My mother called me over the weekend, while I was grocery shopping, to tell me about her latest vacation with an old boyfriend (Disneyworld, "to get away for a while,") and tell me she needs a new job, because she hates her boss, who's a different old boyfriend. The conversation struck me as so lurid that I couldn't really associate it with my mother, who's very conservative and has straight teeth and a good education. Her complaints of poverty left me too dismayed to add much to the dialogue, so she asked me hesitantly if I was "in good spirits." I wasn't, really, I was kind of annoyed, but I answered that I was fine, but a little tired.

"Hmm," she said, "Did you 'party hardy' last night?"

The phrase "party hardy," or maybe it's "party hearty," I've never been sure, is an instant nerve-grater for me. First of all, I don't tend to use "party" as a verb, and the last time I heard that particular phrase was in high school. I associate it with girls named "Karla" or "Angie," who wear high-heeled clogs and attend keg parties at Spider Gates with guys from metal shop. Girls like my old babysitter Valerie, who wore elastic-bodiced peasant tops and oversized pink glasses with her astrological sign outlined in tiny rhinestones on one tinted lens.

My mother is the one who taught me that there was a difference between me, or us, and girls like that. Those girls were "towny," my mother would assess, with an amused sniff. Towny, as if our family were part of the intellectual elite, or residents of an Ivy League campus, and we needed a word to identify the people outside our clique, the ones who lived in the right town but for the wrong reasons.

In the strictest sense, there's little evidence that I'm anything but towny myself. Still, as soon as my mother said "party hardy," I got a little frosty. The arch way she emphasized the words made it hard to tell if she was ironically attempting what she thought was slang that "all the kids use," or if she was implying that I was a little towny myself. You never know with her, and her talent for unexpected, biting sarcasm has honed my paranoid skills of insult-detection to a razor's edge. It's a very useful and worthwhile skill to have, and I recommend that you all develop it as soon as possible. It allows you to mine the most innocuous of comments for the priceless venom it contains, in the process alienating and insulting people not gifted with the ability to strip their speech of all possible ambiguity.

I delivered my crisp and icy speech while standing next to a display of Pippin apples, ("FIRST of all, Mother, I cannot recall EVER using the word "PARTY" as a VERB, and SECOND of all..."). I was the Bette Davis of the produce department, blistering the peels off the tangerines with the sheer force of my glare. But what is the point of that? I mean, I was wearing men's Levi's corduroys I got at the Jesus is Lord thrift store, with the zipper that falls down every three minutes, and a sun-faded t-shirt. No one was thinking "Hey, look at that patrician princess over by the oranges!"

Next time my mother uses the phrase "party hardy" on me, I'm going to let out a rebel yell and holler, "Wicked fuckin' hardy! I partied like a monkey drunk on vanilla extract!!!" or some crap like that, and see what she says.

It would be so great if she answered, "Word."

Star of the day. . .Ad-Rock, Boyeeeee!