whiskey in a teacup . com

I am still alive, and still pregnant (oh so very, very pregnant); it’s just that I am 31 weeks along and exhausted.  Also, a few weeks ago I decided that now was a good time to pursue an additional degree, and that Ethics would be a good class to take, so when I get home from work and try to simultaneously find a comfortable position and keep my eyes open I have to read stuff like:

“By a ‘practice’ I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”

That’s one fucking sentence. Want to hear another sentence?  Here’s one:  FUCK YOU, ALASDAIR MACINTYRE.  Plus I’ve had this stuck in my head from pretty much the first moment I opened a textbook.  Between that and turning twenty-seven, I’ve been pretty busy.  (Turning twenty-seven didn’t take much time, per se, but it was certainly alarming.)

The baby’s house is recovering from its second cold in two weeks and spent the night wrestling with an enormous maternity body pillow, turning this way and that to drain its sinuses.  Morale, however, remains high.

The other main discomfort of last night was the sensation of the baby’s increasingly strong and pointy limbs stabbing me from within like a tiny Edward Scissorhands.  Everyone whose lap I’ve ever sat in knows that I have an unusually pointy ass, and it appears the baby has inherited this vital trait.  His other parts–which I can’t always identify, but assume are knees, feet, and hands–have also taken on an intensely jabby quality, as he lodges them under my ribs and uses them to temporarily turn my belly button into a full outie.  Every movement of his delights me (even the hiccups that cause his head to bang rhythmically against my bladder), but sometimes they are surprisingly uncomfortable.  And cute, precious, etc.

Those of you interested in POV body horror may enjoy this short clip, in which the baby can be seen reacting with vigor either to my touch or to the upsetting news that Conan O’Brien is going off the air.  Either way, I am proud of him.

I got an email from one of the baby-info websites asking me to participate in a poll.  The question was “Do you know when and where your child was conceived?”  This is something that has always amused me–the fact that people think conception occurs immediately after sex, when it fact it can happen hours or even days later.  You might have had the sex that resulted in your baby on a Saturday night, and it may well have been the most romantic and glorious encounter of your life, but it’s entirely likely that you didn’t conceive until the next day when you were cleaning poop stains out of the toilet.  What a nice story to share with little Suzy one day!

I’ve always been able to tell when I’m ovulating, but when it came time to get pregnant I went into Biological Awareness Hyperdrive and started charting my temperature and manually checking my cervix to maximize our chances of success.  But even armed with this data, I can’t identify the specific act of marital congress that resulted in our son; nor am I entirely sure which city and state the act occurred in.  So someday when he asks where babies come from, I will have to tell him something like, “When Mommies and Daddies love each other very much, the Mommy emerges from the bathroom and commands the Daddy to immediately give her a special hug, and then a while later while the Mommy and Daddy are driving on the interstate, the baby magically starts growing inside her tummy.”

On my way home from work today, the song “Lady Willpower” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap came on the radio.  I was jamming along, as you do, when I was struck by duel realizations.  1) Every time I hear that band’s name, I say to myself, “Gary Puckett and the Anion Gap!  Haha!  Someday I will share my hilarity with the world.”  Like, I think it’s pretty funny, but let’s call a spade a spade here:  it’s a lab values joke.  And I’ve been making it to myself, consistently, for years.   2) The lyrics to “Lady Willpower” are vaguely threatening, and the concept of the song roughly translates to, “You’d better fuck me now, because I’m tired of waiting.”  I’ve been singing along to this song for years, since I was just a young girl in the wilds of central Massachusetts, and that sinister undercurrent never occurred to me before.  If you watch the aforelinked video, you’ll notice that dude’s eyes are sort of…rapey.  They make you want to say, “No, Mr. Puckett, I will not let you give me yours.”

Reflecting upon this, I thought about some of the other hits in Puckett’s catalogue.  Obviously there’s “Young Girl”, which is more blatantly pervy but always struck me as okay because, like, he’s turning her down!  He’s not going there!  But then if you listen a little more closely, you notice that he has actually already hit that, and “now” it hurts to know the truth.  Hm.   Later in the song he desperately implores his own personal Dolores Haze to leave “before I change my mind”.  Woah there, stallion!  Are you a gentleman or aren’t you?  You aren’t.  Maybe this could have been overlooked back in the sixties, in the era of free love and whatnot, but if you watch this video you’ll see that Puckett is still singing this song today, only now he’s all old and has a bouffant and it’s that much more unsettling.  Apparently at some point he stopped worrying about how Young the Girl was and penned “This Girl is a Woman Now,” possibly the ickiest ode to taking a chick’s virginity I’ve ever heard.  “She cried a single tear?”  The hell?  There’s not supposed to be any crying in sex, Puckett…unless you’re, you know, doing it with a “baby in disguise.”  And let us recall, Gary, that I am someone who recently publicly defended Roman Polanski…and even I think you’re gross.

I could go on, but I’ll leave on this note:  “Woman, Woman” is the same goddamn melody as “Young Girl”…but it does appear to be about someone who at least has grass on the field.

Last night I dreamed that the baby was a collection of sock-puppet snakes and that his kicks were the snakes’ way of telling me how to handle the nefarious stranger I had just met at Target.  Fortunately, his kicking was so persistent that it woke me up and took me out of that inane plotline.

Today we had a prenatal appointment, and it was the extra-crappy one where you drink a bottle of sugar water so they can screen you for gestational diabetes.  The drink made me feel sick (and caused a minor argument because Jared thought I was yelling at him when in fact I was jumpy from the sugar).  While waiting in the exam room for the midwife to come in, I decided to pee (in the bathroom, that is).  When I came back, the midwife had arrived and Jared was telling her about my various near-fainting spells over the previous weeks.  “Oh, I’m much better now,” I said with a confidence that verged on boastfulness; “I’ve been taking iron and things are fine!”

Several minutes later I was struggling to maintain consciousness as I was hit by a grotesque wave of nausea and dizziness and my vision started to go black.  I mentioned my plight, and for the next couple of minutes I lay there like a useless, sweaty lump while the midwife put cool compresses on my forehead and somehow managed to turn me onto my side (I heard her asking me to turn over, but couldn’t quite make sense of the request).  Jared took my hand and announced that my palms were wet; a nurse took my blood pressure, which was 72/48 (down from 110/70 when I first arrived).

I recovered quickly and was able to stand up and leave shortly thereafter, and it really wasn’t a big deal at all.  (I was able to complete a forty-minute workout last night, so I am really not as pathetic and dainty as it may seem.  I am just occasionally pathetic and dainty.)  In fact, the only reason I’m even mentioning this is because I’ve made the tough decision to add a second theme song to this pregnancy.  I don’t know why I like or even know this song, and it could do some serious damage to my credibility, but I’ll take the easy way out and blame it on “the hormones”.  So, let it henceforth be known that the official wiatc.com Blacking Out or Nearly Blacking Out While Pregnant Theme Song is “Low” by Flo Rida!  You might have thought lyrics like

she hit the floor, next thing you know
shorty got low low low low low low low low

were about sexy girls “dropping it like it’s hot”, as the young kids like to say, but to me they will always be about falling and/or lying down as my blood pressure plummets to dangerous levels.  In much the same way as my mother constantly tells me about the nightmares she had after seeing E.T. while pregnant with me, I hope to one day bore my son with frequent re-tellings of this hilarious tale.

-I’ll tell a longer version of the story later, but basically:  my wallet got stolen, my credit cards were used, the detective did an awesome job detecting the thief, I confronted the thief, and am now involved in a philosophical crisis about whether or not to press charges.  It’s not as simple as you’d think!

-A co-worker (an odd duck in his sixties who comes from a West African nation) came into work last week wearing a new jacket and genuinely DID NOT REALIZE that the illustration on the back was a tentacle porn scene.  When I demurely asked him if he’d noticed what the lady on his back was doing with the octopus, he didn’t say anything, but after that day he never wore the jacket again. I laughed so hard about this that I cried.

-Later I laughed so hard about something that I peed my pants.  (Full disclosure: that “something” was watching Jared modify his Xbox avatar.)  When I discussed this accidental emission with my recently-pregnant friend, she told me that at this stage it’s best to just wear a pad at all times.

-This week I’ll be 25 weeks pregnant, and if you’re wondering how big that makes the baby, please refer to this handy illustration, OH JESUS GOD.

-I haven’t fainted or split my head open again (since, you know, the last time), but I’ve had a lot of near-misses and sometimes can’t make it down the street without pausing to sit down, lest the darkness overtake me.  Not being able to run is frustrating; not being able to walk is infuriating.  To keep myself fit for childbirth I’ve started doing some “prenatal pilates” DVDs, and I have to say I’m a bit disturbed by how many of the exercises focus on 1) squatting down and 2) keeping the hips and inner thighs limber.

-Jared shared this link with me, and oh how I love it.

Last night Jared had draped himself across the couch in a manner that suggested he was going to fall asleep.  We engaged in some useless “Don’t fall asleep here” / “I won’t” back-and-forth before having the following exchange.

“Hey, why don’t you just go to bed?”

“Many people know the API.”

“What?”

“What did I just say?”

“You said, ‘Many people know the API.’ ”

“Oh.  I was dreaming.”

Celebrate by joining me in a good cry.

I dreamed that I was in a library with the cast of Lost on some sort of mission.  A bear was following us (not the polar bear from the island, but a brown bear) and someone from our group eventually felled it.  As it lay dying, Hurley pressed his meaty palm against the bear’s to compare sizes.  (They were the same size.)  Some of us were worried that the bear would deploy its claws into Hurley’s flesh; someone else argued that bear claws don’t work that way.  I suggested that, being in a library, we could find a book about bears and use it to answer our question.

This then segued into a dream about one of Jared’s friends accidentally smashing the windows of Jared’s car while I was inside it.  Now you know.

-Thanks to all for your comments, emails, and other forms of high-tech communication consoling me on my incident!   My head is gradually feeling better, although some soreness/bruising has sprung up at my shoulder, top vertebrae, and various protrudy skullbits that also hit the wall or floor when I fell.  Also, in the days leading up to my own personal episode of Headbangers’ Ball, I was already running critically low on comfortable sleeping positions.  Add eight staples to the head and suddenly that number of positions has plummeted ever lower!  To combat the fatigue that comes with this sleeplessness, I have gone into energy conservation mode, which involves a lot of sitting around.  It suits me.

-All this resting gives me plenty of time to lift my shirt up and not only feel, but see the baby kicking, punching, and gallivanting in my womb.  Sometimes it looks like a team of feral hamsters running around just under the skin; other times it’s so forceful that I exclaim, “Change my order to the soup!” Pretty neat, though.  Another behavior I have noticed is that at night, as I am tossing and turning and struggling to get comfortable, he too seems to toss and turn within me.  This is amusing but also prompts one to think, hey little dude, some of us would LOVE to be floating weightlessly in a pool of warm liquid right about now…enjoy it while you can.