carvedangel.net

i love my son so, so much, but i really need a break. in the past nine months i’ve been out exactly twice, and had part of the day off when i had stomach flu. aside from 10-15 minutes every other day or so for a shower, that’s the extent of my time off. i’m not ready to be apart from him for a whole day or anything (i know, i have problems), but a couple hours to myself would be nice. it’s not just mental, it’s physical. my back constantly aches from carrying him and picking him up out of harm’s way and letting him sleep on me. i hurt my back really bad this morning, but here i am, holding him in one arm as he sleeps, and typing with the other. i need some time to myself that doesn’t involve me cooking or cleaning. i still love this more than any other job, but i’m getting burnt out…

this discussion just occurred between myself and sohei:

sohei: …and i’m not even going to get my father’s day weekend. (we’re going to spend next sunday with his dad.)
me: well, we could do something tomorrow.
sohei: no, i want a whole weekend.
me: i didn’t get a whole weekend.
sohei: every day is mother’s day.
me: what?!
sohei: you get what you want all the time.
me: what?! oh, right, like last weekend and then the phone thing. i always get what i want.
sohei: you get a life without physical labor.
me (incredulous): i get a year without working outside the home. (and if you don’t think i work here at home and that it’s not physical labor, you’re insane. also, hello mr. desk job.)

i left the room before he said anything else, because after that, i was afraid i’d kill him.

last weekend, i finally got sohei to agree – after months of begging – to take me to my favorite discount clothes store. none of my clothes fit right anymore, because even though i lost weight, it’s redistributed. i learned that, despite being 30 pounds lighter, i still can’t find anything that fits me. my boobs are ginormous and i still have the baby pooch on the bottom of my abdomen. shirts used to be the easiest thing for me to buy. now? not so much. if the bust fits, the rest hangs off me like a tent. pants are a struggle, too. my waist is really high, and if i wear my pants at my waist, they’re up under my boobs. so i usually wear low-rise. well, now if i wear low-rise, i have a muffin top, which – no matter how fat i was – never happened to me before. so the pants slide down my ass while, at the same time, my gut hangs over the waist band. so my fashion choices seem to be limited to mom jeans and muu-muus. i didn’t find one thing that fit right or that i liked. we even went to target afterward and i couldn’t find anything there, either. sohei got a bunch of clothes, and little bear got some, too, but i’m still wearing the same ill-fitting crap. the fact that i had to beg and plead to go there for so long just adds insult to injury.

then, today, i was supposed to finally get a new phone. my old one is horrible. i can’t hear anyone on it and it doesn’t tell me when people call or leave messages half the time. i’ve wanted this new phone since christmas. today, i went to the verizon store to try it out and possibly buy it. none of the salespeople were at all helpful, so i decided to order it online and get the rebate instantly. the catch was that it was supposed to be buy one get one free and sohei decided he wanted one, too. when i went online to buy it, bogo didn’t appear as an option. so i called customer service and asked what the deal was, and was told that only one line (mine) was due for an upgrade, so i couldn’t get the free phone. it would have been nice for them to fucking mention that on the damn website, but of course, they didn’t. instead, despite being perfectly happy with his phone (until last night), sohei seems to have decided that he needs a new phone more than i do, so i’m s.o.l. until this time next year. seriously. i’ve been researching this phone and going to forums about it and stuff for months. and when i told sohei at the beginning of the week that he could get one, too, he said he liked the phone he has and the one i want sucks. until last night when he decided that the internet on his is too slow. i’m so glad i tried to be generous and get the less cutting-edge phone so he could have one, too. now instead i get jack shit.

i know it’s just stuff, but i’m sick of looking frumpy or like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. and tired of having to use a phone that doesn’t work. i’m sick of being disappointed all the time, in general, and having to beg for things only to be let down anyway. even if it’s something small, could i just catch a fucking break?

what a crappy day. little bear was really cranky and a bit warm yesterday, and this morning he has a cough and a stuffy nose. some of his cousins were coughing and stuff at the party, but i didn’t keep him away from them – like i usually do with sick people – because a) i didn’t want to seem like an asshole and b) kids seem to cough constantly, so i didn’t really think anyone was sick. i am beginning to suspect, however, that maybe one of them had a cold. w00t.

we went to the store anyway because he doesn’t have a fever or anything. his father woke him up this morning before he was ready to get up, so the kid was not in a good mood. he’s usually pretty good when i take him out, but he screamed a lot during this trip. in fact, i was waiting at the stoplight at the entrance to our neighborhood when he started screaming his head off. i had no idea what was wrong, but i couldn’t really go anywhere until the light changed. i was going to stop on a nearby side road, but for some reason, there was a line of yard trucks/trailers on the side of the road, so i decided to just wait until i could get to the bank parking lot. i had to go around a tractor that was stopped in the road for some reason, and though the other lane was clear at first, a car turned the corner and started speeding at me. i just barely got back into my lane in time. fucker. so we finally get to the bank and i park and get in the back seat to see what’s wrong. nothing. nothing is wrong. the belt wasn’t pinching him, there was nothing wrong with the seat, there was nothing amiss at all. he was glad to see me, apparently, because he stopped screaming. so i drove ahead to the store, encountering a bunch of other idiots, including a semi truck blocking almost the entire entrance to the store parking lot. for the second time today, i had to drive in the wrong lane to get around some moron.

little bear continued to be in a crappy mood at the store. fortunately, my list was really short. unfortunately, sohei yelled at me this morning about getting some meat for the baby, and i couldn’t find what i had in mind right away, so i had to try to look while little bear shrieked and fussed the whole time. (i try to be understanding about sohei wanting to see the baby before he leaves for work, but waking him before he’s ready on a day i have to take him out wasn’t very thoughtful.) i don’t want him eating meat yet, because i think the jarred meat is gross. i’d rather he eat legumes or something to get his protein. but since sohei freaked out about it, i was at least going to find one without wheat or anything else that might bother him. (i’ve read that introducing wheat products at this age is a bad idea because of celiac disease and increased sensitivity later.) it wasn’t easy to find organic non-red meat without wheat or other weird ingredients. i buy gerber, but there wasn’t any such thing available, so i had to get a different brand. i ended up getting organic turkey and brown rice. if sohei’s going to insist on meat, i’m getting my food processor this weekend, because i’m making it myself from now on.

the drive home was obnoxious, but ultimately uneventful, and little bear’s napping (fitfully) now. i hope the rest of the day doesn’t suck this bad.

i haven’t slept at all tonight. not surprising, i guess, as my life is pretty much shot to hell. my marriage is as good as over, i’m losing my house, and i can’t stop worrying about whether little bear is having seizures or he’s just a spaz. (no one else seems to think there’s anything wrong with him, so i guess i should just stop worrying. i wish i could trust myself to know when something’s wrong and when i’m being crazy.)

i seriously thought that, despite all the problems we’ve had, we’d never break up. we loved each other so much once. he changed his mind about the divorce, but it’s because he doesn’t want to split custody of the baby. and maybe he’s scared of being alone, too. but if he loves me at all, it sure isn’t how it was. he doesn’t believe i love him, either, for some reason. i don’t think anything i do will ever prove anything. there’s really nothing left to say about it.

i’m more upset about losing the house than i thought i’d be, too. i knew it was going to happen. we haven’t been paying the mortgage. but i still love this house, and i don’t want to leave. it makes me sad, too, that it’s probably going to sit empty for who-knows-how-long until the bank can find a buyer. i wanted so badly to fix it up. it was a nice house to begin with, but it really could have been more.

and i don’t even know what to say about little bear. i know he’s probably fine. it’s not like he’s ever unresponsive or anything. it’s just scary because, if it is a seizure, it’s doing damage to his brain every time he has one. i can’t catch it on film, which is probably another sign that it’s not a seizure. he’ll jerk his head (usually to the left) a couple of times, then stop for a while. and he seems to only do it when i’m holding him, unless i just don’t notice it when he sits on his own. he hasn’t done the high chair thing again, though he does throw himself backward still. again, mostly when we’re holding him. i kind of think he does that because he wants to stand up. but the head jerk, i don’t know. i just don’t have any experience with babies, so i don’t know what’s normal and what isn’t. i think, deep down, i just feel overwhelmed with the responsibility. if he dies or has permanent brain damage because he’s having seizures, i’ll never forgive myself.

i need to try to sleep, i guess. i just wish things didn’t suck so bad, and i could just enjoy the one good thing i’ve got in my life right now.

i’m still bed-ridden, so i’ve been watching a lot of instant netflix on wii. today, i’m watching morgan spurlock’s 30 days series. i still think he’d kind of a douche, but it’s interesting. the first episode was kind of irritating, because he and his fiancee were trying to live on minimum wage for 30 days. they made all kinds of mistakes, so of course they were in the red in the end. for one thing, they were buying bottled water at the store. for another, they went to the er when the fiancee had a uti. i have had many of those, and have never been to the er for one. you wait until a walk-in clinic opens, sit around for a while, get your prescription, pay $100 or so for the great service, then pay another $10 or so for the antibiotic. her er visit cost over $300, and her scripts cost around $25, because it looks like she got the stuff that turns your pee orange. and she stayed home from work that day, so she didn’t get paid. then they bought drinks when they went to a movie, which we don’t do even on our income. (we smuggle candy and snacks in my purse, and usually do without drinks. i don’t want to have to get up to pee during the film anyway.) and then they both took the day off work for her birthday, and went out for dinner. i know i don’t have the greatest marriage ever, but we almost never take the day off for each other’s birthdays. we go out to eat for most birthdays, but don’t go somewhere we can’t afford. (let me put it this way: for us, a once-a-year trip to the olive garden for our anniversary used to be a pretty big deal.) the thing that really irritated me was that their apartment looked bigger and was way better furnished than our first, and they were freaking out about ants. ants. our little efficiency had swarms of tiny flies. no matter how much we cleaned, they wouldn’t go away. and apparently they were blood-sucking flies, because anytime you smashed one, it would explode in a bloody mess on the wall. and, like most florida apartments, there were roaches. not an infestation, but they were worse than freaking ants. i also saw a giant rat’s tail disappear down the hallway one evening. nice. there are worse things in the world than ants, people.

i know that poverty is a problem in this country and that the minimum wage would be laughable if the situation weren’t so serious. and i also understand the show wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if they weren’t hovering in the red the whole time. but there are going to be critics who realize all the stupid mistakes spurlock made, and say that the minimum wage would work just fine if people didn’t do shit like buy jugs of water and take off work to buy a birthday dinner. i’m also not saying that no one deserves to take days off work or get medical care when they need it. our system’s fucked up, and i know it. but when people (who actually have to live this everyday and don’t have a nice new york apartment to escape to) complain about the minimum wage, someone who’s seen this might assume that they do dumb shit with their money, too.

i’m lucky in that i’ve only spent a few years of my life living below poverty level. and i was fine, because i was young and mostly healthy and didn’t have kids. but we were also incredibly careful. we lived in a 350 sq ft studio apartment furnished with hand-me-downs and stuff we found next to the dumpster. our diets sucked, there were times we couldn’t afford food, we took the bus everywhere, and we worked our butts off in the summer when we weren’t in school. sohei’s teeth were literally falling out, and i went to work with utis and antibiotic side-effects because when you count on a paycheck to eat and have a place to live, that’s what you do. their complete ignorance on how to live on that small amount of money and their mind-boggling privilege drove me up the wall. spurlock claims to have grown up poor, but anyone who’s ever had to rely on public transport knows that you’ve got to do stuff like keep tabs on when the buses stop running or – if you don’t have an emergency $20 for a cab like they did – you walk home. also, my family started out lower-to-lower middle class and though we did better every year, we never bought water from the store. even when we had to use stinky well water. i’m pretty sure my dad would’ve made us boil contaminated tap water before shelling out money for it.

it’s easy enough to show how shitty people’s lives can be living at this income level. you don’t need additional drama or hyperbole is what i’m trying to say.

i made the last post private and will be updating later today.

okay, maybe i went a bit far in my last post. but it pissed me off when this lady was acting like those of us who don’t use the tv as a babysitter are idiots. it’s not stupid to want to spend time with your baby. and i think this lady was kind of a bitch for suggesting that. (oh man. i’ve been such a moron. here i’ve been, paying attention to my baby instead of setting him somewhere and ignoring him. why didn’t i think of that? god, i’m dumb.)

why can’t i stop worrying about the shape of my son’s head? that there are too many bumps and dents and the way it looks? probably because half the women on the baby board i read are getting shaping helmets for their babies. (i don’t want him to wear a helmet, but i also don’t want him to hate me when he’s a teenager because his head looks weird.) (also, i doubt i would have noticed that his head doesn’t look “normal” if it wasn’t for the internet.) (i still think he’s beautiful and i’m just going to quit worrying about his head because he looks just fine dammit.)

sohei keeps talking about having another baby. i’m pretty sure i just want the one. the thing is, i don’t really know why. i loved being pregnant. even though i could hardly walk toward the end, and anything to do with the hospital was awful, i really enjoyed it. maybe it was the worrying. every stupid doctor i went to gave me a new thing to worry about, and i was so relieved when little bear was born safe and sound. there wasn’t a thing wrong with him. or me.

it isn’t so much pregnancy making me not want to do it again. and it isn’t that i dislike being a mum, because i’m loving that, too. i know there are a million things wrong with this sentiment, but i’ve honestly never felt so fulfilled before. my last job came close before it all went to hell, but i don’t think anything will ever beat this. i get to spend my days with this great little person that i love most in the world, and i always feel proud that he’s mine. i made him. (and yes, i know that for most people, it doesn’t take a lot of effort or anything special to make them, but i don’t think i’ve ever, personally, made something this great. ever.)

so, i loved being pregnant, and i love being little bear’s mum. what is stopping me from wanting to do this again? honestly? i don’t know. i can’t put my finger on it. in fact, i feel bad about it sometimes. i have been so lucky. it was so easy for me to get pregnant. the pregnancy itself was a breeze. and while his colicky period was awful, and he’s a very needy/clingy baby, if i had another just like him, i’d consider myself incredibly fortunate. he’s a great baby. so what’s my problem?

i think part of it is that i don’t want him to have to “compete” with a sibling. in my family, as in most, there were limited resources that my sister and i had to share. i don’t want little bear to have to go without something because of his sibling. my sister is such a good friend to me now that i feel guilty about depriving him of a little brother or sister. but who’s to say they’ll get along anyway? juchan and i did not get along very much when i lived at home, which is kind of expected i think, but if we still didn’t get along, it would suck. there’s no guarantee that little bear will like his sibling, so why risk bringing that into his life? also, what if he ends up having autism or something? if he’s special needs, i don’t think i’ll be able to handle another kid.

i know i’m probably setting him up to be spoiled. he’ll probably be upset that he doesn’t have a sibling, because the grass is always greener. (if he did have a sibling, he’d probably be mad about that, too.) and there’s no guarantee that i won’t have another baby someday. (i’m packing away the things he outgrows, rather than giving them away, for now.) and, really, it would be crazy to get pregnant again now. 1) i have to wait a year to conceive, thanks to the c-section, 2) we’re about to have two houses foreclosed on as well as filing for bankruptcy, 3) i have crap health insurance that doesn’t cover stuff like pregnancy. so i definitely won’t be getting pregnant again within the next year, unless it’s an accident. it just feels kind of weird that i don’t want to, ever, all things considered.

okay, i give up on the damn wrestling post. my thoughts on tna vs. wwe are getting outdated. in a nutshell: despite the presence of the wolfpack/nwo/whatever, tna is far more fun to watch than wwe. the booking isn’t always the best, and i hate bischoff, but the wrestling itself is actually entertaining. wwe’s wrestling (when it actually happens) isn’t as good, and bringing bret hart out once, then shelving him for a month, was lame. i was psyched to see him again, but don’t know what the hell he was thinking going back to that company. he should’ve joined the other old guys over at tna.

moving on…

i’ve been thinking a lot about stupidity lately. i watched idiocracy with juchan over the holidays, and today i watched a documentary about stupidity. on sunday, sohei and i were discussing whether we were smarter than our parents and whether little bear will be smarter than us.

first off, we were saying that stupidity and intelligence are kind of hard to define. the documentary agreed with me there. i think it’s kind of like porn, in that you know it when you see it. also, we decided that we are probably smarter than our parents, or at least smart in a different way. sohei says his dad is smart in a practical way, like street smarts. and his mum is fairly intelligent, but is also intellectually incurious. she knows a lot about what she needs to know, but doesn’t learn for the sake of learning.

i don’t even know what to say about mine. my mum wasn’t stupid by any means. she didn’t have as much in the way of formal education as any of our parents, in that she didn’t finish college. but she was, mostly, pretty intellectually curious. she was well read, and, though religious, not a fundy. (neither of sohei’s parents are religious.) as a christian, she thought outside the box. on the other hand, there were some facets of her life where i don’t think she thought enough for herself. using politics as an example, her beliefs often didn’t seem to jibe with her otherwise compassionate nature. when she and sohei used to debate, she’d argue her point, but listen to his as well, then seemed to actually think about it. sometimes i think she wasn’t entirely sure what she believed, either. she was very good at both english and math. (way better than me at math, in fact.) maybe it was her lack of worldliness that made me wonder whether i was smarter. or maybe kids always think they’re smarter. who knows?

as for my dad, he just baffles me. he double majored in biology and chemistry, got a masters in public health, and a doctor of veterinary medicine degree. yet he thinks the world is going to end soon, that the good people are going to float into the sky, and that gay people should go to hell. (i have never bothered to inform him that i’m bi, though sometimes it is really tempting, because i think he’d short circuit like a confused robot.) i just don’t know how you can be a scientist and a fundy at the same time. he’s not stupid about science, either. he’s very good at his job. i’ve read his textbooks, and none of them include jesus riding a dinosaur or anything. but whereas my mum saw the bible as allegory, my dad seems to think it’s fact. so, my dad is way better at chemistry than i am, but i think i’m a bit smarter. more open-minded, anyway. phew.

then there’s the ignorance is bliss debate. in idiocracy, the world was both stupid and angry. oh, and mean. if stupid people were in a state of bliss, wouldn’t the world be a utopia? at the end of the documentary, an author speculates that cows are happy now and wouldn’t be if they were smart. if they were smart, they’d know they were going to be milked, then eventually slaughtered. and if humans were smarter, they’d realize their existence was meaningless. smart people do seem to be a lot more depressed than your average person. is this because we realize how futile life is, or is it a chemical thing? smart people can be angry and belligerent, too, but stupid people are more often portrayed that way, because they can’t “use their words.”

i know i’m not brilliant or anything. i really do wish i was, even if it meant being unhappier than i am now. because i don’t think stupidity or ignorance leads to happiness, either. you just get upset about different things.

i have a theory about human evolution and the autism boom as well, but that will have to wait for another time, as little bear is up from his nap and needing attention.

i’m having a really frickin’ awful day. it started the way most of my awful days start, with sohei bitching at me because i didn’t wash his shirts. he insists he told me to do it before, but if he did, it must have been some morning last week when i was half asleep. it sure as hell wasn’t when i was washing clothes this weekend. i did two loads of little bear’s clothes, and one load with a shirt for each of us to wear to the superbowl party, a sweater for sohei, and a bunch of his socks for work this week. at no point did he mention his shirts. this happens a couple times a month and i’m getting sick of it. he’s about to be responsible for his own shirts.

and i noticed a few days ago that one of little bear’s eyes has some extra skin between the nose and eye, which is, as it turns out, an epicanthal fold. i’d been trying to research it online, but i couldn’t think what to call it, so i wasn’t finding anything. then, this morning, i had one of my just-upon-waking epiphanies, and remembered that it’s a symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome. so i looked up fas and found the term, then googled it. i was pretty sure that the cause wasn’t fas, because after my christmas eve drink fest (which was day one of week five, or three weeks post-conception), i didn’t drink. and everyone, doctors included, insisted that was too early to have done any damage. the other main cause is down syndrome, which he also doesn’t have. and it probably isn’t a genetic disorder. so it’s either a) normal in some babies his age, and he’ll outgrow it when the bridge of his nose grows, b) secondary to abnormal skull growth (though i’ve asked his doctor about that ridge on the side of his head at every appointment, and he hasn’t been concerned), or c) maybe he does have very minor fas, and hopefully that’s the only symptom, aside from his small head size. his low head circumference measurements do make the fas seem slightly more likely, but i really think that would be kind of weird. the measurements could also mean there’s something up with his skull, but the doctor keeps insisting there’s nothing wrong with it. hopefully, it’s reason a, but i’ll be asking the doctor about it at our next appointment if there’s no change. so i’m kind of worried about that.

also, i left neko at no-chan’s house yesterday. i’ve been struggling with this decision for a while, but finally decided that she’d be happier over there. i just don’t have enough time for her, between the baby and the dog, and everything. also, she’s hissed at little bear and started peeing on his stuff. she pretty much destroyed his stroller. there’s no way i could give her to a shelter or anything, but no-chan spoils her cats, and can give her so much more attention and affection than i can right now. and i can visit her whenever i want. we’ll see if it works out, because she already has two cats, and if they get too upset, neko might be coming back. but, even though she’s always hiding now and i almost never see her, i feel like something’s missing. i miss my cat.

as far as minor annoyances go, little bear had a major blowout diaper this morning, and made such a mess i had to give him a bath. of course, it got all over his onesie and changing table, too. and after i got him mostly cleaned up with wipes, i had to leave him in his crib to go run the bath, and i came back to find pee all over his mattress, crib slats, and the floor. that kid can pee… also, i’m sick to my stomach today and just generally feel like shit. i was supposed to go to the store today, but there’s no way i’m leaving the house.

hey spammers, a quick tip: if you have a hope in hell of somehow tricking me to approve your spam comment, don’t insult me in it. idiots.

(also, when time permits, i’ll be making my first post re: pro wrestling in forever. i know you’ll stay tuned for that. )

howard zinn died, apparently… he made american history more interesting to me. i’ve always liked world history, but history about my own country always seemed so dry. and, you know, kind of full of itself. not the way he told it, though. if i homeschool little bear (ha) a people’s history would be his history text. anyway, it always sucks when a great mind dies, and we’ve lost another one today.

aaaand my car has some weird new problem. it’s making this revving noise, and the brakes aren’t responding very well. hopefully it’s just some stupid thing i did and it’s fine, but i’m not going to try to drive it again until sohei gets home. we were still on our street when it happened, so little bear and i made it home alright. but for now my freedom is gone again… i do appreciate the time and money spent on my car, but i still think the $900 would have been more wisely spent on a newer used car. i never cared about driving something so old before, but i don’t like driving the baby around in a 20 year old car. like i said, though, hopefully there’s nothing wrong, or it’s a very cheap fix. but the idea of dumping more money into the car makes me pretty uncomfortable…

again, yes, this.

it’s a nice evening. i’m playing hello kitty online with juchan, tna has me interested in wrestling again (we’ll see if that lasts.), and ben has started laughing spontaneously. and one of my ten books from amazon has shipped. (i don’t know why the rest haven’t, but whatevs.)

so, it’s a new year, new decade. the past ten years have been pretty sucktastic for the world at large, i guess. the reign of bush 2, 9/11, the tsunami, katrina, recession, etc… it’s been mainly okay for me. on the plus side, i got married and had little bear. on the minus side, i lost my mum.

we had a very good christmas this year. since we decided to stop paying the mortgages, and sohei got two major bonuses, we had more money to spend than usual. so everyone got good presents, and little bear got totally spoiled. in addition to clothes, he got a toy piano and other instruments, rattle, car seat toy, fun jungle exersaucer, books, a swing from grandpa genma, and two classic pooh baby’s first christmas ornaments. and some other stuff i forgot. aunt juchan got him a really cute outfit. so he really made out like a bandit.

as for me, i was just happy to have a healthy, beautiful baby. it’s hard to believe he was just a tiny cluster of cells this time last year… and juchan came to visit for a week, and that was so awesome. i already miss her so much. so a lot of great family stuff, but i got some nice presents as well. genma fixed my car, which ran around $900. sohei got me a cute little pink netbook, which i am typing this post on. (i. love. it.) dad gave me quite a bit of money, and i spent some of it on a book shopping spree today. (good sale at amazon, w00t.) i also got a frappuccino maker, which i got quite a bit of use out of so far. and, you know, a lot of other odds and ends, like wii fit plus and wii sports resort. and juchan got me an ornament of the leg lamp from a christmas story, so that was freaking awesome. i pretty much got everything i wanted and then some.

it was great seeing everyone and showing little bear off. on christmas eve, we went to the annual party. everyone said how cute/beautiful/etc. my baby is, and how good i’m looking. (i don’t think anyone believed me when i said i had no idea how i dropped 55 pounds, but i really don’t.) then we spent the night at no-chan’s house and had a fantastic breakfast and opened presents. then we went to get juchan at the airport, then went home to take care of brumby, then went to sohei’s mum’s house. we had a really good dinner there, and opened yet more presents. then we went home and juchan spent the week here and we pretty much slept a lot and goofed around. i wish she could live here.

so i had a pretty great holiday, which was nice, because it’s going to be a tough year in some ways. we’re going to lose our houses and have to move again. we’re probably going to have to declare bankruptcy, too. for now, though, i’m going to enjoy the time i got to spend with everyone, and all the neat loot i got.

i love it. someone spoils the surprise for my christmas present, and i’m the one who gets yelled at.

what a fucking awful week. i got accepted for health insurance, which is a surprising plus, but i’m waiting to have some problem arise with that, too.

first, my three month old phone – with all ben’s pics and video, along with my concert pics and video – dies. just up and dies, for no goddamn reason. they sent me a replacement yesterday, which i’m having to wait to use until i can take my phone over to the store to try to get the data off the old phone and onto the new. i could have done that today, but i still don’t have a fucking car. i’m hoping that if i actually get the phone to the store tomorrow evening, they can transfer all my stuff. with the week i’m having, i’m betting no.

then little bear started feeling feverish. according to the useless thermometers i have, he hasn’t hit 100 degrees yet, but has been pretty consistently warm to the touch all week, and hovering in the 99s. he didn’t sleep at all yesterday, which isn’t terribly unusual for him, but he didn’t sleep well last night, either. and he hasn’t really slept today. he just keeps randomly fussing and screeching. he’s asymptomatic, but i think there’s something wrong. maybe he has an ear infection or uti or something. sohei keeps telling me i’m crazy, but i think i’m going to have to put my foot down and insist on taking little bear to the doctor. he is not acting normal, and even if he doesn’t have an outright fever, he’s warm. (i never, ever get fevers, either, and didn’t much as a child. maybe he’s the same?) hopefully we’ll go and the doctor will also say i’m crazy, but i’d rather be safe than sorry.

and all these little annoying things keep happening. i had to take my lip ring out because little bear kept reaching for it, so i put it on my nightstand. sohei set a bottle of ketchup down on it for some reason, and the little ball part got lost, apparently never to be seen again. so now i have to try to get new lip jewelry before it closes up. (not bloody likely, as i’ve also needed to go to the mall for pants that actually fit, and a watch battery, but as i don’t have a goddamn car… ) and because little bear has been even more sleepless and clingy than usual, i haven’t got any work done this week. the kitchen is disgusting and the laundry has been piling up. i feel like crap and i’m tired from being kicked all night and screamed at for two days. then today i tried to spend my survey money on ebay, and i can’t pay for my item for some reason. the site won’t let me log into my paypal account. it just sits there. so i emailed the seller to ask if i could pay them directly through paypal, but they’ll probably report me for fraud or something.

the baby is screaming and kicking me again, so i guess i’d better pointlessly try to comfort him while he shreiks in my ear some more.

on saturday night, i finally lived the dream and saw skinny puppy live. it was a.ma.zing. we were in the very front, standing right where ogre would probably be most. (we were right, he spent most of the show in front of me.) i’m not a great concert reporter, because i can never remember what order the songs were in or anything. they did play assimilate and protest, which made me really happy. i was worried they weren’t going to play worlock, but ended up playing it as the encore. i thought they’d do smothered hope, but no. he wore his costume with mask during the whole thing, so i was really hoping he’d take it off for the encore, and he did. it was really cool being that close to him. i could see his face pretty clearly despite it being so dark. his eyes are just as gorgeous as they are in pictures. though, on the whole, he’s a lot more, i dunno, real than in pictures. he looks older and less theatrical, i guess. it was kind of neat. i wasn’t just drooling over some artistic rendering of ogre. i was inches away from slightly short, incredibly thin, very much in his forties, kevin ogilvie. at one point, he was standing in front of me, messing with the microphone, and completely overcome, i shouted, “i love you!” to which he replied, “…thank you.” (i thought it was very nice of him not to append, “you sad, creepy woman” to that.) also, while he was singing with gusto, a fleck of spittle landed on my cheek. i have washed my cheek since, but i reckon the memory will linger forever. my only regret is that i didn’t try to touch him. i could have a few times, but somehow couldn’t bring myself to do it. i don’t know why. i clearly didn’t mind being a dork, as evidenced by my loudly professing my love for him, etc. i suspect it had something to do with him seeming less god-like to me, and more like a really awesome, talented guy just standing there. i don’t make a habit of touching people randomly, so i guess it just felt weird. still, if i ever get that close to him again, i will definitely touch him like everyone else was, and not be such a chicken about it. anyway, it was the best concert i’ve ever been to, and even now i’m unable to describe just how absolutely fantastic everything was. i hope i can see them again someday.

when i first got pregnant, sohei would stop on the way home to get me ice cream. nowadays, i can’t get him to stop for anything. even though i’m freaking starving and he won’t be home until 9:00. i want to eat now. waiting this late to eat freaking sucks, especially when diabetic and pregnant. and because i’m not up to cooking tonight, i probably won’t be eating until 10:00. so not happy…

[edit:] he’s stopping to get me a cheeseburger at the sub shop down the street. he clearly values his life.

i’m watching super size me. what a fucking stupid movie. there are so many things wrong with his claims, i don’t even know where to start. and the premise is ridiculous. yeah, if you eat shitty food three times a day, you’re going to get sick. i won’t argue that mcdonalds food isn’t awful, because it really is. but he not only eats it for every meal, he eats more at each meal than most normal people probably do. when i eat breakfast at mcdonalds (which happens about four times a year, not that you’d believe it because i’m a huge fat-ass), i eat a sausage mcmuffin or a chicken biscuit with a small orange juice. for his first breakfast, he had an egg mcmuffin, a sausage biscuit, a hash brown with ketchup (yuck), and what looked like a large drink. even when he’s starving, sohei doesn’t eat more than one breakfast sandwich. and even though the dietician warned him to stop eating stuff like the sundaes, it’s nine days later and he’s still eating them. until i got pregnant, i ate mcdonalds sundaes a couple times a year. (i craved them in early pregnancy for some reason, and even then, i probably didn’t eat them more than five times.) he also seems to order coke with everything. to be fair, mcdonalds does offer things like water, and i wouldn’t think most people order dessert with their meal every day.

then there’s the weight gain thing. if you go from eating a diet consisting of food cooked by your vegan girlfriend, to an all-mcdonalds diet, of course you’re going to gain an insane amount of weight. especially if you’re purposely eating as much and as poorly as possible. and this movie so smacks of privilege it makes me kind of sick. ya know, a lot of people have to eat crap because it’s all they can afford. and, in america anyway, poor neighborhoods are often the least walkable. there are no safe places to walk, and even if there are things like sidewalks, they probably won’t lead to stores that carry things like vegetables. and the part where he was bragging on how he only ate his mum’s home cooking (because it was, like, her job) as a child just about made me vomit.

anyway, if i make it through the rest of the movie, i’ll be surprised. i guess i’m just hoping he has a heart attack or something. oh, and p.s.: my blood pressure, even while “preeclamptic” is lower than his was at the start of the film, before he so much as ate a bite of mcdonalds.

so, i’m 30 today. it’s hard to believe my 20s are over and done with. i hate aging. not so much because i look older and i’m vain, but because it seems like more is expected of me. for example, genma and no-chan refused to get us video games for our birthdays this year, because it’s time for us to “grow up.” also, i don’t like dressing my age. i like the little plaid skirts with chains from hot topic, and fishnet shirts. and lots of eyeliner and unnaturally red hair. can i still wear this stuff? i guess, but it’s getting less and less acceptable. also, people have been bugging me to get rid of my lip ring. sorry, that’s not happening. i will wear that thing for the rest of my life. (i was even bribed with a car if i’d get rid of it. i turned it down. which i suppose is yet another example of how much growing up i need to do.) anyway, it seems like once you hit 30 – like it’s some magic number – it’s time to get serious. even with a baby on the way, i’m just not there…

i am being a good girl and getting mostly practical gifts this year. genma got me a more reliable cell phone. (everyone was worried that my old one was crapping out and wouldn’t work when i really need it. which has actually happened before.) no-chan got me the slipcover i wanted for the recliner in the nursery. sohei is taking me shopping tomorrow for some furniture. hopefully, if i can find stuff at thrift stores, i can get a tv stand and a bookcase or two. i know i’m going to get a cute bookshelf for little bear’s room. and i may get a ceiling fan for his room with the birthday money i got. or i may put it towards the credit card bill. we’ll see.

i think my brain went into some kind of aging crisis mode last night, because i had a dream that i moved to the beach and bought a condo for myself. and then today sohei told me an idea that no-chan had, that maybe i should go back to school and get my health insurance through the university. which, of course, i was totally for. (i know i said i was done with school and never wanted to go back again, but we all knew that was a lie.) so i figure i have two options: 1) i can do the minimum 6 hours/semester undergrad work for fun, or 2) i can enroll in another grad program. if i’m going to pay for classes, they should probably count for something, i’d think. also, i’ve been looking into adjunct teaching at the local community college, and to do that, i need 18 hours of graduate classwork in the area i want to teach in. (you have to have a masters in whatever it is, or a masters + 18 hours of credits specific to that area.) so i reckon if i take classes toward my adjunct goal, i can get insurance while doing that, then get insurance while doing the adjunct thing part-time until little bear goes to school. (i checked, and part-time staff/faculty do get insurance, just for a higher rate.) the only issue here is that if i do the english program, the majority of my classes will be in person, so i’ll need someone to look after little bear while i’m in class. better than needing full-time care, but not entirely ideal. also, i’m not sure whether sohei will agree to it, or even if it’s realistic. i emailed the department head of the technology department (i thought it might be fun to apply for the adjunct position for web design/dreamweaver), and he was polite but not entirely helpful. i think i’d have better luck with english, anyway. though coursework toward web stuff would be a lot handier when i go back to librarianship at the academic level. if that ever happens. hum. still, it’s exciting to have some potential options.

so 30 isn’t feeling as depressing as i thought it might. even if i am about to be a mum, and have to grow up.

i’ve been watching more to love, and it’s not terrible. people have complained that there are too many scenes with the women eating. there are a lot of eating scenes, but honestly, most other reality shows feature eating, too. i didn’t really feel it was necessarily exploitative, except for this last episode where one of the girls was eating a chocolate-covered banana dessert. in that case, they did seem to be doing their damnedest to make her look gluttonous and awkward. but when they’re just sitting around eating breakfast, i’ve seen that on top model, rock of love, etc. so it hardly seems like a big deal. (it’s funny, but i actually find it more interesting that they feel the need to show models eating a bunch of junk food, as if to say, “see? they eat!”) another complaint i’ve heard is that the women all seem desperate. some of them do, yeah, but i’ve seen skinny women on similar shows acting desperate and crying, too. though i have to say, kristian creeps me right out. i’ve known girls like that, and they just make you wince. most of the women blame their weight for their lack of success at dating and relationships, but in a few cases, i can tell them exactly what their problem is. in kristian’s case, she probably scares the crap out of any reasonably sane man. she just screams “stalker” and i can’t imagine why she’s still on the show. dramz, i guess. as for danielle, she talks way too much. and i don’t mean that women should follow the “talk about him” advice where they only talk about the guy or ask him about himself, because that’s crap. but if you can’t actually converse with someone, that’s going to be a problem no matter what. also, tmi, dear. and melissa cries constantly. i know that being fat makes life harder than it needs to be, but you have to try to be a little confident, especially on this kind of show. otherwise, you just look like you belong in therapy. it’s not like i’m not sympathetic, but in some instances, it’s clearly a personality thing. really, i know i’d have an awful time trying to date, because it can be more difficult to find someone who’s into the chub. but my real downfall is that i’m weird and i don’t get people and i talk without a taste filter. it’s too easy to blame teh fat. i’m not sure i ever blamed my social isolation on it, but if i did, i was mistaken. and if someone doesn’t want to date you or be your friend because you’re fat? fuck them. unless you’re into hanging out with shallow people, you’re not missing out on anything. that being said, i think it’s kind of sad that so many of these women don’t date. some of them do, and seem pretty emotionally healthy, but it sucks that apparently a lot of them don’t think they’re worthy of companionship. anyway, i’m kind of torn on the whole thing. it’s nice that there’s finally a reality show where fat people aren’t the butt of the joke for one episode before being summarily dismissed. but, like a lot of people, i can’t tell how exploitative this is, exactly. also, i hate saying that for a lot of these women, their problems are based on personality issues, especially when some of these issues probably stemmed from insecurity about their weight. anyway, i’m going to keep watching it for now, but with a critical eye.

i haven’t actually seen the show yet, but i always enjoy caricature generators…

Two days of r & r undone in about 20 minutes. This is why I don’t ever do anything nice for myself…

i had my first pedicure today. i haven’t been able to cut my nails, let alone put lotion or anything on my feet, so they were pretty grody. they look much better now, and no-chan paid for the deluxe treatment, so the lady exfoliated and did all this other stuff and it felt awesome. it’s not something i’d have ever considered doing for myself, and it was so sweet of no-chan to treat me to that. now that i’ve had it done, though, and it wasn’t crazy expensive, i might actually have it done now and then. after that, we went to lunch, then to the mall so i could get a couple nursing bras. i’ve been wearing a dd throughout my pregnancy, and i know it’s too small, but i was afraid to spend a bunch of money on bras when i didn’t know how big my boobs were going to get. well it turns out the bras weren’t that expensive after all. i got two for about what i pay for one at lane bryant. also, i’m an f-cup now. so, yeah, ouch. but now i have a nice night bra sans underwire, and one with underwire for daytime use. aside from the surprise at finding bras for around $20 each, and that i’m wearing a freaking f-size bra, i was also surprised that they even carried them that large. and that my band size is the same.

anyway, i’d better get to bed. got to get up early-ish for another first: a massage!

epic. fucking. fail.

btw, i may not be my husband’s physical ideal, but when he grabs my “flab” it’s typically appreciatively, at the very least. (i’ll spare you the details on his favorite grabby situations.) if he pulled any of the shit from those oh so useful suggestions, he’d be missing some teeth.

[edit] also, yes, this.

now that the moving stuff is all arranged, i’m not sure i want to leave it to sohei to do by himself. i mean, he’ll have help in both locations. but what if i did end up hiring a psycho or something? also, i have a really hard time being away from sohei these days. i don’t really want him to go to tallahassee by himself. if his dad was sticking around to help, i’d be totally okay with it, but he’s not. on the other hand, i have visions of going into labor halfway there or halfway home and having to have the baby on the side of the road or some podunk hospital. if i did have the baby away from home, i’d be stuck in whatever town i give birth in for the next couple of months while little bear’s in the nicu. i can’t tell you how much that would suck, and it seems like just the sort of thing that would happen to me. but then, making a very bad hiring decision seems like the sort of thing i’d do, too. arg. since i’m incapable of doing anything right these days, i end up being paralyzed with fear most of the time, and unable to make decisions. ultimately, it’s probably not that big of a deal, and everything will probably be fine, but, again, arg.

also, i seem to have a summer cold. ugh.

okay, i think things might just finally be on track. the pinellas guy seems really friendly, and will be out to the house to help out on sunday morning, with a friend, even. the tallahassee guy seems alright, and should be at the house to help out on saturday afternoon. (i haven’t received confirmation, but it sounds like he was fine with that.) the truck is due to be picked up in tallahassee on friday evening, but i’m calling them tomorrow to see whether sohei can pick it up on saturday morning instead. if not, i don’t know what he and his dad are going to do, but i’m leaving it up to them. as long as he’s there by 4:00 on friday to pick it up, i don’t care. the hard part so far has been finding and coordinating all the labor. if we have a truck and workers, the rest of it can be figured out.

also, i put in a request to have the power turned on at the st. pete house. i just checked the website and it’s done. one less thing to worry about, i guess.

but since i didn’t do any of my damn chores today, i guess i’d better get started on the dishes and dinner…

jesus christ, can the world just fuck off for five minutes? i finally get a minute to sit down and eat my goddamn lunch, when sohei calls wanting to know if i heard back from the moving guy yet. (i contacted about a dozen people this morning and heard back from one, who wanted $280. uh, no.) i hadn’t heard back from the $16/hr guy and he was all pissed because for some reason his dad – who is the one driving him up to tally to pick up the truck – can’t figure out what he wants to do, and somehow this is my fault/problem. i’ve been waiting since wednesday for them to make their plans so i could start booking shit, and finally just decided to go ahead and do it today and let them deal with it if they don’t like the dates i picked. so now, because i was waiting on them to tell me when they wanted to go do this, suddenly everything’s messed up, and it’s my fucking fault for not booking help sooner. well, excuse the fuck out of me. if i’d just gone and booked people without asking them what days they wanted to do this shit, they’d be pissed off because i picked the wrong goddamn days. i just contacted the mover a few hours ago. maybe he’s at work or something, i don’t know. it’s not my fucking fault that he’s not calling back or emailing me. then he’s pissed off because i won’t call the moving van company to reschedule, when just this fucking morning i asked what time to put on the reservation, and i’m fucking sick of calling people. i’ve been on the phone all day! i figured he could call the damn truck people and change the reservation, since i put his damn name on it, but apparently not. so i’m in the middle of this fucking phone call when the cat decides to start puking everywhere. yum, there’s nothing more appetizing than cleaning up cat puke. i was starving when i sat down to eat, because i wanted to take care of as much stuff as i could before lunch, but now i just have really bad heartburn and feel sick. i’m so fucking tired of dealing with all this shit.

ugh, i have too much to do today. i already reserved our moving truck for this weekend, and will be calling to confirm this afternoon or tomorrow morning. (on two separate occasions, we’ve had our truck given to someone else despite reserving it, and i can’t deal with that kind of shit this time.) i’ve been looking into moving help for sohei, as well. it’s too bad he couldn’t just get his brother to do it, as it would have been way easier and cheaper, and i know the kid is pretty careful. now i have to find some stranger to do it for cheap, which comes with all sorts of potential problems. what if he’s some kind of creep or weirdo? what if he gets hurt on the job and wants to sue us? what if he does a shit job and breaks our stuff? i am not happy. i wish i could just go do it. and of course if something goes wrong, guess whose fault it will be? even though i’m the one who wanted him to ask his brother or a friend to help, or just hire some pros for a couple hours like we did last time. i’d rather shell out $250 and have it done right by people working for an actual moving company than pay around $100 for some jabroni and end up having to pay anyway to replace our broken stuff or owe who knows how much when he sues us for hurting himself. but what do i know?

i also have to call a glass repair place regarding the closet door. i can’t find a replacement door that matches the other one at any store in the area. they all either have gold or white trim (yuck) and the other door is silver/chrome/whatever. so i’m hoping we can just get someone to replace the glass rather than the whole damn door. i’m betting they’re going to want to see the door before giving me a quote, which means dragging sohei back over to pinellas some day this week. w00t.

at some point, i have to get new locks for the front door and get a decently-priced mattress (i.e., a queen size under $300), but i kind of need sohei for that, since my car is undrivable. we actually need the mattress by this weekend, since he’s leaving the old bed in tally, but i’m betting that’s not going to happen. i don’t know how the hell we’re going to pay for all of this, anyway. the truck is $350 (plus whatever fees), the movers are probably going to end up being $200-300 to load and unload the truck, the mattress is another $300 or more… and who knows what else is going to come up. i’m seriously considering taking some kind of part time job for the next month or so just to pay for all the moving-related crap.

i also have a bunch of chores to catch up on… dishes, laundry, dinner… i can’t wait until we’re just settled back in the house, and everything’s fixed and taken care of. also, on days i feel too shitty to wash the dishes or cook, i can just skip it without being a bad house guest. i’m tired of having to choose between feeling guilty and feeling exhausted.

frankly, i think we should just pay real movers to do all this shit, buy a bunch of furniture and stuff, put it all on the credit card, and declare bankruptcy after sohei is licensed in september. (while we’re at it, we could put all the property taxes we owe on the card and have done with that, too.) i honestly don’t know how we’re going to pay for all of this, and still pay the bills this month. i am also incredibly wary about my choices regarding movers, and really wish i didn’t have to make a decision about that. gah, i am so done with all this crap.

i know i don’t update much, but i’ve actually been busier than when i was working full time. there’s all sorts of stuff that needs sorting out, like insurance stuff and property management, etc. and there have been 11 hour days at the office as well. and cooking and cleaning and laundry and myriad doctor appointments… but i’m mostly happy. i’m looking into work options after little bear, and have been considering assessment consulting, freelance editing, or information brokering. there’s a separate building here at the law office, which is large, has air conditioning and a bathroom, and wireless internet. so it’ll make a perfect office for me. genma already said i could have it as long as i don’t mind sharing it with some various storage stuff. i can bring little bear and brumby and it won’t bother anyone because it’s a separate building. and sohei can visit us, which he’s pretty happy about, because he was afraid he wouldn’t get to see the baby much. now all i need to do is work on getting whatever business i choose off the ground. i don’t expect to get rich or anything, but if i made enough to cover the cobra payments every month, that would be great. whichever thing i decide to do, i know it’ll help if i can get an article published and put some kind of portfolio together. maybe i’ll just end up as a jill of all trades, i don’t know. i have a lot of skills, like web design and research and stuff. i’m great at assessment-related things. i just need to figure out what there’s a market for these days, and start working toward that. i’ll be pretty freaking psyched if i can work this out. it would be a shame to have such a sweet office and nothing to do in it.

:

-sohei and i are going on a mini-vacation to a beachy area for our anniversary!
-i only have a couple days of work left!
-the next two days of work feature parties! and one of them is for me!
-i will be back home for good in about a week!

I mean, why would you want to stay at home and watch Joss Whedon’s crappy rape-fantasy-as-adventure serial?

-televisualist

okay, yes, exactly. i usually like whedon’s stuff, but this show has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. it’s getting kind of interesting, but i never really enjoy watching it. it’s not just the whole rape fantasy written by a supposed feminist thing, but the funny moments are few and far between. i generally like his humor, but what there is of it here, not so much. if i’m at all disappointed that this show is facing the same fate as most fox shows, it’s because the characters won’t get rescued or anything, and we’ll never know what happens.

i had the worst nightmare last night, and i keep thinking about it. i dreamed that i had a miscarriage, and it was kind of graphic. considering how much i worry about stuff, i’m kind of surprised i don’t have more such nightmares. i wish i could forget about it, though. it’s still making me feel unsettled. in fact, i wish i’d stop having nightmares altogether. i have them constantly now, but at least most of them have nothing to do with being pregnant.

i was reading this, and feeling a little smug that i never got wrapped up in that whole traditional wedding thing. in case you didn’t know the story, sohei and i got married on a monday (our seven year dating anniversary) at the courthouse with our two best friends as witnesses. we all went to our favorite mexican restaurant afterwards, then to the movies to see spider-man. that’s pretty non-traditional, methinks. then that saturday we had a reception at our house with our family and friends. it was japanese-themed, and i wore a kimono. which is pretty hilarious, but i’m not at all sorry. (though i am a teensy bit sorry i wasn’t more adamant about having hello kitty and dear daniel figures on our cake.)

anyway, now that i’m older, i’ve come to a realization and do have one regret. weddings aren’t just for the couple. they’re for the families as well. our parents never got to see us be married. no one seemed that upset about it, so i guess it’s probably okay. but our parents aren’t the type to make a fuss about that sort of thing, so i don’t know whether they were just nice enough to not act upset. (it’s not like we eloped or anything, btw. we’d known for a few months ahead of time what we were going to do.) i guess i just assumed that since we all have siblings, our parents would get to see them married in an actual ceremony and everything. but my mum died before ju-chan got married, and sohei’s dad only has one other kid, and she’s estranged or whatever. so now i feel bad. i guess i should just take them at their word that they’re okay with it. i still have no desire to have an actual wedding, though i might consider it if i felt our parents wanted us to or something. i just hope i didn’t hurt anyone with my choice.

yes to all of this.

call me crazy, but i’m betting this isn’t going to be as uplifting or positive as they’re letting on…

i keep meaning to write about this, and keep forgetting. as a (reformed?) hypochondriac, my pregnancy has been fraught with panic about anything and everything that could go wrong. and when i go to look for answers, the standard response is that no one knows why these things happen. and no one knows what causes all these various symptoms in women. also, most of the time, there’s nothing that can be done, and the woman will have to live with the symptoms. or, worse, get over the loss of her baby and hope that it all goes better next time, somehow. (even though no one can figure out what happened to begin with.) when that woman i work with went into premature labor and gave birth to her 24-week-old daughter, no one could explain why. “sometimes these things just happen,” her doctor said. and in how many other diseases and disorders would this be an acceptable response when the catastrophic happens? if it weren’t pregnancy-related, would “shit happens” be an answer someone could live with?

we already know that far too many women die of heart attacks, because their symptoms weren’t “conventional” and therefore weren’t caught in time. (and by “conventional” i mean that they don’t have the damn sense to have a heart attack the way a man does.) which leads me to think, since medicine is obviously as patriarchal as any other area of society, that any problem that is exclusive to women would probably be summarily ignored. in addition to the heart attack issue, we also know that far too many hysterectomies and episiotomies are performed each year, completely unnecessarily. and don’t get me started on mastectomies. women have been butchered for ages for no other reason than these problems don’t affect men, so no one bothered to study them carefully. what’s a tit or uterus in the grand scheme of things?

as pregnancy is something that only affects women, it stands to reason this same attitude applies. does the man in the equation suffer when a pregnancy is lost? in many cases, yes. but i’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that, because they aren’t carrying the baby and can’t feel it moving around and stuff, they aren’t going to hurt nearly as badly as the woman, as she had more of an opportunity to bond. (oh, and there’s usually physical pain when a pregnancy ends as well, which is suffered exclusively by the woman.) after a while, i started getting really pissed off at the complete lack of answers regarding symptoms and pregnancy loss. almost invariably, when you try to figure out why you’re puking or why you have headaches or any of the other myriad discomforts of pregnancy, you’ll almost always see some variation on: “hormones.” wow, really? gee, thanks for putting so much thought into it. “we don’t know, but it’s probably all those hormones!” no explanation as to why or what these hormones are or where they come from or what they do. who gives a shit? just deal. (i am still pretty sure if a man spent three months or more puking almost every day, someone would have done something about it by now.)

then there are all the mysterious ways in which a woman can lose a baby. in the first trimester, it’s usually blamed on something being wrong with the baby. though there are plenty of people who admit that they don’t really know why around 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage at that time. no real, actual proof that it was some genetic or structural anomaly. and just when you think the baby is safely out of harm’s way, you run into problems like incompetent cervix. (who the fuck names these things, anyway?) oops, your cervix opened for no apparent reason and the baby just fell out! maybe it was a biopsy you had before or an std (an astounding number of pregnancy complications are blamed on stds, i’ve noticed. you whore.) or maybe it was genetic or something. again, who knows? you may have lost this baby that you spent the past five or so months carrying and falling in love with, but rest assured that next time, we might be able to stitch your cervix closed like a purse, and maybe – just maybe – the baby won’t fall out next time. (though it may, and also your bladder might rupture or some other awful complication. but hey, it’s the best we can do.) or you run into a situation like my coworker where you show up at the hospital in a lot of pain, only to be told that no one knows why you’re in labor, but you are, and will have to be cut open posthaste. because, you know, these things “just happen” sometimes.

so, yeah, i just find this whole thing a little fishy. also the fact that there are precious few meds made that are safe for a pregnant woman to take. it seems like we spend the majority of our pregnancies being told that we’ll just have to suffer. and i’m pretty damn sure that pregnancy would be a lot different if men had to do it. i don’t think there would be nearly the same amount of suffering involved.

you know, i love rain and everything, but how many more days of shitty weather and dark skies do i have to put up with? it’s great when i’m at home and don’t have anywhere to go, but does it ever do this on the weekend when i can enjoy it? no. it has to storm every time i have to drive somewhere. or stand outside for some reason. i should just start staying home on days when the weather sucks. what are they gonna do? fire me?

it’s the pitch black, dead still it gets before a tornado… i sure wish i’d stayed home today.

i need a new phone. the one i have is almost three years old, and it’s crapping out. so i was looking at the verizon website and saw this. waaaaant.

not bloody likely though.

gah! want these!

i’m so excited! i just looked into belly dance classes back home, and there’s a studio about 15 minutes from my house! and when you get to a certain level, they offer tribal, which is my favorite! i’m looking forward to seeing what the other classes are going to be like, since my only actual experience so far is tribal. i’ve watched other kinds, and they’re neat, so it’ll be interesting if i end up learning something new. this is such a relief, because i’ve missed dancing so much. after our teacher left town, there was only really one other troupe in town, and i heard a lot of bad things about it, so i didn’t go. i probably won’t be able to start until after i have the baby, since it’s going to be crazy from the time we move back until she’s born. but it’s so nice to know that there’s a studio there when i’m ready to start dancing again.

after giving feminism the business for the past few days (or a small subset of it, anyway), now i’d like to point out why i liked it to start with. look at some of these ads. i freaking love that website, btw.

in my post about feminism and choice, i neglected to mention another segment of women (often married, with kids, natch) who are also occasionally taken to task over their choices: housewives. orb has talked about this on her blog, as this is the career she’s chosen for herself. also, my mum was a housewife until juchan was in high school, so it’s kind of an emotionally-charged issue for me.

if given my druthers, i don’t think i’d mind being a housewife. for one thing, i hate working. i don’t care if this makes me look lazy or whatever. i’ve only ever had two jobs i actually liked being at, and before a year was up, i hated them, too. the main reason is that i hate being told what to do. especially if i think that the person bossing me around doesn’t have the right to do so. most of my bosses have been idiots, and i don’t listen to idiots. which doesn’t usually go over too well. i borrow my work motto from mrs. slocombe of are you being served fame: you are in no way my superior. this whole anti-authority thing didn’t do me any favors in school, either, but somehow i never learned my lesson. that might be pride fucking with me, but it’s not something i’m willing to sell. especially for the crap wages i always seem to get stuck making.

then there’s also the fact that i hate leaving the house. part of it is because i’m sick all the time. and aside from being more comfortable in bed and near my own bathroom than at my desk at work, sometimes it can be downright embarrassing being the kind of sick i get whilst in public. i’ve never worked anywhere that was understanding about the kind of time off work i generally need because of this stupid chronic illness. (which i understand from their point of view, but it doesn’t make it suck any less for me.) the other thing is that i still have a lot of social anxiety. and while i know i need to get over it or get on some damn meds, it never completely helps. i’ve been on anxiety meds before, and it makes being around other people only marginally more comfortable. leaving my home is almost always an unpleasant prospect for me, especially if i’m dragging myself someplace i don’t want to be.

which leaves being a housewife. but, i hear some argue, if you choose to be a housewife, then your husband is your boss. i have two things to say about that: 1) hahahahahaha in his dreams and 2) i’d rather have to answer to my husband than to some jacked up asshole i neither like nor respect. i feel like i have more freedom when i’m unemployed. ever since i started working, i haven’t painted once, and my attempts at creative writing have been crap. i’m so tired and worn down when i get home that all i’m capable of is watching tv, eating dinner, then going to bed. i don’t have the energy to do anything creative. you’ll notice that i haven’t done anything with my website since the beginning of ‘06. the layout hasn’t changed in three years. thankfully, i like it, but i used to change it at least four or five times a year. i don’t thrive at all when i’m working full-time. neither did mum. she was always doing all this craft stuff – and even had some of her work published – until she started working.

i mentioned in the other post that i felt more subverted being unemployed than i did being married. the main reason behind this is because you’re made to feel worthless in this society unless you’re earning a paycheck. though, now that i sit here and think about it, i think this job in particular has made me feel more helpless and worthless and owned than being unemployed ever did. sohei might have been crappy to me when i wasn’t working, but it’s nothing compared to how awful the university has been treating me. so, again, if faced with the choice of having sohei act all nasty to me because i’m not working, or having a faceless group of bastards treating me like shit, i’d rather put up with sohei’s wrath. (ideally, i’d be treated decently no matter what, but that’s the problem with the whole patriarchy thing. even though admin is all-female where i work, so you’d think they’d know better…)

after being the breadwinner for three years, i can kind of understand where sohei’s coming from. it’s really, really stressful to be the only one bringing in any money. what happens if you get fired or something happens to you and you can’t work? also, in our case, i’m the only one who can get health insurance through work, since his dad’s business isn’t large enough to offer it as a benefit. so i can see why it’s important that i have a job. but that doesn’t mean i’ll like working. i’ll still hate it. and i probably never will get to pursue any of the creative endeavors i wanted to.

the way i see it, no matter what choice a woman makes career-wise, she’ll be a slave to the patriarchy no matter what. she’ll either be serving her husband and family or her corporate (or state or federal) overlords. she’ll always get paid less than her male peers, she’ll always get the crappier jobs, and she’ll always have to kiss someone’s ass and work 100x harder than the guys. but if i have to “serve” – and it’s clear that i will always have to on some level – i’d rather “serve” my family. at least at home i have some time to call my own and some goddamn freedom. even if i have to listen to sohei bitch that i didn’t do the dishes or whatever, i’ll have made what i consider good use of my time doing the things i want to do with my life, and creating or doing something i can actually feel good about at the end of the day. and what’s he going to do anyway? fire me?

seriously, it probably seems that i’ve been really anti-feminism lately. and i’m not. it’s important that women are willing to put up with eye-rolls and much worse to assert their rights. but i still think that a lot of self-proclaimed feminists are patronizing and nasty and far too willing to throw other women under the bus for their choices. and, for me, it eventually comes down to the fact that i am a woman, but i’m a human being, too. and, as a human being, i feel completely unfulfilled and unhappy working. i hate answering to other people, i hate getting sick away from home, and i hate that nothing i do at work ever has any real meaning. and i feel that my mum was far more valued by my sister and myself than she ever was at work. her life wasn’t ideal, and she put up with a lot of crap over the years for choosing to be a housewife. and while our hands are all too often tied, i think it’s safe to say that every human being wants to feel like they have some control over their lives and be free to make their own choices whenever possible. unfortunately, i don’t get to choose not to work. it’s not feasible in my situation. just like i think it’s completely unfeasible that humans should stop reproducing or that they’ll ever stop treating other people like crap. i respect what feminism ultimately means, but i think some of the ideas that come from it border on ridiculous. i think that, like any group of people with an agenda, they ultimately lose sight of what it’s like to be an individual. i don’t need an entity that i look to for ideas and inspiration and support constantly telling me, “ur doin it wrong.” and while i admit to taking some of it personally because of the choices i’ve made, a lot of the time, it’s not oversensitivity on my part.

i wish i could believe that most people are good. but there are plenty of evil women, too. and i think that, if women did stop marrying and having kids, and we did have some kind of revolution, the world would not be much different. (aside from a major drop in population, unless men suddenly were able to bear children somehow.) because it’s always the awful people who get ahead, no matter what their gender. my bosses at the university are all women (supervisor, associate director, and director as well as hr), and no one has been more horrible to me since i announced my pregnancy than they have. the only people who have helped me at all are men! and no one’s ever meaner about how you look (after middle school anyway, and before then it’s pretty much 50/50) than other women. when i think about what life would look like if women were equal or in charge, i don’t see how it would change that much for me. maybe we’d have less war, maybe i’d get a fair wage at work, maybe women would be depicted in a better light in books and movies and stuff… but the things that fundamentally make my life suck would still be there. and maybe my life would suck worse, because i generally like being married, and having this baby is just about one of the most exciting things to ever happen to me. (i mean, creating a life and watching it grow? how fucking cool is that?)

i still believe i have a right to be treated with respect no matter my gender. and i think that all women should be treated better. when it comes to privilege, men definitely have us beat, and that sucks. it’s also stupid that a lot of women are expected to both work and do most of the household-related tasks, including child-rearing. (though, in a lot of families i’m acquainted with, things are being split a lot more equitably than they may have been back in the day.) i don’t disagree that women are mostly treated as second class citizens. but wouldn’t it be more beneficial to all of us if we genuinely banded together, instead of sneering at the women who aren’t as “feminist” as they should be? why should i think that a woman who’s willing to treat me like an idiot and throw me under the bus because i don’t agree with them, is going to be any better to me than a guy who does the same damn thing? also, isn’t it a little unrealistic to suggest that we should be subverting men? for one thing, it’s completely unfair to turn around and treat other people the way we know we don’t like being treated. revenge is pretty much crap no matter what, and doesn’t do anyone any good.

basically, what i’m trying to say is that i do believe women should be treated as equals. but that we could get a lot more done if we were realistic about our goals, and if we treated our sisters with a little more respect than we sometimes do. (like calling other women skanks or telling them that they’re helping the patriarchy by having kids.) zealotry, no matter the cause (religious, political, etc.), never actually accomplishes anything, because you cut out a large segment of people who might otherwise be willing to help, and no one can take you seriously. (for example, i am completely sympathetic with the animal rights cause, but could never join peta.)

anyway, i guess i’d better get back to work. if you made it through this entire screed, congratulations. i hope i haven’t pissed anyone off too badly.

i’m sure i’ve already established that i’m not the best feminist in the world. so i’m sure you won’t be shocked when i’m forced to ask: why is marriage considered to be some terrible construct dreamed up by the patriarchy? (i had a conversation about this with a friend once, which i may expound upon some other time.) i guess i can kind of understand why some people think it’s lame for a woman to get all decked out in white like some kind of virgin sacrifice. i think the traditional wedding is mostly a waste of time and money. but the reasons i feel it’s stupid have very little or nothing to do with misogyny. i also don’t think that, by marrying a man, a woman is any closer to being “owned” by him. maybe i’m not seeing things correctly because my own circumstances were kind of weird.

in my situation, i was the one who said, conversationally, that we should probably get married. sure, i’d been against it for years, because i didn’t feel i needed some kind of proof from the state that i loved sohei. but, realistically, i needed to be added to his health plan, etc. (now, the whole “no insurance coverage unless you’re married” thing might be some kind of tool of the patriarchy. however, since i’m now the breadwinner and insurance guarantor, i’m thinking that view might be a little backward. maybe in the majority of relationships, the guy is the one who brings home the bacon and the benefits, but i guess that’s just another way in which my marriage is weird.) my wedding wasn’t exactly traditional, either. i wore a simple, cheapish, little black dress and sohei wore a suit. we got married at the courthouse, with our two best friends as witnesses. i did not feel, during the entirety of the ceremony, that i was being given away or sold into slavery or sacrificed or anything else. i could be wrong, but i’m pretty sure he had to say exactly the same vows i did, which means if i had to promise to obey, so did he. (we got a printout of the vows, i think, which i now want to go reference. because for some reason i don’t remember that part.)

then there’s the issue of divorce. i guess it’s harder to leave when you’re legally bound in a relationship. but it seems to me that both parties are equally “stuck.” and, really, i’m not that much more “stuck” with sohei than i was before we married. splitting up our stuff would be a pain in the ass no matter what, since we jointly own almost all of our possessions. so i guess maybe long term relationships are a construct of the patriarchy as well? i don’t know… but i’m pretty sure i prefer that to loneliness or a long line of flings. (that’s just me, of course. i’m not saying you can’t be happy unless you’re in an ltr. i just know that i would personally be less happy without sohei in my life. which is why, despite everything, i’m still married to him.) also, it’s no more difficult for a woman to get a divorce than a man. not in florida, anyway. you can get divorced whenever you want, for whatever reason. if you don’t want it to be a long, drawn-out battle, it doesn’t even really cost that much here.

i don’t know… i just don’t see it. i’m not saying my relationship is perfect, but i don’t feel particularly subverted, either. i actually felt like a second-class citizen more before we got married than i do now. it’s not like we got married and sohei suddenly turned into some kind of monster. “ha! we’re married! i own you now.” he’s no more or less controlling than he ever was. in my experience, being unemployed makes me feel far more “owned” than marriage ever has. while he’s in school, i’ve been the one working full time and bringing home a paycheck and insurance. he’s the one cooking and cleaning and doing most of the house-related stuff. but i don’t particularly feel like i “own” him, either. i honestly think we’ve got a pretty equal partnership going now. i think that would be the case whether we’re married or not.

i think the reason the anti-marriage (and anti-reproduction, in some cases) thing bugs me is that it seems to assume that women who choose to get married are too dumb to understand what they’re doing to themselves. i didn’t get married or choose to have a baby because “it seemed like the thing to do, durr.” or because i’m “supposed to.” i married sohei because i love him, and it also made sense to do that. i guess it was kind of “the right thing to do” in that the smart thing at the time was to acquire health insurance rather than sink another $1000 into medical bills. but i didn’t feel like i was selling myself for health insurance or anything else. and the whole relationship security thing goes both ways. though neither of us feel particularly more secure than we did before, really. we didn’t get married because our parents pressured us or i was too stupid to know better. i found someone i wanted to spend the rest of my life with, so marriage didn’t seem like that big of a deal. and as far as getting pregnant, that was a decision we both made. we’re not doing it because we feel some sort of societal pressure. our parents never pressured us to have kids, either. i didn’t used to think it was something i wanted to do, but as i got older, i thought it would be kind of neat to get to experience it. i didn’t just wake up one morning and go, “welp! i’m a lady! i better commence to procreatin’!” besides, if no one had kids, i’m not sure how we’d go about, you know, continuing the human race and populating the planet and stuff. treating women like they’re idiots for wanting to be “breeders” is pretty stupid and short-sighted. i think it’s pretty interesting that some of the same people who get all up-in-arms about choice are the same ones who think those who choose to have babies are morons for, um, making a choice.

this isn’t to say that all feminists think that all fetuses should be aborted or something. i’m not even saying that everything i wrote above pertains to every feminist or whatever, etc. i just don’t understand the ones who think this way. and i think treating other women like they’re dumb animals for the choices they make (marriage, reproduction, employment, etc.) is pretty fucking un-feminist. because these aren’t choices my husband or father get to make, and they’re not choices you get to make for me, either. i’m the one who wanted to get married, i’m the one who wants to have a baby, and i’m the one who wants to stay home with it for a year. (whereas sohei was ambivalent toward the first, wouldn’t have even mentioned the second if i hadn’t kept hounding him about it, and is pretty much completely against the third.) i think the patriarchy is pretty rotten and does a lot of shitty things. but i think that acting like marriage and having kids means you’re in thrall to it, and if you don’t realize it, you’re a big stupid dummy, is pretty shitty too. and condescending.

i had a nightmare last night that i ate a turkey sandwich. now i want one really bad. i know it’s really stupid and there’s very little chance of my getting listeriosis, but if i did get it, i’d feel awful. (physically and emotionally, clearly.) but damn, i want that sandwich.

in addition to hating my job, i still also hate this dumb hick town. i got pulled over for speeding yesterday. want to know how fast i was going? 35 mph. the cop claimed i was going 45, but i’d seen him before he saw me and automatically checked my speedometer. which was at exactly 35. i was going over the speed limit, yes. by five mph. and that was only because i thought the speed limit was 35. i wasn’t having it and basically told him he was full of shit. i told him that there was no way, in downtown traffic, that i could have reached that speed, especially just after pulling away from a stoplight. he gave me the ticket anyway, the corrupt prick, and made me sit around and wait while he ran my plate to see if there wasn’t something else he could bust me for. there wasn’t, of course. the ticket is for $250, and i have to take the fucking traffic class again. i guess i should be glad he didn’t use my attitude as an excuse to tase or arrest me. (sohei told me that people have been arrested for less at routine traffic stops, apparently.) but i wasn’t about to be all polite with the dumb fuck. thanks to my out of control hormones, everyone’s been hearing exactly what i think lately, and he was no exception. (i don’t think i’ve ever been this mean or nasty without any fear of consequences in my life. aside from when i was a teenager, and even then i wasn’t this much of a bitch.) anyway, i was going the same speed as everyone else. i just got pulled over because i drive a shitty ghetto car, and he probably thought i was black. funny how i never once got pulled over back home, but since i came here, i’ve had three run-ins with the cops. i hate these stupid southern* hick towns with their stupid pig cops. as if i needed another reason to desperately want to return home.

*i know that, geographically, tampa/st. pete is south of tallahassee. however, anyone from florida can tell you that the further south you go in this state, the further “north” you get. tallahassee, culturally, is actually the ass-end of georgia. whereas south florida – further south than tampa – is so full of northerners that it’s basically an extension of new york.

oh dear lord, i hate people like this woman.

right before bed last night, I discovered I was spotting again. Which really sucked because I haven’t for a while. So of course I had nightmares about miscarrying all night. One was particularly vivid and has been bothering me all day… I wish this stuff would just stop. Maybe I’ll feel better after my appointment on Tuesday. I want to see her on u/s again. I can’t wait til this trimester is over.

okay, i’m not letting myself read pregnancy message boards anymore. period. i figured, hey, if i make it through the first trimester, surely i won’t have much else to worry about, right? wrong.

so if i manage to make it through the first 14 weeks without a missed miscarriage – which has been my panic du jour for many, er, jours – i still get to freak out about other various and sundry complications. i’m ignoring stuff like eclampsia, because if i drop dead, whatevs. no, instead i keep thinking about the story one woman told about her mother losing her baby one week from term because the umbilical cord had a knot in it. and the recent news story about the sudden increase in sids we’ve been experiencing. and the stories about the increase in babies and toddlers being diagnosed with formerly rare childhood cancers. jesus christ, can you imagine? carrying a baby for nine months only to have it die suddenly in utero or in its crib the first night home? or going for a standard well-baby checkup and learning that your child has an aggressive eye tumor that’s probably already taking up residence in her brain?

sometimes i think that if i did lose this baby, i might not try again. i’m not sure i can handle this. most of the time, i somehow manage to stay calm and rational, and even get excited about being pregnant. then i get to thinking about how my luck sucks about as much as sohei’s, and with our combined awful luck, something bad is bound to happen. and i spend way too much time wondering if proto-joey’s still alive in there, floating and joeying about. so then i just decide to love the hell out of it, because my heart’s going to be broken whether i pretend not to care or not.

as a strongly pro-choice woman, this whole thing has been weird to me. i’d known i was pregnant for less than two weeks when i was diagnosed with a threatened miscarriage. at the time, all we’d seen was a little yolk sac and tiny fetal pole. and i figured that if i did lose the pregnancy, it really was just a clump of cells, and i’d be sad, but… well it was just cells. then a week later i went for a follow-up and there was a heartbeat. i knew it was far from viable (and the message boards backed this up. “i saw a heartbeat one week, then the next, the baby was dead!”), but it seemed more like a living thing. then later i heard the heartbeat, and that was it. i was smitten. so, at this stage in the game, even though she isn’t viable and is still more or less a clump of cells, i will be pretty damn devastated if something happens. not as upset as i would be if she were about to be born or was already around, but still really sad. this hasn’t changed my stance on abortion, however. because 1) the issue of viability outside the womb continues to be a sticking point for me and b) if it’s not in my body, it’s none of my business. i can’t even say that i’d be angry at a woman for terminating her pregnancy before true viability, because as much as i attribute proto-joey with being alive, the sad fact is, she’s not really. she’s kind of an appendage or, if i’m being callous, a parasite. it doesn’t mean i don’t love her with foolish abandon, though. but that’s my choice.

now i’m wrestling with whether i want to risk a mountain dew with my late lunch/dinner today. i had my first caffeinated beverage the other day – a small frappuccino – and felt crampy afterward. so i’m thinking the possible guilt won’t be worth it. but damn, i want one so bad. being a mum is hard. [update: i didn't get mountain dew.]

an argument i had with my mum once just came back to me as i read something semi-related. and i remembered how mad i got, and i even got angry now, just thinking about it. and then i felt horrible because she’s gone, and what we argued about doesn’t matter anymore. sometimes, especially now that i’m thinking about how i’m going to deal with my own kid, i remember some of the things she used to do that really messed me up. and i feel bad about even thinking about that stuff. because, ultimately, i would put up with the mean remarks and the arguments we’d inevitably still have, if she would just be here. and realizing that i’m angry with my dead mother just makes me want to cry.

i feel like i’m not really doing what i’m meant to. i’m consistently drawn to the field of medicine for some reason. i read medical books for fun after work. when i was in high school, i read microbiology textbooks for fun after school. (as you can see, not a lot has changed.) once i was in college, i changed my major a few times. psych, then pre-med (microbiology), then english lit. i was depressed for a long time when i switched from pre-med to english. but i flunked out of trig and chem, so it clearly wasn’t meant to be. or so i thought at the time. i’ve since become a much better student. so if i really buckle down and study my ass off like i did in upper division and post grad, could i do it? could i learn math and chem? (i’m already awesome at biology, so that’s never been an issue.)

i’ve already been in school too long, though. even if i could study myself smart, it would be a lot of time and expense. i toyed with the idea of maybe doing nursing school instead, so maybe i could be a nurse practitioner or something, but that’s not really what i’m interested in. i used to want to be a pathologist, because i wanted to diagnose diseases and figure out what happened. but now i’d rather do that on people who are still alive, so i’m more interested in internal medicine (specialization: infectious disease).

part of me wants to just go for it and take a chemistry class when we get back home, just to see if maybe i can do it. but if i can, what then? it’s entirely unrealistic, but i want this so badly. i always have. i just wish i’d had the guts to try before i wasted all this time. and money.

if i ever got to have zoe, i think i’d like her middle name to be threnody. i suppose that’s why i don’t get to have children.

sohei sent me this a while back, and i forgot to post it. but what made me think of it is this.

must. hold. out. until. four.

ugghhhhh guuuutssss huuurttttt.

i realized yesterday that i never have any time to myself to just think anymore. i’m glad that my work schedule is such that i can spend as much time with sohei as possible, but it leaves me with very little “me time.” i figured this out yesterday, when i was taking my lunch in the subbasement – as usual – and was only interrupted once. (i usually get interrupted a lot more than that.) i enjoyed the unexpected solitude so much, i stayed there another hour, until i had to go upstairs for my desk shift. this gave me some time to work out some things that have been kind of weighing on me, and even some things that hadn’t particularly occurred to me.

for one thing, i realized that something that bothers me in life, in general, is my ineffectualness. i want to do things like join the peace corps or be one of those greenpeace whaleboat people. but a) i’m so sick all the time i can barely make it through a day of my desk job and b) i’m married and want to start a family, etc. reason a is really enough in and of itself. even if i didn’t have a husband or whatever, i can’t do things like trek through potentially dangerous places or spend time at sea fighting whalers. stupid as it sounds, this is a big source of disappointment in my life. i think this is one of the reasons i want to move to new places all the time and have adventures. (i also realized a lot of it has to do with my dad, but i’ll get to that at another time.)

there was more, and i was tempted to blog about it yesterday while still epiphany-high, but i didn’t have time. so the moment’s kind of gone…

i went to a friend’s show last night and it was awesome. the first band pretty much sucked, and the second one was okay. but the third one, american devils, was awesome. my friend’s band, stronghold, was on last. they were hardcore. and damn, but he could play guitar. i got to meet his girlfriend, too, and she was really sweet. i’m getting old, though, because by 1 am, i was beat. but we stayed until the show was over, and got home after 2:00. it was pretty fun, and i might go next time he plays. especially since no one else from work showed up. jerks.

uhhhhhhhhh. so. restless. want cigarette. want to cuddle. uhngggg.

i love this weather at home. i hate it at work.

i forgot to mention this the other day, but it’s hilarious, so i have to. on saturday, sohei and i pulled into the driveway after a trip to the grocery store and safety dance came on. and, because the power of the 80’s compelled him, he cranked up the radio and tried to safety dance around our obama yard sign. i was on my way to join him when a) he almost tripped backwards over the sign and b) i stepped in an ant hill. after stealing a quip from frye that the safety dance isn’t actually very safe at all, we fixed the sign and dragged our uncoordinated selves into the house.

i didn’t sleep last night. wait, i tell a lie. i slept for about ten minutes or so total. i went to bed, wasn’t feeling particularly tired despite being exhausted when i got home. (nope, didn’t take a nap.) i eventually fell asleep around 1:00 when sohei woke me about five minutes later hollering that i’d pinched him. i’ll take his word for it, but, regardless, it shocked me awake and i couldn’t settle back down. by around 2:00, i decided maybe reading would help, so i put my cute bedside lamp on and proceeded to read watchmen for a couple hours. sohei woke up at 4-ish and i explained that i didn’t think i was going to sleep at all, so maybe if i just stayed awake it would be better. he kindly offered to make me a latte, but then decided he wanted to go back to sleep, and said he’d make me one in the morning. i declined, as coffee – as much as i love it – causes me flare-ups, and i didn’t need one right before i was supposed to go to work. (i accepted the 4:00 latte, as it would give me a couple hours to be sick before i had to leave for the day.) i could tell he wasn’t having an easy time sleeping with me reading, so i went downstairs to watch some house i’d dvr-ed earlier. i got through two episodes and it was about 15 minutes until the alarm would go off. so i put married with children on and dozed off about five minutes before sohei called down to say the alarm went off. i felt like shit, but sohei said he was sick of listening to me complain, so i got ready and left early.

i managed to get here without incident, but i’m not feeling any better. i have the shakes for some reason, and my vision’s all blurry. my guts, of course, are not feeling that great, either. everyone’s going to think i’m on drugs. i’m barely functioning. i’m going to try to get through as much of the day as i can, but i don’t know how long i’m going to last. anyway, the house was freezing last night, and since i’m temporarily without my couch blanket (brumby barfed on it), i think i finally got that damn cold that’s going around. my throat was scratchy yesterday, so i should have guessed, but now i feel kind of feverish and everything. oh well. at least i’m earning that all-important paycheck.

it was four years ago today that i held mum’s hand and watched her die. most of the time, it’s scary how easy it is to forget she’s not here anymore. lately, for some reason, it’s been hard. the other day, i clicked on a link to a news story, and the writer’s picture was there, and her hair looked just like mum’s. her face didn’t register right away, and it felt like being punched in the gut. i used to be able to fool myself into thinking she was just away for a while. that i’d get to see her again one of these days. the more time that goes by, the less that works. i also used to think that i’d see her after i died. but i don’t believe that anymore, either. i don’t believe there’s an afterlife. i don’t really believe we reincarnate or anything. i’m pretty sure there’s nothing after this, and anything religion or myth has taught us is there to make us behave or make us feel better about what’s coming. so i don’t think i’ll probably ever see her again. in a few years – or decades, maybe – i’ll be dead, too, and won’t have to worry about missing people anymore.

it does get easier as time goes on, in a lot of ways. it kind of has to. if i felt like i did for the month directly after her death, i wouldn’t be able to function. but i don’t think i’ll ever stop feeling her absence entirely…

i got the filling replaced this morning and it hurts like hell. i’ve never had a filling that hurt. i’m a little concerned, as the extra strength tylenol is hardly touching it. if it still hurts on monday, i’m going to call the dentist and make sure nothing’s amiss.

I use zillow because I like to torment myself by seeing how worthless my houses have become. (kidding on the square.) well, for the tallahassee house, there’s a satellite picture that shows the rooftops, basically. But for the st. pete house, it’s street level. And you can move the view up and down the street and in front of specific houses. The excitement at finding out how much I could see was quickly replaced with throat-clenching sadness. I want to go home. That’s my house. My first house. And it’s the best house in the world, and that’s where I belong. And I hate to think of what the people who have been living there might have done to it. I wish we were going to stay there forever, but after we sell the tally house, that one’s the next to go. But I want to put any equity we get (ha!) into the st. pete house. I want to give it the makeover it deserves. Hardwood floors, new counters and cabinets… god, I want to be back there. And even though it’s great we’re moving back home, I don’t want to live in Brandon or riverview. I want to live in st. pete. Until global warming causes the ocean to swallow it whole… I can’t believe how choked up I’m getting over that place. I know I’m homesick, but didn’t realize how much of it had to do with that particular home.

the internet will be out until thursday, apparently. i’m not even going to go into how fucking retarded our cable people are, but one of them came out yesterday and was predictably fucking useless. so i continue to miss out on the hko beta, as well as not being able to work on my website. (though spam and ju-chan comments are getting through well enough. i’m stumped.) also, i’m pretty upset that i won’t be able to get up-to-the-minute stats after the debate tomorrow night. i’ll watch keith, of course, but it just won’t be as fun if sohei and i aren’t wailing at our respective laptops and frantically hitting the refresh button every 30 seconds. (okay, it’s mostly me who does that, but still.)

our internet at home has been out since saturday night. this is unfortunate, as i only got to play hko for a few hours. after waiting like two years to play. also, i can do nothing regarding my website until it’s fixed, because i can’t muck about with it at work. and sohei has a big paper due. it’s not a good time not to have internet is what i’m trying to say.

jesus fucking christ. sohei just called. he was on his way to school when some stupid bitch hit his car. he was stopped in the left lane and she changed lanes without even looking where she’s going and ran right into him. he seems okay right now, but the car has a big dent and long scratch on it, and the tire’s messed up. no one can drive in this fucking town. just about everyone i know has been in at least one wreck here, and none of them were at fault. i don’t know anything about the fucktard who hit him, except that she’s apparently yet another stupid piece of shit who doesn’t know how to drive. the happiest day of my life will be when we get the fuck out of this stupid place and go home. if i live to see the goddamn day.

Bored bored so freaking bored. Even when I’m assigned things, work is so boring lately. It’s a beautiful day outside and I want to be home with sohei, smoking cigarettes on the porch and watching brumby play. I keep staring out the window. I love having a window. I’m going to the dentist tomorrow morning at 9:30. I’m really, really hoping they’ll just go ahead and give me the filling then so I don’t have to go another week like this. And I hope it’s not too expensive. Ha. I have to be on the desk in 15 minutes. I hate afternoon desk time. It’s better than sitting around, I guess. This week has just dragged. I keep refreshing my google homepage, hoping that a new news item or email pops up. And seeing what the tiger is up to. She’s so cute. The fox was cute, but the tiger is even cuter. Ughhhhhhhhh. Only an hour and a half until the weekend…

i spent my lunch break helping sohei remember things for his bar application. i love reminiscing. because for every address and every time period, i had a story. and a lot of my recollections relied on things that weren’t really all that memorable. for example, he couldn’t remember whether he was still doing the externship for Seminole electric when we first met. And I told him he definitely was, because we used to use that as an excuse to skip school. His externship was during the last class period, and he’d leave campus for it. My last class period was remedial algebra, and then I’d have tennis practice after school. One day, when he didn’t have to go to his externship, I skipped math and tennis practice and we went to masaryktown. (it’s a hick town near land o’ lakes.) anyway, we were just friends then, but we started skipping all the time. And it was all thanks to that externship. So I remembered all these random little things, and even made a timeline of every place he lived or stayed (however short) from the time he was 16. And I could remember it all down to the month.

In case you care, here’s the timeline:

? – June 1995: Odessa
June 1995 – August 1995: Land O’ Lakes (my parents’ house)
August 1995 – May 1996: Gainesville (Sledd Hall)
May 1996 – June/July 1996? (call your mom to confirm): Tampa (your mom’s hospital apartment)
July 1996 – August 1996: Gainesville (my parents’ house)
August 1996 – August 1998: Gainesville (studio)
August 1998 – June 1999: Gainesville (Prairiewood)
June 1999 – January 2004: Clearwater
January 2004 – August 2006: Pinellas Park
August 2006 – present: Tallahassee

Anyway, it was a neat way to spend my break. I’m proud of my ability to remember useless stuff. And look things up. (I found all our old houses/apartments and some workplaces.) I still feel like crap, but at least I’m in a decent mood.

p.s. – if you have dysentery, like I apparently do, even water and orange juice aren’t safe.

the good: i got into the hello kitty mmorpg beta.

the bad: i o.d.ed on my meds this morning and now have that persistent, hacking cough and scratchy throat that comes with it. to get rid of the cotton mouth, i’ve been drinking a bunch of water, but now i just feel sick again.

the ugly: i’ve gotten sick after dinner every single night this week, and had to go home early on monday. this is not a standard flare-up. i have no idea what’s wrong, but i can’t really go to the doctor until i’m done dealing with the filling that fell out on sunday. in the meantime, i’m in a ton of pain and i can’t eat or drink much. w00t. (i’m in pain from the stomach issues, not the filling.)

it looks like winter outside. it’s just after six, but the sky is dark and heavy and grey. it looks like it should be cold, but according to weather.com, it’s 80 degrees out there. no fair. it’s been more tolerable out lately, but nowhere near cool. i want to see my breath and get all cuddly and everything. if what i see out the window is any indication, i should be able to. but i’m not. stupid florida.

why is it that if you google “lose a filling” without quotation marks around it, most of what you get is weight loss crap? i understand that “lose” = lose weight and “filling” is one of those dieting catchphrases, but jesus christ. i just want to know a) what i’m supposed to do when i lose a filling and b) what i can eat or drink. a friend of mine who’s lost a filling before said she was told to eat only soft foods like applesauce, yogurt, etc. so it’ll probably be macaroni for dinner again tonight… (macaroni is my favorite, but i was going to fry some fish, and now i can’t.) anyway, that’s pretty freaking retarded.

there isn’t enough bleach in the world to scrub this image from my mind.

stupid gmail. i’ve been waiting for the hello kitty mmorpg for like two years now (shut up) and they have this thing where the first 20,000 to sign up through sanriotown accounts get to play beta as founders. and gmail sent the email announcement to the fucking spam folder. so, two days after the fact, i went ahead and tried to sign up, but it’s probably too late. i wouldn’t have even seen the email if i hadn’t been checking the spam folder for something else (that apparently never showed up). it’s never sent sanriotown email there before, of course. i’ll find out in a couple weeks whether i can play. damn, that makes me mad…

it must be one of those self-repeating, immortal franken-ants.

i got my hair cut, and it looks nice. i bought healthy groceries. it’s friday, i’m in love. (okay, it’s saturday now, but whatever.)

they’re running out of movie ideas.

‘night.

(meet me in my dreams, ‘kay?)

the bunnies are stealing watermelons, my face hurts from snot, and it’s time to go to bed for good tonight. i have a list of things a mile long to do tomorrow, and now i won’t be getting up til the day’s half over.

aaand now we’re back to such spam as “mature sluts.” if anyone finds my blog by searching for that term, i’m afraid you’re off by half. i am not in the least mature.

not sure why i’m blogging, really. probably because i never have time anymore and i feel bad about not updating at least once in a while. also, since i’m not particularly bummed out, i figured i should write just so i won’t look back and think i was never happy.

when i got to the subbasement today, mi-kun was signed in to pandora, but i hadn’t signed out of my last.fm account. so i thought his stuff would show up in my sidebar, but it didn’t, thankfully. i don’t want people thinking i listen to stuff that mainstream. haha just kidding. (on the square.)

well, i guess that’s it. i’m not depressed right now. just thought you might want to know.

today so far:

-woke up to brumby jumping on my bladder
-told that i can’t go to the mall because i’ll spend money
-stood in the shower for 20 minutes but couldn’t cry despite feeling a desperate need to
-blew up at sohei because if my life has to suck this fucking bad, the least i could be allowed to do is spend $40 of the $500 in gift money i’ve saved
-in the heat of the argument, was told all sorts of things about how fat i am and how he can’t stand me
-now, finally, able to cry
-after most blotchiness subsided, went to get dressed to go to convenience store and discovered brumby ate one of my shoes; he’s never done this before
-went to convenience store to fill up car and get cranberry juice, and was picked on by the clerk for the aclu shirt i was wearing

it’s just a bit after noon. wonder what else this relaxing day off will hold?

wow, i feel completely ick today. it’s not hangover ick, i don’t think. there was this work thing last night which no one showed up to, of course. (seriously, when will i fucking learn?) and i had a huge margarita, then came home and drank some more while watching obama’s speech. i’ve been depressed the past couple of weeks is all. everything pretty much sucks. drinking didn’t help as much as i thought it would. work sucks now, sohei reneged on trying for a baby, and i stupidly keep trying to do dumb things like be social. maybe if i put a rubber band around my wrist and snap it every time i try to talk to people or plan anything, i’ll eventually learn to stop doing it. it’s little stuff, too, like my ipod not working anymore (yes, still) and losing my ring and everywhere i go being overrun with stupid college kids and all the other minor things that seem to add up until i feel like i’m going to break. last time i was in odessa, no-chan joked that she’d pay the equivalent of what i’m making now if i’d stay and be her personal assistant. i’m considering asking her if i really could. if it weren’t for having to pay the mortgage on this house (and part of the other), i’d be fine with being an indentured servant for the next year.

really, i need to do something. i don’t know what, but what i’m doing now isn’t working. when you feel like you’d rather be dead than live out another day doing what you’re doing, it’s time for a change. it feels like my life isn’t going anywhere. i have a fucking mls and spend my days at a desk, telling people where the bathroom is and that the printers are broken (yes, both of them) and fetching dvds like i work at fucking blockbuster. for around $22,000/year. a trained monkey could do this shit. work didn’t used to suck this bad. and at least i could look forward to finally having a kid. but sohei has stopped wanting to eat healthy and clean the litter box and everything, and we’re right back where we were.

i’ll be 30 in a year, and what do i have to show for it? nothing. i have a string of useless degrees and debt and 100 pounds of weight that’s not supposed to be there. i don’t have friends, i don’t have a career, i don’t have kids. i just don’t know what to do anymore. i don’t think i’ll ever be happy.

my birthday was good. it didn’t start storming until yesterday, and it’s been nice. there was cake and ice cream at work, and i got a card. and sohei took me out for lunch. everyone kept wishing me happy birthday, and no-chan called as i was leaving work. (i pointed out to sohei that my stepmum not only didn’t call, but probably didn’t realize it was my birthday at all.) and the folks at the desk were all shouting and singing as i left. then i got home and uh, yeah. and then we went to dinner and i wore my new dress that no-chan got me and it was really good. i had mezzaluna pasta, two chocolatinis (my new favorite drink), and this insane dessert that sohei called “chocolate disaster.” when we got home, we watched some justice league while i got a back rub. not much later, i realized that i had, indeed, picked up the stomach bug going around at work. but it wasn’t much different from the usual turmoil aside from meds not working, and there was no barfing with this one – unlike the last one – so after everything settled down a bit, i watched ratatouille on blu-ray. (our first blu-ray! w00t.) it was sooo cute. but i wasn’t sure about the message. i told sohei i’d have to read some critical essays on it before i would be totally okay with it. the greatness didn’t end when i fell asleep, either, because i had a pretty sweet sex dream. (thanks, brain!)

i’m glad it was a good day, because it took the edge off it being my last birthday in my 20s. (i’m going to be 30 next year. sob.) i’ll write more about other things later. i want to enjoy the storm while it’s here and read my library book while i’ve still got it.

i’ll second that: fucking duh.

also, just now:

miss daisy – i don’t think i can handle chubby checker right now.
me (to self): nope, he’s pretty hardcore.

well, i’m back home. can i return to odessa now?

seriously, i’m having a shite day. i woke up at least four times last night (which is about every two hours for those of you playing at home) to pee. which could mean i’m pregnant (i’m not) or i’m inching ever closer to diabetes. or maybe it doesn’t mean anything and my body decided it just wouldn’t be right for me to return to work well-rested. or not in pain either, apparently, because one of those times i got up – that would have been the 3:00 time – it was due to yet another charley horse. fuck me, but i’m sick of those. it was probably due to dehydration again, which is understandable, because i couldn’t go two hours without peeing.

things only improved when i got to work, but i don’t have time to write about it now. (that was sarcasm, btw.)

i’m having a hard time shaking this depression. talking to t-sensei made me feel a bit better yesterday. it’s nice hearing good things about yourself, of course. (i forgot to mention it in the prior post, but he also said i had a really strong/forceful personality, and i have to let that come through. which was literally laughable to me, but it’s fun getting compliments you’ve never had before.)

still, i can’t get rid of it. i know, rationally, that it’s chemicals doing this. i know i can’t just stop it through sheer force of will. i just hate how irrational i get. when i’m depressed, everyone hates me. i can’t do anything right. i have no redeeming qualities, and am unlovable in every way. but it’s not just about me. i read things and see things on the news, and i’m certain that existence here is some kind of punishment. a kid with a broken back getting tased 19 times, people getting blown up all over the world, and then the aspca commercial with the one-eyed dogs and caged kittens… how can you look at the world around you and not believe you’re in some kind of hell? what kind of place is this, that there’s so much suffering? and when i’m more rational, i’m sad about it, but it just is. we’re not in hell, but an imperfect world.

i’m really looking forward to going back to the lake house next week. it’s the most perfect place anywhere. it’s just the four of us, and we’re comfortable together, and even when we argue, we genuinely love/like each other. you can say anything, and tiffs are dismissed as the minor things they are, and are forgotten in a few minutes. discussions are occasionally intellectually stimulating and at other times ridiculous, but the participants are always sharp, and the dry and sometimes biting wit isn’t lost on anyone. there’s nothing but delicious food to eat and good (and intoxicating) things to drink, and there’s more than you could ever consume. low music plays in almost every room. all of the furniture is comfortable, even the patio and pool stuff. the bed is nice to flop down on after a busy day of doing nothing, and there’s no shortage of pillows. and the huge white couch facing the glass doors and, beyond, the lake, is as close to heaven as anything. there’s cable and internet access, but they’re seldom used. the outside world has no place there. and i’m counting the days until i can go back. (and it’ll be even better this time, because we’re celebrating sohei’s and my birthdays…)

i’m feeling kind of lonely again. it’s been alright for a while, and i don’t think about it very much anymore. but my birthday’s coming up, and i started thinking about inviting over a couple of people to hang out or something. then i remembered last year and decided against it. i’m not putting myself through that again. i’m glad being alone isn’t so painful anymore. some days, like today, it really hurts, though. i don’t even know why i’m blogging about this. i’ll be over it in a day or two. i guess it’s just weird being around all these people everyday who are friendly, but who aren’t friends. people who will make small talk with me but wouldn’t go out for a drink with me or play video games at my house. it’s like when you’ve been studying anatomy too long and when people smile at you, the fact that their teeth are bone suddenly registers, and it’s like you can see their skulls behind their features. (that’s a weird example. i don’t think many people know what that’s like. and it’s not like i say these things aloud, if that’s what you’re thinking.)

i’m going to get back to work. it’ll take my mind off things, maybe.

i finally got my t-shirt in the mail yesterday, and am wearing it today. out of all the clothes i own, i think it’s the one that pretty much sums me up the best: geeky, political, pacifistic, and because i bought the babydoll style in black (of course), small and goth (not emo! goths did black first!). i’ll post a pic of me wearing it, eventually. (i keep saying that, don’t i? i still have a bunch of pics from the trip i haven’t uploaded yet.)

this article really took me back. as a short, pale, geeky redhead who dreamed of a career in pathology, i loved scully too.

arg! the dye i bought may need a separate developer! when i get home, i’ll check the box. that’s so irritating, if that’s the case. then it’s no cheaper than the stuff you get at the grocery store. also, the lady at the counter was trying to sell me nail files and oil treatments and a membership, and she never once tried to sell me the one thing i needed. now i’m going to have to go back and i don’t even know which developer i need. and i sure don’t trust the morons there to tell me. man, that pisses me off.

random stuff:

i finally changed my igoogle theme from the cute little fox (”tea house“) for the one with the little tiger. it is so cute. i never thought i’d replace the fox theme, but that tiger is cho kawaii.

a guy got arrested in front of the circ desk this morning for trespassing. i imagined what it would be like to be arrested in a library at 7:14 in the morning, and decided it would suck mightily. i’m very lucky.

this other guy was sleeping on the bench across from the elevators, and it freaked me out because it looked like he wasn’t breathing. so i got as close as i felt comfortable doing, and when i was satisfied he wasn’t dead, i moved on. it would have been a funnier story if he woke up while i was staring at him, but he didn’t. people sleep in here all the time. i’m glad they feel comfortable enough to do that. but maybe they wouldn’t be if they knew weird girls were hovering over them to see if they were dead.

i had a nice afternoon yesterday. i got my library book, two kinds of red hair dye (for the price of one if it had been the grocery store), siopao (meat-filled dumplings/buns), gyoza (potsticker dumplings), flower’s kiss candy, and “men’s pocky.” (they were out of chocolate yan yan. ) also, i got my hair cut and bought lots of good stuff at the store. i’m so dyeing my hair tonight…