There's an interesting piece in World Literature Today, How Are Children Affected by the Books in Their Lives? The author doesn't answer the question, of course, but it's a good point that there are plenty of studies on how TV, movies, ads and video games affect kids. But none on books. I've got plenty of ideas about how they affected me, of course. What about you?

Also interesting, and disturbing to boot, is this story in the New York Times, about the simulated prison experiment in Stanford in the 1970s and its possible implications on the Abu Ghraib abuse. If I were trying to put a spin on the situation, I'd love this quote --- At Stanford and in Iraq, (Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo) added: "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."

After listening to quite a bit of the hearings on NPR, I'm not at all saying I buy that idea. But the NYT headline about the line between "normal" and "monster" being thin is very true.

Spotted in Norman today: A sticker with Dale Earnhart's No. 3 bearing a halo and wings. "God needed a driver." I needed to puke.

In my mailbox this week:

"Dear Lori,

Our records show that you haven't yet registered for the benefits of AARP membership, even though you are fully eligible."

I know I'll be 30 this fall, ya'll. And that AARP's minimum age is falling. But I'm not that old, even though I feel it some days.

permalink Posted by Lori @ 3:52 PM

My brain is like a bomb wrapped in cotton this morning. If you touch my forehead, you can almost feel the pulsing monster inside. Be careful not to press too hard, though.

All that stuff I said about not remembering life with an infant? Emma decided last night was a good time to drive home how hard it was. Adam and I had just been talking about the comparative ease of a preschooler ... and then Em wouldn't go to sleep.

We put her down at her regular time, and all was well. We started our TiVo'd Friends. Soon, she needed a new song or CD. A drink of water. A different silkie. A buried stuffed animal. By the time we were on a potty trip, she'd called us back six times. There were at least another six before she drifted off.

So Adam and I are up late, watching Friends in spurts and then the very painful ER. I couldn't go to sleep on the image of Carter and Kim kissing their stillborn baby, so we flip to the Friends retrospective and end up watching the entire thing. By the time we wash up, it's nearly midnight. And then it's the first time we've had to chat about our days, so there's another half hour.

At 1, just as my mind is slowing down enough to consider sleep, Emma was calling again. And this wasn't one of those "Emma was up four times" nights. It was an "Emma was up every four minutes" night. We switched off with who would see what she needed this time, and about the time one of us was settling back into a pillow, the other was headed out the bedroom door.

I kept counting the hours of sleep I could get if it ended right then. I think I ended up with around four.

Not surprisingly, I wasn't the only one who had problems waking up today. We spent half the morning with Emma in hysterics -- Adam cuddled with her and rocked after the usual 5-10 minutes we spent laying with her, trying to coax her into waking. And then I had to hold her for another 10 while she sobbed. I'm sure it was just that she was exhausted, as she was fine once we got her calmed down and dressed.

My world is in a haze, though. I need to find someway to diffuse my brain before it explodes.

Eight years ago yesterday (May 5, 1996, to be precise), Adam and I got married.

It was a pretty unremarkable day, as weddings go. (Except for that whole I'm getting married thing, of course.) Our guest list was long but our budget was short, so the whole thing was very low-key. We had it at the Hillel -- a Jewish student organization with a small sanctuary -- on campus, which thankfully has been redone since then. It wasn't very pretty, and my poor decorating sense didn't help it much. A borrowed wedding-classics CD, on a borrowed CD player, provided our music. Our reception was cake from a local grocery bakery and ice-cream punch mixed up by friends.

The two things I remember most about the day (except for that whole I'm getting married thing, again) were that Bryan, Adam's brother and my dear friend, couldn't come and that the rabbi quite obviously thought I was pregnant. To this day, one of our biggest regrets is that Bryan wasn't there. And the rabbi's assumption was based on the same reason Bryan was in Flagstaff, about to take finals: We moved the wedding date up by six months. It's a long story, but we thought it made sense. We'd do it differently if we could. But the wedding video is hilarious, as the rabbi goes on about "sacred" and "scared" having the same letters and how another scary day is when your first child is born, blah, blah. Adam and I look a little baffled.

But if the day itself wasn't remarkable, the year before it and the eight years since have been astounding. I've been trying to figure out which story I can tell that best illustrates the amazing man I married and the amazing life we have. And there's no one that does it alone. I don't write about him often here, but you should know that he's there, in every post -- my closest friend, my most fervent supporter, my lover, handyman, chef, driver, lawnboy, board-game opponent, fellow media enthusiast, cuddler, day-brightener and hand-holder. And, perhaps more important than any of those, Emma's father. Every day, his love for and skill with her thrill me.

But as you've got an idea of what my life's like now, I'll tell you what it was then.

I met Adam in The Oklahoma Daily newsroom in early June, 1995, two weeks before we kissed, three weeks before I left the guy I was living with (gasp!), one month before we said "love," two months before we were envisioning a daughter together, six months before we were engaged, 11 months before were married.

I was managing editor of The Daily, and Adam came walking in, asking for the editor. She wasn't in yet, and I told him so. He said he'd wait. And apparently he wasn't a great reporter yet, because he didn't introduce himself or ask any questions. Customer service evidently wasn't my forte, because I must not have even said, "Can I help you with something?"

He sat in a corner for a while, until the editor finally called and said she had a flat and could I come get her. I went over and asked this guy if he'd like to come back later, as the editor would be a while. He introduced himself as a new reporter. I introduced myself as his boss.

(Yes, I was his boss and hadn't met him. Someone else had hired the reporters and then positions shifted, so I moved into the ME job. He couldn't start until the summer paper was already under way.)

I told a friend that night about the cute new guy at work, who had an adorable mole right under his eye. I still love that mole.

Summer on campus, and particularly at The Daily, is languid. We spent hours getting to know each other, first bonding over tattoos and piercings. No, really. I was in a silly relationship I knew I needed to get out of, but (if anything ever reflected badly on me here, it's this) I had to wait until my financial aid came in in the fall. But a couple of weeks later, I realized I couldn't stay with him anymore. I had to be with Adam. I moved into a friend of a friend's spare room and stored all my stuff.

Even then, though, we thought it was just a fling. I wouldn't shock you with the places and ways and frequency, but there was a whole lot of flinging going on. And we were spending almost 24 hours together, every day. We were short-staffed that summer, with everyone pitching in. Adam and I were often in the newsroom from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m., eating every meal and spending every night together. Relationships progress fast like that.

We started bandying the word "love" about. I got my own apartment that fall, and though he kept his dorm room, Adam stayed with me all but three or four nights between then and our wedding day. Heck, he even came back to the apartment the night before the wedding, because we just couldn't stand to be apart that long.

We still had a semester left before graduation. We spent a "honeymoon" (and boy, do I use that term loosely) summer in Seattle, me working for The Times, Adam working for a PR firm. (Note that industry switch for both of us.) We came back for one more fall at OU and moved off to Albuquerque to start a new life.

One that led us right back here 13 months later. One that every day, I'm thankful to have. I still look around and realize, as a kid, I never really believed life could be like this. Hell, I never even imagined it.

Thanks, Adam, for giving it to me. Living it with me.

(With thanks to Rob for introducing me to such a disgustingly descriptive term.)

I've spent the entire day catering to Emma's every whim. I didn't just decide I was so tired of saying no that I'd say yes all the time; it's just that she's got a nasty, nasty cold. She deserves to be pampered a little. (And I might feel incredibly guilty about sending her to daycare yesterday, when I thought I shouldn't but really needed to get into work ... and then I came home to a fever of 102. Which no one had noticed yet. Granted, she'd been home with Adam for four hours at that point, so it's not her daycare provider's fault. And Adam was running a fever of his own, so not surprising he couldn't feel the heat radiating through her clothes.)

So, needless to say, it's been a long day. This bout started with a runny nose early Saturday, which quickly escalated from clear and thin to green and goopy. Every turn we made in our regular grocery store trip reduced her to tears, a sure sign she's sick. We holed up most of the weekend, and, as I said, I went in to the office yesterday. I knew all day I'd be home today, though, and made arrangements for that, at least.

But I'm pooped. How is it she can be so sick -- fever spiking every few hours, panting and drooling because she can't breathe with her mouth closed, so congested she sounds like a foghorn -- and still be so active? I shouldn't bitch that she's only been sick enough once to really just lay around and do nothing, but truly, I would've given in to a lot more TV today if she'd only been in the mood to lounge on the couch. Instead, we had endless picnics, fed, rocked, diapered, dressed and held her baby doll for most of the day, played with Play-Doh, performed multiple rounds of "gymnastics" and "ballet" dancing, drew with markers, went to Polly's house, read books, marched in a Wild Rumpus, played a Dora the Explorer game and still watched much more TV than usual: Peep, the Magic School Bus and the last 20 minutes of Nemo. I napped when she napped, and I still feel like I've been run over by a snot train.

But I did say no very, very little. Whatever she asked to do, we did -- with only a couple of cursory email and voice mail checks and none of the usual things that usually interrupt my time with her (no vacuuming or phone calls, laundry or a single minute of bathroom time alone). The only real coercion I used was to get her to drink a smoothie this morning, as she's eating very little.

I've got another full day of this tomorrow. Going back to work on Thursday will be a break! (Please, let her be well enough ...)

Even though I don't really agree with John Rosenthal's column in the New York Times, in which he says we should be more tolerant of punctuation ignorance, I'm thrilled to see the issue discussed on the NYT's op-ed page.

Rosenthal is of course writing about Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a book that is quite near my heart. And I do agree that the point of punctuation is "to remind us to write (and think) clearly." But isn't all arcane rules -- the rules were set for a reason. And punctuation does, and will, continue to evolve. Let's not just throw it out the window because no one knows the difference between its and it's. Let's teach them the difference, instead.