Does he want to see your ass thrown in jail or croon you a Barry White song? Who’s to say?! That photo hits all potential reader demographics.

But recently he got local media attention from WTOP, DCist and Fishbowl when some jackhole on the Metro tried to swipe his iPhone. What the story doesn’t say is that he got ripped off twice.

I was sitting at home that night, not knowing that at that very minute my husband was making like Mssrs. Starsky and Hutch, chasing the perp through the Metro station, when I got a call from his phone. His face appeared on screen but on the other end was a chick who sounded so Midwest nice that I figured her for a Prairie Home Companion extra. She told me she found the phone but couldn’t get it to my husband “before he ran off.” [Editor's note: At this moment I thought, "before he ran off? He hasn't run in a good many years, Pippi Gundersson. He saunters. He moseys. He does not run."]

But here was Miss Fargo 2009 assuring me that she would drop the phone off at the Takoma Park station, her next stop, in a few minutes. When she conferred with an apparent chum that that was the name of the station and then laughed a little I thought, “Huh, OK, kinda weird. Anyhoo.” But I thanked her profusely and figured my husband had just dropped the phone. How nice that this good Samaritan was returning it. The good Samaritan whose name and contact information I did not get.

Problem: the good Samaritan never turned the phone in. I called WMATA police to alert them the phone was on its way to the Takoma Park Metro booth, so there was little chance of it disappearing once it hit Metro staff hands. Moot point. It never showed in the first place.

Robbed twice. First by a garden-variety thug. Next by a twerp who apparently decided her good deed would get her only so far and the $600 phone in her hand would get her much farther. What she had no way of knowing is that I’d majorly splurged to buy the phone for my husband for Father’s Day. That he’d started amassing a collection of photos of our toddler that we can’t get back now. That one of his primary work tools — his source list — was on that phone. That he’d built an impressive music collection on it that he loved to unwind to on his way to and from work.

Not famine, not murder, not anything horrible. Just all a bummer and maddening and unfair.

Everyone assumes that you can automatically track an iPhone when stolen, but that’s only if you’ve pre-loaded the proper app. And my husband didn’t have a password on it, so she’s free to peruse any of the content on the phone. Hopefully she’s stupid enough to take it into a Verizon store to get it re-activated, where a computer will indicate it’s stolen. Hopefully she will also soon have the grown-up equivalent of having your ice cream cone tip onto the sidewalk. I’d like to think I’m bigger than wishing that, but I’m not.

Pitch: Navy SEALs are a special breed of warrior who conduct special operations in any environment, but who are uniquely trained and equipped to operate from, around and in maritime areas. SEALs take their name from the environments in which they are trained to operate: sea, air and land.

Sure the terrorists hate us for our fried Coke balls and our Bibleopoly. But every now and then their hatred is really on the mark. They hate us because, occasionally, mustachioed men in jogging shorts with 0-percent body fat and awfully good aim come and kill them. Hooyah.

At the time I thought, “Jesus, lady, chillax,” and moved on, but a similar conversation today, in which it was asserted that a woman’s pre-baby lifestyle and traits must remain the dominant ones for the rest of her life or she’s somehow settling for some sad Betty Draper-esque existence, renewed my contemplation of the subject. Specifically, it had me yet again thinking, “Jesus, lady, chillax.”

The notion that a woman’s identity is somehow pitiable if it gives itself over to that which comes with motherhood is based on a few flawed premises:

1. That there was some inherent superiority to the pre-baby life.
My life pre-baby was pretty cool, involving somewhat regular trips to museums, an occasional night out at the ballet and a concert here and there. But most nights involved lounging around in sweats watching television, reading or fiddling with the Times crossword, and doing laundry. And now that I have a child I still fiddle with the Times crossword, watch television in my sweats, do laundry and make somewhat regular trips to museums. Except now when I go to the museum I get to watch another set of eyes widen at the riot of color in a Lichtenstein.

2. That there is some soul-shackling inferiority in the tasks associated with parenthood.
This would seem to include spooning mushy peas into a babbling baby, taking a child to piano or lacrosse, or wiping little noses. So here’s my challenge to those who poopoo the rigors of handling, er, poopoo: What did you do today that was somehow better than helping guide a child through the world well fed, happy and healthy? Oh, you dumped some food in your cat’s bowl, got some froyo, and went to Target? Well played.

3. That increased selflessness equals weakness.
Because that’s what the argument folks like Williams are making comes down to. That the act of giving up some concern about yourself — your social life, your poetry reading circuit, your wardrobe — somehow means you’re giving up, period. (This is not to say that those who never have children are living an inferior, vapid life. I am specifically addressing those who would criticize mothers for reveling in motherhood.) What some frown upon as weakness, others call maturation.

It’s a sad group that points to a woman setting her Facebook profile picture to a smiling shot of her child and sees evidence of an anti-feminist plot to lease all available brain space to the patriarchy and the kiddieocracy. Because sometimes a cute picture of your kid is just your favorite picture that week. And it’s your Facebook profile, not your obituary. The day that the sum of our feminist selves comes down to what snapshot we’re putting on a site designed to ensure college students get laid is the day that Betty Friedan officially lost.

It’s a sad group that believes talking about your daily goings-on with your child when asked how you’re doing and what you’ve been up to is proof that you, poor thing, have lost yourself. They have no idea that this life lived in tandem with a child is a new evolution of you and it’s pretty goddamned spectacular.

Since having a child I have helped save 30,000 teachers’ jobs. I have helped my husband grieve the loss of his mother. I have done the best writing of my life. I have built communications vehicles from nothing into powerful tools that speak daily to tens of thousands of people.

But I have also changed approximately 4,200 diapers, read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy roughly 108 times, made 16 packages of personalized pink sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day treats, and turned tears to smiles with a belly tickle more times than I can count. I have, without regret, wrapped up nearly every ounce of my concern in the well-being of my daughter.

This has been the most important role of my life.

And this is what a feminist looks like.

My husband got his first official death threat recently.

It seems that while the New York Times is a big fan of his highly successful “Most Wanted” feature, some of the folks who land in his articles are less enthusiastic. They are apparently unmoved by the Times recently calling him “the capital’s version of John Walsh” after his writing led to the feds’ arrest of 24 of the most wanted fugitives in the area.

One of his as-yet-uncaptured subjects penned him a letter a couple weeks ago. Suffice it to say the dude could work on his people skills. (Although in an odd twist, after specifying how he’d prefer to see my husband shuffle off his mortal coil, he closed it with something to the effect of a seemingly genuine, “So anyway, have a good day.” Which of course reminded me of the Ricky Bobby Talladega Nights line, “I said with all due respect” and that made me chuckle. Until I remembered that someone wanted to see my husband dead and then I stopped.)

This whole bit of unpleasantness made very personal the sticky wicket that is privacy in the Internet age.

As an avid social media user I’ve got absolutely no online privacy. I gave up anonymity on my blog years ago, trading it for the increased traffic and reader engagement that comes when people feel like they actually know you and can scrutinize pictures of your living room to see if you have any taste. And I’ve linked to my husband’s reporting work before so it would take a marmot (sorry, went to the zoo today) about .04 seconds to get his name. These days, I think it’s a given that anyone can figure out someone’s identity, quickly.

But I draw a bright line between having an online identity and having my actual residence identified. In light of the open letter recently penned to my husband by Stabby McVengeful, I’ve started the process of getting us scrubbed off of the major websites that list our names with our address. I know I’ll miss something though. So do me a favor: see how easy it is. This is the kind of project that is ripe for crowdsourcing. If you know his name or mine, are you able to come up with our address? Email me what you find.

If you don’t have my email it should take you about six seconds to find it online.

Here’s a story you would think sprang forth from my me-focused subconscious but no, it actually happened.

My husband and I took the little lady to the park this afternoon and ran into a neighbor whom he has met but I have not. Yet we’ve exchanged waves in passing so he’s seen me a couple times. The guy says as we’re all standing there chatting, “You know, I’d met your husband but never officially met you. But you looked so familiar and I was thinking to myself, ‘Where do I know her from?’”

Punchline: He and his wife were in New Orleans last summer staying at one of the major hotels at the same time that my work’s mammoth annual convention was in town. We had delegates in most of those hotels so we were doing convention news broadcasts on all of their in-house networks. So this poor guy and his wife, after a long day in The Big Easy, would come home, put their feet up, turn on the TV and see… me.

To reiterate the noodle-blowing small worldness of all this: This dude and his wife are traveling in a city a bazillion miles away and I show up on their teevee. A week later, I move onto their street.

And yes, of course I offered to sign his baby’s head.

Yes, it appears that my firmly tongue-in-cheek tweet about my massage yesterday made it onto WhiteWhine. And yes, that’s right above supermactress Elizabeth Hurley’s selection yesterday.

They’d probably be decidedly less enthusiastic about my selection if they knew I’d used a gift card for the massage.

I craved childhood this week. Not for me, but for my husband. On Tuesday afternoon, after being blindsided by cancer only six months earlier, his mother passed away. He was with her, holding her hand and telling her she could go, that he and his two younger brothers would be OK. She needed to hear it I think, a mother first and foremost until the end.

He’d spent much of the past two weeks in her bedroom, talking softly to her, holding her hand and stroking her hair, giving her water. He helped ease her out of the world doing the same things that she’d done after bringing him into it.

After she’d gone, the men of the family pulled out boxes and boxes of old family photos, becoming engrossed in better days. The scrawny blond boys in those photos mercifully have no idea what’s coming in too few years. It was all Star Wars and Saturday morning cartoons and bike riding under the south Texas sun, then later, goofy sunglasses and pretty prom dates. I wanted it back for them.

As the week unfolded, my husband and his brothers tackled a long list of sad tasks. They went together and picked out her casket (the three Texas A&M alums swearing it was coincidence that it was a deep maroon — not that the former Hays County Aggie Moms president would have minded). They pulled their wives to them as we fell into tears. They spooned out yogurt and entertained children too young to grasp what was happening. They held their father, knowing when to talk and when not to say anything.

When their mom was taken away, these sons became even stronger men. But I just wished they could slip back into boyhood.

Out of mental self-preservation we spend every day pretending that what we love in life is permanent. Then we’re reminded in the ugliest of ways that it is not.

Last year my mother-in-law was traveling and vivacious. Three weeks ago, she was sitting having Christmas Eve dinner, slowed by illness but still laughing at the table at old family stories and giving out hugs. Now we are talking about the time she has left in terms of a few weeks.

This past fall, after suffering fevers and tiredness for a few weeks, she was diagnosed with cancer. At the time of the diagnosis it was already at stage IV and inoperable.

Terminal illness makes you realize that hating people for say, their political views is ridiculous. There are bigger things to hate. Like cancer. And I do. I want to scream at it and kick it off the edge of a cliff like some avenging heroine in an action movie.

I want to do a lot of entirely unproductive things that my mother-in-law has not done, because she has faced this illness with a preternatural calm. She is smiling still, even in a darkening hour. Because that’s how Susie is.

As a young woman, she had the looks and sparkle of a Texas debutante but went on to live a life of substance and intellectual curiosity that proved she was more than an exceedingly pretty face. If you wanted to know the best way to spend an afternoon in London or Dublin, she was the one who would point you to the eclectic, off-the-beaten-path museum that would become your favorite memory of the trip. She’d demonstrate the most effective way to iron a shirt while also describing a Puccini opera. She could teach more about spirituality by patiently coaxing the sound from a Tibetan singing bowl than a priest could in an hour-long sermon.

I will have to tell my daughter all of this. She will not experience it herself. Grandma Susie will live in stories told around the table and in 8mm footage in which the beautiful, smiling blond with the perfect gams outshines all every time she’s in frame.

Grappling with the full weight of this in recent weeks has made me realize that the term heartbreaking is not always hyperbole. You can feel your heart actually aching at the thought of a little girl’s grandmother being stolen from her. Likewise, of a grandmother being robbed of time with her pack of four wriggling, giggling grandchildren who adore her.

Praying for a miracle now is feckless, so I pray for continued calm and painlessness for my mother-in-law. I thank God that my daughter inherited her blond hair and features so similar that it’s sometimes uncanny. And I pray, against the odds, that her first memory will be of Grandma Susie singing her “Bah, Bah Black Sheep” while she rocks her to sleep.

Anyhoo, I’m standing in the play area watching Sabine and a girl of about three play at the same efficiently yet whimsically designed and affordably priced Flöorgenvørgen table when the three-year-old starts elbowing in on Sabine’s territory. Her father is standing right there but apparently he’s not seeing too clearly after the meatball and lingonberry lunch he just loaded up on because this happens:

* Three-year-old starts hulking in on toy with which Sabine was playing.

* Sabine gives her a “the hell?” look.

* Three-year-old’s father says, “[Name], don’t take that; she’s smaller than you.” He pauses, and adds, “even if she did snatch it.”

* I give him a “the hell?” look. Seriously, he can’t just own that his kid was being the noodge without having to blame it unfairly on a toddler?

* Three-year-old, also looking confused, says in her beautiful little lispy choirgirl voice of unwavering honesty, “Thee didn’t thnatch it from me.”

* Father turns beet red.

* Three-year-old gilds the lily by sharing with Sabine the toy she was holding, clearly as a peace offering.

And that kids, was the Martin Luther King Day in which IKEA was the scene of someone speaking truth to power, helping me keep my vow of non-violence.

Photo: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times