i-YELL-it!

Over the course of my own personal recent media blackout (see "screech---halt," below) I missed the fact that Mrs. Michael Chabon appears to have managed to get herself into a mess of pretty much well-deserved trouble.

Schadenfreude! Schadenfreude!

I'm now thanking g-d I didn't name my daughter Ayelet, which placed high on my list of potential names but fortunately tanked on my husband's. A friend also thought highly of Ayelet, but it was eventually demoted to middle name by the "much less likely to be mocked on the playground" (¿?) 'Zilla.' (Love ya Noa and Zilla, should you ever read this.)

I must admit that I was a sort of devotee of her blog, which I discovered while trying to pull up a webpage that contained a scan of the above-mentioned child's very cool birth announcement. I think my initial interest was rooted in the fact that she lives right across the bay, and that she has four kids--who, I learned from her blog, attend the school right next to my former residence in Oakland. How I would love four kids! How wrong it is that I know exactly where a public figure's children attend school! Over the months I watched with some surprise as she divulged very personal information about herself and her family, and revealed herself to be exceedingly neurotic and proudly bi-polar. Plus she posted pictures of her kids, who look nothing like her or Chabon. Why, why would I be interested in looking at pictures of a well respected (talkin' Chabon here, not Waldman) author's kids? It was like a sleazy tabloid tailored to my specific interests.

Speaking of, I knew that she'd dropped her blog in order to take up a writing assignment for salon.com. My subscription to salon had run out and I briefly considered renewing it, but, having grown weary of the parenting forum "for mothers who think" (and what the hell does that imply?) I decided that my fascination with the Chabon-Waldman household didn't merit the monthly stipend required to for rights to peruse a site "for tabloid-readers who think." (Actually, the original subscription wasn't even mine. It was linked to my computer but actually belonged to my ex-roommate Mike who had let it run out after spontaneously marrying a girl he met in a Portland coffee shop, thus curbing his habit of trolling the salon.com "personal ads for people who think.")

Poor Ayelet. The woman is so obviously troubled, and it's playing out in front of an audience of newspaper readers who think. 'course she soooo asked for it. Crazy woman.