The One Where The Entire World Has Gone Off Its Nut.

Please tell me that Timothy Noah is reaching here. Please tell me that it’s some sort of parody. Satire. Three Stooges.

Anything but what it looks like, which is that he really means that if you say someone is ’skinny’ you’re using a code word for ‘of color.’

Because if ’skinny’ = ‘African-American,’ does that mean ‘fat’ is a code word for ‘Caucasian’?

I sure hope Timothy Noah didn’t mean *that,* because if he did I’m gonna haul my fat white rear end down to Slate and complain.

I am officially moved.

They moved me! Mom, Interrupted is now featured on the first Wednesday of every month, and so for your reading pleasure, here it is.

Am I the only one…

who watches this commercial and keeps hoping that the young woman will slam past that obnoxious twerp and whack him over the head with a hot iron?

I mean, I understand that it’s important to have good credit. I know how hard it would be to marry someone and discover after the fact that they have crappy credit. But to treat your beloved’s credit score like it’s a dealbreaker certainly implies that your decision-making regarding matrimony is maybe a touch too banker and not enough lover.

If it’s really the person whom you cannot live without, can’t you work to repair his or her credit prior to the wedding?

Cue the iron.

 

©     E.S. Evans 2008

Now I get it: I’m living in a Twilight Zone episode.

One thing that’s really fun about having kids is watching them experience things for the first time that are old hat to you. Disneyland. “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” Snow.  That kind of thing.

My thirteen year old son discovered Twilight Zone reruns in July, 2007, when some cable channel ran a marathon over Independence Day weekend. He was enchanted, and it was fun to watch him mesmerized by the story lines and astounded by the conclusions, most of which are so old hat and cliched to us decrepit oldsters that we use Zone synopses to describe situations: “You know what I mean! It’s like Burgess Meredith with his glasses broken!”

We’re still wading through the recordings of the July, 2008 marathon and last night watched a classic: Little Girl Lost. The boys were entranced! Where is the girl? What if the dog gets lost, too? Can I make my own voice come out of the TV set?

I was entranced, too, only now I was looking at this through different eyes…If I went upstairs and couldn’t find a kid, I would assume that he or she was stuck under a carton of engineered hardwood flooring. Who do you call, by the way, when you can HEAR your child but not see her? The police? The fire department comes to mind, but they’d probably rip down all the drywall. I can see calling a trusted neighbor, but would it occur to me to call a physicist?

I would hope that my child, if he rolled under his bed and into the Twilight Zone, would think of something creative to say or do, as opposed to the piteous bleating that Bettina Miller cranked out. I do know that if we sent Elmer The Basset Hound in after her he would NOT retrieve the girl but would instead wreak such havoc that the denizens of The Fourth Dimension would probably declare war on us and hilarity would ensue.

And what does finding another dimension in the second bedroom do to your property values? Is this a detriment or an advantage? “Who cares if the house only has one bathroom? It has an extra dimension!” Who needs a swingset when there’s a cool place where everyone is upside down just on the other side of your wall?

A sticky situation, certainly.

My mom read the column published Friday in the Ahwatukee Foothills News and promptly emailed me to say, “So I take it that the floor is done.”

 

Well, no.

 

It would be reaching to say I have any skill in laying hardwood floor at all. It took me several days to lay five rows of wood, and most of my sessions ended with me standing in the garage scraping glue off various tools while I cried, muttering, “I suck” over and over and making sure the dog hadn’t been cemented to the floor.

 

To be fair, this was more than I signed up for. I originally wanted Pergo or some similar photographed laminate product. You install it over an underlayment, no glue.

 

But my husband checked with a neighbor who is a professional contractor, and he recommended engineered hardwood to improve the added value to our house. (Though I have to admit, resale value is the last thing I care about now; mostly I just want to flee, screaming, into the night and pretend I’ve never even SEEN this house.)

 

OK, engineered hardwood it is. Found a smoking deal. But the salespeople and anyone else I talked to said, “Glue.” Better for noise, not so good for application.

 

The problem is this: this is way beyond my skill level. I should not do this. We should do something else, like set fire to the second floor and do that ‘flee, screaming’ thing. But I had already pulled up all the carpeting in the one bedroom and thrown it away by the time we figured this out. And there is no way I can afford to pay someone to do it.

 

Ooops.

 

But my husband came to my rescue when he found out that I was standing in the garage crying and muttering. He is much more experienced at construction than I. While I initially mocked his “Anal Retentive Carpenter” routine (similar to this “Anal Retentive Chef” routine that the late Phil Hartman popularized) it turned out that scraping up all your glue as you worked really speeds things up.

So now I’m relegated to apprentice. I pick out lengths of wood for the next run. I hand the cute carpenter his gear. I mop up glue. I cut wood. (Brave man, my husband, to teach me how to use a table saw. In the last piece I cut, I almost set fire to it with the saw.)

And we’re making progress. Where it took me several days to lay two rows of wood, he is banging one out every ten minutes. We might have the room done in a couple of days. And then only two more bedrooms, a loft, and the stairs to go.

Oh, man. Better keep me away from the table saw for a while.

I haven’t been interrupted in a while.

Or rather, I’ve been interrupted too many times, hence the absence. Without further ado, this month’s Mom, Interrupted, as seen in the Ahwatukee Foothills News.

Michelle Malkin needs to shut her donut hole.

True confession: I am a registered Republican.
Another true confession: if I can hold my nose long enough, I can find things on Fox News to sort of agree with.

I am a moderate, a fact which causes my mother (a National Review-reading WFB conservative) to despair. “You’re going to vote for Hillary, aren’t you?” she moans.

Well, probably not. McCain, mom. Which causes her to moan worse.

I don’t usually agree with National Review, and I never agree with their tone. I don’t agree with the tone or the content of The Nation, either.

I say all this so you can understand where I’m coming from when I say that Michelle Malkin needs to STFU, especially when it comes to this flap about Rachael Ray.

The absolute best response I saw was this. Next thing you know, Malkin will go after Helen Lovejoy and her falafel fixins.

I know. Let’s get Fat Tony on this one.

High Anxiety.

You can tell how old you are by counting the rings in your magazine subscriptions.

No, seriously. You can. When I was in high school, I read Seventeen. College and young married? Glamour and Cosmopolitan. (I had to give up Cosmo pretty quickly though: just reading all those italics made me hyperventilate)

I really knew I had hit The Beginning of The End when I let Glamour slide in favor of my Better Homes & Gardens subscription. I finally let *that* one go when I realized two things:

1. The houses in BH&G are not anything like the house I live in. I live in a tract home in the desert, with stucco walls and tile roofs that looked really exotic when I was growing up in Philadelphia but now are all ho-hum. The houses in BH&G are interesting. They’re the homes that George Washington slept in or on the beach or on a lake or in a forest. I kept looking through the mag trying to find pictures of rooms I’d like to replicate (the only way I can decorate anything) and realized that I wanted what was outside the windows: the forest, or the meadow, or the ocean. Anything but the desert landscaping and my neighbor’s wall.

2. BH&G was never going to feature a house that was like mine. When they have a magazine called Tract Homes & Dog Runs, I’m gonna be all over it.

I thought I had found Magazine Nirvana when I found a magazine called Real Simple. It’s subtitled “Life made easier” and it really did, in fact, make my life easier. Cool ways to use old things, great comparisons of products…it was wonderful.

Until yesterday, when I read the continuing feature: One Woman’s Money Diary. The idea is simple: woman sends in her money worries and a certified financial planner analyzes ‘em and helps the worries go away.

June’s Financial Centerfold is a woman who is married with a baby. She stayed home with him after his birth and quit her job. She and her husband are facing these traumas, even after she quit her job:

- no debt, other than their house
- when they moved, their mortgage went down by $1,000 a month
- they earned $285K in profit when they sold their old house
- they save 12% of the husband’s income in a 401(k) and
- put $500 a month into the baby’s college fund and
- still have a ridiculously low monthly outlay

Her dilemma? She can’t feel good about spending any money on herself.

Ahem.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain here, but could we get someone with a real problem? I can’t learn anything from this other than I obviously should have married someone who worked in technology and maybe done a little better with birth control.

This woman has anxiety? Try the anxiety of knowing that your husband’s last camping trip (and supporting trips to REI and Cabela’s) sent your checking account reeling so hard that you came within thirty-seven cents of bouncing six checks. Or realizing that you’re either going to have to work until you’re about 86 or pray that those life expectancy tables that chart you to live until you’re 102 are dead wrong.

That’s anxiety.

She may not be Carol Brady, but she’s no Carmen Electra, either.

Thank goodness.

It took a little while to get it into the AFN, but better late than never, I present Mom, Interrupted’s Mother’s Day column.

In other Mom-related news, Carmen Electra is going to hold off on Carol Brady-hood a little bit longer so she can develop her line of portable stripper poles. I guess it’s safe to conclude that she may not be Donna Reed, but she certainly knows a lot about the Beav.

C’mon. You KNEW I had to go for that one. It was just sitting there.

A bit of a twist on shell collecting.

You’re standing on the beach, minding your own business, and then this.

Words are failing me at this point. The story, with its matter-of-fact details (the coroner is racking up feet in his office this very minute; left feet float differently than right feet…how on earth does anyone know this kind of thing? Just how often does this question come up, for God’s sake?) is one of those where you sit at your computer for awhile with your mouth hanging open.