Get Clucky!

What Have I Been Doing All This Time?

2005-07-10T21:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't been reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, that's what. I have no idea why not. A copy sat on my mother's bedside table the whole time I was growing up, but somehow I never got around to it.

Just to state the obvious: it is very good.

Here's a sentence, just from the beginning or so, that gives a sense of the prose:

Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and pasy which sometimes ended at her ear. She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.

But that's a little more flip sounding than most of the book, which is both placid and melancholy. It is a book sort of about the practice of keeping house, but actually it is about being unable to keep a house. It is about being unable to keep anything.

Which, let's be clear, is kind of a hard thing to read about if you're unsure about your ability to baby-make...which is an ability that, around here at least, has a lot to do exactly with the desire to have and to hold: to keep. Nevertheless, I think the book helped me worked through some stuff, and also, more professionally, have a good time imagining course syllabi I might include it in. I might pair it with White Noise, for example, which is also about keeping and not keeping and impermanence and feeling set loose. But this one would, I think, blow white noise right out of the water.

Ovulation WTF

2005-07-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

One of the more optimistic things I've been meaning to do this week is to buy an ovulation detection kit. Or do you say an ovulation detector? Whatever. One of those. But I've had no luck, because I haven't been to a pharmacy that has the kind my doctor told me to get (clear plan easy), and so then I look at all the other ovulation detectors and have weird little conversations with the pharmacists about their thoughts and whether or not the cheaper one would work, etc. It stresses me out a little.

So anyway, last night I had a very long strange dream--probably my third or fourth this week that has involved not one but two babies (which is weird, too, but another point entirely). In my dream, I had got an ovulation dectector kit, and opened it up so I could do the pee test, etc, because (in my dream) it was first thing in the morning and I had to go.

But, in my dream, I had bought of course the wrong ovulation detector kit. Inside, instead of the nice little plastic stuff I'd been expecting, was a cup, a little packet of the paper you pee on, and also (get this) a PLANT. And according to the directions in the box, what you did was put a piece of paper into the cup, pee in the cup, and then select a couple of leaves from the plant to put in the cup, and then DRINK IT. YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DRINK THE PEE! and then, if it was "spicy," you had ovulated.

I just don't know what to say about my crazyness here, people. Even in my dream, I was all: Dude, this is FUCKED UP.

I am thinking the whole leaf thing might have to do with "ferning mucus," which I am a little obsessed with these days. But as to the pee-drinking, I just cannot defend my weird unconscious.

Ew.

Pro-Family, Pro-IVF, Pro-Choice

2005-07-08T08:29:00.000-07:00

Via Feministe:

I had heard a bit about this, but this article was still very amazing to me: it's about the anti-IVF dimension of anti-choice groups. Though I supppose it shouldn't really be so shocking to read about a protester holding up a sign that says "IVF Kills Babies," when that belief is a natural next step from the basic "life begins at conception" attitude.

I've always been pro-choice...but in the abstract rather than in the personal sense, since I never really thought I would need to get an abortion. But now that i'm taking my first steps into the land of infertility, the attack on IVF really hits home.

There's lots to say about this, but I guess I don't want to get into all my pro-choice views here. But I do want to say: what this emphasizes to me is that, more clearly than ever, it is the pro-choice groups who are on the side of women who want to have babies...and that in allowing women to have control of their reproductivity, one thing we do is to allow them to be the most careful and secure mothers they can be.

Having control of your reproductive system isn't just about your right to have an abortion; it's about your right to be a mom.

Thoughts about London

2005-07-07T08:44:00.000-07:00

B's father is from England, and that whole side of the family still lives in the London area. We just confirmed that everyone is safe.

It's a scary morning. I woke up to Bush's speech. Like him, I think it is so important to show resolve--to continue living and working for what you believe in--in the face of catastrophes like these.

But I was struck by listening to what he said about people with "evil in their hearts." I certainly agree that it is evil to kill innocent people. But what is most terrifying to me is that the people who do this don't think they are evil. They're not anarchists or sadists--they don't do it for fun. They do it because they believe that what they do is good.

Sometimes I can't get my head around that. I've been thinking about it a lot these days, because I've been reading a lot of proslavery pamphlets from the 1840's-50's, and all those people really believe that, in holding slaves, they are doing God's will. It's so horrible to realize.

I guess this morning what I am most scared of is not the mindless forces of evil in the world, but rather the terrifying ways in which rigid belief can turn a commitment to do good into horrible, evil acts against the very people, the very world, you would do good for.

Music to Drive Around To

2005-07-07T07:27:00.000-07:00

My friend PJ drives an elderly volvo, the air conditioning in which is somewhat, shall we say, shy. It works sometimes, but it's sort of bashful and retiring and has to be cajoled. So generally PJ leaves the air conditioning to its wall flower self and just drives around with the windows down.

The thing about about muggy summer window-down driving is that it requires a special soundtrack. Every summer he starts looking for good driving tunes. He won't see this blog...but these are my suggestions. Just sort of for posterity.

Why are these in all caps? Not really because I mean them so emphatically. I just did some sloppy cutting and pasting, and here we go.

WHERE I’M FROM, DIGABLE PLANETS
DAFT PUNK IS PLAYING AT MY HOUSE, LCD SOUNDSYSTEM
BEAST OF BURDEN, ROLLING STONES
MODERN GIRL, SLEATER-KINNEY
BABY C’MON, STEVEN MALKMUS
SUPERSONIC, BASEMENT JAXX
SPORTING LIFE, THE DECEMBERISTS
HAITI, ARCADE FIRE
ANOTHER TRAVELIN’ SONG, BRIGHT EYES
YOU’RE SO VAIN, CARLY SIMON

Also, just in general: most anything by David Bowie or Johnny Cash.

Hey, did everybody see this?

2005-07-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

My mom--only newly clued in to my fertility woes--sent me this link after seeing the author interviewed on the Today show.

Child Magazine has done the first non-cdc evaluation of infertility clinics. You can get the full text here.

This doesn't directly help me, since none of the clinics they pick as the "best" are in my area. But I found it interesting to read through the reviews, because it gave me a since of what to look for, what to ask. And also, really, a bigger sense of how weird and secretive the whole industy is.

Something I was reading the otherday encouraged me (well, the reader) to remember that infertility clinics are business--and that the doctors are probably the ones who are making money off the business. So it's important to remember that their judgement might be a little biased--and that, while they have a lot of incentive to reccommend proceedures to you, they have no real incentive to think about your quality of life, or about why it might be better for you to slow down, take care of yourself and your relationship, etc.

My Project for Today

2005-07-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Is to get some fucking work done. A pal of mine just emailed me from Paris, where she is doing "research" this year, to let me know that she just finished her second dissertation chapter.

Friends, she and I are in the same place in grad school--in the past year she has actually had a larger non-research load than me--and she just finished her second chapter. And me, I'm still sort of plucking placidly at the hem of chapter one.

As soon as she sent me this email, I immediately began to rationalize. Of course she has so much done! It is because she is maniacally single-minded! But even so, I could have gotten that much done, if I wanted to! I could have! I just had to go to the doctor twenty-seven times. And then I had to blog about it! And check to see what happened to other people at the doctor's office! And then, I also had to make fourth of july deserts! Lots of them! How am I supposed to get my dissertation written when I've got all -that- going on, huh? HUH?

Okay, but really, today I'm going to get some work done. Off I go! Watch me!

***I will say in passing that partly it's hard to shift from obsessing about pregnancy to working on my dissertation, because my dissertation is all about mid-19c domesticity and women's self-expression. So really...all this obsessing and blogging seems like it should count somehow. Maybe I could turn in this blog as chapter one? Eh?

***And the other thing that I should say in passing is that doing this dissertation research really makes me put my own little problems in perspective (which maybe is why I'm not actually doing it, but lets not go there). As Joie says, in some ways I've got -good- news because I've got a pretty treatable problem. I can complain about my own fragile nerves and the inequities of the medical system, but man--an infertile woman in the nineteenth century? She really had problems. Can you imagine? You would just wait around your whole life and you would never know what was going on. Awful.

Okay, to work now. really! okay!

It's Official!

2005-07-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

I've got a condition, but I can't spell really spell it.

It's called hypothalamic amenorrhea. It means my hormones are weird. It means it will be hard to get pregnant. Ah! Science.

It's funny, because this is, while not a major breakthrough, bigger news to me than it seems to be to my doctor. She's very cas, very, "oh, well, here's the phone number for the infertility clinic, don't worry, it's not like you can't get pregnant." And I feel a little bit like someone sort of casually was like "oh, well, yes, you've got cancer, don't worry, most people don't die." I mean, isn't infertility a real diagnoses anymore? I feel like she should sort of be willing to pat my hand gently and say, "I've got some bad news for you. You're reproductively challenged." And then I could have some nice cathesis and feel like I'd learned something. As is, I just get appointments for more tests, and phone numbers for people who will give me more tests. All the real information feels perpetually deferred. I even had to sort of pull a diagnosis out of her: "so...what would you call...I mean...is this hormonal...?" I should have just asked if I had HA, which I was pretty sure about, but somehow I wasn't sure how to ask that.

Anyway. Since I did eventually have a mini-period after the progesterone, it's not impossible that I'll ovulate this month--and if I do, it's fine to try to get pregnant, cyst or no cyst.

So that's the news, kids! What happens now, I do not know.

Again with the Marscapone

2005-07-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Having some problems with blogers photo feed. Maybe this will work. If it does, note especially how creamy and fluffy the marscapone is, and how it calls out the two sweet words: "food fight! food fight!"

Perhaps i shall take the leftovers to the doctors office today, and put it to good use if I don't get good news.

Fourths are for Families

2005-07-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

The Fourth of July is one of the biggest holidays on my mom's side of the family--most years, everyone gets together in my little home town and goes to the parade and watches the fireworks and sets off fireworks and lounges around and eats lots of creamy, fruity deserts. It's fantastic.

However, since we all got together at my uncle's wedding a month ago, this year there were no family obligations, and I thought: hey! How bout having a fun, urban holiday with friends!

Unfortunately when I made this plan I did not realize that I would be in the throes of fertility-cyst-crazy weirds, and be a leeetle more invested in family traditions than I am anyway. At about eleven pm on the night of the third, I found myself thinking: well, if I leave to drive the seven hours home -now-, I would make it in time for the parade tomorrow afternoon. That's not crazy. Is that crazy? I would get to stay at least four or five hours before I had to drive the seven hours back to make my doctor's appointment on Tuesday.

Needless to say, B. convinced me that this was, yes, crazy. So we stayed here. But to console myself, I made all my friends come over for a holiday potluck, creamy fruity deserts included. See photos above: there is Blueberry Buckle, Lemon Tort, and Strawberry Marscapone (which I can't spell).

It was so great and so fun, and the food was so good, and everyone was so indulgent of me even when I decided that I had to read the introduction to the Declaration of Independence as a form of saying grace. They are good friends.

However! Some of these friends are boys who are so sweet and femmy they have a hard time working through their VERY NOTICEABLE competitive streaks. Two of these boys in particular are so sweet and enamored with each other and also very competitive that they just MAKE EACH OTHER CRAZY! But they totally like each other too.

And somehow all this long-pent-up competition/love burst forth just about the time we were trying to serve deserve, and the end result is that the marscapone ended up EVERYWHERE. Everywhere! Food fight! Whip cream! Boys squealing! Whip cream down on the windows! On the floors! In the hair! Down the boxer shorts!

Not even kidding. I heard these words: "Dude, there is whip cream ALL down my ass crack." Which is so over the top there's no point in doing the queer reading.

The happy ending is that everyone involved (silly boys) got out of their creamy clothes, jumped in the shower (not together, sadly) and then moped my floor while wearing borrowed swim trunks. And then, while the floor was still wet and we could all do styly moonwalk moves, we had an impromptu dance party while listening to "99 Luftballoons" in honor of our German guests.

So, this is not my normal family fourth. But I'll take it.

Doctor's appointment today! Send good vibes.

Well, It's Always Something

2005-07-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

And today what it is is a cyst. A big one in my right ovary: 2.5 by 1.5 inches. The ultrasound technician who discovered it said, "Well! I mean, it's not...huge."

But having something two inches long in my body is definitely huge in my mind. And it's also hugely bad news, because it means that I can't start the clomid, and also, I can't exercise because the cyst might be so heavy that it would make my ovary "fall down" if it gets jarred, which could put a crimp in my fallopian tube.

Which--well. Just imagine that.

I can't really convey how disturbing this is--and I'd been so excited this week!--except to say that the nurse was being all sweet and supportive and I just--I just cried. And that's not my usual M.O.

But things are fine in the grand scheme. The cyst will dissipate. It's not dangerous. It slows things down, but I can handle that.

I have a consultation with my doctor on Tuesday, so I'll know more then. But just wanted to get this down.

Politics, just for break from the pregnancy

2005-07-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

My uncle saw this quotation, and confirmed it through the Eisenhower library.

Dwight Eisenhower in a letter to his brother, Nov. 8, 1954:

"The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

That's right.

Some Nice Ladies

2005-07-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

So, in the midst of this stressful week, I have met some really nice ladies. And wow--thank god for nice ladies who come out of the woodwork when you need them! Let me just mention them:

1: Nice Pharmacist Lady

So right after my ob/gyn appt on Tuesday, I went to get my prescriptions filled for all my drugs-of-awesome. I handed the scripts (is that the right word) to the lady behind the counter. She was sort of dour and middle aged and didn't make eye contact, but that was okay with me b/c I was still sort of twitchy from the ob/gyn and was muttering randomly under my breath weird phrases like "tell me its hard to get pregnant, I'll show you, getting pregnant, stupid pregnant doctor, I KNEW it'd be hard to get pregnant, stupid getting pregnant, stupid doctor." So we weren't really connecting, this dour pharmacist and I but that was okay with both of us.

And then, when she looked at what I'd handed to her, she magically turned into a Nice Pharmacist Lady! And got all warm and sort of misty around the eyes and said, "Oh!! Honey, good luck with all of this!!" And then proceeded to tell me about how her daughter is also a little reproductively challenged, and she (the nice pharmacist) is starting to pay a lot attention to infertility treatments, and would I come back and tell her how it works? If it works and I don't need more drugs, I can just come back for prenatal vitamins! Just ask for Barb. She really wants things to go well for me.

And she was SO nice that she listened to a somewhat prostrated rant (more "tell ME its hard to get pregnant, stupid pregnant doctor talkin' 'bout getting pregnant" stuff) and didn't even bat an eyelid or subtly imply that if I was really feeling that way, then maybe I needed something stronger than clomid, perhaps a sedative or an antipsychotic. She just nodded very sweetly and said again, "Just ask for Barb."

2: Nice homoeopathy Lady

Yesterday I was in a total hurry, but popped my head into a natural foods store to ask if they sold this fertility supplement that I've heard to be effective, and which I thought might be a nice low key healthy thing to balance out the clomid-weirds. So I went in, and I'm standing in front of the vitamin shelf, and the little store owner comes whizzing by. The Homeopathy is sort of maternal and squat and dyky--picture a softball player with long hair and bouncing busoms. Low-voiced. Bouncy.

"Can I help you?" she said. And, although I don't really like to be helped I said, yes, she could, I was looking for this one supplement, or really anything to increase cervical fluid.

And she asked if I was trying to get pregnant? And I said I was. And she said: "AH! WHAT YOU WANT IS FERNING MUCUS!" And she said it just like that.

Now, I have gotten pretty okay with a lot of things during my months of thinking about baby making. Mostly I have done this by replacing the word "mucus" with the word "fluid" anytime we are talking about my Specials rather than my nose. Call me a prude, but there it is.

But this lady wanted to talk about FERNING MUCUS! AT LOUD VOLUMES! FAST!

She is very interested in FERNING MUCUS because she had artificial--no, but she likes to say alternative--insemination herself and if I wait I can see her 14 year old daughter walk in the door any minute so she knows a lot about FERNING MUCUS and how to make a lot of FERNING MUCUS and how the answer is: dairy.

She said, "I could sell you this or that, but plain and simple, what you need for your FERNING MUCUS is dairy. Ice cream, yogurt, cheese, milk, whatever. When's your target date? Come back and I'll sell you some raw cheese because it's so great and it's easily absorbency and it will really help you make a lot of FERNING MUCUS because you need is a lot of FERNING MUCUS because you really need to make a stream, a stream for the swimmers to climb into the uturus, so the more FERNING MUCUS you've got the better for those swimmers. Do you have good swimmers?"

Which is something we all must ask ourselves. Do YOU have "good swimmers?" I couldn't' ponder this question in depth, though, because I was two distracted by the Nice Homeopathy Lady's bouncing and her ACTING OUT, with full arm gestures of what the FERNING MUCUS STREAM would look like and how the SPERM WOULD SWIM up my DAIRY-INDUCED FERNING MUCUS STREAM. Ferning mucus! Streams! Dairy! Swimmers!

Finally she concluded that I'd been sufficiently convinced as to the importance of dairy in my production of ferning mucus, and she let me leave the store. But not before she said, "You're going to be a great mom. You seem really kind!"

And I don't know how she figured that out, unless maybe not everyone listens so intently to her protracted Dairy-MUCUS lectures, but I have to say it was good to hear.

(note illustration up at the top there of FERNING MUCUS, which I was able to upload so easily now to blogger's new updated photo feed. fun!)

Wait! Ask me again!

2005-06-30T15:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my dog says that, when we tell her to do something and she isn't paying attention, and then slowly realizes that she's missed out on some treat. "Ask me again! I was listening! Really! I can DO this!"

Okay, so this time--it's my uterine lining saying that.

Friends, I have big news. It is very startling. To me. To my ob/gyn. Also to my no-longer-quite-white underwears.

Yes, it's true--I got my period. A verrry verrry small tiny dot of a period, a one-panty-liner-all-day sort of period, maybe more of an ellipsis really. But a period.

I started having very light spotting tuesday night, and can now report that I am on day two of a menstrual cycle. Never in my life was I so glad to ruin a pair of underpants.

My ob/gyn said, "oh! well."

So I guess the deal is that this is a "weak positive" to the progesterone challenge I took way back when. Which is better than a negative, but still sort of weird. And the lightness of the period indicates that (yes, duh) my uterine lining is very thin, so still lots of recuperation to be done. Probably no bebe anytime soon, but maybe sooner rather than later.

And, since I'm having a "cycle," lets call it that even though it's weird and reticent, I get to start my clomid stuff tomorrow, at 4 pm, with another blood test and an ultrasound. So they can tell me exactly how small my uterine lining is.

So: YAY. Yay!!

I asked many questions about the clomid, and the nurse agreed that it might not be very helpful but that it also wouldn't hurt, and wouldn't I rather try the cheap low-risk thing before the expensive painful high risk things? Why, yes I would. Okay by me to put off injecting myself in the stomach! I'd touch my own cervix first any day. and I'm glad to do something I can start now.

other thoughts in passing:

I can hardly believe I am the person having these conversations. I mean: really.

What the Medicales Told Me

2005-06-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

"You're going to have a hard time getting pregnant!"

Ah!!! They are so wise.

I wanted to say: no shit, sherlock. I wanted to say: I've being telling you that for years, Medicales-of-the-world! I wanted to say: your irritating use of the future tense fails to mask the fact that this "insight" is not much of a discovery, given that I _AM_ having a hard time getting pregnant! There's no "going to" about it! Bitch!

I didn't say any of that, though I did mumble a less English-nerd version of the last point there.

And lets be real clear that my grumbling serves mostly so I can pretend that this is not actually real news. Which it's not--clearly, I'm going to have a hard time getting pregnant.

But, friends, I cannot tell a lie: it sucks to hear that from a doctor.

Anyway, here's the scoop: it seems that my estrogen is really really low (blood tests taken so that this can be confirmed). Also, probably my uterine lining is really really thin. None of this is a terrible terrible blow in the wide world of infertility--this should probably be pretty manageable with treatment, though the doctor kept saying ominous things like "well, usually this works...but in -your- [extra special freakish] case we can't be sure..."

I have a lingering suspicion that if I just was really patient and willing to have a lot of sex in the next year or so, things might work out on their own. But then, they might not--and even so, I am not very patient.

So: clomid. That's the plan; that's the plastic container in my medicine cabinet. I have to take five weeks worth of other hormones first to stimulate (one hopes) a menstrual cycle, then start the clomid around the end of July.

There's lots to say about this, but it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. Just wanted to start getting it down. And to thank Alice for asking about it. Thanks, Alice!!

***

PS: Here's some amusing news: I am happy to report that in addition to all my poking and prodding, B. is required to have a semen analysis. Ha ha! I LOVE it. The doctor wisely points out that just because there is something "wrong" with me doesn't mean that there isn't also something "wrong" with B, and there's no point in a lot of hormone therapy if at the end of the day the guys just can't swim or something. Brilliant! So, B. gets to share in the awkward embarrassment. I am, bitchily, thrilled beyond words.

PPS: Did I mention that my doctor is pregnant? And so is her nurse? Both of them? I am happy to say that--I was happy for them! I was! Which I take to be a good sign, because despite my depleted hormones and withered parts, I still seem to be a normally functioning human being. Whew. I was getting worried there.

Off to meet the medicales

2005-06-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

In my mind, that's pronounced like "federales."

Anyway, this afternoon I have a "consultation" with my old ob/gyn. I'm excited and anxious, and rattling around my hot, empty, house. For various reasons I've decided to switch back to the standard doctors office for the duration--these reasons are mostly financial but also sort of strategic and personal, and I'm a little ambivalent about them. I hope the appointment goes well, and actually involes "consultation" rather than just "dictation," which is what I'm afraid I'm getting myself in for. Ah, the medicales. They are so damn...opinionated.

Doctor's visits often go a little poorly for me, because I'm always so busy trying to feel poised and calm--"yes, thanks, I'm fine. Fine. FINE!"-- that I don't do a good job of asking questions. I thought about asking my good friend, who's a journalist with pitch-perfect interrogatory powers, to go with me. But she's the one whose partner just had surgury for endometriosis, so she's a little busy at the moment.

I have been trying to read various websites about secondary amenorrhea, which is my self-diagnosis, and I am curious to see what the doctor will say. The next step could be some blood tests, it could be another, stronger, progesterone challenge. Or maybe she will want to move along to clomid--which, i think, would involve blood tests. Clomid seems a little sketchy to me, at this point, so I am thinking I would rather try more progesterone.

On the other hand, I am in a bit of a hurry. It has been six months since I had a period. If I were pregnant, I would be entering the third trimester now! Can you imagine?

Second Thoughts on Sorority

2005-06-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I said some things about the importance of having female friends. One thing I mentioned is that I felt like there were very few infrastructures for liberal, progressive, or alternative women to develop female friends. After all, if you're tattooed and agressive and suspicious of marriage you may not fit in real well at your local college sorority.

Well. I guess there are alternatives. And they come in an unexpected place: the rollar rink.

Today I went to get my hair cut at the very fabulous Big Hair Salon. The person who does my highlights (I know! When did I become a person who gets highlights? It's crazy!) is named Anna, and she is wonderful and serious Chicago and has tattooes of scissors all down her right arm. I am very enamored with her; I am always enamored with curvy punky girls who take no shit.

Anyway, today Anna said this sentence to me: "It's like being in a sorority--I love it!"*

Which I never expected to hear her say.

What was she talking about? A new group she participates in, the Windy City Rollers (and I strongly encourage you to check out the group photo at that link to ponder the ways it does and does not match a sorority group photo). Yes, it's Rollar Derby. They use phrases like "Derby Dolls." They also have "boot camp" several times a week, and lots of bruises, and a strong sense of sisterhood, I guess. Anna is super excited about it.

So, I mean, I am in general somewhat nervous about the fetishization of any kind of "girl on girl" action. But I am in favor of women making circles in which they can be both supportive and aggressive, cute and competetive. In some ways, I would rather have those things without the guise of fishnet antics. But hey--if I can have sorority at the same time as having zany fishnetted camp--maybe I should feel pretty pleased?

---
*She did make sure to add, spinning her scissors over her tattooed knuckles, "well, it's not exactly like a sorority. I mean, we don't wear pearls."

How We're Doing

2005-06-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

So this morning I went out for a short run (not that I would ever go for a long run; I'm not much of a runner). I was trotting along, sweatily, through one of the more residential and family-oriented areas of our neighborhood. Bungalows, sprinklers, etc. And then some flaccid middle-aged man, in a minivan with an american flag mounted on its roof, drove past, slowed down, and started yowelling "hey hey hey hey." He sounded like a honky fat albert. And I stopped mid stride and yelled, as loud as I could, "Fuck you, ASSHOLE!"

Actually, I didn't. What I yelled was, and I have no idea where this weird burst of rhetorical patriotism came from and I'm finding it a little embarrassing but never say I don't tell all: "You have a FLAG on your car! You should treat American women with some Fucking Respect!"

I swear I said that, isn't that weird?

Anyway, the point is (weird rhetorical patriotism aside): I live in a bit of a dicey neighborhood, and getting some cat calls is irritating but it's sort of par for the course and it very rarely provokes me to outburst. So I am thinking...despite the fact that I'm fine, I'm okay, that maybe I have a little bit of, you know, anger right now.

I've been a little cavalier about this (not just here, but in general), but I'm thinking that maybe I need to deal with some stuff a little more directly.

So: I'm upset.

Let's innumerate some reasons.

1: As always, my fucking ovaries. Or pituitary. Or whatever part of me it is that does not work. I am mad at it for not working.

2. My goldfish died this morning. I just can't really say anything about this, beyond mentioning that a dead fish in a hot kitchen is a bad thing to wake up to.

3. It's hot here. And B. is working like crazy this week and weekend, and I am too much alone.

4. My good friend's girlfriend just got diagnosed with endometriosis. However you spell that.

5. A casual acquaintance just had a miscarriage. I guess you'd call it that. But she went in for her eight month checkup, and the doctor told her the baby was dead. At eight months. And so she had to deliver it--and name it, and dress it, and bury it. It was a boy.

6. Compared to that, I think I don't have much to complain about But. I think I get to have a bunch of blood tests this weeek, to test for various hormonal problems. I'm not sure what happens then. It's worrisome, and I had a dream they had to cut some chunks out of my uterus because it was "dirty." I'm not kidding.

In general, I still feel basically optimistic about it all. I think this will be okay, and that I will eventually get pregnant, and that--while bad things will continue happening to good people--the world is a pretty lovely and summery place.

So I am working on trying to balance my general sense of okayness with my still-real sense of "THIS FUCKING SUCKS. ASS."

Okay. Back to it.

Variously Hysterical

2005-06-22T20:28:00.000-07:00

I am having a moment when I can't remember if the word "hysteria" relates to the ovaries or to the uterus. And thus: it is a perfect word for me to use here! Because, who knows if my "problem" is my ovaries or my uterus? Who knows? It also could be my pituitary gland, I think, but I don't know a word that means "feeling crazy" and subtly implicates both reproductive and endocrine organs in that craziness.

Anyway....Things are okay here. I have been pretty mopey, which seems only reasonable, but I took myself out for lunch today--wore a sundress and sat outside--and that was very soothing. Happiness=ordering an appetizer just to eat yourself.

I am distracting myself from my "hysteria" by:

1: trying to schedule an exam. This still a little up in the air.

2: Watching _Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle_.
This, you should see. I had the privilege of watching it with TJandon,* and I am sorry that you cannot watch it with them too because you will miss out on the CRAZY LAUGHTER that only TJandon can produce. But you should still see it. I have a friend who teaches it in her "Into to Asian American Lit" class.

*Only one person besides me knows who TJandon are, but hopefully she will understand what I'm talking about here.

3: Watching _Mr. and Mrs. Smith_

Okay , so I read some review of this movie that talked dismissively about how cliche it is to relate sex and violence. And I agree that that is a cliche. But I want to give this movie some props for relating sex and violence in what I found to be a pretty interesting way. To me, the movie raises the question: is wanting to hit your wife (after she shot you with a machine gun and a rifle and threw a knife at you and also got bad curtains) domestic violence? When is hitting your husband domestic violence?

In this movie, Brad and Angelina move in and out of relationships with each other: peers, spouses, competitors. There are different rules in those different roles. I think the movie makes some interesting observations about how those roles do and don't work together--and also about how getting in touch with your anger (and, okay, yes, your violence) might actually be good for your sex life. And, interestingly, how even when you get in touch with all that, you still have to act responsibly and deal with your argument about those damn bad curtains.

Also, the movie is forced to find a gender-neutral term for "hitman." Which is all for the greater good.

....so....

That's what I'm thinking about. I have the sense that this is a little fragmented, but I am going to stop now and hang out with my dog. She loves me even when my ovaries/uterus/pituitary gland is out of whack, and that is a good thing.

Adventures with the medico-industrial complex

2005-06-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so unless something changes in the next 24 hours (and, really, here's hoping), I'm probably going to have to pronounce this little "progesterone challenge" of mine a...um, failure? I hate that word.

Anyway, my body seems not to have responded to the hormonal stimulation, so I shall have to do the next thing.

Which begs the question: where shall I do it?

Now, I am a lucky lucky girl and am fortunate to have shacked up with a boy through whom I get pretty decent insurance. So I have no complaints. I know I'm lucky.

But still, I must complain because it doesn't seem that my insurance will cover my visits to the place I would prefer to go. Why? I don't know. Probably because they aren't effecient enough. Probably because they schedule hour-long appointments (!!) so that you can really talk through issues and options rather than the standard ten minutes I receive for an exam from my old ob/gyn. Who's nice and all. As much as I can tell during my brief encounters with her and her speculum.

I know I'm lucky that my ovaries shall receive adequate health care even if I go vist Dr. SpeedySpeculum. But I have to say that I would give a lot, at this nerve-frazzeling point in my reproductive health, for the support that a more careful exam and explanation could provide.

And I just want to say that it sucks that even though the Chicago Women's Health Center is clearly providing an invaluable service, and better care, and in a normal marketplace would win everytime over an average hospital, it will loose clients (I'm hoping not me) because my insurance won't let me go there.

I know it's not news that big business takes care of big business, and that our free market economy is not so very free. But my ovaries are encountering that economic reality in a particularly personal way right about now.

""

Waiting

2005-06-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

Anne Lamott said this about waiting for results from her amnio, when she was pregnant:

"During the first week of waiting, you actually believe your baby is okay, because you saw it scoot around during the ultrasound and because most babies are okay. By the middle of the second week, things are getting a bit dicey in your head, but most of the time you still think the baby is okay. But on the cusp of the second and third weeks, you come to know--not to believe, but to know--that you are carrying a baby inside you in only the broadest sense of the word "baby," because what is growing in there has a head the size of a mung bean, with almost no brain at all because all available tissue has gone into the building of a breathtaking collection of arms and knees--maybe not too many arms but knees absolutely -everywhere-."

--Operating Instructions, pg. 6

Anyway, we here are waiting around a lot this spring. Most lately, we are waiting for the "Progesterone Challenge" to show some results. It feels like we are running in place.

I do this little two-step with myself all the time: it's fine, everything is fine, it's stupid to think something wouldn't be fine, won't you feel silly if you make a big deal out of this and it's fine....and then back the other direction: your body doesn't work, you've always suspected it didn't work, you probably have an extra pair of knees where your ovaries should be, etc.

Exhausting! I am ready to be done with this now, please.

Parenting Techniques from the Hippies Among Us

2005-06-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

From my little wee third-story porchlette, I have a lovely view. I can see not only what most of my co-residents are doing on their wee porchlettes, I can also see into the neighbor's back yard, and into the back yard beyond that (and beyond that into the very windows of another building, which is also entertaining but another story entirely).

Anyway, this last back yard belongs to a lovely six-flat, occupied entirely by couples with young children. All of the people who live in the building work as pilates instructors and massage therapists and (I"m not even kidding) all work in the neighborhood--they all seem to have idyllic existences that involve walking to work and an abundance of ready and willing childcare. Plus did I mention the backyard? It's fenced in, and no one not three-stories up could see in. They are out there all the time, calling peacably to their happy and well-actuallized children: "Olivia! Johann!"

(Again, I'm not even kidding.)

I love to spy on them, and am secretly hoping that when/if I acquire un bebe that they adopt me into their happy idyllic fold, and that if they do they won't hate me for being a curmudgeony meat-eater.

Anyway.

Today the spying was very good. Two of the moms were out with the usual passel of children. One of the moms had a sprinkler hose, and all of the kids were in various stages of swim-suited undress. They kids were running and joyfully squealing and the mom was spraying and laughing a low-toned earth mother laugh, and all was well. It was very pastoral. And I thought: that looks fun.

And really, I found it all the more pleasing when I discovered that the manichean will of childhood had entered even into that well-actualized environment. Because, kids will be kids, even hippy ones, and they (seem to) like to know who the bad guy is. This is why even the hippy ones play copys and robbers, cowboys and indians, etc.

So what do you play if you are a well-actuallized hippy parent, armed with a WATER HOSE?

Ah. "Cops and Protesters." Of course!!

Since I am aspiring, as I mentioned, to spend as much time in a bikini as possible these days, I was tempted to wander over myself. But I was worried they wouldn't be happy about my beer.

Acceptable Risk

2005-06-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

I don't wear a bike helmet. I bike almost everyday, sometimes several miles on my way here or there, and I almost never wear a helmet. Why? They are irritating. They make my head sweaty, and they interfere with my pony tail. I just don't like wearing them.

I often am chided for this, as though my helmetlessness was a sign of utter and immature recklessness.

To which I say: I have had a bike wreck almost every summer of my life. I have scraped my knees and my palms and bruised my elbow and once sort of fell, painfully on my face. But I have never once had a bike wreck-related injury that would have been prevented by a helmet. So I guess helmets do make you safer, and there are probably some bike accidents that you could avoid by helmet wearing...but I am willing to take that risk.

To which my chiders say: tsk, tsk, tsk.

Anyway, I'm thinking about this because hopefully sometime soon I will ovulate, and will "start trying" to get pregnant.

And I wonder: what risks am I willing to take with my potentially pregnant body? With my hopefully maturing eggs?

I'm not really talking here about whether the idea of getting pregnant will make me put on a helmet, though that's an interesting question. I'm talking about coffee. About beer. About giving blood. About exercising strenuously. About taking ferility suppliments. About a million things that I could either do or avoid in these last few pre-ovulatory weeks--things which may or may not have some large or small effect on the eggs I may or may not produce.

The other day I wrote about teaching, and when a teacher should say "good enough!" Today I'm thinking about a similar thing, a similar assymptotic curve. I am wondering: when should a potential parent say "safe enough"?

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2005-06-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

So, as I mention in my little side-bar over there...we haven't really told anyone about the whole getting pregnant thing. There are a couple of reasons for this. One of them is that in general I'm not big on revealing my plans and schemes: better to keep the cards close to the chest until you've got the hand you want. Because most plans and schemes don't come to fruition, you know--and I'd rather keep my losses to myself. I'm a bit proud that way.

But I feel my privacy/pride especially keenly around the topic of pregnancy. I have no interest in revealing the baby-quest to anyone until it's definitely a done deal.

B. finds this a bit ridiculous. He's like--look, you feel good about this, I feel good about this, why not be honest about this with the people in our lives?

And I'm all like: you have no idea how much judgement (in all sorts of ways) is going to happen once the baby is made known. You think your mama is going to like it when we want to take a pregnant belly to Burning Man? no no no.

And he's all: well, look, my mama doesn't really like it when we go to Burning Man -anyway-. So whatever.

And there's a certain wisdom to this "judge away!" attitude that I'm a little jealous of. But I also think it's a little naive. Doesn't he know how weird people--women especially--can be about babies? I just don't want to have to listen to all the "why are you drinking ice coffee, just because it's 98 degrees? Don't you know if you want to get pregnant you have to give up coffee NOW?" stuff. I just don't have the strength.

And I -really- don't want to deal with all the flack I will get at school. Because, and here's where it sucks to be me, when we get pregnant I am going to be getting rapid fire from both directions--from the "be a better mom!" family side, and from the "why would you want to do anything so freakish as to be a mom?" academic side.

What's more, it's not just a passivity/conflict-avoidance thing that makes me want to not talk about this with folks. To me it almost seems like a feminist act to decide that pregnancy is a private thing to think about--and to excuse myself from all the rhetoric of failure that surrounds it. By not giving myself and my experience up to the maternal mob, I'm giving myself the space and time to make decisions on my own.

Professing Perfection?

2005-06-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

To what degree is it the responsibility of a teacher to model exemplarity—professional perfection? This is a question I continue to stew over, both as a teacher and student. In my student life I’ve had two close, mentoring relationships with teachers who were, Mary Poppins style, practically perfect in every way. They have consistently drawn from me some of my better work. And I wonder—as a teacher, should I aspire to be like them?

As a rigorous student, I have always preferred rigorous educators: people who take me and my work seriously, and who put their professional relationship towards me above their interest in me liking them as a person (not that anyone is so invested in me, in particular, but as a teacher I know how much I want my students to like me). I do my best work for this sort of teacher.

But, that said, what’s the endpoint of this logic? When I was student teaching back in the day, my cooperating teacher was by far the best teacher at her school. She was uncompromising in exacting immaculate work from me every day—and every day, she would sit taking notes on my teaching, noting what I could do better the next day (sometimes she would sit outside the classroom, eavesdropping, so that she could observe without students knowing she was there).

She did not expect more from me than she did from herself, and I continue to be proud of the teaching I did under her supervision. But I slept four hours a night for months, and had night sweats when I did sleep.

It was only in retrospect that I gave myself permission to realize that her zeal was perhaps a little…unhealthy. And I realized that I could still do work I could be proud of without making myself miserable.

But now, I have gone and chosen a committee member who has much the same relationship to work. Three books in, he’s currently working on three more. He’s fantastic, but he is not very happy. He makes the professional success he’s had seem profoundly not worth it.

I am zealot enough myself to appreciate that the goal of “being the best you can be” is accomplished or not everyday. As a student, it’s important to have role models who are not satisfied without meeting that goal; who show you that when you cut yourself slack, you cut yourself off from your best work.

But given that perfection can’t be achieved, and that “your best” is, at best, an asymptotic goal to shoot for—when is it a teachers job to say, “good enough!”

Girlfriends

2005-06-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

I just read this entry about the preponderance of woman who say "All my best friends are guys.". I know I certainly said that. It's only been in the last five years or so that I have consciously thought about the lack of close female friends in my life, and done some work to try and fix that. Hugo's post made me think of a couple of things.

First, I remember being a young girl and really wanting to be on the guy side of things--play on the boy side of "boys chase girls," for example, which was particularly awkward. Partly this was because I thought the things girls did togethter (like go to the bathroom) were silly, but mostly for a bigger reason. I always said that I liked boys because I was very outspoken and competitive and that worked better with boys--and it was only much later that I realized that hanging out with boys was actually a way to protect myself from any real rivalry, because boys would only lightly spar with the arguments and emotions of girls. I chose the easy way out in a way that let me tell myself I was doing the more ambitious thing. I think this pattern happens a lot for precocioius women.

Second, (hugo's post mentions this) there is no good infrastructure to support the friendships of liberal women. I grew up with a deep disregard for the idea of sororities--mostly, I still think, because they kind of suck--and only realized later that my sister-in-law, who remains very invested in her sorority even as an alumna, has a terrific vocabulary for articulating and defending her female friendships that I absolutely lack. Sororities put too much emphasis on shopping and marriage--but they help women structure their time around their commitments to supporting other women. Doing this during the college years, when its so easy to get sucked in to immature relationships, is so important. And there is no place I can think of that I might have found that.

In the past few years I have made some very important friendships with women--but it's been hard. And, now in my nearing-thirties, the importance of women friends seems even more important to me. Men are great, but they can't help me find a respectful gynecologist. They can't share my thoughts about pregnancy and professionalism. They aren't aging in the way I am, and they have different fears, different futures.

It may not be a "requirement" of feminism to have good girlfriends. But, following Hugo, I do think it is a profoundly feminist act to acknowledge that your gender effects your life, and that in general other women will have more knowledge to share with you about those effects than men will.

Biology Happens

2005-06-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

So, I had not known (before good ol' Toni Weschler told me so) that the progestin phase of the menstrual cycle is basically (it seems obvious, but I'd never realized it) the gestational phase--it's when your body gets all warm and tries to be a cuddly little egg incubator.

This scientific fact is now being realized in my "progestin challenge" body, because, friends, I am warm. I am very warm. And perhaps I would not be so keenly attuned to this except that it is now Totally Summer here, and I would be warm anyway, but every morning I wake up and I am just sizzling.

Poor timing on my part.

My dog is now sporting a new summer 'do (think teddy bear meets Ellis Island, and you'll have some idea) and I am thinking perhaps I shall join her.

***
Also, a story I can neither confirm nor deny:

B was talking to his sister the other day, and she claims that she was watching a live news broadcast of a hostage situation (perhaps in California? All the crazy stuff happens in California) that involved a man in a car with several hostages, hedged in by police. According to my sister-in-law, the man knew he was trapped and out of sheer frustration decided to pitch at the police a *dead baby.* Which, she says, was recorded live by a startled news camera man who had no idea of how to respond to the situation.

I have found no news recorded this farelly-brothers-esq horror story. At this point it's unclear to me if it's more disturbing that this happened, or that my sister-in-law made it up.

Quite Surprising

2005-06-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

I have been all sorts of giddy since my appointment yesterday. I feel very good about having a new doctor and a new plan and, possibly, a new baby.

But I realized something today, while biking to school: this "progestin challenge" of mine will last ten days. Then, sometime in the week after that I might get my period. And then, sometime a couple of weeks after that I might, first, OVULATE and hypothetically even GET PREGNANT.

Which, I mean, is indeed the goal. But it is still sort of startling to realize that it might happen in hardly more than a month.

Now, it's unlikely, and it will probably take longer than that. But still, it's possible that a month and a half from now I would be knocked up, people.

This is making me feel very carpe diem or something. I am thinking I might spend the next month drunk, and in a bikini.

my visit to well-woman central

2005-06-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

So, today I had my much anticipated appointment at the Chicago Women's Health Center. They rock there; you should all go. I had a lovely and long conversation about all my menstrual weirdness with Louise, the "health worker" who met with me. She was very sympathetic at all levels.

So the results:

1. I'm probably fine. She wasn't worried about anything and did not even do any poking or proding. Yay, absence of poking and proding!

2. She prescribed a ten-day "progestin challenge" which, no, is not a foot race, but rather a somewhat heavy dose of the hormone your body produces during the second half of the normal menstrual cycle. The idea is that you take the hormones, they drop off, you (hopefully) get your period, and then (again, hopefully) your body remembers how much fun menstruation and ovulation can be and starts doing both by itself.

Now, I am not exactly sure how your body reaches this decision; getting my period never made -me- really excited to get it again. But evidentally it is often pretty successful, and since progestin is a naturally-occuring hormone it doesn't have any weird side-effects and is just generally a safe way to get started.

I take the pills for ten days, and then see if I get my period in a week or so.

3. I am to call Louise to report the results of the progestin challenge, because she just wants to make sure everything is okay and to "get me back in there" if it seems like more extreme measures need to be taken.

4. One thing that was interesting to me is that she said that if I get a period and if my body wants to then start ovulating, she said she thought it was fine to dive right in there and start trying to get pregnant. I assumed I would probably need to wait a while, but she said that the only reason to wait would be to accomodate the doctors who would want a clear ovulation date, and fuck them. She didn't actually say fuck them, but she basically did, and it was pretty awesome and I totally love her.

5. I think that's all! I'm excited. It's nice to have something to -do-.

Ye Olde Poke and Prodde

2005-06-02T11:43:00.000-07:00

Since it is now a comfortable four+ months since I went off the pill, I have made an appointment for a followup "well woman visit" (better known as a "poke/prod") during which I can discuss my ongoing lack of ovulation. (I almost said "failure to ovulate" but I'm trying not to get all down on my ovaries yet).

So, after Monday, I might know something.

Two things about this. First, now that I have made an appointment I actually feel more anxious than previously. I realize that as four months aproached I actually got less stressed out about it all because I had a Job, which was to make an appointment, and decide when and where I wanted to make it. Now that I have done my Job, I have nothing to do any more except twiddle my thumbs and keep an eye out for cervical fluid.

Second, it's likely that at this poke/prod (which is at a women's health center) they will say things like "be patient" and "after ten years of hormonal tinkering, four months really isn't such a long time for your for your body to normalize." Which would suck in its way. BUT! They might also say, "here is this drug that might fix things." And then I would have decide how I feel about that.

Because I do want my body to be all healthy and happy before it is pregnant. But I also want to be pregnant. So I'm feeling a little vexed around here.

Polite Conversation

2005-06-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

So I’ve been feeling lately like I’ve been letting my web surfing get the best of me a little bit—a little too much time reading on-line debates, a little too little time cultivating my dissertation. But whatever. I also am finding that sometimes my surfing is helping me figure out some of the nuances of my own ideas.

Anyway, just briefly, the other day I was talking about how grateful I was for this post, in which madame Bitch phd describes how frustrating it is for people (especially liberal intellectuals) to talk about “choosing” to have a baby, as though “normally” no one would do such a silly thing as to reproduce. And I was saying how nice it is to hear that opinion voiced.

Then just today I found myself commenting obsessively on Feministein a little debate which started by being about “harmful” books and ended up being about second-wave feminism…and lo and behold, I’m find myself totally defending the second-wave feminist anti-maternity folks.

And my point is not that these two positions are contradictory—but just that it’s nice to have to fine-tune my own ideas this way. I don’t know why when they want you to write a dissertation they plunk you down in a room by yourself and expect you to still be able to talk to people at the end of it.

Insert Bad Pun About Being Discontented

2005-05-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this is totally outing myself as someone who doesn't always read the Sunday Times, but I just now read the May 8 "review" of one of my favorite scholarly books. Read Lee Siegel's essay "Freud and His Discontents" right here.

Now, like Siegel, I am always glad to have new discussion about old books. And who am I to knock Lee Siegel? He's kind of a big deal, and to disagree with him makes me feel a little crazy. And Siegel does make some interesting points. I was particularly taken by his comments on film.

But...well, I guess I'm frustrated that Siegel seems to be responding more to a cultural idea of Freud, or maybe Freud as manifested by cranky psychoanalysts in the fifties, than to Freud himself. To say that, "If Freud had had only his own writings to refer to, he would never have become Freud. Having accomplished his intellectual aims, he unwittingly destroyed the assumptions behind the culture that had nourished his work" seems just so wrong to me, and not only because Freud was a fantastic--lucid and funny and self-revealing--prose stylist. Freud himself did not seek to reduce the world to pat formulas; rather, his formulas only enable us to describe the mechanisms through which experience becomes ineffable. It seems silly to accuse someone who developed the "talking cure" of trying to shut down conversation.

Also, Siegel says weird things about how parts of _Civilization and its Discontents_ don't fit with Freud's earlier theories. Well, duh: that's because Freud didn't necessarily believe those theories any more. Freud's career spanned decades, and he was constantly revising his ideas; in fact, his openness to revision is one of the things I respect about him the most.

I also don't really agree with Siegel's comments about the history of literature, but I won't pick at them because they are sort of interesting.

None of this is to say that Freud or _CAID_ is beyond critique. But it's weird for me to read something that seems so short sighted in the Times, of all places. No wonder my students say such weird things about Freud when this is what they're getting from important cultural critics.

We had a very good time

2005-05-31T09:08:00.000-07:00

So this long festive weekend, B. and I trucked off to St. Louis to attend my uncle's wedding. Despite my disapproval of the whole event, we really had a very good time.

Just to recap:

Things to Hate:
1. The whole inter-generational power weirdness between my older, richer, uncle and his younger, self-sacrificing bride
2. The whole emotional stress of being around this happy new couple (esp. my uncle) and my uncle's two barely teen-aged sons. Stick together the man-in-midlife-crisis demographic and the newly-adolescent-male demographic and what you have is a real cluster-fuck of feelings, my friends.
3. The repeated public thanking of new-wifey by my uncle for "arranging 95% of this beautiful wedding," because, you know, his work kept him really too busy to help (whereas her award-winning work in environmental journalism is trivial by comparison and easily spared)
4. Having to attend a series of wedding events with the bride's EIGHT REPUBLICAN SIBLINGS.
5. Having to drive a looong way down weird Missouri roads to attend a post-wedding BBQ hosted at the home of the bride's republican parents, and passing not one but TWO confederate flags along the way, and having B ask, "does this mean that you're now related to, like, slavers?"
6. The food, which was consistently very very bad. And there is just no reason for that, people.

Things which were quite fun, really, despite my bellyaching:

1: A responsibility-free weekend with my extended family, at their best
2. Playing the Violent Femmes for my young cousins
3. Excuse to wear a fun new dress
4. A very fun dance party on a riverboat, and it's not really like I love dancing to a mix-cd of least-controversial-dance-tunes-for-wedding,-up-to-and-including-YMCA, but anytime you get both my mother and my 14 year old cousin on the dance floor, I have to give you props for throwing a good party
5. The very curvy maid-of-honor's CLEAVAGE, which was displayed to spectacular effect by her low-cut dress (B. described it as "monumental"; I might have said "operatic"), and which seemed only more interesting after we learned that she was a MASSEUSe
6. The best-man's toast, which included the wish that the happy couple "grow old on the same pillow"

So, not a bad weekend all in all. If anyone has advice on how I can work through my hatred of the inter-generational wedding, do let me know...it would be helpful, especially as more men I know start dating their students and making me hate them.

Remember That Stuff About Getting Pregnant?

2005-05-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

I have not discussed it recently, since there is not much new to report. Just sort of hanging out, waiting to ovulate. Things have been more relaxed around here since I got a hold of "Toni Weschler's book", and now feel that I can say, with confidence: Nope. Not ovulating yet. Which is good, because I don't have to be worry about caffeine or vino or getting pregnant without knowing it. That book, it is very comforting.

But now it's about time to probably take some next steps, and I am sort of dickering about what they should be. My ob/gyn had told me initially that if I still hadn't got my period four months after going off the pill, I should feel entitled to come and start nagging her again. This was a great moment, btw, of me being all "okay, I'll see you in four months then" and her TOTALLY DOUBTING ME. But see! I was right!. For yes, the months now have been four, and I'm still just waiting around.

I'm sort of tempted to just go get in on the clomid action, already, but I sort of hate to do that, partly because it's clomid (and if being on birth control hormones for so long was so werid for my body, why would I want to take more hormones?) but also because I do get the sense that things are happening, hormonally, in my body (again, thank you Toni Weschler). So maybe I should just wait. But--I hate that answer.

I recently found "this website" on natural treatments for female infertility, which seemed more or less helpful. But what I really wanted it to say was, "low on estrogen? eat this herb!" and it didn't really do that for me. So disappointing.

More on Little Pants

2005-05-25T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm sad to say that tracker-panty technology hasn't yet actually been manufactured...or rather,if it has, it has not yet been marketed in the way I mentioned on yesterday's post. So I suppose that's good news--though really, I was just starting to get interested in all the narrative possibilities tracker-panties provide.

Actually, someone B works with has done a lot of research on RFID tags (the technoglogy which would enable tracker panties if they existed, which, again, they don't). In his office even now one can find tracker pants, shirts, sweaters and shoes (though they're not being tracked in the same way). So I suppose tracker panties could be developed if the need arose.

ANYWAY, less perversely, let me mention again the idea of regular-pant sisterhoods. I know the coolest twelve year old girl: she's at the perfect stage of being really interesting and adult but not quite adolescent yet (she says things like, "Why are all these magazines about...like...hair? Why would I want to read about hair?"). She is the daughter of the woman who was my boss during last year's campaign cycle (which means that she, the daughter, has met EVERYONE, like Ted Kennedy everyone) and I was just emailing with my ex-boss, who tells me that cool-daughter got to go to a special preview of the traveling pants movie, and how she went with her cool best friends, and how they all came home and blissfully tried on pants that they could share, and promised to be totally best friends forever, etc. And all this to say: it's good to know that there are girls out there, feeling cool about themselves and their friends and not EVEN being traumatized by the idea of trying on pants in public.

Little Fascist Panties

2005-05-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

I just read about these "crazy tracking panties." on "feministing."

There's not much to say about this, except that the idea of "panties" was already creepy, without the crazy tracking element.

But then again, I know a couple who has a good time with crazy remote control buttefly vibrator panties, in a "its sexy to be in your partner's sexual control" kind of way. So while the creepy panty thing is, clearly creepy, it also has a lot of possibilities for showing up sometime soon in a Susie Bright anthology, I suspect.

Or maybe there will be some sort of "Sisterhood of the Traveling Tracker Panties?" That would have made keeping track of my danger-prone freshman year college roommate much easier. Good Lord.

More Blogthings, defining my life

2005-05-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

I love quizzes. But, lo: they are unhelpful.

So, like all my friends, one of the main questions of my life is: where shall I live? This is one question that encompasses many others: will I really be okay with myself if I don't move to New York? Am I already too old to move to New York? What about a small town? Would I like being in a small town, being arty, like Jackson Pollock or someone? Would my friends move there too? what about my parents? What about my parents moving to New York? If I married a computer programmer, do I -have- to move to California? Do I secretly -want- to move to California? Do my parents and friends secretly want to move to California? & etc.

These are the major questions of the rootless well-educated: when we get together we ask them. We talk about moving where the other ones live. Do you like it there? Would I?

So, indeed, with so many identity questions bound up in location issues, I was muchly pleased to find a "blogthing," as per yesterday's post, grappling with just these very questions. But I am afraid it did not help me much.

>

American Cities That Best Fit You:

55% Chicago

55% Philadelphia

50% Boston

50% Los Angeles

50% New York City

Which American Cities Best Fit You?

I am trying to look at this and think of myself as "versatile" but really what it says to me is "vexed."

Two points:

1.) These are the results I got the first time I took the quiz, without answering the last two questions (one of which seemed pointless, and the other of which seemed to be begging the issue: to find out where I wanted to live it asked me...where I wanted to live). It was when I answered the question about fitness that San Francisco popped up on the list. What?

2.) I think probably the single most important question is the one about cars. Which is saying something. They don't even -ask- you about being able to walk, which is what I would say was most important to me.

B say's I'm not normal

2005-05-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

But according to this I pretty much am.

Your Linguistic Profile:

70% General American English

15% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

5% Midwestern

5% Yankee

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

What they asked me that I found interesting:

Is that place diagonally across from you "kitty corner" or "catty corner"?
(I had not known that places were ever catty corner. But now I do. Evidently, some people do not know that some places are kitty corner, either, but they are.)

What they should have asked me but didn't:

What do you call the beverage that comes from cows?
(had they, asked, I would have confessed that I call it "melk" rather than "milk," and then perhaps they would have conceded that, as B. says, I am not so normal after all.)

Slate gets Sentimental--but doesn't actually get it

2005-05-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

*Note: If you'll skip to point 3, below, you realize this isn't so much a post about sentimentalism, but rather a general complaint about the current "literary" milieu. But it's also sort of about sentimentalism, so lets start there.*

So, in my dissertation I think about some representational complications emerging around questions of gender and citizenship in the antebellum United States. This means that I read a lot of so-called “sentimental” or domestic novels—that is, novels mostly written by women which place the personal development and personal influence of women at their center. This type of book is the source of a long-standing controversy in the study of American literature because no one can decide if they are “good,” if they are “good for” anything, and in general, if we (as scholars of American literature, and maybe just as Americans) should be proud or embarrassed of the fact that they were So So popular.

I was very interested, then, when Slate magazine decided to weigh in on this debate, exploring particularly the “puzzle” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The subtitle of Stephen Metcalf’s article is, "“Why has Uncle Tom's Cabin survived—and thrived?”"

I don’t really want to get into the nuances of Metcalf’s article, because it is well-written and fairly thoughtful and my main point in calling attention to it is just that I’m always sort of generally pleased when the world pays attention to the ideas I spend so much time thinking about. But let me mention a couple of things, just to get them off my mind:

1. Metcalf’s answer to his question might be paraphrased as, “because feminist scholars, in a well-meaning but mostly shoddy fashion, found sentimentalism politically useful.” And while he is right to note the political questions which animate much literary criticism of Stowe’s novel, it’s interesting to me that he seems to think it sort of intellectually suspicious to attend to a book “just because” it marked a pivotal shift in the political and literary landscape of American culture. Perhaps it would be better to…ignore it? Read about it rather than read it? Yes, surely, that would be better. What?

2. Metcalf’s secondary reading stops, for the most part, 25 years ago. So…in as much as he is providing a critical history, his is up-to-date-1988 with a vengeance. Just FYI. Plus I think it's awesome and hilarious to equate Douglas and Tompkins, because they agree on virtually nothing (when Metcalf paraphrases them, he says Douglas is great but gives only Tomkin's ideas) except that, in as much as _UTC_ was hugely popular and influential, they think it is worth investigating (see point 1, above).

3: My main point: My answer to Metcalf’s question—why do we read Uncle Tom’s Cabin—would be that we read it because it’s a really good book. It is fun to read. Every time I read it I get excited about it all over again. And this is markedly different than Metcalf’s answer, because he concludes his article by claiming that UTC is really bad—and he sites some sentences to give support to his claim.

Well. That right there is the problem with a lot of the contemporary literary world, to my mind. Because it’s silly, I think, to believe there is only one way for a book to be good. Authors are interested in different sorts of literary units—the sentence, the image, the story, etc. And I am really happy to admit that at the level of the sentence, Stowe is not so good. But what she accomplished at the level of narrative in UTC is really amazing—the novel is loooong, folks, and it is not boring for a page. Her sense of pacing, her sense of trajectory, is pitch perfect.

And I just get SO IRRITATED when the ability to tell a fucking story is left out of our evaluation of the novel form. If that’s what reviewers look for, well, no wonder so much contemporary “real” literature gets so convoluted…and just dull.

Metcalf wants us to separate “propaganda from literature,” and I think that is a mostly reasonable request, though sometimes a little difficult practically (I have lots to say about how ill-informed Metcalf’s plea is, but I’ll spare you/him because I do agree that more formal investigation would help out English department’s these days). But I wish he would think a leeetle more carefully about what counts as literature, and how he’s judging it, before he makes his claims. Otherwise, he's going to be stuck reading Annie Proulx or some such shit all day long, and then where will be be? Bored, that's where.

Secret Societies I'd Like to Join

2005-05-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

"More significant, the two [Harriet Beecher Stowe and Caroline Lee Hentz] had known each other during the Hentzes ill-fated residence in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the early 1830's, when both were members of the SEMI-COLON CLUB, an exclusive local literary society."

imagine?

"The 'I' is the First Lie"

2005-05-18T11:34:00.000-07:00

That's what a professor I taught for a couple of years ago said in lecture to help clear up a misunderstanding between himself (who thought your average freshman would be all about reading Fanon and Lacan) and the students (who thought the average professor would understand that, in a 20c Literature course, they would be reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald). As you can imagine, the idea that "The 'I' is the first lie" did little to clarify the situation. It was, to say the least, a challenging TAship.

I mention this because both my friend Palish (see sidebar) and Feministe (see internet, or post from two days ago) are talking about names today. Palish and I share the problem--she actually helped me identify the problem--of discovering that the names you love, that reflect your intimate taste and affections, seem shockingly to be...the same for everyone. This is the problem of realizing that, as she says, "you are your demographic" and all your attempts at freethought are just a little illusion to make you feel better while the marketers line up to sell you mass-produced name plates saying "Isabella" for you to hang above your baby's crib. Or whatever.

Which would sort of back up the idea that your "I" is a lie--that it's not discrete and separate from your collective media consciousness. Which would, I guess, also go along with what Feministe says about how she has a hard time getting worked up about changing your name or not when you get married, because it just seems sort of irrelevant these days.

I commented on her post about why not changing my name was important to me as a small political gesture--so you can go read that if you want to.

But I also was thinking about this. When I was 23, my boyfriend at the time had an asthma attack that led to total respiratory failure. He was on life support for a few days, and then when they took him off the respirator he slipped into a "light coma," which basically means that he was Fucked Up. His eyes were open, and he was thrashing around crazily (my mom said it was like he was trying to ride a bike while laying in his hospital bed), but he was in no way at all mentally present. Just a blank, terrified stare for days. (Christmas Day, actually, just to give you the full dramatic effect of the story).

He got better. But one thing that was very surprising to me, then and in retrospect, was that even in the worst of his "coma" he would always respond, even if just briefly, to his name. He was the biggest anti-humanist in the world, and he definitely thought the I was a lie--but if you called to him, even in his coma, he came.

And that convinced me that names matter--they're not connected to a "real" you, but then maybe there is no "real" you that could, for instance, make truly personal aesthetic decisions about things like names. Names aren't separate from socialization--but then, neither are we.

Which makes the aesthetic and political choices we make around names a useful way to figure and recognize ourselves--not as a "lie" but as a part of a much larger social fabric.

you can come with us

2005-05-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

to see the midnight premier of _Star Wars_ tonight, but you can't bring your light saber. Costumes are fine, but no light sabers--if you bring one, you have to check it with the nice lady at the movie theater ticket counter.

You may be asking: why is our nice girly girl telling us this? does she think we have light sabers? and why is she going to a midnight premier of -Star Wars_ anyway? Is this some tragic grab at a last straw of pre-parental stupidity? Doesn't she get enough _Star Wars_ from the model millenium Falcom and x-wing, beloved by her husband, and hanging in her sunroom? what?

But I am asking: how did they figure out to ban light sabers? I mean, was there some particularly awkward light saber encounter at one of the previous movies? Do they just block the view? Do the film distributors send out a little warning with the reels that says "you may want to ban light sabers during the viewing of this movie"?

This all becomes particularly interesting b/c our little neighborhood theater is pretty ghetto, and you'd think, actually, that they might have some real weapon issues that they'd be worried about. You'd think that "light sabers" would be the least of their problems. But I must say, I am having a good time imagining the horrors that could ensue if some ghetto movie attendee suddently, mid movie, whisked out a light saber, swung it around ominously, and pulled up his shirt so we could see "Jedi Life" tattooed across his belly. Could get risky, folks.

Some thoughts on maternally "feministe" me

2005-05-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

Today, while dodging some fairly menial work I needed to do, I posed some comments on Feministe's" site--she'd made some comments on education policy, a topic near and dear to my heart, and I took it upon myself to weigh in.

Said Feministe was engaged enough to respond to one of my comments--and because she does not know me, she just referred to me by my online "tag" thing, and called me "Mama."

Which was sort of sweet and disconcerting all at the same time.

I started this blog because I'm trying to get pregnant, and thinking of getting pregnant makes me think about both authorship and audience in new ways. And that's good, and I'm glad to have an outlet for that--but today I was feeling a little limited by it, especially since pregnancy might be a long time coming. And don't I have things to say, and authority to spend, outside of the idea of myself as a mother?

But I guess that's the question, eh? How separate are my ideas and my experiences from myself as a mother/potential mother. I was actually just reading something about this, as relates to ideas of citizenship--and maybe tomorrow I'll try and trot out some sort of polemic.

In the meantime, I just signed up for a creative commons license, which I find a bit amusing as some sort of displacement strategy. I'm not sure what I'm talking about here, folks--but I'm very protective of whatever it is I've said.

Some other bits of news:

--I just found out about the Intonation Music Fest". Very exciting! Here's to all of us getting tickets.

--Remeber how the other day I found, though my sweet dog's inquisitiveness, a dead baby bird? Well, today, through the same means, I found a DEAD BABY RAT. Except this small dead creature wasn't dead through poetic and natural forces; it had been squashed with a brick and left (with the brick) in the middle of the sidewalk. And also, it wasn't a very small baby rat. I can't tell you how disturbing this was.

Variously Visual

2005-05-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

Two things about me these days: first, my hormone-zits are still pretty bad; second, I need new glasses. One lens of my current pair fell out several weeks ago and mysteriously disappeared—it fell out in the middle of the English department office and no one could find it. So yesterday, very belatedly, I went to look for a new pair.

Now, getting a new pair of glasses sucks for me under the best of circumstances. I have a narrow little face, so all of the glasses I like are always too wide for my face. Never have I managed to find the perfect pair to seal the deal of my hipster identity, because every time I try on the fun funky ones the little cat-eye studded corners are hanging five feet off the side of my head. It’s just irritating. And then also, my glasses-shopping partner in crime/husband has a sort of elephantine critical faculty, and he can find something wrong with ANYTHING, and really, folks, nothing is more demoralizing than having your very loving husband look at your face and say, “ummmm…..no” and sort of frown several hundred times in a row.

Anyway, lets just say that this whole endeavor was not made any more fun by the fact that I currently have an angry crop of
zits on my forehead. I feel so unlike myself. It was just sooo unpleasant to spend all day looking at myself being dwarfed by unflattering glasses (bad enough) and then having the only part of my face not covered by the glasses infested with weird little red bumps. I have been feeling anxious and unnerved ever since; only now, 24 hours and several pats on the head later, have I started to recuperate. I will be so happy when my hormones level out and these stupid zits go away (and, I guess, when my hormones level out and I start to ovulate already).

Tonight we went to watch “The L Word” at T’s, which is quite the scene. The show on the television is what it is, but the show going on around us in the thick of the Chicago “L” community is very entertaining indeed. Everyone was very irritated by today’s episode because a) virtually nothing happened for the second half of the show except for long slow pans of angst-ridden Lesbian faces, and b) Jennifer got all overwrought and went after herself with a razor, which is a real problem in the world, but it was handled very crassly and frustratingly, and plus, she’s just not that interesting a character and it seemed such a shallow way to try and make the viewers believe she’s deep. The crowd was not sympathetic, and this is a crowd that wants to love the show. Anyway, I myself was irritated because there was all this build up about Tina’s labor, and how she was going to have a water birth at home, and I was very excited because I had just been discussing with B. the fact that I had never seen a television/movie depiction of a contemporary birth in which the mom was anywhere besides on her back in stirrups---but, guess what, the home birth didn’t work out and Tina ended up on her back in stirrups. Sigh.

They had Gloria Steinem on the show to give an inspiring speech about starting a revolution…but I guess the revolution does not yet extend to narrative and visual depictions of childbirth. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Breastfeeding God's Way

2005-05-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

"God's understanding of the breast is that it is enough!"

In a way, I actually think is pretty solid theology (I mean, in as much as theology can be solid). I also like the part about how "God Loves Feasts!"

Officially Telling Ten of You

2005-05-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

My mama forwarded the following email to me (what you can't tell in this post is the giddy original pinkness of the font, which was not my mother's fault). Anyway, despite the irritating chain-letterness of this I thought I'd distribute. If anyone hears that this is not in fact a reputable site, let me know.

****

Please tell ten friends to tell ten today! The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "donating a mammogram" for free (pink window in the middle).

This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.

Here's the web site! Pass it along to people you know.

www.thebreastcancersite.com

Very literary

2005-05-12T10:07:00.000-07:00

One of the ongoing petty arguments B. and I have is about whether there is a useful difference between the novel and the epic. I say there is, and I am right, more or less. I was discussing this last night with a professor, who didn't like _Lord of the Rings_ and I suggested the Hobbit as a more novel-ish antidote to the swashbuckling _LotR_ (not to belittle the swashbuckling: I love swashbuckling).

So here's the followup: this morning I rewarded myself for a very long day yesterday but letting myself stay in bed to finish reading _Eragon_, this trendy young-adult fantasy novel which is fine, but which I wouldn't reccommend. (It tries to be swashbuckling, but falls way short). It is about Very Epic things, like finding your destiny and fighting an evil king while you mind-meld, Spockishly, with a dragon. Anyway, I finished it, it was fine, and then I went to sit on the porch to reread some parts of _Jacob's Room_ which I needed to review for a paper I'm revising. I needed to trot off to the library, but couldn't resist: what better than reading Woolf on the porch, with newly-planted pansies, and a cup of tea?

I sat and read, abstractedly. The dog trotted out, sniffing the world and the porch and curled up contentedly with a stick. She gnarbled on the stick, and I read:

"Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the earth. The child's bucket was half-full of rainwater; the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly legs to climb the steep side; tryng again and falling back, and trying again and again."

I looked up and saw that, in her gnawing enthusaism, the dog had pushed her stick half off the porch's edge, and it was precipitously near falling down three stories to the porch of our cranky neighbor who works at home and holds a grudge. So I went to fetch the stick, and found that what had so intrigued the dog as she sniff sniffed the world was the small carcass of a baby bird, pushed from its nest in the rafters above, and now dead and half-covered by the haunch of my soft-coated, enthusiastic, dog.

Woolf writes:

"It us thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. This, they say, is what we live by--this unseizable force."

but also this:

"...as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps--who knows?--we might talk by the way."

Last (i could have danced all) night at our house

2005-05-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Last night at our house, not much interesting happened. But! Two stories -below- our house, something happened that was (to me) very interesting indeed. Our downstairs neighbor dances for the Joffrey, which is the world's best thing for a neighbor to do, I thought, until last night, when she did something even better--she invited the WHOLE COMPANY over for an end of season party.

I'm not even kidding. The whole Joffrey fucking ballet, yuckin' it up two stories beneath me.

If I haven't mentioned this, I grew up doing the dance thing--not the "dance thing" in the way that people near real dance schools do it, and I never had illusions of growing up to actually -be- a dancer, but I did do enough dance to have opinions on which toe-pads were easiest on the blisters, and I did it until I went to college and even now sometimes take classes here or there, for fun and stretching. I really really love it, in the deepest parts of my very me-ness. And I still have some serious deep seated regrets about not pursuing it all a -little- bit further; making a -little- bit more space for it in my nerdy life.

So imagine my feelings at having the cast of the best (ballet) company in chicago, living the life of my dreams, fifty feet away.

Downstairs Neighbor had nicely "invited" us to stop by, in the way that you do when you know your guests are going to be irritating your neighbors and want to preempt their complaints. The neighbor invitation, as I well know, really isn't a real invitation, and I'm too socially paranoid to actually go to a party of glamorous strangers under such false pretenses, especially since I knew I would just be all drop-jawed and lurpy. Look! a dancer! I mean, awkward, right?

So here's what I did: I took the dog for a walk, out the back stairs, and past the party's smoking porch. I attracted, with said charming pooch, some appreciative hellos.

And then, on the way back into the house, back the smoking porch, I accidentally --oops!-- dropped the dog's leash, and she, as though I had trained her to do so, went charging, tail wagging, through the porch-smoking dancers, into the apartment, and then into the thick of the party where I just -had- to follow her ("oh? a beer? sure I'll have a beer, I'm just getting my dog..."). And so it was thus that I found myself officially if just for a moment -at- the Joffrey's party, with something besides my non-dancerness to talk about even ("yes, she's a wheaten terrier, I know, so cute, right?").

We didn't stay long at the party, but we did stay long enough to feel a little bit cool, and also to realize that the party was an 80's costume party. With Karaoke. So I, yes me, got to spend five lovely minutes watching two lovely joffrey-prima ballerina ladies, hair pulled into ratted side-pony tails, sweatshirts torn across the shoulder, singing their hearts out to "What a Feeling." *

To add to that lovely thought, let me leave you with this: imagine what lovely gay dancer boys would wear to an 80's theme party. Are you imagining the little terry-cloth short shorts? The headpants? the tanktops? The clearly outlined pecks and package? Yes?

What you are imagining is exactly correct. I was there, folks. Could have stayed all night.

---

* Okay, so this part is a little bit of a stretch, just to suit the truth of fiction, as it were. They weren't really singing "What a feeling." They were really singing "Holiday," by Madonna. Which is also pretty good, right? And they really had the _Flashdance_ sweatshirts going on and everything. Am I to blame if my fantasy version is better than the real thing? Come on.

My Very Womanly Day: Some Lists

2005-05-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

Very Womanly Activities of the Day

1. Planted some pansies
2. Walked the dog
3. Went to the grocery store
4. Went to the fabric store, to buy easy-sew dress patterns
5. Bought a table cloth
6. Bought a hallmark card to send to my husband's grandmother
7. Sat in the sun reading a 19-c sentimental novel, while drinking tea
8. Went to the butcher's three times in an attempt to buy a preferred cut of meat (pork shoulder)

Less Womanly (but still for the good of the family) Activities of the Day

1. Dropped of car the mechanic's (Tony's), and wrestled with his two doberman pinscher puppies (Toby and Tiger)

Additional Very Womanly (but less celebratory and more "women are the mules of the world") Activities of the Day

1. After dropping off car, WALKED the mile home--with the dog--carrying a bag of fabric, a hallmark mother's day card for my husband's grandmother (don't bend it!), and a ten-pound bag of meat, all the while being leered at by toothless men.

Clever things for the world, and some questions

2005-05-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

I just discovered the site Scarleteen and I am just really happy to know that it exists. My favorite part read thus far is where it admonishes the reader to "remember to wash your hands before -and- after masturbating!" I mean, that is Good Advice for an adolescent!

A friend of mine, over dinner on Sunday night, was saying that she thought all girls should be given a vibrator at age 12 by some cool female figure at school or home. While I totally agree that getting a vibrator in that context would have been a better rite of passage than getting one at age 20 by a boyfriend (as she and I both did), her comment begs the question: how involved should your parents be in your emerging sex life? I think this is a really weird question. Said dinner-friend has regular and intimate converations about sex with her father, but I think she's a little unhealthy (as you too would think if you heard her talk about her "Daddeee" which is how she spells it) so I don't choose to take her as a representative. Although I'm in favor of being really honest about sex, I think that a little bit of inter-generational space is a real good thing.

I mean, it sucks to have your sucky college boyfriend presume to open the door to your masturbatory life, but i'm not sure it's much better to have your folks involved.

Ambivalent Much?

2005-04-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I bought shoes. Buying shoes is a hard thing for me, so I note this accomplishment with some pride.

I did not use to have a hard time buying shoes. But at my weird semi-professional, semi-adult place of life, shoes can be hard. The classy professional lady shoes do not suit me, neither do the chunky college-girl shoes from days of yore. The shoes that are marketed towards me--the shoe equivalent of the jetta, the mini, the subaru outback--I cannot afford, because despite the fact that I am supposed to be in my prime-purchasing years, and would like to dress as such, I cannot because I am not really a grown-up, I am a grad student. And despite my distinguished, thirty-ish age, you aren't trusted with a grown-up salary when really you are still in the kid-land of graduate school.

Which means, if you read between the lines here, that shoes are hard because they make me feel all confused about my major life choices. I mean, it sucks to be a graduate student when you are trying to be an adult, when by all accounts you should be an adult--you have gray hairs, wrinkles, a mortgage for christ's sake--but you're only allowed to -be- an adult once a week or so when meeting with students, and then only in a mirage-like way because in about a year your student will be gainfully employed by deloitte and touche while you are still working on dissertation chapter three, still not able to buy the shoes you want. Maybe your student will buy them for you? Probably not.

Anyway, so add on to all this confusion the idea of getting pregnant, and things get much weirder. Because one thing about being a mom is that you are definitely on the other side of some generational line. But another thing about being a mom (actually, my last post made me think of this) is that being a mom is often sort of infantilizing, too, because you are precluded from lots of adult things like having control over your own schedule, and--if you're not careful--like having a job, a salary, and a place to go in the mornings.

And that means that maybe being a mom is sort of similar to being a grad student, in that it is intellectually and emotionally rewarding but still a little demeaning and socially weird.

This is all speculative. I don't know much yet about being a mom.

But I do know that the shoes I bought are very satisfying. They are Kangaroos, like I had when I was eight, with a little zipper on the side and everything. Also, they are pink.

Pink shoes are, it seems, all the rage, and it's awfully pleasing that for once I can afford something that is sort of fashionable.

As to what this particular shoe choice says about my relationship to myself as a once-and-future adult? Let's not go there, eh?

coffee shop moms

2005-04-28T09:15:00.000-07:00

Here's what I love: being at a coffee shop where there is a cool urban mom giving her cool urban kinder little nibbles of whatever, let's say scones, while she sits wearing cool urban sneakers and reading the paper.

Here's what I hate: being at a coffee shop where there is a cool urban mom, distracting me from my very important real work with various and sundry images of cool urban motherhood.

Really, I have such mixed feelings about the coffee shop moms.* I am sure one day I shall be one, with some level of cool. But I guess that's what's scary, because I both totally identify with them and see them as absolutely foreign creatures. It's like how before I was married but just heading towards marriage, I would meet women my age who introduced me to their "husbands," and I would think secretly to myself, "oh, you have a husband, how brave of you not to be embarrassed about that." Because being married seemed so weird and, I don't know, not old exactly but definitely domesticated, and settled and sedated. And to be a wife, and a husband-haver...that was truly bizarre.

So anyway, I'm a grad student; sitting at coffee shops in the morning is a big part of what I do. It's also a big part of what moms do. But rather than making me feel closer to the idea of myself as a mom, sitting at a coffe shop with the CSM's just makes me feel so weirdly vexed.

-----

*NB: I only have mixed feelings about the cool laid-back sneaker-wearing moms. The kind of CSM who does her make up, puts on stacked-heeled loafers, and ties baby in bows for the coffee shop--her, I straight up hate. I mean, who does she think she is? Is she confusing my coffee shop with a society luncheon? I mean really, lady, let's keep the fashion bar -low- here. Jesus.

things i have been doing instead of blogging

2005-04-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

1: the our bodies our selves thing at WACF

dude, I totally love Our Bodies, Our Selves. You all should have been there.

2: Going to Iowa City to see Greg Brown

Returning to your college town is fun but awkward, because you remember it--but it doesn't remember you.

3: Playing Soccer

I am not EVEN kidding. I played soccer, sort of for real, with refs and everything.

Everything I know about soccer, I learned two hours before the game from my downstairs neighbor. He also lent me some shin guards. He is twelve.

4: Sending flowers to my cousin, who is also twelve and plays soccer

But that's not why I sent flowers. I sent flowers because he was staring in the local production of _Oliver!_. How cool is that?

5: Applying for a job

It would be serving as a teaching assistant in gender studies next year. I won't get it, b/c I'm not in Gender Studies, but it was fun to pretend. Even sort of fun to spend a stressed out day preparing for the interview (which was Monday morning) which I only learned about upon returning home, still hung over, from Iowa city on Saturday afternoon.

The interview did go really well, though. I talked about the _Our Bodies, Ourselves_ things.

6: Being terrified that I owed the university $3,552 for reasons that are only sort of my fault.

But fortunately, I don't. I hope.

Younger Girl and the City

2005-04-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a "boss" of mine today about his three-year-old's upcoming birthday party, which shall (get this) have a Where the Wild Things Are theme. TOO MUCH FUN! What could be a better party? It turns out that WTWFA is the three-year-old's new favorite book, mostly because she loves to ventriloquize the part where Max (remember Max?) tells all the gnashing, roaring Wild Things to "BE STILL!"

And that is an awesome thing for an almost three year old girly to love to say; almost as good as what is evidently her other favorite line: "LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!"

Anyway, boss-man and I had a long talk about the management of boss-daughter's party, because although he liked the idea of having face-painting at the party he had never actually painted a face before. And since I've done the kids-at-summer-camp rounds, I am ALL OVER THAT. So I was able to reccommend a few strategies: do they want to take up all the time face-painting? Do they have a hand-washing strategy? Would they rather just make masks out of brown paper backs (less glam, but a little more hands on for the kids)? Will they then have a dramatic reinactment of the story? If so, will the other small party-guests be okay with boss-daughter being the one who says, of course, "BE STILL!"? They might prefer to say that themselves.

Anyway, I found this all very intriguing and exciting and my enthusiasm made me think I might be okay with this mom-business afterall. I need more arts and crafts in my life, I really do.

***

In passing, did you know that they are making a movie of WTWTA? And that Spike Jonze is directing? And that Dave Eggers is writing the screen play?

This is all at once very thrilling and very worrisome: thrilling because at the point at which Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze are making kid movies, thenI know the world is really cueing me to have the kids who will go to those movies; worrisome because, despite my great thankfulness for McSweeney's, I don't actually trust Egger's narrative prowess more than I could...throw it. Or whatever. I mean, dude's witty and all, but that doesn't mean he can come up with a fucking PLOT.

Girl and the City

2005-04-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

Today I got to go downtown to play—er, work. Right. But anyway, after I did my token few hours of reading, I found myself strolling up Michigan Avenue. The sun was out in a hazy sort of way, and the whole city looked perfectly like a matte print photograph. I was wearing my favorite skirt and my favorite zippy shoes, and then the new Sleater-Kinney song “Modern Girl” came up on my ipod’s randomizer, and—friends, let me tell you, for a minute there life seemed almost too good to be true. It was so cinematic that I almost started my Carrie Bradshaw-esque voiceover: “Sometimes in life, everything lines up so perfectly that…”

Anyway, it was a good day. And I thought to myself: why would I give up this great transition time in life to be a mom? I mean, moms are awesome, but they have a different relation to city-girl-ness. Or at least, in my imagination, when I am a mom, Iwill have a different relation to city-girl-ness. I imagine that I will feel on the other side of the girl-woman transition…but I guess I don’t know for sure.

So, that’s worth thinking about, when and if my ovaries give me the option of actually getting pregnant.

But then I remembered that Corin Tucker is a mom as well as a city-girl. I mean, grrl. Plus, she’s, like, a rock star! So I shant worry my pretty girl-ish head too much just yet, eh?

97.9

2005-04-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

That was my bbt this morning. Which is high! Higher than it's been all week! And I thought to my self...surely I'm ovulating??

And then I remembered: nope. Not ovulating. Just...hungover.

Plus it was fucking hot in our bedroom.

***

Heard last night over too many glasses of wine before dinner, which started too late:

"Oh, you know that girl...she was so-and-so's rubby bitch."

NB: "Rubby Bitch."

Messing about in boats

2005-04-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

The rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his fore-paw as the Mole stepped gingerly down and, to his surprise, found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

“This has been a wonderful day!” said he, as the Rat shoved off and took the sculls again. “Do you know, I’ve never been in a boat before in all my life.”

“What?” cried the Rat, open-mouthed. “Never been in a – you never—well, I—what have you been doing, then?”

“Is it so nice as all that?” asked the Mole shyly.

“Nice? It’s the only thing,” said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. “Believe me, my friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily: “messing—about—in—boats; messing—“

“Look ahead, Rat!” cried Mole suddenly.

It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The Rat lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.
“—about in boats,” he went on, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. “Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on this morning, supposing we drop down the river together and have a long day of it?”

The mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with a sigh and leaned back blissfully into the soft cushions. “What a day I’m having!” He said. “Let us start at once!”

--this passage from _The Wind in the Willows_ brought to you by the onset of spring.

I think it's just what I (just what I) needed*

2005-04-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

Yay! What I just found is just what I needed.

I would like to say that it was my tremendous googling prowess that led me, at long last, to this discovery…but it was not. Instead, after months of searching the internet for this very site, all it really took was a two minute conversation with Linda, the Women and Children First lady.

Thank you, women and children first lady!
----

*that song was playing at the coffee shop I stopped by this morning, and I realized I am still not bored with how much it rules.

Britney's pregnant. Deeply pregnant.

2005-04-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so picture this: I’m sitting in Starbucks (it’s an ugly picture, I know) trying to write an application essay on why I want to teach in the gender studies dept. next year—and it is not going well . So I’m sitting there, struggling, thinking about gender when—what should I see?

A tabloid headline screaming the news of the day: BRITNEY’S PREGNANT.

My responses to this news are various: I’m sympathetic (poor kid) I’m irritated (poor non-pregnant me), and I’m bitchily anticipatory (can you imagine the fashion?). But here’s what really gets my gender theory goat:

The fact that she thinks being pregnant makes her DEEP.

You wanna know how I know she thinks it makes her deep? Go check her website. Go log in, as I’m sure thousands of young girls* will today, and be forced to watch a horrible flash web site load slowly, oh so slowly. And what does this website display but all sorts of crazy “fantasy art” featuring a range of goddess mother imagery including but not limited to: moons going through their cycles, bubbles floating away like sperm-laden eggs, ripening flowers, goddesses blessing the fertile moon (it’s unclear from the symbology if Britney is the moon or the goddess…), Britney in some sort of tribal turban, and, of course, balloons—because when there’s a baby, there always has to be balloons.

There is no stork; yet.

And I just want to say: oh, Britney, you sad little lady. I mean, I am all glad and stuff that you feel like you are moving into a womanly and deeply symbolic phase of your life, and I guess I would rather have you be projecting pro-goddess-woman imagery to all your little fans* than some freakish Christian shwag. But really, I think it’s so lame for her to think, or her to project the illusion that she thinks, that pregnant time is “fantasy” time? I mean, what does all that mean to her? Does she not see that to try and make pregnancy into both “fantasy” and “deep reality” at the same time might not quite work? Especially if she also wants to include, as the final image in this curious montage, a photo of herself showing off her perfect, girlish cleavage?

I guess what I mean is—you can’t have it all. Babies may give you the feeling that you’re a more vital part of life’s rich pageant, but they also give you responsibility by the shitload, literally. And they also are not good for your boobs.

And I think it sucks that so many people, clearly Britney among them, want to believe that having a baby will put them in the register of deep meaning were they don’t have to think about the real and the personal—they just get to coast on through, showing pictures of balloons and goddesses, assured that they are doing something Very Important.

What they are really doing by shifting their own experiences into archetypal ones is avoiding the real, hard work—not of figuring out symbols, but of figuring out themselves.

I think one small index of this difference can be find in surfing the internet for pregnancy blogs—what you’ll find over and over is that the blogs of women who are actually pregnant are full of stupid storks and clichés, while the blogs of women who aren’t or can’t get pregnant are full of careful, genuine, soul-searching and humor. Which is ironic, because it’s that sort of soul-searching that, it seems to me, will ultimately make you a good parent.

I hope the girlies checking out Britney’s site, even as we speak, think about that.

Anyway, so that is the gender trouble that I’m thinking about today. Lest I seem too judgmental, lets all carefully notice my subtext: how dare Britney claim that she is deep? I am the deep one. Yep. Me!

--

*Young girls like, um, me.

97.5

2005-04-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

97.5. What's that? Ah--that's what my body basal temperature was this morning. What that means, exactly, I am still a little fuzzy on. But this weekend I spend a lot of time sneakily peaking into a friend of a friend's copy of this book and I am all very excited about all the many many fascinating things it has told me. Once I am done with my work for the day, I plan on going out and buying it, and then I can report back more details--but I loved the idea of taking my temperature because it gives me something to DO while I sit around, waiting for an egg to emerge.

Anyway, here's what's most exciting about this book, at least preliminarily: because it helps you keep track of a series of functions that indicate fertility, it can teach you to know when you are fertile and when you are not. Now, for me, there have been no times of being fertile in a very long time. So I feel like I should be able to do things one wouldn't want to do when trying to get pregnant, like drink excessively and, also, roll around with my husband any time I damn well want to, without fear of repercussion. But since I could technically become pregnant at any time (who knows when I'll start ovulating?) I've been wary of doing both those things. Well, I mean, at least wary of doing both at once. I suppose the rolling around wouldn't really be a problem if I lived a good and pure lifestyle that would never endanger un tender little bebe. But, um...because I don't live quite that life style, since I've been off the pill I've felt like I needed to give up either unhealthy behaviors, or spontaneous rolling around. And that just sucks. I mean, won't have enough of self-censorship when/if un bebe is actually here?

So I love the idea of keeping track of things so that I can be as unhealthy as I want until the eggsesses emerge.

But of course, there's a catch. Turns out it's totally hard to chart your cycle until you, duh, have one. So until I get my period (and even good Toni at TCOYF doesn't have much to say about that, except that I should just be patient, already) it will be hard to know what my body does when I get one. So charting might not work well for me, just yet.

But, ever optimistic, I stuck a thermomenter in my mouth this morning before pressing snooze the first time on the alarm. And that's very pleasing.

***

PS: I just want to emphsize again how much this book has rocked my world, even though I already new the basics of what it would say--that if I wanted to keep track of my ferility I needed to do stuff like take my temp, check my fluids, etc. What is best about this book, for me, is that it made all of those things seem totally normal. And I realized that even I, who am pretty gung-ho about body awareness, had been a little skeeved out by the idea of cervical mucus. And the author is all like, what's the big deal already? Would it make you feel better to call it "cervical fluid"? Okay, so call it cerivical fluid. Whatever--you know you touch them all the time anyway. So just pay attention, right?

And it just made me realize: feminism is the radical notion that fluids are normal.

Ambivalence about Andrea

2005-04-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

I didn't know until just now that Andrea Dworkin died. This is funny, because this is a weekend I actually had time to be quite leisurely about the news, and read a couple papers thoroughly. And I had no idea.

It's a weird feeling, to find this out third hand--sort of like learning from a friend that a girl you hated in high school died, and you didn't even know.

That would be a bad analogy except that Andrea Dworkin was a girl--a woman--I hated in high school, and in college...and still, I guess. In fact, my undergraduate honors thesis was for the most part a sixty-page anti-Andrea rant (it was less anti-Andrea than it was pro-Susie Bright, but the two sort of go together). Dworkin, to my mind, was so wrong that she was dangerous. Not only was she in bed with all the wrong people, but she had the nerve to criticize everyone else for being in bed, and talking about it, at all.

I can't say that, now that she has died, I feel more warmly towards her, or more ready to say positive things about her.

But I will say that I am always glad to share my world with people who want women--and the complicated, risky world of women's sexuality--to be at the cultural center stage. Although she and I would never have agreed about the status of the obscene, we did have some similar ideas of what should be on scene.

And also--every time I get angry, get crazy angry, about the dangerous ways men appropriate women's sexuality for their own ends, I think of her. And it is always good to remember that someone with whom you disagree so virulently can feel passionate, feel angry, about the same things as you.

So although I didn't agree with her on anything, she was important enough to me (as an adversary if as nothing else) that I'm quite surprised I didn't know about her death until two days later. It's sad to think that the loss of one of America's most publicly, importantly angry women doesn't count as significant news.

The personal politics of new-wifey

2005-04-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

So, my Uncle is getting remarried. He got divorced just about the time I broke up with my long-term college boyfriend, and started dating new-wife about the same time I started dating B, so we have had weirdly parallel lives for the last five years or so. I’m glad he’s marrying someone with whom he is really compatible and who is a nice woman who loves him.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, as though it wasn’t already weird enough to be at the “same” dating phase of life as your uncle who is twenty years older than you, good old Unc has decided to make it weirder for me because:

a.) new-wife is much closer to my age than to his

and, as though that weren’t already enough to make me feel all squirmy and uncomfortable in relation to him/them/my family when its gathered together, the extra special weirdness is that

b.) new-wife HAS MY SAME NAME.

So the niche I had filled in my extended family—ie, the young professional woman embarking on adult life—is now also filled by her.

And this really sucks for me. It sucks for me personally because now I have to compete with new-wife for my space in the family, because I can be neither an adult or a child in the same way that I was before. This isn’t her fault, and I admit that partly it is just my own competitiveness and neuroses that make this so frustrating.

But it sucks for me politically, because I am SO BOTHERED by this intergenerational relationship. And this is her/their fault. It makes me like my family less, that this is happening in it. I try not to map my political standards inappropriately onto the relational decisions of others (as conservatives do, troublingly, all the time), but at the very least it makes me feel that in my family, which usually is so liberal and great, there is this weird other value system—one in which wealthy older men find much younger new-wives who give up their otherwise successful careers to accommodate them—is taking root. And I don’t know how not to judge that, or how to, in good faith both to family and to politics, express or not that judgment.

I have just received their wedding invitation, and this is what motivated my post today. You will not, perhaps, be surprised to hear that new-wife has sent my invitation to Mr. And Mrs. B’s Last Name. She did!

As though it weren’t irritating enough that new-wife has taken my name—she has gotten it wrong.

So irksome. Everybody get excited for what’s going to happen when new-wife and I have babies at the same time! Yay!

An exam of memory lane

2005-04-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

I just checked out this blog, and happily found a long discussion of the always fabulous Emma Goldman. The blog also mentions the Iowa City Emma Goldman Clinic, which is a fantastic women’s healthcare office. The IC EGC was very very good to me for the traumatic two months of my sophomore year in college when I thought I was pregnant (I didn’t know yet that I just have really reticent eggs and the least little bit of stress sends them scurrying off-stage into their ovarian wings). Anyway, I got pregnancy tests there every week for about a month—they never made me feel badly and were really sympathetic to the weirdness of the situation.

Anyway, thinking of the Emma Goldman clinic sent me reminiscing. Here are some of my more vivid ob-gyn experiences: it seems, given all the ranting I’ve been doing about shoddy health care, to fill in some details of my own experiences, good and bad.

1: Fuzzy-Mustache Man
That is not how one should have to describe one’s first gynecologist. Really. But it is true. My first poke n’ prod was administered by a man, and a fuzzy-mustache man he was. Also, he was wearing a bow tie. Also, I had been reading a book before he came into the room and he was very excited to see what I was reading. So, my very first time in the stirrups I had to talk not about varicose veins and birth control, which is what I wanted to talk about in my timid way, but Heilbroner's book The Worldly Philosophers. You know, because globalization and economic theory are so directly related to my cervical heath that I’d want to talk about those issues during my Very First Pelvic Exam.

2: It’s like getting your wisdom teeth out, but it’s my cervix
A couple of years ago I had a very irregular pap smear, and had to have a whole series of unpleasant procedures to determine that—guess what?—nothing had been wrong to start with. But anyway, during the most nasty of these procedures, which—and I am not kidding here—involved an electrified wire and my cervix spending way too much time together, the doctor and the nurse had a protracted conversation about their recent and horrible encounters with very bad dentists, and how they hated feeling so helpless and poked and prodded. During this conversation, my vagina dentata smirked with irony.

3: My cervix holds up half the sky
Because I’m a grad student, until recently I had to go to student health, where I was regularly confused with incompetent eighteen year olds (not that eighteen year olds are necessarily incompetent, it’s just that this student health office believes they are). It was terribly demeaning, especially since you were constantly under the threat of being stuck in a mandatory birth-control information meeting with Your Students. Awful. Anyway, I had this weird exam there from a nurse wearing a beaded American-Flag pin stuck right between her boobs who was very glad to hear that I had “good wholesome, American, middle-class values.” I have no idea what those were, or why she thought I had them. But then, from this inauspiciously neocon beginning, there was a sudden turn towards gyno-consciousness raising when she laid me on a table, on the ceiling above which she had taped a “women hold up half the sky” poster, and started saying things like, “what I healthy pink cervix! O, lovely! Very healthy, very pink!”

4: Healthcare for all cervixes
My ob-gyn in college, unlike this Chicagoan student health bitches, was FANTASTIC. She totally solved the awkward what-to-talk-about-while-I’m-taking-a-core-sample-of-your-cervix problem by being awesome: during university vacations she worked in Nicaragua doing free medical work, particularly cervical-cancer prevention stuff. Talking about this was –so—the perfect middle road between talking about economic theory, on the one hand, and my lovely pink cervix on the other.

Not that I’m opposed to talking about my cervix, natch. But sometimes it’s nice to have a little distance from the prodding.

I Love Naomi as a Hot Mama: But...

2005-04-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

I can imagine a very good, very scary, very provocative movie about any of these topic: bad mothers, bad children, bad child care, bad doctors, bad wild animals. Most particularly, I can imagine a great scary movie about this topic: bad anxiety about reproduction.

I would like to see any of those movies. But I am sad to report that while The Ring Two tries to be all of them, it in fact follows through on none of its interesting topics in any interesting sort of way. It was not even, after the first little bit, very scary (I say this having literally jumped out of my chair five minutes in; it was embarassing). So don’t go. Most particularly, don’t go if you are already thinking about how very very compelling and scary reproduction is, even when it doesn’t involve weird long-haired spawn of satan girls. All the movie will make you realize is how “scary” or “alien” or “other” or whatever your own reproductive system is by comparison.

Most particularly, this is what I found irksome about the movie: I was all curled up in a ball for the movie (I mean, it wasn’t that scary, but it was still scary) and so, walking out, had weird muscle cramps in my stomach…which were not, just in case any one was wondering, menstrual cramps. Nope. My own ovaries are still more scary to me than Naomi Watts’.

Our Bodies, Our Bookstore

2005-04-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

Today I popped in to the fabulous Women and Children First and learned that NOT ONLY is there a new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, but they (that is, WACF) are hosting a party with some of the editors, etc, on April 20th. If you live in Chicago, you should most definitely attend.

Evidently there will also be a "discussion" of some sort about women's health issues. This is what I would like to discuss: how can I find a nice, local, non-patronizing general practitioner? I pretty much like my ob-gyn, but I need a physical and I don't know how to find a GP. There should be some helpful index we can all refer to when looking for such people: universities put faculty evalutions online so students can choose selectively; I don't know why women shouldn't have the same resources when looking for healthcare.

Someone should start that, already. Ready, go!

Loving movies, Hating doctors

2005-03-30T22:02:00.000-08:00

Last night we saw a movie which wasn’t about pregnancy or fertility. It was about immigration and nation formation. But of course, because maternity and fertility are the best metaphors going, a lot of the plot for this movie was generated through a central character who couldn’t conceive (she couldn’t reproduce the nation! Her husband was sad! He became a racist soccer hooligan! Oh no!). All this to say, even thought he movie wasn’t “about” infertility, it came up a lot. I kept whispering to B about the poor infertile mom, and asking him what he will do if I become crazy like she did and start lurking creepishly around playgrounds. Oy.

He had no real thoughts. But because the movie motivated me, I have chosen for my reading-over-breakfast material this morning the always wonderful Our Bodies, Ourselves. Whatever would we do without it?! In it, under causes of infertility, I found this paragraph:

3. Endocrine problems may exist. Failure to ovulate regularly or irregular menstrual periods may be due to a malfunction of the ovaries, pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid or adrenal glands. Normally, several specific hormones are secreted at specific times in the menstrual cycle. If any one of these is not produced or produced in insufficient quantity, the whole cycle can be thrown off. In addition, when ovulation is unpredictable the chances of conception are decreased, as women cannot count on a consistent cycle with a known fertile time. Women often develop amenorrhea (absence of menstrual periods) following the use of birth control pills, which can result in infertility. Women who have irregular periods or who are older when they start their first menstrual periods seem to be more prone to this so-called post-Pill syndrome. (502, the 1992 edition).

And I would say: this is me! I don’t know, of course, if any or many of my hormones are weird. By I know that my “cycle” is so irregular as to not really be one, I started my period rather late, and have been on the pill for oodles.

What this little self-diagnosis means to me is mostly that I will need to be really patient because it makes sense to wait a while to see if my body can cure itself of this “so-called post-Pill Syndrome.” It would make sense for it to take a while.

But the other thing that it makes me realize is that I have been asking since I was 14 what it meant that I hadn’t gotten my period yet—and I was even more worried by the time I was almost 16 when it finally happened. Yet at no point have I successfully gotten a doctor to seriously discuss ovulation/my lack of ovulation with me…it was only this last time at my regular yearly poke-n-prod that I got the doctor to concede that “it might take four months” before I could plan on a healthy conception.

I understand that doctors are not particularly motivated to talk to young girls and women about increasing their fertility. But I hate not being taken seriously—and it seems like it would be good to know any important information about my fertility before I got to the time in my life when I was really primed to have a baby. You’d think that, at the very least, when I got married a doctor would have talked seriously to me about when I should think about going off the pill. I’ve been asking about getting pregnant probably for the last three or four years.

Anyway, this morning I hate the doctors. They suck. They will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, and we will register a new breed who are required to carry pocket-sized Our Bodies, Ourselves with them at all times in their lab coats.

***

In passing, the movie was really good, up until the last two minutes when the soccer hooligan business started in ernest. But there were several plotlines besides the soccer one. It’s called Up and Down, and just now is playing at the Music Box. Trot yourself over there, already.

home again, home again, fertility jig

2005-03-29T21:47:00.000-08:00

We were home this weekend for Easter—went to visit my parents in the small Iowa town where I grew up. It was the kind of short trip that makes you want to stay forever. And I never thought I’d be one who wanted to “stay forever” in my small Iowa hometown—I liked growing up there and all, but to live there now—lord, what would we do? So it’s a little shocking to even find the idea appealing. I love city life. Still, I find in my old young age that I like the idea of a thirty second commute, and of mattering to a place rather than just having a place matter to me.

Anyway, visiting home made me just heartsick for babies. We kept taking these long, sun lit walks through the country side, looking out for the short green buds of crocuses and daffodils and watching a medley of dogs sprint after cows and the whole scene was so fertile it made me want to burst. I wanted to have dogs and kinder frolicking; to have my parents be grandparents, a role in which they will be absolutely triumphant. I want b’s parents come to visit so that the grandfathers can build a little tree house down by the creek.

Really, this went so far that I not only decided that next fourth of July (a big family holiday) would be a perfect time to have a baby blessing but also started Planning The Ceremony to bless a baby I have not yet even had. Crazy talk!

My mom and I were discussing a girl I went to high school with who recently had a very sad miscarriage at four months. Mom, who knows we are thinking about kids but does not know we have gone off the pill, says I really don’t have to worry about this because no one in our family has miscarriages.

But I don’t think I am really “in our family,” reproductively speaking. Although if you put my grandmother, mother, and aunt and I in a room you would think we were just differently aged peas in a pod, you would not think that if you were looking at our reproductive parts instead of our faces. My grandmother and aunt both got pregnant at late ages and while using birth control (my great-grandmother too, now that I think of it) and my mom got pregnant both times the Very MONTH she decided to.

So although it has only been nine weeks since I’ve been OTP, that seems like a long time in the biological world of my family. What it means is that I’m not like my mom or my grandmom—that I’m charting some new fertility waters all by my lonesome. So who knows? Maybe I can have a baby to be blessed next fourth of July—and maybe not.

Curiouser and curiouser, as they say. I’m just sort of hanging out these days, with my zits. Which are worse and worse, by the way—I actually had to change into a less v-necked shirt this morning so as to conceal a particularly red one on my chest. It makes me feel decidedly un-momlike to look like such a zitty teenager.

On Second Thought...

2005-03-23T22:03:00.000-08:00

...maybe it is not very practical to have un bebe. Today the whole prego-lifechange-lifeasmom thing doesn't sound like much fun. I mean, if I had un bebe, what would I have done this afternoon when I was spontaneously invited to run over to the Redline to have a quick beer and meet my friend's brother, in town for the day? Stayed home, that's what. Boring!

I know second thoughts aren't all that interesting, really. They don't mean that much in the larger scale of things. No overall change in the family's baby-now planning.

However, for some reason, I'm just not in to the baby thing today. I even had to look at a bunch of baby photos this afternoon, and even the feet (they're so small! they're so squeezable!) failed to generate much enthusiasm. eh. babies. they just sit there.

In which I have some teeth filled

2005-03-22T15:50:00.000-08:00

So I was scrambling yesterday to finish a first part of a first draft of a first chapter of my dissertation (you wouldn’t think this was very stressful, but it sort of was) and had to stop to go to the dentist. I thought it was just going to be a drive-by exam sort of thing, because I’d had my teeth cleaned a week ago and just needed to have a “hot spot” double checked. So I only put 20 minutes on the parking meter, and figured I could use the down time to get some distance on my writing before it was time to proofread.

Unfortunately the dentist did not think this was a drive-by—he thought it was time for me to get THREE FILLINGS. Fillings are ridiculous; I still do not think of myself as someone who gets them. But I guess I am. And to add insult to injury, while I was being poked and prodded and drilled the dentist and his assistant started talking about how “stupid” and “dangerous” people like the Dixie Chicks and Jane Fonda were, because of their anti-war positions of course. Some people may have forgiven Jane Fonda. But not my dentist! No! and he’s just not buying any Dixie Chicks albums, but if he had, he would smash them and throw them out. Yep!

Meanwhile, I’m lying inarticulate on my back, inhaling the burnt fumes of my own teeth. Fun. My friend Sarah points out that this is actually a really great metaphor for what life is like under the Bush administration.

So because this is the first remotely medical procedure I’ve had since I went OTP, not that it’s been so long, it made me think a lot about baby having. Here are issues that sprang to mind as the drill whirled and the bad-politics aggravated:

1: Pain. Not so very fun. I think of myself as having a pretty high pain threshold, and managing pain pretty well, but really I’m not sure that that’s true. I mean—it sucks to have a needle stuck into three different locations in your gums. It starts to happen and, if your me, your back goes tight all the way through your shoulders, your knees clench so hard they come off the vinyl of the little benchy-chair, and your eyes widen in panic. And that’s just from fitting a tiny needle into a semi delicate tissue that has, lets remember, already BEEN NUMBED! If a little shot or two makes me panicky, perhaps I should not be so bold as to presume that I can handle fitting UN BEBE through MY SPECIALS without an epidural. I’m just saying.

2. Pain Management. Who makes a good coach for me? I am not very good at being coached; it irritates me and I feel condescended to. Particularly boys. I hate boy coaches. But really no matter who is coaching I am prone to not handling it very well when I need it the most. I think the equation goes like this: if I need coaching I feel out of control which makes me want to be in control and feel REALLY CONDESCENDED to by people trying to coach me.

All this to say: labor might be hard between me and my boy. We might not get along real well. I think I am going to have to get me some really nice wise women midwife lady who can manage me in a grandmotherly, non-condescending, sort of way.

I would also like to say that one of the reasons I don’t often take well to coaching is that there are a lot of bad coaches. They should be better at the management of stressed persons, and not increase their stress by making them feel dumb or condescended to.

3. Treatment. Lying passive really sucks. Since, as I said, fillings aren’t very normal for me, I have no idea what they do when they fill one except that it involves lots of things (sticks? Creams? Creams on sticks?) that are numbered, as in, “nurse, I’m going to need a one and a three while I talk about hating Jane Fonda,” and some weird little gun that “cures” something—later I learned it was a resin. Anyway, I am happy to be pretty passive about my teeth, but not about my SPECIALS or my BEBE! So I am going to have to find myself some medical staff who are good communicators. And I am also going to just resign myself to asking a lot of questions even though I hate to feel not in the know. I am okay at that, when I don’t feel condescended to.

Are Ob-Gyn/midwifes use to being interviewed? I hope so.

reality check

2005-03-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

I was just sneaking around and reading the blog of a friend of a friend of mine...and it turns out she has been trying to get pregnant for three years and only recently found out that she and her husband can't have babies "naturally" and so has been having horrible shots and IVF preparations and other nasty expensive things.

Now, I'm not apologizing here for my own pre-pregnancy anxiety, because it is real and because where can you vent if it's not your stupid blog? But I just want everyone out there to know that I do put my own little problems in perspective.

New Favorite Game

2005-03-17T07:07:00.000-08:00

Every morning I play a new game that is awesome. Awesome. It is called the “surely I’m ovulating” game. Here are some of the “moves” I’ve made in this game this morning:

*Fuck, I am irritable this morning. Surely, I am ovulating!

*This morning I have a total craving—not for pickles but for Radiohead. I have never wanted to listen to Radiohead in the morning before, ever. Surely I’m ovulating! Kid A, dude!

*My hair is so gross. I hope it’s because I’m ovulating.

This game has a truly riveting hold on my attention, which is not really a good thing, because can you imagine how exhausting? Plus, it very very easily slips into a different, equally as magnetic but much less appealing game, called “Surely I will never ovulate.” I play that one most days too.

Anyway, off the subject, it is snowing this March morning in Chicago. Snowing. I am a great defender of winter in principle, but I must say that this is straining even my equable limits. If I ever do ovulate, perhaps I will take my eggs to someplace warmer so that they don’t have to deal with this shit.

Wait. Was that me?

2005-03-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

Was that me who was just complaining about how it’s bad to be judgemental? Who wants the world to back off and not judge me when/if un bebe becomes my responsibility?

Well. I just got back from the little grocery store on our corner, and found myself seething when stuck in line behind a woman who was buying, for her son, twelve packs of kool-aid and three bags of chips. And paying for it with her link card (even as I write this, let me pledge to you: I am a liberal) and being really obese, along with her son, and making me worry about heart disease.

I swear, it was sort of like watching that movie I saw a few weeks ago about the really bad but nice sexy poor british mom, except that it was a really bad but probably nice fat ghetto chicago mom.

And I am here to tell you: I judged. I sure did.

There are some larger issues to talk through here about judgement and mothering and class and how I want not to be a gentrifier. But right now I have to go now and make tacos.

So let me just say that for some reason (likely my own mother’s insane judgement/mothering/class issues) kool-aid is one of the really inexcusable things in my moral universe. Kool-aid! It’s like diabetes in a glass. And my point as I say this is not only that Kool-aid is a beyond-the-pale beverage for children (though, clearly it is), but that mothering must be reaaaally weird if it can turn snack time into a moral crisis.

this is just fantastic

2005-03-15T23:17:00.000-08:00

www.nurseatstarbucks.org

had I a baby, i would certainly partake. or rather, the baby would partake. whatever.

Even I

2005-03-15T23:08:00.000-08:00

Would find it boring to discuss again my ongoing lack of ovulation. So I'm not going to.

However, I will say that I had a long and semi-drunken conversation Saturday night with my sole peer-group-friend-who-is-already-a-mom and she reported that -she- had periods, a little irregularly, immediately after stopping the pill.

I'm just saying.

Again, Pulled 2 Ways

2005-03-15T23:07:00.000-08:00

I want to provide two links today: they are very different, but are both on my mind—they give you some idea of what I’m torn between these days.

First, this—

http://www.elle.com/article.asp?article_id=6050§ion_id=36&page_number=1&magind=5791

Which is a link to an article in Elle (I never thought I would reference such a thing) written by Judith Warner, famed author of a book about mommy-problems ( Perfect Madness) and a participant in the general cultural debate about how culture is bad for mommies. If my tone sounds dismissive, it’s not because I don’t think there really are culture-mommy problems…it’s just that I find the whole topic rather exhausting because so few people have anything practical to say about this problem. It can be a little defeating to think about.

I received this link from a dinner guest I hosted Saturday night. B and I got to play apprentice grown-up and have two couples we like over to dinner—they are older than us, and have kids, and are very cool and urban and intellectual and creative. Both of the women, particularly, have fallen into my life at such a good time. I had long bemoaned my lack of positive role models in the next phase of life, and so I am so glad to know these two cool moms. Really, they are so cool: great shoes, guitar playing, etc.

After dinner, over tea, I went on a little rampage about my current thoughts on money and feminism… which I did because I felt very comfortable, but in retrospect maybe I shouldn’t have. I always try to be very humble about motherhood, particularly around women who are actually moms. But it was interesting to get their perspectives—one of them works and one doesn’t—though hard not to feel like I wasn’t stepping on one set of toes or the other as I danced around the topics at hand.

We reached no real conclusions, but I will say that one of the ladies did make me usually reconsider (if not to reject) my feelings about the importance of finance when she pointed out that economic gain was the major goal of 70’s feminism, and that one of the major results of it was to split the constituency of motherhood in a way that ended up not helping anyone.

It is so so easy to judge each other, especially when the topics at hand are so close to the heart, so carefully considered, and so tightly connected to our own anxiety about ourselves. Although I shared this woman’s concern about motherly constituency, I have to say that one of my big feelings after reading Warner’s article is that maybe it’s –good- I won’t really be around other mothers, because without a peer group I can have my motherhood to myself, without so much competition and jealousy and anxiety.

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot about this. But imagine holding all that in mind while also thinking a lot about this:

http://www.thewb.com/Shows/GenericShow/0,11116,214898,00.html

yes, that is the link for the WB’s new reality show, “The Starlet.” It is the first reality TV show I have every cared about, and I am a leeetle bit obsessed with it. Here’s why: while I do not really have any desire to prove my ability to eat tarantulas (or whatever they do on those other shows) I do have a tremendous desire to be a star—a pretty one, with great clothes, desired by many and impressive to all. I don’t necessarily want to be a star in a starlet, WB-ish way, but I definitely am interested in comparing myself to those who do—in imagining how differently and how supremely I would do the little acting scenes in would do the little acting scenes in which they show themselves off.

But here’s the thing—I am too old! Too old, for sure—if having a husband doesn’t rule you out for the role of starlet, having stretch marks in your boobs surely does. Yup. No wrinkles for Hollywood.

So that is all very traumatic, to find myself in this new relation to pop culture and to pretty girls. Of course, it’s been coming on slowly for a while now but nevertheless it still shocks me.

As far as the show’s competition goes, I am rooting for Michelynn. Mercedes is cooler and probably a better actress, but she looks too Winona to say “starlet” to me.

Attractive; UnAttractive

2005-03-07T17:03:00.000-08:00

Going on six week sans pill, I can report as of yet no signs of ovulation. This gives me daily moments of panic in which I am sure that I will in fact never ovulate, never have kids, never get to be cool and pregnant and powerful. I am fully aware these thoughts are crazy, but there it is.

Anyway, as if to comfort me, I have had signs that my hormones are changing, post pill. The signs take the form of:ZITS. Not too many yet, but a good medley of them. B searches for them gleefully, and pops them painfully. It is very irritating, and sadly (since several years ago I had to go off the pill for a few months for other reasons) I anticipate this zitness to continue for at least a few months more.

I feel very bothered by the whole thing. It feels so embarrassing and juvenile. Also it is public, which I don’t like—I’m sure people are wondering what I have done to myself.

Another thing: my hair has been noticeably more limp and wilty and, I think, oily. This might be my imagination, and it might be the weather. Regardless, it sucks.

I am told that pregnancy is often very becoming, that it makes one’s skin and hair “glow.” I hope this is true, and true for me: it seems like it would be a terribly indignity to be not only bloated and pregnant, but also zit covered.

I really have that worry; that is how small a person I am. Terrible!

I was thinking about all these things on Saturday night, because we went dancing at a club downtown (SoundBar, for anyone who keeps track of these things). Going to styley clubs is not normally my thing—they tend to offend both my wallet and my feminism.* But it was a friend’s birthday, and we thought that we’d get in free and we did not think we would have to stand in line for 45 minutes while girls-without-coats (one of my least favorite subspecies, historically) got whisked inside. We were wrong on both these counts, as it turned out, but we went in anyway and we managed to have a good time.

Clubs are, obviously, very much about looks on display, particularly women’s looks. At this moment of aging and anticipation, it is a weird thing for me to encounter that in such a gratuitous way. On the one hand I do still feel a little bit in the game—a little bit competitive with the looks and feminine displays of other women, other girls. I like that I can still get away with a mini skirt and halter top (my sister-in-law, younger and flashier than me, gave me a particularly naked one for Christmas) and I like to be desired, especially when I am dancing. It feels good and powerful. On the other hand, it’s clear that I’m not really involved in the scene there; I am too old and too married and I feel too parental towards too many of the participants. And I never can tell about what I think of that sort of display, despite the pleasure I sometimes take in it. It has always felt like a guilty pleasure.

At dinner, before the club, a couple at a table near us had a particularly darling baby (and it was not only darling because it was out for sushi, though I do find that a particularly compelling activity for a baby). The mother was breast feeding at one point: she was behind me so I couldn’t see her, but B kept me updated and assured me (this is another embarrassing thing I worry about) that despite the breastfeeding the woman had very nice breasts, not at all freakishly engorged. So I had that encounter, another feminine display, in mind while watching the girlies at the club.

I would like to say something wise here about the juxtaposition of the two, but I don’t feel fully qualified to do that. I will say that both seem to have an interesting sort of power, or rather make a sort of power out of the necessary embodiedness of women. It seems nice to say that one is healthier, more real, more valid. I think that’s probably true. But I must admit, reluctantly, that the other is not an empty category of experience for me yet…and although I have purposefully declared it bankrupt and tried, for the most part, to give it up, I will be sad when I realize that I no longer have the option of taking it back.

*Note that “my feminism” provides a useful sort of watch dog function; really, sometimes it does feel like it is its own personified thing, not totally within my control.

Some Things I Saw

2005-02-28T22:08:00.000-08:00

On Friday, b and I went to a movie downtown—I met him after work, we ate, saw a movie, and then met some friends at the Hungry Brain. All of this, of course, falls into the category of stuff that won’t happen for me after we are pregnant. Hnnr. (As a side note, over drinks, I commented that I think in some ways I drink more now than I have every before, and it was a funny moment because we could talk about that with our friends even though only b and I knew what, really, we were talking about. Privacy! It’s weird for me; these are good friends.)

Anyway, had I not already been thinking about motherhood, I would have been after the movie. It wasn’t, in fact, an actual movie; it was a showing of nine of the short films nominated for Oscars this year. Though these were all separate movies made by separate people, they did have an almost universal theme, and it was this theme that put parenting newly on my mind. The theme was: the world is bad, and the badness of the world can be poignantly revealed via the suffering of children. In the short films we saw, we saw children suffering in New Zealand, Korea, the Kashmir, and London. Somewhere else, too, I think. But the children suffering in London were the worst. Those children, four of them, were (the movie) the daughters of a really really young working class British mom who loved them very much but was too young to really be a good mother. She couldn’t manage basic mothering things like feeding them, for chrissakes, so when the only food in the house is some moldy bread she resorts to desperate measures like giving them A BAG OF SUGAR to share (“don’t eat it all!”) and then taking them to wait for hours in the parking lot of a pub while she spend her little remaining money buying beer for a boy she is trying to convince to like her.

This all goes on a shockingly long time, and is incredibly awful to watch, even though nothing ever really desperate happens (except a wasp crawling inside the babies mouth, but that works out okay too, sort of). B. and I both were sort of blown away by it; it won the Oscar and it deserved (as I said, one of a type, but a really good one). But even so, I felt a little manipulated by it. It made me think of how both my mother and mother-in-law are hyper sensitive to a lot of stuff—just no critical distance when it comes to the representation of children.

I myself find this a little irritating. I mean: buck up, right? Don’t spoil every one else’s narrative pleasure just because you want to put your deeply-felt maternal instincts on parade. And this movie—all these short movies, really, who play to an elite audience really interested in class guilt and guilt appeasement—were really interested in letting you put those instincts on parade. I could talk about this more, but it’s sort of beyond my main point and worry, which is this: what if I start to have those maternal instincts?

I always want to be above stuff like that. But it makes me wonder if there’s more integrity in having and expressing those feelings (and developing a feminism that has a meaningful place for them) or in working hard to put those feelings, if I have them, in perspective and realize that while I might need to be a protective mother the world doesn’t really need to care about that.

I don’t know.

Something else I saw this week: a realize amazing McDonald’s ad that featured a totally hot girl walking down the street being ogled by boys who are shocked to see, as she passes by, that whoops! She’s a mom; there’s a baby in her backpack. She walks on by, and they laugh good-sportishly to themselves. The joke’s sure on them! They thought a mom was hot, o ho! I’m lovin’ it!

The really tragic part was that McD’s clearly thought this ad would also appeal to women, who would be flattered to imagine being hot ogled moms. Good lord.

One other thing

2005-02-25T09:09:00.000-08:00

I am spending too much time trolling the internet for local interesting birth classes/options. And I just want to say: there doesn't seem to be very much out there. What is the point in living in a progressive city like Chicago if there aren't an abundance of midwives and doulas and birth centers to choose from? Shockingly, I've found a lot more stuff in the suburbs...I guess because that's where people go when they are having kids. Oh, Urban Mothers, where are thee? Surely I am not the only one: I know you are here, because your children irritate and distract me when I am in coffee shops in the morning trying to work.

Anyway, hopefully I'm just looking in the wrong places, and once I actually get pregnant and am willing to talk about it with people (whenever that is) I'll find out about more resources. Because really folks, it still seems like "starbaby" is the best I have found. And that is just sad.

Why you should go to the Red Line, unless you are PREGNANT and can't

2005-02-25T09:05:00.000-08:00

So I have lamented a couple of times here that now that my mind has gone through the bellyaching of deciding to have a baby, my =actual- belly seems to be dragging its…feet. Or something. I continue to find this tiresome.

That said, I am also a little glad about this womb foot dragging, because every time I do something, I think about not being able to do it anymore…when I am pregnant. For instance, lying on my back. Nope—can’t do that in the later months of pregnancy! And also, lying on my stomach. That will be out for the obvious reasons.

But the other big thing I will not be able to do once pregnant, and probably not very often once bebe arrives (and I can once again assume all sorts of normal lying down positions) is go to bars. And this is very sad for me, because I love bars. I like the kind where you wear jeans and sit around and drink Old Style, and these are often the smokiest ones which means that they will be the ones that are Right Out once I am prego.

The –only- good thing about the impeding departure of bars from my life is that now I have a very good excuse to go to them all the time—and a very good line with which to manhandle B. into going with me (he, sadly, does not particularly like bars, which makes me think that maybe he should be the prego-getting one).

Case in point: last night I wanted to go out to a bar, and b. said that we should not because it was late and we were tired and hadn’t we already been out to a bar this week? And normally he would win that argument, but not now! No! Because of the bebe, or the hope of it. I win! So off we go to the Red Line Tap.

And we are so glad we did, because, although we had forgotten this, Thursday night is Open Mic night at the Red Line. Had we remembered, we would not have gone b/c who wants to sit around listening to melodramatic folk singers do bad impressions of Ani DiFranco? I am so past that. But this turns out to have been a very special Open Mic, because the ani-impersonators were outnumbered, and indeed outplayed, by a series of large and chaotic musical outfits playing instruments like euphoniums and—I’m not kidding here—wash tub basses. In fact, one band (which turned out to be an ensemble band from the old town school) had TWO, plus a guy playing the spoons and a very cute girl with pig tails blowing on a whiskey jug. And like six other people banging on things like flower pots.

Also, the guy with the euphonium was wearing sort of a sequined choir robe.

The music was not –all- that (the junk yard ensemble, though very fun, had a hard time incorporating modern “microphone technology” into their act so they were a little hard to hear), and if you had gone to a performance theater night in college expecting to see some crazy-sequined-euphonium-shit, you would not have been blown away.

But since no one at the bar was expecting to see anything like this, the evening had an incredible energy. The whole haphazard audience (a typically “diverse” Rogers Park group of men with few teeth and the less hipster of the hippies) had its collective mind totally blown. It was fantastic. And I will definitely go back, and so should all of you. Unless, of course, you are pregnant. Then you can just hang-out waiting for me to sulkily join you in the not-going-out-but-also-not-LYING-DOWN excitement of your lives. I can just hardly wait.

All About the Benjamins

2005-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

I've decided something. If we have a child, and if it is a girl, I have decided what I will tell her. I will tell her: make shitloads of money. Pick a career that involves dollars and dollars and dollars, everyday, all day. But don't let it be stripping, because that can bite you in the ass later when/if you run for office. But make lots of dollars, because they will be very handy when/if you run for office. They will be handy when you want to do anything.

I have never been opposed to making money, as something I might do, but at the same time I have never really done it. I have also not really approved of people who picked a career with the explicit goal of making money in mind. “Personal enrichment” and “intellectual progress” and “world saving” have all been ambitions I admired; “money making,” just straight up and not as an accidental sidecar to an otherwise moral act of artistic genius, has never been high on my list of interests or approbation. I mean, money?

But now I see the light. The answer to all a girl’s problems is, indeed, money. And she should do her damndest to make it herself.

Here’s the deal—as I mentioned the other day, I am finding myself newly agreeable dropping the whole career thing to do some pretty serious mothering. I have been baffled by the fact that this idea is indeed agreeable to me: how did I consent to this? When did my long-standing ideas of myself just sort of flitter away with out my guardianship, like so many dollars donated to ATM fees?

I think it happened when I married someone who made about three times as much money as me, with the promise of making four times as much money as me within a couple of years. And I don’t know, probably about five times a few years after that if he doesn’t get irked working for the man and drop out to be a poet.

So with all this income coming in without any effort on my part, with all the condo buying and 401k investing without any labor from me, my labor has stopped seeming urgent. It just doesn’t feel like it really matters. What matters to our new little practice family is my flexibility—my ability to accommodate life to my husband’s much more lucrative schedule. And as long as I’m doing that…well, the rest of the time I can do what I want.

Which is very freeing, I must say. Without the pressure to like my job, without the pressure to excel in it, I get to think a lot more carefully about whether or not I do like it and want to excel in it, or maybe I just want to do something else entirely? Maybe I want to stay home and pluck away at the strings of a novel. Maybe I want to volunteer full time for NOW. Who knows? Might as well.

But this week I am feeling a little bad about it, a little cornered. It’s nice to feel a lot of freedom, but it’s not nice to feel that all your ambition really doesn’t matter, because what you might, through your ambition, actually accomplish won’t have much to do with the central life of your family (assuming that you really do value your family, very much). I don’t like to feel that my professional accomplishments, no matter how great, don’t really have very much pull with the overall course of my life because they just won’t be as great financially.

So, though I am not sure how to immediately apply this insight to my immediate plans and schemes, my own dreams of motherhood, I say: dollars. Earn them. They will be very good for you, and very good for your feminism.

life proceeds apace

2005-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

I have no new news on babying, but I will say that it's an interesting thing to have decided to get pregnant and then to not be, yet. I had not anticipated this stage of the pre-prego experience. So for instance, my in-laws were here this weekend. I felt that we had a Very Big Secret to conceal from them--we have decided to have a baby! But in all ways not pill-related this is not at all new news, we've always planned on having kids. And for all I know, we're no more pysiologically prepared for baby-making than we were a month ago, because I can't imagine I've ovulated. So not much to say--at least, not much that we won't likely still be saying this summer.

But anyway, they came to visit. We went to the auto show. I have never wanted to go to an auto show, since I have never wanted to pay more than the mininum necessary attention to cars (as my mechanic can attest) but it was in fact a good time. I would like to say that I was torn between identifying with the mini (marker of my youthful hipsterness) and with the subaru station wagen (icon of my future urban-saavy momness) but it was not really a contest, I wanted the subaru, it is true. I only felt a twinge of hipster rearing its head when it was proposed that B. could have a mini and I could have the subaru, which did seem unfair and a harbringer of social inequalities to come. But we quickly agreed that we could both have both, actually, so that was okay.

The cover story on the NYT review of books yesterday was a review of a new book about mothering--I don't think I'll read the book, but I was struck by the reviewers sadly blase agreement with the basic claim that having kids, for a woman, really necessitates toning down the professional ambitions, because you're just not going to be perceived as the same career-minded person once the bebes come. This makes me sad, but it also makes me sort of shocked to realize how calmly I feel about the idea of sacrificing job for baby. Not to say that I am planning on doing so, but--I mean, we have a dog, I know I'm the only one who takes her to the vet, and I know what that means for how childcare duties will filter down in the future. Unless I suddenly become very wealthy or b's company takes up a suprisingly liberal paternity policy, when we have kids most their care will fall to me, and it will be up to me to fit in "career stuff" as I see fit.

I guess I'm just very startled to find myself at all okay with being a half-time or even full-time mom. It is interesting to get to know this new me! Her and I will have to work on our relationship a bit. I would say that it would be a good pre-pregnancy project except that the old me feels that my main pre-pregnancy project should be drinking heavily and staying out dancing until all hours. It's a hard call.

treading water

2005-02-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

Just one little thought here.

It has been three weeks since I went off the pill, which is not very long. It is especially not very long when you consider that I went off the pill not really expecting to ovulate at all for three or four months, and not expecting to get pregant for probably a few months, at least, after that.

But man--I am getting antsy. It's like, I've decided already, I'm reading the books, I'm ready! Ready to go!

Now--where's my egg?

The fact that I have no idea how long it might take my historically reticent eggs to emerge makes me all nervous and frustrated. I think I could pace myself psychologically if I knew how long-ish I would have to wait. But the fact that ovulation could happen any time or no time is very hard to plan for.

thoughts on starbabies. for real, starbabies.

2005-02-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

So today while walking my dog past the neighborhood organic foods store, I saw a flyer for a thing (a group? A school?) called “Starbaby Childbirth and Parenting Education.” I’m not usually interested in organizations that include words like “starbaby.” Starbaby? Really—any interest I might have had in astrology and universal oneness faded after age thirteen, and vanished completely after, you know, I started reading Freud. But because I am deathly afraid of caesarean sections and have a general interest in knowing more about non-hospital birth options, I picked up the flyer. I brought it home and checked out the website. And I thought to myself: if I get pregnant, and want a non-hospital birth, is “starbaby” lingo what I’m reduced to?

Nothing against the “starbaby” group, of course, I’m sure it’s grand, and since it’s local and accredited and stuff I’ll probably end up taking classes there myself. I suppose I shouldn’t judge them too quickly just because of the hippy trippy name “starbaby” (rendered, I might add, in a bad and hippy trippy font) and because their “starbaby” jingo carries into the names of their classes, such as “a star is born.” I can get used to that, I suppose, once I have a little “star” of my own.

Why must I get used to it? Because thus far, “Starbaby” is the best local pregnancy thing I have found—and by “best” I mean the only one that doesn’t focus almost entirely on insanely materialistic and suburban issues of maternity clothes and…I don’t know, storks. It seems the language of pregancy is really polarized between the extremely heteronormative (picture mother-to-be in sensible sweater-set reading Good Housekeeping) and the extremely new age (picture mother-to-be wearing a batik jumper reading How to Release the Goddess-Mother Within).

Between those two poles, I probably prefer the birth-experience of the godess-mother/starbaby group. I appreciate those folks for thinking that pregancy can be a cool, enpowering experience. But I have to say that I don’t really identify with them. And finding “Starbaby” stuff around the neighborhood really provokes my fear that for me pregnancy will be a profoundly lonely experience.

I know very few people who speak my language, as it were—people who are political, who are counter-cultural (whatever that means), who are earthy but also ironic—fewer still who would use that language to speak about pregnancy.

In some ways I suppose this points to a shortcoming in that language, one that bothers me and makes me feel a little lonely even when I’m not thinking about pregnancy. It’s like what everyone said about the intellectual/progressive left this election year: we haven’t yet found a way to be the contemporary intellectual left and also talk about values. Pregnancy is one “value”—one place of almost sublime experience—that we don’t yet have a very good way to talk about.

On the other hand, it seems to me that the discussion around pregnancy has a lot to gain from the lexicon of the intellectual left, the indi-rockers among us—a sense of the ironic, if nothing else.

So I guess this is to say that I’m willing to take a “starbaby” class and feel a little reverent and a part of something cosmic and magical and real. That sounds good to me. But I hope when I do, there’s someone to roll their eyes with me in the back of the class.

it's like an illness, but it's a bebe

2005-02-13T09:15:00.000-08:00

B. is sick this weekend. It is a revelatory downer. Having to do everything myself makes me think about doing everything myself…for a long time. It also makes me think about exactly how much I/we are going to have to do if there’s a bebe—because bebes are not sick, but they might as well be. And then they get all active and I suppose there’s even more to do then.

Anyway a couple of topics that occur to me:

1: Sickness.
I know nothing about sickness, really. When is a fever bad news? It’s baffling. And I think about my dog, and how many little ups and downs she has with her well-being, and I just imagine myself spending the first year of my child’s life on the phone with a nurse.

On the positive side, though, this was the first time ever in my life when I touched someone’s forehead and could tell that s/he had a fever. I’m sure that this means I am now totally ready to be a mom, because this is one of the magically mom skills—fever detection—that I never ever have had, and have worried about. So I am thankful that my husband got a 102 degree fever, because it has somewhat increased my confidence. Or whatever.

I had once voiced my concern about this to B.—not about detecting his fever, but just about my lack of the magical mom fever detection skill—and he pointed out that if our dog, with whom we are in pretty constant contact, suddenly changed temperature, then we would definitely know. This made sense to me, but I wasn’t actually comforted by this theory until I saw it in practice this weekend, with my husband and his changed temperature. I can say with confidence that it is very noticeable.

2: Staying in.
We are staying in. It is a downer. I mean, for real—last week were at the Empty Bottle arguing about whether the band name “Man Man” was just a bad rip-off of “Man… or Astro Man?” and this weekend we are shuffling back and forth between the living room and the bedroom; I took advantage of the spare time of Friday night to clean out my closet.

Is this what getting pregnant does to a girl? I mean, it’s different…you can go places with a belly or a bebe, even if that place isn’t the Empty Bottle…but there are some similarities. I friend of ours with a three year old couldn’t come to my b-day party because his daughter missed her nap and then fell asleep at 7:30. So he had to stay in and watch some teletubbies crap because that was the only DVD they had not already returned to netflix.

I am more or less ready to make these lifestyle changes, I think. But this weekend has been a little hard.

3. X-box

I think I should take it up. It has been B’s major form of entertainment through his illness, and the great part is that you can just talk to whoever else is on line. Also, the dog loves it because he stays in one place but is still sort of moving around interestingly and talking a lot. It seems to me this might be a good way to get through late pregnancy/early childrearing. X-box! But I am not really interested in any of the games I have seen thus far, and I still find the whole video game thing a little foreign and intimidating. But perhaps I should buck up.

4. Menstruation.

This really has nothing to do with B’s illness, I’m just thinking about it. I’ve been Off The Pill for two weeks now. I wonder when I shall ovulate? I have been planning on it taking months—my doctor said I should expect at least four, given my weird menstrual history and how long I’ve been on the pill—but I realize that I am a little antsy for something to happen, something to indicate that I have indeed gone OTP and my body is different now.

sort of real

2005-02-09T15:45:00.000-08:00

**this is out of order due to some blog merging issues.**

Today is the second day that I have decided not to take a birth control pill. This means that it is not really real yet—it’s still very easy to go back. My body won’t start controlling it’s own births for a while—maybe a long while. But I have four days, four days total, to change my mind without anything really stressful happening hormonally.

It makes the decision seem undecided some how—which makes it harder because it’s easier to doubt myself. Today is not at all physiologically different than any other day when I’d forgotten to take a pill.

B. and I are trying to make it seem different, and more real, by putting my pills into a box instead of in to me. As a wedding present we got an amazing box made out of a solid piece of Lapis Lazuli. We have loved it in a vague and museum-like way—we agree it’s real cool, but have just sort of left it around to get dusty. But now it’s holding my pack of birth control pills, maybe my last pack for a while. And in the packet the dial is turned to yesterday’s bill, the pill we decided that I wouldn’t take.

We went to the bookstore yesterday to find books about babies and bodies. A frustrating process, maybe more so even than looking for good wedding-planning stuff, because babies are so much more important than weddings (though the books are less frilly, necessarily, because even the girly ones have to talk about poop and hemorrhoids and getting fat and engorged nipples).

Also, it’s different for me because we were both decided that our wedding would be for both of us. Despite the big white dress aspect, it seemed clear that we wanted to share the wedding and the decisions, etc.

And it’s hard to be that clear about a baby. The boobs and the womb are mine, finally, and it doesn’t matter if B. is really more comfortable with the freakish pregnant nipples than I am—I am the one who will get the freakish nipples no matter how much we do or don’t use them.

The book we decided on buying has lots of photos of different women being powerful and womanly and birthing—things I like—and every time I look at them my stomach turns over. And I think about not being able to lie flat on my belly and it all seems very worrisome. I don’t know how I’ll know myself.

There weren’t books about the deciding to get pregnant thing, really, at least not in the pregnancy section. Maybe in the abortion section? Books about getting pregnant stop talking about decisions or professional negotiations after chapter one…there’s a week by week guide but they don’t say things like “around week three, don’t plan a meeting with your advisor because you will be very weepy and they will loose all respect for you” or “by about week 36 even your advisor will stop condescending to you because by then you will for sure look like a MOM, but they might not want to talk about books with you either. They will want to talk about the BEBE.” They don’t say “by week 38 you will be deathly tired of talking about the BEBE and deathly tired of being prego but don’t wish prego away! No! because at least prego is house trained, and once the BEBE actually is there, man, it’s shit city, and for real no sleep, worse even than it is now when you can’t lie on your stomach.”

Maybe they don’t fully need to say those things because I can already guess them. But I’d like to think about them more. The idea of pregnancy makes me fabulously humble. I don’t know how I’ll feel, what I’ll want. I think for me it will be like going to Burning Man the first time, and spending a week in the dust storms, and learning to take pleasure in how little I was by comparison.

But that’s a rosy place to put what really is a very stressful proposition—being a part of a different generation, a different sort of me with priorities that are practically, if not theoretically, very very different. What a lot of work!

one week out

2005-02-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

Have now been off the pill for one week. I have two things to say about this: first, I swear my tits have shrunk, and second, my libido has been doing the hormonal equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. That's a little embarrassing for me because I like to think of myself as a sexually well actualized person, and to think that I'd been placidly going along with a chemically depressed sex-drive is a little weird—especially because two years ago I did think that my birth control was getting to me, and so "fixed" the problem by changing to another pill. I had memories of a more, um, "perky" sexual existence, but had more or less attributed that to some combination of youth and having something to prove.

O, it is a sad day—the day you realize that the "medical industrial complex" has depleted your sex drive and then convinced you that it was all because you were soooo matuuure.

But maybe not, maybe it's just a temporary thing because I'm so hormonally flux-tastic right now.

The new "lets have sex-again!" me is making the rest of me even more interested in spending some time, pre-baby, off the pill. I read a book a couple summers ago (Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver) in which several of the characters were biologists and they all talked a lot about pheromones and ovulation. It made me sad to realize that I had not ovulated since I was 19, and only rarely before then. What if I spent my single years deprived of my greatest sexual attractiveness and my greatest sexual appetites? It would be a crying shame. All that time, I could have been going around bowling people over just by smelling right.

But on the other hand, lets not get too down on birth control here. I was just talking to my mom about how she literally can not conceive (heh) of how miserable she would have been without birth control; how she would have had ten children and then a collapsed uterus and then also no career and probably, at the end of it, no interest in sex (which, it was implied, would have deprived her of one of her greatest life joys. my mom is –very- sexually actualized; it's a stressor). I don't trust my fertility enough to think that I would have had quite such a hard time of it, but I don't know. And I can say with some confidence that without birth control I probably would have gotten pregnant with The Wrong Guy, my college boyfriend, and that would have SUCKED. Sucked. I can't imagine.

All girls should be on birth control until they're at least 25. That's not a new idea, but it's one I'm feeling particularly keenly these days.

Anyway: now I get to be all spry and fertile for a while with The Right Guy, and hopefully we won't get knocked up too fast for me to enjoy it.

That said, babies are starting to seem more straight-up fun and less an existential responsibility, which had been the major motivator for the baby-now movement in our family. So I hope we don't get pregnant too soon—but I also hope it doesn't take too long.