After laying in bed in the dark for an hour or two early this morning wondering if the pain in my chest was a blocked artery, or maybe a blood clot, or some sort of emotional adhesion built out of the dreams it's taken me a lifetime to destroy, Jack woke up just enough to realize that my insomnia = an opportunity for some light groping.

While I lay there, unresponsive, speculating on whether I'd soon be exchanging my husband's slightly sweaty palms for the welcoming grasp of Jesus, I decided to share my burden, not with Jesus but with Jack. I told him about my symptoms/imminent demise, making a mental note to update our will, to which Jack replied, "It's heartburn" (subtext: "you idiot") and put my hand on his dick.

Okay, so it probably was heartburn, what with the garlic and the spicy pepperoni pizza and two bottles of wine the night before.

After a life-affirming little death I was somehow still awake at 5:00 a.m. when Jackson hollered for his dad to come snuggle with him in his bunk bed. Alas, Jack gave me the old "it's your turn" nudge, and since I figured it didn't matter where I did my not-sleeping I went in Jack's stead.

At 7:00 a.m. Jackson realized I wasn't stubbly enough to be his father, was duly upset at the deception, and kicked me out of his bed and started bellowing anew for dad.

Slightly wounded and feeling exactly as haggard as I looked, I took this opportunity to slam Jackson's door, at which he started crying, and then stomp into the office to check my inbox, where I read the responses to the e-mails it now dawned on me I must have sent the night before. After a minute Jackson stopped crying and started hollering again so I stomped back into our bedroom and told Jack to get the hell up.

Once alone in my huge empty bed I told the goddamn dog to stop licking her goddamn ass, put a pillow over my head, and recited Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse to myself over and over again.

This in turn made me think of Maggie, who got out as early as she could and is going to have a kid herself, and about how when I was in San Francisco before the BlogHer conference, with her and a bunch of other women, we were having breakfast at a soul food diner and I looked around the table at each woman in turn and thought, "One kid, one kid, one kid, one kid, two kids, one on the way."

We'd all but one left children behind with husbands to eat eggs and hug and not take pictures of each other, and be with Maggie.

Maggie has a giant tackle box full of beading materials which so impressed me that as soon as I got home I went to the sporting goods store and bought this:

What wonders lie inside?

Ohmyholyfuckinggod it's BEADS.

I made this necklace last month, I thought the colors would be pretty:

but I found that I never wore it so I took it apart and rethought it:

It's still not working, though.

Practically every necklace I've made I've had to take apart and do over. I go through a lot of wire that way but it's the only way to learn how not to make ugly jewelry.

The whole bead tacklebox inspiration thing reminded me that Maggie recently had a commenter accuse her of being someone out of a Sylvia cartoon, The Woman Who Does Things More Beautifully Than You, which I thought was hilarious. First, because Maggie does do everything more beautifully than me, and maybe you, or at least with more purpose and clarity, and second because Sylvia is so late-eighties for me, back when I would clip cartoons out of magazines and newspapers and save them.

If I could find the old album I used for newspaper clippings I would post this one particular Sylvia cartoon for you, it was an interview with a cat about his morning strategies. And the cat said something like, "Well, first I hop up on the windowsill and knock over some potted plants, and if that doesn't work I push over the refrigerator."

Remembering that one made me chuckle again this morning (still in bed, still with the pillow over my head) and it reminded me of this other cartoon that I cut out of Spy in something like 1987 (does Spy still exist? No) and kept in the same album, which I promise I will look for this week, it might be in the garage. This cartoon was called "Old Unfamiliar Folk Tunes" and it was four panels of a cat with it's head angled to the right and then to the left, and the caption went, "The cat is in the hay, the cat is in the hay, woo woo wee wee, the cat is in the hay." I giggled for weeks at that one. Years, actually: I'm having a nice smile over it right now, thinking of how it turned out to be a handy compatibility test for potential boyfriends.

And then I thought, This is fucking ridiculous, and I took the pillow off my head and I got up and made myself a cup of coffee. When Jackson got up I apologized. And then later Jack got what I owed him, too.