Dear Floyd Elliot (if that is your real name),

Regarding your post on whether you should have raised children vs. chinchilla's? Raising chinchilla's win hands down! And I'm not saying that because they wouldn't look pained to be seen with me when I dropped them off at school. My son is about to start his senior year in highschool. In the next month he is: getting his lip pierced. Possibly losing his virginity. Getting his drivers license. Spending a week with me in California. Not necessarily in that order. Do you really think a chinchilla would do this to the woman who breastfed him and gave up anxiety medications for 2 years? If I had raised chinchilla's instead of children, we'd be hosting a skinning party! [No, son, not a skinny-dipping party.] [sigh.]

• My son is getting his lip pierced this Saturday. The girl he hopes will become his girlfriend is getting her tongue pierced. Her girlfriend is getting some other part of her body pierced. I've asked not to know. Somehow, I'm ponying up the cash for this bodily desecration. Really? You'd never know I was raised a Catholic, have always paid my taxes and sport not one tatoo on my middle-aged (goddess-like) body.
• My son is possibly losing his virginity sometime soon. With a girl in his class whose last boyfriend was 20 years old. Oh good. Her father is currently deployed so he is not around to scare the living sh** out of my son if he so much as looks at her breast. I fear her mother is too busy contemplating plastic surgery and vegetarianism to be that interested in what her daughter is up to. My son's father - my ex - just bought a Filipino bride and her daughter who speak no english and thus have added 2 more bodies to the State of Hawaii's entitlement programs. So there is nobody left but me. And the odds are not that good that I'll be helpful in any way. When I'm under stress, I tend to drift off into reveries of happy places, chinchilla farms, black gold, Texas tea.
• He'll be getting his drivers license, possibly next week. He passed his Drivers Ed course. And he has lots of experience driving cars because over Christmas break last year, he stole his fathers car (who was busy in the Filipines buying his new family visiting his new family) and drove it around the island for 2 weeks. For 2 weeks, unbeknownst to moi, with whom he is living, he had become the Hugh Hefner of Honolulu: driving his underage friends around, buying them food with the $ he's making at Jack in the Box, teaching pretty girls to surf in Waikiki, while I, dear reader, continued about my life thinking tender thoughts of my 16 year old son. Do you really think a chinchilla would do this to the woman who breastfed him and gave up anxiety medications for 2 years? No dear reader, I think not.
• We're spending a week together soon, in California, visiting my family. Which consists of my 71 year old father, my stepmother and my sister who is 3 years younger than me. They are already fretting over my son's piercing. Don't they have a life?! Why don't they fret over his non-existent college fund? They are fretting in advance of his piercing just in case they don't fret enough over it once he gets it. Maybe we can all sit and worry about it together the first night and get it over with. My son and I will have quality time together during the 5 hour flight. He will text the girl-who-is-getting-her-tongue-pierced for 5 hours and I will read books from Jodi Kastens summer reading list because I apparently have neither the energy nor the imagination to create my own. [I will also spend a large portion of the trip praying that Hawaiian Airlines did not get a bomb threat that involved our flight number] Then we will share a hotel room the first night we get there, having more quality time together while he texts the GWIGHTP and I drink chardonnay until I pass out on the twin bed. The next day he will attempt to drive us all to my fathers house while I suspect all 3 of us adults will have our eyes closed and our knuckles white, envisioning a fiery death that has an oil tanker and our tiny vehicle colliding at high speed. But enough about my one week vacation this year.