Graham says that every day. Sometimes he is right. Yesterday wasn’t happy, like at all. It wasn’t a happy day. It was a cranky, worrisome, logistical pain in the butt day. It started with crying kids and wet beds and moved into brother fighting against brother until they formed a tenuous alliance long enough to try and overthrow their unwelcome oppressive occupying parental force so that I was forced to spend all of my energy beating back a violent coup. Plus I have a cold. And UPS forgot to come get my packages.

And! I’ve been trying to order reprints of the nerdy flash cards, but couldn’t get my rep to call me back. I contacted the main office and sort of expected to hear that she had been laid off or buried alive or somesuch. It happens. But no! It turns out that the entire company is gone. What? How does that happen? And how do you not let your customers know until they try to place an order? So now I’m scrambling to find another local print company with an offset press that can give me the same great quality and prices without putting themselves straight-fuck out of business.

Meanwhile, the house became a sea of toys and clothes and art supplies and packing materials and backup hard drives and feral chickens and naked children covered in filth. Somewhere in the middle of packing orders and calling UPS and my credit card company and pressing 1 if this is correct, I had a great idea! I should rearrange the living room!

I didn’t do it, there was no way. But all day long I was distracted by oooooh the couch could move three feet closer to the window! And that would open up more of a walkway over here, and then the squishy chair could go HERE but at an angle. If only I didn’t have all these pesky other obligations and this danged chest cold, this living room would look amazing right now and we’d have lots more floorspace to fill up with crap.

I am determined to make today less of a not happy day. This morning I woke up before the boys and got all of my phone calls out of the way, handed things off to UPS, went to the post office. The cold is still dragging me down, but damn it ALL. We are going to have a decent day if it kills me, like even if the day actually digs a well and throws me into the well and MURDERS me. With a well! This IS A HAPPY DAY.

Last Saturday we shoved the boys and the dog and a great many of our belongings into my tiny toaster of a car and drove to Texas. The original plan was yay! Let’s go wander in the beautiful mountains and islands of the carolinas, but then we wrote four thousand dollars worth of checks to the IRS and suddenly a wandering vacation — even a low-key one — sounded nauseatingly expensive. So! Guess what! My parents have a room we can sleep in for free and lots of food and a television we can look at and people we can talk to.

So here we are in Texas, doing most of the same things we’d be doing at home. Running errands, buying packing materials at Office Depot, making block prints, getting to the post office in the last possible seconds before they close. But it’s a change of scenery and we like hanging out with my parents.

Oh and. Yesterday something awful happened. My parents got me an iPhone.

You don’t know how awful this is. I resisted it. I hate iphones. I don’t like people who have iPhones. It’s exactly the kind of douchey technological gadget that symbolizes everything that’s wrong with our materialistic western plastic society and OH MY GOD HOW MUCH DO I LOVE THIS FUCKING PHONE?

My friend Alana called me a swear word when I told her, which is both understandable and fine. Call me anything you want. Throw actual poop at me if you want to. I will download an app that makes my phone into a giant rubberized shit shield.

We’re heading back tomorrow. My butt hurts thinking about the 14 hour drive ahead… my xB’s only real flaw (other than being hideous, obviously) is seats that are zero percent squishy. Is there an app that will let the iPhone work as an inflatable cushion?

“Hey Mama? You know what would be SO funny? Like if you lived in one of those cultures where ladies have to keep their hair covered up or they get like arrested or in big, big trouble? It would be hilarious — if there was a lady you didn’t like? Or wanted to play a trick on? To run up behind her and plop a wig on her head.”

Nicolaus was annoyed that politicians weren’t being funny or interesting anymore. Obama shifted from Mr.Heyyyy look at me vote for me I’m cool! to Mr. Alright I have work to do. We watch the president’s speeches while Nicolaus rolls his eyes and gripes: “Why are we watching this? Where are the debates? Why can’t Obama still take time out to go up on stage and argue with people who don’t like him very much? Because that was so funny. This is boring. I should have voted for McCain.”

At the tender age of five and seven-eighths, he announced that he was finished with politics.

But a few weeks ago he overheard something about bank bailouts and the resulting populist outrage. Nicolaus loves four things in life: birds, eating straight raw sugar, building stuff, and populist rage. If it were up to him, we would violently overthrow our government every few months just to keep senators on their toes. Then we’d all be given trained parrots who would sit on our shoulders and feed us giant spoonfuls of sugar while we stood at our workbenches building cool weapons for the next coup.

Armed with a six-year-old’s understanding of what the hell happened to our economy over the last year, which is only a little bit simpler than my own understanding of what the hell happened to our economy over the last year, he began to work on the best way to deal with the banks. His first idea was that everyone should pull their money out of every bank. We talked about the problems with that, and he was fascinated to learn that our bank does not actually store our exact dollar bills for us in a safe. He processed this for a few days, and by next time I went to make a deposit he had come to the conclusion that the issue is trust. We must really need to trust the banks not to just be robbers if we are going to let them use our money for stuff like that. And if we can’t trust them now or if it turns out that they are actually bad guys — well, then what are we even doing?

And, he decided, that must be why our bank has those huge Greek columns out front. That way their building will look like something old and so we’ll think oh wow, it’s been here since the Greek times, they must be really good at being a bank. Which is silly because haha, were the Greeks ever over here building banks? Haha! Get it?

Yes, I get it. A rhetorical analysis of the persuasive nature of architectural details, very funny, now please stop kicking the back of my seat and you know what a lot of kids ask when they go to the bank? They ask about LOLLY POPS. Which, no you can’t have one, because last time you acted insane and whiney and awful and I told you that next time we wouldn’t get lolly pops, but that isn’t the point.

So he was bummed that we refused to withdraw all of our money right then.

A few weeks later he was running around our living room being one of the Space Chimps. He interrupted his zipping around with a rocket pack to ask me WHY Obama keeps giving the banks more money. And WHY are the giant banks allowed to keep on making people trust them even though they took people’s money and gambled it away and then partied with government bailout money? I told him that it’s complicated and that a lot of grownups are asking the same thing. So his next idea was that we should go to our bank and hold up a big sign so everyone who comes there will see it and realize oh no! We shouldn’t trust this bank!

I told him oh! People do that. That’s called a protest.

Oooooooh he truly loved hearing about protests. It warmed his tiny heart to know that through history people have protested things and he announced with certainty that someday he would lead a BIG protest about something. Starting with: a protest against the banks! That’s what our family needs to do.

I showed him photos of the recent London bank protests while he bounced on the couch beside me, full of freaky amounts of glee over the pictures of people with noses bloodied by policemen in riot gear and people throwing things into the bank’s windows. “Yeah! Just like that! Only we won’t throw anything into the window like that because you know, the glass might hurt Lovie. She would want to protest too, and she’d be sitting on my shoulder so the glass could hurt her.”

Yesterday he saw protesters outside the post office with signs that said “HONK if you hate paying taxes!” and made me honk for them. What are they protesting? Where do you think they got the wood to make those signs? Is it legal to protest like that? Do they stand there all day? And so on.

He started to spin up into his own newest protest idea. He quickly got Graham on board and spent the evening pressuring me to join them.

“We need a grownup to come. You have to help us. It’s going to be — well, I don’t think it’s going to be totally legal.”

“Is it going to be violent?”

“No. Not violent — will you do it with us? We really need you because we can’t drive.”

“I can drive Nicoliss! I know how to drive to the bank even without any grownup helping me!”

“No Graham, that’s illegal. Even though they can’t put kids in jail we still don’t want the police to get us and bring us back home. We need to convince Mama or Daddy to do this with us. Okay?”

“Okay. But I want to also be the one who throws the poop by myself.”

“Yes. Definitely. I will hold the signs while you do that.”

“And also I’m going to tinkle.”

“Good. Mama? Are you with us?”

“Um. What…”

“We are going to SCARE the banks into giving back everyone’s money and saying they are sorry for messing up the economy. And we are going to mess up their building and their sign so nobody will want to bring their money there.”

I must have looked unconvinced. He grabbed a piece of paper out of my printer and sketched this quick plan:

Forgive the crummy scan. All of the Xs and splotches are giant blobs of poop which was thrown at the bank in an effort to reduce their credibility in the eyes of the public. What he actually said was “People will start to come there and see the fancy columns and the BANK sign all covered in poop and be like What? Can I trust this bank? No way am I giving them my money!”

The guy in the middle is Nicolaus, holding a sign in one hand that says “YOO STINC” (sic) – witty because with the addition of poop they now literally do stink – and a sword in the other to show off and try to scare the bank people.

The three things on the ground next to him are barrels of poop. Pretty obvious.

The person in the bottom right is Graham. He is peeing in a straight line up the side of the bank, and lifting one leg so as to make more poop for the project.

I have never been more proud.

So this was going to be a post about how funny it is that even though my kid wants to sound very grownuppish, his solutions are obviously unworkable and childish. The absurdity and unworkability of his protest ideas was going to be the punchline. But then Kevin showed me this in the news today:

Protesters Stage Tax Day Crap Session on the Steps of the IRS Building

A group of at least 30 protesters dropped their pants and defecated on the steps of the IRS building in Washington D.C. today in an apparent protest of the US policy to bailout large financial institutions. Onlookers who witnessed the event said that it took only about 30 seconds to complete and was carried out with military like precision.

Most participants appeared to be men and quickly disappeared on foot and into awaiting vehicles at the scene. Witnesses describe them as wearing regular clothes with no marking or slogans of any kind. Minutes after the protest firefighters arrived to remove the neat and uniformly spaced piles of feces from the steps and it quickly became business as usual at the scene with no arrests being made.

Now I can’t find any legitimate news sources who are reporting this, but still. You believed it for a second, right? Yeahhh. Watch out, establishment. You are in big trouble as soon as my kid can legally drive.

1. Did you know that when you spend money on printing and art supplies you can’t count those as business expenses?? DID YOU? For much of today I’ve felt like throwing up thanks to this wee detail in our nation’s tax code.

All of my raw materials and inventory are considered assets until the year I sell them. So where I thought that I had more than $10,000 worth of expenses, it turns out that what I really have is assets. The good news is that it sounds very grown up to say I have material assets.

2. Whatever you are doing right now is wrong because YOU are doing it. Didn’t you know that Graham wanted to go to your job today and surf the web and read blogs? Are you implying that you don’t think a three year old could do those things? He is capable, you know. He can do it by himself. I suggest that you apologize to him, quickly, before he destroys you and sounds the THIS ISN’T A HAPPY DAY alarm.

Last night I was worried that he had permanently twisted himself into the shape of a tantrum. He was so angry that he tried to block the doorway so I couldn’t come back into the house. Everyone in our building now knows that THIS ISN’T A HAPPY DAY.

When he’s really mad at me, he wants to hit me and call me Poop, Stinky, or Flat head. But he stops himself. The result is a weird slow motion, closed-fisted pat while he yells, “You — you — MAMA!”

Which is a pretty good dis.

3. It’s been two months, and Roux is still not housetrained. I bought some spRay stuff that is supposed to show dogs where to pee. The bottle looks exactly like the stuff we use to clean up his accidents. A little disconcerting.

I also bought some of those training pee pads but they have some basic design flaws. They are the perfect size and shape for a puppy to enjoy shredding. Second, it feels confusing and awkward to stand there and encourage him to pee in the house. Third, the package says they are scented like grass so the dog will want to pee on them. What? If my dog would pee on grass I wouldn’t need training pads. They should be scented like a beige chenille couch. Or hardwood floors. Or Graham’s bed.

Obviously there are worse problems than my three year old acting like a three year old, and a dog acting like a dog. It’s really the taxes thing I’m bummed about. And my own dumbness. And my hungriness, but that will be solved as soon as I gather the energy to put the boys in the car and drive to Taco Bell for a tostada and a Dr.Pepper. Gluten free! Yay! I’m stupid!