Anything Said: August 2007

Friday, August 31, 2007

Political mini-rant and a dog in a bra

Do any of the rest of you (or at least the liberals among you) find it just so sad that none of the major candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination support equal rights for same-sex couples? It's like: grow a pair, and stand up for what's right. I don't get so pissed about it when it's coming from Republicans -- I expect it from them. But Democrats? Aren't they supposed to be all "we don't legislate our personal morality" social justice-y? Or maybe that's just in my Jon Stewart for President fantasies?

I feel like I need to reevaluate my desire to volunteer for the Clinton campaign. I'm not necessarily saying I'm pulling my support; I'm just saying I need to think about how I would feel and respond if I was asked, say, to make phone calls to voters and found myself having to defend her position on gay marriage. Should I really advocate for a candidate with a stance I'm so not ok with? Does the gay rights thing outweigh the potential woman president thing? Does the unfortunate Celine Dion campaign theme song outweigh the rockstar debating skillz? I just don't know.

Anyway, it's not like the other candidates have any better stances on the issue. Except for Kucinich. That guy fights The Man so hard, sometimes it hurts to look at him.

In other news: our landlord's realtor has shown our apartment three times and has hosted one open house. For the latter, we left the following display on the living room loveseat for all comers to enjoy:

Next time, I'm posting a To Do list on the refrigerator dry-erase board, with Item #1 being "Buy Milk", followed by Item #2: "Cut You".

That's all. Happy Labor Day!

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Saturday in the house

So as it turns out, Cletus the Former Fetus does not have an ear infection but rather a case of the uber-alarmist sounding "Hand Foot Mouth Disease." Which, contrary to my initial burst of laughter upon hearing the pediatrician's diagnosis ("Hee!! Doctor made a funny!"), is actually a thing. Basically, it's a virus with a fever and a rash. She's fine now, just grouchy. The husband and I have caught some form of it as well, and we are both achy and whiny and sore-throat-y.

Yesterday I was steeped in denial over my impending sickness, so I decided to go ahead with my previously planned experiment in Once-a-Month Cooking, a system I have been reading about in which one essentially A) buys a shitload of groceries, B) spends like 48 hours prepping and cooking and freezing, and C) ends up with premade dinners for weeks to come. Except that I have an attention span deficiency, so I only planned enough for about a week and a half's worth of meals. It's a good thing, too; I've never bought so much meat at one time in my life. This book is not for vegetarians.

The meals I froze are all very Midwestern Office Potluck: enchiladas, stuffed pork chops, a meatloaf, some chicken puff-pastry thingies, barbecued chicken, chicken in some kind of "Asian" marinade, and a pot of what the book called "Grandma's Chili." I don't know about you guys, but my neither of my Grandmas ever made chili. Chicken noodle soup, yes. Chocolate chip cookies, definitely. But never did they bust out with the beans and tortilla chips.

Anyway, here's my lovely faux-country kitchen in the middle of the enchiladas phase of my day:

And since we've already started the tour, here's my lovely dining room:

And here's my lovely living room, with accompanying afternoon sun:

Showing you these pictures is part of the ongoing self-care initiative that I'm calling "It's Ok to Be At Home In Your Apartment Even Though The Man May Kick You Out Next May." I'm trying to take ownership of my space. Even though I don't, you know, own it.

Anyway, after I was done making all my meals I decided to bake some Snickerdoodles out of my new issue of Cooking Light. They looked very pretty going into the oven and I had high hopes. But alas:

Observe the difference between the cookies on the left and the cookies on the right. This close-up of Cookie A and Cookie B should do the trick:

Cookie A and Cookie B were baked on separate pans. Are any of you good at baking? Can you explain to me why Cookie A turned out moist and delicious while Cookie B and its compatriots turned out burnt on the bottom and chewy on the top? Could it be too much cooking spray on Cookie B's pan? Or what? They both baked the same amount of time. Help me out here.

Ok, nap time. For me, that is; the baby's too busy screeching and throwing toys.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Here we go. Again. Seriously.

With the completion of last week's trip to northern Wisconsin, our summer travels are blessedly, peacefully, blissfully over. Seeing new places is nice. Visiting family is great. But being at home with a glass of iced tea and a warm sleeping dog is the best, best, best.

The tippytop of Wisconsin is where my husband's family keeps its heart. Between the various aunts and uncles and cousins, they own five properties nestled around a small lake, one of the five zillion such lakes that are scattered around the landscape. His family are a kind and loving people. They are also a people obsessed beyond reason with the lake. At the lake, they have no off-switch. At the lake, they honor tradition like it's their religion, talking for hours about lake days gone by and cooking special dinners they've eaten together year after year. At the lake, it is swim swim swim play play play visit visit visit from the break of dawn until last call. As I am someone who generally requires a certain degree of space around myself - both in the physical sense and in the headspace sense - this can be challenging. Often towards the end of our Wisconsin voyages I feel myself shutting down and I fight to stay present and smiling. It feels strange and a little isolating to be with the people who have become your family in a place that has not yet become yours.

The baby did well on the trip, except for a sudden spurt of night-wakings between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. She might have an ear infection. Or maybe she's just teething. I don't know. I'm looking into it. And by that I mean I'm reading some babycenter.com and then feeling all dirty about it afterwards.

Anyway, we got home from our travels yesterday afternoon, and here's the ringer, here's what I've been waiting all day to tell you about: upon my return, I had an email waiting for me from our landlord. This, you may say to yourself, can mean nothing but Bad. Remember when we were getting ready to move from Boston to Chicago and this happened? And how our beast-faced landlords promised to respect our tenancy and then did shit like this? And then how we moved here to Illinois and found ourselves in an apartment that seemed all great until we figured out that it was full of rodents and managed by slumlords and spewing brown water? And so we got all proactive and moved to a beautiful new apartment with all kinds of great stuff like a yard and a parking space and pretty windows? Remember that?

Our landlord is selling the fucking house.

As in, it's on the market now, and some broker is going to be stomping her dirty shoes all over our apartment with her 6,000 prospective buyers and her open houses and her For Sale signs, and if the new buyers decide they want to clean house when our lease is up at the end of next May we are going to have to move. AGAIN. If I could make fire with the force of my rage we could toast some S'mores and share a snack before I burn up the earth.

What gets me the hardest is this: the landlord had to have known she was going to sell when she showed me the apartment. When I walked through the place for the first time I had Cletus the Former Fetus on my hip, and she had her two little boys with her. I know she's not legally bound to give me any information beyond showing me where to sign and telling me where to send my checks, but still: mom to mom, decent person to decent person, you don't take an application from a family with a new baby when you know you're selling the place in a month without warning that family what's what. At least not in my Handbook of Ethics Regarding Matters That Affect My Rapidly Accumulating Bad Apartment Karma.

Friday, August 10, 2007

Yawn. Stare.

I am just so very, very tired.

The baby is cutting three teeth at once, learning how to stand on her own, starting to take wobbly independent half-steps, discovering that the toilet has a lid that she can open and shut. She is waking up and crying out several times a night. Last night it was at 12:30 and 2:30, and then up for the day at 5:30. I was full of fatigue and irrational rage, put teething medicine on her gums and left her in her crib to cry. At 6:30 I finally got up with her. She was all bleary-eyed need; she wanted a bottle but didn't want a bottle. She wanted to cuddle and play but didn't want to cuddle and play. I wanted a pint of ice cream. Beer ice cream.

Do they make beer ice cream? Someone should.

My husband and I are getting maybe 5-6 hours of sleep a night, between the baby's teething wake-ups and our upstairs neighbor's 1:00 AM fights with her teenage daughter/cell phone conversations/random rhythmic hammering. The husband is working hard, publishing another paper, writing a chapter for a book, preparing to teach a class in the fall. Most of the time I'm proud of him for pulling all of this off with so little rest or support. But sometimes I'm overwhelmed with jealousy, usually on the two days per week when I am home swiffering the kitchen floor while he gets to go be Dr. Smarty McGenius. Like today. I want to go back to work full-time. In a different library from the one I'm at now. I also want on-site daycare, a raise, and a cookie.

I read in the New York Times that Entertainment Weekly has a library. A librarian who works there was interviewed for an article on the new wave of librarianship. All I could think was: bitch has my job. Who could catalog archival Real World clips and movie reviews better than me?

The amount of attention that the baby requires of me right now is amazing. And everyone says it will only get twice as intense once she starts really walking in earnest. She is into everything, trying to move too fast. She falls all the time. Twice we've had to stuff her little mouth with a washcloth to stop the flow of blood when she cut herself. Yesterday she learned how to turn the stove dials. This morning she ate paper and played in the dog's water bowl. She says mama and cries when I leave the room. This is not as flattering as I thought it would be. I mean, I crave it, but it's also like a little punch to the heart; it smarts, and afterwords I feel something lingering. Like maybe unworthiness.

Yesterday I read a poem that kind of ripped me open:

Not Pleasant but True

This afternoon when the bus turned
hard by the graveyard,

the stone sugared with snow,
I wanted to go there, underground.

You're thirteen weeks old.
Cold shock, as never wished before:

to die and be buried, close
under the packed earth,

safe for an eternal instant
from my constant, fevered fear that

you'd die. Relief
warming my veins,

and you relieved forever
of my looming, teary watch.

Someone take from me
this crazed love,

such battering care
I lost my mind--

I was going to leave you
without a mother!

-- Deborah Garrison
from "The Second Child"

After I finished reading it for the first time, all I could think was: thank God I'm through that phase, those dark, depressed early days of motherhood. I never wanted to off myself, but I did want to rewind the clock and take it back, all of it -- the wishing for a child, the pregnancy, the childbirth -- if it would make things better, get me out of that headspace.

Then I read the poem a few more times and realized, wait. "Crazed love"? "My constant fevered fear that/you'd die"? Who am I kidding? This is the rest of my life.

What a strange, strange thing we've done here.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Have an awesome summer! Don't ever change!

A couple months ago one of my blog-soulmates, Pop Culture Librarian, wrote a hilarious post compiling entries from her seventh-grade autograph book. Like all good friends do, I swore that day to steal her idea. This past June, my parents bought a new house and moved out of the too-small home they'd lived in for my entire life. I was called upon by my family to pay them a visit and sort through the boxes upon boxes of childhood shit that I had allowed to accumulate in their laundry room. Most of it, I threw away, including but not limited to framed 8x10 prom photos, junior high school slam books, a note wherein the only boy I ever dumped asked me to "just take a knife and stab [him]", and all of the remnants of a disturbingly intense obsession with the Disney animated feature "Aladdin." A few items, however, I kept, snug in a cardboard box, waiting patiently until the day -- this day! -- when I felt obligated to blog but had nothing to say. Today, I present to you, A Study in Lifelong Awkwardness.

Exhibit A is a Holly Hobby one-year diary with a broken lock, kept when I was in the fifth grade. It opens with a bang on March 15th:

Life is dull!! I'm one of the few girls in 5th grade that doesn't have a mad crush on some other 5th grade guy. As you know, B. Yoder [first name obscured to protect the innocent, but dude his last name totally was Yoder], the hunk of my dreams, lives in Hesston, Kansas. (sigh) Guess what? I found a dead cat in the snow today. I unburied it. It was grotesque!!! Bye!

But sadly, even the excitement of a cat corpse couldn't assuage my deep despair. On April 17th, I wrote:

Sorry I haven't written, but for once in my life, I'm not sure what my purpose in life is. Every day is identical. There's nothing good or bad. Two things have happened. I don't have a crush on a boy, not even Kirk Cameron. And I'm constantly grouchy and restless. Only a few things make me happy -- Kids Incorporated, Kara, Jenny, and my mom in a good mood. Oh well, better go now. Bye!

Not even Kirk Cameron? In his adorable pre-Way of the Master days?? Perish the thought! Surely, it was the emptiness of a Mike Seaver-less life that led to the following fit of rage on April 18th:

Howdy! I despise Mr. Miller. Well, I shouldn't despise him. I dislike him greatly. He is a mean, hairy chested funny farm escapee in disguise. He made us do two experiments at home today! I DON'T HAVE TO DO WHAT HE SAYS!!! So there.

That's right bitches, I was putting a wrinkle in the plans of The Man way back in 1988.

Exhibit B is my freshman year high school yearbook, signatures shiny and aglow with the brightness of youth. The inside back and front covers, as well as the first few sets of pages, are covered in handwritten messages and autographs, which might lead an observer to comment on my popularity. But then that observer might actually read a few of those signatures and ask, "Seriously? These were the kids who DIDN'T hate you?"

Melinda, You're a good friend. You're cool, awesome, neato, and you're my idol. NOT! But you are a friend. Good luck always, and I hope you have more fun than you are now! Your friend always, Amanda

Melinda, You're a nerd but I know you can't help it. No, you're really a great friend. Don't ever change. Remember me in Advanced Choir when I sit back in the back row all by my lonesome. Have a fun life! -Alicia

Melinda, You are SO strange sometimes. But a cool person just the same. Keep being strange. Have a great school year. Your friend, Kelly

I love how they all follow the same passive-aggressive combo of pain and flattery: You suck. Nawww, I'm just fucking with you, we can still hang out. Just... later, k? This one's my fave:

Melinda, You are definitely your own person, a unique individual. And that's just what I like about you. Well, stay weird, and may peace remain in your soul. Love, Shelly

A little Buddha, that Shelly. Tells me I'm a freak, then invites me over for mindfulness practice. My wee little boyfriend also signed the same page. This was after the first of the three break-ups we scattered throughout high school, this one precipitated by his need to spend the previous summer "finding the Lord" on a mission trip to France (where he also found a new girlfriend -- she was God-sanctioned, apparently):

To Melinda: I felt really bad leaving things in the condition they were before this summer. But I'm glad things have been resolved now. You have shown great amounts of maturity and I admire that. Don't forget me. Mike

Dude, you're 16 and you listen to Christian rock. Don't comment on my maturity level until you're prepared to surrender the muscle shirts and the DC Talk cassettes.

And finally, Exhibit C is my collection of programs from the high school plays and musicals I was in. That's right, I rocked the Thespian Society. Where else would I have picked up the social grace and effortless people skills I carried into adulthood? At wrap parties, play programs got passed around like yearbooks and signed by cast and crew alike. For instance, my program from "South Pacific," in which I played a singing and dancing nurse of high esteem, contained the following:

Melinda - I had a great time fondling you. Good luck next year. -Dave "Cap'n Brackett"
To my favorite nurse: you did so well, you can play doctor on me anytime. -Jason
Melinda, Hey slut! It was great working with you! You're a wonderful girl! Love, Adam

I swear to you, I'm not making any of this up. Perhaps the comments from my "Godspell" program would be more chaste?

Melinda, You nasty Pharisee, you keep it up! I'll miss you, love, Becca
Melinda, I'm depressed, I think I need another massage (hint, hint). I'll miss you so much. Good luck at everything! Love ya, A.J.

Who knew that my 11th grade acting career was so marked by desperate "one time, at band camp" machinations, the kind that rise up out of nothingness whenever five or more nerds congregate? Oh yeah, I guess I did. But that's so totally in the past now. It's not like my marriage is based on a similar premise or anything. He just HAPPENS to be a tall awkward white man with no rhythm who is exceedingly good with computers. And I just HAPPEN to have the soundtrack to the Fantastiks loaded onto my ipod right now.

What?