For a very brief moment in time, I considered becoming a vet. That was before I realized how unglamorous “expressing anal glands” was and vowed to be Aunt Becky, MD, the diamond-encrusted tiara-wearing, flawlessly brilliant doctor, which makes what I do now even more laughable.

Reach for the stars, kid. Just don’t be surprised if they don’t reach back.

Anyway.

I woke up on Saturday to the whining of two very small, very bored short people. I hadn’t been up for twenty minutes before Amelia was asking to go to the store to buy some Hello Kitty shirts and Alex was grumbling about the solar system he’d constructed out of tennis balls.

Blearily, I suggested we go to the green house – Alex’s favorite hotspot – a prospect that was met with hoots, hollers and elated screams as the two small people struggled to dress themselves.

We spent an hour there before I had to drag them away from the koi ponds and those gazing balls (which they call “planets.”). They were both fairly indignant and I wasn’t quite ready to take them home, so I suggested that we go to the animal shelter to look at cats.

I’m big into shelter animals. Especially the type that aren’t normally adopted. I try to go for the one animal in the whole joint that looks as though no one will ever adopt it (see also: my one-eyed cat named Ophelia; may she rest in peace).

My (NON-SPONSORED) PSA for the day: did you know black cats are less likely to be adopted? Anderson Animal Shelter, where we adopted our cats, was teeming with them. Apparently people still think they’re bad luck. I say, shut your whore mouth and adopt some black cats.

Two hours later, we left with two new cats.

Now I’m stuck naming them.

(I nearly named Alex “Cash,” if that tells you anything.)

We used to foster cats, well before The World’s Crankiest Baby was born, and it turns out that naming cats isn’t all that easy. Our last foster cat, I named “Little Cat” because she was both “little” and a “cat.” I wanted her adopted just so she could be saved from the hell of living as “Little Cat” for the rest of her long life.

The first cat was easy to name. Her shelter name was “Cassie” which is a fine name for a cat, although I immediately called her “Chloe” because I can’t remember names to save my own ass. So Chloe it is.

The second cat, a portly black domestic medium hair, has proved to be trickier. In fact, it’s been so tricky for me to replace his given name, “Kendell,” that I’ve been calling him “Basement Kitty.” Because he hangs in the basement, natch.

I’ve been rolling names around in my mind. Frank? Ed? Bunny? Puppy? Joe? Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre?

You know how you just KNOW when something is right? Well, none of those are.

In the meantime, I’ll keep calling poor Basement Kitty, “Basement Kitty,” until something better comes along. For his sake, I hope it does soon.

What should I name my blurry cat, Pranksters? HALP ME.

I blog under my real name. For as long as I’ve written on Mommy Wants Vodka, I’ve used my real name: Aunt Motherfucking Becky. I WAS plain-old “Becky” until The Real Becky came and smashed my dreams to smithereens. Apparently, there is no room on The Internet for two people named Becky.

Anyway.

There’s a lot of babble about keeping anonymous on The Internet and I completely understand why someone would make that choice. This is not a slam against those who choose to use pseudonyms.

I use my real name: Becky Sherrick Harks, which rules, and not just because I happen to be a narcissistic ass-clown who likes the sound of her own name.

This is why:

0) You never worry about anyone finding out that you have a Super Sekret Blog. Because the moment you’re all, “WOAH THIS IS SO-AND-SO’S SEKRET BLOG,” people find it more alluring and therefore titillating to stalk it. Pop my name into a search engine and BAM! you’ve got me out in the open. Not so exciting for my ex-boyfriends to find if I’m just THERE.

1) It keeps you from talking shit. Sure, a good old fashioned rant feels fucking great, but it feels a hell of a lot less great when someone’s feelers get all hurty. The best way to keep your posts anonymous is to post them via a third-party website, like Band Back Together (for non-rants) and Mushroom Printing (for snarky rants).

1) It ensures you will NEVER have to work again. We ALL know how lazy I am, right? That’s a given. Going to work every day is bullshit. Thanks to using my real name, I’ll never have to work again! What employer wants to Google a prospective employee only to find out that she talks about her vagina on the Internet?

2) You get a whole new identity if you ever decide to be un-Googleable. It’s like entering the Witness Protection Program! I’d have to legally change my name and adopt a new identity, which means I could finally be “Princess Grace of Monaco.”

3) You never have to use those annoying cutesy code words for family members, which makes it easier for people like me, who have tiny brains, to understand your posts without requiring a key.

5) You never worry about slipping up and destroying your persona. Because your persona is YOU, baby. Warts and all.

8 ) People relate better to other people, not personas. Even if it means they’re stalking you on Myspace.

13) You waste a hell of a lot less time blurring out the faces of everyone in pictures like they do on COPS. Not, *ahem* that I watch that show.*

21) You can add your Twitter Feed into your LinkedIN profile, ensuring that alongside the professional updates like, “I recently acquired a multi-billion dollar company,” yours can say, “YOU SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH AND MAKE ME A PIE, WOMAN!”

34) You realize that when world’s DO collide (online and offline) no one gives much of a shit.

55) People now expect when they meet you that you’ll probably hump their leg while eating a hot dog. That gets any awkwardness out of the way beforehand.

89) You can put your real name on any name badges, as opposed to “Sex Kitten23.” That’s especially helpful if you’re somewhere you want to be taken seriously**, rather than at Stardollars.

144) You know that no one ACTUALLY wants to track you down and make a lamp out of your boobs, because they would have done so already.

233) You know that – anonymous or not – if someone wants to find you, they will.

*MUCH.

**Shut your whore mouth.

————-

Your turn, Pranksters. What do you think about the internet and anonymity? Do you blog under your name or do you use a pseudonym? Why does that word look weird? Why does it smell like oranges in my house? Why does powdered gravy suck so badly?

Computers and I don’t get along very well. We have a long standing history of disagreeing upon things like, “connection failed” because I can clearly see that the connection has NOT fucking failed. That sort of thing makes me flop onto the sofa and wail, “WHY ME, GOD? WHHHYYYY ME?”

Luckily, I have Big Mac. He and I have an understanding: I put up amazing pictures as a screen saver, irregularly update my software and he does as I ask. We’re like Ebony and Ivory, together in perfect motherfucking harmony.

However.

It wasn’t always a yellow-hued music video love affair.

Back in nursing school, I lived at home (just like any hot coed wants to do) with my young son, espousing my brilliant papers onto one of the computers my father owns. I did not own my own computer and my father, God Bless Him, begrudgingly allowed me to use his.

When I say “begrudgingly,” I mean it. Times eleventy-thousand-million.

And by “his” I mean my two-year old son’s computer; the one my brother had fashioned out of old parts to give to my son. My kid had a computer and I did not.

Enrolled in school again, I begged him to install MS Word onto Ben’s computer so that I could properly format the glitteringly stunning papers I had to write. He patently refused, firmly informing me that “Word Pad was good enough*.”

And forget any printing capabilities, Pranksters. He locked those up tight, like I was going to use them to print off pictures of cats playing the piano.

(I was)

I was the only assbag on the planet with access to a printer that had to save papers in Word Pad, email them to myself, then get to school early so that I could print them out. Half of the time, I had to rewrite them.

See, my father is an amateur computer tinkerer. He reads those PC Magazines that sound like Fox News. The headlines are splashy tidbits like, “THIS SPYWARE WILL KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR DOG if you don’t install XYZ.” And “HIDDEN WAYS YOUR COMPUTER IS PLOTTING WITH TERRORISTS.”

The articles are more subdued, as you’d expect, but the headlines, well, how can you forget them?

He likes to dick around with the computers he owns – always has – and the ones I used to write my papers were no exception. In fact, I think that was the computer he liked to dick around with most of all.

Otherwise, I cannot possibly explain why he’d actually want to reformat the hard drive so many times. He seemed especially keen to reformat the hard drive once I had something saved onto it. Something, oh I don’t know, like A MAJOR RESEARCH PAPER that I’d been working diligently on for weeks.

It was then and there that I learned to put off today what I can do tomorrow.

It’s also when I learned to never trust a man who trusts that Spyware was going to eat him for breakfast.

*What the hell is Word Pad “good enough” for anyway? I still haven’t a clue.

…well, no, no I hadn’t.

At least, not until I was in Paris.

I was fourteen years old, on tour overseas with my traveling youth orchestra and I’d taken an extended vacation to Paris after the other musicians had gone home. My cousin lived there, you see, and I’d gone to visit him.

(this is me with a non-flasher, my boyfriend, Alex)

(no, my son is not named after him)

(although he was a really nice guy)

Along with my First Experience With Nutella (one which has turned into a full-blown Love Affair), I saw the sights and sounds of the city, including the Mona Lisa and several men, fully naked. Everywhere I went, it seemed, grown men wanted to take off their pants and show me what appeared to be hairy sausages.

I was suitably underwhelmed. These canned Japanese Mushroom-thingies were supposed to make want to have The Sex? I was baffled. I didn’t want The Sex; I wanted a barf bag and a kicky pair of shoes. A busy street, in the subway, outside the Louvre, it seemed that even graveyards were fair game for The Flashing of Aunt Becky.

One rainy day, between meals of steak frites and Nutella crepes, we chose to visit the Père Lachaise Cemetery. My mother, always a bit morbid, wanted to see where a bunch of famous people were buried. I myself wanted assurance that Jim Morrison was, dead, and therefore unable to produce any more of his horrible poetry. Even there, standing between a mausoleum and a grave, a flasher showed me his penis.

To this day, I’ve never seen so many men willing to drop trou and pull out their wangs.

Or, I should say, I hadn’t seen so many men interested in flashing me until I produced two sons of my very own.

And if they grow up to flash their penises (penii?) on the street, well, unlike dressing my son in a tutu, I will have a problem with that.

————

Pranksters, I wanted to say thank you for getting my back yesterday (I should have called that post: Go Ask Aunt Becky: TRAIN-WRECK Edition) There’s very little that gets under my skin more than being improperly accused of something I haven’t – and wouldn’t – do.

I can compose books of sonnets, odes, and entire blogs filled with The Error of My Ways but I take offense, not at being called a shitty mother, but being called out for something I hadn’t done.

When I filmed the video, I expected the “U R gonna make UR son GAY” crowd to come knocking at my door. I had my Delete Finger Ready for their onslaughts.

But this, it was like being accused of “having naturally blond hair” or “being a good writer.” Something that is simply untrue.

So Pranksters, I thank you deeply for reaffirming something I already knew. I have the best, smartest, most full of the awesome community of Pranksters on the Internet.

(I consider you guys family, by the by)(I don’t actually care if that sounds creepy).

(this came in today as a lovely Mother’s Day “Go Ask Aunt Becky”)

For someone so seemingly irreverent, alternative and open minded, you truly revealed your small, narrow colors in your recent contribution to the “momversation” about letting your son wear a tutu outside of the house.

Why shouldn’t this be absolutely OK? Why wouldn’t you be an educated mom and teach your son that intolerance should be fought against, and not hidden? Why are you hiding your own homophobia behind a “not everybody is as open minded as our family?” stance.

An openminded family wouldn’t care that their son is making a statement outside of the house. They would support their independence and bravery. What if your son did turn out gay? I’m sure that – watching your blog as an older gay man – he would be horrified at your parenting skills. Something that I’m not sure you’re aware of.

Anyways, I don’t have a question. And I’m sorry if this sounds so angry – but it really pisses me off when I see seemingly educated moms spreading such misinformation in a public forum.

Dear Prankster,

Last I checked, I’ve never actually called myself, “irreverent,” or “alternative.”

And, I’m not sure you’re aware that my son has – several times, in fact – gone out of the house in a tutu. He owns and wears several different shirts clearly designed for girls and is currently sporting some pretty rad toenail polish.

Why should I care if he wants to wear these things outside of the house? Simply put, I don’t. I never have. I’ve not lost sleep about it and I don’t plan to start. The kid is awesome.

I’m not exactly sure why you sent me this email (three times, no less) but I’d guess that you have me confused with the moderator of the video. Either way, your email was not only unfair, but it was untrue. I’ll cop to plenty of “I’m a shitty mother” charges, but this isn’t one of them.

I would – and do – support any of his fashion choices and his ability to be himself, regardless of the social consequences. Will there be social consequences? I don’t know. But I’m aware that the possibility is there.

That said, I said (on the video and in real life) that I’d get my kid’s back no matter what happens and it’s true. If he’s gay? Fucking fantastic. If he’s not gay? Fucking fantastic.

I care about his happiness, not about who he chooses to love.

Not sure how any of this has to do with homophobia or anything else I’m not, but you remind me of a person I once met so entirely convinced that the world was Out To Get Him that he saw hatred and racism everywhere he went. In turn, people avoided him because he was such a fuckbag.

Turns out, you do reap just what you sow.

Love Always,

Aunt Becky

I have been a mother for ten years now.

Ten. Years.

That number – a third of my lifetime – seems to be so much larger, more significant than it was last year. Ten years is a long time.

I fell into motherhood the same way I’ve fallen into every other major thing in my life: accidentally. I’d never given much thought to motherhood, parenting or having crotch parasites of my very own. I don’t have younger siblings or younger cousins, and the kids I babysat weren’t ever babies. If you’d asked me back then if I’d wanted to have babies, I probably would have said a resounding, “Fuck.” and “No.”

To be unexpectedly a parent was the most shocking thing that’s happened to me. If I hadn’t gotten pregnant against the odds, I can’t say that I’m certain I’d have ever walked down that road. I can’t say that, of course, because I’ve never been an adult without having a bouncing baby (of my very own)(I am not a baby-napper) strapped into my car, tooling along with me. I cannot imagine my life without children.

I’ve said many times that without Ben, I would be nothing, and that’s the truth. Every decision I’ve made in the last ten years has been executed while thinking of the betterment of another. Would I be nothing without him? No. Of course not. But I certainly wouldn’t have gotten married, had two more crotch parasites or become Your Aunt Becky.

I do not know where I’d be without him.

It’s been an unglamorous life, that’s for sure, but one filled with laughter and heartache, joy and sorrow, and mostly, the unexpected.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

————-

Happy Mother’s Day to each of you – those of you struggling to become mothers, those missing their mothers, those whose treasures are in heaven, and those of you woken up each day to sticky fingers and poopy diapers.

Happy Mother’s Day, Pranksters.

———–

We’re doing a carnival of Mother’s Day posts from many different perspectives on Band Back Together if you’d like to join us.

1: time the words “put your ding-dong away” came out of my mouth yesterday.

92,284: times I’ve reminded Alex that his penis is PRIVATE.

92,284: times Ben has laughed uproariously when I said this.

67: times I wondered how on Earth I was supposed to survive living in the Sausage Factory for the next 18 years.

98,273: times that my daughter has insisted that both she and I have penises too.

82: times The Twitter has asked me if I’m really a dude.

1: person who had to tell me she was unfollowing me on The Twitter because I called Blogspot “the Supercuts of blogging platforms.”

1: blogspot blog I myself own.

2: bunnies scampering in my backyard whom I have named “Thor The Impaler” and “Professor Mittens.”

Too Ashamed To Admit: hours I’ve spent playing Angry Birds.

3: the fewest number of pieces one can break a stick of dry spagetti into.

0: boomsticks I currently own.

Too Many To Count: boomsticks I WANT to own.

2: rose plants didn’t survive the winter.

3: days I moped about the loss of my roses.

4: camera apps I have on my iPhone.

0: camera apps used in the picture

0: pictures (I’ve taken) that are better than this.

1: reminder I’m giving that we HAPPILY accept submissions on both Band Back Together and Mushroom Printing.

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.

On Friday, I was sitting around, wearing ass-grooves into my chair while chatting on IM with Jana and Crystal, when it dawned on me: we needed a theme for May’s World Tour. And not one of us had any good idears as to what it should be.

I went off to vacuum, which is what I do when I’m Deeply Thinking (okay, sometimes I eat tater tots)(potatoey goodness seems to make my mind all free and shit.) It dawned on me, mid-vacuum-session that this month, it was time to confront our fears.

Shit, I thought. Now it’s time for me to figure out what I am afraid of.

Blech.

Sure, I’m afraid of earwigs, the color orange and the Facts of Life Theme Song, but really, without some extensive CBT therapy, I’m not sure I could fix any of those. At least, not in a month.

However, I do have something I am terrified of. Something I didn’t admit to myself. Something I had to both confront and let go.

(no not Little Debbie Treats, you assholes)

For the rest… BB2G World Tour: May Edition

Anyone who has dealt with chronic pain knows that eventually, you hit a wall. By the time I was seated in my neurologist’s office, silently diagnosing him with GERD, I was in such sorry shape that if he’d said, “what you need to do is grind a ballpoint pen into your eardrum until you hit your brain,” I’d have fought him for his own pen and done it right then and there. Anything to get rid of that pain.

I’d already been on a dose of something I called The Max, or occasionally Dope-a-Max and it had lost it’s efficacy. As we decided to increase the dose, my neurologist warned me that the higher the dose, the more likely it would be that I’d suffer “cognitive impairment,” which, I don’t need to tell you Pranksters, was the last thing I could have used.

Alas, I went up in dose, accepting that I would probably turn into the Aunt Becky equivalent of a gigantic vegetable, hoping that I’d at least be a kicky exotic vegetable like Chinese Broccoli (with stylish hair) or something.

I bought a notebook to jot down the things I’d previously relied upon my memory for. I accepted that I could no longer just “send an email” without having to look up the address to ensure I wasn’t sending it to the wrong person. I lived in a fog, existing one moment to the next rather than planning for even a couple of days into the future.

I was miserable. Probably more than I’d let on.

The headaches were manageable for awhile, but the gaps in my brain’s functioning made me frustrated and sad. I missed being able to say, “oh yeah, April 18, that’s the day I’m going to Take Over The World, Like Skynet, With Better Hair.” I missed being able to tweet at someone without having to copy/paste their Twitter handle.

Once The Max stopped working to keep my headaches at bay, I switched to something else, hoping to regain some of my cognitive function, as well as manage my headaches. I’d done over two years with The Max, and I was tired of it.

I’d been told that the side effects of Dope-A-Max were reversible so I expected to slowly regain my ability to manage the tasks that used to leave me frustratedly crying at the computer.

And who knows. Maybe they will.

But right now, I feel the gaps in my mind are so large that you could drive a semi-truck loaded with watermelons through them.

Mmmmm…watermelons….mmmm.

What were we talking about again?