Gratuitous self-promotion.

I'm in the May issue of Glamour magazine. No, not my picture. That would require far too much re-touching.

Writer Mikki Halpin interviewed me for "15 Brand-New Thing to Know about Sex!", an article in the May 2007 issue of Glamour magazine. There I am on page 296, tip #9 ("Men Fake It Too!"), commenting on how 52 percent of the men I surveyed for our book admit to faking orgasms.

The reason? They thought the woman they were with expected it. Really. I'll comment more in another posting someday, to give this amazing fact the attention it so richly deserves, but let me just say that this statistic surprised me, too. I mean, think about the logistics...

Gifts to open in front of your mother-in-law.

Some friends dropped by to celebrate my husband's birthday tonight over pizza, beer and cake. Don't worry. They were actually invited, if an Evite counts as an actual invitation. We live in the 'burbs, so no one just "drops by." There were toddlers running around and everything.

There were also bloggers running around. (Because we bloggers travel in packs, like wolves.) One of said bloggers--who writes the very funny Letters from Estonia and Planet Timbotron--gave my hubby this as a gift:


That's right. Hot pink "color for the hair down there." Who comes up with these things? Several of our friends couldn't even meet our eyes. For party guests, thinking about--or commenting on--your host or hostess' pubic hair color is a big Miss Manners no-no, I'd guess.

And yes, my mother-in-law was there, but she just laughed. She's pretty darn cool.

Mini-review: Children of Men.

Just finished watching "Children of Men." Out of 5 stars, I give this movie 6.

I'm kicking myself--or would be, if I were actually working out--for not seeing it in a theater. But in my defense, I have a good excuse. I'm not particularly anxious to see movies about infertility, because, well, I'm living that particular hell.

Now that I've seen the movie, I have one word for myself: Wimp. The movie's not about one infertile person. It's not even really about infertility. (Thank God, because that would involve charts and ovulation predictor kits and drugs and shots and scheduled sex and a host of other really unerotic things.) In "Children of Men," the whole human race is infertile, and has been for almost two decades. This is not good news for Gymboree or Baby Gap.

I can't even remember which film won Best Picture in this year's Oscars, but I can't stop thinking about "Children of Men." An incredible piece of film making, cinematography, acting, everything.

Oh, and it stars mega-biscuit Clive Owen, which in itself is enough to catapult it to the top of my list.

Dr. Ruth, markswoman.

This is sort of related to what I do in my copious spare time.

So I'm driving to work. I'm flipping through the channels and I happen to hear an interview on NPR with Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Me being a sex writer and all, I listen.

She says that after WWII (and after escaping the Holocaust, which is amazing in itself), she went to Israel and served in the military. Then she says that despite her size (4'7"), she was an "excellent sniper."

Dr. Ruth was an excellent SNIPER? How do you go from sniper to...sex educator? I'm trying to picture her with a rifle, getting a bead on Osama bin Laden, and I just can't do it. The mind reels. Seriously.

I think I'd like to have dinner with Dr. Ruth. I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask her.

Why my mind reels this week.

My son Cami is only 19 months old, so it awhile before he heads off to college. But whether I’m dropping him off at daycare or helping him someday unload boxes into his freshman dorm (if he’ll let me) the only way I can wave goodbye to him without completely losing my shit is by trusting that school will be a place of learning for him. Of safety. Not of violence.

Last Monday was every parents’ worst nightmare. It was certainly mine. In the days that followed, I found myself drawn to articles about the shooting, but I couldn’t finish them. I especially couldn’t read the personal details of the victims. Because every time I did, my next thought was “What if that were…” and then I was in one of those classrooms and seeing the face of my son. And I couldn’t read any further.

My husband and I “pulled the goalkeeper”—that is, I went off birth control—in March 2003, when I turned 40. This was before we were even married, before he had even proposed. We turned to fertility treatments in January 2004. They worked, sort of: I got pregnant. And then I miscarried at 8 weeks, after seeing the heartbeat of the fetus we had taken to calling “Peanut.” One month later, I found out I was pregnant again, and then miscarried a few days later. We went through nine more months of infertility treatments before conceiving Cami on New Year’s Day of 2005.

It’s not clear that we’ll have any more children. We’ve been trying to conceive a brother or sister for Cami since he was six months old. On April 5, we learned that our second round of IVF had failed: none of four embryos had kept developing. I know how I felt about those little groupings of cells. I know how I feel about my son. I can’t imagine how the parents of the Virginia Tech victims feel. I can’t imagine how the parents of Cho Seung-Hui feel. I can’t go there. I can’t afford to go there.

I don’t want to be a “helicopter mom,” hovering over Cami for the rest of his life. Intellectually, I know that I can’t protect him from totally random events. (In the area where we live, some people consider getting into the right preschool an act of God.) But if I could drive him to school in an armored vehicle and stand behind him with an Uzi, I would.

The first week I dropped Cami off at daycare, I could hear him crying as I walked to the car. I felt like the world's worst mother. My husband, who was on a business trip at the time, didn't get why I was calling him in tears. Then he came back, and he got drop-off duty. He got it. But things got better. Now when we drop him off, my son waves and points to the door, dismissing us.

Daniel Craig is hot, hot, hot.

We finished watching "Casino Royale" tonight. Frankly, Daniel Craig could read the phone book and I'd still need a drool bucket.

But don't worry, George Clooney. My heart still belongs to you.