Mom, my first issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived, with "all the comforts of home". :) Thank you so much. It's nice study-break reading.

I totally covet the high-tech/old-fashioned kitchen on the cover, though I would substitute warm, sunny yellow on the walls and red or blue accents in place of the pale yellow ones.

All this makes me think, though. I finally share the opinion that Martha is rather retchingly bourgeois. Of course, it would be swell to have a hydraulic lift in a linen cupboard that carries a hidden flat-television screen upwards to watch the Daily Show before bed and then tucks it away under a piece of wood that is seamlessly integrated into the surface of the furniture when you're finished with Jon Stewart. But give me a break. Who has that kind of money and space, besides Emily and Richard Gilmore?* Really. Seriously. It's too much.

No wonder everyone thinks Americans are crazy, and we are spending all our money on consumer goods made in China, and making our houses bigger and bigger all the time to make room for all these things. "In my house, all the juices, fruit and vegetable, have to be FRESHLY SQUEEZED." And in mine, Martha, I'll accept nothing less for cream for my coffee than the milk fresh from the bosoms of my ladies in waiting, which they provide right after polishing my silverware, and right before getting on their hands and knees to scrub my grout with a baby toothbrush.

Oh, oh, and you know what else? Her cat is named Vivaldi. Are you serious!? It almost makes me want to get a cat to name it Poulenc or Shostakovic. But that would be cruel, and having an ironically named pet is almost as bad in my book as getting an ironic haircut.

Still, though, I love the gift, Mommy, and I will happily take her magazine with me into the bath, to manufacture desire. You know I need something to get pedantic about sometimes.

*I just made my way through season 6 again, and it made me remember how good The Gilmore Girls was before Amy Sherman-Palladino and husband Daniel left for greener pastures. (What a shocker. The network was withholding a decent contract to them. Seriously, isn't this case-in-point about the importance of good writing to good television. Things went south SO fast when they left.)