when i celebrate sleep, my dreams are beautiful. but i take them for real. i found i can't kill things. i'm destined to be a poor poet but i'm welcomed back to maine to build things. i think what i want's under my feet and i won't look yet in case i wreck it. i wreck lots of things, usually for the best. jesss_m@hotmail.com

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posted by jesss at 1/02/2008 05:53:00 PM [edit]

Good golly, what a year. Now I'm pregnant. It's pretty good. I finally have boobs. Real boobs. Cleavage, too. My husband is pretty psyched about it; he has finally confessed he prefers the squishier, curvier me to the hard-bodied, flat-chested triathlete me. Which is damn handy, as I won't be so buff nor competing again anytime soon. I'm still struggling with soon having to give up the mountain biking, and I'm pissed we didn't go yesterday. I fear that with winter coming on and all, by the time I have the baby and get back on the bike my technical skills (crappy as they are) will be completely shot and I'll struggle on fire roads, shouting, "Hey, wait up!" ARghhh. I hear that once one has a baby one doesn't (or shouldn't??) mind giving up activities one once enjoyed, but I really don't want to be sitting around on my arse ALL the time thinking the baby is The Most Fascinating Thing Ever. I don't think that will make me a bad parent, either.

It's funny, the different advice I'm getting. My very progressive marathoner midwife told me to cut way back on the exercise this time. I know I can still run and climb and bike, but running fast (or climbing hard) gives me funny disturbing pains. Some people tell me to only walk or swim; others claim that if their mom could do martial arts until she went into labor, I should be able to, also. (Honestly, I have no desire to take up martial arts.)

As for food, my midwife says, "All things in moderation." In much of Europe, it's normal to drink a glass of wine w/ dinner while pregnant. I stopped drinking, though I made steak au poivre one night and couldn't bear to eat it with seltzer, for Christ's sake. So I had a little splash of wine with it. I also had some on Thanksgiving, just a bit (mostly sips of my husband's musquat and port), as the wine being served was Very Good and it was a special occasion. My brother gave me a funny look but let it go. When HIS wife was pregnant, any time she took a sip he claimed she was destroying another thousand brain cells. I'm glad I didn't get that speech.

My family also thinks that we shouldn't think twice about having amniocentesis, which we find invasive and unnecessary. I think this pregnancy will teach us a lot about setting boundaries. :)
posted by jesss at 11/25/2007 05:39:00 AM [edit]

I had sort of a weird week last week. We drove to Maine to visit an inn, a possible site for our wedding (I'm getting MARRIED, of all things). The inn, when we arrived, was ON FIRE. Literally. (We came back an hour later but still no luck, firetrucks everywhere, water flowing everywhere, the fire marshall marching about. ) For some reason everyone told us this was a Sign. Of what? Poor ductwork in the hotel laundry room?

THEN, a few days later, I went for a trail run. I ran up to the fire tower, then followed the white trail,which goes in a straightish line 9 miles or so. About half an hour later, I found myself running up to the fire tower again!! I hadn't changed trails, turned about, or anything, but somehow had managed to reverse direction. This wasn't even by headlamp, it was full daylight for this run.

In more usual terms, my car is frozen into a rim-deep pool of ice, which is sort of beautiful and cool, except it will be there until spring. Rather inconvenient, I'm realizing.
posted by jesss at 2/17/2007 07:46:00 PM [edit]

Great, I finally decide to stock up on Lucozade and hair gel and fly to Europe, and look what happens.
posted by jesss at 8/11/2006 12:41:00 PM [edit]

Two literary thoughts:

When o when will Tim O’Brien lose the baseball cap?

If Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickenson had a child, its writing would be one big gasping string of em-dashes.
posted by jesss at 3/24/2006 10:55:00 AM [edit]

You think MLK's kids ever wish they could take that January long weekend to just go skiing?

Yesterday, in a typical scenario, I spilled my coffee in my car, and somehow, magically, it splashed up and shorted out my stereo. I have no fucking clue how I got this way.

I had this crazy dream in which I was in a house in Iraq, full of Iraqi men who were humiliating us--making us carry crosses and Danish flags, and I was utterly MORTIFIED to have to carry the stupid crucifix around and pretend I was Christian--and then I morphed into the woman who used to live upstairs, who made a sculpture shattering her babydoll image and then--this was the coolest--in the next part of the dream she was like Drew Barrymore in Charlie's Angels, except she'd strung up her boyfriend to a forklift (by the balls, I think, or at least he was dead) in vengeance b/c he'd killed her family. I think I had the Enwhistle case on the brain. That and the guy who lives upstairs (former boyfriend of woman in dream) is annoying as all hell lately and we wish he'd go away.
posted by jesss at 2/10/2006 02:59:00 PM [edit]

I have this bad new problem of hitting people. Well, their cars. With my car. Hitting other cars from behind, to be precise.

In June I rear-ended this crochety woman who said she felt fine but might have neck pain and wanted to talk to her lawyer. I'm not kidding. The cop and EMTs were pretty skeptical. Also there was a small dent in the bumper of her SUV.

Then last week we were in stop-and-go traffic, taking about 3 hrs to go 2 miles on Storrow Drive b/c there was an accident, construction, a broken-down car, and then a state funeral trying to pass everyone. So I finally gently, accidentally, bumped the pickup in front of me. I didn't even bother getting out, but he did. I'd bumped his ball hitch. (Why is this sounding like a thinly-veiled porn summary??) He pointed out his ball hitch and told me to be careful. I think. Traffic was loud, the sirens of the police escort on the funeral and such were loud, and Ball-Hitch Man was speaking Portuguese.

Yesterday, I navigated flooded roads, pouring rain, a torn-up semi-flooded gravel road, bad maps, etc. and covered many miles of city and suburbs. Then, merging onto Storrow Drive (again!!), we had to move through a small LAKE on the road to get onto Storrow. No problem, my trusty little car didn't stall out, but then the SUV (again!) in front of me stopped. I TRIED to brake but my flip-flop caught on the pedal and I COULDN'T free my foot in time to hit the brake. So I hit the SUV.

Which was FINE, just some smeared white paint on the bumper. My car, however, is a wreck. Crumpled hood, flattened grill. And my toe hurts. First I tried to explain to Pretty Yuppy Woman (PYW) that I hit her because my flip-flop got stuck. She looked down at my foot, then passing traffic drove through the lake and sent up a huge wave of water, soaking me. PWY put her window up. After that, I had to wade over to the passenger side to talk to her across her stoic father. THEN I had to explain to her that I didn't have my insurance card because my car gets broken into a lot and I think it got stolen during the last break-in.

Talk about feeling like a tool.

I managed to drive the car home, but b/c it's been RAINING for a week and a half and the streets are flooded and streaming and little rivulets are running everywhere, there was no way to tell if my car was leaking anything. I could tell from the smell of the vent that my radiator was probably cracked.

Today, sun! and a clear green puddle under my car.

On my way home from brunch (and foot X-rays from yesterday's bumper-car mayhem), I looked up in time to STOMP the brake just before hitting another car (an SUV again, oddly enough). I'm a little nervous about driving now. Granted, today I was eating my leftover pancakes, which is maybe a bad thing to do while driving.

Maybe I should hang old tires around my car, like they do on docks, so that I can't damage anything that I hit?
posted by jesss at 10/16/2005 03:29:00 PM [edit]

I'm in this weird 30-something phase where my sister-in-law is trying to brainstorm ways for me to meet men, my colleagues plot blind dates for me, my mother has given up asking me about "that special someone," and I am delighted simply to have a new cute mountain biking partner. People say "do what you enjoy" and meeting people will happen. Well, I pursue my hobbies and I meet lots of people. Maybe I just don't want to date right now. I think I'd be pretty happy not to date for a while, except I have this terrible sex drive that makes me crazy. Also I get a little lonely, not too often. I guess I just need to get laid.

Jesus, maybe I am just too CRUDE to date.
posted by jesss at 10/12/2005 08:34:00 PM [edit]

On More Documentaries

The "7 UP" series in intriguing: a bunch of British little men and little women explaining themselves. Does that little guy really subscribe to the Financial Times? Does that little girl really have 2 boyfriends? Does the little man w/ the big ears really think he has one girlfriend in Africa and 2 from a hotel in Switzerland?

More importantly, is the director manipulating them and us to show "inherent" class biases at such an early age, when in fact these are so obviously ingrained? The sociological aspect of it ends up looking a bit simplistic. At the same time, 7-yr-olds are weird and mysterious, so carefully and almost unwittingly imitating adult behavior, even perhaps more than their teen counterparts might==is that because of the (contemporary marketing) recognition of teens as a separate entity?

In any case, though I didn't catch all their names and backgrounds, I'm intrigued to follow these kids every 7 years.

On the flip side, Nanook of the North was frankly kind of a sleeper. Most interesting:
--Nanook pulling entire family, including 2 other adults, a few kids, a baby, and a cat? puppy? out of his tiny sea kayak, which was apparently some kind of early clown car
-- smiling Eskimo child, grinning after spoonful of castor oil following tummy upset after eating too much sea biscuit w/ lard at the trading post
--the small igloo built to keep puppies warm, safe, and uneaten by adult dogs
--capture of 2-ton walrus w/ small, flimsy, homemade harpoon
--Nanook's fleet-footed crossing of the ice-floe field, and the killing of the fishes.

Unanswered:
--What DID they feed the dogs??
--Once Eskimo man, say, Nanook, dies, who takes care of family? If entire lives are spend in quest of (scarce) food, who'd want to take on spare women and children? Do they simply starve, too?

New neighborhood, new video store, new documentary section. Huzzah!!
posted by jesss at 4/08/2005 09:22:00 PM [edit]

Playing Outside

My snowshoe racing career didn't pan out quite as I'd hoped, mostly b/c I'm never around on weekends and all the races are at least 3 hrs from here, anyway. My assembled team was an enthusiastic group, however, who thankfully espoused the Lars Hedley training protocols, such as consuming a beer within 4 hours of a workout or race to replace lost glycogen stores, or following every training session with onion rings. The basic Lars motto is "Drink like champion, perform like a champion" though you can replace "drink" with "eat." In any case, our team did well.

This is NOT the Lars Hedley of Weston, CT, by the way. He sounds much more fit, if you google him.

Anyway, we did well enough. Like, no one died, and we ate huge meals after.

I nearly partnered w/ someone else for the winter adventure race, except that guy was hoping to finish in the top three, whereas I was hoping to maybe just FINISH the race and have a hot mug of spiked cocoa, so he found a partner with sponsorship. I think that means that the dude is outfitted by and has his race fees paid for by a snowshoe company. That must be pretty fucking nice. I'm just happy that Bob Dion gives his loaners for free. Those guys ended up finishing first. Whatever. You don't join an adventure race to WIN, you do it b/c it is the ultimate grown-up's excuse for playing in the woods. Really. That is what outdoor stuff is for many adults, especially when it's mountain biking or kayaking or something muddy and fun, including tough winter hikes (not muddy, but harsh). You don't realize they're tough b/c you're just outside playing and walking in the woods and your friend steps off the trail and sinks to his chest in snow and you just point and laugh and take pictures before you help him out.

It's weird that we can't just call up a friend and say, "Let's go outside and play." We have to organize it somewhat: mountain bike? hike? xc ski? trail run? and coordinate it--how far from the city, do we need to camp somewhere, carpooling, etc. But it is pretty much just going outside to play. We are just more scheduled about it. Everyone seems to be working 12 hours/day and trying to get to the gym and help an elderly parent sell the home or do taxes or else get married or something, and everyone seems very exhausted and stressed out right now.

I'm glad I have places to play outside and people to do it with. As I realize this, my childhood farm just got sold. That was the ultimate place to play outside. I spend my 11 years there in the woods, on foot or horseback, cooking fresh-laid eggs in a coffee can on a cornstalk fire, out past the barn. I'm going to go pack it up this weekend, to hand it over to the new owners clean and empty, and while they sound like good people, they won't know where the bantams laid their eggs by the barn beams, and they won't remember picking cherries from the roof of the station wagon, and they won't know why we made fun of Little Kenny, or the time he trapped one of our cats, and they won't know about all the beloved pets buried under the apple tree my father nearly killed when he pruned it too hard. Nor will they recognize the chicken coop for its days full of Rhode Island Reds. What did my mother do with those chickens?
posted by jesss at 3/10/2005 08:34:00 PM [edit]