doctrines we have known and not loved

I took some psychology classes in college, and I couldn't believe the absurdity of much of it, Freud in particular. (Penis envy, what a larf! I do think it would be lovely to pee standing up with out having to squat and worry about peeing on my shoes, but that's the end of it. I can remember seeing my first penis as a child, and rather than becoming consumed with envy, I recoiled with disgust at the wormy, snakelike object. "Eww!" My own body seemed so much superior and tidy).

Every now and then I am amazed by people who accept psychological theory as gospel. (I should clarify that I'm not claiming all psychology is ridiculous; I certainly do not mean to disparage "talk therapy" or group therapy, which obviously help so many people. I'm just dissing the more outre beliefs).

As an urban mommy, I'm certainly exposed to so many people who speak the word "Montessori" with such reverence, but after I read Dr. Maria Montessori's book, "The Montessori Method", I was not enthralled. My theory is there would not be such a fetish for Montessori schools and methods if the founder had been named Lipschitz or Snodgrass. Montessori, oh how it trips off the tongue.

Dr. Montessori's ideas did splendidly with her charges, poor orphans in wartorn Italy, but in my opinion, some of these ideas don't translate well to the modern day. (N.B.: I'm sure there are wonderful Montessori schools with delightful teachers where the children revel; my point is just that some of her ideas strike me as wacky and I find it annoying that people speak her name in such reverence while often being unacquainted with the actual philosophy). For example, Dr. Montessori felt that the best way to teach children about measuring was to weigh them every single day and have them record their weights on charts to be posted publicly. I'm terrified by the idea of my daughters developing an eating disorder, and the idea of getting a child so focused on her weight disturbs me (I wonder if anyone actually follows this stricture of Dr. Montessori's nowadays. A lot of Montessori schools vie for authenticity and for being most in the original spirit, so perhaps some do).

Constantly weighing children in a public way seems wrongheaded, but not wacky like some psychiatric concepts. The Sober Husband's father was a Freudian psychiatrist, and he had at least one extremely wacky idea (his most famous work involved giving LSD to dying people, which seemed to both cheer them up and effectively prepare them for death, and you won't find me dissing that). The idea the SH's husband had which I will diss is that there would be no sibling rivalry if everyone knew their place in the family. The father was the final authority and most important member, and his word was law. Next came the Eldest Son (the Sober Husband won this roll of the genetic dice, lucky for him). When the father wasn't about, the Eldest Son/Sober Husband was the next authority figure. The big loser in all of this was my brother-in-law, just a year younger than the Sober Husband. In any disagreement, big or little, the parents always automatically took the Sober Husband's side. "He's your older brother; you have to do as he says", they would say to my poor brother-in-law (as a youngest child, I automatically feel the pain of my poor brother-in-law). My deceased father-in-law felt that this would preclude any sibling rivalry, and my mother-in-law went along with it. It never bothered her to constantly quash my brother-in-law, but it did bother her once she had her first daughter, who as a girl was automatically a lower class than her brothers. Of course, far from quashing sibling rivalry, it gave my poor brother-in-law a lot of legitimate room for resentment of his older brother.

I asked my mother-in-law about all of this once, and she didn't have much to say. "He said it was Freudian, so I accepted it, but later I read Freud, and I didn't see it in there." My husband, the golden Eldest Son, felt it was all gravy for him, but as a parent, he would never impose this system on our children.

This weekend I read a fascinating memoir, Stephen Eliot's "Not the Thing I Was", which retells Eliot's childhood locked up at famed Freudian Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, a sort of asylum for insane children based at the University of Chicago. This book was fascinating in many ways. Like the author, I do not wish to dismiss Dr. Bettelheim's work as a whole, he obviously helped a lot of people, BUT some of his ideas were obviously crazy but nonetheless were treated as gospel by his staff and devotees. The one which stands out the most as insane is Dr. B's rule outlawing deodorant. Dr. B. felt that giving his adolescent charges permission to use deodorant would symbolize that his staff felt his young patients smelled bad, and therefore because it was important for the staff to be loving and accepting, they had to forbid deodorants. The author went to some trouble as a 17 year-old boy to smuggle in and hide a contraband deodorant when he was granted permission to leave the asylum to attend high school.

This really seems to say it all. There is a reality, which is that hormonal teenagers sweat and have a natural tendency to smell bad, but that reality has to be ignored for the sake of theory. Hold your nose and keep parroting doctrine!

mad for power, mad like a cow

I asked four year-old Lola today, "If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?" I was expecting to hear about princesses, but the answer was, with no hesitation, "You! I would be you, Mommy, because I like you so much." (The child was born to shmooze).

Lola continued on: "And then you would be ME." She expressed some quiet happiness at the thought of being in charge of me.


Later, Lola got to exercise some authority when seven year-old Iris suddenly told her to throw their father out of the room. The Sober Husband was in mid-sentence when the order was issued, and Lola immediately assumed a bulldozer like stance and pushed her father out the door. Iris went back to thumbing through her new Simpsons comic without saying anything else. I was initially speechless, and then Iris explained. "She's my security guard! She's the security!" (The husband just went back to work on his computer without complaint).

Evidently I'm popular today, as no one invoked the security four year-old to push me around. I should be, as I bought them cute plush microbes with googly eyes. Lola picked a representation of the mad cow prion, Iris, after much hesitation, got a white blood cell (she came close to getting flesh eating fasciitis), and I got myself a plague bacteria and a giardia (as shown in the picture). Oh, how I love these educational toys. We saw them days ago and at that point I resisted getting any, but we couldn't get them out of our minds, and as the children had been good lately, I took them back to get bugs today. (From the educational tags, you can learn a lot about these microbes, including that they're available online at giantmicrobes.com]. Lola likes to pretend her mad cow prion is eating our brains, and Iris thinks her white blood cell makes a lovely security object.

you need this

I treated myself to a boa made by my friend M (seen in the picture modeling her work) and her talented boyfriend Jovino, who sell their work under the name of Bunnywarez, and I'm just in love with it. I want to wear it every day. Mine is black and white, snuggly but elegant.

I wish M had been making these back in the late 80's and early 90's, when I used to run around in cute dresses all the time. Not only would I have been styling, but I could have used the secret stash pockets so cunningly designed into the boa for my credit card, cash, flask, etc... (I was brutally mugged at age 22, and for about a decade after that I was quite fearful about carrying unconcealed valuables. I used to affect a punkish leather wristband with a hidden cash compartment, but the boa would have been a better solution. It's amazing how well concealed and unobtrusive these pockets are; why, even I can only find one of the two in my own boa).

In the past I wore a black and silver feather boa from time to time, which suited me well (apart from the inevitable vegetarian guilt)but had the terrible habit of dropping feathers. Lord only knows how many feathers I've left in my wake. The children took my feather boa without permission and somehow tied it into an insoluble knot, the little demons. They have been forbidden so far to wear my new, non-feather boa, except that I did ask Iris Uber Alles to model it once for a friend when my hands were unclean from cooking, but I kept my eagle eye upon her.

Now once again I have a wonderful boa, and now I'm in need of occasions upon which to be fabulous (sadly I am not attending Burning Man this year). Pick up a boa for yourself or for the most fabulous person in your life!

zen koans from Iris Uber Alles

"If someone wrote a word on a cake, could you smell it and tell what the word was?"

"Can pudding make a sound?"

annoying best-selling fiction and amazing semi-obscure stuff

My mother gave me a Jodi Picoult novel, which was timely enough as I keep hearing about Ms. Picoult's works. I was sucked into "Vanishing Acts" immediately, but now by page 156 I'm thoroughly annoyed and ready to quit. Ms. Picoult writes beautifully in the manner of a graduate student in creative writing, but she has no sense of dialogue. Her shtick, in this book at least (I must give her the credit to assume her other works may be different) seems to be to set up an interesting situation which already occurred, and then write in her different character's voices to tell us all what they think about what already happened. There isn't really much action, just people thinking about stuff that already happened, and they all sound alike and fake, like they all happen to be taking the same creative writing workshop. Be they alcoholic litigators, old men, or young mothers, they all sit around mulling things over with the same sorts of beautiful cliches.

Here's just one example of how Ms. Picoult annoys me to death: Eric, our recovering alcoholic lawyer, is representing his fiance's father in a criminal matter, but he's interrupted by a message that his little girl is sick. Rather than just pick up the phone and call his fiance, he stops to ponder pretentiously. "I have a feeling this isn't the last time I will be asked to choose between Delia's present life and her past." Oh, please, why is HIS LITTLE CHILD'S FEVER "Delia's present life"? And why all the sturm und drang over returning a personal call in amongst representing one client and one client only? (To be fair, Eric does have one other potential client, a redneck who's concerned about the legal status of his pet crow, but that client seems to obligingly step out of the picture when Eric hysterically runs out of their initial meeting without a word of explanation).

So should I suck it up for another 253 pages of this poetic dreck, or move on? I can't understand a world where Ms. Picoult is a bestseller and my new literary darling, whose baby I would gladly have if we weren't both married to other people and if I weren't so prone to overwhelmingly traumatic morning sickness, Antoine Wilson, can't even get his book out in hardback. People, I implore you: seek out Antoine Wilson's brilliant "The Interloper" and shun the banal bestsellers.

I went to some trouble to find "The Interloper" after reading a one paragraph rave review in the New Yorker, and it did not disappoint for a minute. I cannot understand why this went straight to paperback, when it is so gripping and unusual. It's very hard to believe this is a first book; it's just so perfect.

"The Interloper" is a gem in the "unreliable narrator" genre, right up there with the astonishing "The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester. Here's how our unlikely hero introduces himself:

"My name is Owen Patterson. I am thirty-eight years old. I am in fine shape medically and psychologically. I have been checked out on both counts. Despite my being far away from her, and my not having talked ot her for several months now, I remain married to Patricia Patterson, nee Stocking. We have no children. I consider myself a civilized person, probably around 80% acclimated ot the society in which I lived, if not more. A solid B. I miss working for the software company. Life had a nice routine to it. Software manuals are pleasingly logical when written right, and we used to write them right. If I could wake up from this bad dream, I would wake up in my cubicle at the software company, face creased from the edge of a binder, and ask mouth-breathing Neil, in the next cubicle over, if he wanted to get some coffee downstairs."

Owen struggles to deal with his wife's sorrow after her brother is brutally murdered. The book tells the story of his imaginative attempt to seek revenge upon the jailed killer, a quixotic attempt to restore his wife's happiness which ends up taking over Owen's life.

Unlike Ms. Picoult, Antoine Wilson has a genius for dialogue. His characters all speak in their own voices, even the dead brother who leaves a frat-boy journal behind. I stayed up one night reading the whole book, and I'm sure I'll go back and re-read this again and again. I love "The Interloper" and can't wait to see Mr. Wilson's next work.

Another first-time author amazed me this summer, Lee Vance, a former Wall Street hotshot, wrote a thriller, "Restitution." Vance is amazingly good at creating a likeable but flawed main character whose life suddenly falls apart when his estranged wife is murdered. Like Wilson, Vance is surprisingly good at believable characters and dialogue for a first-time writer. "Restitution" is well worth a read; I ripped through it in a day because I couldn't stand to put it down. I loved it up until the end, where Mr. Vance seemed to have run out of ingenuity and fell back on that old cliche, the chatty villain who explains it all. Mr. Vance's evil genius could well have said, just as the tiny villain of "The Incredibles did, "You sly devil, you've got me monologuing!"

So: "The Interloper", "Restitution", and that older work of genius, "The Debt to Pleasure": wonderful works which bring so many hours of transported reading. Ms. Jodi Picoult's "Vanishing Acts": not even a feh, it's more of a meh. Happy reading, my darlings.

well, la di da

So the big news around here is that the Sober Husband started a new job. He's as happy as a clam at high tide, as we used to say back in Maine, but the children and I are feeling distinctly testy.

Why should we begrudge him his happiness? Part of it is that we got spoiled over the last six or seven months. In the past, the poor man worked two jobs, and we became accustomed to letting him work and not making demands upon him, but then we entered a more carefree era, where the Sober Husband worked from home more often than not. He used to join Lola and me for lunch, and he always made the girls breakfast. He did his share of the housework and errands, and our household ticked along fairly well. Four year-old Lola in particular cherished extra time with her beloved father.

Now we are in a new world, one where the Sober Husband leaves early in the morning before the children are out of bed and returns home late, with nothing on his mind but his fabulous, wonderful job. I'm genuinely happy for him that he has such a congenial and exciting new job, but the children frankly don't give a damn about his personal fulfillment. Lola cried several times the first week, pining for her beloved daddy. Iris Uber Alles shed no tears but instead deployed a forked tongue the second week of the job. "Ever since you started working at Doggyo (note: the names of employers are always changed to protect our income), it's all 'La di da, St. Doggyo! Oooh, la di da, I'm going to work at St. Doggyo! It's not Doggyo, it's St. Doggyo! La di da, la di da!"

We all had a good laugh over that, including the Sober Husband, but we're not always laughing. On Saturday night, the children and I were making ourselves fabulous to go to our old friend M's birthday party, but the husband was dragging his heels. "It's too late to go out! It's already their regular bedtime! I need to be fresh for Doggyo on Monday morning!"

I would brook no such nonsense. "It's Saturday night! You are NOT staying home on Saturday night because you need to be fresh on Monday morning! You have all day Sunday to rest up!" The children backed me up, chanting "Well, la di da! Saint Doggyo!" in a disrespectful manner.

Despite having left the house on Saturday night, the husband was up bright and early Monday morning for his exciting day at Doggyo. "I am still on my honeymoon, you know." Lola's not enjoying any honeymoon, though. When she realized her father had left before she woke up, her face fell. "He didn't say goodbye!" She stamped her foot peevishly. "La di da, St. Doggyo!"

one up, one down

Al, the idiotic orange cat who is allegedly allergic to his own teeth, had been living in the backyard and refusing to enter the house and interact with us.

Suddenly two days ago he had a change of heart, and as I write this, he's purring on my legs. Last night my sleep was disturbed because I could barely move due to a wealth of cats crowding in on me: Al, Iris's cat known as "Frowstomatic the King of the Universe", and a puffy foster kitten. Al hasn't completely mellowed out; he kept waking me up with his growling at the kitten, but he's following me and the girls around purring and meowing for attention.

When I came downstairs this morning, Al was closely following me, just like the old days when he was a treasured lapcat. "Look, I have a new housecat!" I said. "Well, that's good, because you lost one," said the Sober Husband accusatorily.

And that's the horrible thing which happened: two of our foster kittens went into our tiny, fenced in "yard" (which consists of a deck, a few tiny flower beds, a magnolia tree and a tiny lemon tree, and a small square of cement in lieu of a lawn) yesterday, and only one came back in. It's a complete mystery what happened. I called the head of my rescue program to painfully confess this morning that we've lost one.

For three years, hundreds of kittens have been going into that yard, and we've had no injuries or losses. Now suddenly one went missing. The husband's theory is that the raccoon who comes into our yard ate the kitten, but raccoons do not normally attack anything larger than a mouse. They are famously inept as hunters.

The husband has been cross-examining me as though I were the Jeffrey Dahmer of the kitten world, but honestly I did nothing different than any of the other days in which all kittens were safe. We were home most of the day, leaving just to return another litter of kittens to the shelter to go up for adoption and to take Iris to her swimming lesson (and we got dinner out afterward). I thought the tiny yard was completely safe, and indeed there's no way I can prevent larger kittens from going out there. The children are constantly going in and out (there's a door in the dining room leading onto the deck) on nice days. We're going to make some posters to put around the neighborhood, sigh.

I feel terrible, and it comes right on the heels of one of my biggest triumphs as a kitten fosterer. The litter I turned in for adoption were feral kittens who were rejected by the SPCA as unadoptable due to their lack of tameness. We worked so hard to tame those kittens and succeeded. When I got them, they could not be held, and they constantly hissed and growled. When we returned them, they were perfectly biddable kittens who would be a joy in any household.

aaaaall the way

"What is your job?" four year-old Lola asked me.

"Well, my main job is looking after you. My volunteer job is fostering kittens. I don't have a paying job, though. I used to be an attorney when I had a paying job."

After some discussion of the perennial What-Is-An-Attorney question, as well as the ever-popular How Can It Be Considered A Job To Hang Around with Iris and Lola, the conversation turned to jobs of the future, after I allowed that I might want a paying job after Lola got into kindergarten or first grade.

"What are you going to do? What kind of job?"

I hate being asked that from anyone, much less pint-sized wiseasses, so I deflected the question. "What do YOU think I should do?"

Lola was quick off the bat with an answer. "I think you should be a ballerina! A ballerina!"

I didn't quite know how to explain that I am too old (and not anorexic enough) to take up ballet seriously. Iris tried to explain to Lola: "If Mom was a ballerina, she wouldn't be able to pick you up at school! Don't you want Mom to pick you up at school?" (Iris obviously remembered a prior conversation about careers, where I explained that people with important jobs need to pay nannies to look after their children because they needed to be at their jobs a lot. Clearly "ballerina" is one of the most high-powered careers). Lola was not persuaded, though, and said dreamily, "If Mommy was a ballerina, she'd dance all the way to my school! All the way to my school!"

a fledgling food blog

Food is such a passion for me, and I write about it occasionally here, but it feels inappropriate to let it take over this blog (which is really more about my weird little kids and my neuroses). I've started a second blog to focus on food:

The Drunken Housewife Cooks

Check it out, if you wish.

cats are out of the doghouse

I'm pleased to inform you that my formerly-despised foster kittens have gone a full day without confinement to a pen and without a litterbox accident. Hurray! One is dozing on my legs right now.

UPDATE: Dammit, I spoke too soon. I discovered when I slipped my shoes on that a kitten had taken a crap in one of them.

something to look forward to

"When I die," said seven year-old Iris Uber Alles, "I want you to pass out T-shirts at my funeral to everyone. They should say, 'Let her R.I.P.' Get it? R. I. P.?"

She paused in thought, then went on. "No! We should do it at YOUR funeral! Then I can get one! And I won't have to wait so long!"

With heavy sarcasm, I said, "Oh, that will give you something to look forward to," but Iris was too happy with the thought of the t-shirt to pick up on the undertone. "Yes! It will!" she said cheerfully.

our night of fashion and gaiety: The Bad Boys of Project Runway

Local gay event organizer extraordinaire Marc Huestis has a fan in seven year-old Iris Uber Alles. One of the peak experiences of Iris's life occurred at age four, when she attended Huestis's "Sing Along Wizard of Oz" extravaganza dressed as Dorothy. She was called up on stage and fawned upon by drag queens, which is heady stuff for anyone, but especially a small, impressionable child.

This summer Huestis put together a gala called "The Bad Boys of Project Runway" to kick off a fashion-themed film festival. Project Runway stars Santino Rice and Jeffrey Sebelia judged a fashion show (local aspiring designers were charged with creating a dress inspired by a film).

I resisted the "Project Runway" experience for a long time, since I'm not much of a TV watcher and don't have cable, anyhow. But when Iris and I saw a couple of episodes with friends, we were hooked We ended up renting and buying the episodes (and in my case, obsessively reading the delicious Project Rungay blog). We loved Santino's sassy attitude in season two, and we loved to hate Jeffrey Sebelia in season three (we believe Laura! Sebelia cheated! Why do I say that? Michael and Laura were in a position to tell that the sewing on Jeffrey's final collection was different than what he'd been doing all season. Everyone forgets that the easy-going, politic Michael agreed with Laura. Finally, it's just unbelievable that he had no work left to do if he'd done it all himself. In every season, every finalist EXCEPT JEFFREY feverishly slaved up to the last minute to finish the collection. The amount of work the finalists must do is astonishing, and it strains credulity that only Jeffrey could finish so early and so effortlessly without help. Okay-- calming down now -- just had to get that off our collective chest. If you think that was a testy outburst, you should have heard the abuse our fortyish and seven year-old throats hurled at the television when Jeffrey won).

Anyhow, we were looking forward to "The Bad Boys of Project Runway" for months. Iris literally counted the days. (In general, July was a cultural peak for us: the last Harry Potter, the Simpsons movie, the Project Runway event. What have we got to live for now?). There was no way the event could have lived up to Iris's expectations, but it did okay. The best was a Tim Gunn look-alike MC, who had Gunn's voice down pat and who did an over-the-top dance. We most loved a dress inspired by the Clive Barker horror films, all red and black and elegant, but we were okay with the winner being an extravagant dress inspired by an Asian action film. (The winning designer was engagingly tongue-tied and adorable). In person, Santino was warm and friendly, kneeling on the front of the stage during a break to mingle with fans, while Sebelia pulled back and didn't make eye contact with the masses. I took Iris up to meet Santino, who shook her hand and encouraged her to follow her dreams and keep drawing. What a darling he is.

In general, we were most disappointed by the lack of sartorial effort by the fellow attendees. The audience was primarily gay men, gay men dressed in jeans and dull T-shirts (at least our host Marc Huestis's t-shirt was a Michael Kors one, which he cattily observed that he had bought at a garage sale). Iris Uber Alles was not only the youngest audience member but one of the most fabulous, in a dramatic red velvet cape-like gown. My friend Natasha was resplendent in fishnets over freshly-waxed legs (she managed to get her legs waxed with three children along for the appointment, bravo indeed my darling), and our dear Joyce had, as always, put on a fetching dress. (Your Drunken Housewife plucked her eyebrows for the occasion and broke out the sparkle gel for her hair as well as her new chandelier earrings, but stuck to her sensible pirate ballet flats for comfort in standing in line).

Gossipy highlights:

* Santino and Sebelia agree that Heidi Klum seems so sweet and bubbly on air, but in real life, nooo. There was some dark reference to a day on which the Project Runway contestants were made to face a wall and stand that way for some time, ostensibly for some Heidi-related reason. Evidently one should not make eye contact with Ms. Klum and should not inflict one's all-too-subhuman presence upon her.


* It makes Santino very happy to hear that people shout, "Santino wuz robbed!" at Nina Garcia. So if you ever run into the poised editrix, consider shouting at her (and then contact Santino via his myspace page to let him know you have avenged his honor).

* Most of the contestants swallow down their bile and obsequiously accept the bitingly vicious criticism given by the judges. Santino, however, got into a fight with Nina Garcia once. In person, Santino shared that this argument went on for NINETY MINUTES. My God, the stamina of that man, to stand on the runway under those bright television lights trading abuse with the sharp-tongued "Elle" editor for an hour and a half.

* Winning hasn't made Jeffrey Sebelia any warmer. He's not exactly gracious in victory, taking some time to diss Laura as an "uptown bitch" (he seems to feel that Laura should not have entered Project Runway because obviously she doesn't need to win as she already owns a massive Manhattan apartment. Honey, your bitter is showing!). Sebelia also took some time to criticize fellow designer Angela and her poor, shy, morbidly obese mother (whom Sebelia famously humiliated and reduced to tears). This went on and on, and my friend Joyce leaned over and said, "They are so misogynistic!"

* The $100,000 prize is a cruel joke, as no one can put together a fashion line for that kind of money.

* Sebelia has a "men's knitwear" line coming out soon, as well as his Cosa Nostra clothing line. (Men's knitwear???)

*Neither contestant had much love for judge/successful designer Michael Kors. They feel that his taste is far too stodgy and that the show needs a more cutting edge designer/judge, someone like Kors was in his youth.

We are so ready for Project Runway: Season Four AND more Marc Huestis events. Bring it on!

the kind of news I like

SFist reports that a limo got beached on Potrero Hill. I hate those giant gas-guzzlers, so often a menace when they venture into the neighborhoods like mine, with narrow, curving streets.

advice! answers!

Occasionally here at Drunken Housewife Industries we have a moment of caring, where we pause in our spate of anecdotes and rants to reach a hand out to the readers and answer their questions. This time we invited readers to submit problems as well as the more traditional questions, although only one reader was brave enough to try that. The Sober Husband's answers are in bold; the Drunken Housewife's in italics:

That classic beauty, Missy, current reigning holder of the Mrs. Drunken Housewife title, asked, "What's the DH's favorite recipe that Sober Husband likes--but also does not involve the more pricey of ingredients and the more time consuming of preparation?"

Sober Husband: The most precious ingredient in my favorite foods is my wife's love. It is not for sale.

Also, the sober husband likes to try new things. The DH is a culinary adventurer, and the sober husband tags along. Given a menu of choices, he tries the thing he has not had before.

I think the answer to this question is that potatoes-ricotta-pasta dish, the "glutton" one. It's ingredients are common, and we keep coming back to it.

Drunken Housewife: In Italian cooking, pasta cooked with potatoes is referred to "pasta in the style of a glutton." To Americans, the idea of pasta with potatoes seems grotesque, but the reality is magnificent. I have a couple of different recipes for this, but the basic idea is potatoes in small pieces, cooked with olive oil and garlic, along with pasta. It's a real crowd-pleaser.

Silliyak, the dashing holder of the Mr. Drunken Househusband title and former firefighter, inquired, "Can hallucinations have IQ's?"

Sober Husband: The only meaning I see behind the term "IQ" is as a test score. So if your hallucination can take a test, it can have an IQ. You just have to measure it.

Drunken Housewife: It depends upon how good your hallucinations are. One of the best hallucinations I ever had was when I was 22, and in my first experiment with hallucinogens, I hallucinated that I was a plate of Chinese food. That was a high quality hallucination, but I don't think an IQ test would have reflected that.

Our beloved and intrepid Hughman said, "all i wanna know is more about the parrot. does it talk? what's its name? how do the cats respond? the kids? etc, etc."

Sober Husband: Oh, the parrot talks all right. It's getting it to shut up that's the trick.

We call it "Zoe". We don't know whether it's a boy or a girl. Science will tell us for $75, which isn't worth it. The girls want to make a nest and see if it will lay an egg.

She bites everyone and everything, except for me, whom she loves dearly. (And she's got a mighty beak. She can break a pencil in half with one chomp.)

Every morning when she hears me coming down the stairs, she starts squawking. I put her on my shoulder and feed her toast while I read the paper. Then I put her away and clean up the mess of crumbs she leaves behind.

She appears content to live with us and will never escape. We take her outside all the time, even when her flight feathers are long enough to fly. She always climbs onto my hand the moment I allow it.

In contrast, the DH can not pick her up at all because she fights so hard. When it is absolutely necessary to move the bird without me, the DH breaks out a tough leather glove that goes up to her elbow called "the hand of authority".

Drunken Housewife: the parrot is definitely in the doghouse today, as she literally bit the hand that feeds her. She lunged and bit me as I was in the very act of filling her dish this morning. More positively, I was happy this year when she finally learned to say my name (for years, she'd call out, "Anton! Anton!", followed years later by adding on "Iris! Iris!" and now, at last, she calls for me, too. Lola claims the parrot also knows her name, but I have not confirmed that.

Hughman later inquired, "Also, do the girls read junie b.?"

Sober Husband: I don't know what "junie b." means. An author?

Drunken Housewife: As a former library volunteer, I've spent plenty of time reshelving the many volumes chronicling the adventures of Junie B., First Grader. Iris Uber Alles read one or two of this series, and her reaction seemed to be, "Eh." It was okay but failed to grip.

A commenter who wishes to remain anonymous shared through email:

So I have this business, and a business partner. This is his sixth business and my first. He has a lot more experience than I, and is responsible for nearly all of the business that has been brought in. I've been working with this guy since college (2003) and it has been very very good for my career. People hire us because they are so impressed with him, and justifiably so. He's a spendthrift though, and just asked to borrow $1k from our business because some money juggling he did with his own accounts has fallen short. He called to ask my permission, which I gave. I'm not sure how much choice I had to say no, but I think I had some. It's not a matter of overhead, as the business can well afford it. I'm not worried about him paying it back - he will. And most of the money is "his" anyway. I am more worried that this is a shady practice, and that we must not do it. I am also worried about his spendthrift nature getting away from him. He ruined one of his earlier businesses by assuming too much risk. I think he chose me as a partner because in many ways, including this one, I am the opposite of him. We're both gay, so it's not a romantic relationship, if that matters. Also, I need some kind of support system outside my partner to ask these sorts of questions of, and am not sure how to go about finding one. What do you think?

Drunken Housewife: I have two basic thoughts, which are (1)that $1,000 isn't worth harming a valuable relationship over, but (2) you need to do this properly, just in case there are ever any audits or legal issues which come up and also to set a good precedent for the future. There are a number of ways to do that. If your business is in the form of a partnership, your partner could take a draw in the amount of $1,000 and just forego future draws to make up for it. (Both partners need not take a draw at the same time). If you want to do it in the form of a loan, the partner should sign a note and pay interest. There have been problems with the IRS cracking down on sweetheart loans which should be treated as income, so there should be either a realistic interest rate OR this should be treated as income to your partner. I think that what you need is a friendly accountant or attorney for these times. Email me for the name and number of my guy, who is both an accountant and an attorney, if you don't have such a person already. Incidentally you could also sign up for a business mentor with the Chamber of Commerce to have someone to ask for guidance from time to time.

Sober Husband: I have three different perspectives on business ethics always in my head. Each has its own voice that whispers in my ear when I'm figuring out how to do business with someone.

The first voice is the oldest, from when I was a simple academic. That voice tells me that what matters is what you produce, that ones goal in work should be to benefit people and posterity. This voice is not at all informed about how to get along with other people. It only knows parables about famous individual contributors, the simplistic scientific bibliographies that clutter textbooks. It took me a long time even to consider the problem of how to get along with other people at work.

The second voice comes from my actual work experience. This has taught me the obvious lessons that it is critical to choose carefully the people you work with up front, and that ethics would not be an interesting subject if the ethical course did not sometimes conflict with ones own self interests.

The third voice is that of Tony Soprano. The guy's a gambler, he takes out $1000 for a dumb reason, but you need him so you keep your mouth shut. Everybody's got to survive. Not everybody can be proud of what they do to feed their children.

My only advice is to recommend Jack Welch's book "Winning". You can't tell whether he's saying what he really thinks or what he wants you to hear, but it doesn't matter. I think you can find whatever meaning you need in it. It's like an oracle.

in our car

"You drive so slow! Are you trying to drive me crazy? Is there a reason you can't drive at the speed limit?" said the Drunken Housewife to the Sober Husband.

A debate followed regarding whether it is safer to drive ten miles below the speed limit, as that theoretically gives you a greater following distance and stopping time behind all the traffic traveling at the speed limit, or whether it is safer to travel at the prevailing speed of traffic in order to avoid provoking one's spouse to madness and possibly driving other drivers into potentially lethal road rage.

"You should drive like me, graceful and effortless! I drive like a swan!" said the Drunken Housewife.

"I think I drive like a swan!" said the Sober Husband defensively.

"Kids, who drives more like a swan? Mommy or Daddy?"

Seven year-old Iris Uber Alles: "Mom!", followed by a several block-long critique of the Sober Husband's driving.

Four year-old Lola: complete silence (probably the wisest course of action).

surfing, everybody goes surfing

The Drunken Housewife is joining a chain of links, giving us all a chance to see some new sites we might not find on our own. Some of these sites are about monetizing a site, like Cash For Comments and JohnCow. Others include the work and advice of a graphic designer, David Airey at Graphic Design , unusual observations about Japanese culture at Jamaipanese, and the musings of a Starbucks barista at the Barista Brat. Check out some of these sites, and if you wish, join in:


** Start Copy Here **

We all know how important getting link backs is and with this chain, you can get the ball rolling! You don’t have to be an established blogger to take part in this chain.

Here are the rules:
1. Copy this post from the point where it says “Start Copy Here” to the point where it says “End Copy Here”

2. Add yourself and 5 of your favorite bloggers to the end of the list.
3. Post this on your blog

Enkay Blog |Ms. Danielle |Cash For Comments | Betshopboy | JohnCow | Mr. Gary Lee | Jon Lee | Dosh Dosh | Some Make Money | The King Kong Blog | RomanDock | Michael Kwan | Ed Lau | Jane May | Sam Breadstone | Windows Tips, Tricks and Hacks |ProBlogger | The Beef Jerky Blog | The Prize Blog | Online Coupon Codes | Jamaipanese | Rugjeff | ShadowScope | The News Press Net | JohnWaraas | Online Opportunity | Sara | Gaje Master | Graphic Design |romandock dot com |RevieWOW | the Drunken Housewife|Dlisted|Defamer|the Comics Curmudgeon|Hughman|the Barista Brat|Rowan Forest Homeschool


**End Copy Here**

it's time to Answer the Readers' Questions again (so ask already)

One of the occasional features of this blog is Ask the Sober Husband, where readers submit their questions for the Sober Husband (usually either questions about scientific issues or cats) and I compel the poor man to write up some answers. This time, we'll try a new variation. Tell us about your problem/issue/quandary
/burning curiosity for knowledge, and you'll get a (possibly helpful) response from both the Drunken Housewife and the Sober Husband.

Leave your question in the comments or, if you wish to be more clandestine, email it to drunkenhousewife@gmail.com.

his crazy is showing

Lola's orange tabby, Al, has always been dimwitted, but in an easy-going, jovial way. It was his laid-back, loving nature which won this former foster kitten a place in our home. One day, Lola (then three) leaned over the banister and dropped Al from the top story to the bottom story, and Al's reaction seemed to be, "So that's what we're doing today. We're dropping me down the stairs." (Al was unhurt, Lola was disciplined, and no animal was ever dropped down the stairs again). He was also more than game for being carried around like a baby and being driven about the house in a doll stroller, plus he loved to curl up on my chest and purr.

Poor Al has always been a bit of a freakshow. He's emaciated, a walking orange skeleton. As a foster kitten, it took him a whole summer to reach the magic 2 pounds adoptable stage(this is a big part of how he won his place in our home. After we'd had him for so long, it seemed wrong to turn him in). He doesn't have feline HIV or feline leukemia; he has been tested repeatedly. The only thing vets can figure out is that "he is allergic to his own teeth." Aside from his breathtaking skinniness (as a grown cat, he weighs only four pounds at most; his best friend, Frowst, weighs ten), his stupidity is legendary. After over a year, he learned how to use the cat door... to go out. He now can put himself in the backyard, but he can't come back in. Now surely he must notice that his beloved friend, Frowsty, goes in and out all day long, as does Rachel, our other grown-up cat. But when Al gets hungry, he stands by the door and cries.

Weird, skinny, and stupid (but such a cheerful orange color!), Al was beloved by all but the Sober Husband due to his friendly personality. He always loved our foster kittens in prior seasons, grooming them, napping with them, and generally regressing to kitten level with them (he'd go so far as to beg to be given a bottle). But this season, he hates all the kittens, growling constantly. He has moved into the backyard, where he permanently resides. When I'm in the kitchen, sometimes he catches my eye and cries. I've tried bringing him in and closing him up in the master bedroom, with no kittens allowed, but as soon as the door is opened, he tears off back to the yard.

My theory is that he sustained some brain damage. He was his normal, idiotic but friendly self in January when we had our last litter from the last kitten season. Then Al became seriously ill, running a very high fever and living in the closet. His life was saved with IV fluids, antibiotics, steroids, and various other interventions, but I think he "sustained a neurological event", as the saying goes.

That's incidentally the reconstructed version of how Lola came to have a severe speech disorder, by the way (and probably in my simplistic way I've come to believe that's an explanation for everything). Baby Lola was an extraordinarily articulate infant, but she had an extreme fever one night. Anton took her to the hospital in the middle of the night when we couldn't get her fever down (it was something insane, like 113 or so), and she was held for observation. Nothing else of any medical importance ever happened, so we believe that fever sparked a neurological event causing Lola to stop talking and later haltingly speak unintelligibly (but don't worry, my darlings, a super-expensive course of intensive private speech therapy fixed our intrepid Lola, and now the problem isn't getting her to speak, it's getting her to shut up).

Al has become an extraordinarily unsatisfactory pet now, skulking about in the yard. He used to sleep snuggled up with me and follow me and Lola about. Lola likes to visit him in the yard now, and he comes in briefly for breakfast each day, but he's basically worthless as a pet. Speech therapy fixed Lola, but what kind of therapy is available for an extremely dimwitted cat?

hallucinations

My mother-in-law was never really thrilled with the idea or reality of me, and we had some issues during the early years. As time went by, things gradually came to a sort of peaceful holding pattern, but those early years were certainly more colorful.

After baby Iris Uber Alles was born, the mother-in-law came to visit. On the last night of her visit, I bestirred myself to create a gourmet feast. The Sober Husband was praising my cooking to the sky, and the mother-in-law said, "Oh, it didn't seem that hard to cook. The only hard thing was grating the beets, and we did that." There was a silent pause.

Later in the conversation, the mother-in-law said to me, "I took LSD once and regressed to being a baby. Because of that, I know how newborns think, and I can tell you that the baby hates it when you play with her. You think she's enjoying it, but she can't wait for you to put her down."

I was shocked into silence by this unusual slam on my mothering abilities and its underlying rationale. With l'esprit de l'escalier, I thought later that I should have said, "Well, at least I'm able to distinguish between drug-fueled hallucinations and reality." (Indeed I myself actually took LSD once in my early twenties and God was revealed to me in the person of a green washcloth, but I didn't go on to found the First Church of God The Washcloth of Golden Gate Avenue. I did, however, bring the ex-husband in to meet God, and I was shocked when he mistakenly thought the blue washcloth was the divine one. "Oh, is that one the Antichrist?" he inquired). At the time, I just ate my beet risotto silently and seethed.

oh, the IQ of it all

For no apparent reason seven year-old Iris Uber Alles became obsessed with learning her IQ. She kept bringing it up: "Hey, Mom, the next time you talk to someone at my school, can you ask them what my IQ is? What? Do you mean to tell me that no one has ever tested my IQ? ARE YOU SURE NO ONE EVER TESTED MY IQ?"

Now I happen to have a chip on my shoulder about IQ tests. I was never formally tested, but when I took online IQ tests a couple of times, I did not do as well as I expected. I don't remember the score I got the first time I took one, but I do remember being upset for days, idiotically enough, and being especially traumatized when I learned my score was far below the level at which one is expected to perform in order to graduate from law school. Ironically enough in general I test fabulously, and indeed the high point of my life, cognitively speaking, was probably the day I took the LSAT, on which I got a perfect score. (This became legend among my college friends, who all looked at the physical piece of paper and shook their heads. A friend-of-a-friend who was very competitive with me actually cancelled her plans to take the LSAT and changed her entire life plan because she didn't want to get a lower LSAT score than me). But there is something about the traditional IQ test which doesn't mesh well with my way of thinking. I like to say that the IQ test is based upon particular, antiquated forms of reasoning, rather than the powerful logic and incisive reasoning measured by the LSAT, but that is only the inane ramblings of a touchy sore loser.

The Sober Husband decided to scratch Iris's itch to determine her IQ. He found her an IQ test online, and she settled down to it. Watching her, I couldn't resist making another stab at it myself, and of course the husband followed suit. I ended up with a respectable score, one which is typical of a lawyer or doctor (evidently over my years as a Drunken Housewife since I last tested my IQ, my IQ improved). The Sober Husband's was 7 points higher, putting him appropriately enough in the research scientist/professor level, which made me quite sulky until I comforted myself by the rationalization that surely my score would have been higher if I were not suffering from severe sleep deprivation (2 nights terrible insomnia, followed by third night of Harry Potter mania involving buying book after midnight, returning home around 1, and reading until about 4:30).

And Iris? The website refused to grade her test when I put her age as 7, as there is a policy against children under 13 using the site. When I input her age as 13, Iris's score was 90, down in the suited-for-manual-labor category. I explained to Iris that if her test had been scored for a 7 year-old, undoubtedly her IQ would be very high and that for a 7 year-old to test at the level of a dumb 13 year-old was actually quite good.

She sucked her disappointment up stoically enough, which was probably a mistake on her part. We gave her a hard time today over it. When she asked for praise for a tree-climbing trick, I said, "Wow, that's pretty amazing for a dumb girl." Her father chimed in: "It's remarkable what you can do for a person with only an IQ of 90." I advised her that "dumb people have to work harder to learn how to do things, so you should get in the habit of working very hard." Agreeing with this, the Sober Husband suggested that Iris develop a winning personality to compensate for her lack of cognitive ability. I countered with the fear that she might become a bimbo and use her good looks to make up for a lack of brainpower. Iris tried to scowl, but couldn't keep a straight face.