Happy birthday to My Favorite Mother (aka MFM), and happy Friday the 13th to the rest of y'all.

Naah, do it yourself.

If anyone knows anyone at The New England Quarterly, please put in a good word for Monstro, who sent a paper titled “Chillingworth's A: Cultural Castigation in The Scarlet Letter” to its editor today. Thanks!

I've been thinking a lot about the number “a billion” recently. Someone once blogged an interesting tidbit about it:

A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
A billion days ago no-one walked on two feet on earth.

How much is the U.S. government spending in Iraq every month? Ten Billion Dollars. Monthly.

When we moved in, our kitchen left a lot to be desired. There was a carpenter-ant swarm in one of the cupboards, and a hole in our sink housing where a squirter hose was supposed to go. They took care of the carpenter ants (killing our cat in the process), but the hole remained squirter-less until eight months ago. The faucet died and our landlord's handyman inspected the adjacent emptiness.

“Want me to get a squirter, too?”

I didn't know what he meant at first but said, “sure.”

He came back with a new faucet and a silver tube with a squirt-shower attachment, which worked that day and then never again… until today, 7/7/07, when I put a clean cutting board behind the faucet, pushing in the handle of the squirter, and spraying myself in the boob.

So ain't it just my lucky day? Time to change my shirt! Oh Monstrooooooo…

• watched my kid
• listened to two episodes of Sesame Street
• made Monstro the perfect ham-and-cheese omelette
• danced a little
• …and re-read The Last Picture Show cover-to-cover.

  See, the nice thing about reading Gravity's Rainbow (I'm in The Counterforce, within 140 pages of the end of it all) is that after six-hundred-plus pages of Pynchon, McMurtry gives you so much more in so fewer pages that you can knock it out in a few hours and squeeze out some genuine tears at the end, to boot.

  TLPS characters not only feel desolate, but the novel's omniscient narrator evokes desolation at every turn: Coach Popper's treatment of Joe Bob, the night the boys take Billy out, every naked swimming party, usw.

  Strangely enough, though, in many ways, GR and TLPS features film as its primary medium (yeah, I know they're both books, but the picture show is a rite of passage that unites its characters, and GR is a movie, so sayeth my husband, the brilliant Future Doctor Monstro, and from what I've read, I believe it — that's the ONLY way it makes sense, and of course it's supposed to make sense — even Finnegans Wake is supposed to make sense at some level, but I won't be able to tell you that for certain 'til December.

The three of us went to a b-b-q yesterday, and of course it was raining (because MA sucks and there's a reason that the hardier pilgrims beat feet out of here), so baby amused himself by playing with our hostess's phone.

“Don't worry, it's fine,” she assured us. And it was fine, until the cop showed up at her front door. Turns out, baby had called 911. Swell.

We left soon after and I'm still somewhat mortified, although reading this calmed me a bit.

Another study I wasn't invited to…

I finally ordered the enlargements from my wedding proofs today. So, there you go!

My micro-fiction is online!