As evidenced by all the leaves in this picture, I have tried a different approach this year. The close your eyes and pretend there’s not a thing wrong with the lawn approach, the hold your breath and hope someone else finds this leaf mess intolerable and eventually borrows the neighbor’s gas blower. The Who, Me? approach seems to be working so far and every other weekend the yard is restored to temporary tidiness by My Better Half who has thankfully settled in to his role as temporary but constant gardener.

And to be perfectly honest this laissez-faire attitude I have adopted is not entirely due to a new and more laid back me but more to the fact that I have serious wrist and forearm problems stewing and can proudly declare myself a winner of several fine diagnosis – De Quervian’s Syndrome, Wortenberg’s Syndrome, the beginnings of tennis elbow – all of which are orthopedic euphemism for, “Wow, your hand-wrist-arm apparatus is really fucked up. Let me give you a Cortisone shot and hope for the best because if that doesn’t work we’ll have to consider amputation.”

Simple tasks like raking, flipping pancakes, vacuuming, scrubbing the tub and folding laundry have all become excruciating antagonists to the things already gone wrong in this skinny arm of mine. And so I’ve been sidelined from some of the more banal but necessary tasks in life and, like anyone riding the pine, I’m anxious to participate. But I’m also enjoying the imposed break, nothing like a little doctor’s note to help a person settle in to a sabbatical from household chores. There is something liberating about letting things go just a little longer than I would usually. It’s so unlike me. I could get used to this slovenliness.

But then there’s the difficulty and attendant pain associated with tennis. And we all know how unlikely I am to give up the game. So I’m icing and pumping the NSAID’s and fully committed to getting this thing healed up so that I can continue to work on my court skills. And if amputation is necessary then I will be forced to play left handed. It worked for Nadal. No reason it can’t work me, right?

The opposing team was twenty deep and they made up for their lack of talent by having the most over-wrought parents in the history of six year old soccer squads. There is supposed to be one coach per team on the field orchestrating play, acting as casual referees. There are no whistles. There are multiple water breaks. We are supposed to stop and wait for shoes to be tied and shin guards adjusted and every once in awhile someone cries and we stop for that too. But this squad (I’ll call them the Collies in interest of anonymity), took the field with a shockingly aggressive attitude. They had three parents on the field at all times yelling, I mean yelling at their players, not cheering or making hopeful suggestions but physically moving the girls around, harping on them when their attention wandered, herding them up and back, barking orders. The Collies didn’t stop for our four girls when we needed a cleat tied or a water break or when little Samantha got hit in the nose and needed to have a good sob.

They were fixated on the win (the Collie parents), driving their progeny towards the goal. the children responded with the energy and purpose of kids accustomed to an afternoon of parental reprisal should they lose the game. As soon as I heard one parent say, “Just throw it in, it doesn’t matter if the other team’s ready,” I knew it was time to dig in ’cause that’s what we Greyhounds do. We take the challenge and chase the bait and run our little fannies off just to deny the families of privilege their expected victory. And the Greyhounds, all four of them, took on the twenty-deep Collie squad and kicked their well groomed asses. I’ve been cruising on that sweet victory for three days now.

After the soccer game, there was a baseball game attended by normal and well balanced parents wearing layers of fleece under rain gear all of which have developed the indisputable signs of ensuing head colds, the Derby party, (which was fun and festive save for the dead horse at the finish line which cast the momentary shadow of gloom (death is good like that) and made the party guest claiming second place in the betting pool feel somehow dishonest. We polled the group as to how important it was that your horse actually trot off the race track and came to unanimous decision that Eight Belles won second place fair and square despite the fact that her life ended minutes later and therefore second place prize money should be paid out. Then we all indulged in another round of mint juleps, desperate to shake off the grim reality of that scene with the equine ambulances on the racetrack). By the time Sunday rolled around, a tennis-related conflict was merely the cherry on the cake of a strange and surreal 48 hours.

It’s a big week in tennis for me and my team mates. We have cruised through the semi-finals after winning our division and now play for the banner and cheesy little plastic trophies on Wednesday. A few of us thought it’d be a good idea to get together Sunday morning and bat the ball around. When we made these tennis plans earlier in the week, 8 a.m. didn’t sound as early as it felt the morning after a bourbon-centric dinner party. Needless to say, my goals for the morning were simple: stay upright; don’t throw up on the service line. To quote W’s hackneyed phrase – mission accomplished.

While we weren’t out there breaking records with serve speed or the velocity of our over heads, we all played decently and got some important touch on the ball before the big match. Since I was concentrating on the basics, like breathing and holding down breakfast, I wasn’t really focused on the score of the games we were playing nor was I really paying a whole lot of attention to the play strategy on the other side of the court. But after receiving a Sunday afternoon e-mail comprised of a bulleted dissection of my play that morning complete with tight analysis of my partner and I’s failure to talk on the court and the observation that we forgot to bring our power serves that morning, I was left feeling that I had missed the memo on the purpose of Sunday morning play which, I had always thought was for extra practice, but had apparently, somewhere along the way, turned into an opportunity for team mates to play professional coach and develop laundry lists of observed errors and oversights to deliver to each other’s in-boxes later in the day.

It may have been a well intentioned attempt to help us be successful in Wednesday’s match but it came off as a pedantic, scolding and obviously flawed analysis of our tennis game by someone who usually plays a lower court than we do and has no claim to professional prospective. Timing, delivery and personal claim to authority on the topic at hand are important factors to consider when playing critic.

I probably should have let it slide, let it simmer in my in-box for awhile. But then I wouldn’t be me. So I promptly fired off a passive aggressive retort designed to signify my displeasure while pointing out that until this team mate develops her own version of a pace serve instead of that marshmallow she’s currently putting in the service box, she will never understand the difficulty of firing off a ninety mile an hour missive while swallowing your own stomach bile.

I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out that her greatest strength on the court is her partner, who is a lefty and therefore causes all manner of trouble for those of us who have been trained to target backhands down the middle. I congratulated her on the success they’ve enjoyed as team this year and pointed out that she should be very thankful for her alliance with someone who makes her opponents have to stop, think and completely alter all instinctual play.

Here’s how some of my reply e-mail went:

Truth be told, I took the court this morning after a long night of mint juleps and about three hours sleep – so the point for me was to have fun and get some touch on the ball before Wednesday. I was in no way expecting a dissertation on our play nor am I prepared to give a dissertation on your game…I was really just trying to stay upright and didn’t have the mental equilibrium to be taking notes.

What I will say is that I think we all have strengths and weaknesses as tennis players. One of the great advantages that you and your partner have is her left-handedness. She’ll always be an asset on the court b/c all the text book rules on where to put the ball are reversed for your opponents. A lot of thinking often leads to errors on the part of the team who has to change their instinctual play. It will always take your opponents some time to adjust to the awkwardness of the set up. That’s a huge boon for you guys.

As for my partner and I not using our big serves until late in the game – Anyone with a power serve will tell you that doubles is a difficult forum in which to rush the hard, fast serve. It takes awhile to warm up and since, in doubles, a player only serves every four games rather than every other, the pace serve is usually the weapon that doesn’t turn fully fire up until the second set. It’s just a matter of needing to be loose, relaxed and warm when going for the big serve.

The spin serve is the safety serve that players often need to use at the beginning of play, when they are feeling pressure or when they haven’t yet found their groove. Even tournament tennis players have to fight out of early match jitters and find the muscle fluidity to begin putting in ace serves (This obviously takes the ranked professional player less time than it takes those of us who play recreationally. There have been whole matches that I haven’t found my big serve. But a spin serve is better than a double fault. I suspect that as you develop the pace on your serve, you will see what I’m talking about.)

Wednesday’s a big day, but I think our entire team can be satisfied that we’ve all played a great season, no matter what happens. I won’t be presumptuous and tell you that you should change things in the last week of a thirty week season right before a final. Obviously, whatever you’ve been doing has been working for you thus far.

As with everything, some days on the tennis court are better than others. We can all hope for a good day on Wednesday but most importantly we can congratulate ourselves on a season well played, regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s match.

It’s uber-important that we all trust ourselves, trust our partners and just go out there and play tennis this week without getting caught up in the import of the playoff moment, without trying to change our game or the dynamics we’ve established on the court already with our partners, at the last minute, in the nervous rush of pre-match jitters.

I plan to do what I do. I hope to do it well and with confidence. I plan to take it one point at a time. My partner and and I have a little mantra now…watch the seams of the ball, concentrate on breathing between points, be in the moment.

All I can hope for is that she and I leave the court feeling like we played well – win, lose or draw. I wish that for you too. Keep it light, keep it fun, don’t think too hard.

Okay, so it wasn’t quite the bitch slap I really wanted to deliver. I do have some self restraint, knowing when to avoid being un-salvageably vituperative. Even I could see that it was not a good idea to start my reply with,

Dear Team Mate And Average Tennis Player Who I Used to Call Friend But Now, After Today’s E-mail and Last Week’s Odd Decision to Begin Serving While Your Opponent Was Standing At the Sideline Having A Drink of Water, May Be More of an Acquaintance,

Who died and made you coach?

Like sands through the hour glass, those are the days of our lives and so the world turns here on Wisteria Lane where shiny happy people take their psycho-pharmaceuticals and play tennis while ignoring ethnic cleansing in Africa, the slow ravages of cancer, the high price of gasoline, the war in Iraq and the debacle which is the Democratic Primary.

To quote the Talking Heads, again, “You may ask yourself – well, how did I get here?

And then it’s home again to begin preparing for Saturday’s Derby gathering. It’s a simple menu of bourbon, lard and coconut but there is some do-ahead required not to mention the requisite house cleaning, rose purchasing and mashing of the mint leaves for Julep consumption.

Go Z Humor and Monba and Pyro and Smooth Air and Big Brown. Run your tails off while I drink my face off and please don’t stumble, I hate to see a horse fall. Leave the blundering and banging into things to me and my intoxicated guests.

Happy Friday everyone, Happy Weekend too.

And now that school is back in session and I managed to not kill myself or my children or any of the small furry animals that reside here, it is time for me to fully panic about the damn Cake Walk which I volunteered to organize and run, again, for the third time. I’m not complaining (yet). I’m sure the PTO president in her infinite wisdom saw no issue with scheduling the school’s 50th Anniversary Party and Fundraising Bash for the week following Spring Break because apparently she’s never been away on vacation and can’t imagine why all the usual volunteers and involved mothers – just back from Florida – would be more consumed by the need to pick up the dog from the kennel and complete fifteen loads of beach towel laundry and catch up on 72 hours of e-mails than bake, frost and decorate a cake in the likeness of a pair of sandals or a dragon or a Barbie castle to donate to this year’s Cake Walk. So far I have ten responses to my Cake Walk flier. Last year we had 70 cakes donated and still ran out of cakey prizes a full half-hour before the close of the event.

Perhaps I should have chosen a color other than acid yellow for my flier paper. But Staples was having a sale. I thought the vibrant, ghastly hue of stomach bile would at the very least garner some attention and would save me four whole dollars over the calmer melon sherbet option. “A penny wise, a pound foolish,” as Ben Franklin might say when faced with making copy paper decisions for the local elementary school fundraiser.

So we’ll have ten cakes and three hours of event time which means we can allow approximately three winners per hour. That’s a winner every twenty minutes which amounts to a lot of walking around in circles to the up-tempo strains of Billboard Top Forty while waiting for me to draw the winning number from a hat. I have searched the MP3 archives for a worthy play list and was feeling good about my selections: Sexy Back by Justin, Touch My Body by Mariah, I Wanna Have Your Babies by Natasha Bedingfield and, of course, Beautiful by Snoop Dogg that is until MBH pointed out that I wasn’t MC-ing White Party on South Beach but rather a grade school version of musical chairs with cake. He thought some of the lyrics a bit inappropriate for the intended audience, taking special issue with the following chorus from Beautiful:

When I see my baby boo, shit, I get foolish
Smack a nigga that tries to pursue it (Oh-hooo!)
Homeboy, she taken, just move it
I asked you nicely, don’t make the Dogg lose it
We just blow ‘dro and keep the flow movin’
In a ‘64, me and baby boo cruisin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Body rag interior blue, and
Have them hydralics squeakin’ when we screwin’
Now she’s yellin’, hollerin’ out Snoop, and
Hootin’, hollerin’; hollerin’, hootin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Black and beautiful, you the one I’m choosin’
Hair long and black and curly like you’re Cuban
Keep groovin’, that’s what we doin’
And we gon’ be together until your moms move in… (Oh-hooo!)

I stand by my original selections and continue to insist that we can’t coddle our children forever. But in order to be accommodating and pleasantly suburban I have agreed to tame it up, and add some filler tunes like Queen’s We Will Rock You and Bust a Move.

That should make it acceptably white cake (with low fat cream cheese icing) for all those grade-school-parent-haters, don’t ya think?

Apparently Mark and his wife have found some sort of connubial equilibrium by,

“each keeping a notebook in which we record all the things the other does that are wrong. They plan to compare notebooks on their deathbeds to determine who was the better person.

But in the meantime, they’ve realized that they haven’t had an effective way of handing out both praise and criticism. That is, until now. From here on out, they’ve decided to issue annual spousal performance reviews.”

Hopefully Mark won’t mind that I’ve put the Madmarriage through the same corporate stress test and come up with the following performance review for myself and My Better Half:

CCE’s 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: CCE has been known to spend whole evenings organizing shoes in the mudroom and vacuuming the dog. There is no question that she sets exacting and impossible standards, unafraid to work overtime in the pursuit of cleanliness and the perfect pie crust. She must, however, continue to try and manage her own frustration that other team members often fail to reach projected cleanliness goals and will continue to incite her wrath over black finger print smudges on the door jambs and dirty socks on the bedroom floors. CCE needs to work on delegation skills, leaving at least a few household chores for Her Better Half seeing as there are only twenty four hours in a day, eight of which should be spent sleeping. She needs to trust that he can, indeed, manage to do a load of laundry without causing second floor flooding or an incremental bleed of red towels on white t-shirts.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Meets standards.
Comments: CCE is a fit and attractive 30-ish female who strives to meet deadlines, milestones and objectives in the bedroom when she’s not too exhausted, drunk or impossibly irritated with her BH. She has recognizable trouble switching between housekeeper, mother and sex goddess roles and often fails to apply her imagination in thinking outside the 11-years-of-monogamy-box. This being said, we think that CCE’s bedroom acumen could be improved by her BH’s attentive fawning to include fresh cut flowers and the simple purchase of a some edible chocolate body paint, a swing and a healthy dose of Xanax. CCE has great potential in this department. We hate to see her fall short of her obvious ability to reign supreme and excellent in all things bedroom.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: CCE successfully straddles the line between knowing when to be supportive and encouraging (when youngest child is streaking towards the goal in last week’s soccer game) or downright neglectful (when American Idol or tournament tennis is on television). She is not afraid to administer punishments for failure to replace the cap on the toothpaste and is not above eliciting peak performance from her children by withholding dessert for minor offenses. While subordinates complain that she can be a real “ball-buster”, we think CCE epitomizes perfection in the parental management department and has even been known to show her soft side every now and again by planning impromptu trips to the playground or the bowling alley.

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: While CCE is never ever late for anything, there is such a thing as pathologically punctual. We appreciate the inner and exacting clock by which CCE operates but would caution her that it is really not necessary to proceed scheduled play date times by twenty minutes. And we reiterate our belief that no matter how anxious she is to make a good impression, no dinner party hostess really wants her invited guests to arrive “right on time”. A fifteen minute lag is expected and appreciated and often means the difference between said hostess finishing her shower and blow drying her hair. Because the attention to detail in the punctuality department borders on excessive perhaps CCE could go and hang out for a week with her mother-in-law who has never been on-time for anything and the two could sort of rub up against each other and moderate the other’s tendencies into something more decent and acceptable.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves or exceeds standards.
Comments: CCE continues to lead by example in all household matters (even making beds while occupants are still dozing and frequently considering driving the cats to the nearest quarry for possible abandonment if that’s what is necessary to cut down on excessive pet hair on the couch). In the coming year, she should consider cloning herself in order to save her sanity. Overall, CCE is a good wife when not being a complete “ball buster”.

CCE’s Better Half 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Needs improvement.
Comments: CCE’s Better Half, here on in referred to as BH is still learning how to be an asset rather than a detriment to the household management program. While his instincts in this arena are good, (who doesn’t love a guy who likes to play video games and board games and allow children to play in the mud on the way to the bus stop), BH needs to commit more time to the more banal aspects of the job (i.e., dog walking, cat litter changing, planning for business trips rather than panicking the night before heading out to Cincinnati when he realizes that all his dress shirts are still in a wad at the bottom of the suitcase in the spare bedroom since his last trip to Grand Rapids0. BH could also use a week’s worth of continuing education classes on topics such as preparing healthy family meals outside of his current comfort zone which includes fried pizza and the drive-thru at BK, how to romance one’s business partner with simple gestures like spontaneous phone calls, appreciative notes and the ability to discuss financial matters without exploding into a rage.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Satisfactory.
Comments: While BH claims to consistently meets his own deadlines, milestones and objectives, he isn’t always a team player and consistently misses obvious ways to establish bedroom business relationships such as actually entering the bedroom when CCE is still awake, sometime before 1 a.m., which would require deliberately skipping a three-hour web surfing session which seems to occupy his evening hours on most occasions.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards on occasion.
Comments: BH often meets his six year old’s expectations playing court jester to her queen. She favorably and affectionately refers to her father as “a big child” and therefore expects little but laughter and unconditional love. BH’s eight year old son is a little more demanding and suffers the internet obsession acutely, often commenting on BH’s inability to peel himself away from he lure of the computer during non-business hours. BH is often unavailable for discipline, hygiene, safety, scheduling, education and appropriate outerwear selection routines and prefers to delegate these responsibilities to partners and sub-ordinates. “BH is an exceedingly loving parent, when he remembers he is one.”

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Questionable.
Comments: Yes, BH is always on time but only because CCE is a worthy task-master.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: BH is part of the marriage. In the coming year, he should strive to replace rotting wood on the exterior of the house, remember to call his mother and father who live in Florida on occasion, like on their birthdays, and put away the growing stack of clean clothes CCE has efficiently washed and folded and placed smack in front of his bureau. If household budget allows, he also should take a course in how to endure television programming that he may find insanely boring, (i.e., Hell’s Kitchen and pre-recorded French Open matches) in order to better spend time with his wife and appreciate just being close to her and holding her hand.

Having grown up in these parts, Patriot’s Day has always just one of those holidays that is part of a long weekend, a long weekend in which my parents always did copious amounts of yard work and rototill-ed the garden and planted spring peas. But My Better Half, never having heard of Patriot’s Day before moving to Massachusetts a few years ago, insists there must be something more than gardening to the regional affair, something that has to do with Miles Standish and Paul Revere and the Red Coats, or, at the very least, Tom Brady’s being beautiful. I just nod my head and say, “Sure, honey. You must be right,” and return to raking out the garden bed at the base of the front stoop. It’s not that I’m too lazy to google the origins of the holiday, it’s just that there are a zillion yard-related things to get accomplished before the lilacs pop and the leaves flush out on the trees. I assure him that I can properly celebrate the heroes of The Boston Tea Party and the Patriot’s Offensive Line while working the leaf blower.

And while this regionally observed holiday may strike outsiders as odd or, at least, undefined, I suspect that every area of this country has its own unique celebration noted and observed by its endemic people. It’s what makes us so diverse, these different celebratory occasions. For example, while Massachusetts has spring peas and the Boston Marathon in mid-April, Kentucky has the Derby in early May. And, because I embrace differences and appreciate a good holiday as much as the next person, I’m planning a dinner party to coincide with this year’s Run For The Roses.

And even though I am, through and through, a Yankee, I plan to mark the occasion with some good Southern cuisine. My friend and neighbor, a Louisville native who will be attending the event, has loaned me her Kentucky Heritage Recipe Book for menu planning purposes. As it turns out, within its dog eared pages is some sort of secret code to the workings of the South.

All people embrace a holiday with good old over-eating. Each regional celebration has a menu so purposeful and explicit that outsiders can’t possibly understand or fully appreciate the significance of the cuisine to the inherent importance of the event. I know this with certainty after pouring over the pages (mouth open, eyes wide, stunned and amazed), of every recipe in the Kentucky cook book; all of which contain some iteration of bourbon, cheese sauce, pecans, mayonnaise, coconut and lard. Apparently it is the unique combination of these six ingredients by which a dish earns its revered status as truly Southern fare.

And while I know that the British have Spotted Dick, which, as an adult I have come to realize has less to do with a sexually transmitted disease and everything to do with dried fruits and suet (which may be just as gross), I did not know that the South has Bishop’s Whipple which, surprisingly, is not a major surgical endeavor designed to circumnavigate a clergyman’s intestines but, rather, some sort of dessert with dates and pecans and, of course, bourbon flavored whip cream.

The Derby dessert course apparently must also include the requisite Bourbon Macaroon Mold with its layers and layers of coconut cookies doused in bourbon and served chilled with bourbon whip cream. And, just in case the guests are having trouble keeping their party on between the mint juleps and the sweets, there is the Beer Cheese spread which is made with two pounds of “rat” cheese and garlic “pods” and a forty of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon. While I think guests are encouraged to spread this Beer Cheese on crackers, the recipe leaves the exact purpose for the cheese open to interpretation. Perhaps Beer Cheese is used as sauce for the mysterious main course called Scrapple which is made by boiling an unidentified cut of pork down to a state of utter gelatinouity. The meat falls away from the bones, the fat is skimmed and cornmeal is added to the unidentified pork broth and allowed to thicken into a porridge like consistency and then is poured into a mold and allowed to congeal. Once solidified, the unidentified pork porridge is sliced and fried in lard and served hot to guests who are so freakin’ sideways with Bourbon and Beer Cheese that they fail to see this Scrapple as possibly the most disgusting culinary invention of all time.

And if the Scrapple fails to get their attention then the Scotch Eggs are sure to rock their inebriated worlds. I will let the recipe speak for itself, just as it is written on page 18 of The Kentucky Heritage Cookbook:

Boil desired number of eggs hard. Peel and cut into halves. Remove the yolks, mash and season lightly. Refill the whites and press halves together firmly. Cover tightly with country sausage meat. Roll in egg and crumbs and fry slowly in deep fat. Drain and place on rounds of toast and surround with cheese sauce. (I shit you not – deep fried sausage coated deviled eggs on toast with Beer Cheese sauce.)

And if, after all this culinary celebration, there are a few stout and hardy people still standing on two legs rather than squatting on piano benches and crawling to refill their high ball glasses, there will be a refreshing Reception Salad (involving cream cheese, pimentos, pineapple, jello, celery, pecans and, of course, bourbon whipped cream), that is sure to be the straw that broke the race horse’s drunken, lard-heavy back.

Now that I’ve watched this clip of her stand-up routine, I feel quite sure I will become a Cathy Ladman stalker. Despite the fact that she is 51 and I am 34 and she is Jewish and I am not and she lives in New York and is married to a man and I live outside of Boston and am also married to a man, I’m pretty damn convinced that she and I are soul mates. I think we could be really, really happy together, that she is someone that could make me laugh and I am someone who could, well, chuckle enthusiastically thus improving her timing and delivery. I’m not sure what she’d get out of the deal but I know that just being in her space for half a minute would really perk me up. And if it doesn’t stop raining here I just might call Amtrak and schedule my trip to NYC because I could use a little comedic levity right about now.

I just want to issue a public apology. Mother Nature if you were in anyway offended by my suggestion that you might wear tennis skirts and that I might be able to kick your ass, I am truly, truly contrite and hoping you can forgive me my hubris and quick temper. Three fucking weekends of rain in a row feels like more than appropriate punishment for having made such a thoughtless and cavalier statement. So please, please don’t feel you have to continue the torture. I can’t be responsible for my actions should next Saturday dawn all dreary and damp and unseasonably raw. Have mercy. I have two small children who should not be made to suffer through another housebound weekend with their bat-ass crazy mother who has taken to cleaning the toothbrush holder with Q-tips out of sheer boredom and ennui.

Luckily we were playing a team comprised of two decent and understanding women who were already fully aware of my venomous and petulant tendencies (we all played for the same team last year). They just smiled and said, Such good tennis. So much fun. To which I responded Please excuse me while I swallow my own vomit. Oh and pretty please, for a just moment, try to imagine that you just lost an important match by one game, two points in an abbreviated third set that, by North Shore Women’s League rules, cannot be played in its entirety due to time constraints and come back and tell me how much fun it was again. Really, tell me again, because I need one more excuse to slam this ball at you from the service line after play has stopped and you approach to shake my hand.

Needless to say I’ve been licking the wound, suffering the sting of injured pride and damaged self esteem, all afternoon and only after a liberal dose of Clonazepam and a towering bowl of ice cream can I even write about the defeat.

Tomorrow is another day, a practice day, in which I should force myself to do wind sprints and full half hour of back hand volleys. Instead I may read a book and begin drinking before noon and stay in my pajamas until I need to take O to the dentist. Again, which, as you all know, always always puts me in such a foul mood that I will probably be freebasing Clonazepam and eating from the ice cream carton with my fingers by tomorrow evening. Oh, and yet another winter storm is rolling in which is just a cruel joke, a lesson in enduring patience.

Good things come to those who wait. Things like tulips and sunshine and tank top weather. It’s a shame that Mother Nature is just sort of an amorphous spiritual type idea because, if she were a little more real and had a tendency to wear tennis skirts, I’d be kicking her ass right now.

I quaked with recognition, so much so that I let rip a great big guffaw of familiarity, when reading the line, “If you are a person who loves Alice Munro and your going out with someone whose favorite book is The Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal.”

I can’t help but think that My Better Half directed my attention to this article to highlight the fact that we are, literarily at least, compatible. It’s his way of reminding me that we chose each other for our intellectual curiosities. His subtle way of highlighting the fact that he thinks my high school boyfriend is a dumbass, while he, My Better Half, the father of my children, has read Dickens and Moby Dick and Hemingway and Faulkner and not just for college English but for fun, for recreation, for love of the written word.

This is not to say we read the same things, he and I. His bookish preferences run to the decidedly male end of the spectrum. He claims that every literary novel written by a woman contains the requisite rape scene and he just can’t stand the predictable subject of violation. While I know this to be untrue, I can settle into the fact that he’s not going to take as much as I do from the stories by Grace Paley or Lorrie Moore or Sue Miller or Virginia Woolf. There are distinct gender differences in this reading thing.

He prefers non-fiction to fiction. I am a short story, fiction-only-please, kind of gal. If he deigns to indulge in a little pulp, it is always of the murder/mystery variety and not Dean Koontz or whatever schlock is out there but, rather, Chandler or Philip K. Dick and the occasional Ross Thomas.

If I’m feeling flighty and distracted, I am more apt to grab something sweepingly popular off the best seller list. I can still enjoy Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love even though I know it’s been read by Oprah and every book group in America. I am, admittedly, fascinated by popular fiction, at least in part because I envy the mediocre writer their astonishing and surprising success and am always trying to figure out what exactly has propelled a particular book of questionable value to the apex of popularity. I find literary success of any kind hopeful and reassuring.

To My Better Half, the rise of popular fiction only bolsters his opinion that the entire country is comprised of semi-literate morons. The more fuss there is surrounding a book, the less credibility he thinks it deserves. I can’t remember the last time he’s read a best seller of the fictional variety. Currently he has Dashiell Hammett’s Crime Stories and Proust’s Swann’s Way on his night stand while I have Grisham’s Innocent Man on mine. (Disclaimer: It’s my first Grisham and it’s actually non-fiction and I’m only reading it because it contains a lot of the legalese I’m desperate to master in preceding to finish the true-crime novel I’m working on, but still, it’s Grisham, and it’s there beside the bed. I’m quite sure My Better Half is shocked and horrified by its presence in our shared chambers.)

Admittedly, I have loved My Better Half’s unapologetic superior intellectual shtick. I have, at times, found it kind of hot. But right now, I just see it as reason to be annoyed that he won’t sit on the couch with me on Tuesday night and enjoy American Idol like everyone else in the free fucking world. If we’re not watching Masterpiece Theater, The Wire or a Sundance film, he retires to the office to surf the internet and listen to political speeches and catch up on programming blogs. I’m totally alone on the couch trying to groove to the sounds of David Cook doing Billie Jean. I wish he could ditch the pretense for just a little while and take some pleasure in the decidedly fun aspects of popular culture, after all there is some inherent value in Justin’s SexyBack and Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and the occasional Wally Lamb novel if only because these shamelessly popular examples of pure fun, of entertainment for entertainment’s sake. I tire of having to be learning something from someone at all times. Just sitting and receiving and doing little work in the process of being distracted has its own charms and advantages, ones I have come to appreciate more as I age.

Still, as said in the NYT piece, there has to be some substance that counteracts the fluff…”Most of my friends and men in my life are non-readers…but now that you mention it, if I went over to man’s house and there were books about life lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

After all, what mother hasn’t cooed with pride over their infant’s first mecomium stool, that greenish black slick that is all the evidence an anxious new parent needs that their darling new baby possesses the very same digestive track as all other healthy babies the world over. There is comfort in this sameness. Expectations fulfilled. One off-colored elimination and the entire family is exhaling a collective sigh of relief.

And then there is the issue of the new mother’s own ability to defecate. Without a proper bowel movement, she is a prisoner in the maternity ward. More stool softeners are administered. Nurses talk in hushed whispers about her inability to poop as if it is a sign of this mother’s mental weakness. They have forgotten just how startlingly and scarring it is to pass a watermelon size creature from the vagina. They are focused on forcing this poor woman with the stitches to produce yet another expulsion that will surely tear her insides out, will lead to internal bleeding and the end of a perfectly good birthing experience. There is a stand-off. Armed guards stand at the bathroom door and order her performance. She will weep softly and pretend she has shat. They will rush in and insist on seeing the evidence and the new mother is forced to admit she has lied. Back to toilet for another attempt. Hours drag on before she achieves the successful void which is celebrated and admired and practically wrapped up along with the flowers and the teddy bears and the swaddled infant as souvenir of this important life changing event.

Now safely home with baby in arms, the true shit talking begins. There are long battles waged about whose turn it is to drag themselves from bed to change yet another diaper, change the whole outfit, the entire crib, in fact, because another runny infant stool has crept beyond the gathered leg pleats of even the most absorbent nappy and has stained the sheets and spoiled the cute footy-pajamas with the moons and stars.

This ritual grows tiresome, like Ground Hog day with diaper genies and Huggies’ wipes and changing table pads.

And somehow, in all its shit-filled sameness, life just sort of flies by until a person finds themselves suddenly parenting a child capable of crapping their pants at a zoo-themed birthday party even though they’ve been ‘potty trained’ for months. Just as quickly, they are Mom to an eight year old little boy who is crying as he clutches the porcelain, ‘It hurts Mommy, it hurts. Make it stop.” And without reaching up there to extract the compacted stool herself, she is powerless to help the child experiencing the distinct pain of his first anal fissure. Apricots are administered. A Sids bath is drawn. There is hand holding and supportive cheers while the boulder of poop is finally excreted. It is a monumental turd that refuses to be flushed away. It threatens to remain their as evidence of the ill effects of too many chicken finger/french fry combos for time eternal until someone gags their way through the process of breaking it up into flushable sized portions.

Because this defecation thing is something we all must do on a regular basis and because we parents have become sort of inured to the relative disgustingness of such discussions, 225,000 copies of What’s Your Poo Telling You? have been sold and the Poo Quality Index has become a popular topic at dinner parties, on episodes of Oprah and at play groups alike.

(I am happy to report that I have yet to discuss the PQI with anyone over tapas and dirty martinis or while standing attentively just to the right of the monkey bars. I’m not sure the suburban town in which I reside is ready for discussions about feces. But have no fear, I will probably make this social blunder very soon as I have a compulsive need to bring up shocking matters at regular intervals just to ensure that I am not too well liked in this town of 30,000 judgmental mom-types.)

Perhaps I am so comfortable with discussions of colon performance because I endured months and months of undignified testing in order for doctor’s to determine that my intestines are truly unique and mysterious and that no matter how many colonoscopies are conducted or stool samples collected and placed into small vials and stirred with little plastic spoons in preparation for lab analysis, no one is going to be able to determine the exact reason for my inner turmoil. The ability to sit in a room with a male doctor and exchange colorful commentary about one’s recent performance on the seat-of-ease is definitely an acquired skill. No matter how professional and gravely serious this doctor is about the topic, initially, there is that awkward silence that is you trying to determine just how much is too much information. I mean he’s asking but does he really, really want to know?

There is a distinct feeling that anything you say or do in regard to your bowel movements can and will be used against you in a future episode of Candid Camera. Such is the nature of the topic. But the success of the book and my ability to discuss poop for an entire and lengthy blog posting is evidence that we’re all in this together. To void or not to void has never been at question.