Category Archives: Products

Friends and Enemas

I want to be a poop donor.

I know, there are many more noble pursuits, grand aspirations, lofty goals. But I’m a great believer in practicality, and this is something I can actually achieve.

The idea started, as most nutty ones do, at book club. I don’t know how the subject came up, but we took one of our many digressions from the work we were discussing and ended up talking about gut flora. Having discussed the health, maintenance, and benefits of same at great length, we eventually segued into a conversation about, well, poop. (Trust book club to find the gutter on any subject.) From there? A short hop to the topic of fecal transplants.

“Fecal what?” said one of my friends, disgust contorting her face.

Fecal transplants. Yes, it’s what it sounds like: putting healthy poop into the intestines of people with unhealthy gut flora. The healthy flora take over, like little intestinal Mormons converting tiny gut heathens. It really works. (Unlike Mormonism.) And they’re doing it more and more.

That’s the long and short of it. The details? No one knew. And no one wanted to.

We moved on. But days later I got to thinking about the conversation. Fecal transplants, huh? That must mean there are fecal donors. People with stellar intestinal flora. Who might those people be? Could they be…me?

Not to brag, but my gut is an all-star. It’s a fucking rock. If it were an athlete it would be Michael Jordan. If it were a warrior it would be Genghis Kahn. How do I know this? Two ways: one, I never, ever get sick. Two, I’m regular. I make the Staten Island Ferry look erratic.

Due to this, I’ve become rather passionate about the flora living in my intestine. I take pride in them, just as I would a prize herd of heifers. If my stomach were a barn there would be blue ribbons hanging from the stalls. As it is, I hang ribbons in my mind. My flora accept them, nodding sagely. They’ve been living antibiotic-free, eating well, and enjoying a low-stress environment for years now. They’re perfect specimens, every one of them. Coats shiny, eyes bright, hooves held high. Such as it is.

So when, recently, a gal from my book club sent out a link to a website called The Power of Poop I clicked it right away. The article in question was about do-it-yourself fecal transplants–a process that sounded both disgusting and Byzantine. But there was a link for potential clinical donors, and I found myself clicking it. I seemed to fit the criteria. Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all. Perhaps someone really could benefit from the rare qualities that my micro-livestock possess.

I decided to find out.

Look, maybe I’m nuts. Buy it’s better than drinking your own urine, right? Stay tuned. And hopefully open-minded. (;

Bird Flew

2 Replies

Stages of grief. There are the ones famously described by Elisabeth Kubler Ross. But there are other, lesser known types as well. Those, for example, experienced by a four-year-old girl who has to return a favorite bird book to the library. A book she has had out for two-and-a-half months. A book that can no longer be renewed and is many days overdue.

These stages look something like this:

Denial.

Realization.

Meltdown.

Strong-arming parent into buying book on Amazon.

Whereas Kubler Ross’s stages can take months, we went through all of ours in a couple of hours.

First, MJ lost it with the babysitter. I wasn’t there for that part. But I heard about it.

“MJ was a little tender tonight,” the sitter told me when I got home from work. “She realized her bird books had gone back to the library,” here she gave me a meaningful look.

I winced. “Oh, right.”

“So she had nothing to read at dinner…”

“But we have other books.”

She nodded sadly. “She wanted the library ones.”

I felt myself growing defensive. “I told her. She knew they had to go back.”

“I know. She was just really upset.”

Shit. “Like, freakout level?

She nodded, “Pretty much.”

After she’d left–I paid her extra for her trouble–I went into the bedroom. MJ was putting her stuffed owls to sleep under a cloth napkin. She barely looked up when I came in.

“Hey,” I said gently, putting on my best horse-whisperer-near-skittish-colt voice.

“Hi, Mama.” she still didn’t turn around.

“Hear you had a tough night tonight.”

She looked up at me. Her face was streaked with dried tears, long salt stains on each cheek. “My bird books are gone.”

I knelt beside her. “I know. Remember we talked about this? We’d had them out for nine weeks. We had no more renewals.”

The tears immediately recommenced, tracing new paths over their predecessors. “I want ‘Look Up.’ I miss it. And the other one. ‘Birds!'”

“Which ‘Birds?” We had two–”

“The one with Blood Lust!” she sobbed. “I want my Blood Lust book!”

The situation devolved from there. She wanted the books back. NOW. Nothing could console her. I tried telling her calmly that it couldn’t happen at night–the library was closed. Big mistake. Reality was not of interest to her. We were at an emotional Defcon five. I could almost hear the sirens.

Opting for a different tack, I told her we could go tomorrow and try to take them out again. This worked for a second. But then I saw her face change.

“W-what if they’re gone?” she sobbed, voice quavering wildly.

“Well, they…might be. But–”

“They’re going to be gone!” she wailed. “My books! Another kid will get them!”

“Oh, honey,” I crooned. “I know. This is hard.”

Aimless sympathy was not what she was looking for. “I need to own them,” she screamed. “I want them always here!”

Ah. So this is was her endgame. Possession. I got it, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. After all, I couldn’t go buying her every library book she got attached to. We’d end up looking like Strand Bookstore. And being just as broke.

I told her as much.

“Then I’ll buy them!” she cried.

Really. I decided to call her bluff. “Well, you have loads of money in your piggy bank. Do you want to use some of it for this?

An upturned wet face, desperate with hope: “Yes!”

“It may not be cheap…”

“I don’t care. I have, like, ten hundreds of money.”

So, for the next half an hour, MJ and I traipsed around the house gathering cash from her various stashes. Most of it was coins, but she had some dollars, too. Adding it up as we went, we piled it all into a paper bag she occasionally uses as a purse. Once we’d gotten to $14–an amount I thought fair for two kid’s hardcover books–we went to my laptop and ordered.

“Fortunately for you,” I said, as I clicked the final button, “we have Amazon Prime.”

“What’s that?” asked Myra-Jean.

“Today’s Friday. You’ll have your first book on Sunday.”

She smiled beatifically and cuddled into my chest. “I’m ready for bed now.”

As promised,”Look Up!” came today. Myra-Jean was predictably thrilled. We read it this afternoon, at dinner, in the bathroom, and before bed. Tomorrow, God willing, we’ll receive “Blood Lust.” It’s coming from a third-party seller because–big surprise!–it’s out of print. Probably banned in some states. Used as kindling. Sold for mulch.

As for the money? It’s the first MJ has ever paid for anything. She had a hard time parting with it, in the end. But I think it’s important for her to understand that sometimes you have to buy the things you want. Not every day is Christmas. So I’m not giving it back.

I can’t, however, bring myself to put it in my wallet, either. I don’t want it. It’s her precious loot, after all. Meaning far more to her than it ever could to me.

So there the bag sits on our kitchen counter. A reminder of a sad night, a cycle of grief, a problem solved. Some good memories, some bad…

And some just out of print.

Let Me Eat Crow

Grim Cheepers

1 Reply

Today Myra-Jean was a lammergeier.

What the hell is that, you ask? I have no idea. Or hadn’t, until today. Turns out it’s a bird. Otherwise known as a bearded vulture. My daughter’s ornithological knowledge has officially passed from the cute to the bizarre. It’s one thing when your four-year-old pretends to be a sparrow, heron, or even a blue tit. (Although the latter did raise a few eyebrows in the over-ten set.) It’s quite another when she claims to be a bird that no one has ever heard of and that you, her parent, can barely pronounce. Speaking of which, where the hell did she learn to do a french accent? The whole thing is just creepy.

“I eat mostly bones, Mama. I drop them onto rocks to break them open.”

“Really.”

“Then I eat the marrow inside.”

“Can we finish brushing your teeth now, please?”

“You mean my beak?”

Right now she’s super into a book called “Guide to Birds.” It’s excellent–detailed, packed with interesting information, well written. It’s also for older kids, so it’s a wee bit on the graphic side.

“It takes practice to become a proficient killer,” one section, called “Blood Lust,” starts.

“So most birds of prey specialize in a particular strategy. For members of the eagle and hawk family, the principal weapons are the talons, which kill by puncturing the prey’s body and inflicting mortal wounds. In contrast, falcons hold small prey in their talons and use the bill to snap the spine and cripple them.”

“Goodnight Moon” it’s not.

I feel slightly mortified introducing such imagery to her, but MJ seems drawn to it. She asks for the same pages–the bloody ones–over and over again. True, she was initially perturbed by the book’s high body count. But she quickly grew able to compartmentalize. Take secretary birds, for example. These odd creatures, looking like “eagles on stilts,” are the only birds of prey that both stomp their victims to death and swallow them whole. MJ “loves” them. Loves! Most girls her age love cookies. And puppies. And “Frozen.” My kid loves the avian equivalent of the Terminator. Either she’s compartmentalizing or she’s crazy.

Mike says books like “Guide to Birds” are probably as good a way as any to introduce MJ to the vagaries of life. I suppose this is true. God knows it’s easier to talk about birds dying than people. Still, when I’m sitting with her in the rocking chair, cuddled up under a blanket, trying to define the word “impale” without traumatizing her completely, it all feels like a bit of a parenting “don’t.”

On the other hand, if it toughens her up a little bit? Makes her roll with the punches–like scraping her knee, getting her hair combed, or being handed the wrong-colored bowl at breakfast–a tiny bit more easily? Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all. Better than a claw through the skull, right?

Now there’s some good parenting for you.

Car-Oh Mio Ben

1 Reply

Have I mentioned? I’m blotto in love. You can tell my husband; he already knows. The symptoms are classic: I think about my new love all the time. I touch it gently whenever I walk by. I sing songs extolling its virtues. I tell everyone I know about it. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis kind of thing–it does, after all, involve a car. Mine.

My new electric car. I’m in love.

Friends, family, and co-workers have had it up to here. They’ve been listening to me for weeks. I’m like Shakespeare, but without language skills. I wax absolutely un-poetic. I can’t stop going on about it: my good fortune, its good mileage. My fellow salespeople roll their eyes dramatically when they hear me telling yet another customer about my Nissan Leaf.

“It’s all electric!” I gush. “No tailpipe. No gas!”

“None?” my customers ask politely.

“None!” I croon.

“There she goes again,” my co-workers mutter.

I can’t help myself. This is a huge deal for me. I’ve wanted an electric car for, oh, ten years, and this is the first time I’ve been able to afford one. Used to be, in order to buy an EV you had to have the extra $2500 to install a charging station at your house. Now that’s no longer required. My car–my beautiful roadster–charges from a regular extension cord run (OK, rather unglamorously) out of our garage. Plug it in just like it’s a lamp. The next day–presto!–a full charge. Which, admittedly, only gets you 85 miles, but that’s far enough for my needs. And much farther than any lamp I’ve met.

Here’s what I love: the sound it makes (none), the emissions it puts out (repeat the former), the $2500 I’ll be receiving back next month from the state of CA, the little digital song it plays when I turn it on (“ding ding ding ding DONG”), and the heated seats. Which are, of course, an unnecessary drain on the battery, but provide such profound comfort that–hell, if it comes down to it? I’ll walk.

Anyway. It’s just a car. But with news about climate change growing so dire you don’t want to read it after 8PM (for fear of wrecking your night’s sleep) it’s a little bit more than that. It’s a statement. It’s a gesture of hope. It’s a source of encouragement.

And it’s many, many, many trips right past the gas pumps.

Can you hear the angels singing?

Bird (on the) Brain

4 Replies

First the Big Bang. Now tiny tweets.

As they are wont to do, Myra-Jean’s obsessions have shifted again. Leaving behind the interstellar plane, they’ve flitted back to earth and landed nimbly in the world of ornithology. Good-bye, Jupiter! We are all about Juncos now.

It began with a book our next-door neighbor gave us some time back. It’s a quirky, prettily drawn tome called, simply, “Birds.” It sat unread for awhile, but gradually MJ took to it, eventually memorizing it nearly completely. This happened between literary flights to outer space, of course. “Birds” was a side interest, you could say. A flight of fancy. Had a bit too much Kuiper Belt? Let’s take a palate-cleanser with a belted Kingfisher!

Then my mom got her a bird bingo set for Christmas. A simple but pleasant game, with gorgeous drawings of exotic breeds, it became a daily activity. MJ–a typical, classification-loving four-year-old–learned quickly how to spot Spotted Kiwis, Arctic terns, and Magnificent Frigatebirds. It’s weird to hear your kid pull a card out of a bag and cry, in a competitive fervor, “Come on, Andean cock-of-the-rock!” But, with kids this age, you get used to anything.

The bird bingo craze abated. But, for MJ, interest in her feathered earth-mates did not. A couple of weeks ago, at the library, she found a just-published book called “Look Up!” Everything you ever wanted to know about birdwatching, it’s for kids a bit older than my daughter. But that didn’t stop her. We read it. And read it. And reeeeeeead it. Soon she (and we) knew more about ornithology than any person without binoculars decently should. I was more than a bit embarrassed when, at the zoo, MJ pointed at a cage and yelled “Look! A Eurasian blackbird! I think he’s a juvenile!”

“Ok, kid,” I muttered. “Simmer down. Let’s keep the Linnaean classifications to a dull roar.”

One day not long after that we took a trip to the beach. Many of MJ’s classmates were there. “Why don’t you go play with them?” I asked.

“No way. I want to go sketch those brown pelicans.”

“Um–”

“And Mom! I think that’s an albatross!”

Little Miss Audubon drew for hours. I went to sit with the adults.

The obsession, at this point, is at what I’ve come to call its “boiling point.” We’re as far in as we can be. I half expect to go into her bedroom in the morning and find my daughter incubating eggs. All day today she insisted on being called “Saurus Crane.” She routinely squawks. She says she dreams of penguins.

And we’ve hit the library again. In fact we’ve pretty much cleaned it out. The whole avian oeuvre is here, with us. We have books about penguins, birds of prey, crows, owls, and sparrows. We have generalized bird books. We have “Birds of Los Angeles County” and “the Audubon Guide for Young Birders.” We are steeped in ornithological facts. It’s even infecting me. I am looking at our local ravens with new eyes, staring obsessively at mourning doves, and considering killing the neighbor’s cat on behalf of the local hummingbird population.

OK, not really. Although I have taken to calling him Hitler.

Anyway. It’s super weird. But also wonderful. I wish I’d noticed the natural world when I was younger. Perhaps, growing up in Brooklyn, it was an impossibility. Certainly growing up in my brain it was. Either way, I’m thrilled to have a kid who makes me pay attention now. Oh, there’s a down side. The more you learn, the more there is to get depressed about–half of the damn bird species are struggling to survive, and the neighbor’s cat will continue to do his fucked up, feline part. But there’s beauty in the minutiae of this world; I’ve found that learning about it makes the somewhat rampant ugliness a touch more bearable.

So here’s to the robins! Hail to the mockingbirds! Kudos, California condor!

Now how can I get a bell on that asshole tabby…?

Rained In

(Sis)turmeric Love

3 Replies

Little sisters. Such copycats.

Abigail, whom you may remember from her infamous chicken foot stew, has now jumped on the turmeric bandwagon. And, as usual, one-upped me–by mixing her turmeric into a kale-and-almond-butter-based smoothie. Will I follow suit? Most likely not. Yes, it looks delicious. Yes, it packs a bigger nutritional wallop than my simple “yellow milk.” But I’d have to get the blender dirty. This is an insurmountable obstacle for one such as me.

My other sister Lily has also joined in the turmeric craze. She’s on day three of drinking it every day. That the both of them are now imbibing the “magic yellow” (and not the urinary kind) makes me very happy. I get to credit myself with improving the health of 75% of my siblings. Or is it 63%?

Anyway. I have three. Two are drinking turmeric. You get the point.

Now if I can just get my brother on board I will ensure the longevity of my entire family line. Our blood–tinged slightly golden–will flow through the ages.

I will also ease my mathematical struggles. Statistics were never my thing,

As for me? I actually stopped drinking the stuff a few days ago. I know. I have no willpower. I have no consistency. I have no dishwasher! I hate washing the pot. That yellow scum is a bitch to get off! If I hadn’t killed my Gaffers and Sattler with the wrong kind of soap back in October we might be having a different conversation right now. As it is, I think I’m back to just taking a multivitamin.

And saving up for a Bosch. That’ll really improve my health.

Mellow Yellow

2 Replies

Turmeric milk. Yum. Ish.

I’ve started drinking it every day. I know it’s an eccentric habit, but, considering that a friend of mine recently tried to get me to start drinking my morning urine–and I considered it–I think I’m actually getting less weird by the day. Perhaps the yellow spice will even help with that. It cures so many things–depression, arthritis, inflammation, cancer–that my overweening eccentricity will surely decrease with consumption as well.

I’m making a recipe I found online. By accident, really. I was reading Facebook, and one of my friends was struggling with something, and someone posted that she should try turmeric milk, and the next thing you know, there I was sipping a cup. Because, you know, why should there be a new-age cure I don’t try? Even when I don’t have the disease. Haven’t you heard of prophylactic dosages? (And if you think I’m talking about giving an aspirin to a condom you need to break out your dictionary app.)

I’ve been trying to get Mike to drink it, too. He has a bad back, lots of stress, and a cold. Who’s better qualified for help from a nutritional panacea? Still, you’d think I was offering him, well, a cup of my morning urine. I’m getting about the same reaction. Oh, he drank the first batch, alright. And the second, albeit with greater reluctance. But now that he’s back out of bed he seems to think he’s past his need for my ministrations. When, today, I offered him a cup, he turned his nose up at it. Literally. Sniffing imperceptibly at his foolishness, I poured myself his serving as well as my own.

But I couldn’t finish such a giant helping. Turmeric’s good and all, but not two cups worth. Even when I added prodigious amounts of honey.

Still, I believe that, with this new regimen, my already excellent health is going to improve . Too bad I will smell like a to-go container of sag paneer. Is that even a curry dish? Whatever. You get my point.

At the very least I will not smell like pee.

Bottoms up!

thumbstumbler

A Subsidiary of "Lesser Homes and Gardens"