Diversion

I enjoyed this one (stolen from Matt's blog)... thought I'd do a bit better, since I am from Long Island. Then again, was I ever from L.I., spiritually? In college, when my dormmates and I played "guess where I'm from," I got "Pacific Northwest." I don't know how much less Long Island-y that could be. (For the record, I think "Pacific Northwest" was the wrong choice for me... I am SO smoldering and dark beneath the easygoing surface :-)

You Are 37% New Jersey!

You've got a little Jersey in you. Not too bad, however you could have done a lot better. Based on this score, you may not actually be from New Jersey. You're missing out!

How New Jersey Are You?

Point Reyes and Doom

Mark and I had a very lovely visit to Point Reyes yesterday. We stopped in Fairfax, which is on the way, and had lunch. As we were perambulating along the sidewalk, a man with two adorable little kids happened to pass. He said, with absolutely no preface, "You are DOOMED!! You are soooo DOOMED! You are DOOMED!" Yeah. He said it, like, three or four times. I instantly knew what he meant, but Mark had a moment of complete existential consternation, not immediately grasping why this seemingly normal-looking stranger thought we were doomed.

So I give that strange man the prize for the oddest thing said to me by a stranger since I became visibly pregnant. Most people just beam at me, or stare with something like disgust, or say, "It's a boy!"

Point Reyes was totally gorgeous. We decided to drive all the way out to the lighthouse, but then got our knickers in a twist because the road seemed to go on and on and on and on, and I had to pee, as pregnant people often do, and there were no signs to tell us how much longer. We made it all the way, but the road to the lighthouse was closed and there was no parking outside the gate, which would have enabled us to get out and WALK in, so we drove to one of the Point Reyes beaches. We walked along in the sand, and then fell in it, and I felt very beached-whale-like. We had a great conversation about the mortal terrors of the ocean. Also, I tried to dip my hand in the surf and instead got smacked down by it. That'll teach me! What hubris, to think you can sidle right up to the ocean and then precisely determine the boundaries of the relationship.

The theme of the trip was Beauty and Doom. The ocean is beautiful, but I just don't see how anyone can look at it and not think about Doom.

Poor, Neglected Blog

Lately I have not been very bloggy. I wonder what is wrong with me. I guess I have been a little bit down, but I perk back up intermittently. So, let's see what my updates are:

1) Mark and I saw Maria Shriver at our corner deli, Angelina’s. An apparent perk of moving is that you get to see Maria Shriver at your corner deli. Next time, Ahnold?

2) I have rediscovered Wham. Wham is good. Anyone want to make an issue of it?

3) For my birthday, Mark took me to the Fairmont and we stayed in an amazingly luxurious room and ate amazingly luxurious food. It was very, very fun. And I was also proud of this: we walked from our hotel room (up on Nob Hill) down to the Bay and then ALL the way back up, a million steep hills... I was proud of myself, since I am so big and ungainly these days, and I huff and puff when I exert myself.

4) I got my Rhogam shot at Kaiser. What is Rhogam, you may ask? It's this shot that was invented for mothers-to-be who are Rh negative but are having a baby with a man who's Rh positive. This is potential "Rh incompatibility" and there's a chance, if your blood mingles with the baby's, that your body could produce antibodies that would attack the baby's blood, or if not THIS baby, then the next one you have, if you have a next one. Only 15% of the population is Rh negative, so it's on the rarer side, and when I got my shot it came with this little pamphlet that said, "This information is designed to make you comfortable with yourself as an Rh-negative individual." Isn't that strange? Rh-negative individual? I didn't feel at all uncomfortable before I read that, but then I started thinking, "I am an Rh-negative individual," and felt PIGEON-holed.

5) I am afraid of needles--so afraid that I would have to call it a phobia. I go into an absolute panic. This problem is not helped by the fact that I fainted at my first pregnancy blood test. So when I get shots or blood tests, Mark has to hold my hand and talk and talk and talk about something trivial to distract me. He has gotten very good at it. At my last blood test, he talked about the great question of "Who stole our boss and friend Freddie's Snapples from the communal work refrigerator?" And at the Rhogam shot, he talked about mini-candy-bars in the communal work candy jar and which ones you take first and which ones are real "desperation picks." For example, you probably go through and take out the Krackels and Butterfingers first, but would only eat a Hershey's Kiss or a plain Hershey mini if all the former bars are gone. I have to tell you, this kind of talk helps me through needle experiences beautifully! Okay, so the nurses laugh at us, but the humiliation is worth it.

6) Ann Marie kindly offered to come over yesterday and take some pregnancy portraits of me, which she did--thank you, AMD! She also got some good shots of my cats, so that is happy.

Mike Arnzen rocks!

Mike's fantastic visit is best represented non-verbally:



Hmmm...that one might have been a little tougher if the featured beverage were a Pabst Blue Ribbon, as opposed to an Angelina's coffee. Whaddaya gonna do?

My sleeve was wet because our shower had just been fixed, and I tried it out, and blasted it all over myself.



These are pics Mike took of the crazy Destroyer show at the Elbo Room at which the band was accompanied by Madame Maraschino's burlesque dancers. (EDIT: this was a semi-strip act in which the dancers choreographed special kitschy routines to go along with each KISS song... Mark said "Rocket Ride" was really, uh, amazing.) I was planning to go, but guess what? I had a major contraction earlier in the evening and I didn't make it! Scary... must have been brought on by anticipation of the madness of the evening--the baby's way of saying, "Please don't take me to the show, Mom. I am too pure and innocent." Maybe I'll write a post about it. Anyway, the below pics are the dance that accompanied the song "Snowblind." Mark didn't fall down once all night in his six-inch platforms! I will include one closeup of him as Ace (thank you, Mike):







Mike called this one the "Dionysian KISS finale":

In my headlines today

1. Strangers keep coming up to me and saying I am having a boy. They don't say, "I think you're having a boy," either; they say, "That's a boy," with complete conviction. I assume they are basing this on something about the shape of my bump or the way I am carrying it. No one ever comes up to me and says "It's a girl." Superstitiously, this makes me worry a little. It's not that I have anything against having a boy--not at all. But it would be odd now, since I've been thinking of the baby as a girl for so long, and also because he would have to wear a lot of dresses at this point. Today, the very nice Chinese teller at the bank told me it was a boy, that it was Year of the Dog, which was a good year, that I should drink lots of water for my obvious allergies and not take any medication, and that I should not say out my Social Security number so loudly. I'm sure she was right about a few of these things.

So as things stand: we have the ultrasound specialist, the Chinese lunar calendar, and the "Myths and Superstitions" online quiz thinking it's most likely a girl; and on the other side, we have every stranger in the world saying it's a boy (also my own intuition when I first became pregnant).

2. A guy whistled at me on Geary today, plunging me into a state of utter self-consciousness and hurt feelings, since I am 99% sure he did it to be mean.

3. At the party I went to on Sunday, a woman I had never met came up to me and said, with no preface, "Oh! I would never have worn something like that when I was pregnant. It's so tight." This outfit, by the way, can be seen in my last blog post, the top picture: pink top and skirt. Confused, I said, "It's not that tight," showing her the looseness of the waistband. It was very comfortable, really. She said, "I just mean, it's so revealing. You can really see the shape and everything. I would have worn a big, tent-like outfit to cover myself up." ???? Are people just trying to make me cry these days, because they know they can do it so easily? That my hormones cause me to cry at commercials for refrigerators these days? It's like shooting fish in a barrel, people.

4, 5, and 6. My ribs hurt, my ribs hurt, my ribs hurt.

Feeling brave

Here are a few more...and with these, I consider this phase of my life adequately documented, don't you?

Me, pregnant version

I had not taken any pictures of myself doing this pregnancy thing and it has been pointed out to me that that is an oversight :-)
Yes, despite my current pain and suffering, I may someday wish to remember what it all looked like and felt like. So I asked Mark to photograph me in my fancy black maternity dress for the university dinner last night. Since he did not say, "1, 2, 3, action!", most of the pics came out with my eyes closed. But here is one (you can see I had no warning on this one either, but at least my eyes are open).

New cell phone and updates

First, and less important: I have a cell phone again, with the same number as before. This time I had to pay for it, and I got the least snazzy and most affordable one. No fancy phone camera for me this time :-(

Second, Mark and I went to USF's annual end-of-year dinner tonight, held this year not on campus but in the Imperial Ballroom of Japantown’s Miyako Hotel. The yearly university dinner is usually a verrrrry tedious affair replete with mediocre food and hours of people you don’t know being praised and awarded for bringing good press and funding to the university; without being able to take advantage of the free bar, and anticipating my chronic rib pain acting up over the hours, the prospect of the evening was extreeeemely daunting to me. But this time, to everyone’s somewhat surprise, Mark’s program was awarded the college's first-ever “Collective Achievement” award by the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences! Dean Turpin made a very gracious speech and called each of the program’s full-time faculty members up to the podium by name, where they received a heavy glass statue award that looked like an Emmy or a Grammy or something along those lines. I felt very proud of Mark, who has had a lot to do with shaping the direction of his program, as the Director of Curriculum.

I was left sitting at the table, now vacated by all the faculty who’d gone up to accept the award. I was content as a clam, but to my surprise a kindly middle-aged waiter approached me with concern. He said, “You are not a teacher?”, wondering why I wasn’t up there accepting the award and basking in glory, too. I said, lamely, “I am, but….” I trailed off, finding it too difficult to explain the whole part-time/full-time distinction and not wanting to talk too much while the dean was talking. The kindly waiter said, “I’ll bring you another dessert.”

He brought me two: a chocolate mousse _and_ a lemon tart.

So I ate three desserts, and I also stole an extra roll (slipped it in my purse).

My Hospital Visit

...actually, allow me to revisit that hit-and-run guy first. He smashed me so loudly that a man across the street wrote down all his information for me (and he didn't even know I had been sitting in the car at the time). He said he thought the other driver's behavior was "unbelievable." So it was far from a benign tap. Even if the hit-and-runner didn't see me sitting in the car (and I think he probably did), he didn't bother getting out to see if he'd damaged our car. It is pretty hard to accept that there's nothing I can do. I was pissed. I also felt shaken up and crampy in my midsection, which apparently were the little contractions I was having. They were not extremely painful or anything, but I guess that's a minor-league version of what will happen to me. The doctor showed me what they looked like on the monitor she hooked me up to, and then showed me what the major-league contractions looked like on a neighboring monitor (another woman in another labor and delivery room).

That was one of the interesting things about going to the hospital prematurely. I got to stay in a labor and delivery room, one of the ones I'll be in when the day comes (maybe even the exact one). I got to see the whole set-up and some of the equipment and how it works. They put a monitor on the baby's heartbeat, and there was a line representing me and my contractions (which went away), and you could also see other anonymous women and babies in other rooms (kind of weird). I got pretty obsessed with staring at the monitor of a woman who was clearly in labor and having huge contractions, and her poor little baby's heartbeat was dipping up and down dramatically. It turned out my regular doctor was on duty, a good piece of fortune for me, and she came and checked me out on the ultrasound. She said the baby looked good and established what I had been suspecting as true (that the baby's feet are in my rib area and possibly contributing to the pain, though I realize she can move around a lot in there). She showed us on the monitor how the baby is trying out her breathing mechanism and said this was a good sign.

She also measured the baby and came up with an estimate of the baby's weight. Now, it's only an estimate, and inexact, but it was 3 pounds, 6 oz!!! My books told me the baby should be around 2 pounds at this point. My doctor said it was still normal for her to be about this weight, but-- yikes! Maybe she's going to be a biggie.

Thank you all for sending me such supportive comments on my trauma of yesterday. It made me feel a lot better.