I had to go to the doctor yesterday. Routine stuff, really. No new diagnoses, no new ailments, nothing of the sort, except that I still give good (neck) spasms. Like, the doctor seemed impressed by my neck spasms. Apparently, I excel at neck spasms. Who knew?

But as he was examining me, he noticed my chin.

You’re thinking, what, you give good chin, too, Aunt Becky? What does that even mean?

To which I would say a resounding, “probably not” and “I don’t know.”

I’ve been stuck with this rash on my chin for the past couple of weeks. On any given day, I was convinced it was typhoid, a tick bite, malaria, diphtheria, the bubonic plague, tetanus, or cat scratch fever. To be honest, with everything else that’s been going on, I’ve sorta back-burnered my chin. I mean, I’m pregnant with a FOOD BABY! Everything else comes secondary!

But my doctor looked at my chin and decided it was a “rash.” He didn’t share the TYPE of rash, so I’m assuming it’s face herpes. I mean, that’s the logical guess, right?

(right)

If it’s face herpes, it means that my face has been sleeping around on me. So much so that I now have a new strain of herpes that grows on your chin. It’s like evolution, on my face! Really, it’s a win.

Except, I guess, if you’re my chin.

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We’re doing a blog carnival over at Mushroom Printing. You should join us.

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Also: my friend Amy sells Scentsy, if you like that sorta stuff (and I do).

I got invited to some PR event this weekend in LA.

PR companies seem to have my address wrong – I get invited to stuff in NYC and LA, under the assumption that I actually live in either of those places and not stuck smack-dab in Chicago, the middle of the country. Perhaps PR companies assume that no one would ever consider living outside of the coasts, and to those PR companies, I would like to offer myself as evidence that people do, in fact, live in the Midwest.

Either way, I’m getting the itch to take a trip (yes, I’m still planning on the Epic Road Trip) and for upwards of an entire minute considered going to this event, just to get the hell out of here.

I can lock the kids in the basement with a litterbox and a fresh bowl of bowl of food and water, right? What do you mean, “kids don’t watch themselves?” That’s bullshit!

I have serious reservations about tripping it out to LA. LA is a great city, of course, if you’re a model or an actress, which is where I lose out. I’m neither. I’m a writer.

When I first posted a picture of myself on my blog, I had people say, “Wow, you’re prettier than I’d have expected.” Which is one of those weird underhanded compliments I never know how to respond to. Do I write ugly? Do you think I’d be ugly because I’m a writer?

I don’t know.

But I do know that LA is land of the beautiful and Illinois is the land of crooked government officials.

So I always feel a wee bit insecure whenever I travel there. Maybe I’m pretty for a blogger, but I’m not shampoo-model pretty and I am okay with that.

The last time I was in LA was a year and a half ago, in the middle of a cold-ass January. I happened to be freshly out of makeup when I arrived, so I made a bee-line for the MAC store, where I required the assistance of a man who probably modeled for Prada when he was not matching skin tones at the MAC store.

When I told him that I needed some powder and that stuff you put under your eyes to remove black circles, he took one look at me and tisked before flouncing into the backroom.

Minutes pass.

Finally, he emerges, breathless, and tells me that he had to go hunting for this particular shade. I looked quizzically at him as he applied it.

“Well, you’re just so…pale!” he sputtered out, then immediately reddened underneath his own makeup.

“We Midwesterners prefer the term, “sluggish,” to “pale,” I replied.

He laughed.

“Besides, how would YOU look if you didn’t see the sun for nine months of the year?”

He laughed harder.

Then he invited me over for dinner at his partner’s house.

I didn’t accept, of course, because I’m from Chicago and I know that “being invited over to dinner” means you’re going to be dismembered and stored in an upright freezer.

Probably.

I’m deathly afraid of fish, rather than spiders, live fish, although I’m not apt to go running out of an aquarium shrieking and screaming in the throes of a major panic attack. In fact, once you learn that I was once stuck in middle of the ocean, ensnared in the tendrils of a Portuguese Man ‘o’ War until I was blistered and raw, my fears of fish seem a little less absurd.

Probably only a little, though.

When I was a waitress, I worked at an outside restaurant right on the river here in Geneva, and one of the jobs in the morning was to clean out all of the cobwebs that sprung up overnight, so that the spiders wouldn’t *ahem* shit on the guests while they ate their overpriced burgers.

Your Aunt Becky knows how to be glamorous, eh?

So, when I woke up on Saturday morning to find this on my back door, as I went out to lovingly minister to my roses, I was mostly amused:

My recreation is stunning, I know. It’s so…realistic!

I did the mother fucking limbo to get underneath it so that I could tend to my roses, and made a mental note to watch the hell out for that web. Spiders eat mosquitoes which are the Devil, so I like them around.

But Friday was also Of The Devil and Your Aunt Becky got a migraine as karmic payback for past misdeeds, so by that evening, after I’d finally gotten the last crotch parasite to bed, screaming her ever-loving head off, I went back outside to water my exotic plants. I’d only bought them, you see, because their names sounded like STD’s and turns out that they need a whole TON of water to stay pretty.

Still suffering from my migraine, my earlier mental note had been tossed aside to make room for the lyrics to “Baby Got Back” and I walked face-first into the spiderweb.

While I appreciate SPIDERS, I do NOT appreciate a face full of spider WEBS and I made my displeasure known by shrieking and then running around my yard impotently for a couple of minutes yelling, ‘GET ER OFF, GET ER OOOOFFFFF.” But the yelling and running only drove the spider webs into my mouth, and then, because I’ve recently lost enough weight and not bothered buying new pants, my pants fell down, I stopped running around, and went back inside to wash the spider web off.

When I came back outside to gather my gardening sheers, some 45 minutes later, I noticed two things:

1) the spider web had been entirely rebuilt.

b) It now had an occupant. A big gigantic red occupant.

“Hey buddy,” I said to it, because I was deliriously migrainey and Charlotte’s Web made me cry like a baby. Plus, a spider that big is always a good ally.

I ducked under the spider web–no way I was about to make THAT mistake again!–and as I was halfway through, the big ass spider spun some web out of its ass and swung itself towards me.

“WOAH,” I cried, as I stepped back, off the porch step. I’m okay with spiders, but this didn’t seem like an overly friendly gesture to me. I grabbed my garden sheers from the table and headed back towards the back door, preparing to go inside.

Casually, I eyed my door-dweller. It stared back at me and lifted one leg at me and shook it menacingly.

No, I rubbed my eyes, that’s the headache talking. It has to be the headache talking. I looked down at my poo-eating dog, Auggie, who was standing next to me, and he looked back at me as if to say, “I dunno.”

Figuring something as small as a spider couldn’t possibly have a vendetta against me, I tried to step back through the doorway. AGAIN the spider spun some web from its butt and lunged at me.

I shrieked and jumped backwards off my stoop, shockingly, not landing on my ass.

The spider wasn’t a regular spider. It was a MAN-eating spider. The spider was going to KILL me for ruining its web!

I went around the outside of my house and through the front door, where I then observed my enemy from the inside. It had caught a bug and slowly eating it while watching me and I swear he was winking at me.

Every now and again, it would raise a hairy leg toward me as if to say, “I’VE WON.”

Then I realized, I could never go to sleep again. EVER. Because that spider not only knew where I lived, it had a VENDETTA against me. It would wait until I slept and lay EGGS in my EARS and then pretty soon, my brain would be full of spider babies.

I got out an icepick, a six pack of sugar-free redbull and lay in wait. Knowing that the spider would come for me, and when he did, I would be READY.

Tragically, The Man Eating Spider had another idea in mind. He hit me where he knew it would hurt most.

Yes, Pranksters, The Man Eating Spider killed MY FAKE CAT MR. SPRINKLES!

That BASTARD! How could he kill my FAKE CAT!?!

But I showed him! Ben crushed his web once more that morning, like the Man Eating Spider crushed my DREAMS for my FAKE CAT.

*shakes fists at sky dramatically*

WHY, MR. SPRINKLES, oh, WHY DID YOU TAKE MY FAKE CAT FROM ME?

*sobs*

P.S. Now I need some good bug stories, Pranksters.

Technology and I have a somewhat tenuous relationship. Without certain members of my family doing such things as “programming my remote” and “plugging in the microwave,” I’d probably still be stuck staring at a can of Spaghetti-O’s forlornly and wishing I could figure out how to open it. It’s not that I’m inept, it’s just that I’m inept.

I’m okay with this because while I have routinely explained that dirty socks actually do not have to roam about the house in pairs of two, looking for a family, but prefer to actually live in the basement by the washing machine, my pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

Division of labor, I guess.

The television, however, I have figured out.

Not maybe the fancy doo-hickeys that go along with it and all the buttons on the 57 remotes that we own (apparently they all do mystifyingly separate but all equally important functions and can never, ever be thrown away, ever), but I understand how televisions work.

See: my television is home to a number of very small actors who are incredibly versatile. While sometimes they boringly report the news (although never naked, because we’re not in the UK), when I switch channels, they seamlessly switch to contestants on American Idol, a wee Ryan Seacrest joyfully narrating and building the suspense. The tiny actors then whip out instruments and sing and dance and occasionally even have talent.

The actors that live in my television set are not the same as the ones that live in yours, though, so we’re never watching the exact same episode of Law and Order: Incredibly Depressing Episode Where You’re Reminded That At Any Moment Someone You Love Might Be Raped (and Probably Die), because having MY actors live in YOUR television set is positively absurd.

But the actors that live in my television are amazing, I’ll admit. They’re almost as awesome as the hamsters that live in my air conditioner that hold ice cubes in their mouths and blow cold air through the vents at me (but nothing, let’s be honest, is THAT awesome).

No, the actors are awesome because no matter how hard I try to catch them in the act of switching between programs, I simply cannot do it. That means that no matter what, I can’t catch Ryan Seacrest announcing, “THIS, is your NEXT RAPE VICTIM!”

But THAT, Pranksters, is what I so desperately require my television to do. If I could make my television set do anything at all, I would make it so that all of the programs did a mash-up.

Meaning, that at any time, you could catch Dexter Morgan mutilating one of the Desperate Housewives, his hair all sexy and askew, as he told them all of his secrets, yelling about his Dark Passenger.

Or maybe Dr. House could come in and do a musical number with some of the Glee kids about the wonders of Vicodin, because honestly, there’s nothing not wonderful about Vicodin, once you get past the potential for addiction and stuff. (WHATEVER)

The horrible contestants at the beginning of American Idol would be chased off the show by some roaming sharks from Shark Week, screaming as they were eaten alive, right in front of your very eyes. I mean, don’t tell me you haven’t thought “Jesus, people GET A FUCKING LIFE” when you’ve seen some of your fat male television actors traipse across the American Idol stage in a Star Wars themed thong bikini, making your ears bleed.

Kate Gosselin would find herself on Dog, the Bounty Hunter as his new wife and occasionally all of the actors would duke it out a la Celebrity Death March.

Then my television would have to make me popcorn. OBVIOUSLY.

While many of you asked the cake redeemed itself in it’s deliciousosity, I regret to inform you that the burning hair smell put me off of it. Then, when I realized the fondant smelled exactly like I’d imagine the color Blue to smell, it further solidified my desire to never let it touch my delicate, refined, distinguished palate.

(the very same delicate palate that loves on Crunch Berry Cereal. Hard.)

So this, my friends, this is a requiem for a Cake Wreck:

Alas, I cannot submit my creation to the SITE Cake Wrecks, because they only accept professional cakes, and as we’ve all gladly seen, I am no professional.

Somewhere, a lone bugle is playing Taps for my sad, sad cake.

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Yesterday as I was flitting about the house uselessly writing a couple of things that I had promised I would do, I noticed that my right ear was making an odd tapping noise. I have a cold, because it’s a day of the week that ends in “y” and I always have a cold, thanks to my three crotch parasites, and I chalked it up to odd inner ear congestion.

As the day wore endlessly on, the knocking in my ear continued, and as I was finishing up the last of my articles late last night, I had a horrible, awful thought that combined the most awful of my fears.

What if something had laid their hideous eggs in my ear canal and now it was hatching to eat my remaining three brain cells? Like an alien? Or a bug? Or an ALIEN BUG?

(what, ME neurotic?)

(shut up)

When I informed Dave of my fears, he rolled his eyes and laughed.

The Daver: “You do remember it’s January in the Midwest, right?”

Aunt Becky: “Yes.”

The Daver: “And that nothing is actually alive.”

Aunt Becky: “Yes.”

The Daver: “And that you’re being neurotic.”

Aunt Becky: “You’d be neurotic too if you were growing an alien bug baby in your ear canal.”

The Daver: (rolls eyes) “Clearly.”

Then I went and flushed my ear canal with water and hydrogen peroxide for a couple of minutes, figuring that it would kill whatever was eating my brain. While it fizzed merrily, I hate to report that my ear is still sort of thumpy today.

The alien baby CLEARLY is immune to hydrogen peroxide.

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Today I am over at Toy With Me, where I am telling the not-at-all (SARCASM ALERT) embarrassing story of my bachelorette party. It involves a clogged toilet, a stripper, and balls on my face.

And, as always, if you’d care to vote for me in The Bloggies under best humor blog (voting ends in a couple of days), here is the link. I will love you all over in ways you never knew possible.

Tuesday brings me over to Toy With Me, where today I am bringing you the hilarious BEGINNING of my biggest insecurity. Shockingly, it’s not about my ass or jiggly post-baby belly. No, it’s something that was the subject of my SECOND column: my weird fear of my vagina.

While I was going through my archives, cleaning up my shitty grammar and the places where my computer lovingly substituted *#&@^@ for quotation marks, I discovered the birth of my neuroses. Which is actually kind of…well, full of The Awesome. It’s rare that you get to see where it all began.

Do I even have to tell you while I’m VERY proud of how this one turned out because it’s hilarious and bawdy and you need to read it, it’s REALLY not safe for work. Unless you have THAT kind of job, in which case, are they hiring?

So I give you The Vagina Monologues.

Below, you have what ran in Canadian Family’s Blog as my first Guest Post over there. It’s VERY safe for work.

And, as if I don’t ask enough of you, The Daver is asking for your help on his blog. Like actual serious help.

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In hindsight, I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t know what he was thinking, but I don’t know what I was thinking either. The gigantic pizza slice costume was one thing, but this, this was something else entirely. But nonetheless, there I was, standing in the middle of the pizza restaurant where I worked, in a Santa costume feeling stupider than I’d ever felt before.

The customers you could tell, were even a little embarrassed for me. I looked like an idiot. But the district manager had gotten the inane idea in his head that for some reason having “Santa’s Helper” in the store for Christmas Eve would somehow bring flocks of customers in for lunch in droves. What he didn’t know could fill volumes. Sort of like the time he taken me aside, just as I’d gotten four new tables who were all waiting for me to get them drinks to whisper conspiratorially, “I think someone is stealing…cheese.”

But I needed the extra money because it was my son’s first Christmas, and as a single mother who was also in school full time, I took every shift that I could lay my grubby hands on. Debasing or not, it was money in my pocket. Shockingly, no one actually wanted to have their picture taken with “Santa’s Helper.” I’m not sure if it was the yellowed, fraying beard, or the fact that my pants fell down about every third step that I took, or that I was obviously female, but no one seemed interested. In fact, everyone seemed to avoid me, which was just as well. I used the time to get caught up on my homework. No rest for the wicked.

Finally, just before I was to go home to my son, some family agreed to have their picture taken with “Santa’s Helper.” Perhaps they hadn’t seen me. Maybe they didn’t like their kid very much. Or maybe everyone just had a fantastic sense of humor. Who knows.

All that I do know is that they thrust their tiny baby onto my threadbare lap. And all that the baby knew was that one minute, she was burbling on her mother’s shoulder and the next, she was shoved onto this stinky scary bearded lady in an saggy red Santa Suit. She did the only sensible thing to be done: she opened up her wee baby mouth and she bellowed. She screamed, she cried, and she wailed.

The picture was taken and a phobia of Santa was formed. This poor kid was going to grow up terrified of Santa. Jumping at holiday displays and wondering why the thought of Christmas always made her feel nervous and nauseous, always trying to get out of festive celebrations in favor of sitting in front of the television with her twelve cats and a pint of ice cream.

It would all be my fault.

Satan’s Little Helper.

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All right, o! Internet, my Internet, it’s time to bring Your Aunt Becky a bowlful of YOUR stories about Sandy Claws and how he terrified YOU as a child. SO BRING IT.

My daughter needs teeth, Internet. MAYBE EVEN DENTURES.

Now I know, I probably told you when I was very heavily ninety-billion months pregnant confidently that I just KNEW that my fetus was teething. I’m sure I was cocky and confident and annoying about it because I’ve HAD babies before and therefore I am an EXPERT on my babies and I just KNEW my fetus was teething my her kicking patterns in the womb.

Then, at 4 months of age, which is when the baby books say that some babies begin popping some out, I was just certain she was teething. The rivers of drool coursed down her adorable pink onesies, drenching us and her, and causing some really disgusting looking rashes if left unchanged. Also, she was kind of a jerk sometimes.

It HAD to be teething. I KNEW it.

After all, BEN popped out a set of chompers at that age. And yet, nope. Not a tooth in sight.

You’d think that I would have learned from Alex’s example. Alex, he of the Asshole Baby phenomenon. Now, before you tie me up at the stake and burn me to a crisp, let me assure you that Alex and I are thick as THIEVES. Honestly, the child is my clone* and there’s not a damn thing I wouldn’t do for him. As a baby, though, I’m pretty sure that he was part Asshole, but he’s grown out of it.

I blamed his *ahem* temperament, though, on teething. For 9 long months, I claimed he was teething (the first 3 were a write off) and still, nothing emerged from his mouth besides the occasional regurgitation of breast milk and the near constant scream. Unless, of course, I was holding him. I alone could soothe the salvage beast within**.

Flattering, until it’s suffocating.

Shortly after his first birthday, he popped a whole mouth of teeth out, going from looking like an old man to JAWS from James Bond overnight. It was weird as hell.

I’m imagining that’s the way Mimi is going too, although with all of her weird bone issues, maybe I will have to invest in some baby dentures, which, you have to admit would be kind of freaking adorable. I can just see them floating in her nightstand in a wee glass. Perfect ickle baby teeth, suspended in water. Maybe I’ll buy her gold and diamond teeth as a consolation. You know, like a baby grill.

She can release a hardcore rap album about life in the suburbs. And drive around in her pimped out Escalade Power Wheels with tinted windows.

Until then, we’ll subsist on weird creepy Gerber purees and I’ll pretend that one of these days I’m going to start making baby foods because I’m going to pretend that I’m one of Those Parents (I can barely be bothered to order take-out or eat anything myself these days). And I’ll just TELL her about the cool stuff she can eat when she gets teeth.

Like…uh all the stuff her brothers (or her mother) won’t eat. Damn toddler food battles.

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How are YOU today, Internet? Come gather ’round Aunt Becky’s dining room table and please, just wipe away the dust. She’s found that there’s no diet like the Topamax/flu diet and man, oh, man if she had a scale, she might notice that she’s lost upwards of 0.5 pounds! (or not)

*I was an Asshole Baby and many people would swear that I’m STILL an Asshole, so, you know, like mother, like son. Except Alex is NOT an asshole now. He’s a love.

**He’s still a Momma’s boy, and I swear that I turn into a gooey pile of mush when he demands that I “cuddle him” and then says, “I WUV my Mommy.” Somehow, it’s all worth it.

On my list of things that I am feeling even more neurotic than my standardish garden-variety neuroses:

1) Being on time. Daver, it appears after six of the longest happiest years of my life, might actually be allergic to being punctual. Not, you see, because he is TRYING to drive my blood pressure into the high 200’s, but because he dawdles.

I’d prefer to be at least 15 minutes early; maybe even more like 30, so watching him do just one more thing on his Linux box makes me wild. I suppose having the Sausages is a great cover for our constant, uninterrupted tardiness.

2) Having a clean sink. My bedroom is STILL not quite unpacked from BlogHer–my bedroom, I should add, is also the place that my daughter sleeps so lightly that the cat farting in the basement can make her eyes open like that kid from The Exorcist. So getting in there to clean it must be when I am without kids.

Which, hahahahaha!

But anyway. Having a dirty sink is one of those things I can’t handle. I can be blitzed from the night before, so zonked from my Lunesta that I’m hallucinating fleets of rabid Attack Squirrels bombarding me from strategically placed corners of the kitchen, and still, you will find me scrubbing pans and loading them dutifully into the dishwasher.

3) Having an empty dishwasher. I cannot handle the thought of having clean dishes in the dishwasher that haven’t been put happily back to their ickle homes in my cupboards. I also hate emptying the dishwasher like it was a Nazi Hitler who ate babies–similar to how I feel about getting gas–so it’s fortunate that my eldest can help.

4) Running out of the sweet, sweet nectar of the Gods, Diet Coke. Now, my love affair with all things nutra-sweetly kissed by that delicious combination of chemicals and tin, is well documented. Dave has often considered putting in a soda fountain to save money on Diet Coke–Diet Pepsi will NOT do, sir, NO–but so far, nothing.

Why yes, yes I am an addict. I swear on all that is holy that Coca-Cola puts something into DC cans to make we weight-obsessed women go ga-ga over it, and I’m not going to complain. Certainly, water is better for me. But water is NOT Diet Coke, the yardstick to which all liquids are measured. And is therefore sub-standardly good.

Besides, there is water in Diet Coke.

Daver calls it “battery acid” which is something I take with several tons of salt, as he is the person who will eat not only beef sticks, but pig skins. So he’s not exactly one to talk on the relative flavor of things.

5) Blogging. On the days that I am not quite sure what I feel like talking about, I feel anxious and sweaty until I am able to find something more that I can pollute The Internet with. Because Lord knows, the Internet will not be able to handle it, and the world may stop turning if I can’t blather on and on about my butt cheeks or something.

Unrelatedly but kind of related if you squint kinda, I am trying to respond to comments IN the box of your initial comment. Because, yeah.

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So what are YOU feeling neurotic about today, Internet?

I have a confession to make, Internet. No, it’s not that The Daver is secretly a 12 year old, because hi, he’s a whole whopping 2 years OLDER than me (old balls)(loose skin) and it’s not that my 5 year plan consists only of one phrase: don’t die. It’s not even that I actually appreciate how much shit I can shove into my mini-van.

It’s this: Back to School Night makes me feel like a fraud.

Every time I have to deal with something related to Ben’s schooling, I feel like at any moment, an unmarked Child-Napping van will pull up and a bunch of guys in polyester suits will spring out and drag me into the van. Then, the soccer moms will all emerge from their coordinated hiding places around the playground, wielding pitchforks and torches; their pony tails mussed and their jeans hiked up to their nipples.

“FRAUD,” they’ll scream at me, gnashing their perfectly whitened teeth. “You’re no MOTHER! GET AWAY FROM OUR KIDS.”

Well, Internet, I guess I might have a bit of an imagination. And maybe a complex or thirty-seven.

(shut UP)

It’s funny, I guess, in one of those not funny kinds of ways, because I have no such issues with the smaller kids, but when Ben reached school age, I just feel like I don’t belong. Most of the parents are older than me by 10-15 years and I’ve frequently been snubbed by them (and no, to answer your question, my nipples were NOT hanging out at the time. And both of my ass cheeks were firmly INSIDE my pants, thank you very much).

It’s obvious that I need to get the hell over myself immediately if not sooner, because, this shit is just ridiculous. I need to make some friends that have kids, get involved and move the hell on to be neurotic about my socks or something.

Believe it or not, the one thing I am NOT neurotic about is my socks.

There’s just something so very…ADULT-like about going in and registering your child for real school. When Ben went to the hippie Nut Ban! school, it was different, because no matter what grade he was in, it always felt like preschool. But shit, man, *I* remember being in 3rd grade pretty vividly.

THAT was the year my mother scarred me for life. And shockingly not by walking around the house naked as a jay-bird, although that would have been pretty terrifying too. No, see, she gave me BANGS that year. Bangs that would certainly have kicked YOUR bangs’ ass. They started approximately at the crown of my head, or maybe it was the back of my neck, I don’t know, but they went all the way to my eyebrows in one straight line.

I’m pretty sure she hated me at that point in her life. Because, obviously.

Long. Straight. Bangs.

When I saw that bangs were making a comeback, a part of me died a little inside. That same part died when I saw stirrup pants AND oversized shirts make their reappearance for the second time in my life, because shit, you know that splatter paint technicolor shirts are coming back too.

I always thought that the eighties was kind of the time when designers threw their hands in the air and then migrated to Siberia for a decade and a half. But, according to H & M, I am sorely mistaken. It was like my childhood vomited itself all over the store, down to the gaudy plastic earrings and plastic pearls and I half expected NKOTB to be blaring from the speakers.

But no, it was some other God-awful screetchy music and I kind of wished for half a second that I was deaf so I couldn’t hear it any longer. Then, when I realized that wishing I was DEAF was stupid, I sort of prayed for a meteor to fall on me.

THEN I realized that I was an old fart and that I’d effectively turned into my mother.

I went home immediately so that I could lay down on the couch dramatically and after I rested my hip (my arthritis was acting up) and changed my Depends, I went outside where there was all kinds of ruckus and commotion disturbing my afternoon Matlock session. I shook my fist at the damn fool kids on my lawn and wished feverishly that I had a cane with which I could beat them silly.

It was only after one of them addressed me as “Mom” that I realized that those kids on the lawn were my kids.

Shit, man. Shit.

A couple of months ago after a particularly awesome boning session, The Daver and I were laying in bed talking. For the life of me I can’t remember how the comment got brought up because you’d think it would really be kind of important, but it the implications were that Dave disclosed that there were actually ugly vaginas. And that he’d seen them before. I’d never thought of a vagina as ugly before and was immediately on edge.

Scared now, I retorted with, “You mean like the porn roast beef puss?” which was genuinely what I’d thought he meant.

“Nope,” said The Daver. “I hate to break it to you Becky, but some vaginas are just kind of ugly.”

A phobia was born.

Let’s be clear here, Internet. I am not the type of person that likes to get up close and personal with a hand mirror and my crotch. I figured that vaginas, like penises, were all a little different looking, and all a little FUNNY looking, but ugly? Hm, well, if Daver was saying so, it was probably true because even to save his own lily white ass, the man cannot lie.

Well, of course my next thought was if SOME vaginas were funny looking, did that mean that MINE was? I started gnawing on my thumb nail nervously as I remembered how large my newborn son’s head was and how small a vagina is. I quietly processed this in the dark, my eyes as wide as saucers until I quietly piped up with,

“Is having sex with me like throwing a hot dog down a hallway?”

I may have to call in an impartial third party because The Daver couldn’t stop laughing long enough to answer me.

That’s fine.

The next time he brings it up, I’ll tell him that I think penises look like the Alien from Aliens.