A co-worker of mine recently said he was having a "No Joy" day. I guess it has something to do with the military (which doesn't surprise me), but I thought it was an accurate summary of how I feel when I have way too much to do. That has been happening a lot lately. No Joy occurs for me when I find that I am skimming along the surface of my life, never really paying attention because I'm too worried about the next meeting, the next class, the next bath for the baby, the next party to attend or for which to buy food. I'm not the sort of person who thrives on or enjoys this lifestyle, though I'm sure this will shock those who know me. The happiest part of my life came during my maternity leave, when for the first time since I can remember, I started noticing things like dust motes in the sunlight and the smell of grass again, even though I was up to my ears in dirty diapers and deaf from screaming-child syndrome. I only really had one thing to concentrate on - my baby - and it bowled me over how happy that made me.

For some reason, I thought once we had the little angel that our social calendar would die down. I even mourned the thought a bit. I'm sure it still will in the future, once the little angel doesn't WANT to sit in a restaurant on Friday night like she does now, or once she goes to bed at 8:30 p.m. in an actual bed. Of course, at that point, she will probably start having her OWN social calendar, which I will get to manage in addition to my own. I anticipate that far from encouraging her to take flute lessons, dance lessons, soccer lessons and learn three foreign languages by the age of five, I will ask her to please PICK ONE and stick with it for at least a season before tossing it aside.

Don't get me wrong - I'm relieved to still have wonderful friends calling me to get together. I really enjoy the social part of the calendar. But trying to balance my full-time job, seeing my husband, my part-time teaching gig, my social life, exercise and the tiny sliver of what I used to have to spend with the little angel has left me feeling a bit discombobulated. I have been trying to remember if my mother and my friend's mothers seemed this frantic when I was growing up. They probably were, if not in exactly the same way, then in different ways. It certainly can't keep up, though.

So I ask you, is it possible to not feel this way? If I cut out everything in my life, would I actually feel any better? Or is this self-reflection and judgement just a necessary step in adjusting to motherhood? I do find that many people in my life who have kids fall into two camps: those that fought the change and those who sank into it like an overstuffed chair. Those who fight still get pedicures on a regular basis, clothe their children in outfits involving stiff collars made from delicate-cycle materials and purchase outdoor Pack-N-Plays. They look really good, though. Those who wallow in the change too much end up disregarding grooming altogether, dressing to match their children and talking in four-word sentences, even to adults. Where's the happy medium? Is there such a thing? Can one be a hip mom without encouraging smoking, drinking and new babies when the first one is still in middle school? Can one stop the child from working a forty-hour, extracurricular week without crushing their hopes for playing varsity basketball? Can one really shape the child's reading ability by whether or not one points out syllabic functions in "Goodnight, Moon"? Why is the world so different now? Does my baby need her own cell phone? Will the other preschoolers all have Blackberries? Will she speak in acronyms by the time she is eight?

HELP!!!!

The little angel recently learned to yodel. It started out when she realized that no matter how hard she tries, she can't actually grab her tongue. She will attempt such tongue-grabbing for hours, but she never seems to catch it. She does succeed in covering everything around her in saliva and twisting her tongue in new shapes. One afternoon, she was innocently trying to grab her tongue when she laughed at the same time. She looked so shocked and amazed - it was as though she'd been told about unicorns. She tried it again. Same yodeling sounds, so easy to change! Just squish the tongue and make different noises! And you can try to grab the tongue at the same time, with different fingers! I have fingers! Callooh! Callay!

Now this yodelling is handy for phone conversations with Grandma and lifting me out of my post-office funk, but annoying at 6 a.m.

This past weekend, my beloved, the little angel, my friends and one of my friend's mom (and actually the wife of the guy who gave us the boat) decided to take our little 12-foot AMF Puffer sailboat out for its maiden voyage. We acquired the boat at the end of last summer, but with the little angel and all we hadn't had a chance until this weekend to see if we could sail it.

My beloved and I were having a tense morning after I admitted that, though I did learn how to SAIL A BOAT when I lived in Chicago in 1997, I never actually learned how to ASSEMBLE A BOAT. Considering I had to repair the sails with duct tape minutes before the launch, you can imagine my dismay when I realized I would have to rig the boat based on a picture book and seven-year-old sailboat observance. Quite scary. But I figured it out.

We towed the boat out to Shawnee Mission Lake and set it in. I took my friend B., who seemed a) good-natured and b) strong if not c) knowledgeable about sailing. My beloved had to stay on the shore, because we had decided we shouldn't foist the little angel off on our sunbathing friends if not necessary. B. and I were just figuring out the jib and tacking back and forth merrily when I noticed that due to a good breeze and strong current, we had gotten out of my comfort range from the shore. I decided to turn the boat around, so to speak. That's when disaster struck. There were several things that went wrong:

* I'm not a very good sailor and probably took us around too fast.
* Neither is B., and he forgot to switch sides, thus stacking all of our weight on one side of a small, fiberglass boat.

And the most important reason:
* We didn't have a drain plug and the hull had already taken on about 120 pounds of water at this point.

The boat went over. B.'s facial expression was akin to my husband's when the little angel crowned: male shock and horror. We went in the drink, the full twenty-foot sailboat, mast and two sails laid out like a toy boat in the bathtub, with us bobbing helplessly in our (THANK GOD) lifejackets. B. looked at me, grinned, and said, "At least we both still have our sunglasses."

The surprising part about all of this was that nobody seemed to notice that we and our ENTIRE SAILBOAT were bobbing helplessly sideways in the water. A friendly kayaker tried to help us, actually pulled B. into his kayak to help "tow the boat," but this was pointless. Then someone got a park ranger to come along and try to tow us with his motor boat, but he was also unsuccessful going against the current. At one point, B. asked as quietly as possible if a person had to have an IQ over 50 to carry a firearm. I shushed him, thinking it might hurt our plight if the park ranger heard him.

The park ranger and the kayaker decided to tow us to the opposite, inaccessible-by-car shore. We found our bailing pitcher bobbing happily in the weeds. I suddenly became terrified of snakes. B. told me they don't come out in August. I didn't believe him. B. can be a liar in crisis situations. Finally, the kayaker, B. and I managed to get the boat enough out of the lake to partially drain it, thus confirming the lack of drain plug - WHICH I MIGHT MENTION IS CRUCIAL TO FLOATING - before we removed the mast, sail, keel and rudder and threw them on the park ranger's motor boat. We tied the sailboat to the motor boat, climbed in, and motored back to shore. Our friends estimated we were probably in the water for a little under two hours.

Here is what I learned this weekend:

* Always check for a drain plug.
* Take an extra drain plug with you after you have checked for the drain plug.
* Make sure the person with you has a decent sense of humor and good-fitting sunglasses.
* Duct-tape the oars to the inside of the boat so you don't have to try to hold them and swim at the same time (it doesn't work).
* Make sure the person on shore taking photos of your idiocy has a telephoto lens.
* Always wear a cute swimmingsuit (I didn't) so when scores of people turn up to laugh at you as the park ranger tows your sailboat in, at least you look good in stranger's photos. I'm sure my bad ones will end up on the Internet soon.

It's been a while since I've read any office etiquette information, but I'm pretty sure it's poor form to spit an entire mouthful of water out on a conference table. Which I did yesterday.

It wasn't my fault. We'd been having a post-meeting conversation about how our youngest co-worker S. is more mature than the rest of us thirtysomethings. How she knows how to make Excel do those stupid function thingies and we don't. How, in fact, since we didn't learn how to do anything besides type in high school, we have actually faked our way through between eight and 15 years of not knowing how to make a spreadsheet add two plus two or insert a fancy bar graph into a PowerPoint presentation.

Then the topics turned personal. My other co-worker S. said she feels silly because young S. is already married and has bought a house and she is just now moving in with her boyfriend, even though she's older than young S. Something about the way she said it, though - she kind of whined through her nose in a perfect imitation of me in middle school, lecturing my parents: "Well, my boooyfriiiieeeennndd." I don't know what triggered it. Maybe it was the fact that I've woken up at 5:30 the last two mornings to go torture myself at the YMCA before work. Maybe it was because it's the end of the week. Maybe it was a release of pent-up work stress. Something about her comment was SO FUCKING FUNNY that I couldn't hold myself back, despite the fact that ALL THAT WATER was in my mouth. It was as though a part of me floated up and was stuck to the ceiling of the conference room, watching my earthly body violate every social more known to officedom. Out the water came. It bounced off the conference table and started rolling toward our meeting notes. Then I experienced the fiery snuffle you get when you swallow water at the swimming pool. I thought in horror, Did I actually shoot the water out of my nose, or is this just afterburn from the laughing? To this day, I'm still not sure.

About a week ago, I was driving down near the Plaza when I noticed I was following an "extreme" car. It was an Escort or something equally NOT extreme, but it was labeled as such on the back. And then I noticed the "x" in "extreme" was bigger than the other letters and yellow, as though the inclusion of the letter "x" made the word EVEN HIPPER.

It was then that it occurred to me that almost anything can be jazzed up by adding an "x" or a "z" to the name. Car manufacturers are well aware of this, especially BMW, a manufacturer so enamored with letters its very name is an acronym.

"E" and "i" kind of got a makeover in the late nineties, with the addition of e-commerce, e-mail, i-control, etc. I mean, "e" used to be silent half the time, for God's sake. When I think of a typed "e," with an old typewriter, especially, the vision practically screams bun-headed librarian. Can there be a more uptight looking letter than a typed "e"? But oh, no, "e" is now the fat kid that went away to summer camp and came back twenty pounds thinner wearing low-riders and a tube top.

But what about the rest of the alphabet? What about the letter "m"? Nobody thinks it is particularly cool. I can't remember the last time marketers fixated on a "b." "T" got some minor fame during space exploration, what with t minus this and that all the time. It's really quite an unfair distribution of fame. The alphabet is really just a little microcosm of modern society, and most of are somewhere in the middle, after "i" but before "x." Sigh.

This past Sunday we baptized the little angel. In to town trooped my mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, his wife and two kids, sister-in-law, her husband and two kids and my parents. No one stayed at our house. Thank you, Jesus.

The little angel did fairly well in church. She thought it was funny when the pastor poured the water into the font. When he walked her around the church to introduce her to the congregation and they started clapping, she looked surprised and popped a big smile for her adoring audience. Clearly, she is destined for the movies.

As she was going through this ceremony, I was thinking of how innocent she is now, and how it can't last. How we're all destined to smoke cigarettes behind the barn or kiss the wrong person in the back seat of their parents' care in high school. We're all just one lost job or bad health situation away from public aid. How I can't protect her from the world; she'll lose that innocence one day. But on Sunday, she was everything that is pure and good about humanity, laughing at the water and transfixed by the candlelight.

Yesterday my beloved and I both had bad days at work. He works in human resources, which is a thankless place to work, in my opinion. I am in the busiest part of the season for my job, after having missed the first busy part while out on maternity leave. And, as I've already mentioned, I really wish I could spend my days with the little angel instead of the mad dogs at the gates of hell. But, I digress.

When I got home, I immediately went upstairs to the do the accounting for my little company, Piper Group, Inc., which up until about a month ago was my primary job. Unfortunately, when I went back to work, they made me work for The Man, so now I have a W-2 just like all the other schmoes and no longer get to say I'm president of my own company for doing the exact same job. I was rather cranky about having to still do the icky accounting when I don't even get my own logo on the business cards. My husband was cranky about something else. So there he is, standing there in the office complaining, when he decides to dramatically throw himself on the plastic-covered futon. Why is the futon covered in plastic? Because Sybil, the vegan 16-year-old cat, has a bit of incontinence when it comes to said futon. Let me repeat: He decides to dramatically throw himself on the plastic-covered futon. That the cat likes to pee on. You get what happened now, don't you? It took a millisecond for the truth of the situation to set in, then my husband leaped back up from the futon, calling upon the great Egyptian cat gods to banish poor Sybil to the seventh level, or at least fifty feet under the pyramid. Sybil knew to at least hide. I couldn't help myself. Tears started pouring down my face. It was the best thing I'd seen all day.

Last night I went biking with my friends S. and B. S. is still sporting her DebbieWear (from Singles), which is what she calls official biking gear, such as padded shorts or special shoes. We are training for the MS-150.

I forgot to tell her my hybrid can be a bit testy. The chain often will leap off its sprockets for no apparent reason, and always at the bottom of a large hill. Last night it was 105 degrees (with the heat index, which I always count) in fair Kansas City, and by the time we made it to the bottom of the large hill in question, we were panting like overdressed poodles. B. had motored ahead of us and was nowhere to be seen when S. lost the chain. Not realizing what had happened, she continued to pedal until the chain was jammed deep within the innards of the bike.

I remembered this chain business and knew all I had to do was pull it out, but pulling out a bike chain covered in grease on a sweaty, 105-degree day is not easy business. As I was pulling, swearing, covering myself with grease, a kindly, young and shirtless stranger approached. "Do you need help?" he asked. Without looking up, I thought he was B. using a fake voice, so I actually just ignored him and kept working. Once I realized he was a kindly, young, shirtless stranger, though, I let him help. S. leaned forward. "I would get my fingers dirty, too, but I don't want to ruin my DebbieGear," she said.

Finally we got the chain out. The shirtless stranger departed. All I could wonder was whether or not he thought S's name was really Debbie, and if he thought she just walked around referring to herself (and her clothing) in the third person.

Well, as you will recall, I was quite anxious on Friday about my adventure in the skies with the little angel. So anxious, in fact, that I forgot some stuff. We arrived at the airport v. early, parking in the sensible miles-away parking lot, and headed to the counter to check All Our Stuff. As we were handing over the pack-n-play, the suitcase for us and the wheelie for the little angel, the ticket counter person commented that we needed to have a birth certificate or shot record for the little angel. Oops. After a few frantic moments, she assured us she would let us on the plane, but that we would have to have such documentation faxed to us in Portland so we could get back on the plane to come home.

Then she asked for my free ticket voucher.

I cradled my head in my hands, realizing that I FORGOT EVERYTHING IMPORTANT. My husband looked pained. He left to try to drive the half-hour home and back in 45 minutes so that we wouldn't miss our plane. Of course we would miss our plane. Of course we had only brought one cell phone between the two of us, because there was no way we would be separated. The ticket agent determined that every flight between Kansas City and Portland, including getting routed through BOSTON, was overbooked. She looked sad for me. "I'm sorry," she said. "You could maybe standby at 8:40 p.m., getting into Portland at 11:30."

I hung my head. She let me use her little counter phone to call my husband and tell him to give it up and come get me. He was about a block from home at the time. She helped me lug all the suitcases off to the side, where I had to change the little angel's diaper on the seats because I couldn't leave ALL OUR STUFF to go change her in private in the bathroom. I fed her. I started to whimper a little. Then I just decided to go ahead and cry.

Then, like some nice bear in a fairy tale, another Southwest ticketing agent came up. "Why are you crying?" he said. I explained the whole story, and he left, only to resurface about fifteen minutes later with boarding passes. He had taken it upon himself to overbook two flights so that we could go to the wedding, restoring my faith in strangers and truly overwhelming me by his kindness.

I called my honey again, but alas, he had NOT gone home to get the ticket, because I told him just to come get me. Now me, I probably would've stopped and gotten it anyway if I were that close, but he's not me. So it turned out that we had to buy the second ticket anyway. But we were going, and that was all I cared about. Three airplanes and one two-hour delay in L.A. later, we arrived in Portland exhausted but relieved. We were there about 30 hours before going through the whole rigamarole again. The little angel woke up every two hours last night. The whole affair cost us about $800. But my cousin B. looked just beautiful in her dress, and the little angel got to meet the entire extended family and all her second cousins. So I guess it was worth it.

I'm going to let my beloved pack next time. And now I believe in big angels.