Tag Archives: existential crisis

Creatures of love

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Producing all this content is hard, dog. It’s hard out here for a boring lady. Today I sprawled in the bed while a baby napped. I read a book. The cat slept on my legs. She tolerates me. My book was acceptable. Maybe I will write about what was in the book at another time. It was nice to read with a cat and a baby. When I did catch Asperger’s, anyway? It must be going around. Spread by mosquitos.

Later, we went to a local event related to food. It was tremendously unsatisfying in its execution. We returned to our home with cold food that somehow cost us $30. A baby was displeased and would not relent until she was allowed to roll around on a blanket without pants. A huge thunderstorm moved in, and she would not believe that I was not causing it. This is the Lord’s way of telling us to move out of this town. Do not mess with what I eat.

Fiesta de Septiembre

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Today is the third anniversary of my legal ensnarement of Mr. H. At least according to the state of Massachusetts. The JP actually filled out the form wrong. It’s really tomorrow. Then our sham wedding anniversary is Wednesday. Got it? OK. It’s a big month here atop the Indian burial ground. We both have birthdays, and of course our cat anniversary because I am the asshole who gives free kittens as gifts. I can’t wait to turn 25 again. Each year, our age gap widens. Soon it’ll be like {Warren Jeffs joke}. Oh, my heart’s not in it. You may note that I have a nearly three-month-old baby, so what happens in September does not stay in September. Don’t believe September for a moment. She’ll screw your cousin, give you herpes, and make you think you gave it to her first.

It’s 2 PM, and I have accomplished a shower (but not a hair drying, and now it looks all funny) and two baby naps. The painter’s tape stuck to one spot on the ceiling mocks me. It’s been there since January, and all I want to do is tear it down. But I can’t lift the ladder by myself, and the person who can lift the ladder will make so much noise that a baby wakes up. A tired baby is an angry baby. So here we are again, piece of tape. The days just trickle away. Hi, hi!

Accomplishment Friday

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One week after Bastille Day (ce n’est pas Bastille Day), a baby achieved five weeks of breathing. A baby had seen better weeks, what with having the little thing that holds her tongue in her mouth removed and all. Long story, but she did really well, and the people at Children’s Hospital were very nice and simultaneously achieved the desired results while not accidentally killing her. I almost handled the dying for her, because my heart broke wide open from seeing her little head bobbing over the nurse’s shoulder when they took her into the OR. Oh shit, you have no idea.

Clearly her mouth developed improperly because of Something I Did While Pregnant. Did I take a Sudafed? Was it because I came within a few feet of the litterbox? Was it the sushi? See, I am pre-emptively guilt tripping myself. She’s going to have so much more free time as a teenager. Whenever she’ll start with “It’s all your—” I’ll be like “Gotcha covered, kid. See: July 2006, where I walked around with rocks in my shoes as penance.” And she’ll shrug, steal some of my Valium, and leave to go buy a slutty outfit.

We all needed a break on Friday night, so we tempted fate by walking downtown to get ice cream. A baby obligingly fell asleep in the sling, which is great because going somewhere in public with a baby is a bit like handling dynamite. Handling dynamite was covered in a episode of Lost, if you need a refresher. Results were mixed. We made it within a few doors of the ice cream place when a man scurried up to us and said “The guy from Lost in Space is at Gary’s Ice Cream!” We said “Oh,” and he helpfully offered “Not the old guy, the other guy.” Well, whoopee.

So we get in there, and Major Don West is signing photos for a bunch of obese older people in sci-fi themed t-shirts! Wow! He even had a seven-foot-tall replica of The Robot. Why did we leave the house without a camera?

Thus distracted, I made a fatal error when ordering my ice cream. I ordered a scoop of one flavor in a cup, and a scoop of a second flavor, intended to share the cup. But because I didn’t yell “PUT THEM IN THE SAME CUP,” each scoop arrived nestled in its own cup. Mr. H asked them to put the two scoops in the same cup, and panic ensued. The counter person couldn’t process this request, so he brought in the seventeen-year-old manager. “What’s the problem?”

“Um, we want both of these scoops in one cup.”

“What?”

Finally, after we employed hand gestures, switching to two other languages, drawing a crude image on a napkin, and holding Major Don West at knife point, TeenMgr squeezed both single cups into…another cup, single sized. At that point, I ran out screaming and threw the whole dripping mess in the trash.

At least a baby slept all the way home.

What is the sound of one hand typing?

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About two weeks ago, I informed Mr. H that it was Canada Day.

“What? Is that why all those French people are driving around waving flags out of their cut-suspension Renaults?”

“No, honey, you’re thinking of Bastille Day.”

And here we are! C’est Bastille Day. Also known as “A baby has been alive for four weeks.” A baby will be a full one month old on Sunday. This week, a baby has learned to smile in response to a smile and make a sound approximating a laugh. She also has some new noises that are sort of screechy, but not crying. More like the caws of a gleeful pterodactyl. She enjoys rolling over to escape the totally bullshit “tummy time” paradigm and following a toy with her eyes. Once in a while she manages to get her hand in her mouth, and that is a good time. Hobbies include “naked butt time” and sleeping up to 4 hours at a time. She also loves to be outside, so I drag my ill-groomed self outside several times a day to walk with her in the sling. Except today, because it is hot as balls.

A baby also broke out in a crusty rash, got diarrhea, and made her distaste for the booger removal apparatus known. Next week a baby has to have a minor surgical procedure to correct a defect in her mouth. I am feeling like a hideous ogre for even entertaining the idea of allowing someone to rearrange my baby. A baby will get a hit of laughing gas for her procedure. I hope they are doing a two-for-Tuesday deal for parents.

—

I am never doing this again.

Did I mention I am never doing this again?

This is my last Bastille Day with a four-week-old baby. Phew!

—

At some point, I will write her full birth story. It’s a corker. My best theory is that the river flooding scared the bejesus out of her, because she promptly stopped growing and ran out of amniotic fluid (her first version of “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue,” perhaps). So she sneakily skirted a hippie water birth. I was floating around in the tub and everything, until the midwife basically said “ah, no way, dude” after listening to her heart rate crash. This earned us a white knuckle car ride to the hospital, where a Colombian man I’d never met before cut her out of my belly. I think he yelled “gooooooallllll” when he yanked her out. She also hates baths. No water, plz kthx. She didn’t ask to be born!

It’s No Good, reports Depeche Mode

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I am still not allowed to live in my house. This displeases me.

Yesterday I was debating weeping or going to the post office, case and my sister helpfully suggested that I go to the post office and weep there. This turned out to be just the ticket. Thanks, ethicist! Everyone else was already weeping, even the employees. And after filling out a few forms and showing ID and a little ankle, I am allowed to pick up mail today.

Is it possible to get PTSD from sheer inconvenience?

If you need me, I’ll be in the bell tower

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I am trying to book a hotel room, and I’m really tempted to book the “Housewives on Hiatus” package just for the stupid name.

A better idea is probably to check into a monastery with a vow of silence until the baby arrives. Then I will have the baby out in the woods, like animal, away from everyone who annoys me. At this point, “everyone who annoys me” includes just about everyone but the cat. It’s no fault of everyone’s own. Science knows that weeks 31-40 of parasite hosting are when husbands become intolerable. They can’t help it, the dear little creatures! It’s the hormones acting on their delicate systems.

Despite being all Phantom of the Opera and hissing and scurrying into darkness, I still manage to show some restraint. When I think of all the people I did NOT kill over the past few days, I am truly amazed. The person at Starbucks who ordered a half-caf, half-syrup, skim caramel macchiato with one Equal. The financial consultant. This freak was referred to us by a relative (remind me to send a card). Freak assumed I was a housewife rather than asking the more reasonable “And what do you do for a living?” Oh, hey, do you see those many thousands of dollars of computer equipment in the office? That’s just so I can play The Sims when I take a hiatus from housewifing.

He directed all questions about investments and expenses to Mr. H. Mr. H knows about as much about where the bodies are buried as the cat. So I kept having to answer. The parasite sensed evil, and kicked the ever-loving crap out of me the whole time the guy was here. When he tried telling me about fund choices, I asked about ethical investing options. He looked at me like I was insane. I said “Well, for instance there are some companies we don’t patronize, so I can’t feel good about making money from them either.” He asked for an example, and I said Wal-Mart, I mean duh. He was shocked. “Wal-Mart? I never heard anything about them being bad.” I booted him out the door, but not before he left business cards containing both a Hotmail address and his “title” in “quotes.” If he’s not a “Wealth-Accumulation-Strategist,” then what is he? I have formulated several hypotheses, but the one that makes the most sense is “Not coming anywhere near my no money.”

Consider your options

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Consider your options

I can say nothing intelligent about port security, abortion rights (Roe support petition), religious riots, torture, or just about any other thing. I have a headache, and there is an error retrieving XML called “undefined.” And another idiot can’t clear her cache. That’s not a euphemism for constipation. Someone genuinely refuses to believe that a browser would trick her like that, so clearly I must not have uploaded the changes.

Instead I will tell you that I’ve been having crippling anxiety dreams. In the last one, I was working at an upscale dog salon/function room, and I had to do set up for a dog Bar Mitzvah. I didn’t know which accessories to set out, so I set them all out. I got yelled at anyway. I woke up with a foot in my bladder, a cat on my head, and a sense of impending doom.

Get glad in the same pants you got mad in

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I hear we have a killer storm heading this way. That’s fine, being snowed in will give me more time to chew a hole in the wall to create an additional phone jack in the right spot for the fax machine. Some would say “Put the fax machine near an existing phone jack,” and others would say “Why do you even have a fax machine?” These would both be valid lines of reasoning. But the fact is, I have to fax things, and I am not going to do it in the kitchen. I am having the extra jack put in the bathroom, so I can have a phone by the toilet like in a hotel. That makes much more sense.

And this reminds me of the nicest bathroom I’ve ever used, which is the one at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. Well, they have more than one. Many more. They are all nice. Once you are able to heat your bottom in a chamber of silence, you can never go home again.

I am feeling all very Prufrock today. There was a time when I did not deign to deal in faxing, except to think that faxable pizza would be a great idea. Read: I was baked more then. At least I have used a nice bathroom. That’s more than, I don’t know, Haiti can say.

Truthy, not facty, with annoying emphasis

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Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The parasite has learned to roll over, which feels rather odd. My mother always stood in the wings during high school and college hissing “You know I’ll always pay for an abortion, right?!” Now she’s inventing excuses to fly up and rub my belly. I should have bilked her out of abortion money while I had the chance. She’s never going to fall for an abortion a month now. Gestating is not nearly as uncomfortable and grotesque as I once conjectured, but I still wouldn’t wish it on anyone who didn’t want to do it. My resolve is strengthened.

Today is also the most depressing day of the year, mathematically (thanks, Lisa!). In unrelated news, through a complicated scheme, I will cancel my cable and restart it on the same day to get a free month of service. Why TV? I like OnDemand. I don’t like owning DVDs, and I am actually too lazy/busy to send Netflix movies back. It’s true. I just sent back one from July. We paid something like $75 to watch that movie. I wish Apple would get with it and figure out how to beam first-run movies directly into my head. I can’t see the movie screen because I need glasses now. Getting old is a bitch! I have toe arthritis. I’m not really 25, no matter what I might claim. Don’t listen to me at all.