9:29:28 AM Will Edmondson: kids are always fun and cute
9:29:34 AM Will Edmondson: its hard for a kid to be a dick
9:29:35 AM Tara Ariano: hahahahahahaha
9:29:42 AM Tara Ariano: They’re not always fun or cute.
9:29:51 AM Tara Ariano: That is a lie propagated by the Kid Council.
9:29:56 AM Will Edmondson: yes they are, they have moods like everyone periodically
9:30:12 AM Tara Ariano: I love my niece dearly but she is two and she will stop a day cold with a tantrum.
9:30:31 AM Will Edmondson: yeah but that doesnt happen daily
9:31:08 AM Tara Ariano: It happens a few times a week.
9:31:23 AM Tara Ariano: And she’s not bad; that’s just what happens at that age.
9:31:42 AM Tara Ariano: When they can talk enough to think you should understand what they want, and get frustrated when they get thwarted.
9:33:13 AM Will Edmondson: I mean
9:33:18 AM Will Edmondson: they’re not animalas
9:33:26 AM Tara Ariano: No, of course not.
9:33:53 AM Tara Ariano: Kids are great, but if you say they are fun and cute all the time, a parent will correct you.
9:33:59 AM Will Edmondson: Ive always heard that patience isn’t hard when its YOUR kid
9:34:05 AM Tara Ariano: HAHA a parent will correct you on that too.
9:34:14 AM Will Edmondson: I dont think so
9:34:24 AM Will Edmondson: I think it depends who you ask
9:35:15 AM Tara Ariano: Okay. I guess my friends who are parents are not as saintly as your friends who are parents.
9:35:41 AM Will Edmondson: well, I guarantee that your friends are probably snarkier than mine
9:36:01 AM Will Edmondson: but I think parents like everyone like to complain
9:36:22 AM Tara Ariano: Sure, but I don’t think they make shit up just to have something to complain about.
9:36:24 AM Will Edmondson: and I think that anyone will admit its easier to tolerate when its your kid
9:36:27 AM Tara Ariano: And not all my friends are jerks like me.
9:37:00 AM Will Edmondson: oh I never said you were a jerk
9:37:08 AM Tara Ariano: No, *I* am saying it.

Sometime in February, I was spending a Saturday night doing my favourite thing: lying on the couch watching TV and periodically checking Twitter, only to scroll past my friend Melissa rhapsodizing about the lemon meringue donut from Dough. Knowing she lives in another part of town, I mentioned the superior donuts at Bomboloni, not far from here. Melissa was, justifiably, offended that I thought she didn’t already know about them. The exchange gave me an idea: a New York City Donut Crawl — like a pub crawl, but with donuts. Melissa was in. Sarah jumped on too. The date was set for April 17.

Hatching this whole plan was really out of character for me because I’m kind of a health nut. HAHA just kidding, I had spent the previous weekend gorging on Easter candy at my sister’s house, so I might have paid some Twitter lip service to the idea that I was going to end the day sick, but I was pretty confident that, having not eaten anything since a very full lunch late-ish on Saturday, I’d be able to put away a good number of donuts over the course of the day. We stopped at Bomboloni and picked up a few to bring to our first stop; Sarah was bringing a representative sample from the 7th Avenue Donut Shop in Park Slope, and Melissa was bringing some from Dough.

At Doughnut Plant — where the line snaked well out the door – we were seriously, SERIOUSLY spoiled for choice. Since Melissa had asked for a Toasted Sesame, which had been my original choice, I went with the Vahlrona Chocolate instead; Sarah’s original idea was to compare the classic glazed across as many stores as she could, so I got her one of the Vanilla Bean Glazed. We took our four shops’ worth of donuts to a nearby park so that we could eat and Melissa’s son — let’s call him Woolyknickers Jr. — could run around.

I am ashamed to admit how quickly I slowed down. I ate the whole Vahlrona — it was very melty and wouldn’t have kept — but then we all started picking at the various varieties. From Bomboloni, I had brought Cotton Candy (which I thought a kid of Junior’s age would like), Raspberry, Nutella, and Toasted Marshmallow. From Dough, Melissa had brought the famous Lemon Meringue, as well as Chocolate Chipotle, Blood Orange, Dulce de Leche, Hibiscus, and Lemon Poppyseed.

I picked at a few (all amazing) before getting bold and going for the Lemon Meringue and OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. It’s a fluffy yeast donut filled with tangy lemon curd and topped with a giant dollop of toasty-topped meringue. I am a fierce partisan of Bomboloni’s Toasted Marshmallow and their Raspberry, but Melissa was right: the Lemon Meringue was unreal. I have to call it the day’s Best In Show.

From the park near Doughnut Plant, we walked up to Dessert Truck Works on Clinton Street. They only had two varieties of filled donuts — Nutella and Vanilla Creme — but they’re made to order and rolled in coarse sugar, so when they are delivered to you, they’re sweet and warm and smell unbelievable. Dave had mostly been documenting the day (all the photos are, of course, his), but he made an exception to try the Nutella.

At this point, Sarah had to peel off to go back to Brooklyn, so though we had one last stop to make (at the old-school Donut Pub), we marked the day by flashing our new Donut Crawl gang sign, courtesy of Dave.

Melissa was bringing the spoils (literally) of our gluttony back to her husband, but outside Donut Pub, I tried a bite of the Toasted Sesame and named it the day’s second-place finisher; Bomboloni’s Raspberry came in third. And then Melissa and Junior went back to Williamsburg and Dave and I walked home. All told, between all the bits I tried, I probably ate a total of four donuts…but most importantly, I confirmed that time spent eating donuts anywhere other than specialty artisanal shops is, quite simply, wasted.

Obviously, we need to do a Bagel Crawl next. I’ll probably be ready this time next year.

Oh my God, you guys, The Nate Berkus Show has done it again. Meet Jackson Murphy, a kid movie critic who needs about seventeen wedgies.

[2/22/11 5:10:45 PM] Tara Ariano: I have a serious America question, guys.
[2/22/11 5:11:44 PM] Mark Lisanti: And now you will ask a question that reveals our lack of knowledge of our country.
[2/22/11 5:11:56 PM] Tara Ariano: No, I think you’ll get this one.
[2/22/11 5:12:12 PM] Tara Ariano: How would I go about acquiring Girl Scout cookies if I don’t know any Scouts or Scout parents?
[2/22/11 5:12:19 PM] Tara Ariano: Because, by the way, I have never had a Girl Scout cookie.
[2/22/11 5:13:44 PM] Lindsay Robertson: The only good ones are the Thin Mints
[2/22/11 5:14:37 PM] Mark Lisanti: THIN MINTS, Tara. All. Day. Long.
[2/22/11 5:14:44 PM] Mark Lisanti: Put them in the freezer.
[2/22/11 5:14:48 PM] Tara Ariano: I’ve heard that.
[2/22/11 5:14:52 PM] Mark Lisanti: They are amazing.
[2/22/11 5:15:10 PM] Tara Ariano: I think the Girl Guides (the Canadian/British/other Commonwealth version of Girl Scouts) did a Thin Mint equivalent.
[2/22/11 5:15:27 PM] Tara Ariano: It’s a chocolate cookie (like the cookie part of an Oreo) coated in minty chocolate, right?
[2/22/11 5:16:21 PM] Lindsay Robertson: Yeah
[2/22/11 5:16:26 PM] Mark Lisanti: If you do find them, buy 10 boxes.
[2/22/11 5:16:42 PM] Lindsay Robertson: The thing with thin mints is nobody can eat just 25.
[2/22/11 5:16:46 PM] Tara Ariano: hahaha
[2/22/11 5:16:50 PM] Lindsay Robertson: like, a sleeve is a serving
[2/22/11 5:16:54 PM] Lindsay Robertson: for EVERYONE
[2/22/11 5:17:19 PM] Lindsay Robertson: they’re more of a drug than a cookie
[2/22/11 5:17:38 PM] Lindsay Robertson: you have to ask yourself “am I ready to get into thin mints?”
[2/22/11 5:17:43 PM] Tara Ariano: hahaha
[2/22/11 5:17:47 PM] Lindsay Robertson: and be a thin mint person and hang out at thin mint bars?
[2/22/11 5:17:48 PM] Mark Lisanti: You will be pounding sleeves.

Back in the pre-blog era, I had a website called Hissyfit.com, a webzine that published rants (or “hissyfits”) by contributors and, ever more rarely as time went on, by me.

One I actually roused myself to write concerned a topic about which I have apparently been passionate since the age of ten: my rock-solid conviction that I don’t want — nor should I have — children. At the time, Sylvia Hewlett’s book Creating A Life was getting a lot of attention for its prescriptiveness regarding the issue of when women should, ideally, reproduce, so I felt the intentionally childless deserved equal time, or if not exactly “equal,” whatever I could muster from my readers.

The post has been offline since we took down Hissyfit in 2004, but I occasionally get asked about it. Plus, since writing it, about a million of my friends have had babies, so some of my views on the subject have evolved (though not to the point where I’ve changed my mind).

So, by popular demand (giant overstatement), here it is again: 113 (formerly 112) Reasons To Lead A Barren, Childless Existence That Ends In Your Death.

And for the record, I mean no disrespect to parents of all ages and situations. I admire your choice to have and raise kids; it’s a job so difficult I can’t begin to fathom it.

1. Pregnancy.

2. Labour.

3. Stretch marks.

4. Having your sleep interrupted for several years. As it is now, I have to sleep with a white noise machine. Adding a crying baby would finish me.

5. Cleaning up another person’s excretia for several years. No sale. If, God forbid, something happened to Dave that required someone other than himself to deal with his poo, maybe I would sign on for that — but at least he would reward my efforts by being fun to hang out with most of the time.

6. Cleaning up another person’s vomit and snot.

7. You have to watch kids all the time. Remember in the old days, when you could stick your kid in a high chair or a playpen or one of those swing deals or a crib for hours and feel fairly certain he’d be okay? Now we’re all at a higher pitch of child-related anxiety so that if you put a child in a high chair, you immediately start picturing him somehow propelling himself backward and knocking himself out. Are kids smarter now than they used to be?

8. Kids are not that smart. Sure, some of them are smart — for kids. Like, they learn how to walk or talk or read earlier than normal. But still, that doesn’t mean you can take a three-year-old to True Grit and expect her to enjoy it. She probably won’t even follow it.

9. Kids are, however, smart enough to know how to piss you off. They will figure out which annoying behaviour irritates you most effectively. Or they will go about in a fine mood all day until you get to the mall, at which point they will start screaming at the top of their lungs for no apparent reason, or adopt a posture of passive resistance so that you practically have to dislocate their shoulders just to get them the hell out of there, or both.

10. You can’t reason with them. And that pretty much goes for their whole lives. When they’re very little, they don’t understand reason. When they’re medium, they tune you out. When they’re teenagers, they just hate you. And when they’re adults, they ignore you just because, now, they’re adults and they can, if they want.

11. They are expensive.

12. They need things that you have to give them or else you’ll be arrested.

13. They want things that you have to give them or else they’ll think you suck.

14. Between the things they need and the things they want, there’s very little money left over for things you want, like fancy electronics or trips to the movies several times a week.

15. When you do go out, you have to accommodate the kids. If your five-year-old doesn’t like pad thai, guess what? You’re not eating pad thai until he goes to college. Planning to see a movie? It had better be PG.

16. Whenever you do get a chance to go out by yourself or with your partner, you have to pay someone to sit in your house with your kid. Does anyone pay you to sit in your house with your kid? No.

17. And then you have to hear about the babysitter from the kid. “She’s mean!” or “She wouldn’t let me watch Wheel Of Fortune!” Or, the opposite — the kid says she likes the babysitter better than you.

18. And speaking of TV, unless you get the kid his own TV, you have to watch what the kid wants to watch.

19. Or, you have to make the decision of whether to let the kid watch TV at all. Will it kill her imagination if she does? Or will the deprivation make her into a rabid TV-holic once she’s old enough to decide for herself? And will the kids at school ostracize her if she doesn’t know who Dora is?

20. But that’s just the tip of a gigantic iceberg: how do you make the rules that will define the kid’s whole moral and intellectual framework?

21. And then you have to think, am I a good enough person to be making those decisions for someone else?

22. Obviously, it doesn’t stop with TV. Then you have to decide about the kid’s diet, too. Are you going to be one of those “fruit is nature’s candy” parents?

23. And what about bedtime?

24. And discipline? Time-outs — do they actually work? Would you ever spank the kid?

25. Assuming you’re raising the kid with a partner, does one of you stay home with the kid full-time? Which one?

26. And if the kid does have a full-time stay-at-home parent — let’s say it’s you — how do you protect your own identity and keep from having your whole life subsumed by the kid and his needs?

27. And if you decide not to stay at home with the kid, how do you resolve your inevitable feelings of guilt at not devoting enough of your time to her?

28. Then there’s the way everyone and their dog is going to question every decision you make about the way you raise the kid.

29. Your parents.

30. Your in-laws.

31. Your boss.

32. Your friends with kids.

33. Your friends without kids.

34. Strangers on the internet.

35. “Scientists” doing “studies.”

36. Authors of bossy-ass books that get a lot of media attention but reportedly don’t sell well.

37. The kid himself, who will compare you to his friends’ parents.

38. So then you decide to take a trip, take a break from the day-to-day grind. You have to go somewhere that’s fun for a kid — and remember, you won’t have a babysitter out of town, so you’ll be spending every second with the kid.

39. If you decide to take a trip without the kid, there’s the guilt — plus you can’t just book the kid into a kennel while you’re gone.

40. Every choice you make will have an indelible effect on the kid for the rest of his life.

41. Think about that: the day you send the kid to school in her second-favourite t-shirt, she’s storing the memory away in order to tell it to a therapist in twenty years.

42. (And all of this, by the way, is just assuming that you mostly do things right — that you don’t go completely nuts and leave the kid alone while you go smoke crack, or drown him and his many siblings in the bathtub.)

43. Adding a kid to the mix changes your relationship with your partner, too.

44. You and your partner have to arrive at consensus on every decision regarding the kid.

45. Even though the kid will inevitably try that whole “Mom said I could” thing in order to try to turn you against each other.

46. Even though you and your partner will have probably been raised under very different circumstances that you either (a) think worked out pretty well, or (b) will try to correct by doing with your own kid the exact opposite of what your parent did with you.

47. Good luck having a conversation with your partner that doesn’t involve the kid in some way or another.

48. Oh, and you’ll be so tired from raising the kid that you won’t have much time to read interesting or challenging books or even magazines that you might then discuss with each other.

49. Then let’s say, God forbid, that it doesn’t work out between you and your partner. Now in addition to the emotional turmoil of changing your entire life by removing your partner from it, you have to put your own feelings completely aside in order to insulate the kid from the trauma of the broken home, as much as you possibly can.

50. No matter how well you do so, the kid will hate you and your partner anyway.

51. Unless the kid ends up hating and blaming herself for the end of the relationship.

52. For which everyone you know will judge you as a failure as a parent as well as relationship-wise.

53. (And all of this, by the way, is just assuming that the kid arrives in your home of sound mind and body, so that in addition to all the usual challenges and stresses involved in raising any child, there isn’t also the unique challenges and stresses involved in raising a child with special needs.)

54. (But then, all children have special needs — that’s the whole point.)

55. Plus did you know you can have all the fun of being around a kid without having one yourself? Just be a cool aunt/uncle type to your friends’ kids! Then when the kid gets fussy/tired/annoying, you bring him or her back to his or her parents. Like Zipcar, but with kids.

56. (Because by the way there will be no shortage of kids in your life. Virtually everyone you know will have at least one.)

57. You will start to talk about nothing but your kid.

58. Your friends without kids will feel like they have nothing in common with you anymore.

59. And/or they will be intimidated by your kids because they don’t know how to act around them.

60. And secretly you start to think there’s something wrong with your friends who don’t have kids because they don’t have kids.

61. Or you don’t “secretly” think it, and you say something, and the friendship ends.

62. You know how when you were a kid, there were some other kids in your peer group you didn’t like, who were annoying?

63. What if, as your child gets older, you start to think he’s annoying?!

64. It’s not like you can send her back.

65. Or give him up for adoption to some annoying family.

66. And because the kid is in many respects just an amplifier for all of your own attributes, including the less-attractive ones, then you have to ask yourself, “Am I annoying?”

67. Your friends’ kids might be cooler than yours and make you jealous that you didn’t end up with the kick-ass kids.

68. Even if the kid isn’t annoying, he will do things that annoy you.

69. Not clean her room.

70. Keep his room too clean and judge you for not keeping the rest of the house as clean.

71. Take up hobbies that are loud or disruptive or messy or expensive.

72. Not take up any hobbies at all and freak you out because he seems to have no personality.

73. Like things that are the opposite of what you like.

74. Suck at school.

75. Be much better at school than you ever were and make you feel inadequate.

76. Suck at the same subjects you sucked at so that you can’t help with homework.

77. Swear.

78. Not swear and judge you for swearing too much.

79. Tell your parents how much you swear and get you in trouble.

80. Swear at school and get you in trouble.

81. Get suspended.

82. Get expelled.

83. Go to juvie.

84. Be a picky eater.

85. Develop an annoying allergy — like, to milk, for instance so you can’t make her Kraft Dinner, or cereal for breakfast. Or have to have soy milk so that you secretly think your kid is a pinko.

86. Or maybe you don’t “secretly” think your kid is a pinko, and you call him a pinko to his face.

87. Which leads us to the kid’s teen years, when every child is a pinko.

88. And then your kid is all ranting to you about “The Man,” like you’ve never heard of “The Man” before.

89. Annoying teen poetry.

90. Or the kid goes the other way and joins the John Birch Society.

91. You have to teach the kid to drive even though you don’t like him touching your stuff.

92. Your kid has to touch your stuff, generally, and they gunk it up or leave fingerprints on it or break it.

93. So you finally realize you can’t have nice things.

94. (That’s where Pier One comes in.)

95. Then the kid reaches the age of majority but you’re so not done, because then you have to send her to college.

96. He might pick a major you find objectionable, but you have to pretend to be supportive.

97. Or she decides not to go to college at all, and you have to figure out where you went wrong, while at the same time pretending it’s okay for her not to pursue her education.

98. And then he can’t get a job and he moves back in, just when you and your partner were starting to remember all the things you liked about not having a kid living in your house.

99. (And all of this is leaving aside all the issues of having more than one kid — like how to make sure you don’t end up liking one of them better than the other and trying to force them to love each other and also the whole issue of how it’s somehow more than twice as expensive to raise two kids as it is to raise one.)

100. He dates someone you don’t like.

101. She dates someone you like and then dumps him/her.

102. He gets married young.

103. She gets married a bunch of times.

104. He lives with someone and gets screwed over.

105. She can’t get pregnant, and has to decide how to proceed, and how badly she wants kids, anyway, and then kind of resents you because you did have a kid.

106. He gets a girl pregnant and ruins his life, or the girl’s.

107. Then he has kids and you feel old, plus you have to judge everything he does with the kids even though you always swore you wouldn’t do that.

108. Even as an adult, everything your kid does reflects on you, well or poorly.

109. Maybe there’s a whole “Cat’s in the Cradle” situation where your kid totally rejects you as an adult.

110. Which also reflects on you, of course.

111. Or your kid’s too attached and can’t start living her own life, which…see above.

112. Having a kid is just about the only irrevocable decision you can make in life.

113. What if you figure out too late that you’re way too selfish to be a parent?

I know she’s only eleven, and that it’s wrong to hate a child. BUT DAMN.

“Thanks” to Jezebel for this story. When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare in which I’d be driving with my dad, and he’d have a heart attack or some other medical calamity and I’d have to take the wheel. And I mean I would have this dream once a month. It never happened — my dad’s never had a heart attack — but I blame the dream for the fact that I failed my driver’s test the first time. Now I’m old, and my monthly nightmare involves me going back to school and having to take an exam for a class I forgot to attend. Progress?

Me, my mom (Carol), and my sister (Leah), circa 1982.

Do you like judging people? I do. It’s one reason I DVRed the latest episode of 20/20 based on a teaser for this segment, which if you haven’t already seen it you must watch immediately. (The other reason I DVRed it is that one of my other usual Friday Night JudgmentFest standbys — Supernanny — was a rerun. Thank God for What Not To Wear.)

So the segment — in case you think you’re too busy to follow a link — is about women who buy super-realistic baby dolls and treat them like real babies: they buy them new baby clothes, they take them out to the park, they set up nurseries for them, they HAVE BIRTHDAY PARTIES FOR THEM with THEIR ACTUAL HUMAN GRANDCHILDREN AS GUESTS. One woman in the segment likes to fool strangers into thinking whatever doll she has out that day — because SHE HAS MORE THAN ONE — is a real child, and fully admits that when she’s out with one of her dolls and no one comments on it, she feels let down. Surprise! She’s a childless forty-nine-year-old. Another surprise! Her husband declined to appear in the segment. Really, the situation here is that (a) people have more money than sense, and (b) they need therapy and aren’t getting it from the producers of 20/20.

Obviously, the segment is fucking amazing. Check it out.

Destined to become the web-sensation heir to “Kids Watching Sneezing Panda,” please enjoy my niece Olivia cracking the hell up at “Hamster On A Piano“: