whiskey in a teacup . com

A couple of weeks ago I accidentally updated the Netflix queue such that two Roman Polanski movies arrived on the same day.  Jared protested, and then, before he could be forced to watch either film, he was assigned to travel to Zurich on business…the day after Polanski was arrested in the very same city.  “Ha!” I scoffed, “You wanted to avoid Polanski and now you’re flying right towards him.”

I share this hilarious anecdote because now Polanski is all over the news for the three-decade-old act that was, depending on who you ask, consensual sex or child rape.  Most people think it was the latter.  My opinion has always been this:  While it’s entirely possible that Polanski did rape that girl, it’s also entirely possible that he didn’t.

I wrote most of this entry a long time ago and never posted it because I thought it was just too uncomfortable a topic.  But you know what?  The alleged victim is now a grown woman who has spoken openly many times about the incident and is calling for the charges to be dropped, so I will offer these comments in the spirit of thoughtful discourse.

It is, by and large, unseemly and inappropriate for a man in his thirties to “party” with a young teenager and then have sex with her.  But there’s a difference between gross, inadvisable sex and actual rape.  My main problem is with the notion of the “age of consent”, since age in and of itself is not what makes people physically and emotionally ready for sex.  I also have a problem with the notion that thirteen year old girls are innocent, pre-sexual children who not only cannot consent to sex, but who can’t actively seek it out.  Plenty of people are molested at that age.  Plenty of people, for better or for worse, also have sex willingly at that age.

Join me on this thought experiment, and spare me the obvious rebuttals because I get it, and yes I’ve read the transcript:  A girl who fancies herself a sophisticated Hollywood model, who has had sex before, who willingly takes drugs and alcohol while willingly being photographed naked by an older, famous, attractive man is not necessarily a little girl ravaged.  She is quite probably a vulnerable girl who’s less mature than she realizes, who is taken advantage of by an adult who should know better, but the fact that she was thirteen and not fourteen or sixteen or eighteen doesn’t change the dynamic that much, in my mind.  People don’t suddenly become completely rational and relaxed about sex when they reach some random age designated by their state of residence, or when they find the “right partner”, or get married, or whatever.    And likewise, as you rewind the years from eighteen to sixteen and so on, you simply cannot draw a universal line at some specific age and say, “At this point, it was consensual, but at this point, it was rape.”

I say all this with the caveat that if Polanski ever came calling for my teenager, things would get ugly in a big hurry.  Of course they would.  But on the other hand…I was young once myself.

One of my very biggest misconceptions about pregnancy was that it was going to feel like the most natural thing in the world.  I was convinced that the moment the zygote touched down in my womb, I would “just know”; flower buds would bloom as I passed them on the sidewalk, baby birds would alight on my shoulders and sing delightful tunes for me!   The moon would turn full and I would be filled with an awesome surge of maternal love and joy for the starchild within!

Instead, I spent the first few days of my (then unknown) pregnancy lecturing Jared about how I was never going to get pregnant, and how this would gradually cause me to descend into misery because I would not be strong enough to battle infertility.  Indeed, even after I found out that our attempts at procreation had been successful, I saw no direct correlation between the two lines on the pregnancy test and the concept of actually having a baby someday.  Physically, I felt no different than I had before, and emotionally, I was sure the bottom was just hours or days from dropping out from under me.  It was difficult to feel the excitement and joy that I so thoroughly believed I would feel, and that lack of joy made me feel ungrateful, guilty, and very disoriented.

But no matter—I was pregnant, as I had wished to be for so long, and I would nurture the life within by continuing to exercise, eat well, and relax on the weekends with good books and fresh air! Again, this could not have been farther from the truth.  At first I did continue to run and eat salads and I was very impressed with myself.   Then, at about five weeks pregnant, a constant and all-consuming nausea set in, and while it would be overly dramatic to say that my life became an utter hell, it did become extraordinarily unpleasant.  I stopped working out or even moving at all other than going to my job, which I usually left early.  I spent evenings and weekends in a miserable stupor, lying in bed occasionally asking Jared to bring me toast and then telling him to get out of my face.  I was furious at this leftover cavewoman impulse designed to prevent me from eating rotten meat or whatever–I don’t even eat meat, nature, I’ve got this under control!

Beyond the nausea, I have also had every single classic symptom of pregnancy:  insomnia (or in my case, increased insomnia), heartburn, “sore” breasts (aka two sacks of wet cement and shards of glass strapped to one’s chest), vivid dreams (in some cases, of the “disturbing” AND “wet” variety), skin breakouts, digestive “sluggishness”, and so on.  Oh, what a magical time it has been.

I am just now starting to feel a bit better, and this relative freedom from nausea has allowed me to feel moments of elation and eager curiosity about who my child will be and what he/she will be like.  I have lost a few pounds since getting pregnant (I suspect this is mostly due to muscle atrophy) and my stomach is deceptively flat (who needs situps when you’ve got the dry heaves!) so I have not yet entered the “bursting with life” stage of pregnancy…but I have reached a detente with my body, and I am hopeful.

It turns out that pregnancy prevents one from feeling any guilt whatsoever about refusing to fast on Yom Kippur.  Sorry, three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax…this Jew’s got a growing parasite to feed!

Posting has been light around here lately, mostly because my mind has been occupied with one particular thing for the past couple of months.  So let this day live in infamy, for today I announce my pregnancy to the internet at large!  (You can picture the baby, all two and a half inches of it, brandishing a spear and shouting “THIS.  IS.  UTERUS!” in the manner of the dude from 300, if it helps you.)

I am twelve weeks along, and today we had the surreal pleasure of seeing the little one on an ultrasound screen, bouncing and shimmying around and apparently amusing itself verily.   It would push off with its little feet, float around, sink back to the bottom, wave its hands around, and do it all over again while we gazed at it and laughed.

Please enjoy Road to Nowhere, the official theme song of my pregnancy thus far.  I play this for my little passenger sometimes, and though I don’t know if he/she can hear it yet, I know he/she is dancing away in there.

One of the most gratifying parts of our trip to Berlin was an afternoon I spent by myself in the Dali Museum near Potsdamer Platz.  (Jared had been felled by a sick foot and didn’t want to hobble around the city with me.  It was sad, but I really enjoyed getting around with naught but my rumpled street map and preschool-level comprehension of German.)   The museum was brand new and gorgeous; outside a model of the famous Mae West’s Lips sofa sat casually in the grass, and inside was a fountain made out of a grand piano.  The exhibits were the stuff of dreams (all the Don Quixote, Carmen, Faust, and Alice in Wonderland collections, along with a deck of sexually explicit tarot cards, shiny coins displayed under glass, various sculptures, simple paintings textured with gold glitter, etc), and there was something whimsical, awesome, and never before seen (by me) around every turn.  There was also a small theatre of clear plexiglass chairs arranged in front of a screen that was showing Un Chien Andalou on a loop.  I spent hours in there, determined to look at every single thing even though it was very warm and I was getting restless.   On my way out I made a ridiculously ambitious purchase–Dali’s journal from 1919-1920 translated into German.  Yeah, I haven’t really delved into that one yet.

Anyway, I just wanted an excuse to post this link.  Goddamn I wish that dude could have been my grandfather.

Two selected dreams from last night:

1) I am mauled and partially eviscerated by a werewolf in some dive restaurant.  Not sure what the exact context was, but shit was scary.  My entrails looked like angelhair pasta, which was disappointing because I’ve seen human intestines up close and I know they don’t look like that!

2) I am trying to kill Hitler with a broomstick in my parents’ living room.  I can’t get too close because he’s brandishing a razor blade.  Luckily the real-life sun comes out just enough to wake me up before things get too ugly.

Do you ever notice how, sometimes you’ll be arguing with your husband about the definition of a word so you plug it into google, and then you forget about it and close the laptop, and then the next time you open the laptop the word “bukake” is just sitting there in the google search box?