Greetings, readers, and welcome to the newest little addition to domesticat.net, known as "Ask Domesticat." You, too, can now have the pleasure of having your questions answered* in a public forum by the one and only domesticat! Our first question comes to us from a severely snowbound reader a stone's-throw from Canada:

Where do you get your "domesticat-esque" impulses from? Or, what makes you so "domesticat-ey" (domestikitty?)

Answer:
The short version: chemical therapy. As many of you know, I spent most of my teenage years completely unable to relate to anything not placed within 0.000005 inches of my own skull. Somewhere around my seventeenth birthday, someone switched my daily drug feed from "self-absorbed teenager" to the mostly-decaffeinated "decent human being" blend.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen! You might be surprised to learn that, while you're standing there, yapping loudly into your cell phone while filling up your gas tank, the person sitting in the next car can hear what you're saying…

Before we go any further, let me tell you something, you wanna-be darlings of the fashion world: unless your name is Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants. I do not care what you look like, who did your plastic surgery, or what company your grandfather founded. Unless you are Audrey Hepburn, yes, you look terrible in capri pants. On principle.

In fact, let me amend that statement. Even if you are Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants, because you are dead and have been so for quite some time now, and this whole hopping-out-of-the-grave-and-dancing-around bit really needs to be kept to the better Buffy episodes, mmmmkay?

She reached behind me and weighed matters with a quick twist of her arm. "Are you absolutely sure about this? That's pretty drastic…" The feel of the weight coming off my shoulders was dizzying, powerful. Up until that point I had never considered it to be a burden; it was something to be tucked up and away with elastic bands or caps, or carefully restrained with a bow.

I was seventeen, and absolutely certain. "Cut it.""But it's…beautiful. You're absolutely certain you want me to do this? It will take you years to grow this back."

As she spoke, I took my glasses off and tucked them under the plastic robelike drape they make you wear (to protect your clothes from rogue hairs) while sitting in the cutting chairs. Without my glasses, I was blind—and had to trust. Trust felt sticky and warm, like the back of my neck, which was rapidly beginning to adhere to the nonporous plastic drape.

Did you ever have a family member whose antics were guaranteed to liven up any holiday gathering? Someone whose particularly-skewed ideas of fun and amusement were the subject of dinner-table conversations for years to come?

I wouldn't be posting if I didn't have one. Truthfully, I had several, but the one that comes to mind is Clint.

In my family, "mudding" is a verb. As in, "Clint's gone mudding. Who's gonna pull him out this time?"

He wasn't the first member of my family to get addicted to this particularly-rural pastime. My uncle, Keith, was the one whose antics that most of us remember most vividly. My sister, when asked to describe, said it this way: "On every holiday, Keith would take the biggest vehicle he could find and go out to the bluff and sink that sucker up to the axles in mud, and then we'd all have to go pull him out."

Clint was the same way.

As said to Heather: the last error in a script is always the most difficult to track down. Sure enough, I've spent far more thought-cycles today on the last, final error in the portal code I was writing than on any other bug I've squashed today.

Someone got brave today and asked the question that I think has been on the minds of most of my friends lately: "How are you, Amy? Not how you say you are, but how you really are."

Asking such a question to someone who has recently lost a family member is an inherently risky action. There's no way of determining in advance which person you're talking to: the friend who is bravely wandering through her days, or the friend who has decided that this whole bravery and wandering thing is for the birds (and who is looking for an excuse to cry).If you reach the former, you'll get a cautiously-optimistic answer: "I'm fine."
If you reach the latter, you'll get a cautious answer: "I'm fine."

The difference is in the tone of voice.