Alas, this will be my last post on this site. In my three month hiatus from updating here I've discovered the joys of having an anonymous blog, where you can talk smack and obsess about the minutia of your life without your entire social network knowing what a fool you really are.

I knew it was time to switch to an anonymous blog when we were at lunch with an older, distinguished couple we know and the subject of yoga came up. The wife was imploring me to try a prenatal yoga class for my next pregnancy and her husband became visibly uncomfortable and eventually confessed, "I Googled you and found your blog."

Of course my mind started racing, trying to think of any bizarre thing I may have written on this or any of my other sites that I may need to explain quickly in order to preserve any hope of being friends with these people. (I believe I was thinking something along the lines of, "Please please please don't tell me he came across the Snoop Dogg translator.)

So, that's it for Jen N Tonic. I haven't decided what I'm going to do with Buttafly, but I'll probably resume updating that eventually in some form or another.

Off I go to resume bitching about pop rap lyrics and ringtones under the merciful veil of anonymity.

Thanks for reading,

Jennifer

So I'm going to take a few months off. It's not exactly time off from updating the site, which I clearly don't spend much time doing, but time off from my daily feelings of guilt and ineptitude for my inability to regularly update my blog. It's not like I'm trying to publish daily articles in the American Journal of Physics here.

Anyway, I'll probably start updating again sometime this summer. Probably June. If you want to be notified when I start updating again, sign up in the little NotifyList box to the right.

And please, no riots or mass suicides. I know it will be hard to live your life without the sporadic wisdom of this site, but it's only a few months.

Watch out with the court shows, they will suck you in. Then, one day you find yourself watching and screaming at Judge Maybellene on the television, "you tell 'em, girlfriend" That's when you know life is over for you...(not that I know this from personal experience or something).

I always start by telling myself I only have it on to amuse myself while the baby eats, but I usually end up getting sucked in -- unless it's one of those shows where his goofball son comes in to rap with the teens on their level or where he spends the hour interviewing his wife about how great their family is.

The problem is that occasionally a Dr. Phil-ism will seep into my consciousness and I will find myself referencing it in conversation. Shocked and disturbed that I have reached a place in my life where I am quoting the wisdom of a daytime talk show host, I usually make a poor attempt at disguising the source of my knowledge.

[J. and I discussing some problem...]

ME: Yeah, that's a common issue. But it's like Dr....umm, I mean, the doctors at the American Academy of Psychiatrists say, "You have to name it before you can claim it."

J.: Do they always hand down their recommendations in rhyme?

[J. hearing me on the phone with a friend...]

ME: Well, Jessica, life rewards action, and you create your own experience.....Mmm-hmm....Yeah, Confucius said that.

J.: [Shaking his head and mouthing] Dr. Phil?

ME: [Nodding]

• If all goes well I am going to do a long post about what I've learned, entitled "Dr. Marc Weissbluth, Author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child, is the Devil."


• If all does not go well and the travel disruption puts us back to square one I will never update this site again because I will be living out the rest of my days curled up in the corner of my closet with a bottle of vodka.

So my son is in the 8% of babies who still do not sleep through the night at four and a half months. I recently read that "sleeping through the night" for an infant is a shorter span of time than it is for adults, so many parents have babies who sleep through the night (by baby standards) and don't even know it! Well, if sleeping for two to three hours at a time before waking is the infant version of a good night sleep then I've been all worried for nothing.

I've read The No-Cry Sleep Solution where the author rambles around and doesn't really give you any specific advice at all. I liked The Baby Whisperer, but the author got a bit heavy-handed with the whole being British thing, repeatedly referring to the reader as "luv" and "ducky" and talking about how healthcare is better in the UK. No "luv"s and "ducky"s in Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child which reads like a doctoral thesis but isn't as empathetic and comforting. I managed to make it through BabyWise without retching and, speaking of retching, I learned from Dr. Ferber that your baby might cry to the point of vomiting on herself when you're following his program, but don't comfort her because it'll teach her to manipulate you.

I've tried everything and nothing seems to work, which is especially disastrous since his sleep issues + my sleep issues = total disaster. He can't stay asleep. I can't fall asleep in the first place and can't go back to sleep once I've been woken up. I am a freaking zombie, well on my way to being a fat freaking zombie since having any sort of willpower seems to require having had more than three consecutive hours of sleep at some point in the past four months.

So, if any of you parents out there have any tips or tricks to get a baby to sleep through the night that is not already covered in the aforementioned books*, please let me know. Meanwhile, I'm going to go collapse.

* Unless you're going to suggest something along the lines of using relaxing lavender scents or soothing music. Let me assure you that the lack of scented plants and ocean sounds is not the reason that my baby has not been sleeping through the night.

Luckily I won't have to deal with these email woes anymore because I hereby renounce electronic mail. Unfortunately I'm awful at talking on the phone (who knew that was something you could be bad at) and am too lazy to write letters, so I think that leaves smoke signals and the telegraph for future correspondence. I know, it sounds inefficient and possibly dangerous, but once you hear the events of the past week you will agree that I really need to just give up on this whole email thing:

MONDAY
My friend T. BCC'd me on an email she'd sent to a girl who used to be a friend of mine. They'd recently had a falling out and T. wanted to get my input on her response to Former Friend. I gave her my very, very honest opinion and hit Send. But something didn't feel right. So I checked my Outbox right before the note was about to be sent. Ah, yes. I had replied to all. So that could have been, uh, really bad.

I went to investigate how this could have happened. After all, I don't usually make stupid mistakes like that. I quickly found that I no longer have a Reply button in Outlook. Seriously. How does a Reply button just disappear? The fact that the Reply to All button is now in its place is setting me up for some serious social conflict.

TUESDAY
I check my Qurb spam folder and sift through 817 spams to try to catch any legitimate emails. Unless friends have started emailing me about Cialis and girls who like to **** **** in the ********* it was all spam. I go to my computer two hours later to find that I have 280 new spam emails. I also get a voicemail from someone I met at a social event who'd emailed me but never heard back, her email obviously lost in the depths of my Qurb folder.

Meanwhile, most people using Hotmail, MSN and some other carriers don't get email from me at all. My main email account is on a blacklist ever since a spammer used it as his reply-to address a few months ago.

WEDNESDAY
I wake up to 593 new spam emails. I email J. to whine about this but my email won't send. I check my Outbox to see that none of my emails have been sent since Monday night. I immediately start cursing my server and start to investigate what the problem is.

After torturing my server for hours trying to get my email to send I realize that it is not an issue with my server at all. I then blame my laptop. Nothing works. I slam my fist onto the keyboard in frustration and dislodge the Shift key. Meanwhile, I can still receive email so I communicate with J. by writing him messages using the "Tell A Friend" feature for Buttafly articles. So all my emails to him have the subject "Jennifer has sent you an article from Buttafly.com!"

THURSDAY
About 3,000 Google searches later I determine that SBC has prevented me from sending email from non-SBC accounts. It's a free feature that comes with their DSL package called "Surprise! We Started Blocking Port 25 and Didn't Tell You About It!"

I dig out my last bill and call the 800 number for tech support. An automated message tells me that the number has been changed to a 900 number and it will cost $19 to call it. I curse SBC and vow to switch to cable as soon as possible but decide to go ahead and pay the ridiculous fee to get them to stop blocking the port on my account. After one ring I hear a garbled recording of some music and a woman talking in a low, husky voice. I decide I like the new ambiance of the tech support line. Nice touch. As usual I'm tuning out what she's saying and just waiting to hear what number I need to push if I'm using Windows. But then I hear something about "pleasure" and "fantasies" and realize that I am probably not on the phone with SBC. So, $19 later, I see that I transposed the last two digits of SBC's 800 number.

Meanwhile, until I get set up with smoke signals or carrier pigeons or something, those of you who know me might want to keep me off emails sent to multiple recipients for a while since my tendency to talk smack doesn't mix well with the new placement of my Reply to All button.

Unfortunately for Mix-A-Lot, cell phone users, and the human race in general, I do not mean that the ringtone simply plays the tune of one of his songs. No, it plays him rapping new lyrics to the tune of Baby Got Back that he wrote specifically for the ringtone. It begins, "You want this call and you cannot lie."

Man, times are hard when the only airplay you can get is on some idiot's Nokia 3600. That's just really depressing. Will he include these pieces in his live performances? "And now here's one I wrote for the Sanyo MM7400..."

If there's a silver lining here it's that perhaps there is a future for Ashlee Simpson's catalogue of work after all. And maybe other '90s flame-outs like Gerardo and EMF can reunite and put together some new songs that talk about incoming calls.

I don't know, I'm reaching here. It's just so depressing.

A pretty safe guess was that one of them probably involved losing weight, since that’s what I have been vowing to do every new year (OK, every week) since I was 16. Although back then I was just upset about that extra five pounds that I could never seem to shed. Now that I’ve had a baby and the weight isn’t exactly falling off like it’s supposed to after your first child it’s more like twenty five pounds. So when we get back to Austin (we’re currently in Houston) I’m going to start my own modified version of the South Beach Diet. I modified it because I don’t eat fake food – no egg substitute, nonfat cheese and faux butter for me. It should be interesting since my willpower has been at an all-time low lately. I had a big lunch at Katz’s this afternoon and then just got back from an Italitan restaurant where I did my impression of Jabba the Hutt.

On a related note, I may never update this blog again because I have discovered the wonderful world of weight loss blogs. In fact I may never do anything again. For some reason I am fascinated with shows, blogs, or any other documentation of weight loss that involves before and after pictures. I never cease to be amazed at how much a person’s weight impacts every aspect of their life.

OK, I need to wrap up this post because I can’t think. I apologize if any part of this post has been incoherent. I am at my mother-in-law’s house in Houston. She recently took in an elderly friend who needed some help as well as her two cats. So it’s me, J., the baby, his mom, her cat, her friend and her two cats all in a 1,200 sq. ft. house with Everybody Loves Raymond reruns being played at full volume about eight feet away from me. Not exactly a silent bastion of concentration.

I've never been a big fan of blogs and think that 99.99% of them suck, but I have to say that I follow these chicks' blogs religiously. In fact, one of many reasons I haven't updated my own site this month is because I've just been sitting at my computer hitting Refresh on A Little Pregnant and Chez Miscarriage to make sure that Julie's baby and Grrl's pregnancy are still okay.

So in the spirit of the season and writing an entire post without bitching about anything for once, I send my warmest Christmas and holiday wishes to Julie, Karen, Tertia and Grrl. I sincerely wish you all the best in '05. Thanks for making an internet connection worth having.

The main blog I've been keeping up with is my husband's. He finally got his own site since he loves to talk about politics and economics and other stuff that I deemed too boring for any of my sites. International free trade agreements? Who cares! Fat Joe videos? Now that's fascinating stuff.

Anyway, I need to keep up with his site since it seems that everyone else we know is reading it. We know this by the volume of email he's received from people we know who've found the site. (Tip: If you're ever not getting enough email and want to fill up your inbox quickly, start a political blog and tell your friends about it.)

The problem is that we live in a particularly intolerant, close-minded part of Texas. I love this area and even the people, but many of them are just not very open to different ideas. For example, on many occasions J. and I have been at social events where the subject of politics comes up. Most of the times I've voiced an opinion that's unpopular people start preaching at me and telling me how wrong I am and refuse to discuss the issue any further than that. And last month J. put a bumper sticker with the name of a local political candidate on the back of our car on a Friday around 10pm. By Saturday at 11am the bumper sticker and our car had been keyed. The whole "difference of opinion" thing hasn't exactly caught on around here.

Anyway, now that J.'s blog has "outed" us to the local Thought Police as people who are somewhat conservative and sometimes vote Republican (or, in their words, "ultra right wingers" and "Republican Nazis") it'll be interesting to see how our social circle changes. (Read: it will probably become nonexistent, and that's funny.) I'm currently trying to talk J. into letting me post the emails he's received for your viewing pleasure.

Ah, the many joys of having websites.

I've been trying to come up with some sort of purpose for all this crap. Sign up people I don't like to their distribution lists? Forward the particularly lurid ones to all my friends who send me chain letters with the subject "PLS forward - VERY IMPORTANT"?

As I was going through this thought process the Twelve Days of Christmas was playing in the background, inspiring me to wonder: What if this "true love" person mentioned in the song did all his shopping through spam emails alone?

And thus was born the Twelve Days of Spam, a beautiful song for the holidays as well as a wistful retrospective of the past year as seen through my Qurb folder. All of the lyrics are derived from actual spams I have received.

The Twelve Days of Spam

On the twelfth day of Christmas my spammer gave to me...

Twelve slutty Asians,
Eleven SoBig.F worms,
Ten Rolex watches,
Nine free drugs online,
Eight hot teen webcams,
Seven low mortgage rates,
Six tranny chatrooms,
Fiiiiiiiive Viagra,
Four Vicodin,
Three Xanax,
Two Valium,
And a virus that crashed my C: drive

I fully expect to see this on the Osmonds' next Christmas album.

-----Original Message-----
From: J.
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 6:10 PM
To: 'Jennifer'
Subject: RE: King Ranch Buck

I would agree that no one should ever kill an animal and not eat it. Rare is the hunter these days that does that. It is highly frowned upon. So let's agree that killing and dumping it is bad.

So now we are only talking about people who hunt and eat what they kill. If I eat a deer, that's one less cow that I am eating. It's a pure substitution. They aren't going to kill that cow that I would have eaten and just dump it out on the ground for me since I didn't eat it. My not eating meat for a week is a small effect, but it does have an effect. If everyone ate deer for a month this year, fewer cows would be killed because there just wouldn't be as much demand for meat.

Finally, I think hunting is a fine and noble endeavor. It's a basic human skill that is enjoyable and useful, and I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I think it's preferable to raising animals for slaughter. To say otherwise while wearing the leather and eating the meat of animals you paid someone else to kill for you strikes me as hypocritical. To me it smacks of the kind of moroseness that only the idle rich can achieve because they have time to obsess over such things.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 5:37 PM
To: J.
Subject: RE: King Ranch Buck

Don't confuse rich yuppies hunting in 2004 with being opposed to the death of animals in general. Obviously I can understand the concept of hunting animals for food. I am comfortable with the food chain. The difference is that it is completely unnecessary in this day and age.

You make it sound as if you shoot an animal in the wild that it saves an animal from the slaughterhouse, but it's not a binary choice -- the animal in the slaughterhouse is going to die anyway. Of course I think it's a better life for an animal to live freely and be shot than to live cooped up and then die in a slaughterhouse, but since the animals in slaughterhouses are going to be killed anyway, regardless of whether you go hunting, why not just eat them? Given that more than enough animals are already being killed for food and tons of meat is wasted every day, why destroy one more living being just for amusement? To me it seems wasteful and disrespectful of life.

People in the modern era are incredibly greedy and gluttonous, and I feel like hunting is a prime example of that. Yet in this case it's wasting life rather than just material goods, which seems especially disrespectful.

-----Original Message-----
From: J.
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 5:33 PM
To: 'Jennifer'
Subject: RE: King Ranch Buck

Jen-

I can't believe you are down on hunting. How did our ancestors survive all this time? Were they all just bad people? Is a slaughterhouse better than a gun? Personally, I would rather live freely as a deer and take my chances against a hunter than be a penned up cow slaughtered in a slaughterhouse. Every creature gets hunted by the creatures higher up in the food chain. There are even a few enterprising lions and sea crocodiles that hunt us. Because we live in a society where meat comes in little plastic bags, you have the luxury of being overly sensitive about killing animals to eat their meat.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 6:43 PM
To: Dad
Cc: J.
Subject: RE: King Ranch Buck

I am so opposed to that.
People suck.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dad
Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 6:19 AM
To: Jennifer (E-mail)
Cc: J.
Subject: FW: King Ranch Buck
Importance: High

Jen,

Heres my point about trophy hunting. I could not bring myself to kill something like this just to show off the rack. The meat on a buck like that would be tough as a boot.

D

-----Original Message-----
From: Alex T.
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 6:45 PM
To: XXXX
Subject: King Ranch Buck
Importance: High

[Picture of large dead buck attached]

I WANT ONE!!

It all started when I learned how to use my sling correctly. After the wonderful lady at Special Addition showed me that it was not in fact correct to stuff your baby into the sling in an upside down, sideways position ("Do you think that could that be why he screams every time I put him in it?") I found out how to place him so that only his little head sticks out of the top. Combine that with the fact that I usually have him wear his hat that has a bear face on the front and perky little ears sewn into the top, and you have the cutest thing in the history of civilization. I'm not biased, it's just a fact.

So the first time I headed out to the grocery store with this baby-hat-sling combo I prepared myself for the huge response I'd surely get. Would I feign modesty? "Oh, I guess it is kinda cute. Hee-hee!" Or would I just need to be direct and use force to push through the crowds of people that would inevitably congregate around us. "I know, it's insanely cute, but I'm going to need you people to clear a path to the creamed corn."

When the first few people I encountered in the produce section didn't immediately drop the tomatoes they were inspecting to coo over my baby I assumed that they just must not have seen him. I found that I instinctively looked at everyone I passed in anticipation of a response from them as I walked through the store. I also found that I instinctively got pissed when there was no response. When a white-haired, grandmotherly lady walked by and only gave a passing glance to the sling ensemble I huffed and wrote her off as a sad, bitter person with no soul.

Today I was walking down Congress Avenue and came up to a crosswalk where two businessmen were waiting. They glanced over briefly as they continued their conversation. I wanted to jump in between them and halt their pointless banter about some billion-dollar this-or-that until I got some proper oohs and aahs. The hat has ears on it, people.

My mom called today to say that she bought the baby a little Christmas outfit with a matching Santa hat. This could potentially bring the cuteness level around here to Defcon 5. I'm planning on attending a couple of holiday events with the baby in this getup, and woe be to the person who begins a conversation with me without first falling all over themselves about the baby and his little outfit.

-------------------

EDITOR'S NOTE: I know I used the word "little" a lot in this post. However, it is impossible to discuss infant clothes without it. It's also impossible to discuss the subject without raising your voice to a high-pitched squeak at every noun-adjective combo, as in "the little baby shoes!" or "the little itty bitty jacket that Babies R Us had the nerve to gouge us $65 for when you know it cost them like, what, five bucks to make."