Why I should probably be back in therapy.

I have a complicated relationship with supermarket cashiers. They’re serving me, and yet at the same time they have all the power—tallying my purchases, weighing and considering each item, silently judging me. I’m always a little mortified (I can hear them thinking, she pays that much extra for organic? chump) and yet also grateful because hey, they're letting me take this food home! I mean, I have to pay for it, but still. Mostly, though, I really want them to be nice to me. I’m not asking for much. A smile here, a “have a nice day” there. Sometimes the exchange with the cashier is the only adult interaction I’ll have all day. I want a little validation that I exist. Is that too much to ask?

At any rate, there’s a new cashier at the Met Food across the street, and this woman is One Cranky-Ass Bitch. She’s a middle-aged woman with badly dyed red hair and a thick Russian accent. She scowls at every item that rolls towards her, and then regards me with an icy stare and spits, “Give me $35.17,” like she’s mugging me. And oh, when I tell her I’m going to use my debit card! The sighing and the rolling of the eyes! “Cash back?” she growls, and then looks at me like god help you if you say yes. If she could get away with balling up the receipt and hucking it at my face, she would. She is not a nice person.

So of course I’ve been trying to make her my friend. I head straight for her cash register and I put each item down right where she can pick it up—no making that conveyor belt roll, my friend! That’s too much work for you! Then when she accosts me with the total I always beam at her and say, “Okay!” and I count out my money—exact change for you, neighbor! You’ve had a hard day! And then she shoves my receipt at me and my bag and I tell her to have a nice day and she hates me more than ever.

I went in on Saturday to buy a bag of potting soil. I had a hard time negotiating the bag, as it was big and heavy and I am small and puny. I plopped it down at her register and said, “Whoa!” because I’m a dork. She glanced at me to sneer, but then something changed in her expression—and she smiled at me. She. Smiled. At me.

Finally, I thought. I’ve broken through. She could only resist my charms for so long.

Of course I smiled like a crazy person back at her, and I handed her my money and she gave me my change and I shrieked “Thank you! Nice day, isn’t it! Hope you get outside! Bye! See you later!” at her. She looked right at me and she smiled again. I was in heaven.

When I walked in the door I was about to tell my husband about my breakthrough when he said, “Did you know that you’ve got something on your face? You’ve got a big black smudge under your nose.”

So. It wasn’t my charms, but my dirt mustache. Cranky-Ass Bitch was laughing at me. She was thinking, “The American whore looks like Hitler. And my heart is glad.”

I'm sort of considering doing it again, just to amuse her.

In which I don't bother coming up with a conclusion.

Today Henry woke up to find that his nose had turned into a cascading waterfall of goo. Besides the runniness and the sneeziness he seems relatively okay, but he has also been squeamish lately about strange substances on his skin, so every time he sneezes and mucus shoots out of his nose, he screams “Get it off me! GET IT OFF!” and I have to run and wipe him before he enters The Freakout Territory From Which It Is Difficult To Exit Gracefully. You’d think such a fussy child would learn to wipe his own nose, but when the tissue is used and it becomes infused with the goo, then his hands must be wiped. It's an exhausting process. A few times he just lunged forward and wiped his nose on my jeans, and I let him.

Right before his nap I thought he felt a little warm, so I whipped out the thermometer. Now, in the past Henry has found the under-arm option of temperature-taking unacceptable; strangely, he always handled the rectal option with aplomb, so that’s where we went. So today I didn’t even think about it: I lubed up the thermometer and put him over my lap. Henry was intensely curious about the goings-on; when I got out the thermometer he was all “What is THAT” and then “Oooh, temperature,” and “Because I don’t feel well” and “This will make my rash better” (lately everything is about the rash). Then I took off his diaper, which is always a thrill for him, and when I told him to lie down across my lap he was clearly anticipating Fun Times. And then there was insertion.

What I failed to take into account is, because this has been a ridiculously healthy year for all of us, I haven’t taken Henry’s temperature in a long, long time. And what an 18-month-old will tolerate is not necessarily what a two-something enjoys. So I stuck this thermometer in and Henry says, “Hey. HEY. WAIT. HEY. What’s THAT. NO. HEY,” like an adult chastising a little kid who put something where it’s not supposed to go. It was so adult that I started laughing and I took the thermometer out of my indignant son’s butt and he stood up and looked at me, still saying, “HEY” except now because I was laughing he concluded that whatever had just happened, it was hilarious. And then we had lunch. The End.

How not to make a pot roast.

1. Chop two carrots, two celery stalks, and two onions.

2. Blinded and weeping from the onion fumes, avert your eyes while chopping. After all, you’ve done this a million times, you know where the knife is supposed to go—

3. Drop to ground, holding what’s left of thumb.

4. Hold thumb-remnant under running water. Marvel at the amount of blood.

5. Search counter for rest of thumb.

6. Realize all of thumb is attached; what you’ve done is create a meaty flap you can’t look at too closely without feeling nauseated.

7. Think about the words “meaty flap” and feel nauseated anyway.

8. Wrap thumb in paper towels and lie on floor for a minute. The cool, comforting floor.

9. Push dog away. Consider whether the dog smelled your blood and thought you were offering yourself as a tasty snack. Decide your dog never loved you—all those times he gazed upon you with those watery eyes, he was just thinking, “Someday you’ll slip up with that knife—and on that day…”

10. Push dog away. Repeat as necessary. Stupid dog.

11. Look at thumb. Get up to replace blood-soaked towels.

12. Lie on floor again. Feel sorry for yourself. First Ted Koeppel’s cruel, gratuitous rejection; now this.

13. Does anyone even watch ABC/Nightline? And what’s with all the “-line” shows? Dateline? Frontline? Is there another –line?

14. Look at thumb. Get up to replace blood-soaked towels.

15. Staggering to bathroom, swaddle thumb in Blue’s Clues Band-Aids.

16. As the vegetables (along with part of your body) are already chopped, decide to just finish the damn thing.

17. Heat 1/3 cup olive oil in a skillet.

18. Put 2.5-lb bottom round in skillet.

19. Apply ice to the teensy 2nd-degree burns covering your face and neck.

20. Brown meat while weeping softly to self.

21. Open bottle of wine ineptly, causing cork to break off.

22. Push rest of cork into bottle while cursing.

23. Consider drinking wine. Realize that child is sleeping now, but soon child will be awake, and a drunken and bleeding you will not be sympathetic to his needs.

24. Put stupid meat in stupid slow cooker.

25. Do the other dumb shit that you have to do to make goddamn pot roast. Turn on the fucking slow cooker.

26. Look at thumb. Stagger back to bathroom to replace blood-soaked Blue’s Clues Band-Aids.

27. Lurch toward bed for much-needed nap.

28. Hear child calling you from his crib, a full hour before he’s supposed to wake up; you had an understanding, damn it. Decide you hate child.

29. Remove child from crib. Child offers to kiss the boo-boo on your thumb. Decide you love child. Politely decline offer.

30. Wince as your child repeatedly kisses your ravaged thumb.

31. Attempt to entertain child for 4 hours, even as blood loss and pain takes its toll on your mood and energy level.

32. Enjoy overcooked pot roast with husband. Glare at him when he offers, “The extra thumb means extra yum!” Announce that you’ll be ordering take-out for the next two weeks.

Why I could never be a Buddhist.

Yesterday, while Henry was napping, I was leaving my bedroom (where I work) to get a glass of water from the kitchen (where I obtain glasses of water), and there, on the floor in our hallway, was a waterbug.

For those of you lucky to never have experienced the unique horrors of the waterbug, let me tell you a little story. Once there was a cockroach who grew to monstrous proportions—say, 3-4 inches in length, 1-2 inches in width--with long spiny scrabbly legs and fucking WINGS that enabled it to FLUTTER ABOUT sickeningly and make Alice SCREAM HER HEAD OFF.

Basically, yeah, they’re gigantic, meaty cockroaches, that live in the basements and walls of NYC apartment buildings, and emerge periodically from the slimmest of cracks in the walls or around fixtures to die. It is their dying wish that before they expire, they watch humans scream and flail their limbs. Smelling our fear, they can finally die in peace. Fuckers.

So this waterbug was, thank God, on its back, which meant it had breathed its last putrid, breath, and had joined its ancestors on the shorelines of the River Styx. I ran to the kitchen to unroll the entire paper towel roll. You see, when picking up a dead waterbug—which I have done exactly one other time, and that was only because my cat had dissected it and I didn’t realize that the giant bug I thought I was picking up was actually the TORSO of a waterbug, but where was its head, OH GOD WHERE WAS ITS HEAD—sorry. Where was I? Yes. When picking up a dead waterbug, it is essential that you avoid being able to feel any of its contours or textures, be it the chitinous exoskeleton or its meaty underbelly with the legs GET IT OFF ME! GET IT OFF—

Okay. So you don’t want to feel it, because then you risk dropping it in horror, and then you risk it landing somewhere on your person, and that as we all know leads to death, because there’s no reason to live once that happens. So you get a whole roll of paper towels, wrap them around your hand so that you have created a Paper Mitt of Protection, and you lean over carefully, and quickly scoop it up, hoping that it wasn’t only pretending to be dead.

Which this one was. Pretending, that is. To be dead.

When I touched the thing with my PMoP, it flipped over and ran right at me, over my toes, and past me.

Let me repeat: Over my toes. My toes. Right over them.

It blindly skittered around my hallway, attempting to climb the walls, falling back, fluttering in the air for a sickening moment or two, and then climbing again. Meanwhile, I was in the kitchen, doing my best imitation of Lucy Ricardo when she had just had a waterbug's legs ambling across her toenails. What, you never saw that episode? It's a hoot, my friend. As you probably guessed, Ricky saves the day.

Now, I have never actually killed one of these things. When I lived alone, I simply ran from my home, screaming, and hoped that when I returned, it would either be 1) dead or 2) gone. As long as I have lived with my husband, he has usually been home when a waterbug has emerged for its Make a Wish Foundation moment, because I made sure I always had a JOB, so I would be out of the house as much as possible, thus limiting my chances of exposure.

That’s how much I hate these things. I would rather spend my days in a cubicle—a nice, vermin-free cubicle—then risk encountering a waterbug. This is how sick I am. Now you know.

So! What with this gargantuan insect rushing about inside my house, I got busy! Making calls! First I called my friend Sarah, who wasn’t home. My hysterical message provided hours of entertainment at her house, I'm sure. Then I called some neighbors! Maybe they were sitting on their couches, hands folded in their laps, waiting for me to call and invite them over for some cockroach-smushing! Nope, they weren’t! Then I called my husband, who was no help at all. "Kill it!" he said, somewhat obviously.

I got out some roach spray that has been under our sink from before we moved in. Using every ounce of guts I had left, I got close enough to the thing, who was now running! Everywhere! Trying! To find! An exit! and I pressed down the nozzle—only to see that the can had no pressure left at all. Still I kept pressing, and the roach spray drip-driip-dripped down on the waterbug, who began to slow down, and then flipped over on its back to wave every single one of its horrible legs at me, and then died.

And then I ran away again. Then I went back. Then I ran away.

Finally, I managed to get it. I got it. It’s gone. But there will be another one. There’s always another one.