Swine Flu, the Swine-ASS, and spilling my wine

We've been struck down by the flu since Friday. One at a time they fall down, call me to pick them up at school, and spread mounds of used kleenex all over the house. They share the same thermometer in a contest to see who is the warmest. They cough day and night and race each other to the bathroom. I'm running out of toilet paper.

But that's not really the digusting thing I wanted to talk about tonight. The truly disgusting thing is that my children don't want to talk to their father and so he sent me this tonight:

I am going to assume that your phone has been cut off. I will call you at work tomorrow to set up a way I can talk to my children.

At work? Seriously? Now, this appears to be a bluff but then sometimes he really does the things he says he's going to do. Like calling my employer to tell them I'm selling crack in the parking lot. And maybe that time he said he was going to call the financial aid office at the college I was going to to tell them I had inherited money from my dead Grandmother so that they wouldn't give me grant money.

All she left me was a Rubik's Cube.

Is he really going to call a counseling center? In his demented head this forces me to

• Do what he says, which is to force the girls to talk to him on the phone which makes me a hypocrite and a bad parent
• Tell everyone at work all about him in case he does call
• Live with the anxiety that at any minute he could start calling my work over and over and over and tell them I'm selling crack in the parking lot.

The problem with this twisted manipulative plan of his is that THEY ALREADY KNOW. I tell everyone I work for and with, all my friends, every school my children go to, the mailman, the street cleaner, and the guy who wears the orange vest and directs traffic at deserted intersections.

It's true that some people do believe his stories. But I don't need those people anyway. They are easily bought and suckered. I need people like the police chief in my town who listened to my ex talk about how he was moving to my town and they needed to be prepared because "something is going to happen"--and thought he was completely off the wall.

So yeah, call my place of work. I just hear MC Hammer in my head singing "Can't Touch This" which is very bizarre but so true.

Oh, and I spilled my wine on the carpet in a moment of spaz, not unlike Meg Ryan who throws the best fits in movies I have ever seen. I admire that.