there was a three-week span late last year when i thought i was about to die. like i was seriously fearful. suddenly i was in these kind of fugue states. some mornings they were so bad, when walking anthony to school i had these bouts of vertigo and started actually veering like i was about to fall. and through this, admittedly terrifying time, i did what most men do when confronted with scary hea...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. left field

excerpt from Brain Rules by John Medina

alex recently told me where hiccups came from. he said, "your diaphragm falls asleep and then the snoring makes the hiccups come out."

the really sad thing is that is a better-sounding answer than i could have come up with in a pinch.

walking down the hall, i passed marty getting anthony dressed in one of the bedrooms. she was crouched down helping him with his pants.

what anthony said:
there are two kinds of balls. there are balls in your body and there are balls outside of your body that you can play with.

what marty said to anthony in response:
the balls that are in your body have a long science name called testicles.

what marty said under her breath:
and, depending on the day and your mood, you might find there's a touch of overlap here.

CLICK HERE
for a visual representation better defining
anthony's playful balls theory

the scientific world has long said that the female sex drive resurges after forty and that it is age and hormone related.

marty says the return of the sex drive has less to do with age and hormones and more to do with the fact those women are no longer messin' with small children.

smart money is on the person wranglin' three of them.

after bella asked me about girls and bras a few weeks back and i had to confess ignorance, i emailed a girl i knew in my elementary school days who has a son around the same age as bella. it read: reliable as always, carrie responded, and in great detail, with the following: then days ago marty was telling me about a friend of ours whose daughter just got a breast bud and how that phase of maturity would be starting for us soon. i first asked marty to describe what a breast bud was. she did. i next asked marty if she meant to say that the girl got just one, and if she still had one budless side. marty said that yes, that is what she said and that is how it tends to happen. marty went on to tell the story of when her first breast bud popped, she was sure it was cancer and remembered specifically thinking about how sad her mom was going to be that one of her daughters was dying.

the blank, lifeless stare i gave marty during my breast bud tutorial was not due to a lack of understanding. it was due to an exaggerated sense of understanding and an immense gratitude that when it all began for me one of the two face-down cards i was dealt had a giant Y on its face.

bella recently confided in marty that she was glad that i, her father, had never taken the medicine that would have given me breasts.

when marty told me this i wanted to ask her what she felt would compel our eight year old daughter to make such a declaration. this is what i wanted to ask but instead found myself so dumbfounded i could do nothing but look at marty with my mouth slightly agape. and this would be the sixth time in my life i'd been struck dumb.

marty just stepped out of the shower. i was there and ready to go in next. alex just had his morning pee. marty bent over to dry her legs. alex was standing behind her. i saw his eyes lock onto her backside. they widened. marty stood up, snapped her hair back over her head and walked out of the room. alex called to her, "mom! mom! come back here. you have floss stuck on your butt." when he saw her continue walking he bolted after her.

from around the corner i faintly heard marty tell alex that what he saw wasn't floss. the boy wasn't having it.

the conversation developing in the next room made me think of the scene from planes, trains and automobiles where steve martin and john candy shared a bed together. in the morning the two characters awoke snuggled into one another and martin's character asked candy's character where his hand was. candy replied that it was between two pillows and martin told him, shriekingly, that those weren't pillows.

this felt like that. only with the potential of being way more disgusting. given this, i stepped into my shower before marty's explanation got too scientific (ex-biology teacher and all). i was afraid if i waited too long, her anatomically accurate account would scar me more than it would alex who sports the significant benefit of not knowing what all the words mean. that and i didn't want to wreck my perky morning grin brought on by the cruel imagining of marty in the next room trying to sidestep an early morning menstruation lesson to her six year old son while wearing only a bra and an alleged piece of floss stuck to her naked rear. in the world of motherhood, that's called a day-breaker before you're even down the stairs.

it's good to be back. i've missed talking at you.

on October 8th, awareness of scrotal lift technology hit the mainstream. being google's number two hit for the term my logs spiked in response to peoples' sudden curiosity. unfortunately my dissertation on the topic does not seem to be hitting the mark with these information seekers because such visitors only stay for an average of 15 seconds, which is not nearly long enough to take in my enlightened commentary on the subject.

based on other google offerings, my guess would be they're actually after the site discussing the related Scrotal Drape and Support product page. i made them one click stronger at least.

"A sphincter is a circular muscle which normally maintains constriction of a natural body passage or orifice and which relaxes as required by normal physiological functioning." - wikipedia

a body has many sphincters but at the end of the day you only care if one of them is working as advertised; the anal sphincter. this is one of those hyper-smart organs that can discern what's what with great alacrity and precision. right now, three of the five sphincters in my home are malfunctioning at the hands of some twisted and humorless virus. mine is one of them. bella's is another. and alex, well poor alex has all sorts of evil stuff going on.

as a parent of a school-age bella, the stakes of having an unpredictable digestive illness such as this are much greater, because she greatly delights in sharing everything about our home with her classmates (i mean does the child have no sense of propriety). so if my sphincter were to deceive or fail me while, say, sleeping on the couch and bella came to learn of this misfortune, she would be sure to regale her wide-eyed, floor-sitting schoolmates with the story about how everyone in her house is potty-trained except her baby brother and father. please wish me luck in holding the line.

and for those keeping score at home, i still haven't puked.

on very cold nights, our home has one less blanket than it needs. which bed comes up light is about as predictable as who will be resting in any of the various sleeping spots our house has to offer.

obviously, you'd think the adults would carry the advantage being bigger and smarter and all. but, little people move quietly and have more to fear if caught. so blankets get tugged back and forth across a bed and even drug from room to room in the night's silent hours. but that's not all that gets transported. i once saw alex pushing a miniature baby stroller down the hallway at 3am. i looked just long enough to verify my blanket wasn't in it before flopping my head back on the pillow, tightening my grip on the corner of my linen and going back to sleep.

three nights ago i drew the short straw. while sleeping in alex's bed (which is pushed up against bella's bed), i got bested by bella who wound herself up so tight in my comforter, my fatigued arm couldn't work her out of it. so i spent the night in and out of sleep, curled up and shivering. i gave up on sleep around 5am and headed towards the bath for a steamy shower. in passing my nemesis, i cast a scornful look at the blissfully warm and sleeping girl. i swear i saw a contented smile form on her rosy face as i stumbled by tightly hugging my naked chest. while i stood waiting for the shower's water to get hot, i noticed something about my body; it felt lean and my skin was super-taut. it was almost as though my body's futile attempt to generate warmth caused me to loose three pounds in the night. then my mind recalled a suggestion from a health magazine where it said drinking ice cold water, instead of tepid, burns forty extra calories per glass because your body has to heat the liquid once in the stomach.

it seemed to make sense. at least to my un-rested and slightly bella-jealous mind. instead of gyms having saunas they should have seat-lined deep-freezes where old rich guys could go in with their buddies and sit around naked debating last weekend's games while chattering and rubbing the tops of their thighs for warmth. granted if these did exist, i wouldn't actually get a membership, because between having a wife who doesn't like to turn the heat up past 60 degrees and a daughter who outfoxes me with frustrating regularity, i'm already paying a mortgage on my very own seat-lined, bed-scattered deep freeze.

and as clarifying note, marty is the exception to this rule. she (a) always sleeps in the same spot and (b) never goes without covers. everyone living here knows not to lie on mom's clean patch of sheets and to never slide a blanket off her sleeping frame. even bella won't tangle with that sleeping lioness. and that's saying something.

i once read that mcdonalds restaurants were designed to make a person want to leave after twenty minutes. something about the molded chairs, brilliant colors, plastic art and the like. i never gave this theory much credit until i saw a target store's effect on my wife. within seven minutes of entering a target marty will need to defecate. and i'm not talking about a subtle sensation that needs answered in the next half hour or so. i'm talking about an urge so swift she grabs waify high school employees by the arm and commands them to direct her to the nearest restroom. i think their new store designs, which place the bathrooms up front by the checkouts, are in direct response to marty and others like her.

i on occasion get the feeling that having a website may have run its course, then i get to post some cherry life detail (about someone who is not me), like how target's color scheme makes my wife's sphincter go limp and i wonder what i'd do without such a viable and diverse platform.

about ten years ago i worked with a guy who had a urinary-tract infection. for the sake of this telling, let's call him matthew. we were collaborating on a project during his ordeal and in addition to witnessing a lot of fidgeting and quiet curses, i received many vivid descriptions of his ailment.

during one of his many doctor visits he complained that the prescribed medicine wasn't work...

a new TROYSCRIPT was posted today. dinner-table biology