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Robert Frost famously once said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He’s been dead for quite a few years now, but if he were still around I think I’d have to look him up just to tell him that I found out what it is that doesn’t love a wall: a teenage boy.

Here’s what I want to know: have teenage boys always punched walls, or has this fad just come about since the invention of drywall? Because it’s hard for me to believe that there was quite as much wall punching going on in the days of lathe and plaster, let alone in the days of stone and mortar. And if there was, then I don’t see how teenage boys kept enough use of their hands to be able to engage in that other thing they like to do with their fists so much.

But what do I know? Maybe they did. Maybe teenage cave boys punched the hell out of their cave rooms—punched right through their Death Metal (well, Death Stone) posters and into limestone. And maybe teenage boys on the prairie punched right through their rough hewn planks and into the dirt of their sod houses. Maybe, even, that’s the real origin of the Three Little Pigs story: it wasn’t a Big Bad Wolf that huffed, and puffed and blew the houses down; it was an Extremely Pissed Teenager who raged and fumed and finally put his fist through the wall (all except for the brick one, of course.)

It’s hard for me to say, since I have never actually been a teenage boy, but I find it difficult to believe that all of these angry teenagers aren’t secretly running a stud finder over potential walls in the middle of the night, and then, when they find the areas that are safe, making tiny little marks to show themselves, and others, exactly where to punch. Kind of like the marks hobos would leave on the doorsteps of homes it was safe to beg at.

However, even though I’ve never been a teenage boy, as luck would have it I am married to a former one, and he assures me that this is not the case: when you are in a “wall punching state of mind” your mind is not clear enough to look for the softest area to land your fist. You just need to punch. “You wouldn’t understand,” he tells me.

What? Oh, I understand the urge to punch—and bite, kick, scratch and gouge. What I don’t understand is the urge to do these things to someone (or something) that hasn’t annoyed me. Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of things that annoy me. A wall just doesn’t happen to be one of them.

Ceilings I can understand. Who wouldn’t want to punch a ceiling? I mean, just think about the way they are always producing cobwebs in the blink of an eye, hiding them in plain sight until that perfect moment when someone you want to impress walks into your (supposedly) clean house, whereupon they unspool them in long, dusty strings directly in that person’s line of sight.

And floors are just as bad. The way they lay there, encouraging both children and humans to pile things onto their invitingly flat surfaces. If they had a little more compassion they would repel clothes and toys like magnets with matching poles, instead of staring up at them seductively and saying, “Oh, go on. Just throw that down right here, honey. I’ll take care of it.”

But walls? I like walls: not only do they keep annoying people away from me, but unlike doors they aren’t wishy-washy about it—they keep them out all of the time. Which, come to think about it, might be why teenage boys don’t like them.

And why I do.

Fair warning: this is going to be one of those columns in which I complain, yet again, about how hard it is to put up with picky eaters. Not how hard it is to feed them, mind you, since I stopped trying to feed my own picky eater years ago, but simply how hard it is to live with them.

Allow me to explain. When my daughter, Clementine, finally reached the point where she had managed to vote every single food off of her own personal “Survivor Food Island” (except for Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt), I stopped trying to cook for her at all. This, for me, was a wonderful change. No longer did I have to make two versions of dinner every night: one with flavor, color and texture, and one without. Once again I could cook what I wanted, secure in the knowledge that, as long as I could find a reliable supply of Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt, Clementine was not going to starve. This worked like a charm for at least a year. I’d make a big pot of chili; she’d peel back the lid on a container of Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt. I’d make falafel; she’d peel back the lid on a container of Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt.

And then she started to branch out. Foods that had already been tried once before and then rejected were invited back onto the island, for all the world like wayward boyfriends being taken back on the condition that, this time, they be better behaved. And apparently, they were: where once there was only Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt, now there was a whole food pyramid (or at least a food cylinder) of things like plain mashed potatoes, noodles with butter, and ramen. In the alphabet of food, it was everything from A to B. But at least it was a start.

The thing about being a picky eater, though, is that pickiness is a dominant trait. And while you might temporarily drive it into submission through either force of will or desperation, it will still always be there somewhere, just looking for a way to get back out. And the way it got back out in my house was by mutating into Paranoid Eater.

What this means is that the Picky Eater who would once only eat a plain bagel and cream cheese will, when confronted with a cabinet full of plain bagels and a refrigerator full of cream cheese, change into Paranoid Eater. What’s the difference? Well, where Picky Eater will carefully check each bagel to make sure a stray poppyseed didn’t wander onto its surface, Paranoid Eater will carefully examine each bagel for mold spots. Then, finding none, Paranoid Eater will sniff the cream cheese, declare it “old,” and put it away in disgust. (It used to be “throw it away in disgust,” until my shrill protests convinced her that the lesser evolved members of the family were perfectly content eating tainted, yet already paid for, food.)

Picky Eater and Paranoid Eater often work together. Picky Eater will cook an entire pot of plain noodles and slather them with a whole stick of butter. Then, when Picky Eater steps out of the room (perhaps to check on that shipment of Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt), Paranoid Eater will step in, see that the noodles have been sitting in the pot for more than five minutes, and pronounce them too “old” to eat. This pattern continues until I finally declare that enough is enough, and that while those noodles don’t have to get eaten, nothing else may be consumed until they are. Which, then, brings about yet a third mutation: Pissed Off Eater.

Fine by me: as long as she’s okay with Yoplait Thick and Creamy Vanilla yogurt.

It’s September, which means that once again it’s time for my birthday. To be honest, the prospect of this fills me with a certain amount of dread. Not because of the grey hair (Clementine solved that problem for me—at least temporarily—when she had my hair dyed green and purple). And not because of the wrinkles (I have discovered to my somewhat delight that zits don’t tend to appear in the middle of a wrinkle). And not even because of any potential cognitive lapses—sometimes I think that forgetting is nature’s reward for agreeing to become a parent. No, my dread is not due to any of the age related aspects of having another birthday, but rather because of the fact that birthdays mean presents. And presents, for me, mean pretending that I like them.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I am a terrible person to buy presents for. No matter what you get me, I will always find something wrong with it: wrong size, wrong color, wrong price, wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m not proud about it, and I’m not bragging, I’m just stating the simple, unhappy, truth: I suck at getting presents.

This is okay where my husband is concerned (although he might tell you differently). After sixteen years of marriage he is used to the first words out of my mouth being, “Did you keep the receipt?” every time I open a gift. (In my defense, I must say that he can be spectacularly bad at buying presents. I will always remember the time I asked for something from Victoria’s Secret and instead got a pair of full length flannel nightgowns from J.C. Penney. That’s right: a pair. Two! I suppose his thinking was that this way I would always have one while the other was in the wash).

The problem I am currently having with my present-receiving disorder, however, is that now it no longer involves just my husband—it involves my children. And there’s no way I can ask my kids if they still have the receipt—not unless I want to have to do damage control for the rest of the night.

This used to not be such a problem, because instead of buying me presents they used to make them. And while I can almost always find a flaw with a store bought present, even I would have a hard time finding fault in a handmade one—especially one from my kids. Macaroni necklaces, stick figure drawings, amorphous lumps of clay—I have loved and will continue to love them all. But as my kids have gotten older, and busier, and more susceptible to advertising campaigns, their presents have changed. And not for the better.

Now instead of making me an ashtray in art class they buy me a “Mom” mug at the dollar store. And even though I do drink coffee, and I don’t smoke cigarettes, I can’t help but prefer the former to the latter. (Although, to be honest, the ashtray did cause more trouble than the mug. After Clyde gave it to me his older sister couldn’t resist pointing out to him gleefully that I didn’t smoke, at which point I felt compelled to lie and say that it didn’t matter because I was planning on taking up smoking anyway. It was, I thought, a harmless little white lie—until Clyde started pestering me daily, and in front of everyone I knew, about when I was finally going to start smoking. It’s been four years now, and he still hasn’t laid that one completely to rest.)

Still, if I’m being honest, I would admit that the problem isn’t really flannel nightgowns and ashtrays—it”s my own lack of tact and graciousness. And that maybe fixing that should be my present to everyone else.

Yeah. Or I could just learn to enjoy smoking—while wearing several yards of flannel.

I read once that one of the most difficult, and therefore most highly paid jobs in the world was that of master jewel appraiser—more so even than that of jewel cutter. This is because while the ability to wield hammer and chisel in order to achieve the perfect cut is something that can be taught, the ability to look at a stone and be able to determine its worth—or better yet, glance at two stones and tell in an instant which is was worth more than the other—is just something that you are either born with or
you’re not.

I’m not sure, but I think that my kids might actually be blessed with this incredibly rare gift. Yes, both of them. Not that I’ve ever seen them judge one precious stone against another, mind you—there are precious few precious stones in our house—but I have seen them judge something that is, in my opinion, even more valuable (and rare), and judge it with a diligence and cold-blooded precision that would make any master jewel appraiser proud.

I am speaking, of course, of love.

Some people might say that love is intangible: that it can’t be quantified, and therefore can’t be measured. To those people I would say: obviously you have never seen the calculating way one child will look at another child’s Christmas presents. (Or the way they can weigh a cookie with just their eyes. I mean, have you ever really watched the way kids study a plateful of cookies? You would need x-ray vision to be able to better judge the comparative chocolate qualities of two seemingly identical chocolate chip cookies. I’m telling you: if chocolate ever becomes a controlled substance, we won’t have dogs at the airport anymore, we’ll have five year olds.)

But at least when it comes to chocolate chip cookies there is an actual difference—however slight—between cookie A and cookie B. The same can’t really be said about love, especially when it comes down to using material rewards to calibrate the scale. (And they always use material rewards to calculate the scale.) The worst part of such calculating is that it doesn’t matter if they are two very different children with two very different interests—believe me, they will find a way to compare apples to oranges. Or cheeseburgers to eyeliners, as it were. “You bought him another double cheeseburger? Where’s mine?” “But . . . you’re a vegetarian.” “So. You could’ve gotten me something. I’m out of eyeliner.”) And no, it’s no good explaining that Burger King doesn’t sell eyeliner. Or that Sally’s Beauty Supply doesn’t sell cheeseburgers—that I know of. The burger, and the eyeliner, aren’t the point. If they were, I would gladly make a detour to Sally’s every time I stopped at Burger King (and vice versa).

No, the point is the love. And on a child’s love scale, it is very simple to compare cheeseburgers to eyeliner. And then convert those figures to love. (They must be born knowing the conversion formula. Or they learn it in grade school, at the same time they learn how to convert gallons into liters and miles into kilometers.) Of course, I could make the argument that I am already giving the both of them all of my love, all of the time, but they would never buy that. And they shouldn’t, for the simple reason that it’s not true.

It isn’t that I love one more than the other. Really. It’s just that, if I’m being honest, I really don’t dole out equal amounts of love at equal times, for the same reason I don’t try and pour the same amount of milk into a bucket and a thimble: sometimes one just needs more than the other.

Come to think of it, maybe there is something to all this love appraisal stuff after all.

The other day, as I was loading the dishwasher for the third time that morning while discussing something important with my daughter, Clementine (multitasking!), I was vaguely aware of the fact that she was manipulating something in her hands. Spin, twist, pull—she spun the object around and around like a Rubik’s Cube, until finally, with a little sigh of triumph, she set it down, and I saw that it was a ballpoint pen. Or rather, it was the remnants of a ball point pen: what she set down on the table was just a pile of pen parts.

“My pen!” I said, chagrined.

She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s just a pen.”

“But it was my pen,” I insisted.

The eyes fluttered back again. “It’s a pen. They cost like five cents.”

At that point I turned my back on the new pile of dishes that had just materialized, and explained to her at great length that, unless you bought pens by the gross, they cost more than five cents. And besides that, it wasn’t like there was some sort of pen vending machine in my living room where I could drop in a nickel and get a replacement—to spend that “five cents” on a new pen would involve at least fifty cents worth of gas. And what’s more, even if I could walk to this hypothetical pen store where they sold you one pen for a nickel, it would still involve at least a half hour of my time, which, despite what she seemed to think, was valuable, so actually, even if it turned out they were giving away pens at the neighborhood pen store, it would still end up being something like a twenty dollar pen. To finish it all off I added that, besides, even if by some miracle there was, at this moment, a nickel-pen dispenser in my house, it still wouldn’t matter, because she didn’t have a nickel anyway.

At the end of this rant she rolled her eyes so far back in her head that she was probably seeing gray matter, blew out an enormous sigh and said, “Geez. It’s a pen. A pen. I’ll buy you another one.” And then she walked away. I sat down and tried to put the remnants of my pen back together, so flustered by my diatribe that for a moment I couldn’t even remember what it was that we had been talking about before the pen mutilation distracted me. And then it all came back to me: we had been talking about chores. And money. And how she didn’t see the point of doing one for the other, since she didn’t care about material things like I did, and therefore had no need of money. And, by the way, she was going to need ten bucks for lunch the next day.

At that point a vital spring launched itself away from my pen corpse and made its successful bid for freedom, and with a sigh I gave up and tossed the whole thing in the trash.

Look: I understand the whole love/hate relationship people have with work and money. I have it myself. (I love money—hate that I have to work for it.) And part of me is glad that Clementine has managed to retain such a charming naivete when it comes to worldly concerns: knowing that there is still even one person out there who is not concerned with the getting of “filthy lucre” is kind of like knowing that there still might be a remote tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest where the children have never held a game controller. It gives me hope. It gives me faith.

If only it gave me an unlimited supply of pens, I would be set.

My son, Clyde, will be starting fifth grade this year, which means that once again I will dig out “The Backpack.” Note the definite article, please: not a backpack, but rather the backpack. We’re not talking about some random bag with straps attached, something that could be had at any Target, WalMart, or, for the classy, Lands’ End, but rather the backpack. The only one.

At least, the only one Clyde has ever owned.

There are several reasons for this. The first is that I am incredibly cheap. Okay, to be honest, the second and third reasons are also that I am incredibly cheap. What can I say? I just don’t see the point in spending money on the same thing year after year, when, as far as I can see, it’s not like there have been any major advances in backpack technology. And even if there have been, so what? I mean, it’s not like I’m making him use an outdated insulin pump or something. And besides, hypothetical advances in backpack technology aside, the essential function of a backpack has remained the same for the last forty years: it is a place to lose your homework in. In that sense, a potato sack would probably work out just as well as the latest backpack, and might even work out better—especially if you left a few of the original potatoes inside.

Putting aside cheapness for the moment, though, (if I must), the second reason Clyde has never owned a different backpack (the fourth reason, actually, if you’re keeping track), is that I feel guilty about filling the landfills of the world with perfectly good, if outdated, backpacks. And yes, backpacks do become outdated: while I might be hesitant to accept that backpacks have been improved on structurally, I am completely cognizant of the fact they do change in a fashion sense, and that therefore, just like that Grand Funk Railroad t-shirt you wore to death back in sophomore year, can become outdated.

This hasn’t always been the case—back in my day, no one ever thought about whether or not their backpack was unfashionable: it was a backpack, and therefore, by its very nature, it was unfashionable. Sadly, this is no longer true, thanks to the same people who convinced our preteen daughters that they needed a new princess every other month. I’m speaking, of course, about the Disney people. Because before Disney got into the backpack business, your choice of backpacks was limited to blue or red. Once Disney got involved, however, and started putting people like Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers on backpacks (as well as the above-mentioned princesses), backpacks might as well have been made of soft cheese—their shelf life was that limited. (There’s a joke in there somewhere about Lindsay Lohan and Limburger, but I think I’ll let it pass.)

Of course, the same could be said about the lunchboxes we carried when I was in school, but at least our lunchboxes were durable enough to become collectible one day, so that, hopefully, the mom who had to suffer through swapping out the Grizzly Adams one one for the Happy Days one for the Dukes of Hazzard one was able to take early retirement off of the stash in her basement. The same can’t really be said about a backpack, though—no one is ever going to buy a used backpack as a “collectible,” not even the ones with “Milli Vanilli” on them. Why? Because, unlike a lunchbox, which is impermeable, a backpack is going to soak up every smell it comes in contact with.

Which is why Clyde’s great backpack run will almost certainly end this year: next year will bring middle school, and with it, gym class. And even my great, great cheapness is no match for the smell of fermented boy socks.

One of the perils of walking around with green and purple hair is that you soon forget that you are walking around with green and purple hair—or at least I do. This means that when people look at you in horror, amusement, disgust, or even approval, you automatically think that it is YOU they are directing these looks at, and not at your hair. You then take offense/feel smug (depending on the look) for the next twenty minutes or so, until you catch sight of yourself in a mirror or store window and realize, “Oh yeah. I have green and purple hair.”

Another peril of green and purple hair is that when you first get home from the salon your husband will look up from his book, sigh, and then go back to reading, all without saying a single word. But since this has been a peril associated with almost every new haircut you have ever tried, it, at least, it is a familiar one.

Surprisingly enough, one thing that is not a peril is regret: I don’t for a minute regret my new green and purple hair. Not because it’s so rad (although it is), and not because it helps give other people immediate notice that there is something not quite right about me (it does—and there is), but rather because my green and purple hair represents months and months of me not nagging, and despite what my family thinks, I really don’t like to nag.

Here’s what happened: about halfway through this last school year I realized that, unlike her uber-nerd of a mother, Clementine was never going to be a grade grubber. Instead, just like the pole vaulter who always seemed to just barely skim over the top of the bar, Clementine was always going to be quite content to just skim the top of the bottom when it came to grades. It was almost impressive, really, how closely she is able to skim that bar—somehow, she always seemed to know just what the bare minimum was and do that and nothing more. If she needed to get an 83 on the final exam in order to pull a 70 in the class, an 83 is what she would get.

Which sounds fine until you realize that one point over is located perilously close to one point under, and that all it was ever going to take to blow her from one side to the other was one good puff of wind.

Hence the green and purple hair.

The deal I made with Clementine was this: if she would make more of an effort to stay away from the edge—to jump not just over the bar, but beyond it—I would let her give me a makeover.

There were limits, of course. Nothing involving make-up, or clothes, because what would be the point of that? Those would only be temporary changes, and, like the change I was asking her to make, I wanted my change to be permanent. Or at least as permanent as possible without the use of a needle.

And besides, I really do like getting my hair cut. And, as it turns out, bleached. And dyed. And then dyed again. But of course, even if I didn’t, I would still gladly submit to the process every school year in if it brought the same results. Of course, since each year of school gets a little harder than the last, by all rights my makeovers should get more extreme as well. Which means that, technically, by the time she gets to college, there might actually be needles involved.

All I can hope is that she picks a place where it doesn’t show. But if she doesn’t, and four years from now you see me walking around with a Mike Tyson-style facial tattoo, you’ll know why.

When my daughter Clementine, was still a toddler, my husband and I were always amazed at the casual way she would flout our rules.

“No more cookies,” we would say, and (foolishly) consider the matter closed. Meanwhile, she would shrug her shoulders, stare straight at us, and then defiantly reach out for another cookie.
“No,” we’d say again, plucking the cookie from her hand. “No.”

There would be a scream, and then one of us would put the cookies away while the other one carried a protesting Clementine over to the timeout corner, where she would be given the first of what usually turned out to be many, many timeouts. It was usually sometime between the fifth and the tenth timeout that my husband would look at me and say, in his best Gomez Addams voice, “She’s so delightfully disobedient.”

“Yes,” I would agree, taking the Morticia role. “Yes, she is.”

Flash forward ten years or so, and the protesting howls from the timeout corner have been replaced by slamming doors and language that could make a sailor blush—or at least take notes. It should also be noted that my husband rarely utters the words “delightfully disobedient” anymore—instead, the words that seem to come out of his mouth most often are “How many more days until she turns 18?” and “Wow—I don’t think I’ve ever heard those two words put together in quite that combination before.”

And yet, the truth is that even though we don’t often say it out loud anymore, in our heads we are still thinking the same thing: “How delightfully disobedient.”

I know it must seem strange to wish for a disobedient child—kind of like wishing for an unfaithful spouse—but the truth is, obedience is overrated. Blind obedience is not very far removed from being an unthinking follower, and while this trait might seem desirable in the two year old you are trying to keep out of the cookie jar, it is dangerous in the extreme in the twenty-two year old you are trying to keep out of the cult.

It’s not that I’m saying that all obedience is bad—as my friend Michelle used to tell her high school students, sometimes you just have to be the pink poodle (meaning that, sometimes you just have to know when it’s time to play the game). But it’s also good to know when the game is optional.

That, I think, is what it is important for us, as parents, to teach. Not blind obedience, but rather, selective obedience. I’m not talking about the kind of selective obedience that only makes you stop for a red light when you think there might be a cop around (because stopping for a red light is always a good idea), but rather the kind of selective obedience that refuses to sentence a man to ten years in prison for jaywalking, because that’s what the judge told you to do.

Voltaire famously said that if you can make a man believe absurdities, then you can make him commit atrocities. I think the corollary to that should be that if you can make a man (or a child) believe in your own absolute authority, then you can make them believe in your own absolute infallibility. And absolute infallibility doesn’t exist anywhere—not in governments, not in churches, and certainly not in families.

I still think that we were right to stop Clementine from eating another cookie when she was two, but that doesn’t mean we’ll always be right about everything, and it’s good that she questions our rules every now and then—good that she’s still so “delightfully disobedient.” Good for her, and good for us.

Or at least that’s what we keep telling ourselves. In our best Gomez Addams voices.

For the first few years of my daughter, Clementine’s, life, we lived in a house without a bathtub; this meant that my maternal paranoia about her drowning during a bath was somewhat muted. Somewhat, but not completely—as anyone who has ever bathed an infant can tell you, the fear of them slipping under the water if you so much as even blink is an ever present fear. In fact, I don’t think it’s something you ever quite get over—my youngest is now ten, and if things get too quiet during his bath time I’ll start banging on the door, picturing him somehow wrapped up in the loofah cord and held underneath six inches of water, like one of those bizarre deaths in the “Final Destination” movies. (As a mother, I had to stop watching those movies when every single one of those deaths started looking plausible to me. “See,” I would always say whenever one came out, “I’m not being overprotective. You can die in a freak mining accident, train derailment, elevator fall, etc.”)

Given, then, my somewhat unreasonable fear about bathtub drowning, you’d think that I would have been happy when Clementine started preferring the shower to the bath. After all, no one has ever drowned in the shower, have they? Well . . .

Maybe not the participant, but as far as innocent bystanders are concerned, I have to say that death by drowning is still very much an option. This is because, no matter now much we beg and plead (in our bubbly little drowning voices), Clementine cannot seem to take a shower without flooding out the entire house.

The problem arises from the fact that, in her world, there is no use in preparing for, or trying to prevent, the worst—the worst is inevitable, and when we fight against it we only kick out at our own bleak destinies. (This is the “what’s the use of anything” school of thought, first invented by Nihlists before being perfected by teenage girls. And yes, it is an actual school; their uniforms are black on black.)

What this means for the rest of us is that Clementine sees absolutely no reason to ever attempt to keep the water inside of the shower, because all such striving is ultimately futile, and hopeless, and pointless. Worse yet, any such attempt on her part—such as actually putting the shower curtain inside the tub when she showers—would be tantamount to somehow denying this heartfelt philosophy, and from then ultimately surrendering to the demands of our corrupt society. It’s just a shower curtain, I know, but still.

If I was richer, of course, she would have a room with her own bathroom, and I wouldn’t have to bear witness to what the continued effects of hopelessness + Suave Strawberry Essence were. But unfortunately, I’m not, and she doesn’t, and so I get to experience the wrath of the swamp thing every time I go into the bathroom after her. Which, I admit, isn’t that often—my lungs just can’t take the damp. Also, I was kind of hoping that if I left it alone—if I let things reach the absolute limits of squelchy, fetid, disgustingness—that eventually she would make the change herself.

That’s right: it was my hope (a foolish one, I now see) that she, herself, would eventually see the error of her ways—that she would eventually grow tired of using towels that smelled like ripe cheese and had mushrooms growing from their corners. But I must have underestimated her capacity for suffering, or at least her acceptance of it. Or maybe she just really likes Spanish Moss. In any case, I must admit that my path of passive resistance has been an abject failure, doomed from the start.

Maybe those Nihlists have a point after all.

The other day, when I was looking through the ingredients list for kosher marshmallows (don’t ask), I came across something called “isinglass.” I didn’t know what it was, but it had such a pleasant ring to it that I thought that it must be something delightful. Something like the frost that forms on the inside of your window on snowy Christmas mornings. Or maybe, since it was obviously some kind of food, it was a type of delicate sugar that makes marshmallows super fluffy and soft.

Curious, I looked the word up in the “Food Lover’s Companion,” where I saw, to my complete horror and disgust, that ‘isinglass’ is actually just another name for fish bladders. In particular, sturgeon bladders. (I don’t know why that makes it worse, but it does. And also, on another note, I really have to give it up for the cooks of yore. I consider myself to be a fairly frugal cook, but I’ve got nothing on the first woman who picked a bunch of fish bladders out of the trash and said to herself, “It seems such a shame to waste these; surely I can use them for something.”)

Once I finally got over my disgust (It didn’t take too long: I think my exact thoughts were, Meh, I’m sure I’ve eaten worse) I started thinking instead about the curious way in which we name things: the way that we often give the most disgusting products some of the nicest sounding names. And then, for perhaps the first time ever, I thought that maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea, and that maybe, instead of regarding the process of euphemistically naming things with suspicion and disgust, I should be embracing that very idea for my own life. After all, I was fine with the idea of fish bladders in my kosher marshmallows before I knew what ‘isinglass’ was. (And for all you out there who are feeling smug because you don’t have to eat kosher marshmallows, I have one word for you: gelatin. As in that stuff that is made out of hooves.)

So anyway, with my newfound tolerance for euphemisms firmly in place, I decided that what I really needed to do was to come up with suitably cheerful names for the disgusting substances in my own life; once I did that I could be as happy as I was the day before I found out about the isinglass. (Which, admittedly, wasn’t all that happy, but still. If ignorance is bliss, then willful ignorance must be even better. Or something like that.)

Keeping in mind that the best way to start a new project is to simply begin, I immediately decided that from that point on there will no longer be any such thing as mold encrusted cereal bowls stashed under the beds and couches in my house. Instead, there will be bowls filled with oatessences.

In the same spirit, there will no longer be little yellow dots of urine on the toilet seat: rather, there shall be bladder dots.

The fur that accumulates on a toothbrush head that has been lost under the bed for two months, and placed back, unwashed, in the cup on the bathroom sink? Dentafuzz.

The dirty socks that are so sweat-encrusted they are hard on the bottom? Pedicrumbs.

The spoons that have become glued to the table by a combination of spittle and milk? Cuttlebuts.

Perhaps, if I stick to this new program long enough, I can even come up with a euphemism for that time of life when you finally escape all of the above mentioned little bits and pieces of disgustingness, only to willingly go back into the pit once more for someone else. Oh wait, I think there already is a euphemism for that. It’s called “parenting.”