Effing Things Up, Old School

I seem to be sliding away on this little slipstream through time, where I'm losing track of things and forgetting important stuff, and even though I'm grasping at the sides trying to slow down, it's not really working. It's something that just happens every now and again, and the best thing to do, it seems like, is stop fighting it and just cancel as many commitments as I can until things regain equilibrium.

Earlier in the week, I was supposed to go volunteer in A's classroom. I completely forgot. The teacher didn't send me a scolding note or anything, so it was actually three or four days before I realized my mistake. I almost forgot my coffee date Wednesday morning, and last night I fell asleep putting the kids to bed and slept through another commitment. I have something scheduled for Sunday and even though it's something I want to do, with people I want to be with, I desperately want to get out of it.

I think a lot of it is that I haven't been getting enough alone time lately. Any, actually. 24/7 I am with people. Even at night, one of the kids has been crawling into bed with me (kindergarten rant to follow), and I'm woken up by people touching and poking me and talking in my face. Too much of this always results in a caged bear feeling and reality beginning to detach around the edges. I've been getting OUT plenty, which is good and important in its own way, but it's not alone.

It's funny to me now that I used to think working a full time job was extremely demanding on the socialization front. At least then I could go take a lunch break by myself, or go home and decompress for an entire evening if I wanted. I suppose the upshot is that my socialization tolerance has vastly increased. And I do enjoy socializing, I can't stress that enough. It's just ultimately very tiring, and I can't recharge unless left alone quietly with my own thoughts. I find myself lately uttering, barely aware of it, "Please Stop Talking to Me!" to the kids when they are just doing that verbal meandering that kids do.

When I suffered socialization burnout pre-marriage and pre-kids, it was an easy fix. I'd turn off the phone, ignore the doorbell, stay in my pajamas and read books in bed for a few days until I felt like facing the human race again. This approach no longer works.

So I'm left with trying to figure out a way to get alone time without it taking away from something or someone else.

So far, I'm coming up pretty short.

Bad Parenting is Fun

After being given a very thoroughly illustrated note, lamenting my cruelty and tyranny, I called both girls to my side.

"Come here, please. I have a secret to tell you!"

This lit them both up, and they forgot how evil I was.

I gathered them close around me.

"You see, I should have told you sooner, but ... I'm not actually your mother."

Their mouths fell open.

"Whaaaat?"

"Yes, you see, your mother -- your real mother -- was a beautiful, flaxen haired, milksop princess. But she died, as milksop princesses often do. And then your father married me ... your evil stepmother."

There was much giggling and gasping and "Mom! Tell the truth! Come on! Is that true!?"

Then Q chimed in with a thoroughly inappropriate (though, he assumed, adequately obfuscated) remark comparing me to the beautiful dead milksop princess. However, this remark was immediately and correctly parroted by C, and thus repeated, picked up and parroted by A.

So if you ever hear my children say I'm a firecracker in the sack, that would be why.

I Has Problems

I'm sensing a disturbance in the element of water today ...

Ten minutes before class, I was icing my bruised forearm. Suddenly, I noticed that the ice bag was leaking and had left a volleyball sized wet patch on the front of my jeans. So I threw on a new pair and left the house.

I dropped off C at the sitter's, I arrive at the dojo, and discover that my entire bag is soaking wet. Because my water bottle -- though it was tightly closed -- somehow leaked anyway and soaked my uniform through and through.

So I went in and bought another uniform. (I really did need another one anyway.) Except they didn't have pants in my size! So I ended up borrowing a friend's, who conveniently shares my size and had brought an extra clean one in.

(And then I fell off an icy ledge! But my fall was broken by a wolf! And then the wolf attacked, but luckily, I had a pistol hidden in my coiffure!)

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Birth? Really?

(Due to technical difficulties, I could not upload a thumbnail of the image. Therefore, you'll have to view the article to see it.)

This month's issue of Smithsonian had an article about this birth photograph by Wayne F. Miller. It depicts the birth of his son, David Baker Miller, in 1948.

I'm not sure what bothers me more: the photograph, or that the article seems to unquestioningly accept this depiction as an iconic representation of birth.

The predominant element of the photograph is the doctor. Tall, gloved, masked, he projects an aura of detachment and control. The baby is the product, held indelicately upside down by one leg. Disembodied, rubber gloved hands hover in the foreground.

The mother is nowhere to be seen. Apparently, she is irrelevant to the picture's message. Life begins when you are heroically rescued from the inert, decently covered field that is your mother's womb.

I know, the photograph is an old one. It reflects the standard birthing practice in 1940s America. Which is why it bothers me more that an article about the photograph, written over sixty years later, does not question the imagery or the symbolism. This is still, as far as most people are concerned, what birth is all about? This is what was chosen to represent birth on the Voyager spacecrafts? (Nice work, Carl Sagan.)

This picture is of a birth. It is not Birth.

A truly representative image of birth would include one thing above all: the Birthing Mother. The baby may not even be visible yet, but the Birthing Mother is still Birthing. There may be attendants, there may not. The setting can be anywhere: a hospital, a bed, a bath, a field, a creekside. The mother's face may show bliss, or agony, or determination, or fear, or calm, and it's still Birth. It may be from 1948, or 2008, or 18,000 BCE. The doctor, the rubber gloves, the mask, the sheets; these things are not intrinsic to birth, nor are they important to birth.

I think you can type "birth," or better yet, "homebirth" in Google image search and get thousands of images that are better representative of birth, and far less disturbingly cold, science-fiction flavored, and misogynistic than this one.

That this occurred to no one else before the article ran is a sad mystery to me.

UnSunday

I've discovered another useful aspect to Facebook. If I scroll back through my Wall, I can track all kinds of information. I was going through my history to see which Alchemy oil I was wearing on a particular day, and happened to notice that I was in a bad mood last Sunday, too, noting in particular that the day could "stick it."

I'm combating Sunday crossness by baking cookies (chocolate chip & hazelnut!), drinking coffee, and carefully washing my clothing in anticipation of a week of sartorial fabulousness. (What, you don't think t-shirts and jeans are high fashion?) I also have a workout scheduled shortly and have talked my husband into making dinner.

My eldest may be contributing to my crankiness. When I tried on a new shirt this morning, deciding whether to wash it or return it, she chimed in with her opinion:

"Mom! You look like a woman!"

So glad I'm fooling someone, if only momentarily.

Random Threebies

If I try to post three random things every day, maybe I'll get back in the habit. I know I spend a lot of time lamenting my lack of blogging lately, but part of that is because my life is both busy and boring. At least when it was just boring, I had a lot of time to spew randomness, and write lengthy entries about something as mundane as a stupid jackass who didn't hold the door for me when I was 9 months pregnant. You know, things like that. (I still remember your face, and you better watch your back, buddy.)

Something I'm doing lately, and I'm not quite sure what it is, is making my left butt cheek hurt. Yes, just the one.

More on the effing weather. There is another reason I am despising the cold. There is something wrong with the kitchen and the laundry room in this house. Although they appear to be original to the house, they are significantly colder than any other location. There was, at one point, a wind that would come in between a cabinet and the wall. I can't explain this, except that the entire house is a sublime example of free, drunken brother in law handicraft, so I can only assume it's somehow related. So, I hate to be in the kitchen to cook, because it's too effing cold, and I hate dealing with wet laundry in the 50 degree laundry room. This is making life annoying.

(And no, it's not supernatural. Not even demons will come in this house, citing the lack of structural integrity.)

Annik has an ear infection. She started abruptly acting like a crazy person on Saturday. First she was complaining that her ear was dirty and needed to be cleaned. Then she started doing things like banging on the window and crying, or laughing like a wild hooligan, and I sent her off to Urgent Care with Q. Now she's on thrice daily antibiotics for the second time this school year.

Winter, man. Freaking winter.

Oh help, Oh no!

It's a Gruffalo!

Wait, I mean, oh my god, I am so sick of winter already. It's so very early to be going here. Usually, the last several years, I've at least made it until March before crashing. And to be fair, I'm not really crashing, so much as getting Insanely Restless. It's not even properly cabin fever; I'm getting out quite a bit. It's just ... ugh, the cold, the wet, the dirty. Separately, I can deal with all of those things. Together, the crazy comes. It's like reverseDave's Syndrome. If it gets much colder, it'll be me jumping on top of a car, brandishing a stick, and wearing an offensive slogan.

I hate talking about the weather. So when I get to that point, where the angst of it is worse than the disgust of talking about it, it's bad. My irrational rationale is that I just have too much Mediterranean blood to tolerate this kind of weather. It's just unfair and biologically inappropriate to expect it of me.

Which leaves me no useful course of action anyway, except to come here and bitch about it to all three or four of my readers. It's not like I can whip out my 50% Italian card and have someone whisk me off to the Isle of Capri, can I? CAN I?

...

I didn't think so.

Just Some Pointless Rambling

I was thinking yesterday that I'm shooting my blogging wad in other places lately. Blogging used to be my primary weapon against new-mom isolation, and then new-mom-who-just-moved-into-a-new-town isolation. Now, with the advent of Twitter, and my abuse of Facebook, all of those collected tidbits that would have formed into a blog entry just get shot out, piece by piece, into the cybersphere.

Oh well. If I refocused my blog's intent, maybe that would change. But then again, maybe it wouldn't.

This morning I'm totally tired, crabby, and sore. If I consider Friday the end of the week, then I took eight karate classes this week, while subsisting on between 1200-1400 calories each day. Since I feel tired and sloppy in class, I'm inclined to blame the calorie count for that. Yesterday was particularly bad, because I forgot lunch, and then forgot to eat dinner early enough to digest before the night classes. When I got home I realized I'd consumed around 700 calories for the day and worked out (at varying intensities) for around 200 minutes. Uh, whoops. So it's a small wonder now that I was exhausted and was forgetting my katas completely.

So today I'm going to eat well, be lazy, and only exercise 30 minutes here at home. Maybe I'll crank up the heat and lie on the living room floor with a jury-rigged tropical drink and pretend I'm taking a vacation somewhere that is not EIGHT FECKING DEGREES FAHRENHEIT.

Ahem.

Oh, so that's what happened.

I just realized something today.

Over the past several years, I've become far more girly than I have ever been (consistently) in the past. I wear perfume every day (except in summer, blech). I "do" my hair. I wear makeup. I still like to wear clothing that's more or less androgynous, but (I hope) it's a little more stylish and a little less "Lazy College Student". I do not wear heels, but I like edgy shoes.

Anyway, I wasn't sure about why this development was taking place, but it hit me today, as I cleaned out Yet Another Little Potty Full of Poo, that for me, this has become an important offsetting factor. If my day's work is going to be largely janitorial, I better at least look good doing it. Contact with poo diminishes the old self-esteem, wearing a perfume that smells like cinnamon rolls fluffs it up. Yin and yang.

And to be fair, no one ever really made me aware of the VAST and UNSTOPPABLE destructive, chaotic force of two small children. Had I know just how much cleaning (to so little avail) would be required of this lifestyle, I may have stuck to my original guns and refused to bear children until I could afford a maid.

Preoccupations

Lately, I am so engrossed with music. Now that my Sansa is working, and fully loaded, and the dock is working (it stopped for about six months, then mysteriously restarted again), I'm using that to full advantage. I'm also blipping when I can, although lately my laptop is behaving badly and tends to crash when I'm using blip, so I've cut down a bit. That site is so much fun, I'm rediscovering all kinds of music that had completely fallen off my radar. When I hear something I loved years ago, but had forgotten, it's like all these little lights turning on in my head.

It's like a portable drug. It makes me happy. The other day, My Sharona came on the Sansa while I was out in public. Due to my overdosing on a particular YouTube video with this song as background music, I started giggling uncontrollably. I tried to pretend it was in response to something my toddler did, and buried my face into her hair, but all I could see in my head was Buster Bluth dancing in his WWI/stripper uniform, and I was helpless.

I'm also spending a lot of time at the dojo. After we were all sick with horrible illnesses in November, and I missed a lot of time, I made a goal that I was going to try to get there four times a week. I've been doing pretty well with that, and have been doing a lot of back to back classes to boot. It's been really fun and energizing for me, and helped me kick ten pounds in the last month alone. (I still have about 13 more to go, though. Grr.) I got my first stripe on my blue belt on Monday, yaaaay.

And I was on a quest to update my wardrobe, since it'd been about a year since I bought anything new and most of my things weren't fitting anymore. I finally found a pair that fit perfectly at Target, of all places, but when I tried to cheat and buy more pairs based on the ones I tried on and liked, they didn't fit, and I have to bring them back. WTF is up with that? I bought the same brand, same size, same cut, different leg styles. And they are entirely different, not just the effing leg openings. I found a place online that makes custom jeans and I swear, I'm trying that next. They're no more expensive than Gap jeans, NONE OF WHICH FIT RIGHT IN ANY WAY! Ahem.

I hate the garment industry.

Today I should blitz the laundry, and do some baking, since it's a non-dojo day for myself and A, which is rare (I think between the two of us we're there 5 days a week), and because the entire world is covered with a giant sheet of ice. It's a good day for hunkering down, holing up, and daydreaming about a vacation somewhere sultry and warm and abandoned.

Happy 2009

I have this feeling that 2009 is going to be a pretty, pretty, pretty good year. I don't know why I think that, and I hope I don't get bitten by Fate for saying so.

I spent most of the afternoon today at the mall, alone, which was fun for a while and quickly degenerated once I started trying on jeans. It's not satisfying whatsoever to be able to wear smaller sizes if the smaller sizes still fit like crap. Okay, there were a few jeans that weren't horrid, but they were boot cut, and I wanted straight legs. IT WAS NOT TO BE. Trying on approximately 15 jeans over a few hours is really not my idea of a swell time.

I did have fun at Sephora, though.

So, to welcome myself to 2009, I'm doing a meme.

What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
Bikram yoga, which I'd love to still be doing but officially don't have time for at present, and making jewelry by hand. This wasn't a year for big momentous things, it was more of a little incremental progress year.

Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't make resolutions, I set tangible goals. I met half my goals last year, one was lame and deserved scrapping (it was to paint the house's interior, which now seems like ... dare I say it? ... putting lipstick on a pig), and the other was to get my blue belt, which I did. This year's goal is to get my brown belt. I may have a second one, but I'm still developing it.

How will you be spending New Year's Eve?
Well, I spent it with my hubby at home, and I have no complaints.

Did anyone close to you die?
No, fortunately.

What countries did you visit?
Only Canada.

What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?
I'm going to go with money, crass materialist that I am.

What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
I suppose it would have to be November 4th, wouldn't it?

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I'll say either the blue belt or the twenty pounds I lost.

What was your biggest failure?
I'm not sure if I had a "biggest failure." I had a lot of little pit stops in weight loss and in refining my patience ... but I don't know if I'd go so far as to say I failed.

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Yes, as a matter of fact. I sprained my ankle in the summer doing Couch to 5k, which I may be officially giving up as a lost cause. We had an awful continuous spree of illnesses in November.

What was the best thing you bought?
My car, my car, my beautiful car!

Where did most of your money go?
My car, his car, rent.

What song will always remind you of 2008?
Um, probably "The Sex Has Made Me Stupid" by Robots in Disguise. Not because of the content of the song, specifically, but because it came out this year and the video was immensely entertaining.

What do you wish you'd done more of?
Traveling.

What do you wish you'd done less of?
Discovering house problems and waging constant irritating battle to get them fixed.

What was your favorite TV program?
Rome. Yes, I know it's not from this year; it took me some time to discover it.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Yes, actually, there is a cab driver out there somewhere who is fortunate that I don't know his name.

What was the best book you read?
Argh. I don't know if I can single one out.

What was your greatest musical discovery?
Blip.fm

What was your favorite film of this year?
No Country for Old Men Well, it was the best movie of the ones I saw released in '08. I'm not sure I could call it a favorite ... it was good but wrenching and I don't know if I'd watch it again soon.

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 34, and I am embarrassed to admit that I actually don't remember what I did on my birthday this year.

What kept you sane?
Music, exercise, and good people.

Who did you miss?
My friends in Rochester, and my sisters.

Who was the best new person you met?
I think we may have technically met in '07, but it was this year I started to get to know my friend Joanne, who is very cool.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
The Universe does want us to be happy.