suburban kamikaze

Seven things I like about you

Now I have to share the limelight. 

So, you know who else is versatile? That guy over at Ducks Mahal. He cooks, he writes music and he hatches ducklings from scratch. If he were married to a cowboy, he'd be the Pioneer Woman.   

As for Style, this woman has more than her fair share. And she is already kind of a celebrity so she doesn't really need any more limelight. Also, I kind of resent her and not just because she has more nail polish than I do. She also has way better hair.

Still, there's style there, no question. She is also very funny, but happily, I am not required to acknowledge that with an award. I am not that big a person.   

You know who else has style?  Jess. Seriously. You can tell just by looking at her that her house is ready to be photographed for the Crate & Barrel catalog, no matter when the photographer shows up. How she does it with all the kids, dogs, hamsters, birds and in-laws roaming around, I do not know. She wears opera gloves in the kitchen. 

For versatility with nouns and verbs, you can't go wrong with Mommy's Martini, Anne Nahm, Whiskey in My Sippy Cup and the inimitable Bossy, whose expertise goes from A to Zumba, with about a million stops in between.

I must remember to ask her where the idea of  "limelight" even comes from. It doesn't sound like it would be all that flattering.

I am also supposed to tell you seven things about me. But I am not good at following directions. So there's one.  -SK

Style. Versatility. Laundry. It's all here. Except that nobody has ever given me an award for laundry.

What to make of this? The author of the "worst blog ever" has given me an award for blogging style and versatility. I don't know exactly what it means, but it's hard to argue with her. I am all over versatility. And style? I don't know anyone else who spends as much time in heels doing other people's laundry and dirty dishes.

It is the product of an overly optimistic sense of how the day will unfold. It is the product of other people's failure to do their own fucking laundry and wash their own goddamn dishes. It is a message to those other people: Mommy's delusional going places.

It's just a PTA meeting, but still. 

  Related: I get to bestow the honors:  Seven Things I Like About You

Celebrity baby trends we can't get enough of:

10 Reasons Celebrity Kids are Cuter than Yours

10. Advances in in-utero cosmetic surgery

9.   Nannies recruited from high-end makeup counters.

8.   South Beach Diet infant formula

7.   Christian Dior diapers

6.   Celebrity breeding program carefully managed to block character actor gene. 

5.   Baby spa treatments take all the stress out of teething, terrible twos, preschool. 

4.   All-over tanning salons eliminate unsightly diaper lines. 

3.   Luxury strollers equipped with professional lighting.

2.   Photoshopping done by Lucasfilms Ltd.'s Industrial Light & Magic.  

1.   Sperm and egg required to audition. No exceptions.

Photo: No such thing as a bad hair day at Celebrity Elementary School.

 

from the Reasons Why archives: 25 Reasons You May Not Reach Silver Anniversary

Like you have a better system

People are always asking me, "SK, how do you manage to do it all?" 

As if I have time to answer questions like that!  But what choice do I have? (Which coincidentally, is also the answer.)

Even so, you've got to have a system.

If you are a man, or a teenager, this can be as simple as manipulating the biological impulses of your closest female relatives, whose genetic makeup predisposes them to do it all for you.

But for me, this means Post-It notes. By which I mean any rectangularly-shaped scrap of paper that can be adhered to every surface in my range of vision.

The best thing about this system is the way in which reminders can be used to trigger other reminders in an Inception-like layer of redundancy; a yellow Post-It above my desk reminds me to find some notes that would not even be missing right now if I had remembered to tape them to my desk. If that is not proof of the beauty of this system I don't know what it is!

I'm not saying it's perfect. As with any system, there are occasional breakdowns.

The small purple reminder I left to remind myself  "March 17" is, I'll admit, something of a mystery, but at least I know when it is due. In my line of work that is really the important thing.

The point is, I have made myself a note to take it down by next week, when whatever it was won't matter anyway. Which works out perfectly because next week is going to be five different colors of impossible.  

 

from the Mother of Invention archives: Patent pending, Einstein's Mommy

Sh*t your Ken doll says

It took them half a century but the people at Mattel finally figured out that a plastic six-pack and a pair of shiny plastic biceps could not make up for the fact that when it came to talking to women, Ken was in way over his plastic head.

It wasn't entirely his fault. Ken was cast in the role of a character actor; built to disappear into whatever story line generations of girls could project onto him.

On his own, however, Ken fell into the same plastic traps over and over again.

"Does this dress make me look fat?" asked College Barbie. "Do you think my friends are pretty?"

"Have you given any thought to where this is going?" asked Late Twenties Barbie. "Do you see yourself ever having children?"

"Is that what you're wearing?" Early Thirties Barbie wanted to know. "Are those really your friends?"

Late Thirties Barbie was relentless: "Where are the fucking juiceboxes? Did you remember to buy diapers? Did you have a good sleep?"

Decade by decade, Ken made the mistake of taking each query at face value.  Sadly, just when Ken had started to pick up on the existence of subtext, Over-40 Barbie had pretty much stopped talking to him to altogether.

But thanks to a little microphone near his heart, three buttons on his back and the ability to play back a recorded message, the newest Ken on the shelf can look forward to a lifetime of doll-wooing in which all of his lines will be fed to him in 5-second bursts of exactly what she wants to hear.

"Sweet Talking Ken" can't lose! He will always know the right thing to say: "Instead of badgering you for sex this morning, Late Thirties Barbie, I'm taking the kids to the park. Why don't you sleep in a little?"

All of which has got to feel a little unfair to Old Ken, not that we will ever know. He doesn't really like to talk about his feelings.

 

From The Secret Life of the Suburban Man Archives:   Home Improvement Television

The Complaint Department, Oscar Edition

I wake up to find this in my inbox:

"The SK has nothing to say about the Oscars? Tap tap tap....just waiting for the SK to tell me what I should wear, what party to attend, with whom, and which movies make the cut...You can’t just leave green jello up all week.  People get bored.  They topple governments."

Can you believe it? It's now my fault that people are rioting against the government in the Middle East and Wisconsin.

I may have stirred things up a little bit in the cheese state, but honestly, I have never even been to Tunisia.

Just because I have a lot of shoes doesn't mean you can lay everything at my feet.

On the other hand, I suppose the Jell-O cup is getting a little stale. Not literally. Literally, it looks completely unchanged. In any civilized place, like the Greater Miami-Fort Lauderdale Area, that cup would be an ant planet by now, complete with its own Dolce & Gabbana and a walk-in plastic surgery center.

My point is, I welcome your complaints and I admit I have left you hanging a little bit on the whole Oscars thing.  So just to clear that up:  I will be wearing Gap. Corduroy, of course, but with lots of chunky jewelry and my rhinestone-adorned Infinity Scarf. Because otherwise, what the hell did I buy that thing for?

Honestly, sometimes I look in my closet and I think, whose life is this? Because I spent pretty much the entire week wearing the same pair of gray corduroys and a black t-shirt.  And there are at least three Oscar-caliber dresses hanging in there.

Then I remember, it's aspirational. If Ari Emanuel calls with an invitation, I won't even have to think about what I'm going to wear.  

As for the movies themselves, I will be booing loudly at any mention of the word "Inception," because an endless series of car chases and explosions taking place inside a dream, inside a movie, is just as boring as an endless series of car chases and explosions taking place anywhere else inside a movie.  The correct answer is Winter's Bone. 

But while we're on the subject of complaints can I just say that I have been really, really busy?  No?

The truth is, there are weeks where I just don't have enough time for you. But it's not because I don't care. It's because I do.

Every single SK post goes through a rigorous process of quality assurance. You would not believe how much time I spend on things like hyphens. That is how I know that the trademarked brand of gelatin dessert has one. There is also fact-finding followed by fact checking.  That is how I know that the gelatin dessert on the window sill in my daughter's room is not actually Jell-O at all. Then there is the process by which I decide to call it Jell-O anyway, because "gelatin dessert" sounds like something some asshole in the Kraft public relations department would write. 

There are also, sadly, stretches during which I am not in the least bit funny. I swear. You can ask my family!  Sometimes I use this time to write stories for other less funny publications. Then, exactly at the point at which these stories are due, I return to SK with a vengeance that is known as "procrastination." 

I could write an entire screenplay in one sitting with a deadline for something else hanging over me.  And it would still be better than Inception.

 
Photo: Oscar night at the Kamikaze house.

Prose and eros

From the Valentine's Day archives, because I didn't have time to get you anything this year.

But that doesn't mean I am not thinking of you.

-SK

I would like to be able to show you the slutty new tattoo* I am sporting as a Valentine's Day surprise for Mr. Kamikaze, but I can't.

And not just because I didn't get one.

I also didn't get one in a place you can't show on public radio, if you know what I mean.

But seriously. I am actually here to talk about books. 

Not here. Here.

I only used that whole slutty tattoo business to rope you in. It's an old trick and I take no credit for it. But I'm not going to apologize for something that you fall for every single time! You are practically asking for it.

But wait!  Not just any books. These are sexy books. Books to read between the sheets even.

And if there is anything better than getting into bed with a fresh stack of books, then I am not the Internet's foremost authority on sex and/or laundry.

*As for the tattoo, I had envisioned something guaranteed to make Mr. Kamikaze's heart pound with excitement. Upon further reflection, and with a writer's keen instincts for unintentional irony, I decided against having "Antiques Roadshow" emblazoned across my collectibles.

Happy Valentine's Day.

-SK

From the Valentine archives: Sex in the Suburbs

The backup plan

Mr. Kamikaze and I have an ongoing debate on the subject of driving in reverse.

He is of the opinion that I am doing it all wrong. I am of the opinion that passengers being chauffeured to the train station should walk keep their opinions to themselves.

But it is more than academic now that Boy, Esq. is learning to drive.

This is a stage of parenting in which unresolved marital issues tend to resurrect themselves like zombie pedestrians in the crosswalk.

Leaving aside his refusal to acknowledge the number of times over the years in which I have saved our lives by pointing out his errors from the passenger seat, the bottom line is this:

I spend as much time backing out of the driveway in a day as certain train-riding people spend behind the wheel all month.

It begins at 5:30 a.m. and continues throughout the day, under conditions certain train-riding people could not imagine. I back up in good weather and bad - a distinction so marginal as to be practically meaningless in Chicago.  I back up before I have brushed my teeth or my hair and again afterward. I back up while reciting the daily schedule, arguing about chores and handing out lunch money. Some days I back up in the process of discovering I have no money. Then I have to back up while writing a check. 

I back up by myself and I back up with a passenger load of middle school girls so loud you can almost hear them over the blaring Justin Bieber soundtrack. I back up while turning the radio down; I back up threatening to turn it off.     

So when Mr. Kamikaze tells me I am doing it wrong because my head is turned over my left shoulder instead of over my right, I laugh so hard I nearly back up into the garbage cans.  

 

From the Other Stuff I am Right About archives: "Missing" soy sauce discovered in refrigerator exactly where wife said it would be, A palm tree means never having to say you're sorry

The first cut is the D list

I am prepared to swallow my pride and accept that a part-time career as a journalist and shallow humor writer does not qualify me as a literary critic. Still it stings when the Macbeth paper I edit for my son's 10th grade English class is returned with a D.

In my defense, it was honors English and I've never read Macbeth, so probably that works out to more like a C+ when you factor that in. Or rather, when in you factor that.  (Or is it "whom?" I can never keep those straight.)

My point is, I'd like to see his English teacher try to write a coherent story in 15 minutes with an editor standing over his shoulder screaming "15 minutes ago, lame ass," and the ballots are not even all counted! and the phone is ringing with a call he has to take or he won't be able to finish his other story which is due seven minutes after the first one and the only thing he's had to eat all day is Cheez-Its.

Whatever. I am prepared to cede the point when it comes to Shakespeare.

But the next assignment? A parody of a news story. And  I don't like to brag, but I have been writing news parodies for decades, sir. Sometimes even on purpose.

I pass on to my son a bit of the craft, the word play, the deft substitution of the ridiculous for the absurd. His piece, in which House Republicans draft a proposal to repel health care, makes me laugh. It's good, I tell him. But what do I know? 

It comes back with the word "repel" repeatedly crossed out. Above the first one, the teacher has written "repeal" in red ink.

Now my son is convinced that his mother could not even pass tenth grade English.

"Honors English," I say.  Because how hard could the other class be?

 

From the literary archives: A Stapler of One's Own, All's well that ends mostly well, Portrait of the agent as a young man

"Worthless Blather" would be a great name for a cocktail

Ever since I read the letter that  hangs outside the theater door at The Second City in Chicago, I have pined for a heckler of his caliber.

Michael J. Morris of Minneapolis was so peeved after seeing a Second City show" (the quotation marks are his) in 2009, that he immediately typed out the five paragraph letter of complaint that sits behind glass near the upstairs bar, where Kevin makes a very nice Margarita. Not too sweet.

Morris' rant is one of the most passionate works of scolding you will ever read. You can almost see the little beads of indignation-inspired sweat hanging just above his upper lip as he types.

"Your humor is stupid, childish and without any reason for being," Morris fumes. "I found about five percent of your material only slightly humorous. The rest of it was worthless blather, filled with cheap profanity and tasteless sexual slurs."

Morris is no fool. He knows that cheap profanity and tasteless sexual slurs are comedy gold, even in Minnesota. But he is drawing a line in the hard, frozen, earth.

"You people will go on making your crappie little money with your crass, ridiculous, asinine excuse for humor. I'll stay the way I am," he vows. "Second City; I'd call you Second Pity. Because you are pitiful."

Morris could have left it right there. As an expression of contempt, you can't do much better than "pitiful." That "pity" rhymes with city was just a stroke of luck.

But Morris knew that no self-righteous rant would be complete without an answer to the question: Why the fuck should I care what Michael J. Morris finds offensive?

Why should you care? Michael J. Morris will tell you why: "Because of sick, morally unconscious people like you this country is headed for collapse."

It's not just unfunny. It's unfunny enough to bring down a country.

So when D. "Ballbuster" Bennett referred to my work recently as "inane bullshit", it was a little disappointing. It's accurate as far as it goes, but it just feels like the effort isn't there. Especially from someone who wants us to believe that people call him "Ballbuster."

John Smug-something goes a little further, but still falls short of the Michael J. Morris Gold Standard. "Why is NPR posting this drivel?" he writes. "I suggest you leave the purveying of "humor" to people that are funny."

I give you "credit" for the ironic quotation marks John, but still.

Michael J. Morris does the math.

Photo: Michael J. Morris is just getting warmed up, by Rick McCawley

State of the Laundry

The state of the laundry is a disgrace frankly.

But something in the Constitution I believe, requires us to address this from time to time. Or possibly I am thinking of the Health Code.

Either way, it's not like anyone else is going to do it. Please don't even pretend that is not your wet towel on the floor.

Trust me, a bipartisan crackdown is coming. Left or right, there is no excuse for our failure to get both socks into the washing machine at the same time.  

We are serious. The days of sternly worded Post-it notes in rainbow colors are over.  From now on, they will all be yellow.

Mark my words. Or read the full text of my address to the nation at NPR.org

The Naked Book Club, by S. Kamikaze

It is no secret to those of us who have never had a life-changing relationship with a dog, or whose parents did not accomodate our literary ambitions with dramatic forms of abuse, that the road to writing success runs straight through the bedroom.     

Which is as it should be, certainly. You don't have any business as a novelist if you can't write between the sheets.         

Happily it's a proposition that can be reduced to a simple formula.

I learn this in a Chicago Tribune story about playwright Laura Eason, whose play "Sex With Strangers" both incorporates and unfolds by this contrivance, as expressed by the following equation:

Sexy Title + Hot Characters + Topical Subject + Literary References + Big Twist = Your Name on A Book Jacket and/or Theater Marquee  

Could this be any easier?

I have sketched out three novels before I even finish the story: 

Sex With Delivery Men:  Merry Getlucky is a bored 32-old housewife with Facebook friends in two cities, perfect breasts and a Charles Dickens crush no living man can compete with.  Then along comes a mysteriously seductive UPS guy with her latest Amazon package and a big brown truck full of Expectations. Now she's ordering books she has no intention of reading, trapped in a box of her own making.    

Hard Drive:  Holly Bytes is a 24-year-old computer hacker whose perfect breasts mask a heart hardened by hard luck and hard men until the day she stumbles over a power cord in the library computer room, erasing all traces of a handsome literature student's graduate thesis. But when she offers to help him recover his files, she stumbles upon a shocking secret: Ulysses is unreadable.   

The Naked Book Club: The members of Hollywood High School's Jane Austen Book Club have a terrible secret and it's not just that they're vampires who look like Abercrombie & Fitch models.  They haven't read a single book all year. So how is it they know so much about Persuasion?  

The Naked Book Club Part II: Still Naked: What has happened to all the cheerleaders?

Lightly scented ginger rebuke

It is nothing really.

A few bars of seasonally scented soaps and body lotions.  A guest robe. Which is really soft and matches the decor, but still, it's just a bathrobe.

It is more than the Suburban Executive can take. Even as she massages ginger hand cream into her skin, its lightly-fragranced emollience feels like a rebuke.

"There must be five kinds of soap in here," she says, sliding her arms into the cloud of a robe.

"I can't help but feel that this is some kind of rebuke."

"Don't be silly," I tell her. Just having toilet paper would be a rebuke.

It is true that bathrooms at the Executive's house are sometimes lacking in "amenities." But that is part of the adventure charm bathroom. One of the first things I do after arriving there is make phone calls from the guest bathroom to other friends.

"Oh my god," I say. "All the towels are on the floor. Also? I am pretty sure these are the beach towels we left here last summer."

Housekeeping is a very low priority for the Executive. You don't get to where she is in the high-powered world of not-yet-bankrupt news publications by impressing people with the grade of toilet paper in your guest bathroom. What's weird is that she seems to have passed the same priorities on to her housekeeper.  

But these are the things that make her house as familiar to me as my collection of too many opened cereal boxes in the pantry is to her. She spends hours trying to impose a little order in my kitchen only to return to find that I have somehow accumulated 15 jars of dijon mustard. Again.

The point is, there is comfort in familiarity even if there is too much mustard and no towels. I am not talking about literal comfort, of course. There is nothing comfortable about trying to dry yourself off after a shower with the little pack of Kleenex from your purse.  Now that I think about it, that is not the point at all.     

But I can't imagine staying at her house and finding things like soap, towels, toilet paper or a working light fixture in the bathroom. It would feel like I didn't really know her anymore.  Which, sure, would probably feel okay for a minute or two, especially right after a shower, but later on, certainly, it would feel bad. 

My point is, friendship is not about the number of kinds of soap in your bathroom or the softness of your towels.  But it doesn't hurt to have a couple of extra jars of dijon mustard on hand.   

Oh 2010, we were just getting used to you

Worst Celebrity Baby Trend of 2010: All of them.

Most Annoying Justin Bieber song of 2010: All of them.

Decorating Trend That Totally Fucked Us Over:  The Return of Pink Bathrooms. 

Shoe Trend We Totally Fell For: All of Them, but especially, all of them.

Fashion Trend We Totally Rocked No Matter What Our Husband Said: Corduroy, but also, all of them.

Fashion Trend We Were Convinced We Rocked Even Though We Were Really About 10 Years Too Old to Pull it Off:  I'm sorry? 

Best Red Wine of 2010: All of them.

Song We Danced to Way Too Much Even When We Heard it In the Grocery Store: All of them.

2010 Date Nights That Included a Stop At Home Depot:  All of them.  

Most Appalling Thing We Did This Year According to Our Teenagers:  All of the above. 

Number of 2011 Resolutions Aimed at Defending "Most Embarrassing Mom Ever" Title:  All of them. Duh.

 

Photo: Ringing in the New Year with an Authentic Midwestern Hamball

Just don't care now available in family size box

From the just-don't-care archives: The secret is pretending to care

As to rumors that I will spend Halloween sitting on the front steps dressed as Pussy Galore and handing out candy cigarettes to the neighborhood children...

That is ridiculous. It has always been my practice to walk around. I will leave the cigarettes in a bowl outside.

 

There is only one rule in our house. As soon as I remember what it is, someone is going to be in a lot of trouble.

Nothing. It's what's for dinner.

More recipes from the Not Cooking archives:

Like "Julie and Julia" only with bigger pots

The Secret Ingredient is Spite

Having a Ball in the Midwest

Saving the earth, one load of teenage laundry at a time

Trust me, there is nothing in artist Alma Loveland's interpretation of laundry know-how that is going to get my teenager to do his own laundry from start to finish.

For one thing, it's way too complicated.  Lint removal?  The pretreating of stains? You may as well include the instructions for launching the space shuttle. Or loading the dishwasher.

But it's an inspired piece of artwork, commissioned as part of Blogher's Voices of the Year project, that captures perfectly the aspirations of parenthood:  One day he will have his own children and they will leave wet towels all over his floors.    

It could also help clean up a much bigger mess than the one in the laundry room. It's up for auction with all proceeds going to the The Nature Conservancy for the benefit of the Gulf of Mexico.   

 
 An Open Letter of Apology to My Future Daughter-in-Law

Our pursuit of unshaven men takes a harrowing turn

It may have been my idea. Who can pinpoint the exact moment an idea takes shape?

But if I am going down for the crime of having dragged everyone into the theater that evening, I am taking A.O. Scott down with me. It was Mr. Scott who wrote the New York Times review that led me to believe that Eat, Pray, Love, the movie, was more than the sum of its verbs.

Here is the excerpt from his review that stayed with me: "... insouciant, unshaven charm"  Also: "Javier Bardem"

Which pretty much sums up this movie except for the other 135 minutes from which all charm has been completely exfoliated.

The result is a movie-going experience so numbingly awful that I begin to see literary potential in the two hours and 10 minutes I spent waiting for my luggage to arrive. 

We are a few days into the South Florida leg of Margarita Tour 2010 when we are brought low by our faith in New York Times movie reviews and a weakness for unshaven men.  

All my friends and I can do is exchange stares of disbelief as we shamble toward the theater exits like shipwreck survivors.  

As is so often the case, the first thought that pops into my head is a selfless one: We must warn the others.

"Oh my god," I say. "We are about to do the Executive the biggest favor ever."  

This stops the Litigator in her tracks. "No," she says firmly. "We are not."

She is right of course.  If there is one ironclad rule of Girls Night Out, other than the two-drink minimum, it is this: conspiracies against absent posse members are to be encouraged.  

And so we feel compelled to convince the Executive that Eat, Pray, Love is not a two hour and 20 minute Hallmark card read aloud over a lunch of cafeteria spaghetti.  

It might have worked if not for the fact that the first opportunity falls to The Psychologist, who is prone to bouts of empathy and cannot bring herself to follow through.   

Also, the Executive is no fool. If it is so good, she counters, why not see it again with her? 

But no vacation is long enough for that. 

Photo: At 2 hours and 10 minutes running time, Sit, Wait, Trudge explores one woman's quest for the perfect carry-on.

Am I the only one who hated this movie?

I am my mother's daughter

She would really like it if I got into the habit of making my bed and stopped swearing so much.

She doesn't like the way I drive. And would it kill me to wear a little lipstick once in a while?

She has tried to impress upon me the power of positive thinking. "If you believe that a 15-year-old is going to be good company, he will be..." and other stuff like that.

This makes me laugh so hard I almost spill my margarita.

But laughing so hard I almost spill my margarita? I get that from her.

Photo: Not your grandma's grandma.

More questions than answers in my refrigerator

Stuff we should not have said to that Rolling Stone reporter

We've all been there; killing time in some dingy airport while a storm blows over the Midwest or a cloud of volcanic ash settles over Europe.

Hours go by and there's nothing to do but obsessively check our iPhones, flip through the pages of that doorstop of a book we're never going to finish or settle into the cocktail lounge where at least the seats are cushioned.

What the hell kind of masochistic instinct sent us all rushing out to buy another book purporting to unveil the secrets of the derivatives market anyway?

What happened next was really Michael Lewis' fault when you think about it.

Anyway, the next thing you know we've started up a conversation with some guy we kind of know and he's kind of interesting, or at least more interesting than anything else we've got to do at the moment.

It turns out he's a good listener.

In hindsight, we recognize the sheer stupidity of it. But who among us has never unburdened themselves of a few grievances over cocktails with a correspondent for Rolling Stone?

Isn't anything off the record anymore?  Christ. But while we can't unsay it, there's still a small window for damage control, a chance to reduce the fallout by offering some little bit of clarification, explanation, rationalization, justification or possibly just an old-fashioned mea culpa before the next issue hits the newstands.  

Let's all come clean in the comments section, shall we? 

How to feed 4 teenagers for 2 weeks for under $1 million

I know what you're thinking. Impossible, right? 

But I'm here to tell you it can be done. I am almost sure.

With only a week to go before Teenage Summer Camp closes for repairs the season, we are on track to pull it off. 

We may even come in slightly under budget, as long as butter prices remain stable.

Two 15-year-old boys are the biggest challenge. There's about 12 feet of boy altogether, which holds about as much liquid as the diving end of a public swimming pool. 

Milk, juice and 12-packs of every variety disappear as fast as you can say "If I catch you drinking out of the container again, I am going to shut down your online medieval butchery and send you outside to climb trees and drink from the hose just like we did when we were kids, before there was vitamin water."

Their sisters go through butter, flour and sugar as if they are running a cupcake factory.  Which is an exaggeration by a degree of roughly a dozen cupcakes. 

Even so, we've discovered a few tricks to keep costs to just this side of ruinous:

(Actual results may vary.)  

1. Ignore their pleas for every fast food offering in a 25-mile radius as long as possible. (My record to beat: halfway home from the airport.)

2. Minimize grocery shopping. For example, this week, we limit ourselves to one trip per day, not counting the search for little paper umbrellas and cupcake ingredients the girls need for their ongoing project, Destroying the Kitchen with Martha Stewart.

3. Have the children help in meal planning by inviting them to create their own grocery lists.

4. Discard the children's grocery lists which contain nothing but Pop Tarts, breakfast cereal and ice cream flavors.

5. Shop for store brands with names like "Always Save," "Dirt Cheap," and "Mommy Doesn't Love You Enough." 

6.  Prepare to defend your purchase of store brand "toaster pastries" against such fierce protests you will start to believe they can actually distinguish one partially hydrogenated vegetable oil product from another, until you remember that these are kids who believe goldfish taste like cheese.  

7. Craig Claiborne's basic pancake recipe: One quadruple batch makes enough pancakes for four teenagers to put four times as many on their plates as they can actually eat. Snatch some back and you won't have to make pancakes again until the day after tomorrow.  Or possibly yesterday.

8. Let them eat cupcakes.

Photo: Shark-infested sea of cupcakes by Martha Stewart and the Whimsy Twins.

Postcards from the summer camp archives: Teenage wasteland

A day spent forcibly undergoing spa treatments at the hands of two tween girls is no day at the spa

I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee

No Guilt, Great Sex, Flat-Belly Secrets of Celebrity Moms: In which we briefly review the American magazine industry as represented by the reading material at the beauty salon

It's summertime and the reading is easy.

There are so many beauty, health, career, sex, money and parenting solutions on the magazine racks it is hard to believe you are still wearing your hair like that. Why haven't you tweeted your way to a better job?

We fall for the promise of Shape magazine's 10-minute total body-toning workout because that's the kind of stuff you can trust a magazine full of women in bikinis to deliver.

Plus, with only 9 minutes to devote to our own body toning regimen, including shower, we are not in a position to call them out. Even if they do seem to hedge a bit by offering a Plan B: Fake a Toned Body Tonight.

Likewise, we would never question the authority behind Cosmopolitan's Levitating Multiple Orgasm guarantees. We are probably just doing it wrong. Besides, no one knows this stuff like Cosmo. What other publication manages to reveal Never Before Revealed Sex Secrets month after month? Your own husband/boyfriend/dreamdate is always telling them stuff he wouldn't dream of telling you.

If Marie Claire tells us we can Look Like a Million for UNDER $100, we are ready to invest - despite the fact that their shopping list includes a collection of $98 accessories.

But we are pulled up short and spilling our lattes over the boldest of the Overly Punctuated, Multiple Typeface Manipulative Promise Headlines in the Summer Magazine Stack at the Beauty Salon - brought to you by Working Mother magazine: 

Never feel GUILTY again! (it's possible, we promise) 

Really? Has WM discovered the secret to silencing our inner Sanctimommies? Or perhaps a nice selection of summer reds for under $15 a bottle?   

Here is New York psychologist Dana Dorfman, who is quoted three grafs into the story:   "A person without guilt is a sociopath," she says. 

That is setting the bar a little high, don't you think?

Further reading from the Guilt Archives: Bad Mommy Diaries, Is a hobgoblin anything like a hamster?

17 Rules Every Blogger Should Know, Part Three

Rule #17:  Jump in with both feet.

Once you have decided to tip toe through your neighbor's bed of tulips, for god's sake commit.  Doing something stupid halfway is actually twice as stupid. Do the math.

Do not exit the flower bed before you have obtained the money shot.  You're not going to redeem your dignity by crawling out a few minutes sooner than it would have taken to do it right.  They've already seen you. Now you've just trampled their flowers for nothing. 

     

Carpentry Is Easy

Today I am going to teach you how to install perfect crown molding, using only a few simple tools and the tricks I have learned in nearly 15 years of home remodeling experience. 

Trust me, you can do this. And nothing adds as much appeal to a room as a man wearing a tool belt fancy strip of wood at the top of the wall.

There are many different types of crown molding. But we are not going to get into that here. There is also something having to do with cutting angles along a perpendicular joint but I will not insult your intelligence with a recap of sixth grade geometry.

The point is, why don't I have my own home improvement show on the Do It Yourself Network? I have all the right bras. Also, I have lived through more do-it-yourself remodeling projects than I would have thought possible while married to a man who is paid to construct sentences.  But words, as it turns out, are useless when it comes to building home equity, hanging drywall or satisfying a man's need to fondle hardware in the Home Depot plumbing aisle.

I am not bragging when I say I have picked up quite a bit watching him swing a hammer over the years. Debris mostly, but also some technique, which I will illustrate here:

And that is how I managed to surprise Mr. Kamikaze by finishing the kitchen crown molding in just one afternoon, while he was busy practicing the kind of journalism that people used to read before there was Celebrity Baby Watch.

The push-up bra is optional, but can be useful in recruiting help for your project. Not that you need help.  But there is no shame in having an extra pair of hands around for things like actually knowing how to install crown molding handing you the thingamajig used to hold the whatsit.

I had a little help from a friend, who in an ironic twist, happens to be an authentic carpenter. 

This can be a real time-saver.  

You're welcome.  -SK

The smell test

I have just emerged from a three-day flu coma to find that my house smells like sour milk and wet laundry, the source of which - as you may have already guessed - is sour milk and wet laundry.

Family members have apparently used my illness as an opportunity for a three-day laundry and recycling holiday.  An astonishing number of mostly empty milk jugs line the basement stairway, infusing the air with a scent so tangible it nearly masks the undercurrent of abandoned laundry just below.

There is a lot of catching up to do. Three days on the 7-up diet have left me behind the curve. Unfortunately, curves rule this season, according to The New York Times fashion review. Also, "breasts are back."   

Yeah, well. Yours maybe.  

Catching up on world news, I learn that the Japanese are not eXactlY up to speed on the process of gender selection:  Crown Prince Naruhito "shared the blame for his wife's failure" to produce a male heir to the throne, the Times reports.  

But who can snicker at such foolishness after learning that a cabal of Texas ideologues fuming over history's failure to recognize Jesus' role in writing the Constitution have won their fight to wedge Jerry Falwell, the National Rifle Association and a favorable view of Sen. Joseph McCarthy into middle and high school social studies textbooks?

These are people who believe that stuff like the civil rights movement and the New Deal unfairly overshadow such great American intellectual movements as the Moral Majority. Not that high school students won't enjoy it, but do Texas parents really want to relive the whole debate over the sexual orientation of the Teletubbies? 

Among other changes, the group wants students to learn that the civil rights movement "created unrealistic expectations" and that reports of McCarthy era overreaching and anti-Japanese racism during World War II are exaggerated and frankly, beside the point, when you consider the enormous contributions of people like Thomas Jefferson St. Thomas Aquinas.*

*Jefferson was replaced on a list of inspirational writers apparently because his role in establishing the concept of church/state separation irritates Texas Board of Education members. 

Like Japanese criticism of a princess for her failure to produce male offspring, it's only funny until you realize these people are serious.  Just not about history or social studies.  And even then, it's still more entertaining than the average social studies textbook.  The question is, will middle school students get the joke? They don't even notice sour milk when they are stepping over it.

Here is the real lesson kids: American adults can't even hold a civil conversation about social studies, let alone agree on how it should be taught. You may as well just settle in for a semester's worth of Hannity & Colmes reruns.  Take good notes.  This will be on the test.

-SK

Winter log, Day 137: In Which I Am No Longer Charmed By My Snowboots...

 

A valentine for whoever keeps sabotoging Sarah Palin's delusion that she is ready for more responsibility

This can't be accidental. The woman has advisers, right? Political consultants, public relations people, friends?

So who is it who allows this woman to take the national stage with a tattoo on her hand that says whatever you do, don't take me seriously... ? Or words to that effect.

Because if you are Sarah Palin - an ambitious woman whose chief, and possibly insurmountable political liability is that she comes off in public as not very bright - writing stuff on your hand as a crib sheet for a question and answer session is NOT AN OPTION.

And don't misunderstand me: one of my closest friends is a woman who happens to write stuff on her hand. We don't even let her be president of our playgroup. I am just kidding. Our playgroup never even had a president. It was more of a parliamentary system...

Anyway, my point is this: there is nothing wrong with working from notes, even notes on your hand if that's what you prefer. Unless you are Sarah Palin. This is so glaringly obvious that even the dumbest marketing intern working in the office of whoever came up with the new Dockers campaign could not fail to see it.

It has to be deliberate.

Someone in her posse is trying to save frustrated tea-drinking conservatives from their most desperate impulses. Roses are red, violets are blue, I can't think of any other explanation, can you?

A Valentine for Jenny Sanford

For her game-changing performance as the politician's woman scorned, South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford has us fawning in admiration.

Not only does she manage to castrate her creepy, lying Appalachian Trail hiking, soon-to-be-ex husband Governor Mark Sanford in a memoir The New York Times calls an "elegant evisceration" - she does it without ever seeming to relinquish the high ground.

Why expose the father of her children as a "laughably cheap, self-absorbed, soulless, cheating, first-class jerk?" asks a reporter.  Because he's a laughably cheap, self-absorbed, soulless, cheating, first-class jerk?  

But Jenny merely looks puzzled. "It's not the book that put him in a bad light," she says.

And later in the interview there is this:  "He didn't have a lot of experience courting women, let's just say."  Take note Mrs. Spitzer: a kick in the cojones doesn't get any more elegant than that. 

Of course, as campaign manager for Mark Sanford's three congressional and first gubernatorial elections, Jenny Sanford does have to answer for her role in foisting this guy upon the citizens of South Carolina.  But if this book is half as entertaining as it looks, they might be willing to forgive her.

Photo: Roses are red, violets are blue... the best revenge is in hardback at a bookstore near you.

Makers of legal pads, scouring pads, launchpads and Thai noodle dish belatedly embarrassed by inadvertent allusion to feminine hygiene products

Rebranding considered for popular noodle dish.   

Photo: Shrimp Pad Thai by starportfoods.com

Study: 73 percent of nation's working journalists assigned to Kate Gosselin's hair

Concern that beats like health care, Jay Leno time slot are shortchanged

In a new study of America's shrinking newsrooms, researchers say nearly three-quarters of the country's still employed news reporters have been assigned to cover some aspect of the reality-tv mom's evolving hair styles.

"This is a story that highlights profound changes at the root of America's troubled relationship with hair," said one editor, attempting to justify his paper's deployment of two city hall reporters and a photographer to the effort.

"We can not afford to be caught short."

In which we look back over the past year and vow to make 2010 our bitch

Not that there weren't some good times 2009, but honestly? We're not going to miss you all that much.  

The children took up strange and ancient interests but never once remembered to put a napkin under their glasses. 

We almost learned to use the remote control, but lost interest in the first 15 minutes of everything that wasn't figure skating, Clive Owen or Californication. 

Not that we were immune from all of pop culture's charms. We jostled outside a theater in New York to throw ourselves at a handsome English actor, shared a moment backstage with a handsome English rock star and celebrated the 445th birthday of an English playwright who, as it turns out, was a bit of man candy himself.  

April in South Beach was pretty close to perfect despite the invisibility a B-cup imposes in that part of the world. We had to climb over the woodwork to fetch our own napkins at the tiki bar while bartenders carved fresh fruit into zoo animals for the Suburban Executive's drinks.

The summer brought us planeload after planeload of middle schoolers who left wrappers, dirty socks and half-eaten pizza in every room of the house, but who reminded us of what is really important:  being able to send our children off to their parents.

We answered some of the big questions like who buys 64 ounces of ketchup?  

We brought you epicurean delights like Peeps martinis, tried to trick our husband into buying us a vacuum cleaner for Mother's Day and shared the kind of parenting advice for which actual results may vary.  

Along the way, we collected you: The funniest, strangest and most uncooperative group of blog readers anywhere on the Internet.

With your support and comments, our efforts to be funny were often completely derailed. Your digressions carried us far from shore, sunk the paddles and disabled the satellite navigation system.

But you are still here, and for that we are vowing even greater security measures things in 2010. 

Happy New Year,

S.K.

Your cardigan says Merry Christmas but your pedicure says ho, ho, ho.

I am folding laundry in my sweat pants when the phone rings.

I am adjusting the straps on a plunging red push-up bra when the phone rings. 

"I am a little embarrassed to be asking you this," she says.

I am laughing before she even gets the words out. She wants to know what I am wearing.

"Don't talk dirty to me unless you mean business," I say.

But she is serious. She wants to know what I am wearing to the party. "This is not fair," I whine. "I promised Mr. Kamikaze I would stop making fun of Midwesterners and you guys just keep serving this stuff up. What am I supposed to do?"

"I know, I know," she says.  "But seriously."  

"That is what makes it so funny," I say. "You know we aren't required to do this anymore, right?"  I say. "It's right there in the manual under 'grown-ups'. Oh wait. There is an asterisk here ... something about a 12-state region between the coasts..." 

Still, I take pity on her. I share with her some tips from my forthcoming book The Underachiever's Guide to Holiday Party Dressing in the Midwestern Suburbs:  1. Build from the shoes up.  2. Make them fabulous. Go tall for house parties where you won't have to do much walking. 3. If you feel you simply must wear your appliqué Christmas sweater, make sure that at least your toenail polish says slut.

Then  I say, "I have to go. There are people I need to call to start mocking you right away."

"I know," she says. Then she adds, "But it seems to me that you have actually put some thought into what you are going to wear to a Midwestern Christmas party. Why couldn't I make fun of you?"

"Don't be ridiculous," I tell her. "You don't even have a blog."

Everything I know about parenting I learned from "Dancing with the Stars"

Pop culture parenting is so hard.

One minute you think you're in step and the next thing you know, all of your television-inspired parenting techniques are so last week.

Oh well, cha cha cha.    

Today's in-the-know parents? They're taking their cues from a dog trainer. And why not?

The Argentine Tango will get you only so far.  

Please, do not even think of trying to compete with the Midwest for appalling regional delicacies*

Then again, this has got to be better than it sounds. 

*Locution by SK reader Sue, who argued here, that hamballs to the contrary,  the Midwest has plenty of competition. To which I can only say, slider stuffing?  The envelope please.