break the mirror |
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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 HOME Archives: 
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6.07.2008
 Max is here!! actually, he got here a week ago. :) giving birth was a pretty cool experience. and more important, we now have a GREAT BABY! all the proper fingers and toes, strong sucking reflex, etc. and look at his lips!! he looks more like a baby human now and less like some kind of gnome-thing. yesterday i awoke to find max had a goopy eye and the cat was limping. this morning i awoke to find same eye goopier and lame cat missing. we're off to the baby vet. we half hope the cat doesn't return. max is a regular condiment factory, with mustard coming out one end and cottage cheese out the other. now i have to learn to type with one hand. 5.23.2008
 Yeah, um, this was taken 3 months ago. At this point my belly is one absurd massive thing. We bought a watermelon tonight and it looked like I was smuggling another under my shirt. It's really freaky. In the image at left, the red mark is a burn mark from a skillet handle, as I'm spatially impaired with this belly and kept burning it for a while. I've mastered the art of keeping it away from the stove, but now I keep hitting it with doors and such. It's really hard to get used to having the front of your belly about a 12 inches in front of where it usually is. Thankfully I have anywhere from a day to 2 weeks left before my body makes some sense again.
So.....marriage is hard. Who doesn't know that? Has anyone ever truly, really, everlastingly gushed over the greatness of marriage? WHY marriage, anyway? It is supposed to be a societal stabilizer, right? Like, we marry and have children and stay together, which keeps a number of people home and busy instead of out causing promiscuous mayhem, or something. I'm heavily pregnant and trying to figure out why we all think marriage is so great. My marriage is fine, and my husband is a very nice man. A little dense, too much of an engineer (take that as you will), and possibly mildly afflicted w/ Asberger's, but really good enough. Ah, but marriage should be more than good enough. I don't know of a single married couple who doesn't mention "compromise," or "overall," or "big picture." All well and good, but it also smacks of a grit-your-teeth-and-bear-it-as-you-recall-some-mighty-fine-aspect-of-your-single-days. Or at least, it gives a whiff of "this wasn't what I expected, but everyone else talks it up, so I guess it's good." 1.02.2008
 Still pregnant! 19 weeks, or just over 4 full calendar months, or nearly halfway, or what have you. I still have some growing to do if that thing's gonna be basketball-sized by May. We went backcountry skiing this weekend, very fun. Very clumsy (no, not b/c of "my condition"--because I'm a klutz-ass on skis and haven't done it in 2 years, and the hard ice crust didn't help with turning and stopping). We (no, let's place blame here--my husband's best friend, to be exact) misread a trail map and we accidentally skied an old unused hiking trail instead of the XC ski trail, following moose tracks the whole way. "Lovely!" you say...if you enjoy constant steep stream crossings and some heavy underbrush at times. Eventually we sorted it out and found the right trail, just in time to turn around and head back to the cars. We tried again a few days later with better success (trail-wise; we did end up out after dark, with our cars deeply stuck in a snowy forest lot...but that's not important). I had my first run-in w/ the pregnancy police this weekend, too--first she tried to tell me that my baby would end up 2-headed and unable to do math if I had a sip of my husband's beer (you know, because all European babies are 2-headed and unable to do math thanks to moderate prenatal alcohol consumption there, right?), then she practically tried to pull the single slice of bacon off my veggie burger, saying the nitrates would kill the baby or cause birth defects. Jesus Christ. Everyone knows you DON'T get between a pregnant woman and her bacon!! The pregnancy police is lucky she still has her hand. On the bright side, it seems the baby likes chocolate, which is great. (I've decided that every time I feel it move, it means that it likes whatever I've just eaten, which is often chocolate.) Oh, and somehow, recently, we've started calling it "the baby" instead of "the fetus." I guess we are making some kind of transition. cheers. 11.25.2007
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. :) 2.17.2007
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. 8.11.2006
Great, I finally decide to stock up on Lucozade and hair gel and fly to Europe, and look what happens. 3.24.2006
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. 2.10.2006
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. 10.16.2005
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? |
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