I’m not a doctor, but I play one whenever I’m on webmd, a friend is not well or a neighbor’s kid has a bad case of diaper rash. I was recently sent this press release and I don’t think I’ve been more excited about a book launch since Judy Blume released Then Again Maybe I Won’t (the boy’s version of Are You There God? Its Me Margaret). My new bedside table companion is: the Hypocondriac’s Handbook, Symptoms and Illnesses That Should Have Killed You By Now, by Ian Landau.

I imagine this book will thrill and reassure me just the same way Then Again did. It will reveal all the dirty details of disease, I’ll tell myself I should stop but I won’t be able to to because illness, after real estate, is a fetish of mine. Soon after, it will become my life story as I quickly am struck down and (miraculously) recover from the most troubling ailments. Don’t worry about me though, I’ll make it through.  Its David my darling husband who will have suffer through my symptom obsession, he’s who you should be concerned about.

With detailed descriptions of each disease and its history, tips for self-diagnosis, and suggested

treatments, Ian Landau has given you everything you need to know to diagnosis yourself. So, don’t wait for next week’s episode of House, get a copy of The Hypochondriac’s Handbook and diagnosis yourself and your friends today! Discover which of these diseases you should have already died from by now.

About the Author

Ian Landau is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his family. He is not a doctor, but his two children don’t know that.

Hypochondriac’s Handbook

Syndromes, Diseases, and Ailments that Probably Should Have Killed You by Now

By Ian Landau

Skyhorse Publishing Hardcover Original

On Sale: July 13, 2010

hi all,

I’ve never done this before but I need help. I am working on a story about how changes in your life affect your sex life and I am looking for women who have experienced the following: illness, such as MS, and had it affect their sex life for better or worse. I’m also looking for a woman who has experienced job loss, either they have lost a job or their partner and it has caused a shift in their romantic life.

I’m working hard till June 21 so hopefully I’ll be able to blog a bit during then but deadlines always trump posts.

Thank you in advance!

Francesca

For days now Dashiell has been going on and on about a makeup gym class he is going to take with Mr. James, a super sporty guy in town who is one-part coach and one-part clown and teaches special gym classes at the Pre-K. The classes were scheduled in the winter, but with all the snow days, they missed a few and are now trying squeeze them into the last month of school.

Yesterday it rained again and his teacher told him that Mr. James makeup class would have to be postponed for one more day. Dashiell walked up to her and asked, “Mrs. Showell, when we do the makeup class are we putting the makeup on lips or our cheeks?”

She said it was very hard to keep a straight face and try to explain that it wasn’t a makeup class it was a make up class.

Even funnier, later that day the boys were up in my office playing on the computer and when I came up this morning I found the father from my dollhouse wearing the mother’s gold beaded necklace. Now, Conrad is a lego.com hog and I’m sure Mr. Dashiell had to occupy himself while waiting for his brother to let him have a turn and apparently he did.

Maybe your kids are like mine and complain that when you tell them not to kick a soccer ball into your tree peony, they whine “Sometimes it’s like you care more about the flowers than us.” Frankly, sometimes I do. I can even tell you exactly when I cared more about my flowers than my children. It was last Thursday.

It was evening, the boys were playing outside and I had just coerced Conrad to put the soccer ball down and do his homework before we kicked it around so we could have more time to play. Dashiell was wrapped up in an imaginary game of Star Wars and slaying an imaginary Rancor with his real light saber (actually its a pool noodle with duct tape). While helping Conrad use a number grid to count by tens, I could hear Dashiell’s “Hasiwaki Yas” the international ninja/Jedi/badass language for “take this and that” but I didn’t pay attention because I was amazed to find that I actually understood Conrad’s math homework and that much to my surprise, he did too. We finished the math problems and I told him to put the assignment into his backpack, Conrad turned towards the house stopped short and screamed.

I looked over in his direction and I could see the head of one of my prize allium on the driveway. Immediately, I knew what had gone down, but I didn’t want to know, I couldn’t believe it was true. “Conrad, you need to tell me how bad it is before I see for myself.”

“It’s pretty bad mom. Pretty bad,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, but I certainly was when I met a woman at bootcamp on Friday who told me she works at a dialysis clinic in East Orange where most of the patients are elderly and have  bed bugs crawling on their wheelchairs. She said sometimes its so bad she is afraid to  push them up to the machines. She now undresses outside and inspects all her clothes before she brings her uniforms into her house.

Then on Saturday, driving back from long Island, David and I were stuck in a traffic and we saw an exterminator truck on Northern Boulevard in Locust Valley advertising: Bed Bug Specialists.

As nightmares go, the NYC bedbug epidemic is top on my list and now that New York Magazine has run this excellent article on the Upper East Side’s secret service exterminators, I love New Jersey suburbs more than ever before. Granted, I’m not so naive to think that we will remain bedbug free, they will come here with all the other migrating families. But for now I am glad to feel safe and unbitten in Montclair.

I have a friend who is so obsessed and fearful of her home in Dobbs Ferry being infested she has laid down some very strict rules that after reading the article now sound like common sense:

She won’t allow anyone who lives in NYC, SF or LA to spend the night at her home. These cities all have bedbug epidemics.

She won’t stay in a hotel in any of these cities.

She won’t ride the subway.

She won’t shop at estate sales, ever. Bedbugs can live in wood. They can burrow into your phone and you have to painstakingly steam clean, chuck or burn everything in order to get rid of them.

“Everything had to go. Margaret recalls a “special company wearing what looked like hazmat suits.” The men removed everything that couldn’t be dry-cleaned—rugs, books, luggage, paintings, shoes, toys, computers, even radios. Only simple, hard-surfaced items, like china and silverware (which even bedbugs can’t burrow into), remained in the apartment.”

Other things you should know but people don’t tell you or talk about:

Bed bugs have an odor (how freaked out are you now!)

Pest Away, a firm mentioned in the peice, receives between 50 and 75 calls about bedbugs from the Upper East Side every week—and that’s just one firm.

Bedbugs tend to bite in threes—either in a line or in a triangle. In the article is says, “In exterminator jargon, this pattern is known as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” They have been known to leave triangular shaped bites on victim’s foreheads.

And now for some service: The number one way to turn a problem into an infestation:

If you have them in your mattress get rid of your mattress. Don’t move to the couch. If you move to the couch, they will move to your couch and infest your whole apartment. According to my friend, “they just want to stay with the food source.”

The other day my neighbor told me that she was at the library with her two kids where she was struggling to read to her lovely and patient 3 year old son while trying to control and contain her 15 month old daughter. The librarian looked up from her desk, looked at the baby and said, “You know what she is? She’s a hot mess. You can see it in her eyes.”

And you know what? She is a hot mess—an expression I can’t get enough of. She is this petite, porcelain little thing with dazzling blue eyes and a sly smile that says,  maybe I did and maybe I did!

I would never be described as a hot mess. Now that I think about it,  I’m pretty sure I was a ‘lukewarm sloppy’ at a party I went to Saturday night and then I probably became a ‘drunk mess,’ but I was not a hot mess. I talk way to much to be a hot mess.

But apparently after looking at The Cut’s round up of red carpet looks from The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala last night there are all sorts of ways you can miss the hot mess target. What’s most surprising to me is that all these women have great taste at their disposal and they still can’t hit it, but I guess that’s what makes it all the more delicious.

The eyeshadow just makes her look crazy

The zipper on this jumpsuit has hot mess potential but she is wearing it with as much sex appeal as she would wear a velor sweatsuit.

I'm sure she is a hot mess but there's something about the lighting in this picture that makes her look like more like a scary mess.

Chewie got a hair cut, well actually he was shaved like a lamb and he is so cold that I had to buy him this beatnick inspired tee. David has been calling him The Skipper and making lots of references to Burgess Meredith. He really just looks like a small pig with a dogs head. Naturally, since I’m his mother, I think he’s still beautiful, but even the groomer had to tell me to stop laughing at him.

My dad was discharged from the hospital on Friday and my parents insisted they could manage by themselves, in fact my dad sounded so chipper on the phone that morning I couldn’t argue.

I had the whole day to myself because dad conveniently had has his heart attack during spring break. David took the kids to visit his family in Rockport and I spent time with my parents at the hospital. Now they didn’t need me and David and the boys would not be home until Saturday afternoon. I had nearly two days all to myself.

I should have been excited, but to be honest I was a little panicked. I hadn’t been alone for a weekend since…I didn’t know. It must have been before Dashiell was born and traveled to LA for a story but even then I was with friends from work, or maybe it was when I went on that press trip to St. Barths, but then I was with a pack of other reporters. Either way it was at least five years since I had been alone—completely alone for nearly two days. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though spring break is on the calendar for months ahead of time when the actual week comes it always feels like it sneaks up on us and we are surfing the web to find activities and friends who will be around while we are around to make the week off feel special. Our plan was going well…

Monday David and I took the boys to the Intrepid. We parked the car in Weehawken and rode the ferry over. It was fun even though the guard at the submarine told Dashiell he couldn’t go down below because he was too short, which resulted in a lot, and I mean a lot of tears and was very mean to do a little boy. David reported him to a manager and the Intrepid staff did was tell us that particular guard was a temp. Hopefully the incident will tarnish Dashiell’s infatuation with the military.

That evening David and I went to see the Flaming Lips at the Welmont. I was feeling very much 40-years-old before the concert, wondering how long the warm up band would play and how late we’d get home. I didn’t want to have a drink because I was afraid I’d fall asleep. David suggested we ride our bikes to the show and it turned the whole night around. We parked our bikes in front of the theater feeling very Earth Day friendly, saved on parking and looked rosy cheeked and awake. We overheard a guy scalping tickets say to the owner of a bodega on Bloomfield Ave, “Sold out show tonight, but its a real nerdy weird crowd.” We couldn’t disagree; I was wearing a bike helmet and a girl walked by us wearing a pink tutu. The show was an amazing strobe light, beach ball and streamers spectacle with negative-like images of a naked woman dancing on a video screen with a tattoo or jeweled necklace with the word “BROKEN” scrawled across her chest. There’s something about standing next to your husband of twelve years singing Vaseline that can rehab a marriage that feels distracted and just plain pooped out. But what really got me was when Wayne said, “You know I see a lot of people thinking about how their lives should be and they think and think but all your life is who you kiss and touch and what you taste and what you do.” By the finale of Do You Realize, I was crying. I felt like maybe I’m the only one crying because I’m old, until I saw a younger woman in front of me wiping away tears too. We rode our bikes home and did a few extra loops around the block because we had an extra 15 minutes. It was a breezy night and flower petals were swirling in the street.

Tuesday: My mom called just as we were about to take boys to Applegates for ice cream after dinner. My dad had heart attack and was in the ER at Lenox Hill Hospital. Read the rest of this entry »