And when I say “practically,” I mean “forcefully.”

Oh, that’s right—I have a blog. I knew there was something I was forgetting.

We’re back from scenic Salt Lake City, where my brother- and sister-in-law live with my brand spanking new niece. Conveniently, Heather and Jon also live there, so when we weren’t gorging on sweet, sweet New Baby, we were hanging out with them, begging them to move to Jersey. (Their responses: “No, thanks. Really, no. No. No. Please let go of me.” I think they’re coming around!)

Of course they won’t come here, because there’s no reason anyone should ever leave Salt Lake. Damn it, we should all have such low humidity. Maybe some people find zero percent humidity to be a bad thing, but I am squarely in the Hooray For Desert Climate camp. Not to mention, it’s sunny all the damn time, and there’s all this, like, space, and everyone is friendly. Crazily friendly. I was suspicious, but they seemed like they meant it. I had to find a doctor for this sore throat that I was sure was strep and that I would kill the baby (it wasn’t, and I didn’t), and I was calling all kinds of doctors and urgent care places, trying to figure out where to go, and everyone I talked to was so lovely and genuinely concerned and not trying to hang up on me, I just wanted to cry. At the urgent care clinic, the nurse put me in an examining room, and then returned five minutes later to apologize because the doctor was late. Five minutes. I practically humped her. And then the doctor arrived, and he was hot. They think of everything there!

When we weren’t ogling the baby, we were leering at my brother- and sister-in-law’s nice house, with its plants that are alive and its stuff that isn’t broken. Scott and I would ask questions like, “So how do you, uh, keep plants from being all dead and you know?” and “How much did you pay for, like, this thing that works and also is pretty?” We got some answers, but all we wanted is for them to come live here with us and do everything we’re too lazy to do.

So once my sore throat was better, I decided to throw myself down some stairs. That’s what I did at 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday (we were leaving at 5:30 a.m., and I figured I’d ruin any chances of sleep with an injury or two). And I’m bruised in so, so many ways. My arm has this fascinating lump on it that if you touch it I scream. It hurt so much that I didn’t even notice the broken pinky toe until 12 hours later, when I was all why does my toe hurt? And what’s that purple stuff on my foot? And then I took my shoe off (NEVER TAKE THE SHOE OFF) and saw the horror therein. I honestly saw stars. If I had had a tiny tiny saw in my purse, I might have just sheared the thing off. Just to never look at it again.

I'd do it all over again, bruises and all, to see Henry holding his new cousin and kissing her soft little head. If my baby niece and her lovely parents were to come move here they could beat me up every day. And if that doesn’t get them here, nothing will.

Why gyms are no good. No good at all.

I quit my gym a while back, on account of I never went. Apparently I hated money enough to give it to a place that was offering me nothing in the way of goods or services. Anyway, eventually I came to my senses, and realized I could spend my money on something better, like cookies.

The gym quit was perfectly timed: shortly after that we made our decision to leave Brooklyn and find a house in New Jersey, and my weekly bouts of ennui became hourly fits of plus-sized panic. I ran back to my psychiatrist, who told me that the best thing I could do for myself was get some regular exercise.

For a while I fooled myself into thinking I could exercise plenty without some stupid gym. The gym and I were through. Who needs a gym, when you have a park and good sneakers? I’ll jog! Okay, ha ha, maybe walk! Fast!

Whoever said walking was a good workout was lying. To me, a good workout means you sweat, and maybe I’m in better shape than I thought, because I couldn’t break a sweat, unless I wore two sweaters. Also, I kept tripping on the sidewalk. And I inevitably took my dog, because I would be lacing up my sneakers and there he’d be, watching me--and you try to get a workout when Charlie is tagging along. He has to pee on every tree, every hydrant, every garbage bag. He doles out his pee like it’s his gift to all of Brooklyn, to be evenly distributed to its residents. Behold his golden puddles! It’s Christmas, but not!

Lately my anxiety level has been ramping up day by day, as we near our closing and our departure from Brooklyn (I actually just screamed a little). So today I sucked it up, and called a local gym. This gym is not my ex-gym; it’s a gym that happens to be in the same building as Henry’s school, so I really have no excuse. I can drop him off and go. Mind you, during that 5-second elevator trip up those three flights, my brain will be screaming NO NO GO HOME AND EAT DING-DONGS. Nonetheless, the chances are not bad that I might actually get myself some exercise, sometimes.

So! “Is it possible to get a six-week membership?” I asked the nice salesperson. “No,” she said, “We don’t do short-term memberships.” Apparently this place hates money as much as I do! We were meant to be!

“Really?” I said.

“The shortest membership we could do is two months,” she said.

“I’ll pay for two months,” I said, and she said, “Well, this month would be prorated to start today.” So six weeks, in other words. Who was I to point this out?

She told me to come down to the gym, so I went to the gym, and when I got there she told me, and I quote, “The accountant doesn’t want to give you that membership because it’s too much paperwork for just two months.” Wow! They loathe money!

”Really?” I said.

“Let me see what I can do,” she said. I was getting good at this! “Why don’t you go home and I’ll call you.”

So I went home, and no joke, there was a message from her saying to come back, the membership was approved. I took my gym stuff with me! I was going to work out! Mental (and, I suppose, physical) health for me!

“The accountant said to give you a temporary six-week membership,” she said when I got there.

OH MY GOD WHAT OTHER KIND WERE WE TALKING ABOUT, I wanted to shout, but didn’t.

Then I exercised today for the first time in a long time. That in itself is not worth the effort it takes to type the words. I flailed around on an elliptical machine. I tried not to hurt myself stretching. I considered the weight machines but concluded that I had done enough for My First Workout in 2006. The End.

But here’s what I forgot: when you’re a nervous wreck, having had a workout is an excellent idea, but being in a gym is the worst thing you can do to yourself. First of all, you're surrounded by muscled, supple forms, and you're not one of them. You have to get naked in a locker room, which would not be a terrible thing unto itself, but inevitably, in this cavernous, mostly unpopulated space, a woman will stroll over and take the locker right next to yours . You will try not to look but oh god peripheral vision. You have to squeeze yourself into your five-year-old, pilly Lycra-infused pants and witness the horror of the visible panty lines. You suffer a glimpse of yourself in a full-length mirror, an object you have very wisely banned from your home.

Then you go to the Cardio Station (do they perform open-heart surgeries there? It would be a welcome distraction) and you put on your iPod and commence to feeling the burn and so forth. You imagine the elliptical trainer is the damn gym accountant and you step on his head again and again. Your freak-outedness begins to dissipate.

But then! A beefy personal trainer (is there any other kind?) keeps entering the room and peering directly at you, the sole enjoyer of Cardio. You try not to worry, but that’s what your brain is good at these days. There he is, back again. Oh god, is he going to come over and tell me I’m doing something wrong? Is he going to—oh please no—correct my form? Or did I commit some terrible breach of gym etiquette? Oh please let me be done before he comes back. And then you realize: you don’t have a towel with you. And you’re sweating all over the handlebars. You are gross. You are what you always loathed at the gym. The sweat-leaving person. You jerk.

Now he’s back with another trainer, and they’re standing in the corner, pretending not to be talking about you. One of them has a towel wrapped around his neck. It’s an obvious message.

You finish five minutes early because you can’t stand it anymore, rush past the trainers, get a wad of paper towels from the bathroom, and purposefully wipe down the handles, as the responsible gym-goer you are. Anyway, with your iPod off you can hear what they’re talking about and it’s something about their hours or their quads, or both, but anyway it’s not about you.

At least your conscience (and the elliptical machine) is clean.

So after you’re done with your comic approximation of stretching, you return to the locker room, where Next Door Locker Lady is just emerging from the steam room and she says hello. Oh god do you have to talk with her now? Sweet Moses, do you have to make small talk when you’re both naked?

After a quick retreat to the showers and subsequent drying, dressing, etc, you head to the elevator. Standing at the elevator is a cadre of seven-foot-tall, confident athletic types, all dressed in revealing workout costumes. Undoubtedly they Take It to the Max on a daily basis, right after they Push It to the Extreme. And you have to stand among them, with your workout clothes in a plastic shopping bag. The group includes the "your money is not worth the effort" salesperson and the trainer who had been staring at you over at The Cardiac Center. No.

You duck into the stairwell and head down the stairs.

And you set off the alarms.

While racing back up the stairs, you see the sign, cleverly angled so that you can’t read it as you head down the stairs: DO NOT GO DOWN THE STAIRS ALARM WILL SOUND. You get back to the elevator, and there they all are, looking at you. “Ha ha!” you say. “That sure woke me up!” No one says anything.

Anxiety: returned!

Oh, and: Happy Birthday, Henry.

I spent most of last week preparing for Henry’s birthday party. I had all sorts of wild ideas, like how it was going to be fun, and I wouldn’t want to die at all.

Note to those around me: if you ever catch me musing, “You know what I think I’ll bake? A three-layer birthday cake. I mean, I don’t really have time, but how hard could it be, am I right?” I give you permission to slap me to the ground, shove me in a closet, lock the door, and then stand on the other side and berate me for my silly and pointless housewifey notions.

Something along the way went wrong. Not with the party—with me. I spent all week cleaning and preparing and thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking about the cake! The damn cake! Which was going to be blue, and have an R2-D2 on the top (courtesy of my Star Wars-loving artistic husband). And for some reason, it had to be homemade, because to have it any other way would mean my son would hate me for the rest of his days. Also, I would bake cookies for Henry’s class. If I didn’t, his teacher would ship him off to an orphanage, for a mother who brings Entenmann’s is surely a mother who has no love in her heart.

The cookies were not a problem, because when are cookies a problem? How hard can they be, really? Unless you forget the sugar or use motor oil instead of butter, you’re in good shape. But the cake, I think, was possessed. I see no other reason for the events that followed. I think the cake needed a good exorcism.

By the time I was ready to begin the baking of the cake, I was a little out of my mind. I had spent all week buying birthday-party notions and paper plates and streamers and banners and all manner of festive shit. I had wiped down every surface in the house, including the dog, and I had mopped the entire apartment not once but several times because I decided I had to keep mopping until the water was clear. Because we live on the first floor of a building that is alongside a busy thoroughfare, where our windowsills are blackened with soot and god knows what effluence on a weekly if not daily basis, this is a challenge—but not if you’re insane enough.

(It’s not that I’m a clean person. My mother and husband and anyone who’s every lived with me will tell you that I am not. It’s that once I get started I have to do an utterly perfect job. This is why I try to avoid doing housework; I can lose days just cleaning the grout, and I prefer doing things like interacting with my loved ones and eating food and breathing.)

But back to the cake! I baked the layers while Henry was in school, congratulating myself all the while for my excellent planning. The layers would be completely cooled by the evening, at which point the frosting would begin. And the frosting, as we all know, is a piece of cake HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAHHHhhhurrrk.

So. The cake was baked, and it looked good. (I stress “looked.”) I was the perfect mother and my son would be happy and successful and he would never use the F-word at me as he grabbed the keys to our nonexistent car and took off with his slut I mean girlfriend. That night I began preparing the frosting. Only I was so harried by this point that I used twice as much milk as the recipe called for, and somehow it didn’t dawn on me until I was done that frosting was not supposed to have the consistency of applesauce. Whoops! I sent my husband out to buy confectioner’s sugar. And then I sent him out again, because I said two boxes, not one. Only I didn’t say that at all, I just THOUGHT IT and he should know what I am thinking. While he was out at the store, I wondered what to do with an enormous bowl of frosting soup; I concluded the only thing to do was immerse my hand in it, because when else do you get a chance to stick your hand in a bowl of frosting? The decadence of it!

It wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. Mostly it was sticky, and then, oddly, it burned. I rinsed and rinsed but the burning continued. I don’t know what to say about that. (The next day I told my husband about putting my hand in the frosting and he looked at me like I told him I put it up my ass. “Why would you do that?” he kept asking. “What were you thinking?”I think he was just jealous. Until I told him it burned.)

Once my second enormous batch of frosting was completed, I added so much blue food coloring to it that one taste dyed my tongue, but it still wasn’t as blue as I wanted. No matter, it was good enough. I arranged my slightly lopsided cake layers and began to construct my masterpiece. Only the layers kept… sliding. And the frosting was looking a little puddley. In fact, it was oozing off the cake. But I was in denial. I kept going, kept slapping the frosting back up on the sides of the cake and watching it make its way back down.

By then I was weeping and cursing and demanding that God explain why this frosting wasn’t working. I have never before experienced an unsuccessful frosting, as I am the Anal Baker who follows every baking rule and instruction to the letter. To the letter! And still the frosting would not obey me! We had the air-conditioning on because the humidity level was rainforest-level, and I was frosting the cake about two feet away from the blasts of arctic air. And yet my cake looked like a bucket of melting blue crap. I had to give up. I threw the whole thing in the refrigerator, and went to bed.

Because Scott and I had tasted numerous generous spoonfuls of frosting, we were far too wired to sleep, so we laid in bed bitching about the sorry state of our lives while millions of tiny bugs scurried hither and yon underneath our skin (at least that’s how I felt) and I obsessed about the cake the cake THE CAKE. Finally, as dawn threatened to approach, we managed to sleep, and then a few minutes later somehow we got the kid to school and I presented them with the damn cookies. And then went home to regard the state of the cake.

It was now well-chilled, and looked like it had a terrible disease. Blue frosting was smeared across the top and the primordial ooze was stuck to the sides. I turned the air conditioning back on to Kelvin Cold, scraped every inch of frosting off the cake, whipped it back into spreadable consistency, began the re-frosterizing, and then watched in horror as it melted all over again. I was by now incoherent with rage. There was no reason this frosting should be doing this; obviously it had some sort of personal problem with me. I tossed it back into the refrigerator and then I calmly paced the living room and threw some things at the wall. Then I returned to the cake, scraped the frosting off again, put the bowl of frosting into the freezer, let it set for a while, and then re-frosted, this time even closer to the air conditioner. And lo, the frosting did stay put. And I was happy.

Then I went to pick up Henry from school, and when we returned, I checked on the cake, which was now safe in the fridge, sure to not have incurred any more harm. Except it had.

When I was out, Scott had taken the cake out to draw the R2-D2 on the top, and despite taking every precaution (setting the cake up less than an inch from the air conditioner, etc.) the frosting had melted. AGAIN.

I tried not to scream. I called my mother and sister for frosting advice and moral support. “Why does it keep melting?” my mother asked. Good question, Mom. They both agreed I needed to add more confectioner’s sugar. Now I had a plan. Okay. I scraped the sides of the cake (AGAIN), added cupfuls of sugar, blended the damn frosting (AGAIN), and applied it to the sides. Again. This time it seemed to want to stay. Finally. But I was exhausted, and on edge from the cupfuls of sugar coursing through my veins (I don’t know about you, but I can’t not taste frosting), and there was no joy left in me. The cake had won.

By the time the party rolled around, I knew I had achieved a new level of insanity. I could think of nothing but the cake. The cake should be out of the refrigerator, I kept thinking. A chilled cake is not ideal. Room temperature, that’s what it should be. But if I put it out and it melts! Our friends were arriving and everyone was mingling and laughing and all I could think was that damn cake better taste good or I will punch it.

Then it was cake time, the moment of truth, and the cake came out of the refrigerator, and everyone oohed—I must say, it did end up looking impressive—and I cut into it and immediately knew, as I had to put all my weight into it, that the cake had the consistency of a brick. Fuck it, I thought, and hoisted leaden slabs to everyone around me, and we all attempted to digest forkfuls while I stared at the hateful, hateful dessert. Five minutes later, I pointed at the three-quarters of cake remaining and shouted, “THERE. NOW DO YOU SEE?” Because, yes, the frosting was running down the sides and oozing all over the table. “Do you see that?” I said, as my guests muttered to each other, “And she thinks she’s ready to go off her meds?”

Everything is true except for the part about the mustache.

The humidity level is somewhere past 100 and it’s 97 degrees and my computer is melting. The child is in his crib, doing what he does best: napping and sweating. There’s air conditioning on in there, so I don’t know why he wakes up sopping wet. Then again, this morning he told me he had just been “flying a little” and “there was some basketball downstairs.” Sounds like a workout, son! You should dream about sending email, like I do!

A while back, I promised two exciting tales: my tale of subway drama, and my appearance on Bravo. See, I didn’t forget. Only I began to think that neither of these anecdotes is all that interesting after all. But whatever, I have nothing else to give.

The subway incident went something like this: Henry and I were with our friends, J. and F., who hail from the town of P___ S___. We had just been to the New York Aquarium, which is all the way down in Coney Island. The outing had been my idea, and like so many of my ideas, it had been a terrible one. There were many subway stairs to negotiate. The toddlers were cranky, as toddlers so often are. The aquarium was both expensive and crowded. Henry had no interest in anything but the sharks. The sharks, and then we were done. DONE, do you hear me? DONE. No, he did NOT care about the starfish or the seahorses (they’re horses of the sea, kid! Give them a chance) nor would he give a second glance to the walruses, even though they were much more impressive than the sharks, if you ask me. But he wasn't asking me. No, no NO. So I shelled out $18 for fifteen minutes of holding a screaming 40-pound child while I searched for the shark exhibit and then two minutes of holding a silent 40-pound child while we looked at sharks. Then we went down to the beach, and hey! What a worse idea to have than the aquarium! At the beach, the children can coat their sunscreen-marinated bodies in sand, and be like hot little breaded fillets. Fillets that want to be held! And don’t want to go anywhere near the water even though it’s hotter than hell!

And then we poured some melted ice creams down our shirts and hauled them up the assload of stairs to the subway and there we were on the subway, finally. We were sweaty and disheveled and two out of the four of us needed diaper changes. It was our stop. I was holding Henry and I ran ahead to the door because I’m paranoid about the door closing before we can escape.

And then it closed. On my foot.

My foot was inside the train. I was outside, on the platform. Henry was in my arms. J. and F. were inside the train, looking out at us. My stroller was inside the train. Next to my foot.

And the door, it would not open.

For those of you who do not hail from these parts, the NYC subway doors are merciless. They will close right on you. They are not the friendly elevator doors that occasionally decapitate people but usually are quite nice about letting people through. Not these doors. Once they begin closing, nothing can stop them. You may think they will open. But they will not. No! Usually, if you get a limb stuck, you can wiggle yourself free, but in this case, I couldn’t.

And we were in the last car, which meant that the conductor, wherever he or she was, could not in a million years see me. Me and my trapped foot. My trapped and doomed foot.

So I screamed for a while, but nothing happened, as my scream is thin and girlish. Actually I think I was calling out, “Um, hello? Hello? Trapped foot, over here! Helloooo?” which is not going to get anyone’s attention, especially not here, where the subway conductors will rip your foot off as they head out to their next destination and not think twice about it. Subway conductors would sooner leap out through their window and gnaw at your ankle with their extra-long incisors until your foot is severed from the rest of you than open the doors for you. This is true.

Fortunately, a man sporting a thick, lush handlebar moustache was standing on the platform. He heard my weak cries and, with a booming baritone, demanded that the doors be opened. And lo, they were. And my foot was freed! Hurrah!

Henry was exceedingly concerned about my foot, but this didn’t stop him from demanding that I hold him all the way home. No stroller was good enough for him, as I had been in danger, and this was no time to be separated from me. Never mind about the limping! You hold me, damn it! You see how I love you!

The End. You see? There have been better stories. Like the one about when I was on Bravo! Which I will get to eventually.