I responded to many terms of endearment lavishly dished out by my mother, whose vocabulary was otherwise generally limited to an array of profanities. I was called all the usual terms including “Sweetheart,” “Baby,” “Babe,” “My Dear,” “Honey”, and “Angel.” But I was best known in the family as my mom’s “little baby Jesus.” This title, so I thought, was bestowed upon me because, as annoyingly observed by my siblings, I was the perfect child who could never do any wrong. “Good” was defined using me as the objective standard. But this didn’t last very long as my actions were becoming increasingly difficult to justify as good, especially as I entered my “difficult” years: ages 2–26. 

A little later in life I realized that being my mom’s “little baby Jesus” wasn’t because of my perfection, but really because the baby Jesus and I were both a result of unplanned pregnancies, and the term “little baby Jesus” sounded much better than “Mommy’s little mistake.”

It was no secret that my parents’ marriage was more like a verbal WWF cage match than a friendship with benefits. Even as a young child I gave my mom my full support when she would sit me down and tell me that she and my father were getting a divorce (this script played out at least three times per year). I needed my father and mother; I just didn’t need or want them under the same roof. They never did get a divorce. There were probably many reasons that despite their contempt for one another they stayed together including their children, finances, and the stigma attached to divorce given their Catholic upbringing. Perhaps the biggest reason was that my parents needed each other in a highly codependent and psychologically unhealthy way. The times when they did get along best was when they were attacking a common enemy, such as my aunt, uncle, a family friend, or a politician. Even the “good times” were based on anger and hate. 

Yes. My mother had a unique talent. She could make use of vulgarities in such a way that, if she were a character in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, they would have had to change the rating from “R” to “X”. Her creative and vulgar insults often included commands involving a mixture of sexual acts and dead mothers (directed at my father). If there were a way to track such a metric, I believe my mom would hold the record for the most uses of the “F-word” in a lifetime. What’s ironic about all this, is that if any of her children uttered even the most benign of profanities, she would have slapped us silly.

Yes and no. Everything I said wasn't a lie as the following chart shows:

Here is one recipe: four chain smokers, four hours, 80 cigarettes, and one enclosed moving vehicle. Works like a charm. Here are some other strategies.

In short, my Aunts got loud while my Uncles got inappropriate. For a more scientific answer...

Here you can see that the level of inappropriateness (on a scale from 0–10) for uncles starts at a 5 and at one drink since I don’t think I ever saw one of my aunts or uncles without at least one drink in their system. It goes up consistently until five drinks, at which time speech slurs to the point where inappropriate comments become indistinguishable from gibberish.


Here you can see that while there is a moderate correlation between drinking and volume (loudness) for my uncles, the correlation is much stronger with aunts. Aunts begin the night being overpowered by their husbands until four drinks. Then at five drinks, the aunts overpower the uncles in volume at which point the uncles want to go home.

For a while, yes. I have confidence I will be again some day.


At age ten, cuteness is a powerful selling factor that sharply decreases along with successful sales until age eighteen, when successful sales increase slightly because of sales experience, then drastically increases around age 70 when prospects once again buy mostly because of cuteness.

Yes, I really did. To understand my reasoning a bit better, here is a photo of me in the sixth grade:

It depended on how drunk they were:

This following chart sums up my answer nicely: