percent of the time useless—and occasionally allergic reaction-producing. I know we all grew up doing it, but almost all pink eye—especially if it’s bilateral—is viral, usually a cold virus. And it’s no more or less contagious than a cold.)

How To Stop a Nosebleed

You can find that here—an oldy but bloody goody.

How To Keep Cats from Jumping on Your Head To Wake Up and Feed Them

Cats can understand cause and effect, but only up to a point; too many steps in a process and their fuzzy little heads start to hurt. If upon arising you immediately feed them, they will learn to wake you up, and often in creative ways. If you separate getting up and filling the bowls by more than, say, two steps, they will eventually forget that the two occurrences might be connected.

And finally: a picture in which you can see my own personal stomach-sleeping-preventing bumper:

(Levitating child not included.)

DoctorMama’s Helpful Hints

I’ve been neglecting you. To make up for it, I’ve prepared a real treat for you: a whole bunch of helpful hints and ingenious solutions to problems you didn’t even know you had. If I could patent these, I would, but since I can’t, you’re getting them for free. You’re welcome.

How to Stop Sleeping on Your Stomach
Those of us who stomach sleep tend to get cricks in our necks and sore lower backs. If I spend more than a few minutes doing it, I get a back spasm so bad that I am unable to turn back over, and I’m left to struggle like an upside-down turtle. One solution I’d read about was to sleep with a long pillow next to you on the side you usually turn to. Good in theory, but unless your bed is next to the wall, you’ll just end up with a pillow on the floor. My brilliant solution? Tuck the pillow under the fitted sheet, creating a bumper. It won’t fall out, and when you turn over, you naturally sling your knee over it and stop halfway.

How to Keep a Toddler (or Drunk) from Falling Out of Bed
See How to Stop Sleeping on Your Stomach above! It’s genius, I tell you.

How to Use Decongestant Nasal Spray Without Becoming Addicted
When you have a cold and can’t sleep because you can’t breathe through your nose, use decongestant spray in one nostril only. The next night, you can use it on the other side. Don’t use any during the day. You can keep this up indefinitely.

How to Quit Decongestant Nasal Spray
If you’re already addicted, quit using it on one side. Once that side is more or less back to normal, quit the other side.

How to Avoid Losing Your Child in a Crowd
Or rather, how to find your child after you’ve already lost them in a crowd. All you need is some masking tape and a marker. Put a strip of tape across the child’s upper back and write on it: IF FOUND CALL [cell number]. My son adds: tell your child to approach either a Person In Charge or someone who also has kids.

How to Clean Out a Stainless Steel Carafe or Thermos When You Can’t Reach Your Hand In
Put a Brillo™-type pad and some water in there, put the lid on, and shake it like a hurricane.

How to Fix Yellow Toenails
If you wear pink or red toenail polish, you may have noticed that they leave your toenails stained yellow. I searched for years for a cure, and finally discovered that the clear polishes that have names like Yellow Out actually work. Duh.

How to Keep Noisy Toys from Driving You Nuts
Put clear packing tape over the speaker holes. Several layers if necessary. Kids’ hearing is way better than ours; they don’t mind at all, and it makes life so much more bearable. (This trick is not my own invention; I learned from another cranky old parent.)

How to Keep Your Ice Cubes from Getting Smelly
Because I’m sorry, baking soda just doesn’t work. Charcoal odor absorbers, however, do. Drop one directly into your ice bin and voilà.

How to Cure Diaper Rash Quickly and Cheaply
Most diaper rash is at least partly due to candida (yeast). Buy a (store-brand) tube of vaginal yeast cream (throw away the applicators that come with it). It’s good as prescription cream; clears it up in, like, 12 hours. Works on athlete’s foot, too. We call it Toe-Butt-Vagina Cream.

How to Stop Picking at Your Face (Or at Least Cut Down)
Put 25-watt light bulbs in your bathroom.

How to Soothe a Sore Throat
Suck on a baby aspirin. (Do NOT let children do this.)

How to Keep A Cat From Shredding Your Furniture (Besides Declawing)
Keep its front nails clipped. A regular nail clipper works fine. You’ll probably need a second person to do the cat holding, but it’s not as hard as you’d think—nothing like trying to pill a cat.

How to Get Children to Behave
I have no frickin idea.

This One Is Mostly About ME

First, about your comments on the previous post: I was highly amused but not surprised at the unwillingness of most of you to follow the instructions re: only one piece of advice. It’s good stuff, though. Pretty much all of it mirrors my discoveries, and are things I wish I’d known earlier.

Just a few of my favorites (and I have many):

• Ice diapers (genius!) (Darwin wanted to know if a maxi pad would work as well?)
• “And then I thought: if a goddamn monkey can do it, I sure as hell can.”
• “NEVER EVER talk to a mother of an ‘easy’ baby. EVER!”

Dar’s initial reaction (she only recently found out I even have a blog): “I am speechless—and I love my moniker. The comments will be there a while right? I want access to them at 3:00 am when I am all bits and pieces.” She is deeply grateful.

Now, all about me. All this baby stuff got me thinking about—NO, not about having another one!—about my own childhood. Coincidentally, as I was cleaning up some files I discovered some old photos.

I’ve written before about how I didn’t like being a child—I found the powerlessness awful, and I had very few carefree experiences. But looking at these pictures, I was struck by how very unhappy I look in almost every one of them. See what you think:

This one is hilariously—oh, I don’t know the politically correct term, but let’s say underprivileged Caucasian:



This one I remember really liking, believe it or not (awkward age, anyone?):



The happy toddler in this one is my little sister; I’m the one huddled in the background:



“Playing” in front of our house:



My main pleasure in life at the time—and evidence of where HB gets his love of tight colorful outfits:



At my grandparents’:



About to perform in a play for a Medieval Renaissance festival (don’t I look festive?):



And finally, fun times at the beach:


My conclusions? I am happier than ever to be an adult, and I should worry less about HB’s childhood experiences, because it does get better.

At Least I Floss Daily

My blogger meet-up the other week was terrific, which was no surprise to me, since every blogger I’ve ever liked on screen and had the chance to meet I’ve also liked in person. The only thing that has ever startled me is that many of them are much taller than I thought, since that’s one thing you can’t tell from pictures. For some reason I expect everyone to be kind of shrimpy like me.

For those of you who have had the opportunity to link up with a favorite blogger, have they been the same in person as they appeared to you on screen? (I don’t think you can count brief meetings at events like BlogHer, but I wouldn’t know for sure since I’ve never been.)

I will be testing my 100% record soon, because through happy chance, I have a quick trip that will take me near the lair of E of Oral Hygiene Queen, whom I have been wanting to meet for years. My only worry is that she will find my dentition lacking, and I think it’s too late to get my teeth capped. She can probably spot caps a mile away anyway.

$

Such an uncomfortable topic for me. When you grow up poor, money takes getting used to.

I was told back in the spring that I was probably going to get a raise, but I didn’t hear anything else until recently, when my new contract showed up. The raise was nice, and nicer was that in my next paycheck, I got something extra: back pay—my raise was back-dated nine months, to the beginning of the year.

So I ran right to my checkbook and took care of one of my higher-interest student loans. This is what I’ve done with every influx of cash I’ve had since starting a “real” job five years ago, and yet it was only recently that my student loans got below $100,000. When we married, TrophyHusband and I were in debt for about a third of a million, with no assets to speak of aside from our degrees. His loans are being whittled away by a program for physicians who devote their time to research (research being much less remunerative than clinical work, the government tries to lure folks into it this way). Mine I’m chipping away at—$1300 a month, plus extras. I’m also putting the maximum into the various retirement accounts available to me, as is TH; the Alternative Minimum Tax rakes us over the coals every year; and of course there’s daycare. So our bank account isn’t enormous.

But we don’t have to worry. It is highly unlikely that we will ever have to worry again, at least not the way I worried growing up. After my father died, we had no income; my mother had three kids and no degree. I was placed in Head Start. We lived in a tiny apartment—we owned the house, but rented out two-thirds of it. We had an old car that broke down a lot. I wore a lot of hand-me-downs. I had two Barbies, while my friends had dozens (though I don’t recall wanting Barbies, or any toys really; all I ever wanted was books).

I didn’t really mind any of that. It felt normal to me. And I wasn’t truly deprived; I did have music lessons, and our local Y had an awesome array of classes priced on a sliding scale—I took pottery, trampoline, gymnastics, magic, swimming, even horseback riding. I mostly made friends who didn’t have much more than we did; the richer kids just seemed to live in a different world. But I did hate the worry. My mom was not good with money. Bounced checks were routine, every single month. There were always stores we couldn’t shop in because her name could be found on the handwritten list above the cash register: DO NOT ACCEPT CHECKS FROM THE FOLLOWING … Having people show up to cut off the gas or electric was not uncommon (though I learned that if you tell them you have a sick baby, they rarely actually do it). We lived in the poorer section of town, and when I went to junior high, I had to ride the “bad” bus, where you risked getting assaulted if you tried to sit in one of the tough kids’ seats, and sometimes even if you didn’t. A couple of times I went home after school with friends from one of the fancier suburbs, and I was astonished at how nice their buses were. I did whatever I could to avoid my bus—rode my bike, begged a ride, even walked the three miles.

Finally, when I was about twelve, I said to my mother, “This is ridiculous. We shouldn’t be bouncing checks. We should only spend what we have.” This was when I found out that a) my mother was unsure as to just how much money was coming in and b) didn’t really know how to balance a checkbook. So I sat down and figured those things out, put us on a budget, and took over the finances. I didn’t let my mother go to the grocery store without me, because she was liable to throw all kinds of pricey crap in the cart instead of the perfectly good store brand stuff. And it was a beautiful thing—no more bounced checks, and I finally knew just how much I could spend on new shoes for school. As soon as I could earn a little money babysitting, I did it as much as I could (in fact, I was regularly sitting for a family of three boys under 4 from the time I was twelve—no wonder I didn’t want to have kids too young). In high school, I saved enough money to pay for all of my own stuff, plus get myself to Europe two summers in a row. (My mother eventually married my stepdad, who is a perfect balance for her—he’s so frugal that he has been known to pour cheap wine into expensive bottles for her, and she can’t tell the difference, so everyone is happy.)

Frugality has a hold on me that I’m not sure will ever loosen. Oh, I’ve relaxed some—we go out to eat a lot, we take a vacation here and there, I get my family nice gifts for birthdays and Christmas, and I’ll buy myself fun stuff every now and again. We give a lot of money to charity. GoodCat recently had to have some teeth pulled out, and when they said that they could pull out two extra that looked iffy for about $60 more or wait and see, meaning it could be an extra $500 down the road to redo the sedation, I let him keep his teeth. But I’ve never bought a fancy car (I drive a Scion; TH almost exclusively rides his bike and will probably sell his car soon), we resisted our real estate agent when she suggested we look at the biggest house we could qualify for (three times as much as the house we bought), and the most I’ve spent by far any item of clothing was the $300 I dropped for my wedding dress. We never carry a credit card balance. Our house has one and a half bathrooms and two and a half bedrooms, no garage. I almost never buy my son clothes that are not on sale, and I certainly buy him nothing from any boutiques. His equipment is all of the good-enough brands. I recently learned how to drive my car so that I get more than 31 miles per gallon in the city, and this pleases me enormously.

Right now I tell people that I’m cautious with money because of the student loan debt, but there’s more to it than that. Buying things that cost a lot when you can get something much less expensive that works just as well just seems, well, stupid if you don’t have much money, and immoral if you do. My in-laws redid their kitchen using a special kind of granite that had to be imported from Brazil. It looks no better than the home-grown stuff, but cost something like five times as much. This just seems wrong to me. But then, I guess we don’t really need to live in a 1300 square foot house either. We didn’t have to use real tile when we redid our bathroom (though we did have to redo it; it was crumbling to pieces and flooding the downstairs). And one of these days I am going to have someone out to repair all the holes in the plaster …

Anyway, what I really meant to talk about when I started this is, I have no idea how to raise my son when it comes to the whole money thing. I feel very uncomfortable about the fact that he will be in such a different position than I was. He’ll be going to private schools pretty soon. When he asks for money, I won’t be able to say “we don’t have it” honestly. I’m not sorry that he won’t have to scrub other students’ toilets in college like I did, but I also don’t want him to be like the rich kids I hated. Or did I just hate them because they were rich?

I can already see some of the ways I’ll be mortifying HellBoy when he’s a teenager ...

Birthday Maggot

I’m not too hung up on birthdays; since I share one with my brother, it’s always seemed like just another holiday rather than My Special Day. But this year my husband, in cahoots with one of my best friends, decided to throw me an almost-surprise party—“almost” in that he didn’t tell me until a week beforehand that it was going to happen, which didn’t give me enough time to get anxious about it. And it was absolutely lovely. A perfect mix of friends—from work, from the neighborhood, from the family, from blogs, and even from my childhood. Lots of kids for HellBoy to jump on the couch with, and I got to hang out on my patio and sip mojitos. My husband got me a pretty cool present too:


And he’s not even allowed to read my blog—he just listens up when I tell him about it.

Embracing My Inner Maggot

Here’s how tough things have been around here: I started running in the morning.

It was a long time coming. I had to skip my run more and more often, what with late meetings/work/HellBoy meltdowns. And I started to wake up too early more and more often, opening my eyes in a panic: What is it I’m overdue on today?

Finally one morning as I lay in bed waiting for the 6 am alarm to go off, I realized I was a maggot, and I knew what I had to do. I hauled my carcass out of bed, put on my running clothes (discovering in the process that a tight running bra is a lot harder to wriggle into when you’re stiff), did my warmup stretches (ditto), swallowed some coffee, and for the first time since I started running some two decades ago, went out for a run as the sun was rising.

I hated it. I’m a running owl, not a lark. But I thought of all you maggots out there, and I did it. And did it again, and again. And you know? It’s not so bad. It’s certainly very different. I can’t get the same cleansing, relaxing feeling I do at the end of the day, when I can let all of my built-up frustrations melt away. I actually need to run longer to feel like I’ve done anything. But it does lend the rest of the day a certain calmness.

On another subject, we saw the ENT, and got good news: since HB is overall improving, we can hold off on surgery, as he is likely to outgrow this. I was more relieved than I expected to be.

As for the blog rename, I’m mulling over the options. I won’t go password-protected. I’ve been combing through my archives a little bit, and I don’t think I have too much on here that I’d be horrified if someone discovered. I’d much rather not be outed, and I do think I need to change things up a little, but to completely prevent all possibility of recognition would mean changing the blog so much that it wouldn’t be fun anymore.

The 'Screw Interview

Because I said I would, I now answer these questions from thumbscrews:

1. You can travel back in time and visit yourself at [select all applicable] 10, 16, 22 and 30. What would you tell your various temporally-disjointed selves?

Amazingly enough, these are the ages where I had things pretty together (whereas 9, 15, and 21 sucked). (29 was pretty good.)

At 10: Get a photo of yourself in that red vinyl jumper. But not in the yellow patent leather shoes.
At 16: Don’t bother with the German. Learn Spanish.
At 22: It won’t kill you to suck up a little more often.
At 30: Just get it over with and get rid of him now.

2. If your drug of choice was an item which could be purchased at Home Depot for under $150, which one would it be, and why?

I’m not sure if this means something that really can be bought at HD, in which case, I don’t know, maybe a flat of flowers that could not possibly survive in my garden? Because hope springs eternal? If this means an actual drug drug, I’d pick E. Because happiness is nice.

3. You can reanimate and spend several hours (say, sharing some Batter-Dipped Choco-Cheesecake Nibblers at the local crap-on-the-walls chain restaurant) with one of the following individuals - which one would you choose, and why?
- A deceased relative of whom you were moderately (but not overwhelmingly) fond.
- A randomly-selected serial killer of moderate notoriety.

Definitely the relative; serial killers kind of bore me. I’d pick my paternal grandfather and try to get up the guts to ask him a) what possessed him to marry my grandmother and b) what my father was like.

4. Think of your most esoteric, potentially-humiliating sexual fantasy. Think of another, equally-odd (but completely fabricated) fantasy. Describe them both without identifying which is which.

For me, describing a fantasy in detail will ruin it. Therefore I give you no details, just:
a. Ordering someone around.
b. Being ordered around.

5. What is the typical prison sentence for the most legally-questionable act you've ever committed?

Prison sentence, probably ten years. More concerning to me would be license revocation. No comment on this one.

6. Think of the worst physical pain you've ever experienced (childbirth, ping-pong ball-sized kidney stones, atomic wedgie). Think of the worst emotional pain (depression, divorce, disaster). Think of the person who is closest to you in the world (child, spouse, sibling). You must decide whether they will suffer a comparable degree of physical OR emotional pain. If you choose the former, you will be required to inflict it yourself. If you choose the latter, it will occur without any involvement on your part. Which do you choose?

I could not possibly deliberately inflict physical pain on my child. So I guess it would have to be the emotional pain. Which was horrendous, but I have a feeling it will happen to him one day regardless; might as well get it over with.

7. You're granted the power to uncover the truth behind one very, very big secret of the modern age - who shot Kennedy? What the hell is the deal with celebrity Scientologists? You will not be permitted to share this knowledge with anyone, ever - it will be solely to satisfy your own curiosity. What do you choose to learn?

Did Bush truly believe there were WMDs in Iraq? I.e., is he just stupid, or is he evil?

8. While purchasing some plantains at Tienda Mexicano, you find The Lord. You discover that he is a cruel, arbitrary Lord, as well as one who has read entirely too many "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. He takes you outside, sits you down on the hood of his El Camino, hands you a can of Jugo de Coco and informs you that you will never see any of your current loved ones again. They will continue to live their lives, just magically sans any awareness of your continued existence. By way of compensation, you'll be allowed to determine your own natural lifespan. You may elect to die instantly, live to 120 or any option in between. What do you choose? Why?

120. I could think of ways to fill the time.

9. You are given the opportunity to sample human flesh. Your enjoyment of this unusual entree will not be the result of any amoral acts - the source of your Bruce Burger (Tim Tartare? Francois Filet?) will be an individual who has died of unrelated causes. Your consumption of said flesh will not be as a result of starvation, nor as a condition of some sick wager ("Take a chomp out of Lloyd's thigh and I'll give you season tickets to Six Flags Over Highly Unlikely Transactionville"). Yea or nay?

Nay, but not because of squeamishness about cannibalism per se; rather, I have a hard time eating any meat—even chicken can squick me out if I think about it too hard.

10. You are given a Memory Dustbuster. It looks like a regular Dustbuster, circa 1989. However, when held against the human skull, it has the ability to suck out specific memories. Like many small appliances, this one has gotten a bit finicky in its old age. It no longer removes single memories ... for each one which is removed, an equal-but-opposite second memory is also vacuumed up. You can suck out a particularly awful recollection ... however, you'll also lose a happy memory of comparable intensity, and you have no say in which one it happens to be. Do you use this device? How many times?

Nope. Maybe I would’ve at the time, but they’re part of me now.

11. The Enormous Glowing Sphere of Influence Equation: how many of the following events have occurred in your life for which you've felt personally responsible? By this, I mean that the event in question would definitely NOT have occurred were it not for one or more conscious decisions on your part. Do NOT include events which were confined strictly to your professional life - thus, lawyers/doctors/matchmakers/executioners/etc. should use their discretion on this one.

- Marriages - 2
- Divorces - 0
- Births/adoptions – 2 (yes, I only have one child, but I’m counting the baby born to a patient for whom I prescribed the medicine that starts with V and ends with A)
- Deaths – nonprofessionally, 1 (helped my mother say the right things to get them to let my grandmother go a little earlier than she might otherwise); professionally, many … I am proud of how many people I’ve helped to die in the presence of their loved ones with as few tubes jammed into them as possible. All of them would have died anyway, but it would have been days or weeks later for most, and years for at least one.
- Involuntary commitments (mental institution/rehab/prison) – 0, but it should have been 2 (one rehab, one prison)
- Relocations of over 1,500 miles - 0
- Ascension to a level of fame/renown/power sufficient to interest/impact more than 10,000 individuals – I was going to say 0, but I have had at least a slight influence on the lives of many patients, students, and residents. That number is in the thousands, I guess.
- Change in income level of +/- 50% - 2
- Formal adoption/renunciation of religious faith (or other organized belief system) – 0. Never had it, never will; I don’t think I’ve discouraged anyone else, however.

12. An exercise in writing, randomness and self-reflection (when commenting/posting, only include item "C"):
A. In exactly 25 words, describe the thing you're proudest of.
B. In exactly 25 words, describe the thing you're most ashamed of.
C. Combine the odd-numbered words from A. with the even-numbered words from B

Graduating account the a of finking medical on class, a I pal quit France job summer done was courses without knowing I I not succeed.

Putting One Foot in Front of the Other

Some very enlightening comments on my last post. I meant to follow up on that post earlier, but I got blindsided this week. I was in a fantastic mood at the beginning of the week, because my assistant was finally returning (her replacement still cannot reliably transfer a phone call, page someone, or revise a Word document). I was peppering! all my emails! with exclamation points!!!

Then I got a call from my assistant.

Her OB put her on disability for another month at least.

For severe postpartum depression.

I feel like a gigantic asshole for not realizing this. She hadn’t told anyone, but the signs were there. It’s sobering to realize how blind I can be (and how much in denial). I’ll go visit her this weekend, and I sent her flowers. She’s getting treatment.

I’m panicking about how I’m going to make it through the next month, and terrified that she’ll never come back. I’m now trying to plow through the mountain of stuff that I had been putting off doing until she came back.

It will probably be a little while before I’m blogging much.

BUT: I’ve been seeing a lot of maggots on the running path now that the weather’s better, and that makes me happy. Keep it up, everyone, and don’t forget to keep it slow!

Anyone have any good running reports to share?

Roundheels or Prudes?

I have a lovely single friend who graciously allows me to enjoy vicariously her romantic exploits (and gave permission for me to discuss this topic here). She’s a hottie who is not afraid to (very safely) explore her wild side, and she’s ticked off a number of conquests that are on my fantasy list (e.g., bike messenger, guitarist in a rock and roll band, various other sullen slacker stereotypes). The other day she was recounting to me a romp with someone new, and remarked that this fellow was unusual in that he’d asked specific permission to proceed at every step along the primrose path. Although she certainly appreciated his courteousness, this had the effect of interrupting the momentum somewhat. It wasn’t as if he was asking to do anything freaky, she pointed out. It was more that he seemed to be expecting her to call a halt to the proceedings at any moment, and was surprised (though grateful) that she did not. And come to think of it, many of the men she’d enjoyed had displayed a similar “Wow! What a wonderful surprise!” reaction to her favors. Which made her start to wonder if she is unusual. Do most people call a halt before going All the Way? And if so, when? And for crying out loud, why?

I was of no help here, because I’ve encountered a similar “surprised but happy conquest” situation a number of times (including with TrophyHusband). I have never started making out with a guy without following the experience through to what I believe to be its natural conclusion. This is because I would never swap spit with someone I was not willing to swap other bodily fluids with (or pretend to—condoms always, everybody!). So we got to wondering, are we easy? Or are we overly picky? Do lots of people make out with someone they aren’t that into, or do lots of people hold back even when they’re hot for someone?

We went to the closest authority for more information: TrophyHusband. As a man who is very experienced in the ways of the swinging single world, we figured he’d have a reasonable sample size to be able to give an opinion. The question we posed to him was: “Did most of the women you made out with ask you to stop at some point?” (His sample being limited to women.)

His answer was a rueful “Oh yeah.” He was unable to put a number on it (years have past since those times, after all), but estimated that it was certainly the majority of the time. He said that where things were halted varied widely, though there was perhaps an above-the-waist/ below-the-waist trend. He had no answer to the why question; he said no one ever explained, they just said, “Okay, that’s enough!”

So, are my friend and I roundheels, or prudes? For those of you who don’t finish what you start, why? And what makes you decide when to stop?

Embrace Your Taste (and I Reserve the Right to Disagree)

In my last post, I singled out one of the paintings displayed on our cruise for ridicule, and this engendered some questions as to why, essentially, I was being mean about that particular work.

My mother is a painter and was an art teacher; she is also alarmingly frank. She is incapable of saying “How nice!” about a work of art that she thinks is bad. The first time she was at my mother-in-law’s house, my MIL grabbed her and said, “I want to know what you think of this print we bought!” and my then-fiance and I each made an audible gasp of horror. (Miraculously, my mother liked the piece.) When we were children, if my siblings or I drew a picture, we never expected my mother to say “Honey, that’s beautiful!” and hang it on the fridge; instead, we got a critique. This is not to say she never liked the things we drew. She let us know when she approved of something as well as when she didn’t, and why—though she still wouldn’t put anything on the fridge; she finds that practice abhorrent. (My husband recently put one of HB’s finger paintings up on our fridge, and I flinched. I let it stay—for now.)

So I was taught from a young age to look at things in a visually critical way, to figure out what I liked and what I didn’t, and to try and articulate why I felt the way I did. In other words, I was schooled in the development of taste. This is not to say that my mother ever insisted that there is one absolute standard for good art; I was always aware that there were pieces that a lot of people liked that she didn’t, and vice versa. (The argument over what should be anointed as Great Art and go into museums is beyond the scope of this entry.)

Why do I detest this painting? Yes, it has some good qualities. It is fairly proficient technically; aside from the hands, the figures are well rendered. The sole of the woman’s left foot is particularly nicely done. Yet when I rounded the corner on our cruise and was confronted with this piece, I recoiled (and sent my husband back to take pictures of it). Why? There are a number of reasons I can articulate, though many I probably cannot.

• The coloring is monotonous and not pleasing.
• The overall composition is ungainly. The eye is not led around the figures but rather gets an impression of a triangular clump of body parts. The phrase “beast with two backs” comes to mind.
• The positioning of the figures is awkward; it seems forced. It is obvious that this was not done from live models, as it would not be possible for the models to maintain that pose for much longer than it would take to make a snapshot, and indeed it looks as if this was drawn from a photo rather than life. There are reasons to draw something rather than photograph it; for one thing, the artist gets an opportunity to walk around the models and get a real sense of where things are in space and how gravity acts, and to use this to inform the piece in a way that a photo cannot. I could imagine a painting of two nudes in an awkward position that I would appreciate—if it was obvious that the painting was meant to display the awkwardness of human coupling.
• There is a coyness to the hiding of all the naughty bits that is irritating—reminiscent of the opening scene in Austin Powers, which is funny but not beautiful.
• But the thing that really gets me about this piece, I think, is the obvious idealization of the figures. What is the purpose of this piece? If it’s to display the beauty of the human form, I’d like to see a real human form. If it’s to titillate, it should be sexier. This piece is like soft-core porn: offensive to some, yet not getting anyone off—the worst of both worlds.

Of course this is all subjective. Most simply, I find gazing at this picture viscerally unpleasant. Other people must not, or it wouldn’t be hanging there (though I am willing to bet that a lot of people wouldn’t like it).

The bigger question is, is it okay to mock a work of art? I say, of course it is. Someone went to the trouble to create it for public display and someone else went to the trouble of selecting it and hanging it in the hopes that yet another person would buy it. This means that it is being offered up for judgment. That’s the point.

And is it okay to criticize another’s taste? Well, yes, sometimes. If my mother had disliked the piece my mother-in-law showed her, I don’t think she should have said, “Ew, that sucks,” as that would be criticizing my MIL’s taste to no purpose and therefore impolite. But if my MIL had asked my mother’s artistic opinion on a piece my MIL was thinking of buying, then telling her she didn’t like it would be honest and right.

It doesn’t seem any different from, say, music. I’m sure you know and love people who enjoy music you can’t stand, and you’re willing to tell them that, yet you do not love them any less for it. I, for instance, cannot abide jazz, though it does not make me respect someone less for enjoying it. Some people are embarrassed by their own taste in music, which I don’t get. If you like something, you like it. Same with art. Embrace your own taste.

So, if you happen to enjoy this piece of art, I don’t think you should be ashamed of that fact. But I also think you should know that if you go on this cruise and buy it, there are a significant number of people who will recoil when they see it on the wall of your boudoir.

Rules to Blog By

Whether the original Trainwrecks site was harmless or evil (which I do NOT, NOT, NOT want to discuss—I’m very bored of that topic), it served one useful purpose for me: it gave me rules to blog by. Until its demise, I was a little afraid to check my “came from” stats, waiting for the day that the telltale “trainwrecks.net” would appear. So I scoured their site, looking for blog behaviors that were most likely to trigger a trainwreck pile-on. Some things weren’t too hard to avoid; I’m not about to run off with someone else’s spouse and brag about it, my pets are all neutered, and I’m not running any financial scams. Other things I wasn’t about to stop doing even if I was risking a trainwrecking; I wasn’t going to wean my toddler just because some people think extended nursing is disgusting, and I won’t say that my husband is anything but outrageously wonderful, because it’s the truth—but there were a few things that I thought might be good for me to keep in mind. Here are my Rules to Blog By:*

1. Welcome dissent. Introducing a controversial topic without expecting readers to have some ideas that differ from my own would be foolish, and would deprive me of opportunities to have my own viewpoint evolve. This relates to the next rule:
2. Never delete comments (unless they are dangerous—i.e., could reveal my identity, or consist of hate speech). Having dissenting comments deleted really ticks people off. (I haven’t yet been tempted to delete a comment I didn’t like, but I think I need to keep this rule in mind just in case.)
3. Do not insult readers. If someone misunderstands me, I will err on the side of assuming that I phrased something poorly rather than that the person is stupid.
4. Do not complain about something over and over, yet reject all suggestions for improving the situation. I admit this is occasionally hard to resist.
5. Do not post pictures of your kids—unless they’re really, really cute. Obviously, I wrestle with this one.
6. Do not brag about something under the pretense of complaining about it. For example, I should not say “The problem with having a child who is toilet-trained early is that they yell embarrassing things in public restrooms like ‘No touching the poop, Mama!’” If I’m going to brag about my child being toilet trained, I should just say “My kid poops on the potty, and that rocks.” Except that would violate the next rule, which is
7. No talking about poop—unless you are funny enough to pull it off. Which I’m not. This last statement may look like a violation of the next rule, but it’s not.
   
8. Don’t put yourself down in the hopes of having readers disagree with you. So please do not argue with me: I am not funny enough to tell a worthwhile poop story. If I am looking for validation, I will ask for it; if I get insults instead, I will remember my final rule:
   
9. Don’t take it personally. A good rule to follow in life as well as in blogging, and hard in both worlds.

*Please note that I am NOT saying that all of these things are necessarily wrong, nor that everyone should follow my rules; these are simply the things that I might be tempted by and want to avoid.

What’s Got My Knickers In a Twist

As I alluded to previously, I’ve been a little stressed lately. The reasons are pretty boring, but just so that everyone knows it’s not you, it’s me, this is what has had me staying awake nights:

• I have a new boss. I do not yet know if he will be a bad boss or a good one, but he’s new. I do know that he’s more focused on “the bottom line” than the prior boss, and this could work against me, because much of what I do—teach and mentor—is not accurately reflected on the bottom line.
  
• My new boss likes to have 7 am meetings.
  
• So far there have been two 7 am meetings at which my presence was requested. I was 20 minutes late to BOTH of them.
  
• My assistant is out on maternity leave, right in the middle of a HUGE project, and her replacement is astonishingly helpless. Examples:
  
  • She does not know how to revise a Word document. I couldn’t figure out how she kept introducing new errors into documents I was giving her to correct until it dawned on me that she was retyping them.
  • She does not know how to find a “sent” email. She sent me an email announcing that there was a room change for a meeting. She did not tell anyone else about this room change. When someone asked where they were supposed to be, she asked me to send her the email she had sent me.
  • She does not know how to page anyone. If you dial the numbers for her, she does not even know that you should stay by the phone to wait for the call back.
And on and on. I am spending most of my time doing her job these days. This is not an exaggeration.


• When I was expecting a rejuvenating couple of days last weekend, my in-laws showed up with—surprise!—my sister-in-law and her infant and her two-year-old in tow. Eight people, three of them under age three, in 1300 square feet, with one shower. Then the grandparents ditched everyone and went shoe shopping for hours. Somehow I spent most of my weekend babysitting the four-month-old.
  
• Tuesday I broke out in an itchy rash from my neck to my ankles. It turned out to be a systemic reaction to an antibacterial ointment, but I spent a terrified couple of days thinking it was one of my antidepressants. (It was bacitracin, by the way, and about 30% of people who use it for any length of time can become allergic. Interesting fact: bacitracin got its name because it was originally isolated from a bacteria grown from a wound from a girl named Tracy.)

There’s more, but you get the gist. Some of it’s better already (this weekend is much more relaxing, and the rash is almost gone) and some of it will be better very soon (my assistant returns in two weeks), but if someone in cold-weather running gear runs past you in the next couple weeks muttering “Serenity Now,” it’s probably me.

What Would Miss America Say?

I was thumbing through the most recent issue of Glamour (a magazine I usually find sneakily feminist) and I saw a little filler article that made me want to smack approximately 1,750 women upside the head.

They asked 2,156 readers some “Would you rather” questions—for the most part silly things like “Would you rather go to a huge party naked, or never eat your favorite food again?” (66% would give up their favorite food). But two of the questions—or rather, the answers to them—made me dizzy with disbelief. The first one was, “Would you rather achieve world peace but never find a cure for cancer, or cure cancer but never have peace?” The majority (59%) answered that they’d rather cure cancer.

WHAT? What is it with the fear of cancer? Don’t people realize that they have to die of something? Most people don’t die of cancer as it is. And though I don’t like to scare anyone, there are plenty of diseases that are worse than most cancers. Give up the possibility of world peace to eliminate cancer? I know it’s just a silly poll that I’m sure most of the respondents didn’t take seriously, but come on.

The second question that got me riled up was, “Would you rather have a body like Heidi Klum’s but die at 40, or be morbidly obese but live to 100?” A whopping 81% said they’d choose Heidi Klum’s body.

All these women really believe that having a hot body would make their lives so special that it would be worth giving up 60 years of life for? (Or perhaps they’re so afraid of getting fat that they’d rather die? But since the vast majority of women in this country are already significantly bigger than Heidi Klum, I assume it’s mostly the former.) The question didn’t say you’d get her face, or her career, or even Seal; you’d just have her body. Just what do they think they’d do with it?

Even weirder, most of the women who said they’d give up world peace for a cure for cancer must also have said they’d die at 40 for Heidi Klum’s body. I guess they’d be okay with dying young as long as they don’t die from the Big C. Maybe they’d rather step on a land mine in the next world war?

Lessons Learned This Holiday Season

1. It is not enough to bring your toothbrush and medications in your carryon; you should also bring your passport. Because even if you are not flying through, say, Denver, it may happen that of all the flights going out of your airport the Saturday before Christmas, yours could be the one that is cancelled for “maintenance.” (Now, to me, “maintenance” implies routine things like changing oil or rotating tires. Things you would never do on one of the busiest travel days of the year. Couldn’t they just admit that the flight was cancelled because the PLANE BROKE?) On such a busy day, there will be no extra seats on any of the rest of the flights that day, unless you are willing to fly via a complicated connection THROUGH ANOTHER COUNTRY. Hence the need for passports (which TrophyHusband was able to drive home and retrieve in time).
2. You might also want to bring a few changes of clothes in your carryon. Because even if you are checked into a flight three hours early, it may happen that none of your luggage makes it on the plane with you.
3. Don’t pack a suitcase for each person; mix it up a bit. This way, when all of the bags eventually show up except yours (which does not arrive until the night before you are leaving to go back home), you will still have something to wear.
4. My mother really needs to update her wardrobe. Since I had no clothes to wear, I had to borrow hers. She is somewhat shorter and wider than I am, so I couldn’t comfortably wear her things the whole trip. And when I braved the mall wearing her clothes and asked the sales clerk where I might find jeans, she looked me up and down and sniffed, “Well, you wouldn’t want the Juniors department,” and took me to a rack of Mom Jeans. I couldn’t decide whether to slap her or spontaneously combust from embarrassment, so I just slunk away. (I did find an awesome outfit, in the Juniors department, so there, judgmental salesgirl.)
5. It is truly is better to give than receive. You become acutely aware of this when your gifts are stuck in your lost suitcase and you have to unwrap others’ gifts and then say, “Thanks! I hope my gift to you isn’t being sold on a corner in another country!”
6. My husband is a trophy and a mensch. OK, I already knew this one, but he proved it over again. My family has a tradition of giving most gifts as “stocking stuffers,” which creates an absurdly huge stack of gifts to unwrap Christmas morning, but is pretty cool because you never know who gave what; it’s quite freeing. But many of the gifts were stuck in my suitcase (see #5). Then my brother (whose awesome girlfriend recently broke up with him, probably with good reason) announced that he had bought no stocking stuffers at all. I thought it was going to be like Whoville, only without the singing. But my husband, despite being Jewish and finding this whole Christmas thing incomprehensible, had gone out on the sly and bought a heap of cute and thoughtful gifts, and the pile of loot was not appreciably smaller than usual. (HellBoy, when he saw all the presents, said, “It’s Hannukah morning!” which pleased my husband greatly.)
7. If you are very tired and have just eaten a big Christmas dinner, do not lie down with the child while putting him to bed. Because it may happen that you wake up the next morning with fuzzy teeth, and your parents and their guests will be very perplexed as to why the hell you never came back to the table.

Happy New Year, everyone.