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SAM: I want a Slushy Magic.

ME: [in an English accent] Daddy, I want a PONY, and I want it NOW!

SAM: No, really. I want a Slushy Magic.

ME: [still in an English accent] Daddy, I want an Oompa Loompa! I want you to get me an Oompa Loompa right away!

SAM: I am not Veruca Salt! I just want a . . .

ME: [singing] I want the world. I want the whoooooooole world.

SAM: STOP SINGING!!!

We took Sam to Disney World a few weeks ago. After spending six hours in two theme parks, we decamped to our hotel. Sam was inexplicably still energetic, and wanted to go for a swim. I agreed to take him to the pool, with the understanding that while he went down the water slide thirty-two times in a row, I’d be relaxing in a chaise with a book and restorative glass of wine.

Which is exactly what I was doing, when two teenage boys swimming in the pool began strangling one another. One wrapped his arm around the other’s neck and squeezed, and then after a brief and entirely serious struggle, they traded places. Finally, when neither one had managed to actually kill the other, they began to splash one another. And me.

“Hey,” I shouted, when the first wave of water hit me and my precious Kindle. “Knock it off!”

I fixed them with my Death Glare, and the boys, properly frightened, moved to the other end of the pool, where they could continue their fight without incurring my wrath.

I returned to my book. Two minutes later, another wave of water hit me. I looked up, ready to go medieval on their teenage asses. But this time, I’d been splashed by a small boy and his father, who were playing with a noodle. The dad gave me an apologetic wave, which I acknowledged with a nod, and went back to reading.

“Why don’t you just, like, move?”

I looked up. A woman lying a few chaises down to me was glaring at me.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“If you don’t want to get splashed, why don’t you move?” she said. Then, before I could answer, she continued. “He’s only three, you know. He doesn’t know any better.”

I surmised this was the mother of the small child who had just splashed me. I was confused by her confrontational tone, but in no mood to deal with it. That’s the thing about spending six hours at Disney theme parks — you lose all patience for everyone. Especially people who intrude on your cocktail hour.

“How old is the man with him?” I asked.

“You mean my husband?” she asked. “He’s thirty-three.”

She said this as though his being thirty-three made her point. Which it didn’t. To the contrary, it made my point.

“Is he old enough to know better?” I asked. And then, without waiting for her response, went back to my book and my wine.

A few minutes later, I heard her recounting the interaction to her husband. “She got, like, mad that Dylan splashed her, and she was all, like, ‘isn’t he old enough to know better,’ and I was, like, ‘he’s only three.’ And she was all, like, ‘whatever.’”

Which wasn’t even close to what either one of us had said.

It almost made me wish I was back at the Disney parks, being jostled by the crowds, having my ankles banged by strollers and getting cut in line by South American tourists pretending they didn’t know any better.

My best friend tells me that these sort of interactions only happen to me, but that doesn’t seem very likely. How does everyone else go through life avoiding the assholes?

This could be the result of having watched too many episodes of Dexter, but whenever I see a windowless unmarked white van, I immediately think: Kill van.

Who, other than a serial killer, needs an unmarked van? If you’re an electrician or a plumber, you’d have the name of your business painted on the side. And, as potential killers should know from twenty years of Law & Order episodes, it’s not a good idea to advertise where you work when you’re in the middle of snatching someone off the street.

The lack of side windows makes it even scarier. I won’t even park next to a windowless van, just in case a sociopath is waiting inside, ready to leap out with a syringe.

But — unless I’m alone in this neurosis, which is possible — shouldn’t this start to affect what serial killers drive? Wouldn’t they have figured out by now that they’ll be more likely to draw attention to themselves driving around in a vehicle which causes everyone to think, Oh, look, there’s a kill van. Maybe serial killers will switch to driving grey Honda minivans or Ford Fusions, which supposedly come equipped with a generous trunk space, always useful for stuffing bodies into.

I wonder if the F.B.I. has thought of any of this. They really should hire me as a consultant.

ME: Want to do something? We could play a board game.

SAM: [Not looking up from his Nintendo DS] I’m already playing a game.

ME: Or we could read. How about the next chapter in HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON?

SAM: [Still not looking up] Mom, please. I’m in the Zone.

I watched Sam tape together two empty water bottles, end-to-end, so that the openings lined up.

ME: What are you doing?

SAM: Creating a tornado inside these bottles.

ME: Oh. Okay. Do you have to create your tornado on the coffee table?

SAM: Yes. Oh, and I need water. And blue food coloring.

ME: Outside.

SAM: What?

ME: All tornado experiments, especially those involving blue food coloring, will be conducted on the patio.

SAM: Is that a rule?

ME: Yes. Consider that an official Gaskell Family Rule. Rule number fourteen, right after the ban on drum sets.

SAM: Seriously?

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”

― David Sedaris, Naked

I can cuss like a longshoreman. Actually, that’s not fair to longshoremen. It’s probably better to say that I can cuss like the ex-sorority girl that I am.

(Tri-Delt, during the period of time when Saturday Night Live ran that “Delta Delta Delta, can I help ya, help ya, help ya” skit. As I’m sure you can imagine, I never tired of hearing that line from drunken frat boys while drinking bottles of Zima in grungy bars that smelled of vomit.)

I have been known to drop the f-bomb on occasion. My favorite curse of all time comes courtesy of Bill Nighy as Billy Mack in the movie Love Actually – “Fuck wank bugger shitting arse head and hole!” – but I can never remember the whole thing at the moment when, say, I’ve just dropped a stapler on my foot.

Where I run into problems is when those stapler-hitting-the-foot moments happen in the presence of my 8-year-old’s tender ears. I reined it in for most of his babyhood, or at least I thought I had right up until one day when Sam was four. We were driving somewhere, cruising along happily, when a jackass ran a stop sign and nearly ploughed into us.

ME: JESUS!!

FOUR-YEAR-OLD SAM: Don’t you mean Jesus Christ?

I supposed it could have been worse. If someone had been listening – or if he repeated it to his pre-k teacher – I could have passed it off as religious zeal, were it not for the tone and inflection, which I had to admit sounded just like me.

The thing is, if anyone else – husband, friends, grandparents, random sociopaths we bump into in public – swears around Sam, I give them my death glare. And, if I do say so myself, my death glare is terrifying. I have scared small children, grown adults and vicious dogs alike with it. But it’s hard to death glare myself.

Last year, Sam’s teacher pulled me aside at afternoon car line.

“Sam had an incident today with two boys in his class,” she said.

I knew the boys in question. They’re both assholes. And if you don’t think first graders are capable of being assholes, you have never spent time around children.

“They came in from recess and told me that Sam said the f-word on the playground,” Mrs. B said.

Shit, was my first thought.

And then: I’m so totally going to blame George for this. I’m going to throw him right under the bus. I’m going to tell her that he swears all the time, and I’ve asked him to stop, but you know what men are like.

I wondered if I could pull off delicately fluttering one hand to my throat while I said this last bit.

“But I know Sam would never say anything like that,” she continued. “And when I pressed the boys, they admitted they’d made it up to get him in trouble.”

See? First grade assholes.

“How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a fuck. I’ll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I’d be like, ‘And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.’ How could you not, if you’re a human being? Maybe they’re not so admirable. Maybe they’re robot zombies.”

– Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

Apparently, there’s a new BRIDGET JONES movie in the works. And it’s not going well.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, the first movie was okay. Not as good as the book, certainly, but entertaining enough. On the other hand, the second movie was so incredibly bad, there was an entire episode of THE OFFICE dedicated to mocking it.

So, what’s going to happen? Bridget has a baby, and then . . . what exactly? She sits around in sweat pants for six months six years, negotiating breast feeding mishaps, misplaced pacifiers and hormonal fluctuations? Hopefully, there will be more to it than that.

What is it with Hollywood and babies anyway? Suddenly, babies are being almost fetishized in the entertainment media. Every time I pick up a trashy magazine, hoping to see who looks like crap in a bathing suit, there’s another sappy story about some third-rate actress announcing her pregnancy. God help us when Princess Kate gets knocked up; the Internet may implode.

They have even turned the pregnancy manual WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING into a movie. The trailer ran before THE HUNGER GAMES, and it looks so . . . so . . . well, so incredibly godawful, it’s hard to put it into words.

Yes. I wish I could unsee it, too.