whiskey in a teacup . com

Every now and then people will start threads on pregnancy message boards with topics like “Things no one tells you about pregnancy and childbirth!” or whatever.  The main thing that seems to shock women is that they poop during labor…which, really?  You didn’t realize that bearing down with all your might for hours on end might cause you to take a shit?   But in the past week or so I’ve discovered my own Thing Nobody Told Me:  that somewhere between the eighth and ninth month I would get the distinct sensation that someone had whacked me in the junk with a baseball bat.  It’s a pain that has taken my waddling to a whole new level.   And yet, if this illustration is to be believed, my junk is in for a much greater insult in just a few more weeks!

Sitting up:  my anemic blood drains from my brain and I feel weak, dizzy, and short of breath.

Lying down:  the heartburn, OH GOD the heartburn!

Your lease is up in five and a half weeks, little guy.  Please don’t be early, but please don’t be late.

While making plans to meet my mother for lunch, I suggested a town that’s roughly midway between us.  “That’s pretty far for me,” she said.  “It’s pretty far for me too,” I replied.  “I’m too nervous,” she said.  Then I recalled that my mother does not drive on highways or certain major thoroughfares.  When she was eighteen she was in a car accident in which she was ejected from the driver’s seat with her foot stuck under the gas pedal and dragged a ways before the car came to a stop.  When I was a kid we would take weird circuitous routes to get places so she could avoid the scarier roads.  As a result I am a very cautious driver (that’s good!) and have a very difficult time being driven by other people (that’s bad!).

My estranged father called me last night; he had things to say that I was willing to listen to, but he infuriatingly chose to open the conversation with a casual, “Hi, let’s get together sometime!” type of attitude that completely denied the many, many years of devastation and distance that mark our relationship.  When he expressed that, despite having been a hateful and selfish parent throughout my life he wanted to be “involved” with my baby, I responded with something along the lines of, “I often wonder what fucked up genes I’m passing on to the baby from you, and how I’m going to avoid hurting him the way you hurt me and the way your father hurt you.  That’s how you’re fucking involved.”  It was actually one of the least painful and more produtive conversations we’ve had, which tells you something about why I choose to be estranged in the first place.

“…coming out to others affords one of the few remaining opportunities in ever more bureaucratic, technological, and socialistic societies to manifest courage.”

-Richard Mohr

It occurred to me the other day, as I was throwing out a forgotten, putrefying cucumber and singing “I Hate Myself For Wasting Food” to the tune of “I Hate Myself For Loving You”, and as Jared joined in with his own verse while we both danced around the kitchen, that this child is going to be a tremendous dork.  Plan: to start teaching him as early as possible that the dorks are actually way cooler than the cool kids.

Alternate title:  An Emphatic Protest Against the Movie “500 Days of Summer”

On general principle, I have a baseline level of respect for movies that aim to tell an interesting story rather than just pander to the lowest common denominator.  Netflix always creates category recommendations for me called “Cerebral Foreign Dramas” and “Thought-Provoking Cultural Documentaries” and I eat it all up, barely pausing to feel the shame inherent in being a stereotype.  Independent movies, therefore, are usually somewhat up my alley.  But this is an example of an indie movie that hits the same stale notes as, I don’t know, The Notebook or some shit.  Just because the female love interest hasn’t had a nose job (she’s so real!) doesn’t mean this is anything but a painfully banal unrequited love caper, albeit one shot on cheaper film.  Most of the gestalt of this movie is pure Hollywood, and all the Urban Outfitters garb in the world can’t change that.  When the eponymous Summer tells a joke about how she used to be called Anal Girl in high school (due to her organizational skills), there’s a fucking spit take.  Spit take = zero cred.  It’s just simple math.

It’s impossible to care about the protagonist because he has no discernable gonads whatsoever.  I get that he’s supposed to be the sensitive impish hipster type, but even within the realm of sensitive impish hipsters he’s unbearably pathetic.  He gets the girl alone numerous times and doesn’t make a move; she asks him outright if he likes her and he says no.  Now, I myself would never respond favorably to aggressive courting, but I do expect a man who’s sexually interested in me to, like, show some sexual interest in me.  As a female viewer, I felt no sympathy for this socially impotent doofus, nor did I understand why Summer eventually started fooling around with him in the copy room.  What of it, Summer?

It’s also not evident why Summer is so entrancing to the protagonist.  Aren’t there any other pretty girls in your town who listen to indie rock?  In my town, that’s like three quarters of the female population.  What’s so special about Summer isn’t really clear, nor is it clear why she has such a bug up her ass about relationships.  She becomes distinctly odious when she defends her stance that Ringo is the best Beatle by saying, “Nobody likes him; that’s why I like him.”  People who go out of their way to demonstrate how “quirky” they are are perhaps the most insufferable people on earth.  These are basically two inscrutable, unlikeable characters who bone for a while (off-camera, no less!) and then stop.  Hey, I have an idea, let’s make a movie about them!  Or LET’S NOT.  And let’s not make the trailer deceptively intriguing, thus causing people to spend their Friday night groaning through this clunker.

And of all of the movie’s flaws, the most fundamental is this:  If you spend 500 days wild with infatuation because a girl sings a Smiths lyric while you’re standing in the elevator together, then HOW DOES IT FOLLOW that the music you hear in your head when you think about her is 1) Hall and Oates and 2) “She’s Like the Wind” by Patrick Swayze?  I give up.

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.