As I’ve mentioned before, Aura is rather smitten with the idea of bras. Having been informed that she herself will not be able to wear a bra for another 10 or 12 or forever years, she took it upon herself to help me locate one. While I rifled through the underwires, Aura disappeared momentarily, soon popping back with an armful of ruffles and lace and hot pink. I’m telling you, if kindergarten doesn’t work out, I’m shipping her off to those stripper conventions in Vegas and calling her a really short salesperson. She’ll be in heaven, helping Candi/Bambi/Diamond find rhinestone-studded bras to match their g-strings.   

Aura would also feel at home in Frederick's of Hollywood.

After more fruitless searching, I gave up, dragging a reluctant Aura away from the Maidenform racks. On my way out of the department, I noticed packs of Hanes underwear on sale. Normally I’m loyal to Calvin Klein underwear, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I tossed a package labeled “low-rise” something into the cart, too intent on making sure Aura hadn’t stashed a Wonderbra on her person to actually read the package. 

When I got home, I didn’t give more than a fleeting glance to the new underwear as I threw them into the washer. I do remember thinking they looked a little…larger than I would expect. But I chalked that up to 100% cotton and the need to adjust for dryer shrinkage. That Hanes, I thought admiringly. Now there’s a company that thinks of EVERYTHING. 

And then I slipped on a pair. At first, I was just confused, thinking that perhaps I had put a leg through the waist hole? Was wearing them inside out? Had accidentally sewn two together? Then it dawned on me: These were briefs. Unlike the low-rise bikinis I typically wear, or the very occasional thong I don when dressing up to go somewhere without coloring placemats, these underpants were BIG. Like cover-your-stomach-and-some-of-your-hips-and-maybe-a-third-of-your-thigh big. 

So kind of like this. But without Lady Gaga, and bigger.

I really want to say that I hated them right away. Eeeeeeeehhhhhh. Hear that? That’s the sound of me trying to say that.  

But I can’t. And you know why? I LOVE THEM. No, I don’t wear them during the day, when someone might see them peek over the waistband of my jeans or possibly get caught on the hem of my jacket. However, when I change for the evening, slipping on my old sweats and tying back my hair, you better believe I reach for a pair of these babies.  

Such support! Such coverage! Such…stretchability! I tell you, I am a better, entirely more agreeable person wearing these—God help me—briefs. If Adam wants to go out and buy a bottle of rum that costs as much as a small sovereign nation? Sure! A charity telemarketer calls for a donation? Why not? Hell, when I’m wearing these suckers I’m apt to agree to support ALL of PBS’s New England stations, that annoying WordWorld and Antiques Roadshow be damned.  

Big underwear has changed my life. In fact, it reminds me of a story Adam once told me about a coworker named Radu, who hailed from Romania but moved to the United States when he was about 30 years old. Every day at lunch time, Radu would go out and buy himself a big, steaming bowl of clam chowder. This went on for months and months. Finally, Adam asked him why he never bought anything else for lunch. And so Radu explained: “For 30 years, I never knew about clam chowder. Now that I know, I cannot waste any time.”  

I TOTALLY GET WHAT HE MEANT.

Yes indeedy, a floor mirror. This purchase was actually a pretty big deal for us, considering that Adam and I have been cohabitating for almost 11 years and have never owned a full-length mirror. Well, technically, that’s not quite true. The first place we rented came with a full-length mirror on the back of a closet door, but there was no light in the closet and the mirror had a ripple distortion thing going on. So if you wanted to check your outfit, you had to bring a flashlight and then convince yourself that you didn’t really have three breasts. We didn’t use it that much, except during parties, when we were like, “FRIENDS! STEP INTO THIS HERE CLOSET AND COUNT HOW MANY BREASTS YOU HAVE!” It was similar to a chummy game of Clue or Monopoly, except more psychologically scarring.

Barring that particular mirror, we never had another full-length. If I needed to check my pants or shoes before leaving the house, I would stand tiptoe in front of the bureau mirror. But mostly I just hoped for the best and then squinted really hard at my reflection in elevator doors or store windows. Grocery-store windows always worked fairly well, though I’d often have to contort my body to keep the Sale! posters from getting in the way. And even then it seemed like “THIS WEEK ONLY! RIB EYE ROAST $3.99 PER POUND!” always prevented a really accurate glimpse of my waist.

Which, if I’m being frank, was the point. I don’t like looking at my reflection all that much. And if I do get too good a look, then I immediately find something lacking, whether it’s the width of my thighs or the shape of my lips or myriad other issues. I’ve always been this way with photos of myself, too. It was only recently that I realized this little phobia now involves someone other than just me.

“Mommy, why don’t you let Daddy take more pictures of you?” Aura asked during a family outing a few weeks ago, as I was ducking away from Adam and the camera.

“Oh, well, I don’t always like the way I look when I see the pictures,” I replied.

Then it struck me. A lot more comments like that might lead to a lot less of this:

I don’t know if being dissatisfied with your own appearance is the result of too many supermodels in magazines, or a misunderstanding of modesty, or simply a hallmark of being a woman. But in this household, it has to stop, or at least start to stop. I may not be able to guarantee that Aura will always be as carefree and content with her appearance as she is now at three years old, but I damn well have to try.

Step 1:

Thank God for baby steps.

And I really am. I’m sure there is a veritable legion of five-year-old boys out there who would happily correct me or at least shin-kick me into obeisance, but honestly, I’m not sure I could be convinced. I mean, just look at those things:

I know, I know. There is evidence, and there are fossils, and yes, scientists think dinosaurs lived on all continents and came in varying sizes and met a bad end by asteroid, yada yada yada snore. But STILL. We don’t really know, right? It’s not like they left behind these wildly revealing dinosaur diaries or scratched out some cave drawings with their little Mesozoic claws. Basically, some men back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found some bones, got out some Victorian-era Crazy Glue, and went to town. It was kind of like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition except that Ty Pennington was a paleontologist and instead of a new house there was a new creature. YES, IT WAS JUST LIKE THAT. DO NOT DOUBT MY POP-CULTURE PREHISTORIC ANALOGIES.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t just like that. However, I remain skeptical of a field of study in which there exist so many may haves and probably dids. The freakin’ explanation cards in the museum even admit to the uncertainties. For example! It turns out that no one really knows why the Triceratops had that frill thing on the back of its head. Some think it was for mating purposes, others for defense, still others for temperature regulation. No one suggests the theory that the frill was meant to draw attention away from the BUTT UGLY HORNS, but I might as well go ahead and float it.

So what is it about kids and dinosaurs? I wouldn’t say Aura is necessarily overwhelmed by the idea of dinosaurs, but she’ll sit in front of a dinosaur fossil or the show Dinosaur Train for, oh, any-amount-of-time longer than I ever will. In my mind, there are so many others things that should intrigue a child, like magnets or ladybugs or electricity or UNICORNS, for God’s sake. Every time I see a kid playing with a toy dinosaur, I want to sneak over and replace it with something like a Donny Osmond or William Shatner action figure. Yes, yes, the dinosaurs were around 160 million years before that unlucky, asteroid-lit night. But Shatner? Now THAT guy has real staying power.

A minute or so into our tour, Aura had already stopped listening to my speech on the importance of higher education, preferring instead to climb staircases and run on the lawns. I was soon reduced to talking to myself, raising my voice during the important parts to regain Aura’s attention. “Schools like Harvard are certainly a possibility IF YOU BUCKLE DOWN,” I yelled. “Never forget that MERIT SCHOLARSHIPS can be yours!”

It was somewhere around the time I was explaining college’s potential for “LIFELONG FRIENDSHIPS!” and “SELF DISCOVERY!” that I first noticed the many flyers dotting the campus. The more of them I read, the softer my diatribe became.

By the time I finished reading these, I was starting to change my tune. “But there is certainly nothing wrong with smaller, lesser known schools!” I called to Aura as she whipped back and forth in front of the famed Widener Library. “Many state schools produce a DIZZYING array of successful graduates!” I cried out,  pulling Aura back toward one of the campus gates. Every time a passing student smiled at Aura, I glared in return, muttering things like “Sexual deviant!” under my breath.

Then I saw this flyer.

It wasn’t until Aura started tugging on my hand that I realized I had been standing in front of this particular flyer for an unnecessarily long time. But…vajazzled? In a legendary place of higher learning? The editor in me took offense with the j in place of a g, the proofreader in me bemoaned the underline in place of italics, the music lover in me reared back in horror by the bastardization of jazz.

And the mother in me? “FORGET WHAT I SAID,” I announced to Aura, scooping her up and racing for an exit as fast as my legs could carry us. “THIS IS NOT THE SCHOOL FOR YOU.”

Another day, another $48,868 per year saved. And Aura will never touch a stick-on jewel again.

And this was no big deal until Aura arrived. Before that, there was take-out and there was defrosting and there were Trader Joe’s meat+ beans+ sauce entrées, but dinner was never An Event. Once in a while, just for chuckles, we’d spend a weekend afternoon making an actual meal, after which we’d congratulate ourselves heartily and draw historically inaccurate comparisons. “Look!” I’d yell gleefully to Adam. “We flambéed corn JUST LIKE THE PILGRIMS DID.”  

Then Aura came along and I cut down on work. It seemed…obligatory that I take on the brunt of the cooking, and that it involve things like ingredients and pans and nutrition. So far, I think I’ve done passably, my quiches and Thai peanut noodles and buttermilk chicken uncolored by the hatred I feel while making them.  

You know what I hate most? The pressure. And for that, I wholeheartedly blame:  

Before the Food Network came along, a person could just tool around the kitchen, doing her best and then serving the end result. Yes, of course, some creations would be better than others. But that was to be expected, such as with, I don’t know, American Idol contestants, or children.  

No longer. Now EVERYONE is an expert on cooking, because EVERYONE watches the Food Network. Hell, you don’t even have to cook to be an expert, not that this stops most people. The other day, Adam peered down at the cutting board as I was chopping. “Wait!” he exclaimed anxiously. “Is that a three-quarter-inch dice?”  

“Um, it’s a dice alright,” I replied, my grip on the chef’s knife tightening. “I’m not sure how many inches it is.”  

“Kaaaaateeee,” he moaned, shaking his head with a level of distress typically reserved for natural disasters. “If the dice is wrong, the entire dish will be wrong. DON’T YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO MESS WITH THE SUGAR-PROTEIN MATRIX?”  

I’m not sure, but I think that was right around the time I offered to three-quarter-inch dice his left testicle. Let me try to remember. Yep, it was then.  

I place the blame for the matrix comment squarely on Alton Brown. You know where he can shove his food-chemistry diagrams? You get one guess.

From here on out, I’m instituting a severe weekly cap on how much Food Network people in this house can watch. That goes for Aura, too. The other day, she walked into the living room just in time to catch the end of a Rachael Ray episode. “Mommy!” she called excitedly. “This lady just made super yummy noodles and caramel cake for lunch!”  

I sat down to join her on the couch. Slinging an arm around her, I said, “Yum! And you know what that lady likes to cook for dinner?”  

Still wide-eyed with newfound adoration, Aura turned to me. “What?” she answered.  

“Little girls,” I told her, then changed the channel.

To be fair, all of these predictions were made before American suburbia was in full swing. I’ll even stick my neck out here and presume that Dante never even visited a Chuck E. Cheese. For if he and the others had, if they had indeed breathed in the aroma of overpriced pan pizza and been nearly deafened by the sound of buzzing and beeping game machines, they would have witnessed heaven in its purest, most exact earthly form:

Skee ball.

I ask you: Is there anything more heavenly than the perfect thwump of a ball landing in the 5,000 point hole? Can you think of anything more divine than watching prize tickets pour out in a long, kinked paper chain? What, what, can possibly exceed the pleasure of watching the points counter go up and up, and up again?

Yeah, that’s right. NOTHING.

Well, I guess Muslims might disagree. Because judging from the number of kids there, the place wasn’t exactly packed with virgins.

As for hell? That’s easy. Hell is the sound of those mechanical animals’ eyeballs opening and closing. Creeeeaaaak click. Creeeeaaak click. I wish I could have gotten audio and embedded it here. Let’s just say it’s like the sound of your worst nightmare, times, oh, TEN TRILLION.

Tik Tok, Ke$ha

Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack
Cause when I leave for the night, I ain’t coming back
I’m talking – pedicure on our toes, toes
Trying on all our clothes, clothes

Now, I’m not overly familiar with Ke$ha’s background, though it apparently included one ill-advised decision to eschew the letter s. I do know that around these parts, it is extremely difficult to get a pedicure on any part of your body except your toes. But I guess you have to be really, really clear about that in Ke$ha’s neck of the woods.

Empire State of Mind, Jay-Z

Yeah, Im’ma up at Brooklyn,
Now I’m down in Tribeca,
Right next to DeNiro,
But I’ll be hood forever,
I’m the new Sinatra

To me, Jay-Z does and will always look like a wildly misplaced accountant. Go on, try to tell me I’m wrong:

I’d like to meet the lyricist who took a look at Jay-Z, listened to his songs, and then thought, “Egads! This guy is JUST LIKE SINATRA.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and propose that this person is well acquainted with whoever suggested the dollar sign to Ke$ha. You know what? I bet they met in a Mensa meeting.

Obsession, Mariah Carey

It’s confusing yo, you’re confused you know
Why you wasting your time
Got you all fired up with your Napoleon complex
Seeing right through you like you’re bathing in Windex

Wait. What was I going to say about this again? Oh, right. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  And also: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

 Sexy Bitch, David Guetta featuring Akon

She’s nothing like a girl you’ve ever seen before
Nothing you can compare to your neighbourhood ho
I’m tryna find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful

Now that’s a line that is begging to be tried out in a bar. Actually, maybe the lyricist already did. I’m thinking it went down something like this.

Lyricist: Girl, you are HOT.

Girl: Oh, yeah? How hot?

Lyricist: Well, it’s tricky to put it into words.

Girl: Go ahead, try. I’ve got time.

Lyricist: Okay. Let me start by saying that I cannot even compare you to the neighborhood ‘ho. Not even if I try REALLY, REALLY hard.

[Bouncer appears. End scene.]

(Great. Freakin’ fantastic. Now I used the word plug in a post. As if using jailbait and mom porn wasn’t bad enough. With plug, it shall be like the Trifecta of Filthy Search Terms. Oh, THE LENGTHS I GO TO FOR THIS BLOG.)

Now I just don’t know. Without diminishing in any way the tragedy of families who have lost a child to a choking accident, I’m not convinced that a redesign is really necessary here. Some chopping into bite-size pieces? Sure. Some careful observation of your child when eating? Of course. But a redesign? Maybe for Toyota accelerators, yes, but not the hot dog.

I’m not sure if today’s parents have actually lost their common sense or if manufacturers, government officials, and the medical community just think we have. For instance, this is Aura’s current favorite toy.

Yep, it’s slime. Yep, it’s gross. And yep, it makes the most terrifically awesome disgusting sound when you slap it. But despite what you probably might not think, you are NOT supposed to eat it. See? The bottle says so.

Perhaps some warnings are a little too much, even possibly weakening the value of warnings that are really needed. Also, where are those other labels, the ones parents themselves would write? Where, I ask you, is the BEWARE! DANGER! sticker on parking lots, where Aura has now fallen once for every month of her life with forehead gravel-imprint marks to prove it? Door hinges, tile floors, wheels on shopping carts, the occasionally sharp-edged, lawsuit-worthy Lego block…hell. I’m going out tonight and getting me a label maker.

And if anything needs a stern cautionary sentence or two, it’s these kids themselves. Something like “CAUTION. THIS SMALL PERSON HAS COME IN CONTACT WITH APPROXIMATELY ONE MILLION BILLION OTHER SMALL PEOPLE. IT IS GUARANTEED HE OR SHE WILL GET SICK, GET YOU SICK, AND GENERALLY SERVE AS AN EXAMPLE OF WALKING PLAGUE.”  That would work nicely, I think.

In the meantime, I’m so capitalizing on the hot-dog fear. I hear that the first person to come up with a plausible redesign wins a lifetime supply of foam wall coverings. You know, because walls hurt you if you run into them.

Actually, I wasn’t only taken aback. I’d say I went through several stages of reaction. I’ll openly admit that the first stage was pride and perhaps a little self-congratulation. We, the people in this apparently rampant-with-energy-greed household, are above average! A full 114% above average! Not everyone can make that claim, you know! Particularly not those crunchy hippies with their REUSABLE SHOPPING BAGS and AIR-DRIED CLOTHING and GOVERNMENT-APPROVED ENERGY-EFFICIENT APPLIANCES.

Then I realized we were those hippies. So I moved on to the embarrassment stage, which I believe was probably the main objective of this nifty line graph:

As I ran around turning out lights and pulling the television plug right in the middle of Aura’s nightly viewing of The Electric Company, I began to panic. Did all my neighbors get this same report? On their reports, was it noted that #19, that house up on the hill, was totally skewing the neighborhood average? Were there forcible suggestions that maybe the people at #19 should not be invited to any more neighborhood BBQs and, also, that little girl whose balls periodically roll down the hill into their yards? KICK HER. As I stood there in our kitchen, now eerily silent thanks to the newly unplugged refrigerator, and listened to the sounds of Aura fumbling her way through the darkness, I couldn’t help but wonder.

The embarrassment eventually gave way to anxiety and fury and a bunch of other emotions I typically reserve for Senate campaigns and the American Idol results show. By the time last weekend rolled around, I was terrified to even drive through the neighborhood, slumping low in the driver’s seat as I waited for the sound of compact fluorescent bulbs pelting my windows.

Honestly, I’m stupefied. Our heat is oil. We cook with natural gas. Sure, I run the washer and dryer a lot, but what can I say, besides that we’re evidently a sloppy lot? We’re pretty good about turning out lights when we’re not in a room, and we rarely forget to power down our laptops. And for heaven’s sake, I can barely remember where the vacuum is, never mind USE it.

All I can come up with? The fans. We all have fans next to our beds for white noise. It started with me in college, then I passed on the addiction to Adam, and we collectively helped Aura develop her own dependence. We even hooked my mother, who has been living with us for several weeks. It’s like Fan Central here. One can only imagine the furrowed brows of the electric company officials, huddled as they surely are around our file, perplexed by the fact that our energy usage actually goes up at night instead of down.

Poor patsies. They’ll never figure this one out. Well, they might, once our house is the catalyst for the blackout of the Northeast corridor. But for now? I think we’ll sleep just fine, our fans drowning out the sounds of neighbors rioting outside. They can stomp their Birkenstocks as loud as they want. We won’t hear a thing.

DAY 8

Setting: 1980s, Earth

…And God looked down upon what he had created and was not pleased. “These people!” God said. “They are spending wildly and unwisely. Just look at all those Swatch watches and Tupperware parties. It is now time to show them the error of their ways.”

And so God introduced a new creation, one He believed would finally and quickly demonstrate to people how foolishly they were wasting their money. It was a creation, He predicted, that would end the problem once and for all. It was:

THE CLAW MACHINE

Unfortunately, God may have given His people a little too much credit. Turns out that as soon as one generation learns its Claw Machine lesson, another one comes along and needs some firm, costly educating, all over again.

Everyone blames the recession on the mortgage industry, but God? As always, He knows better.

***The winner of the Linaloos.com giveaway is Val!  Yay, Val!