The Princess Diaries (The Princess Diaries 1)

5ED

E = {x|x is an integer greater than 4 but less than 258}

Tuesday, September 30

Something really weird just happened. I got home from school, and my mom was there (she’s usually at her studio all day during the week). She had this funny look on her face, and then she went, “I have to talk to you.”

She wasn’t humming anymore, and she hadn’t cooked anything, so I knew it was serious.

I was kind of hoping Grandmère was dead, but I knew it had to be much worse than that, and I was worried something had happened to Fat Louie, like he’d swallowed another sock. The last time he did that, the vet charged us $1,000 to remove the sock from his small intestines, and he walked around with a funny look on his face for about a month.

Fat Louie, I mean. Not the vet.

But it turned out it wasn’t about my cat, it was about my dad. The reason my dad kept on calling was because he wanted to tell us that he just found out, because of his cancer, that he can’t have any more kids.

Cancer is a scary thing. Fortunately, the kind of cancer my dad had was pretty curable. They just had to cut off the cancerous part, and then he had to have chemo, and after a year, so far, the cancer hasn’t come back.

Unfortunately, the part they had to cut off was . . .

Ew, I don’t even like writing it.

His testicle.

GROSS!

It turns out that when they cut off one of your testicles, and then give you chemo, you have like a really strong chance of becoming sterile. Which is what my dad just found out he is.

Mom says he’s really bummed out. She says we have to be very understanding of him right now, because men have needs, and one of them is the need to feel progenitively omnipotent.

What I don’t get is, what’s the big deal? What does he need more kids for? He already has me! Sure, I only see him summers and at Christmastime, but that’s enough, right? I mean, he’s pretty busy running Genovia. It’s no joke trying to make a whole country, even one that’s only a mile long, run smoothly. The only other things he has time for besides me are his girlfriends. He’s always got some new girlfriend slinking around. He brings them with him when we go to Grandmère’s place in France in the summer. They always drool all over the pools and the stables and the waterfall and the twenty-seven bedrooms and the ballroom and the vineyard and the farm and the airstrip.

And then he dumps them a week later.

I didn’t know he wanted to marry one of them and have kids.

I mean, he never married my mom. My mom says that’s because at the time she rejected the bourgeois mores of a society that didn’t even accept women as equals to men and refused to recognize her rights as an individual.

I kind of always thought that maybe my dad just never asked her.

Anyway, my mom says Dad is flying here to New York tomorrow to talk to me about this. I don’t know why. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with me. But when I said to my mom, “Why does Dad have to fly all the way over here to talk to me about how he can’t have kids?” she got this funny look on her face and started to say something, and then she stopped.

Then she just said, “You’ll have to ask your father.”

This is bad. My mom only says “Ask your father” when I want to know something she doesn’t feel like telling me, like why people sometimes kill their own babies and how come Americans eat so much red meat and read so much less than the people of Iceland.

Note to self: Look up the words progenitive, omnipotent, and mores

distributive law

5x + 5y - 5

5(x + y - 1)

Distribute WHAT??? FIND OUT BEFORE QUIZ!!!

Wednesday, October 1

My dad’s here. Well, not here in the loft. He’s staying at the Plaza, as usual. I’m supposed to go see him tomorrow, after he’s “rested.” My dad rests a lot, now that he’s had cancer. He stopped playing polo, too. But I think that’s because one time a horse stepped on him.