Say your name, then press the pound key

The freelance project I'm working on these days requires me to immerse myself in the culture of conference calls. There's a weekly call I have to attend, and then another that happens about once a month. The weekly call is not a huge deal: three or four people going over a progress report, usually for less than an hour. I'm the only one calling in; the others are sitting together somewhere in an office. The monthly call, though, is a big protracted affair, with participants dialing in from all over the country to comb through tiny editorial issues and major policy decisions for ninety minutes or so.

I think that as far as annoying office culture goes, conference calls are relatively benign -- largely because your colleagues can't see you and therefore don't know that you are simultaneously playing Solitaire and finger-shooting yourself in the head every time someone asks a repetitive question. In-person office culture can be far less forgiving. When I worked as a librarian for a social justice nonprofit five-ish years ago, we had monthly staff meetings that bordered on the insane. This was a touchy-feely organization with exceedingly touchy-feely policies and procedures, and nary an all-staff breakfast passed without the employment of breakout sessions, lists composed on Big Paper (preferably with red marker), and, my personal favorite, "talking back to text". That was when we were supposed to bring in a book or newspaper article we had read and share its overarching themes of equality and justice with the group. Always, someone shed tears. And all the while, the 60something Executive Director would pace around the room in her rainbow tights and flat-ironed hair, interjecting between people's offerings: "Do you see? Do you all see? [Name of nonprofit] is here, in the room. You all bring it to the table, every day."

Surrounded by such oppressive togetherness, I could not roll my eyes or pretend to hang myself with my winter scarf. All I could do was suffer in silence [in my two years of working there, I never did Share With The Group, a factor over which my supervisor expressed copious concern] and then go home and bitch about it with my friends. It became a kind of dialect of misery, spoken fluently by those who knew me best. For example:

Me: I had the shittiest day at work today.
Dori: Oh, I'm sorry. Were you in the room?
Me: Yeah, I totally brought it to the table all morning.

Calling in to a conference call offers the protective anonymity that allows antisocials like me to thrive. It also, however, brings with it these unique and conference-call-specific phenomena: A) She of the constant Ira-Glass-like quiet muttering; B) She who insists upon using hand gestures and head movements to communicate with people who cannot see her; and C) She who does not know how to operate a phone.

The latter is what has been especially souring this otherwise relatively tasty cocktail as of late. On my monthly call, there seems to be someone, or a group of someones, who have some kind of fundamental opposition to the Mute button. As in: they won't push it, no matter how many times someone stops the meeting to politely suggest, and I paraphrase: "Hey! You with the noise! Shut up!" A couple of meetings ago, there was some guy on the line who I imagined must have been cradling the phone in his teeth while leaning down to type with his nose, so outrageously loud were his keystrokes and his porn-star breathing. On this week's call, a bunch of clatter and clicking was followed by a comically whispered conversation centered around the statement: "I don't think we have a mute button." This, of course, in response to the moderator's plea for quiet from the virtual peanut gallery.

The anonymity factor of a conference call means that you can get away with such egregious offenses without anyone having a face, or sometimes even a name, to grab onto. The flipside, though, is that should you dare to participate -- ask a question, say, or issue a decree -- you have no clue as to how your contribution is being received. I worry about this a bit with my weekly calls, during which I am required to actively engage in discussion. Are they rolling their eyes at the idea I just spouted? Are they looking at each other, all "ummm... NEXT"? While the grown-up in me realizes that my fellow call participants are all professionals, the insecure teenager who lives rent-free in the back of my brain wonders if maybe, just maybe, they're all sitting around a conference table, sticking out their tongues and making jerk-off motions with their hands every time I speak.

Which would actually make for a pretty awesome in-person meeting, if you think about it.

My seasonal affect

There are some days that just feed the self-loathing, and today is one of them.

Does it follow that if A) you are awakened at two-hour intervals throughout the night by your child for no apparent reason,

and B) you spend the moments between wake-ups dreaming about making out with this girl you knew in high school at a private Patti Griffin concert at which Ms. Griffin asks you personally for requests and you cannot think of a single one so you ask her to play "Understand Your Man,"

and C) the child that spent all night disturbing your sleep decides to wake up mid-tantrum and subsequently refuses to get dressed or eat breakfast,

and D) you look out the window and observe that it fucking snowed overnight, AGAIN,

and E) the freelance project you had hoped to work on today is tied up in bureaucratic red tape bullshit you don't understand, except insomuch as it is keeping you from making money this morning,

and F) there is finally, for the first time in months, a professional librarian job posted on your region's library network website, but it is would require a 45 minute (at best) commute on a remote two-lane "highway" that is notorious for being ignored by snowplows, and you would have to work evenings and drive home on this road at night,

and G) the thought of dealing with this commute fills you with misery and despair, while the thought of not applying for the one position to be posted in months fills you with rage at your laziness and lack of initiative,

and H) you are cold...

then you will be inclined to forgo a shower, eat an unripe banana, and sit around playing Scramble on Facebook all day while life passes you by?

Ouch

Last night I watched a documentary called American Teen. The film followed five high school students (living, incidentally, in an Indiana town about twenty miles from where I grew up) as they completed their senior year. The kids were your typical John Hughes "types": All-American boy; poor, good-hearted jock who needs an athletic scholarship in order to go to college; bitchy popular girl with a painful secret; pimple-faced nerd; Alternagirl. Their stories made me cringe with the recognition of adolescent hell. Alternagirl gets dumped by her alternaboyfriend and almost flunks out of school from the ensuing depression and anxiety. Nerd Boy IMs a girl that he's crushing on: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like me?" and then beams a greasy-faced grin when she responds "...6".

More than anything, though, watching this film reminded me what a little shit of a teenager I truly was. Like, there was this part in the movie where the bitchy popular girl gathered her friends together to go vandalize the home of a classmate she didn't like. They toilet-papered the house and its surrounding foliage, then spray-painted a penis and the word "f*g" onto the front windows. I was all outrage and fury, thinking "How humiliating for that kid! How horrible for that kid's parents!" -- until about three seconds later, when I remembered being seventeen years old, dressing all in black with three of my friends, buying about 20 cans of that fake snow that comes in a spray-can, driving in the middle of the night to the home of this girl, Andrea, who we didn't like for some reason or another, and covering her driveway with fake-snow "spray paint" spelling out things like "Go back to Germany, Nazi!" Because she had white-blond hair, see, and because we sucked. After that, we drove around stalking the Papa John's delivery guy for awhile, waiting until he left his car before we leapt out of ours to spray "YUM!" onto his rear window, and then we drove over to my ex-boyfriend's house and sprayed "Shaq Diesel" all over his beloved burgundy pick-up.

The girl in the movie was caught and punished; we were not. I don't remember us seeing a single consequence for any of the stuff we pulled: not for getting drunk and breaking into the middle school through a utility door on the roof, not for stealing all the "Home For Sale" signs we could find from yards all over town and re-planting them in a friend's front lawn while his family was on vacation, not for pulling the fire alarm two days in a row to get out of choir practice. All that shit had consequences for someone -- the middle school janitors who had to clean up the mess we left behind, the homeowners who had to get new signs -- but not for us. Is it a sign of Being Old that I am now feeling mortified? Remembering that feeling of being untouchable for what it really was: the security of knowing that someone else would always be responsible for your stupid decisions?

Oh, OH, and in the movie, when Alternagirl got dumped and spent a month skipping school to cry in her bedroom, and her dad tried to comfort her and get her back on track, and Alternagirl just wasn't having any of it? Remember that? I'm not asking do you remember it in the movie -- I'm saying do you remember that feeling, when your parents' attempts at giving love or help were just never going to cut it, because they didn't understand and they would never understand, and they were just so irrelevant to the situation anyway because this was your life? Ohhhh, I'm telling you, people, it is just blowing my mind to see this now from a parent's perspective. As in: back when I was about to turn sixteen and was reeling from my first break-up, and one of my best girlfriends had just been thrown this huge "sweet sixteen" party at which her boyfriend presented her with a dozen roses, and all I could think about was how no one was going to throw me a party, no one was going to dote on me, no one was going to give me flowers, and I was a total bitch to my mother, telling her she didn't care about me, and then on my birthday she still went out and got me this beautiful bouquet of pink roses and a card and an ice cream cake? And I barely glanced at the flowers before telling her I didn't like pink? When, had those flowers come from a boy or one of my friends or, really, anyone other than my parents, I would have been elated? Yeah. I'm guessing that stung.

For all that she drives me crazy with her temper tantrums and her demands and her middle of the night wake-ups, Cletus the Former Fetus currently A) is happy, B) has no self-confidence issues based on the opinions of peers who will grow up to be unsuccessful and lame, and C) thinks I walk on water. I realize that the fact that this will all change is not a revolutionary statement, but still. Damn.

If you can't say anything nice

I have to tell you that hanging out with college professors all the time? Is exhausting. All that posturing, all the talk of "my research" this and "fundamental grasp of theory" that. It's enough to make an underemployed public librarian with an elementary-school-level knowledge of science and geography want to strap on her boots, hike out to the garage, retrieve a ladder, bring it back inside, and offer it to her houseguests for use in getting over themselves.

It's not the young faculty, for the most part. They seem pretty cool -- although I do still hide my magazines when they come over, and keep the Tivo "Now Playing" screen off-limits lest someone see my stockpiled episodes of "Rock of Love Bus" and "American Idol." It takes time for me to feel comfortable revealing the depths of my uncoolness to newbies. I like to stick to my homies who revel in it (or at least lovingly tolerate it). But I have high hopes for some of these young, tenure-track folks and their spouses, in spite of the fact that a number of them couldn't identify most of the songs when the husband and I dared to break out our beloved Rock Band 2 last weekend. (Dude, how do you not know White Wedding? How do you not know Eye of the Tiger?)

Some of the older professors, though, the ones who have been tenured for awhile? I don't know if it's a generalized college professor thing, or if it's a big fish in a little liberal-arts pond thing, but some of them seem to have serious problems with polite human interaction. I remember the first faculty/staff potluck I went to last summer -- not the one where I was introduced as "The new faculty spouse... I don't remember her name," but a different one, one that was packed with wall-to-wall people, only a few of whom actually spoke to me. I remember the older faculty members sat at little tables by themselves, backs to the crowd, while everyone else mingled and chatted. I remember introducing myself to some bearded dude who shook my hand, said "Nice to meet you," and then turned away to get more food without even offering his name in return.

The other night we had some faculty over at our house for a potluck. One guest paid a visit to our downstairs bathroom and, upon returning to the kitchen, made some comment about the bathroom's outdated seventies decor. No harm, no foul; both of our bathrooms are, indeed, exquisitely ugly. I mean, I myself probably wouldn't have up and insulted the home stylings of a person I had just met that very evening, but that's just me. Anyway, though, the real kicker was when another guest, in response, said "Oh, that's nothing! You should have seen the place before Mrs X and Mr Y got done with it [referring to previous owners of our house who had also been affiliated with the college]. It looked even worse than it does now!"

Yeah. For real.

Now I don't know if I've mentioned it more than 75 times already on this blog, but I am currently engaged in a passionate love affair with this, my first and only house. I don't care how much of it needs updating, or how dreadful the heating bills are. There's just no call for venturing out onto someone else's estate and dissing their castle.

Get it? It's funny because he's an idiot.

I'd tell you to watch this with a sigh of relief today, except that seems inappropriate. This dude ruined a lot of people's lives all over the world, and just because he's leaving office doesn't mean the damage he did disappears.

But I do enjoy a little well-deserved mockery. Enjoy before they pull the clip off of YouTube!


I think I just peed myself a little.

A spin-off, perhaps?

I'm considering starting a separate, anonymous blog in which to document the ridiculous antics that go down in the public library. I mean, I've been blogging for four years now, but only on a handful of occasions have I written about my work. That's four years' worth of unposted Crazy. My current sources might be limited since I only work a couple of shifts per week, but I've got stores of archived material, people. Stores.

Like, back when Rachel and I worked together at a suburban library that was overrun with Mormon Elders printing out stacks of porn on the Children's Room printers. That was, like, five posts right there.

Or when, at the same library, I stood behind the reference desk while a crazy-eyed woman waved her arms in the air and shouted at me: "May you be judged! MAY YOU BE JUDGED!!!"

Or when, just the other day, an old woman shuffled up to the reference desk and asked me to call up a website on my computer for her. She had received one of those bogus car advertisements in the mail, the kind that address you by name and give you your own "personalized" URL to view so you can claim your massive savings. She asked me to bring up the website quickly, because "they" were watching her to make sure she was speedy; then, once I had accessed the site and showed her that it was requesting a good deal of her personal information (name, phone number, address, income specifics) to be input in order to proceed, she narrowed her eyes and asked me to print the page. Once I did so, she paid me ten cents for the print-out and asked me to sign the bottom of the sheet. When I asked her why, she said: "In case there's some kind of cash reward in it for you, sweetie."

I wonder sometimes if the world is just full of too much Awesome to keep reigning it in for privacy's sake.

The fuzz: a mini-rant

I just heard that they finally arrested the cop who murdered Oscar Grant on New Year's Day. Grant, if you haven't been following the story, was a 22-year-old unarmed black kid (with a 4-year-old daughter at home) who was shot in the back by a white police officer while being restrained face-down on a San Francisco subway platform. Because it was a holiday, there were tons of bystanders in the train station to capture the event on film with cell phones and cameras, which the police reportedly began trying to confiscate as "evidence." A few witnesses, though, were able to escape onto departing trains with their footage intact. If you've got the stomach for it, you can see the videos here. They are as appalling as you might imagine.

What's the deal with these little boys (and some girls, yes, but let's be real: mostly boys) running around with guns and unchecked power? I mean, I know police violence is far from the norm -- but police officers acting like jerks is certainly not uncommon, and doesn't it seem logical that one could lead to the other? Back when I was working for the battered women's program, it would make my skin crawl to see cops at our events, knowing from my work on the hotline that more than a couple of the members of the local force were actively engaged in beating the shit out of their wives.

I know there are nice cops. I met one just the other day -- he followed me on my way to the gym so that he could politely tell me that my license plates were expired and politely ask me to fork over $98. I'm not stating my support for a police-free state; I'm not calling for anarchy. I'd just like to not have to keep seeing stories like the one above. And when the worst does happen, when some untrained asshole decides to play Rambo, I'd like to feel confident that there will be repercussions.

Maybe this arrest will be a step in the right direction? I guess we'll see.

A surprise!

To whomever was kind enough to anonymously send us this beautiful handmade doll from this lovely etsy shop, I send my - and Cletus' - warmest thanks.

How I'll hate going out in the storm

I just looked out the window and it is snowing. Again. I have a zero tolerance policy for winter precipitation. Rain in the spring and summer? Sure. It breaks up the heat, greens the grass, helps the crops grow: it has an arguably benevolent purpose, except when it's flooding your basement. Snow, though? What is snow good for? It makes me cold, I have to shovel it and it makes me tired, I have to drive on it and it causes me anxiety. It ruins my plans. I hate it, and I maintain a deep and fundamental distrust for those who don't feel the same, my husband included.

Allow me to debunk the myths:

1. But snow is so pretty!
No. No it isn't. The lights on a police car are an appealing and patriotic combo of red, white, and blue, twinkling like Christmas decorations in your rearview mirror. But when those lights correspond with a $50 speeding ticket and represent a major impediment to your ability to complete your daily tasks in an efficient and timely manner, do you find them aesthetically pleasing? I think not. And such is the case with snow.

2. It makes everything look so clean and sparkling.
Yeah, for like a minute. Then some dog comes along and pees on it, leaving a bright yellow patch that won't fade for a month. Cars start to drive on it and it turns into wretched brown slush. Or, alternately, it instantly freezes into a sheet of ice and cars can't drive on it, at which point you won't even care that it's so clean and sparkling because you'll be flat on your back with a twisted ankle and a concussion, having slipped and fallen on your neighbor's unshoveled sidewalk.

3. I love to sit inside and watch the snow fall outside my window. It makes me feel so cozy.
Dude, what exactly is it that makes the snow imperative in this scenario? Take the nasty white stuff out of the picture and you're still indoors, still warm, still looking out your window. I assure you that it's still frigid out there, with or without the snow. Coziness is implied.

4. Kids love to play in the snow.
This is true. Kids also love to swallow dirt, hit one another, eat entire meals consisting of nothing but ketchup, cover themselves in peanut butter, and fingerpaint their crib sheets using the contents of their dirty diapers. They enjoy playing in the snow because we have presented it to them as something that is Fun, and also because it is messy and because it usually entails throwing stuff at each other. If we all started allowing our children to play in a vat of ice chips, they would probably like that too.

5. Winter sports make it worth all the hassle.
Now I myself have never skied, but I do understand that it is somewhat of an obsession for many people. I invite those people to think, however, of the amount of time they spend skiing each winter, and compare it to the amount of time they spend shoveling out their driveway, narrowly averting spin-outs on the highway, and missing work due to their kids' unplanned snow days. Now, I enjoy a good book. You might say that reading is an obsession of mine. But if for every hour I spent reading, I spent another ten being pelted about the head by books, I'd be switching to radio. Is all I'm saying.

One might ask: Melinda, if you hate the snow so much, why did you move back to the Midwest?

One might ask, and one might receive in return a blank stare of desperation, followed by the hollow laughter of the grievously foolish. If you'll excuse me, I have to go shovel my driveway.

Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi!

Courtesy of Christopher:

I've been a Coke girl for as long as I can remember, but I think those days just ended.

Can I interest anyone in a cold, refreshing, gay Pepsi?

You know, it's a government official...

Ah, wrapped up again in the healing arms of the internet. Thanks for your support and suggestions. I'll tell you this: it's always a comfort to know that the parents who, like me, have no idea what the hell they're doing vastly outnumber the parents who have all the answers. And to those of you who have achieved parental enlightenment against all odds, I salute you. I suspect that I will never belong to Your Tribe, but I do hope to visit someday -- because if there's one thing I'd like to get right in my life, it's this.

Last night I spent an hour on the phone with my college roommate, a woman I love with a ferocity usually reserved for family members, Bono, and Jon Stewart. She is pregnant with her first child and brimming with joy. When she asked me about Cletus the Former Fetus, I held back on the horror stories of my current day-to-day existence. I focused on the easy stuff: she's talking in complete sentences. She can sing the theme song to Flash Gordon. She loves to snuggle and hold my hand. She's obsessed with raisins, both as nourishment and as toys. I figured there was time enough for tales of Toddlers Gone Wild. My friend is, after all, still miles away from the point where parenthood starts to alternately build up and then chip away at your spirit.

She did, however, have me laughing hysterically over the phone, as she usually does, this time over one of our pet topics: misheard song lyrics. This is the woman to whom I first confessed, well over ten years ago, my confusion over Alice Cooper's excellent little ditty, "Poison."

"Why is it such a problem for him that her lips taste like meat, I wonder?" I pondered into the no-doubt stale air of our dorm room.
She responded with an incredulous stare. "What are you talking about?"
"Like meat. You know: 'I wanna kiss you but your lips are venison.'"
Her reply: "Only you. I swear to God."

For her part, she used to think that Bon Jovi's inspirational anthem [and, it must be noted, a song boasting one of the top three Key Changes of all time] "Livin' on a Prayer'" contained the line: "Take my hand and we'll make it; I'm square." Not as in "I'm unadventurous and boring" but as in "I'm good for it." You know, we're square. JBJ just wanted y'all to know that he's a dependable fellow.

Last night she was regaling me with tales from karaoke, particularly one recent outing wherein she had a revelation about the lyrics to Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."

"You know that part where she's singing about 'You're where you should be all the time, and when you're not you're with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend?'" she asked.
"Um-hmm."
"Seriously," she said, "I had NO IDEA that's what she was saying. I always thought it was 'wife of a postman'!"
I laughed. "Dude, that's so specific."
"I know, but..." she trailed off for a moment. "I mean, you know, it's a government official..."

Maybe you had to be there.

Anyway, it cracked my shit up. Can you top it?

Throwing fits

I woke up this morning after four hours of fitful sleep to the sound of my daughter [still? again?] whining from her bed. She had been up half the night, screaming and making demands. "I want up! I want down! I want Mommy! I want Daddy!" As I lay in my bed this morning listening to it all start anew, for the briefest of seconds I wished for a do-over. Not of last night, but of it all. My choices, every one of them. It's the kind of thought you don't allow, the kind you feel guilty over for weeks when you think about all the other people with bigger problems, real problems: people with sick kids, people who are alone and lonely, people who are broke. I am none of those things. What I am is an idiot who can't handle her two-year-old.

This has been going on for awhile now. Posting about it seems about as pointless as posting about my showering habits. That is to say: utterly uninteresting in its lack of originality. "What's that you say? Your two-year-old child throws constant temper tantrums and you are consumed with equal parts rage and rage-related-self-loathing? I've never heard of such a thing!"

It starts first thing in the morning, every morning. Crying and calling out irrational demands. She wants me to pick her up, but as soon as I do, she wants down. She wants me to snuggle with her, but when I move closer she pushes me away, all the while in tears, moaning "I'm pushing you! I'm pushing you!" Refusing to move from a given spot, barking out little orders. "I want juice! I want a book!" Sometimes, in good moments, she can be redirected to ask appropriately, say please, and is rewarded with the object of her desire and my transparently grateful shower of affection. Other times, rarely, a short time-out will do the trick, sometimes in her bed, sometimes in my lap.

Most of the time, it's all just a hot mess. She is strong and smart; she pulls her little hand out of my grasp in a parking lot and starts to run a circle around our car, stopping halfway and looking over her shoulder to gage my reaction. I know that my reaction is critical. I weigh my options: freak out about her immediate safety and yell; stay calm and approach (knowing that she will only run further); stay put and ask firmly for her to return. Whatever I choose, it feels wrong. Whatever I do, this will end in the same way: me, dragging a screaming child by her armpits into the car. I am the "before" portion of a television commercial pushing Calgon or chocolate or aromatherapy candles. I am a shitty sitcom about family life. I am an Erma Bombeck column.

At daycare, they think my child is perfect. Apparently she just sits around all day smiling and chatting and playing nicely with the other kids. She's also on her best, sweetest behavior whenever we're visiting with friends or family. Basically, whenever someone else is around, she does her best Toddler of the Year impression. Then our friends leave, or I pick her up from daycare in the afternoon, and it's like a switch flips, and it's instantaneous. I'm talking the second I strap her into that car seat, the moment I close the door behind our departing visitors, it's on. She's fussing, she's crying, she's sitting on the dog and shredding a paperback book. All through dinner: she wants more potatoes, she throws the potatoes on the ground and screams. All through bedtime: she wants to brush her teeth, but upon receiving her toothbrush she refuses to open her mouth, then screams when you move to put the toothbrush away.

What's hardest for me, I think, is the anger. What am I supposed to do with all the anger? I shouldn't direct it at her, although in the middle of the night I totally do, and then I feel like I monster when five minutes later she finally relaxes with her arms wrapped around my neck and her face buried into my shoulder. Shouldn't direct it at my husband, although in the middle of the night I totally do, especially when he hasn't jumped to action as quickly as I'd like, even though I know he's as sleep-deprived as I am. But how do you not feel anger? How do you not feel pissed off when the person you love more than anyone else in the world takes everything you give her, throws it back at you, and then screams in your face for thirty minutes?

And how do you not feel ridiculous when this person who's breaking your heart, this person with whom you're trying to reason, this person who's pushing all your buttons again and again? Is two. Can't read. Worships Elmo. Is not capable of malice, only curiosity.

There are all these things we're "supposed" to be working on right now. Transitioning to a toddler bed. Weaning her off the pacifier. Potty-training. But all we're doing, really, is trying to get through each day intact, with a child who feels loved despite her parents' inability to deal.

I'm exhausted. Living a total cliche is hard work.

Ask here

Yesterday afternoon, a thirtysomething couple approached the reference desk behind which I perched. They were all rosy cheeks and puffy jackets, holding hands. I braced myself for the superior customer service I was about to provide. They stepped up.

"Do you have any books about Mike Tyson? Like, an autobiography?" the gentleman inquired.

I countered, launching into what we grad-school-educated information specialists refer to as The Reference Interview (to laypeople: Asking Stuff). "Are you just looking for books about Mike Tyson, or would you specifically like an autobiography written by Mike Tyson?" I asked.

"Oh just a book about him, you know, like, his rise and fall, or something like that," he replied. The woman leaned in over his shoulder, piping in, "Yeah. About his life story. Just any autobiography."

My fingertips paused over the keyboard on which they were about to scamper. How to put this... how to put this... "I just want to make sure I understand exactly what you want," I explained. "An autobiography, typically [I threw that one in to be charitable], is a book that the subject writes his or herself. So if Mike Tyson wrote a book about his own life, that would be his autobiography. It sounds like you might be looking for a biography, which would be a book about Mike Tyson, written by someone other than Mike Tyson. Is that right?"

The couple looked at one another with raised eyebrows, as if to say "Jesus, is this our tax dollars at work?" Then the man leaned in and, speaking very slowly so as to make sure I could parse his request, said, "Look, I don't even know if Mike Tyson is smart enough to write a book himself. All that we're looking for is a book about the man. Why don't you just point us in the direction of the autobiography section."

Which I, of course, did. I sent them right over to our much-heralded autobiography section, located next to the books by women section, just beyond the books that are yellow section.

[Were my husband reading this post aloud to you right now, this would be the part where he would congratulate me on Being So Much Smarter Than Everyone Else On Earth, after which he would inform you all that I regularly scratch my skin and call it itching. As in, "I'm itching my leg right now." To which I would of course reply: it's called regional usage. Snob.]

Happy belated New Year, from our house to yours

January

Month after Christmas:

Cold, snow, ice, short days, dark nights...

No presents in sight.