So, I told you yesterday about the missing porno flick: Anal Clinic, which has probably offended the delicate sensibilities of half my readers. Many of you wondered where the hell the porno went, but in order for me to tell you, I need to give you some background so it makes sense.

In the last years of my High School Experience (I make it sound like I was there for longer than four years. I DID NOT FAIL HIGH SCHOOL, PEOPLE.) I began dating a guy who I’ve mentioned before: Tim. Tim is the guy who messed around with Molly, which I walked in to see.

But before this happened, he was my boyfriend for a couple of years. Tim was a year younger than me, and his family had money, and I mean some serious money. They ran a tobacco and candy distribution company that was hitting the big time for our area, so they made major bank. I mentioned finding a gold brick while looking for Anal Clinic, and it was the truth: there was always crazy crap like that floating around, hundred dollar bills shoved in random places as if by accident. While I was tempted to steal the gold brick, what the fcuk would I have done with it? I’m pretty sure Starbucks wouldn’t take it.

Anyway.

So this family had a butt load of money, and they built a house in an exclusive neighborhood in my hometown, but they made the ridiculous decision to design it themselves, so it ended up being pretty stupid looking. Just like it would be if MY non-architect self tried to design a house and no one told me it was a bad idea.

(My advice to you: if you’re ever in the position to design a house without a degree in architecture, please don’t do it. It will be completely obvious)

But this was a house that was huge, sprawling and well-used. The kids in that family tended to attract some of the more creative friends who would pretty much move in and make mischief with anyone who would come over. I’d call it a Party House, but it wasn’t, not really. It was more like a mini-mental institution for rich kids.

By the time Tim and I started dating, his house had been well-established as the place to do the wackiest shit imaginable. Just as an example: when Tim and I literally first started dating, we went into the guest bedroom on the main floor to make out, right? In the middle of our make out session, three kids in full army gear snuck in, shimmied across the floor on their stomachs and began to pelt us with frozen grapes.

Why? I don’t know. What I did know was that this was absolute mayhem and I loved every second of it.

We’d frequently order pizzas only to scare the delivery driver. There was an alcove on top of the front door in the foyer that someone would stand perched upon when the driver would pull up. He’d walk to the house with the pizza, ring the doorbell, and someone downstairs would open it, showcasing an empty foyer. THEN, whomever was perched on the alcove would jump down in front of the started kid and pay for the pizza.

Freaked ’em right out.

Another favorite trick was to make slip and slides with garbage bags in the backyard which was on something of a hill. We’d fill up the yard pretty much full of water, turning the grass to mud, and hurl ourselves down it. When we’d get tired of that, we’d make mud people, dress them in Tim’s mom’s dress clothes, naked mud wrestle, then jump into the hot tub and wash off. IN THE HOT TUB.

Nothing was off limits, nothing was sacred, and nothing stopped us. It was freedom and chaos all rolled into one gigantic mud ball.

Another time we found a huge dead fish–from where? Who knows–and on one of the hottest days of the summer, put the rotting body on hood of one of the other kids cars. It actually stripped off some of the paint.

But this is the house I brought Anal Clinic back to watch it. And like several of my driver’s licenses it went missing, probably, I would suspect, by someone intent upon making me do exactly what I had to do: go to a video store and pay for a porno called Anal Clinic. Who wouldn’t be embarrassed by that?

I like to think of those years as the reason I was blessed with two rambunctious boys: I’m obviously well equipped to handle it.

Aunt Becky wants to hear YOUR stories of mischief making. I cannot possibly be the only person who got up to this sort of crazy shit…Am I?

The first time I tried to order pizza in my very first apartment, the local pizza place hung up on me when they heard my address. When I called back, they told me that they didn’t want my business anymore, thankyouverymuch.

The very first thing the building manager said to me upon my arrival? “I need to check your walls and see if they’re up to code. Esther built that room, you know, the little one, for her cats.

My father (and the Realtor who found the place) said to me, “She put a grand piano in the living room. Can you believe it?”

I can’t say that I did believe it, really, until I had actually moved in. The place looked harmless enough during the walk-through: four walls and one outdated kitchen and bathroom. It was pretty typical Chicago Apartment fare in my college-student price range.

To tell you that I took on the living arrangements of a crazy cat lady would be an understatement.

This woman was THE Crazy Cat Lady, with a dedicated cat-room and all. After I moved in and had been living there for a while, I made a few discoveries of my own. Esther had taped dried flowers to the windows in lieu of curtains. Esther had several cats (and cat hair is damn difficult to get out of carpet).

Esther’s legal last name was ‘Lester,’ and she had not forwarded her mail. I received several bills in very red envelopes with her name on them. Finally, several months after I moved in, the Esther Lester mail abated and the neighbors had essentially stopped talking about her and her crazy cat room (which became my office).

All thoughts of Esther The Crazy Cat Lady/Former Occupant were gone from my mind and I could concentrate on far more important things, like finishing my English/Secondary Education double major and writing thesis after thesis on whether or not Percy Byshee Shelly was doing the nasty with John Keats.

(They were totally humping.)

Then, one day, completely out of the blue, I received a package from Amazon.com with her name on it. As I mentioned earlier, Esther had left no forwarding address and I was compelled to open it. You know, to see if it was worth trying to forward it her new place. It could be important! Who knows, really, until you open it?

Inside where three copies of the same book: One Woman’s-Reflections-Esther by none other than The Crazy Cat Lady Herself. Holy shit, I thought, She wrote a book! She wrote a crazy cat book.

I wish I could tell you that I kept the letter that came with the books, but I didn’t. I do, however, have a real-life enactment of the letter based on actual events:

Dear Crazy Cat Lady,

Here are the last two Earthly copies of your crappy book. It was so very crappy that we couldn’t continue to sell it on Amazon.com. Only one person bought it. Ever. Please keep your crap out of our warehouses.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

Of course, you know what happened next: I called everyone I knew. “She wrote a book!” I laughed into the phone to anyone who would listen. “She wrote a fucking book of poetry!!! And it’s BAD!!!”

Indeed, the poetry was bad. There was a poem about Lake Michigan that was such an obvious metaphor for sex that it could only have been laughable. It went something like this:

The waves crash down over me

pounding, pounding

pounding me, pounding

o! the waves!

Apparently, to Esther, everything was a metaphor for sex, including her trips to the grocery store (I squeeze the melons to feel their flesh under my flesh), the feeling of driving her car (O! how it vibrates under my control!), the Chicago wind (It pushes me and forces me to resist!), and drunken students wandering by her window (O! to feel virgin flesh on virgin flesh/the weight. O!).

She had two other topics of poetry: her grandchildren (O! but they bring so much joy to my lonely life/because my children don’t visit!) and thinly-veiled attacks on her neighbors:

O! they complain!

Complain about the noise!

About the singing!

About the dancing!

Don’t they know how to live?

O, the shame. O, the hilarity. O, the search that showcased her second and her third book.

Come on, Esther. You make this too easy.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that many a drunken night was capped off with readings of Esther’s terrible, terrible poetry. Many a poem was paused midway through to fake an uproariously loud orgasm much to the delight of the audience, who was, by that point, having an asthma attack from laughter at the crap that passed for poetry from a vanity publisher.

(In fact, if I can side track for a moment, your own Aunt Becky does a hilarious reading of some of Esther’s better works. I bet if you ask her nicely, she’ll videotape herself doing this and put it up on YouTube for you.)

The most lasting impression, though, is how many people have asked me to relinquish the last remaining Earthly copy of Esther’s book. My answer'”depending on my mood'”ranges from a polite-but-firm ‘No,’ to a very threatening ‘Fuck no’ with a little more ‘No!’ on top. I guard the damn thing with my life. It’s tried to walk out at parties and my English Geeky friends are constantly trying to ‘borrow’ it for ‘entertainment value.’

To this day, I don’t know what happened to Esther, but she can rest assured; her message will live on in my house as long as there is sangria to be consumed within 100 yards and an audience to fake-orgasm for. Her memory also lives on at Giordanos, but for a far, far different reason, I’m sure.

…google “cheeseburger crotch not pregnant,” apparently this brings you to my doorstep. While I normally am thrilled to pieces to have new visitors and virtually meet new people, I’m not sure this would be the place you’d want to look for such a thing.

Color me stupid, but I have no idea what a cheeseburger crotch (pregnant or not) is (but this is a highly trafficked term here at Casa de la Sausage).

And I don’t want to.

(okay, maybe I do. But I’m kinda sicked out now.)

How did YOU get here?

(Confidential to the person who found me searching for “i m just living for my kids i have nothing to offer my husband,” that may be the most depressing search term I’ve ever heard.)

In the Great Purge Fest of 2008 (part 1), I have been moderately successful. Save for one thing, one large stash filling up part of my stand alone freezer:

I have approximately 4,380 gallons of breast milk that I have nothing whatsoever to do with.

When I first had Alex, and realized just how freakishly much milk I was producing (ahhh, thank you Fenugreek, who has left an indelible hatred of all things maple syrup related. Seriously, my nursing bras, which I am soon to be throwing unceremoniously away–likely in a fire-y blaze–still smell of maple syrup. If you have no idea what the fuck I am talking about, I’ll break it down really simply: there’s an herb you can take–sadly, it produces no hallucinations– that increases your milk supply. One of the side effects is maple syrup smelling bodily odors: including, sweat, pee, and milk. Oh, YUM. Nothing grosser than looking for Aunt Jemima, that wiley bitch, in the toilet BECAUSE WHERE ELSE IS THAT SMELL COMING FROM?), I scoured The Internet looking for what I could do with the excess milk.

I did call a milk bank or three hundred who didn’t want to accept my goods because “they were full,” AND when I realized that I had both had a cold in that time AND taken a decongestant, I learned that the milk would be unsuitable for a preemie. And Sweet Baby Jesus, the last thing I’d want to do is make life for a preemie worse, what with my reckless use of over the counter decongestants. For serious.

I came across another website, the likes of which I haven’t been able to find again, in which people discussed how they could sell their milk on The Internet to creepy pervo’s who for some reason (probably because their mother’s didn’t love them) got off on drinking breastmilk.

Can we say a collective, “EWWW?”

Buuuuuttttt, this site also informed me that these creepy dude’s would pay up to $3.00 an ounce for the stuff, which would mean that the stash currently occupying the bottom half of the freezer I bought for this exact purpose, would translate into at least $500-600. This could easily buy me a designer purse or two, and that makes me happy.

Shit, pumping is one of the most irritating jobs on the planet, and anything that would compensate me for the time that I spent hooked up to that blasted machine, watching my nipples yanked into positions and shapes I had no idea they were capable of, WHILE being unable to do much else besides think about how bloody bored I was, was a good damn thing.

The downside is that I am far, far too lazy to sell a simple pair of shoes on Ebay, let alone spend the time putting up an ad, figuring out how to send the stuff so it didn’t rot in the mail, or coming up with cute phrases to make creepy Uncle Pervy’s want to buy my goods “Hot Momma Milk” and the like.

So, scratch that idea.

I came across another website, in which the enterprising author had attempted to make cheese out of her stash of breastmilk, and that pretty much wigged me out. I don’t care for cheese anyway, AND color me weird, but I don’t think I could ever, ever ingest any of that milk. PLUS, I hate cooking in the first place, and have never so much as attempted making cheese of any sort, so I promise I wouldn’t start with my own milk.

(shudder, shudder)

I suppose I could thaw some out for the holidays and throw it in my guest’s coffee as a passive-aggressive measure, but I’m not coy enough to do so without being noticed. And I’m too stupid to remember NOT TO DRINK THE COFFEE, so I’d be slurping it down thinking about how great it tastes (breastmilk is very, very sweet. Shut up. You’d try it, too.) before I recalled WHY it tasted so good, and then I’d have to drink Ipecac and spend the rest of the day barfing. I hate very little more than I hate throwing up (aside from Kim Kardashian. I hate her more).

So, what can I do with this stash of milk, which I am going to have to toss in a couple of months? Alex won’t touch it unless it’s on tap, Ben, well, I don’t need to scar him anymore than I already have, and Dave and I would sooner drink our own pee than drink the stuff.

Any suggestions?

In a drastic measure to realize a childhood dream, Daver had been petitioning for an air hockey table for about a year. I can’t complain about trying to realize childhood dreams, righting what once went wrong, or in my own case, buying my kids the crap my parents refused me. As my parents were hippies, their idea of “toys” consisted of those lovely wooden figures, you know, the ones that you buy in those specialty stores for about a million bucks?

Problem was, I’m not much of a wooden figure person. I longed not-so-secretly for Barbies (not allowed in my house under any circumstance), a Baby Pee-Pee, and most importantly a Power Wheels.

I am sad to report that although my not-so-subtle drip-drip method of acquisition (it’s likened to being pecked to death by an adorable chicken) never managed to work in this case.

So I plan to do what any mature and responsible parent would do, I’m going to buy my kids the one thing that I always wanted and never got (the Barbies and Baby Pee-Pee aren’t really appropriate for my boys, gender stratification and all): a Power Wheels. This is providing, of course, that they aren’t off the market by the time I’m IN the market for it.

Dave is aware of this impending expenditure, and would possibly complain were it not that the deck is now totally stacked in my favor. What on Earth (besides blow jobs) did I do to convince him, you ask?

I let him buy the fancy air hockey table he has been oogling.

It appears as though unfortunately even I am not immune the not-so-subtle drip-drip method.

When I was released this weekend from the purgatory that is getting my eyes examined (for some freakish reason, even though I have to do this yearly, my dread only intensifies with each year. No clue why), Dave and Ben took me over to “see something.” That “something” happened to be a half-priced air hockey table. Dave had used the fact that I love very little more than a good bargain (or a good humping) against me, damn him straight to hell!

There were three models sitting menacingly there, all at half off their sticker price, and Dave knew to start me on the cheapest, which was a full $60 cheaper than the next one up and looked it. It was ugly as fuck. No way is that going into our basement, I said, which happened to be his cue to point out the nicer model. I saw it and immediately agreed: the price was reasonable, the set up wasn’t too hideous, and it wasn’t nearly as HUGE as the highest price one.

I could hear a silent “fuck” pass over Daver’s eyes, as he then hastily backpedaled to point out all of the glaring problems with it. It didn’t have a score keeper computer (so.fucking.what?), it was smaller (good, GREAT!), and the legs looked weaker (there were no legs to be seen on the display).

Turns out, he’d been trying to sell me on option Number 3 and because my eyes were still fucked up from the exam, I hadn’t realized his angle until I had agreed to Option 2.

Option 3 was only about $20 higher than Option 2, which is not a sum that makes me go “Woah, Nellie!” but what I didn’t like about it was that it was so fucking huge. When I said as much, Daver and Ben immediately insisted that it only looked that way because my eyes were still adjusting back to normal from the exam, and because I was hot, hungry, and tired, I finally agreed to Option 3.

Who am I to deny someone their childhood dream?

Turns out that I happen to have “Sucker” written on my forehead, with what a piss poor decision I agreed to.

When Daver dropped us off at home and went back for the table, he realized that there was no way in hell that he was going to fit it inside our truck (which is only midsized), and had to borrow our generous neighbors Suburban.

Once he got it home, he had to enlist the help of ANOTHER neighbor to get the damn thing inside (we live in the world’s best neighborhood. Seriously), and once he set it gleefully up and called me down to see it, I nearly swallowed my own fucking tongue.

We have a finished basement, and the fucking albatross takes up half of one of the rooms. HALF OF ONE OF THE ROOMS.

(I would put a picture here but you wouldn’t be able to see it’s massiveness to scale. One could easily surmise that our basement was teeny-tiny and that the air hockey table was just a normal size, but looked much bigger. This, my friends, couldn’t be farther from the truth).

Now, we hadn’t exactly decided WHAT to do with that half of the room, and although I’d repeatedly petitioned for a Cotton Candy machine to put there, sadly no one had agreed to it, which is why I stubbornly refused Dave’s suggestion of a bar to go there. Besides, when the basement is The Teenagers Lair, I’m assuming that a bar would be the last thing we’d need there.

And to be completely honest, it’s not that it’s so massive (it’s seriously as big or a little bigger than our dining room table, with it’s leaves in) or that it hulks at me menacingly when I go downstairs to do laundry, it’s that someday, when the novelty has worn completely off, it’s going to become a flat storage space. Or a train table. Or a place to sort your dime bag.

Then, eventually, I will have to devise some way of storing it that doesn’t involve putting it on the side of the road for someone else to take, lest I get killed by certain members of my family who, despite the overwhelming layers of dust, will INSIST that they DO play it! Regularly!

Maybe this is the time to tell Dave about the fully functional Hot Dog Cart I bought for our bedroom. I can tell him he’ll hardly notice it’s there, sleeping tenderly on his side of the bed.

It’s got to be something in the genetics.

While retracting Alex’s foreskin (oh, God the search terms) and bemoaning my fate of a life spent cleaning teeny penises (penii?), I noticed something that I can only attribute to his father’s side of the family.

He laughed.

Laughed.

Kept laughing.

Alex laughed the entire time I was cleaning the schmutz off of his penis.

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t covered in my copy of What To Expect When You’re Expecting.

Seen on the wall at Jimmy John’s,

Sometimes we’re the pigeon,
Sometimes we’re the statue.

Ain’t that the Lord’s Truth.

The summer after Alex was born, I decided to sort through the Tupperware coffin of loose pictures in my parents basement and take the ones that I wanted. I was tired of not having any pictures of me as a baby around and imagined huge battles between my brother and I over who got to keep the picture of our stupid dog Silas.

So, I dug in one day, and gathered a bag up.

I had lofty goals, Internet, you see. I was going to:

a) sort the pictures chronologically

b) throw out repeats/crappy pictures and

niner) place them all neatly in a book or thirty.

I got to about age 6 in my life before I threw in the towel and shoved the whole lot into a far smaller Rubbermaid bin and shoved it into a corner. My father and grandfather took pictures the way I collect orchids: obsessively. I was, apparently, a favorite target.

Years later, it’s still sitting there, collecting dust and mocking me quietly.

I shudder when I think about having to sort through the amount of things that my in-laws have saved. To call my mother-in-law a pack rat would be a grave disservice to pack rats everywhere. She is a pack rat times approximately 6,879. I don’t pretend to understand, so I just smile and nod, which seems easier to all parties involved and wins me more Daughter-In-Law Of The Year* trophies.

So I go through our house about every 3-4 months and purge the fuck out of everything, while, of course, Dave and Ben are away so that they cannot protest when I get rid of their collection of ancient reciepts and old mouldering socks. It’s great for my soul.

When Alex was born, I badgered my mother-in-law in the patented Becky-Drip-Drip Method, which I liken to being pecked to death by an overly large chicken, for baby pictures of The Daver. I love baby pictures of people that I know, and I was dying to see them.

Each and every time I was met with an excuse. Turns out that in the vast multitude of boxes, she has lost them somewhere. But during a visit, she’d brought up a handful that she’d had lying around and whipped them out to show me. Turns out that Alex looked very little like The Daver. Who knew?

Having recently given up on the task of placing my pictures in an album I pulled out a stack from my own babyhood to show her.

So we flipped on and on through the pictures of Baby Becky, while I commented on my fathers’ Iranian Taxi Driver glasses and his David Crosby mustache. She’d laugh uncomfortably, obviously trying to get away from me, but having nowhere to really go, she was stuck.

Eventually, it dawned on me that I was showing my EXTREMELY CONSERVATIVE mother-in-law naked pictures of daughter-in-law. As a dimpled baby. Occasionally being nursed. But nearly always naked.

Including the bear skin rug set.

“Heh, heh, heh,” I sputtered, trying to recover from the situation and perhaps mend the ever-widening chasm between us.

“What’s up with kids in the eighties? Heh-heh-heh.”

I couldn’t stop myself.

“It’s like they were never wearing clothes. Heh-heh-heh.” Trying to salvage the situation.

“WELL,” she replied, her irritation seeping though her tightly clipped words, “Maybe not in YOUR house.”

Great, I thought to myself, just fucking GREAT, barely suppressing the laughter. Now she thinks you come from a NAKED Family. I snickered into my cupped hand.

Oh well, I thought to myself as she got up in a huff and walked away, leaving me stranded on a couch, in a pool of naked baby pictures. That’s better than thinking you came from The Jello Mold Family.

*I am the only daughter-in-law. Therefore, I have to be the best.

I am currently in the running for dumbest injuries ever sustained.

1) I sprained my ankle walking down the stairs in my old condo. Walking leisurely, mind you, I was not running quickly nor was I saving any cute and cuddly kittens from a burning building.

2) I scratched my cornea doing absolutely nothing whatsoever.

3) And today I strained my back spackling the wall in the bathroom. SPACKLING a wall. And no, it wasn’t a wall designed to rescue cute and cuddly kittens from being crushed by it.

If this keeps going, I may soon injure my taint while sleeping.

I had only one goal for being pregnant with Alexander. One stinking, flipping goal: not to become a total fatass as I had done with Ben. I ate well, occasionally indulging, of course, but overall, I grabbed a bowl of green beans over a donut every damn time. I guess the old “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” really rang true for me as I still managed to gain roughly what I did with Ben, WITHOUT THE DELICIOUS CHOCOLATELY GOODNESS.

So I figured, so what, I’d be one of those women who breastfed and lost most of the baby weight. I was okay with being 10 or 15 lbs fatter when I weaned him, but things are getting ridiculous over here. I’ve been nursing for nearly 5 months, and when I first attempted to diet I GAINED 3.5 LBS. I’ve since lost that plus an additional 2-3 lbs, but it’s killing me over here. I saw a picture of myself taken last night and nearly wept, who IS this fat person that’s taken over my body?

I considered doing Jenny Craig, but it’s extremely expensive (ala $400 a month) and I freaking hate boxed meals. I’ve tried the eating tofu, egg whites, and veggies and still, it’s not coming off fast enough for me. I’m nursing, so I can’t do anything extreme like I’d like to do, so I’m thinking Weight Watchers may be my best bet as I’m obviously not doing something right. It’d be one thing if I’d been holed up on my couch with a bag of Cheez It’s and a 24 case of Coke, but unfortunatly I’m not.

I think what’s most interesting about all of this is that if someone came to me and complained about the same thing, I’d remind her to give herself a damn break, that she’d JUST had a baby and was essentially giving him the best nutrition possible and that she needed to let it go for awhile. I DID try to let it go, and it lasted about a week before I realized that I was STILL obsessing about it.

So here is my plea, dear readers (few and far between as you may be) WHAT should I do here? How can I either buckle down and lose this fat or let it go for another couple of months?