Our parents, being cheap-ass people, bought us cardboard dollhouses that were really no better than shoeboxes, and we had to put them together ourselves. I loved my lame-ass cardboard dollhouse, and I loved collecting miniatures to add to it. I ordered them from the Harriet Carter catalog, and every time I put a new piece of furniture in one of the cardboard rooms, the whole thing would collapse. Aah, memories.

Let me digress for a moment to tell you how cheap my parents were. They bought our clothes and toys at garage and rummage sales, so we never, ever got the "cool toy" for Christmas. One year we got fruit snacks and socks. I'm not even kidding. And it's not as if we were poor, either. We were middle-class kids who went to private school. So we were comparing ourselves to our friends, who weren't usually wealthy, but at least they had toys.

To this day, my mom will wrap up AA batteries or a blank VHS tape or a mouse pad that she ordered through the mail, just so we have something to open. Believe me, this goes over a lot better at age thirty than it did when I was eight and just wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid like every other girl in my class.

We never saw the "cool movies" that all the other kids saw. E.T.? Never saw it. Star Wars? Never saw it. On the rare occasion that we did get to go to the movies, my mom would smuggle warm cans of Diet Rite in her handbag, along with popcorn that had been microwaved in a paper bag. Thanks, Mom. That's a treat.

I mean, I'm not saying that we were particularly struggling or suffering or that we didn't have a lot of fun as kids or that my parents are awful people or anything of that sort. But our parents did not understand the lust a little girl feels over the toys that all her friends are getting that she never gets. "Why does Santa Claus always bring us underwear, Mommy?"

She and my grandmother would sew us cheapo dolls that were supposed to resemble Cabbage Patch Kids but never did. Looking back, it's sweet and touching, right? But back then, when your friend Becky has eight Cabbage Patch Kids with long hair and sweet dresses and adoption certificates and you have some knockoff piece of crap made by your grandmother, you are a bitter little kid.

I talked to my mother yesterday and she was telling me about how they were going out to dinner because they have a coupon. My parents live for coupons. My mom is constantly entering contests in the newspaper and she totally gets free stuff all the time--movie passes and tickets to the zoo and who knows what. She's a thrifty lady, my mom. It's terribly cute. (Again, unless you're eight.)

So anyway, there's this inner eight-year-old who still wants a giant dollhouse with tiny electric lights that work. I can only imagine that this would be a tremendously expensive hobby, not to mention that it's sort of twee. I guess I could wait until I have either a daughter or an interior-design-loving son. But that could take a while, and I want a dollhouse now. (And also an oompa loompa.)

In the Smithsonian, they had an exhibit of this super cool dollhouse of my dreams. My friends probably thought I was insane for wanting to take pictures of it and stand staring at it for fifteen minutes. I just--I love that. A tiny miniature house. I don't know why.

What I was intending to write about was not my weird passion for dollhouses, but the saga of having my mail stolen AGAIN and having $3,000 worth of checks written to my credit cards, even after I warned the credit card companies that this was happening. "Please put an alert on my account," I said to these moronic people. "I don't use these checks, and I don't want any of them cashed." Whereupon they cash $3,000 worth of them. Is this thing on?

And I may have to take up check forgery, since the banks apparently don't care to do anything to stop whoever has repeatedly stolen my mail and gotten away with it. It is apparently very lucrative. Why am I busting my ass to earn an extra $150 a month tutoring if I can make $3,000 overnight by stealing someone's checks? I must be doing something wrong.

Bah. I am bitter and stressed, but venting about it is just going to make me angry again. I'd rather sign up for my Harriet Carter catalog or start searching eBay for the perfect miniature living room set.