Since bitch is the new black and black is the clothing colour of universal appropriateness then is using bitch as a term of endearment just as timeless and universal as a cocktail dress?

I once had to sit through a lecture at the middle school where I taught about how it wasn’t amusing or endearing to call each other bitch or whore (by “each other,” I mean the students. The teachers were not calling each other whores. Though wouldn’t that have made for an interesting school day?).

Except that it is amusing and endearing. I get great glee when Flicka calls me Snatch in an email. I wish everyone would call me Snatch (for $75 and a trip to the Social Security office, I could formally make that my name). And though it may make my mother wince to know this (my mother has such a good, ladylike mouth. Her daughters, alas, do not), I call people I like by obscenities ranging from the standard bitch and some saucier fare that probably shouldn’t be documented on a blog to the more mild dirty old curtain twitcher.

Curtain twitcher.

Doesn’t that sound dirty?

Do you know we need more of? We need more obscenity-like words or phrases to use as a term of endearment. Please suggest some if you have them.

I like being called obscenities lovingly. It creates a strange, reverse coding. We’re taught not to say these words around people we don’t know well, but then we use them precisely to create an intimacy that we are comfortable enough with each other to tease. I’m, of course, talking about saying them in a loving way, like “hey, Bitch, when are you going to haul open the doors of the Lushary because I need a drink” and not, “Melissa, you are a complete bitch.”

Sometimes, after I hit send on an email where I have called someone bitch, I have a moment of regret wondering if they will see this as the loving term that it is. And so I ask, if you are called bitch lovingly, is it classic–the new black–like being handed a blue, Tiffanys box or is it more like being hit in the head with the blunt end of an empty Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottle? Are you a fan of the Lovingly-Spoken Obscenity (LSOs) or are you offended to the core when I call you whore, my sweets?

I have been reading the new Jennifer Weiner book, Certain Girls, that goes on sale tomorrow. It picks up where Good in Bed left off, following Cannie years down the road after the success of her book, Big Girls Don’t Cry (which is the book she writes to get back at Bruce Guberman). Her daughter, Joy, born prematurely back in Good in Bed (remember the pushing scene?) is now turning 13, hating her mother and trying to figure out what is real and what is fiction about her conception and early years from Big Girls Don’t Cry. Along the way, Peter decides he wants another child and post-hysterectomy Cannie turns to surrogacy (you knew there had to be an IF theme floating around there somewhere).

It is definitely IF-lite. The surrogacy storyline is tucked into the larger book somewhat like an errand to be run before the end of the day. But to be honest, it didn’t matter. Isn’t it funny–I bitch about talk show hosts not covering IF correctly, but it rolls off my back when I encounter it in Jennifer Weiner’s book. And perhaps it is because I like Cannie so much that when she declares the viability of her eggs simply by an antral follicle count (I know, don’t you wish? Though a doctor who shows you antral follicles and declares, “those are your eggs!”…) I want to simply stroke her hand and smile and say, “that rocks!” rather than deliver a list of 70 questions starting with, “did your doctor do any day-3 blood work?” and ending with “doesn’t your clinic do any psychological screens before they allow you into the surrogacy program? Have you considered a private therapist?”

I think why I love this book and why I will always purchase Jennifer Weiner’s books is for what she does so well. She makes you care. She makes you want to know what will happen next with each character and worry about them and laugh with them and cheer with them. And frankly, it’s a rare author who makes me wish that I could walk alongside the character too and know what happens to them well into the future.

If you could choose one character from any book to start a blog (and who would update the blog daily) and follow along with their story long after the book ends, who would it be and why?

Along with a host of characters from Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth, Cannie was high on my list. So it is nice to hear what has happened years into the future with Cannie and Joy and Peter and even slimy Bruce. This book should be in every beach bag this summer and we should consider covering it with the Barren Bitches Book Brigade.

It feels so good to throw things away. To crunch up old post-it notes and recycle bottles and donate clothes that I’ll never wear again (goodbye skinny ass; there’s a new derriere in town). I love Pesach cleaning. Not just the bleaching and washing and scrubbing, but the organizing and reducing and neatening that takes place simultaneously. Spring cleaning is one of the greatest traditions of all time.

My gut instinct was to start with the room last night (since isn’t that how we think about those types of rooms? With a mentally-italicized “the”?), which didn’t make a lot of sense so we settled on our bedroom. By 11 p.m., it was finished–blankets washed, drawers organized, piles of papers discarded.

I feel like I should take some before and after shots so you can watch the house come back into place. I tackled the sideboard this morning. I keep wandering back into the kitchen to marvel at the neatness of it.

Baruch ha’Shem for fertility treatments that made it only possible for us to afford a townhouse. Can you imagine if we only had to pay a co-payment and ended up in a house with 15 extra rooms to clean? There’s nothing like Pesach cleaning to show you the silver lining in forking over thousands per cycle.

This morning, the Wolvog asked if he could have a slumber party with Lindsay. “She could sleep in Aunt J’s room,” the ChickieNob agreed, referring to the room where my best friend sleeps sometimes when in town. This is the room that belongs to the not-yet baby.

When we were trying to conceive the ChickieNob and Wolvog, I kept their intended room as a dumping ground and office. I hated working in there and thinking about how someone else was supposed to be occupying the space but I think it would have been even worse if it had remained empty.

My mother has been nudging me to use the second bedroom more efficiently. Right now, it contains the futon that has become our guest bed (welcome to our house; please enjoy this lumpy mattress reminiscent of your college days), a dresser and armoire, and then junk. Piles and piles of junk. Old toys, old clothes, clothes we don’t feel like hanging up, clean unfolded towels, unused pillows, a pack-n-play. Junk. It’s the type of room that makes people anxious with the clutter.

But I didn’t want to do anything with it because changing it in any way felt like a sign of defeat. If it was being used for some other purpose, it wouldn’t be designated for the not-yet baby. And that would be a sign of defeat. This, of course, doesn’t make sense since we used the ChickieNob and Wolvog’s room at one point as an office. I like to look at the corner that once held my computer and think about the work I completed before they arrived.

In explaining why Lindsay probably wouldn’t want to have a sleepover party at our house considering she lives a few miles away, I mentioned that we could do something with that room. Make it into an extension of the Playmobil lands that exist in our basement and living room. It felt right. It felt like we weren’t taking anything away. We were simply adding. And when the time came to use that room, the lands would merge and the whole basement would be flooded by little pieces of molded plastic. It would also mean that I could go horizontal while they were making up their stories, lounging on the open futon like a lady of leisure. It would mean that I could clean upstairs while they’re awake.

It feels like nothing. It feels like a big step. It feels like I’m welcoming. It feels like I’m shutting a door. It feels like we have had Playmobil now invade every single level of the house. Which makes vacuuming a nightmare when you see those tiny plastic flowers being sucked into the Dyson and you have to stick your hand into a cloud of dust in order to retrieve them.

It is so strange how a room–a space–can take on this greater meaning of intention or welcome or emptiness (even while physically full of crap). What is currently in your not-yet baby’s space? What was in that space before your child arrived? Are there rooms in your house that are greater than the sum of its physical parts?

Explain Twitter to me. I signed up for it back when I didn’t realize that all those widgets were making my blog unable to be opened and created one Twitter post. Since then, I keep receiving notices saying “so-and-so is following you on Twitter.” Which doesn’t make sense to me based on my small understanding of Twitter which makes me think that there’s a much larger purpose to this site.

My understanding of Twitter is that it’s a way to put one sentence (or so) blog posts on your sidebar rather than constantly publishing new post. So you could post four or so a day letting people know that you’re about to peek into your refrigerator or listening to something good on NPR or considering getting a pet tiger, and others can read along without having post after post clogging their blogreader program.

But then I don’t truly understand how the person is following me. Is there a way to get updates when someone posts something through Twitter? Is that “following?” Is it sent to your inbox, or do you need to leave Twitter open all day? I went on it last night and the page I was on looked like a cross between one-sentence blog posts and an IM conversation. Please explain Twitter to me.

Since I need to let everyone know when I’m considering heading to the loo.