Apparently, my tolerance for cigarette smoke is increasing.

I say this because I didn't even complain this weekend when I went to Cincinnati with my parents for my grandfather's birthday, and upon our arrival, we learned that because we were late getting in, we would have the pleasure of a smoking room. They had given all the non-smoking rooms away, you see. My vision, of course, was of a smoky haze that would be hanging around the reading lamps when we got there, and maybe even of the odd cigarette butt snuffed out in the little mugs we were supposed to use for the in-room coffee in the morning.

As we were about to learn, the fact that I associated "in-room coffee" with this particular establishment was a misconception for which I was to be mocked or pitied, depending on your level of compassion.

When we got there, though, it smelled to me not so much like I had crawled into an ashtray, the way I feared it would. Instead, it was like I had simply entered a hotel room twice as stale as most. Not aggressively smoky, just not aggressively clean, the way a room should be when you're about to sleep there and try to forget everything you saw on Dateline about the black light and the bodily fluids and the la la la I'm not listening, because I have my fingers in my ears.

The first thing we noticed in the room, however, was that my father was promptly bothered by a mosquito. He smacked it, and then he congratulated himself -- and deservedly so. Ten seconds later, I un-congratulated him, because I saw the mosquito, still flying around. Oh, no, he assured me, he had certainly squashed it. He had picked it off his finger with a tissue, in fact. So what was with this one? Well, it was a new one. So we killed that one, too. And then we killed the third one. He checked the window for suspicious breaches, but we found none.

My mother emerged from the bathroom, and we learned from her two things. First, the toilet didn't flush unless you held the handle down for a second. Second, it apparently would run forever if you didn't -- you guessed it -- jiggle the handle. Does anyone actually jiggle the handle anymore? Isn't jiggling the handle a little passe at this point? Not for us, it wasn't.

That night, we discovered that air conditioning, which seems like a blessing when it hums to life in a stuffy little box that already contains traces of smoke and mosquito and such, can also be a curse. Specifically, it is a curse when it brings with it a chemical smell that I associate with a sudden release of chlorofluorocarbons that make me wonder whether I can go all night without taking a deep breath. The air conditioner, quite simply, has a stench.

In the morning, however, I was up and raring to go, although depressed by the lack of -- yes, that's right -- in-room coffee. Doesn't everybody offer in-room coffee now? Good grief. Like I want to walk over to the lobby at 8:00 in the morning in my "God Is In The Tub" shirt and my pajama pants and my hair doing its matted morning thing, just so I can fetch a styrofoam cup of weak, burnt brew that I secretly suspect of being decaf, not for any particular reason but because this hotel is simply that kind of suck.

My first order of business, once I got my eyes propped open, was to iron my sunny pink shirt. I know what you're thinking, but if you didn't know what was coming, I would argue you might not be thinking it yet. You are thinking, "Do not rest the hotel iron upon your sunny pink shirt until you have verified that it is not covered with mysterious blue goo!" Well . . . yes. I should have done that. But I didn't. I put the hotel iron down upon my sunny pink shirt, and it turned out to be covered with mysterious blue goo indeed, which my mother blamed on someone's overzealous use of spray starch. So while I tried to figure out what I was going to put on instead, my mother worked her magic on the pink shirt and removed almost all of the goo. Mom: Removing Glop From Your Clothes For More Than Thirty Years.

The TV, when you turned it on, started on a channel of its own choosing and at a blaring volume you had never chosen. There was literally one tissue in the Kleenex dispenser when we arrived -- yes, the one my father used on the mosquito. There weren't enough towels. The keycards worked for approximately eight hours at a time, provided you didn't let them touch anything else, including your credit cards, your keys, a snap inside your purse, or anything else that would render them instantly useless.

It is difficult to explain just how painful this particular hotel turned out to be. But there is a bright side. I have chosen to take it as a testament to how much my parents and I still like each other that we spent an entire weekend sharing this one room, and no one was carried out on a stretcher or carried any of his or her teeth out in a jar. Not even the front desk clerk who acted so horribly put-upon when I wanted a goo-free iron. She was certainly in the most peril of any of us.