Comma chameleon

Did you know that the correct punctuation differs between the phrases “my cousin Rachel” and “my wife Kara”? An astute reader recently pointed out that the phrase “my wife Kara,” which readers of this column (including, and sometimes limited to, my mom) might recognize as appearing in this space with the same frequency that severed limbs appear in Quentin Tarantino movies, really requires a comma between the words “wife” and “Kara.”

After several salvos in a grammatical battle that could only be described as epic (by me) or unbelievably dorky (by Kara), my defeat became impossible to ignore, though I intend to do so anyway. Defeat only matters if you pay attention to it, much like door dings.

The difference between cousins and wives, while largely ignored in some remote mountain areas, is that a person can have multiple cousins but not multiple wives. This difference makes “my wife, Kara” a non-restrictive appositive phrase, which requires a comma, while “my cousin Rachel” is a restrictive appositive phrase, which does not require a comma. If you’d like further explanation, which of course you don’t, consult Google. Or I could refer you to Janelle, who started this whole kerfuffle, but if you argue with her, you will lose. She’s like a sixth-degree Kerfuffle Master.

Still, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, I’m feeling a little too set in my ways to change. I love my wife Kara. I’m not so sure how I feel about my wife, Kara, though. That comma reminds me of the speed bumps they put down in the park that make you go so slow that you couldn’t even run over a little kid if you wanted to. Plus, it’s only wrong to write poorly if you do it by accident. If you do it on purpose, that makes you literary.

While we’re on the subject of grammar, if there’s ever a game show called “Celebrity Spelling Bee,” I’d bet a lot of money that Fergie would win the whole thing. She’s like a musical Speak & Spell. By the way, if you’re thinking of the Duchess of York Fergie right now, you might want to double check that you put the cap back on your Geritol this morning. I’m talking about Black Eyed Peas Fergie, a pioneer in the field of Fergaliciousness, who capitalizes heavily on the fact that the letters of the alphabet often rhyme with one another.

“Fergie, spell Euonym,” the mean British judge would say. If your show doesn’t have a mean British judge, it’ll get cancelled faster than “Deal or No Deal” should have been, but for some reason hasn’t.

Then Fergie would lean toward the microphone nervously and say, “Euonym. E to the U to the O to the N to the Y to the M. Euonym.”

“That’s correct. Woopty doo. Now bugger off.”

This is the kind of thing you think about in your spare time, when you’re not worrying that your bald spot might soon be large enough to pick up DIRECTV.

Whatever your thoughts about grammar may be, though, the important thing is that you can discuss the finer points of grammar all day long without mentioning Don “’t have a job” Imus once. This is a very important quality for a conversation topic to have, and one that has been altogether lacking over the past couple of weeks. So even while Janelle is quietly sneaking up like a ninja, ready to pounce on you with the distinction between restrictive and non-restrictive appositives, which you, at first glance, thought were different kinds of safety harnesses, you can relax with the knowledge that your views on Imus needn’t be aired, much like his show. And that works out well, because even my wife Kara is sick of hearing about that.

You can pelt Mike Todd with your APA handbook online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Sticking it

**UPDATE 4/23/07** The First Annual Pic-of-a-Stick Off is off to a rather slow start. I hope that's not too terribly disappointing. Post hate comments at Jered's I'm Actually 30 blog.

Here's a shot my wife comma Kara took two weeks ago, about halfway up Mt. Stissing in Pine Plains, NY. I think this shot is especially relevant because it answers the question, once and for all:

What's icy and brown and sticky all over?


This stick! It's the stickiest. How come I'm the only one who thinks the brown and sticky joke is funny? Oh, that's right. The terrible sense of humor.

And here's our buddy Chunks taking a picture of the same frickin' stick:

Chunks, how'd that shot come out? Send it to me and I'll post it. You and K-Dog can have a Pic-of-a-Stick Off. Or you can post it on your blog, the one where you pretend you're still 28. Let's see what you got. Bring the stick! Loser has to wash the winner's blog for a week.

Also, what's red and sticky? That bloody stick again. Woo hoo! That joke might play better in England, 'cause they say "bloody" all the time over there, usually while throwing scones at wickets and watching Coldplay videos.

And I think we all know what's red and sitting on the head of the dude who's about to lose a stick picture competition.

Answering the casting call

Each year, my buddy Don, who is the kind of outdoorsman who meets with other outdoorsmen to hold raffles and cook pancake breakfasts, takes me and my wife Kara for a little fishing trip down the creek near his house. Before Don started taking us on these trips, the last time I’d held a fishing rod was at Penn State, where I’d taken a fly fishing class to complete my gym credits.

Did you know that you still have to take gym classes in college? I suppose it helps prepare college students for the real world, where it’s been my experience that at any moment, a PowerPoint presentation can turn into a pick-up kickball game. At any rate, learning to fly fish is a relaxing way to spend a gym period, not like in middle school, where the majority of my time was spent scurrying into the corner behind the bleachers to keep the pubertorily advanced kids, who showed off their new armpit hair in the same way an adult would show off a new Lexus, from concussively pelting me in the head with volleyballs.

Don takes us fishing in his old rectangular aluminum rowboat, which weighs roughly the same as an Abrams tank and maneuvers exactly as well as three-wheeled shopping cart filled with bags of asphalt. We don’t so much hit rocks with that boat as we do pulverize them. The boat’s so big that when we turn it over in the tall river grass for its first run of the season, entire ecosystems flee out of it, except for the spiders, which prefer to make their presence known hours later, on your neck.

The first time Don took us out, I said, “Hey man, do you mind if I flatten the barbs on this lure with some pliers so the fish will be easier to take off the hook?”

Taking fish off the hook is the worst part of fishing. It wouldn’t be so bad if a fish would give you a little heads-up as to when it would decide to start violently flapping about in your hand, but you just never know when that fish is going to turn from Seinfeld Kramer into YouTube Kramer. My biggest fear of having kids is that I will be the last line of defense for hook removal, especially for that surgical situation in which the hook gets swallowed, which is the fishing version of the Blue of Screen of Death.

“You don’t need to flatten the barbs. They don’t feel it,” Don said. And he’s probably right. To a fish, getting impaled through your face and then having your entire body weight hanging from your lips is probably just a minor inconvenience, the human equivalent of getting toothpaste on your shirt.

The biggest surprise of these fishing trips has been Kara’s enthusiasm for them. Once she gets a hold of that fishing rod, she’s like a different person: a person who actually likes to fish. After she caught her first one, she got so excited that she started swinging the fish around through the air, repeatedly smacking it off my back.

“I caught one! I caught one!” she said, as she made the sound of one fish clapping off of one ducking husband’s back.

“Dude, my back! Quit hitting me with the fish!” I said. Luckily, we had a man in the boat with us; Don grabbed the fish and let it go.

A couple of years ago, we came around a bend in the river to a drowning fawn, which was slowly losing its struggle to climb a steep, muddy riverbank, its little nose barely above the waterline. Before anyone could talk, Don was out of the boat, waist deep in the water. He gently cradled the fawn in his arms and set it down in the grass beside the creek. It was pretty cool to see my best supplier of homemade venison jerky coming to the rescue like that. I’ve never seen any of my other friends who hunt save a deer, though to be fair, they do all of their deer hunting using nothing but their Hondas.

You can throw Mike Todd a line at mikectodd@gmail.com.

My furnace just beat it

As the For Sale sign in the front yard gently swayed in the new spring breeze a couple of weeks ago, I noticed an unfamiliar scent hanging in the air inside the house. I turned to my wife Kara, who had also noticed it. She put her book down and sniffed the air, trying to figure out whether or not to accuse me of having something to do with it.

One might expect, just a couple of days into spring, that the air would be filled with the promise of new life, something along the lines of jonquils, honeysuckle or scented candles floating around in a flooded basement. But our house was filled with an entirely different, much worse aroma.

“Why does our house smell like an Exxon tanker crashed into it last night?” I asked. The smell of oil was becoming so strong, you could taste it.

“Oh, man. This smells expensive,” Kara said.

Turns out that our furnace, which had been cranking along without issue since the release of the movie “Footloose,” decided that our last springtime in this house would be a perfect time to putter out to a stinky death. Of course, this timing made perfect sense, because Kevin Bacon, who starred in “Footloose,” later on appeared in “Apollo 13” with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks starred in “The Money Pit,” a movie about why Shelley Long shouldn’t have left “Cheers,” but also about how stuff breaks all the time. Yes, you can make an entire movie about that. You can also write a newspaper column about it every week, if you have nothing better to do.

“It’s the heat exchanger,” the heat doctor said, using a tone that let me know that his patient was terminally ill. “Must be a crack in it. Even if I could fix it, it’d cost about the same as a new furnace.”

If your heat exchanger has never cracked, you might not be aware of this, but the smell of burning oil is nearly indistinguishable from the smell of burning money.

That night, as I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, alarming thoughts raced through my head. A furnace is no cheap thing to replace, especially as you’re trying to scrimp together everything you have to move into a new place.

“Babe,” I said, gently rousting Kara.

“Mmph, what? I was asleep,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said quietly. “I was just wondering what would happen, you know? I mean, what would happen if Sanjaya won the whole thing?”

“Did you seriously just wake me up to ask me that?” she said.

“But if he wins, will they have to cancel the show?” I asked.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

And she was right. You need to have perspective. Some things just can’t be helped by worrying about them, even though you might think, in your heart of hearts, that the chubby guy was a better singer.

Besides, there are much more pertinent issues to worry about, things that are happening in the real world. For instance, did you know that Michael Jackson is pursuing the construction of a fifty-foot-tall Michael Jackson robot that will roam the Las Vegas desert, shooting laser beams out of some unspecified body parts? A buddy of mine sent me the link to that story, and it was actually a real story, not something from the Onion or Fox News.

I’m not sure we, as a society, can fully comprehend the ramifications of having a giant Michael Jackson robot roaming the desert until it actually happens, but one thing I do know: if it ever invites any of my young, impressionable appliances over to play, there’s no way that’s happening. But I do have an old furnace that it might like to meet.

You can send emails and condolences to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A good phlogging

My buddy Rob always knows where to find the best flying penguins:

Check out his photo blog for more excellent pics. Oh, and then there's this, compliments of my sister Amy's forwarding prowess:

Enjoy smoking again, Lent people.

Welcome to the Hotel Amy

My sister Amy, much like the Muppets, has taken Manhattan. We haven’t lived in the same time zone for eight years, so it’s pretty exciting to be able to call her without having to go through the exhausting mental gymnastics of subtracting three hours. Also, the only female to ever properly execute a simultaneous headlock and wedgie maneuver on me is now just a short train ride away, and that is most excellent for many reasons, not the least of which being that her proclivity for applying said maneuver seems to have diminished greatly ever since she became a lawyer. Lawyers can give people headlocks and wedgies with words.

So now when my wife Kara and I visit Amy in the Big City, we don’t have to worry about carry-on luggage and putting on our prettiest socks for the security people. We just hop on a train and relax for a couple of hours, listening to the surrounding cell phone conversations and letting them lull us gently to sleep like sweet lullabies, sweet, cacophonous lullabies about the merits of piercings vs. tattoos, punctuated liberally by laughter that could wake road kill.

Since we know we’re going to be doing a lot of walking in the city, we pack in our old camping backpacks like we’re attempting a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Somehow during the packing process, Kara stops looking at me as her husband and starts viewing me as her own personal burro.

“Oh, can you fit my boots in there, too?” she asks, looking at the cascade of tampons, purses, hair dryers and Gap jackets overflowing out of the top of my bag.

“Hee-haw,” I reply, adjusting my saddle blanket.

Last weekend, Amy was traveling away from the city, so Kara and I selflessly volunteered to keep her vacant apartment from getting all lonely and dusty in her absence. This is a service which we provided (perhaps a little too generously) completely free of charge. Sometimes you just have to make sacrifices for family.

We also enlisted the help of several of our friends, just to make doubly sure that Amy’s bed, couch and floor were properly slept upon while she was away, keeping them nice and broken in for when she got back. If you’re going to do a job right, you need good help. Besides, Kara and I couldn’t be expected to go out on a Saturday night in New York City and drink enough alcohol to get ten people drunk all by ourselves -- that would have been totally irresponsible. You need at least five people to do that.

When my buddy Josh and his wife Jaime arrived at Amy’s building, I met them in the lobby, gave them a high-five and a hug, respectively, and strolled over to the elevator with them, not paying any attention to the man who came up behind us. Had I been more alert, I would have let him get on the elevator first and then quickly come up with a reason why we needed to wait for the next one. Unfortunately, I didn’t have this foresight, and I paid the price for it.

Josh’s favorite game to play, besides Fill up the Hard Drive with Illegal Material, is a pastime most aptly described as Embarrass Mike in the Elevator. Whenever we’re on an elevator with a stranger, properly observing elevator etiquette by standing in silence that is only mildly awkward, Josh likes to turn to me and say things like, “Oh, I hope there’s a view. It’s going to be so romantic up there.”

Last weekend, as we stood in the elevator with the stranger, watching the digital number beep upward towards Amy’s floor, Josh looked at me and asked, “So has that rash cleared up yet or what?”

You can be a part of it, Mike Todd, Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

We Vanderbilt this mansion on rock and roll

Here's a shot of my summer home in the Hamptons:

I let tourists come hang out in the backyard sometimes, if they promise to wear geeky hiking clothes and only micturate in the porto-potties I've provided by the parking lot.

Okay, okay, it's a picture of the Vanderbilt Mansion last summer. I don't even know what a Hampton is. But my middle name is Vanderbilt. Okay, it's Cox. Yes, with an x.

And baby makes glee

If you ever find yourself concerned that America’s population isn’t growing fast enough to keep up with countries whose kids are learning how to calculate double integrals while our kids are trying to figure out how to disable the parental controls on the DVD player, I’d just like to assure you that my friends are doing everything they can to pitch in, procreationally speaking. They are like modern-day Rosie the Riveters – if you made of poster of them, they’d be flexing their muscles proudly and saying, “We Can Do It!” in an old-timey font, and by “Do It” they’d mean “Reproduce Faster than You Thought Our Species Able.” Then that poster would be hanging on the wall at Bennigan’s next to an old snowshoe and a rusty tricycle.

My wife Kara and I just returned from visiting the most recent one of our friends to take the parental plunge. The sensation of watching one’s friends become parents is a lot like standing behind the safety fence at an amusement park, watching the roller coasters go by as people scream their heads off high above, turning in gigantic loops and having the money shaken out of their pockets. Some of those people didn’t even mean to get in line for the ride, but they actually all seem to be having a pretty good time now. For the time being, Kara and I are content to stand by the fence and watch, letting our friends and the guy with the Megadeth tattoo on his neck get in line ahead of us.

Last weekend, I watched in amazement as my friend (whose name also happens to be Kara, so for the purposes of keeping this narrative semi-comprehensible, I’ll call her Cheetara) seemed so natural at being a mom after only having five weeks’ practice.

“Here,” Cheetara said, “You can hold him,” bringing her tiny little baby boy over to me. Baby and I eyed each other, both a little unsure of the impending transaction. Some people are natural born baby-holders. Kara, for instance, can hold a baby like nobody’s business. She could hold a baby through a carwash without waking it up. I get nervous just holding somebody else’s wine glasses for fear of breaking them. And wine glasses don’t wriggle around. Also, wine glasses don’t cry if they suspect that you are a bad person, leading everyone else in the room to think that maybe the wine glass has picked up on something they’ve been overlooking all these years.

Cheetara gently handed Baby over, and I did my best not to let him smell my fear. Luckily, his senses aren’t too keen yet. He went to sleep in my arms with his binkie perched in his mouth and his legs dangling in the air. He was just so peaceful and perfect, all I could think about as I looked down at him was, “Little Dude, I think there’s something terrible in your diapers.”

I quickly passed him back to his rightful owner. When I asked Cheetara about the tribulations of diaper-changing, she perpetuated one of the great lies of parenthood. “Oh, they’re not bad at all. He only goes number two about once a day, and it’s hardly even noticeable. It doesn’t look like you’d expect at all.”

I was soon to see the horrible truth. A dirty diaper looks exactly like what I expected. Worse, actually.

“Oh, naaaasty,” Kara said.

Cheetara deftly wiped him down as he just chilled out on a blanket on the floor wearing only a binkie and a smile. It works out pretty well that babies are totally cool just hanging out naked, because they sure do have to spend a lot of time like that. They’re like, “Yeah, that’s right. Check me out. I’m anatomically correct.”

You can purée Mike Todd’s carrots online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting creamered

Sometimes, I accidentally hear what the morning DJ on the country music station says. I really don’t mean to. His voice is only allowed on the radio during times of desperation, when all of the other stations have banded together in an attempt to make me listen to McDonald’s commercials.

By the way, did you know that McDonald’s will put the sugar and cream right into the coffee for you now? This is what business students call innovation. Pretty soon, you’ll never have to touch a creamer again. It’s kind of a shame, though, because my friend Josh does this really funny trick where he pretends that he has something is his eye, and he rubs his eyeball with his closed fist going, “Aw, man, my eye is killing me!” Then he takes a fork in his other hand and sticks it into his fist, like he’s going to scratch his eye with the fork.

And as you’re sitting there watching him, the syrup dripping off the pancake on your fork, thinking to yourself, “Is he seriously going to scratch his eye with a fork?”, that’s when he pops the fork into the creamer that was hidden in his fist, making a sound that, on an old-time radio show, would certainly have passed for an eyeball being punctured -- of course, if you had listened to this performance on an old radio show, not only would you have been helpfully reminded to drink more Ovaltine, but your pancakes would not have been ruined from the creamer splatter.

If McDonald’s has its way, Josh won’t be able to do that trick anymore, which I think we can all agree would really be a shame. At least he’ll still be able to do the thing where he grabs his head like he’s going to crack his neck, and then just as he turns his head to the side, he smashes a Tic-Tac container that he’s hidden in his hand, making it sound like he’s broken something very important. Ah, that Josh. He should really get a job.

Anyway, I recently heard the morning DJ working himself into a foamy lather over the fact that some elementary school teachers are using the phrase, “sitting pretzel style,” rather than “sitting Indian style.” He was very angered about this, mostly because very angry people draw a crowd.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to be really angered about it, too. Clearly, our kids should not be taught to emulate snack foods of any kind. Where would it end? Today, pretzels. Tomorrow, HoHos.

In my estimation, though, what’s sadder than the proliferation of snack-related sitting positions amongst our children is the precipitous decline in our national regard for the Seinfeld rerun. You used to be able to depend on Twinkies and Seinfeld reruns to never get old. But I think those reruns have lost a little bit of their luster ever since Kramer had to go and mess them up with his racist tirade, which must have, by now, been shown on the internet more times than that video of the French guy head-butting the other guy in the chest during that big cricket match.

After the event, which couldn’t have been run more smoothly by Tom Cruise’s publicist, Kramer apologized to Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who shot him down like they’d taken lessons from Cindy Beal, who shot me down for the prom like she’d taken lessons from the Red Baron. That is, if the Red Baron had his mom answer the phone to say that the Baron was doing homework and couldn’t talk.

A couple of weeks ago, the morning DJ asked the question, “Who would someone apologize to if they offended white people?”

Of course, the DJ was being disingenuous. The bigger issue is who deserves an apology when you’ve offended humankind in general. Also, the answer is Jeff Foxworthy.

You can head-butt Mike Todd in the chest online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Parenting without kids

When my wife Kara and I went out to dinner a couple of nights ago, taking a break from the regimen of Ramen noodles and Cinnamon Life Cereal to which we’ve been rigidly adhering since we put our house on the market, we noticed that a couple of nearby families allowed their small children to have their Game Boys out at the dinner table.

For those unfamiliar with Game Boys, they are handheld devices with tiny little screens that devour childhoods whole, allowing kids to play video games when they should be out catching fireflies and smooshing them on their shoes as a warning to all other low-flying insects. Parents who allow Game Boy-playing in restaurants are clearly putting their kids into a high-risk category; these kids are far more likely than their peers to mature into adults who wear Bluetooth headsets when they’re not even talking on the phone, like they think they’re platoon commanders or Old Navy employees.

I can only imagine how my parents would have reacted if I’d have whipped out my old Game Boy (which was black-and-white and carved from a granite slab) at the dinner table, much less at a restaurant. The only game on that Game Boy would have been “Super Mario Brothers: I’m Looking at My Bare Hands Now Because Mom Just Snatched My Game Boy.”

As you can probably tell, Kara and I like to criticize everyone else’s parenting skills, because when you don’t have any kids, you have lots of time for stuff like that. You can also watch movies that do not feature talking bears, and you can say bad words without having to spell them out.

But we’ve also been thinking about babies a lot lately, mainly because our friends are proving to be slightly more fertile than the Tigris-Euphrates river basin. Sometimes, they even find that out on purpose. Walking through the aisles of Target yesterday to hunt for some presents for a baby shower, we were amazed at the contraptions that are available to new parents.

“Oh man,” Kara said, “Look at this thing.”

She was pointing towards a device that looked like it should have been offered for sale at a farm auction instead of in the baby aisle. It reminded me of the episode of Sesame Street where they visit the dairy farm.

“I can’t believe you actually have to hook yourself up to this thing. I wonder if it hurts,” Kara said.

“Moo,” I replied, feeling very gender fortunate, but also thinking about how much easier life would be if, like cows, people could just eat hay. You could keep a bale in the kitchen and just go to town on it whenever you wanted. No preparation, no dishes. I’m not sure if you’d want to figure out how to chew on your cud, though, because that seems pretty gross.

We ended up purchasing a baby wipe warmer. I had no idea that baby wipe warmers even existed, but apparently baby-wiping technology has come a long way. We thought that this gift was also culturally relevant at the moment, because if you’ve seen the movie “Hannibal Rising,” which of course you haven’t because it’s terrible, you find out that Hannibal Lecter would have grown up to be a park ranger if his mother hadn’t used cold baby wipes on him.

Judging from what we saw in the mall, our baby-having friends sure seem to be in for it. Parenting these days offers challenges that weren’t around even a few years ago. For one thing, kids have wheels in their sneakers now, which makes them nearly impossible to catch, especially on inclined planes. They just glide on along like they’ve evolved without us. At least they refuse to wear helmets, just like when I was a kid. Fads may come and go, but cranial contusions never go out of style.

You can give Mike Todd a timeout online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Cold showers bring no flowers

Every morning, our ferret Chopper runs into the bathroom and paws at the side of the bathtub, standing up on his hind legs like a prairie dog, waiting impatiently for his morning coffee. He doesn’t actually drink the same coffee that you and I do, but if he did, he’s such a good little guy that he’d probably drink only fair trade coffee, even though he wouldn’t understand exactly what that means, either.

Chopper’s coffee is the warm water that comes out of the faucet before it gets hot enough for a shower. Either my wife Kara or I will spoon him some warm water with our hands, and he’ll take a few enthusiastic licks before he runs off to find some remote corner of the house to convert into his very own half bath. He’s quite the little architect.

Last Saturday morning was different, though. Chopper and I both stood there beside the tub, waiting for the warm water to start like we were waiting for Godot. I only reference “Waiting for Godot” now because I had to read it in high school even though not a single blessed thing happened during the whole play except for two guys standing around like idiots talking about nothing like it was a presidential debate. Since reading that play hasn’t done me a lick of good except that I kind of felt in on the joke while watching the movie “Waiting for Guffman,” which everyone in the world except me thought was hilarious, at least I can make myself feel marginally smarter by mentioning the play here, because smart people prove their smartness either by mentioning obscure literary works in regular conversation or by questioning other people’s patriotism. Both ways work.

Even though only the hot tap was turned on, the water felt like glacial runoff. I yelled up the stairs, “Did you use all the hot water for your shower?”

After a brief pause, Kara said, “Oh, I think I might have fallen asleep in the shower this morning. Sorry.”

The fact that she had fallen asleep while standing up would have been perfectly understandable if she had, at any time during her shower, been a giraffe, or if our brand of soap had been Irish Narcoleptic.

Chopper gave up and wandered off. I crawled back into bed.

“Hey, what are you doing? Take a shower and let’s go get something to eat. I’m a little bit hungry,” she said.

“I’m a little bit rock and roll,” I replied, high-fiving myself.

“Seriously. Get ready and let’s go,” she said.

This was the low point in my morning, compounded by the fact that the news was reporting that chimps are making weapons now. It’s only a matter of time before they start selling them to rogue states and dolphins.

So I took a lightning-fast shower, keeping warm by bathing in a steady stream of expletives. A certain warmth also emanated from the knowledge that I had just earned Good Husband tokens, which could be spent in any number of ways, including, but not limited to, practicing poor toilet etiquette and not looking up from the computer screen while she was talking to me.

When fate smiles on you and lets your significant other wrong you in some small way, it’s very important not to get too excited, lest you turn into the bad guy, which can happen quicker than you might think. Wringing everything you can out of your partner’s mistake is a delicate art form. You have just been given a precious little egg, an egg that you must nurture until it hatches into a beautiful little swan of revenge. At least that’s what I hear from other married people. I would never do such a thing. I’m too busy heating up shower water on the stove.

You can offer to be a ferret’s barista online at mikectodd@gmail.com.