After reading Frustration (about something my eldest son Rob did to make me cry with the frustration of not being able to hit him with a stick), Mar commented:

Seems like my N has a very similar personality when he’s at his most…challenging. I’m always sad when people ONLY see this..challenging side.
Quick ! write something to redeem Rob in the eyes of your readers!

GOOD THOUGHT. I know that EVEN THOUGH I understand that someone might only blog about a spouse when the spouse is being awful, or about life when they need to vent, I NEVERTHELESS sometimes get the impression that someone is married to a total pinehole or having a rotten life. And Rob, while he has his pinehole/rotten moments like any other human being, is not ALL BAD.

Rob was 5 when I found out I was having twins, and his response was a sarcastic “Great. TWO of them.” He was not particularly fond of his 2-years-younger brother William, so the prospect of EVEN MORE younger siblings failed to please. But then as soon as the twins were born he was affectionate and sweet with them, and started saying things like, “When do you think we can have ANOTHER baby?” He was very happy when I was expecting Henry, and wanted to talk a lot about what did we think the new baby would be LIKE, and he’s been affectionate and sweet with Henry too, as with the twins. He’ll say, “Hey, Henry, do you want to go PLAY OUTSIDE with me?” and then they’ll go racing out together, a 12-year-old and a 3-year-old. Periodically he’ll mention that he thinks we should have another baby in our family.

Oh, I just remembered a Rob-related story. After the twins were born, Paul and I weren’t planning to have any more children. So when Rob asked when we could have another baby, I said no, there wouldn’t be any more babies. I’d have to look up exactly what he said, but he was dumbstruck and indignant, saying something like what about the fifth one, the boy? He said it EXACTLY as if it had been a long-standing, much-discussed plan—as if for years we’d been saying that our family would be boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, and now we were suddenly saying we wouldn’t have that last baby after all. So then it was neat when we DID have an unexpected fifth child, a boy.

Anyway, back to the Rob Praise. He’s a good talker. He asks questions of the sort a person WANTS to answer, and then he listens, and then he asks more questions of the “Is it like….?” variety that keep the conversation going and show he’s been listening. And I don’t have to worry as much that he’ll be upset about something and won’t tell me about it—like William, who will suppress it and cry privately over something COMPLETELY FIXABLE, with me not even knowing he was unhappy about a decision I’d made casually.

He says hello when he comes into a room, and says things like “Goodbye, I’m going to the bus now, have a good day, see you later, bye!” when he leaves in the morning. And when he comes home he’ll say “How was your day?” or “Did you have a good day?”

He’s naturally helpful, in that he will start pitching in without being asked. If it’s a task he doesn’t know how to just pitch in with, he’ll ask if he can help. If I come home from errands and start bringing in bags, he’ll put his shoes on and come out to help without anyone saying anything. And this isn’t because we’ve trained him to do it, which is why I used the word “naturally”: it’s the sort of thing that, after he started doing it on his own, I thought, “Hey, we SHOULD HAVE been training him to do this. And we should train WILLIAM to do this TOO.”

He also says “thank you” a lot. We did train that one, but we also trained the other kids and it’s Rob who does it without being prompted or reminded. I’ll come home with something even kind of boring, like a new plain shirt I got him on clearance, and he’ll say, “Hey, thanks!” with enthusiasm. Or if he’s out of some food item he likes, and I go to the grocery store and come home with it, he’ll say, “Yay, string cheese! Thanks!”

He opens doors for me, and for strangers.

We passed one of his teachers at the grocery store and didn’t recognize her at first because she was out of context, and as soon as he realized who it was, he asked if he could go say hi—and then he bounded over to her, greeted her nicely, pointed me out so the teacher and I could exchange a wave, and then said bye and bounded back. Polite and friendly, but without inundating her with child-interaction during her school-free hours.

He likes to go shopping with me, and is a pleasant companion: chatty and helpful.

He doesn’t notice much or care much if other people don’t like him. This is a trait I unsuccessfully work on acquiring, and so I’m glad he has it.

Also, he’s tall and he has lots of eyelashes.

So. Even though I feel like he will drive me LITERALLY MAD with the arguing and the firstborn justice issues and the ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS HAS TO BE RIGHT, he does have his good points too.

So now Blogger is back up, but Twitter is down. This has been a disorienting couple of days. At least it was not both at the same time! APOCALYPSE.

I posted a new review yesterday:
ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ Toothbrush
and Orajel ® MY WAY!™ Kids’ Toothpaste—and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway—and if you are wondering if I was required to write those things in all-caps with exclamation points, that would be a big AFFIRMATIVE! (Also, the names must not be broken between two lines; thus the awkward formatting.) Anyway, I tell you this not only because part of my contract involves telling you about it, but also because when Blogger went down it lost all the comments—so if you commented on the post after it went up mid-day Thursday but before Blogger went down later in the day, you’ll need to re-comment to be entered.

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Rob made me so angry the other day, I could barely talk about it. Paul had checked Rob’s homework as usual, and had made Rob re-do a math worksheet on which Rob (1) hadn’t done the problems the way he was supposed to, (2) hadn’t shown his work the way he was supposed to, and (3) had gotten the wrong answers. And Rob had better grow up to be a stunning trial attorney who works either for justice or for our exceedingly comfortable retirement years, whichever, because ROB CANNOT BE WRONG. Does he seem to be wrong? NO, YOU ARE WRONG. Can you prove him to be wrong? NO, THERE IS ANOTHER EXPLANATION. Can you calmly and quietly explain to him that everyone is wrong sometimes, and that in this case it is his turn? NO, HIS EARS ARE NOT HEARING YOUR IMPOSSIBLE CONCLUSION IN RE HIS WRONGNESS.

So. Rob maintained despite all evidence to the contrary (written instructions at the top of the sheet; the provably wrong answers) that he was doing it the way he’d been taught AND that he DID have the right answers. It was obvious his ears were no longer connected to his brain: during the time he should have been listening to Paul’s admirably patient explanations, it was clear that all he was doing was compiling his next argument to explain why he COULD NOT be wrong, whatever the evidence seemed to be. After MANY (again, admirably patient) attempts, Paul finally sighed and said all right, Rob could continue to believe he was right if he wanted to, but Paul was nevertheless telling him that he must redo it the way the instructions said, and with the work shown, and with the correct answer at the end. Rob FUMED the entire time.

The next day, Rob presented us triumphantly with a signed note from his teacher (he emphasized this to us: “SIGNED”) saying that he was supposed to show his work and do the problems the way he’d been taught. He had evidently explained to her that his parents were doing exactly what the teachers had said they might, which was to try to make him do math The Old Way. When, as you know if you’ve been following along, Paul was NOT trying to do: he was telling Rob he had to do the problems not “the way Paul learned in school” but “the way shown at the top of the paper.” AND, Paul had been TELLING HIM TO SHOW HIS WORK.

Not only is this blisteringly embarrassing to me to think of Rob telling the teacher that we were forcing him to do what we were NOT forcing him to do (and then having her SIGN A NOTE to that effect) (and I can’t think of any way to explain to her what actually happened, without looking crazy/defensive/over-reactive AND making HER feel embarrassed), but our theory that Rob’s ears are entirely disengaged at such times was demonstrated with excruciating clarity. I don’t know how Paul kept his temper, because I started CRYING with the effort not to BEAT ROB WITH A STICK and then perhaps send him to his room until the next school day, when I would shove him ahead of me into the classroom and force him to tell his teacher what had ACTUALLY happened, and give her a SIGNED note saying that SHE may now beat him with a stick.

But all Paul did was sigh and explain AGAIN. To which Rob said, “OHHHHHHHHHH… _I_ thought you meant…” (that was when I started crying with frustration).

And you know how everyone expresses exasperation at the “Just wait!” people, and yet the “Just wait!” people continue to say “Just wait!”? I can feel them out there, so tempted to tell me what small potatoes this incident is in comparison to what is to come as my 12-year-old gets into his teens, closely followed by his four siblings.

I always wonder what it is such people hope to accomplish with that kind of talk. Do they want us to give up on this whole child-rearing endeavor, and leave home and/or kick the children out so we won’t have to deal with the horrors that await us? Do they want us to go back in time and not have children? Are they hoping to plunge us into ineffectual and pointless despair as we contemplate upcoming years of Ever Worse? Are they imagining that we are somehow so blind and delusional, we believe that our current complaint represents the worst we will or could encounter? Do they want us to imagine them rubbing their hands together with poorly-hidden happiness at the thought of our upcoming surprise and distress?

We had two household crises: (1) The upstairs toilet clogged, and even after vigorous plunging was only flushing half-heartedly (i.e., the water went down, but not the toilet paper), and (2) The dishwasher stopped cleaning the dishes, even though it sounded like it was running normally.

In time-honored tradition, I first made two unfounded accusations:

Then, this past weekend, Paul purchased some sort of toilet device and used it to discover a BRANCH flushed down the toilet. So it WAS the children’s fault, but not in the way I thought: Henry had flushed his “sword,” by, he assures me, “accident.”

Less success with the second crisis: we switched back to regular dishwasher detergent, but there is still food all over the dishes (and splashes of food/milk untouched on the inside of the dishwasher door), so we are hand-washing. Another branch, this time crammed in the dishwasher water-sprayer? STAY TUNED.

I just read and loved a book I NEVER would have chosen except that BOTH my parents read it and liked it:

Death Match, by Lincoln Child
(photo from Amazon.com)

The cover does not appeal to me, nor does the title, and also I think more than 95% of the books I read are by women because I generally don’t identify with either the writing style or the subject matter of male authors. I would not have even picked this book up to skim the inner flap, is what I am telling you.

Furthermore, the book has flaws. There is a time or two when the protagonist does something and I think, “It is 100% clear he should be doing something different, so this is obviously just a way for the author to give us information he wants us to have and/or force the plot into a particular shape.” And there are some other places where, afterward or at the time, I thought, “But why would they….?” and “But wouldn’t they…?” and “Wait, but if it was the night before, the child would have been…” and “Surely any sensible person would have realized that the information could have been…?” and “But couldn’t he have just NOT set it up that way?” and “Well, and it would have to cost WAY MORE than that.”

But WHATEVER, because the PREMISE is one of the most lock-on fascinating ones I’ve heard of in a long time. And you might THINK I am spoiling it when I tell you the plot, but I am not: I will tell you what my mother told me when I thought SHE was spoiling it, but then when I read the book I thought no, she wasn’t.

The premise is that there is a dating service that has a 100% success rate: it costs $25,000 PER PERSON to join, but there’s a full money-back guarantee and no one has ever used it—or even needed to be matched a second time because the first one didn’t work out. (The cynical reader might notice that every single person who uses this agency is not only attractive and intelligent and emotionally/mentally-well-balanced, but also marvelously multi-talented, and with many interesting interests. We will not spend too much time, however, wondering about couples who are kind of dim and dull; we will just assume they didn’t make for as good reading.) Matched couples are remarkably, blissfully happy. As one or two of the employees at the agency says, people left on their own choose each other for the wrong reasons and eliminate potential partners for the wrong reasons; the agency matches people who at first think the match was a total mistake, and then within minutes see the perfection of it.

Then the couples start committing joint suicide, and a psychologist/detective is called in to find out what is going on. The book is not only his attempt to figure things out, but also lots of interesting discussion about how the agency works, and the tests they use to establish compatibility.

***SLIGHT SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO BE PREPARED FOR UPSETTING SCENES INVOLVING CHILDREN***
The opening scene is a little traumatic, because a small child (old enough to sit in a high chair, not old enough to speak) has SEEN her parents kill themselves. But we don’t join the scene until it’s over (we just figure out that she would have had to have seen it), and the child is safe and unharmed and of course too young to really know what’s happened. In another scene, it is mentioned that one of the women who committed suicide was pregnant.
***END SLIGHT SPOILERS***

A potential downside of this book is you may find yourself looking sideways at your significant other, wondering if you chose him/her for the wrong reasons and if you are not in fact particularly compatible. One character in the book says that even though he’s had a long and happy marriage with his wife, he would have cut off his own arm to have a relationship like the one he’s seen of a couple matched by the dating service. Food for thought, and not necessarily a meal that sits well. But it has been a long time since I had to take a book to another room because I HAD to keep reading it and couldn’t tolerate any distractions at all.

Yesterday I was having a crappy day for no reason. I woke up, and the day was already crappy despite the tulips blooming and nobody barfing and the car out of the shop and basically everything going just fine. But there was no more Easter candy, and when I woke up I thought I was waking up at about 2:00 in the morning but in fact it was 5 minutes before I had to get up and yet I still fell back to sleep so I woke up feeling all weird and sleep-interrupted, and furthermore I’ve been reading more volumes of the Y: The Last Man series so I’d been having bad dreams about being trapped in a bathroom with killers outside, and as soon as I woke up I remembered I’d forgotten to thaw muffins and ANYway it wasn’t all that bad a day and yet it WAS.

I poked around for awhile trying to fix it. Good breakfast. Favorite lavender-vanilla conditioner and body wash. Extra coffee. Sitting and reading more Y: The Last Man instead of getting going on the laundry. Still I remained cranky and wan.

Then I remembered what I hardly ever seem to remember on the days that are crappy because I am feeling too crappy to think of things that would make me feel better: I have Crappy Day Presents. And at first I tried to talk myself out of opening one, because I didn’t have a good reason for having a crappy day, and also because a characteristic of this kind of crappy day is a certain sullenness and resistance toward improving it—as if being able to improve it with a present would mean it hadn’t REALLY been a crappy day. I shook that right off.

And I also remembered that when I wrote about Crappy Day Presents before, some of you asked for follow-ups to give you more ideas for sending your own CDP boxes, so…look what Mean Living (more of a Twitter girl these days AHEM languishing blog) sent me:

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP ALREADY

I should have waited for good lighting to take the pictures, but I knew those mini Cadbury Eggs were not going to make it to the good lighting (they are half-gone as I write this post) so you get one with too much flash, and one dark and not completely in focus.

Can you believe that cross-stitch? Mean Living is all “Please excuse all the flaws” and I was all “OMG you MADE this? out of, like, THREAD??” Look at the BIRDY. Look at the SWEET LITTLE FLOWERS, which gradually change from darker to lighter as the row goes along. And do you see what it says? “TODAY’S GOAL: Do not go slap out of my mind.” And the thread it’s written in MATCHES MY BLOG. I think I should put it by the coffee pot. Or next to my alarm clock.

I nearly came home with another cat yesterday. She was perfect: 6 years old, a grey-and-white fur pattern we’ve never had before, had lived with other cats before, and she passed The Henry Test (tolerating with aplomb his sudden loud sounds, lunges, awkward hugs, and fur-ruffling pettings, but also stepping confidently away from him when she’d had enough).

But I didn’t bring her home. Instead I talked my mother’s ear off all the way home about how it was like when you date someone who seems so perfect and list-checking-off in every way, you WISH you were passionate about them, but you’re just NOT. I thought she was a great, great cat, probably perfect for our family, but I didn’t feel like I couldn’t leave the shelter without her.

And we are NOT having more than three cats, so I thought I’d prefer to leave the Third Cat position empty, in case I encountered a cat I felt I couldn’t live without. It’s fun to acquire a new cat, and our current cats are ages 1 and 2 so it’s likely to be a LONG TIME before we replace them (just did math: HENRY COULD BE OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL OMG)—and we just got them in the past year, so maybe it would be nice to spread out the cat-shopping fun a little. But I also feel a little weird and regretful about it: we could given that great cat a home, but chose not to because of a weird and misapplied dating analogy. It helps that our shelter is no-kill AND has a high turnover: she WILL be adopted, and soon, just not by us.

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I used that trip to the shelter to motivate myself to get rid of four more kitchen-trash-sized bags of clothes. (Connection: donation dumpster at shelter.) A lot was Henry’s outgrown stuff, but there was also a bunch of clothes I bought for Elizabeth that she just Won’t Wear, and I might as well pass them on to a little girl who Will. And some curtains I’ve saved for over a decade because they were perfect in our apartment even though they don’t work in our house. And five pairs of rain boots that are too small for anyone who lives here. And several pairs of near-new shoes that kids didn’t like/wear for whatever reason. And a long skirt I think of myself as being just about to wear, but I don’t wear it, EVER. And two pair of wide-legged jeans I trip in. And some shirts the bigger boys are wearing that were a good deal but I don’t like them; they’d be fine as handmedowns, but I DON’T LIKE THEM, so I’m not storing/saving them and then seeing them again later. And about six pairs of brand-new jeans I bought for Elizabeth before it turned out she wears jeans about once a month. And some baby blankets.

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Henry, encountering a slice of turkey: “Is this fish made out of HAM?” Meat education fail.

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I dreamed last night that I was in labor, but it was a pleasant dream because it was labor as I’d IMAGINED it would be (tight squeezing pain over entire tum area—like a Braxton-Hicks but with pain) rather than as it actually WAS (internal small-focus stabbing-knife-gas-pain-type feeling), and I felt like I was handling it.

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Driving home from the library, THREE people are lucky I’m such a fearful defensive driver. First, a guy in a car pulled out of a side street, right through his stop sign and into my path. I had to come to a complete stop to avoid hitting him. He didn’t even flinch. A little further down the same road, a bicyclist traveling on a street perpendicular to mine flinged at full speed into the crosswalk from a sidewalk behind a building where I couldn’t see him, without stopping before entering the crosswalk, and without even glancing to see if a car was there. Third, a child (8-10 age) ran across the road without looking, not in a crosswalk.

Our school system has started taking school pictures TWICE a year, once in fall (“The Classic”) and now also once in spring (“The This Makes Us a LOT of Money, So How About We Do It Twice as Often”).

I object. School pictures are ONCE A YEAR. Those cut-out frames, with a place for each grade’s photo, have ONE PLACE PER GRADE. People who say “My fourth grade school photo” mean THE ONLY ONE TAKEN IN THAT GRADE.

I don’t object TOO stridently, though, because all I have to do is “not buy any.” At worst, it’s a second day of the year I have to make sure the kids have haircuts and are wearing clean clothes, so that no one will think I am a parent who forgot Unnecessary Second School Picture Day.

Still, I am irked. Not STRIDENTLY irked, but irked, on principle. These photos are so much more expensive than a package deal at JCPenney’s, for which I can print out a $7.99 coupon any time I want and get a 20-minute custom session where they try to get the facial expressions I’d like to have immortalized, rather than having my child stand in line and get a 6-second custom session where 3 seconds involve being told to stand stiffly and 2 seconds involve being asked to smile like they don’t mean it. I do the school pictures each year rather than doing the $7.99 deal because (1) I HATE having to take kids to have their pictures taken, and (2) I HATE dealing with the sales pitch for additional shots afterward, and (3) school pictures are sooooooo tradiiiiiitional. But they are NOT sooooooo tradiiiiiiiitional TWICE a year.

I AM glad this year, though, because even though I didn’t fill out the order form for photos, they sent home a proof sheet to try to tempt me to change my mind. And they did a little mock-up of what the child would look like against each of the eight background choices, which include, and I am not even kidding, “Floating Upright in Outer Space Posing for a Photo,” “Standing Out in a Freezing Winter Field in Springtime Short Sleeves,” “Standing in the Ocean, Apparently, With a Tropical Island Behind Me But I’m Wearing a Sweater Because Spring Was Late This Year,” “In Some Sort of Mansion, I Guess, or Maybe a Museum,” and “At a BASEBALL GAME, FTLOG.” So I have free, tiny, stiffly-posed, insincere-expressioned photos of the twins in all these places now, and that was WELL WORTH the minor inconvenience of making sure they didn’t have peanut butter on their shirts that day.

(I believe if you click the photos you can see them larger. But not MUCH larger, because they ARE tiny.)

The star of today’s shopping trip: a new toaster. We’ve needed a new one for awhile: our old one is a 4-slot toaster we got from Freecycle that takes so long the bread has time to GO STALE. But I couldn’t justify the cost of a toaster when we technically already had one. This toaster finally motivated me to make the purchase. For one thing, it’s stainless steel, so now I can enjoy noticing every fingerprint like everyone else.

But wait, there’s more! Gone are the days of spending tortuous long hours manually coiling the cord! This baby winds it up FOR you with the press of a button! Space-age!

Also, there is a COUNTDOWN TIMER, so you know when your toast is about to pop up! Now Mother won’t totally screw up breakfast for her family by serving ill-timed toast!

But this is my favorite feature: a big dent, so it was $9.00 instead of $36. And it’s not even as dramatic as it looks in the picture.

(Look! I already have fingerprints to wipe off!)

I also bought this handheld solitaire game. I wanted it at $14.99, but no. I saw it at 30% off and 50% off, but no. At 75% off ($3.74) it was MINE, BABY.

Nailpolish. Two-dollar nailpolish, so maybe it won’t be any good, but I thought the color had potential.

The last time I bought the “beauty bar” bar soap I use on my face was when I found a bunch of 8- or 12-packs of it on 75% off, maybe…ten years ago. To my surprise, when I used up a bar and went to get a fresh bar, I was actually OUT OF SOAP. I thought I must be mistaken, but it appeared to be true: I would need to PURCHASE soap. I bought Ivory because I’d recently read in a celebrity magazine that some celebrity’s mother told her to ONLY use Ivory soap on her face. When I was buying the soap I was remembering that it was Elizabeth Taylor, but when I was taking this picture I remembered that I think it was actually Jennifer Lopez. That is…not quite as pleasing, but she does have beautiful skin too.

(One bar already in the shower.)

Cute Easter eggs for next year’s egg hunt, 90% off, so 50 cents. I also got some candy, but let’s just gloss over that.

(Package-ripping courtesy of Henry, who was bored in the cart.)

New Target-brand bandaids. The hearts/flowers set is nice, but the other set is even better: one is cute giraffes/monkeys/elephants, and another is rows of purple penguins. (The third is teddies.)

These were YESTERDAY’S shopping trip, but whatevs. Elizabeth likes to wear dresses and skirts (with four boys, I say “OMG THANK GOODNESS”), and she’s been wearing her velvet-top-and-huge-poofy-gold-skirt Christmas dress once a week to kindergarten, and it really was not made for that many launderings, so I was looking forward to post-Easter dress clearances. I got one really-almost-TOO-dressy pink dress that would work as a flower girl dress and has beading and many layers of fabric under the skirt; one yellow eyelet sundress; and one brightly flowered sundress. All 75% off.

(It really is difficult to take nice photos of clothes.
See also: eBay, where even awesome-condition cute brand-name clothes
look awful when photographed flat on someone’s bed.)

Someone recommended this book to me and, as I often do, I put it on the library request list without even investigating.

When We Were Strangers, by Pamela Schoenewaldt
(photo from Amazon.com)

I read the first couple of pages and I was like, “Oh. Tiny village, young girl, late 1800s, poverty and misery. Not my style.” I kept reading only because it was my last library book.

It totally won me over. By the time she sets out for America, I was all, “Whoaaaaaaaaaa.” I could just PICTURE it. I really really really did not think I was much interested in immigration stories aside from a moderate interest in the most dramatic story from my own family (boat sank, almost everyone was killed except a few people including my male ancestor and female ancestor, who then perhaps bonded over their survival guilt and got married), but it turned out I WAS interested. Bewitched, almost. And yet, when I think back over it, I’m STILL not interested in a summary of the plot, and I don’t have much interest in reading MORE immigration stories.

Will YOU like it? Dunno! I mean, I could say, “If YOU don’t like immigration stories EITHER, you might!” or “If you DO like immigration stories, you might!”—so I suspect it’s actually, “If you like this style of writing, you will!” since I felt like it was more the storyteller than the story for this one.

Y: The Last Man, by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra
(photo from Amazon.com)

Paul heard about this book and thought I’d like it so he requested it from the library. I read it in an evening, and handed it to him saying “More.” It’s an apocalyptic graphic novel series, and the gist is that every person and animal with a Y chromosome dies all at once—except for one man and one male monkey. The first book has to Do The Apocalypse Part, so there are a few upsetting pages where the women are watching all the men die. And then, of course, there is a new world order, and you know what new world orders are founded on? PEACE AND LOVE. Ha ha! No. New world orders are founded on people grabbing for power with both fists, using violence and cultish control practices when necessary.

So…it’s not like I can tell you this is not an upsetting book—but if you LIKE apocalypse stuff, as I do, I think you’ll like it. I was worried the visual element would be too much (I like apocalyptic BOOKS but not apocalyptic MOVIES), but I was able to handle it with only a few winces or upset feelings—and those are sort of guaranteed with, like, a mass death situation.

Picture This by Lynda Barry
(photo from Amazon.com)

I buy every new book by Lynda Barry without even looking to see what it’s about. It doesn’t MATTER what it’s about; I know I will like it. The back of this one says something about Lynda Barry having created a new genre, the graphic-novel how-to, and that’s what this is. It’s part demonstration, part instruction, part freestyle thoughts on art and the experience of making art and the experiences that go into art. Every page is crammed to the edges with pictures and words and watercolor. I don’t even DO art and I was interested. But of course, part of this is that I am very keen on Lynda Barry’s whole THING, her whole drawing/writing STYLE. So if you AREN’T…well, then, I think you won’t like this book! But if you DO, well then you WILL.

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Well! Aren’t those good reviews? “If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you would like! Contrariwise, if you DON’T like this sort of thing, then this is NOT the sort of thing you’d like!”