I'll have to give you the recipe

Thanks for all the nice things you said about my house. Me and my desperate for affirmation neuroses are all aflutter. However, since none of you are actually IN the market for a Seattle townhouse you are no good to me whatsoever. 

I have a mommybloggish post stewing in my brain, but I am EXHAUSTED (they said the "brokers' open" - an open house for agents - would last till 1:30, but when I came home with my crazy tired kids at 1:30, two more agents showed up and said, no, it goes till 2. Have I mentioned my kids usually take their naps at TWELVE thirty?) and also I have eaten about half the cookie dough I am storing in the fridge for Sudden Potential Buyer Appearances. I have eaten half of it (and I am not, unfortunately, exaggerating) because there haven't BEEN any Sudden Potential Buyer Appearances. 

BUT! I am tired of talking about my house. I bet you are tired of it too. So. Herewith: some really excellent things I've read this week, online and off. 

I just finished this article in the New Yorker today about how we treat depression (and mental illness in general, and I suppose that's the point of the article: is depression mental illness?) Is it a purely biological thing? Are pills the only/best answer? I've read a handful of these articles over the last couple years, mostly book reviews I think, and I find them FASCINATING. I can't decide what I think about this issue (and neither can the people who are supposed to be figuring it out) but I love reading about it. The bummer thing about most articles I read on this topic (and, now that I think of it, that article in the Atlantic a few months ago about the happiness study - also a good read) is that there's no discussion of the effect religion/spirituality has on psychological conditions. I don't know what that effect IS, if any, but I always think it's odd when a writer leaves it out of the article entirely. 

I finished the recent Atlantic article about how the recession will affect us at my parents' house over the weekend and HOO BOY was that depressing. Also in the FASCINATING category, but you'll need to go to the liquor store afterwards. 

I tore the Washington Diarist column (by Leon Wieseltier, who I don't normally like to read because he always seems to be competing in the Erudite Olympics) out of the February 18 New Republic. I was going to write about it, but I couldn't think of anything to say (surprise surprise). But I've kept it in my desk drawer and I THINK about responding to it. It's about the Haiti earthquake, but also about the existence of God, our collective reaction to disaster, suffering, fatalism and the [crappy] nature of men. GAH. Pretty intense and ultimately a total bummer of a read, yes, but (am I using this word too much?) FASCINATING. Also: short! I promise! 

WOW have I been reading DEPRESSING STUFF. 

My dad also emailed me Ten Rules For Writing Fiction which he found linked on Arts and Letters Daily, a FABULOUS spot for online reading. Basically it's a bunch of famous writers giving their ten rules, which aren't always that helpful. For example, Margaret Atwood's first rule is to take a pencil to write with on airplanes because pens leak. 

Oh, and I might as well link to MYSELF: tomorrow (Thursday) at Parenting you can read about my yesterday, which involves vaccinations, flu shots, screaming children and (of course) cookie dough. I [spoiler alert!] survive.

In need of a deadline or four

It's never a good day when cleaning all three toilets is what puts me in a better mood.

I think I'm looking forward to the return of Real Life tomorrow. Phillip will go back to the office (and school on the weekends) and I will go back to some kind of routine. The kids are infinitely less beast-like when they doing the same things day in and day out, and I might get bored, but at least I'm not threatening to send someone to Time Out for the nineteenth time. Usually.

I frittered my entire afternoon away - I hate that feeling. I made this big To Do list, but nothing on my list was particularly urgent so I sat around, clicking through the internet, thumbing through the Sunday ads, reading The New Yorker. (I got a buttload of magazine subscriptions for Christmas. How am I supposed to read actual books?) But I put the magazine down and forced my eyes closed. I just felt so jittery and restless, like I had so many things to do, but I didn't quite know what those things WERE... and then I woke up feeling worse. I HATE taking naps.

Oh, and I printed out my NaNoWriMo novel. It's about an inch-thick stack of paper. There's got to be at least five worthy sentences in that stack, right? RIGHT? Woe. I think that angst is for another post. 

For the first time in, oh, EVER, I was watching the clock, willing Jack to wake up already. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? I knew that he'd be up for a little walk around the block, which is what I self-prescribed for Mood Improvement. When I checked on him he was sitting silently in his crib, like a little boy in a horror movie. The silences and empty spots that kid can endure - hours alone in his crib, hiding in dark closets, SHUDDER. But I yanked him out of bed and jammed on his boots and his hat and let him dictate our route. I felt so much better when we came home that I actually apologized to my husband for taking my frustrations out on him earlier (even though, seriously Word 7, stop being a tool) and went upstairs to clean the bathrooms. Miraculous!

So now I'm feeling a bit better. Things were accomplished. The end. Also, I have tentative plans to drink meet up for happy hour with friends after the kids go to bed, a guaranteed mood-lifter.

I think I'm feeling goal-less. I never thought I was a goals person, really, until just recently when Phillip said wait, actually, you are TOTALLY a goals person, HELLO speed-novelist. I've thought about it a little, though, and what I think he means is I am a DEADLINE person. Kind of sort of the same thing, sometimes, but not always. I lost the baby weight well before my 30th birthday, but then? Meh. Pass the fries! Oh, and same with my sister's wedding. When I realized I'd packed on six pounds I pulled out all the stops to get them off by the wedding and I DID. But now? Pass the leftover tiramisu! And when I look at my "novel" I despair at the thought of ever beating it into shape. Will I have to wait for November 2010?

Maybe my list of resolutions should have been a list of deadlines. I'll get back to you on that.

In the meantime: I am ready. Monday can bring it.

I'm posting this because I'm avoiding posting about grad school. You're welcome.

Last night I was talking to my mom about an old friendship, one of those relationships that's a lot different than it used to be, and you're not entirely sure when or where things changed. I told my mom, "I used to think she just really changed after we graduated, but now I wonder if she was ALWAYS like this and was just different when we were in school?" And my mom said, "I think LOTS of people change when they're in college and then revert back to who they were before" and then we started talking about everyone we knew who could or did or might or is currently fitting this mold.

I think it's hard to say, because most of us aren't terribly sure who we are before we Go Out Into The World (college, for most of us, and whether that is The World is debatable). But as far as you can really categorize these things, I think it's true for me. I was a boring rule-abider before, during and after my college years, no huge changes for me. But I WAS different in college. As unfortunately evidenced by the totally worn out pair of Birkenstocks I finally threw out the other day, with a huge exclamation of "I CAN'T BELIEVE I EVER PUT THESE ON MY FEET" disgust.

The big stuff didn't change - I didn't lose my faith - but the details did - I became an honorary non-denominational Protestant for four years.

One of the biggest things that happened to me was one of my best high school friends (I KNOW. Eventually I had GOOD FRIENDS from HIGH SCHOOL!) made a special trip to my dorm room sophomore year to come out in person. This was an enormous deal in my universe. It affected everything from how I interacted with my NDCF friends to what classes I chose to the music I liked to recalculating a lot of high school memories to (and this is embarrassingly true) how I cut my hair. I'd always been interested in feministy genderific sociological stuff, but now I was REALLY interested in it, obnoxiously so. I really needed to make sense of certain things, and I really really wanted to live "authentically". I was super committed to doing and being the things I said I was going to do and be, namely: Independent! Smart! Well-Traveled! Did I mention the INDEPENDENT?!

Then I started dating a boy. (One of my very favorite Dar Williams concert moments is when she told us that she got married that year, paused a second, then added, "TO A MAN".) Many - practically ALL - my feministy genderific sociologically contrived ideas floated into outer space somewhere. Half because they were mostly stupid ideas, half because I didn't need those ideas to protect me from Phillip's big scary Man Agenda. In fact, when I tried to tell him why this stuff was so entrenched in me he never appeared to be anything other than Utterly Clueless, so nonexistent was his Man Agenda. Sigh. College Me was frightfully stupid.

ANYWAY. I tell you all this because a few years later I was telling a friend how much I just really wanted to quit my job and stay home with a baby and she was looking at me like I had sprouted another nose. If this person thinks much about our friendship I'm POSITIVE she wonders Where I Went Wrong. We had several conversations about it, all of which made me feel tremendously guilty because where DID I go wrong? Was I copping out? Failing? Turning into someone I never wanted to be?

I spent way too much time thinking about this, but I'm glad I came to the right conclusion, which was: IT WAS OKAY FOR ME TO CHANGE. And perhaps I wasn't so different after all. Maybe the person she became friends with wasn't "authentically" me, but maybe someone trying out a lot of new ideas, the way they say you're supposed to when you're in school.

When I was out with two friends getting my nails done this weekend, we calculated that one friend and I had now known each other a total of twelve years. TWELVE! For someone whose formative years were spent either moving or having friends move, that's a huge number. We've weathered each other's changes, although we're much better friends now than we were in school. But other people haven't ridden the Change curve as well, myself included. It's totally okay for ME to change but I'm not at all sure it's okay for other people.

Did you change or change and then revert? Do you have those different-than-they-used-to-be awkward friendships? What do you do about these? I was telling my mom that my current strategy is to just Go With It. I'm not really sure what that means, but I think it has something to do with letting go of expectations, to just take whatever I get and do my best in return. That's all we can do, right?

#487 on the List of Ways to Improve

I am not going to write about the baby today. But first I will tell you that I have a pregnancy weight-centric post up at Parenting. Mmm, ice cream.

I got an email yesterday from someone thanking me for fulfilling my [minor] responsibilities on the church committee. The thanks was so profuse it was a little embarrassing. Or, it would be if it wasn't completely real. You know how some people thank you because they think it's getting them something? Well this person thanks you because he means it. He's always like that, in emails and during the meetings, and not just to me. He thanks everyone. Not just thanks, he appreciates everyone. He makes sure to acknowledge what each person is contributing and appreciates them. Publicly.

Not for the first time I realized I appreciated his appreciation.

But first I have to go through my inner monologue of suspicion, cynicism and motivation questioning. Why is he so NICE? I'm not proud of that. I don't know why I have such a hard time accepting that there ARE genuine people who genuinely appreciate.

I have some other friends (one of whom I think reads this website, gak) who are good at the appreciation thing. Right before Christmas I realized I hadn't made the treats I usually make and pack in little gift boxes for gifting out to all the random yet important people around us. I frantically threw some fudge together and then, realizing that you do not simply "throw fudge together" I frantically mixed up a batch of fake no-skills-required fudge and added that my gift boxes. A few days after passing them out I got a message on my phone (seriously people, my phone is never on, sorry!) telling me I was no less than Ina Garten herself (who's YOUR favorite Food Network chef?!) and that was the BEST FUDGE EVER and oh man, the MARSHMALLOWS (told you this was fake fudge) and the WALNUTS and they swallowed the pieces whole, they were THAT GOOD. It was totally embarrassing. I mean, FAKE FUDGE. So not worth the accolades. And yet, these are people who thank you with complete sincerity. A cold cynical person like myself will find them a bit off and wonder, much like Bing Crosby, what their angle is. But they don't have angles. At that moment in time my fudge WAS the best fudge ever.

Oh, and then? A few church committee meetings ago I said something stupid that someone smart immediately had to pick apart. It was the equivalent of getting up the nerve to raise your hand in your 400-level comparative lit class and saying something that is only half right. As I was getting schooled by the smart person, I consoled myself by thinking that at least I raised my hand, I never raise my hand, no one else was raising their hands. During the break the man who emailed me today said something like, "I bet you'll remember THAT from now on!" and I said something like, "Or I'll just keep my mouth shut" and he laughed like I had said something hilarious and WOW that made me feel so much better. I know, I might be making him sound kind of weird and irritating, but in that moment I felt appreciated for not being a snotty know-it-all (at least not on my committee!) and for having a sense of humor. I felt like he got me. In a moment when I really wanted to be gotten.

I want to be like them. I want to be the kind of person who is humble enough, secure enough and sincere and genuine enough to express appreciation the way they do. Sure, I know how when the occasion obviously calls for it. I think I've picked out some pretty swell hostess gifts, I've written glowing letters, and I am an excellent hugger. But I tend to keep my mouth shut about the every day stuff. I'm thankful in my head, but I often miss the moment to say something out loud. Plus, there's just something suspicious about people so free with compliments and enthusiasm and thanks. I wonder if I'm comparing my lack of generosity to their endless wells of it, and the resulting grouchy feeling keeps me from trying it out.

But that email yesterday challenged me. So yesterday I told my bagger at the grocery store how much I appreciated her bagging skills. The bread was not smushed. The eggs were safe. The chips were on top. No bag was impossible to carry. And we all remember how uptight I am about bagging, right? I said, "Thanks for bagging everything so well," or something equally dorky and she looked at me like I was that dorky and said, "Thanks". But maybe she went home tonight and told her boyfriend about all the annoying uptight people at the store today, oh, except for that one lady with the baby who thanked her for not cracking the eggs like DUH doesn't EVERYONE know that?

Twelve years too late!

In keeping with our little school theme here, I got an email the other day from a girl I knew for all of one year of high school. Apparently she found my brother's MySpace page, got my email address from him and there she was, asking me what I'd been up to for the last, oh, twelve years.

(Note to my brother: People with MYSPACE PAGES have no business making fun of people who run highly entertaining professional-looking BLOGS. Mmkay?)

(Note to everyone who'd rather read about the baby: Please help me in my Continuing Adventures With Baby Food over at Parenting. Seriously. I NEED HELP.)

So anyway. It wouldn't be such a weird occurrence, getting an email from an Old School Chum, right? Except that this was a girl I knew during the worst year of high school on record, when I didn't have anyone to eat lunch with, let alone someone who would think to email me twelve years later. And we weren't even friends! I mean, of all the people I would have liked to have been friends with at that school, she was at the top of the list. She was probably the friendliest nicest person I knew that year- but being friendly and nice meant she was friends with everyone else and there obviously wasn't much time to become BFF with me. We were on the basketball team and in the same classes, but that'd be the extent of our friendship.

Which leads me to wonder: WHY EMAIL ME?

The obvious answer is: because lots of people in the world are much nicer and pleasanter and sunnier dispositioned than I am. SOME people just like to say hello and catch up. It's a NICE THING TO DO.

And it's not like I MINDED getting an email from her (and believe me, there are plenty of high school era people I'd rather not get emails from.) The handful of memories I have of her are all good ones. I was sort of surprised that I wasn't creeped out when I saw that email was from a High School Person. There are exactly three people I communicate with from high school and two of them I haven't talked to in years. Tracking those people down, finding out what they're up to, the thought of going to (oh dear God in heaven) a REUNION makes me queasy. So the fact that I thought it was nice that she thought of me is not un-meaningful.

BUT STILL. I guess I just don't see the point. It's not like we had some great friendship to reignite or anything. We didn't even graduate together. We were on the basketball team sophomore year and then she moved away. The End. So what is the point of emailing me?

(See, Phillip got really sick of me going on and on about this last night so I have to come do it here.)

I have to admit, there are two or three people I'm curious about. I'd like to know if they got married and what kind of jobs they have and where they live. Just so I can sort of finish them off in my brain. Closure! But NO WAY am I going to hunt down their MySpace pages and EMAIL THEM. (Okay, MAYBE I would hunt down their MySpace pages, but I would not email them. Although MySpace is scary. SCARY. Why can't everyone have nice little blog?)

I don't think this girl was looking for me. When I saw "your brother's MySpace page" of COURSE the first thing I did was go FIND my brother's MySpace page and INVESTIGATE. Turns out he is "friends" with a whole bunch of people from our high school (he graduated two years after me) and clicking through all those profiles seriously messed with my head. And then I discovered the high school reunion page two girls set up to connect everyone and MY BRAIN EXPLODED. Too much information! Too many old names and faces and updates! Gah! I'll bet anything this girl was clicking through just like I had done, found my brother's page, thought to herself, "Hey! He had a sister in my class! I should see what's up with her!" and then actually DID THAT VERY THING.

So who is the normal one? Her? Or me?

If anything, it made me want to email one of the friends I haven't emailed in years, just so I could say, "GUESS WHO EMAILED ME!" And then gossip about all the people I saw on the reunion page.

I often wonder what it would have been like to attend high school in the states. Phillip isn't exactly friends with people from high school, but he'd always run into them on campus or reconnect with them through job networking or friends of friends of friends. I have other friends who were super excited about their reunions (okay, not freakishly so, but they still wanted to go whereas I would not consider the thing in a million zillion years.) I wonder what it'd be like to go home to your parents' house and hear about all the other kids who've been in town lately. I don't know. But going to a school where NO one goes back home didn't make a difference to all the people friended on the reunion page. THEY were beside themselves with the getting reacquainted.

Maybe it is ME. And my surly snobby high-school-is-the-pit-of-all-evil* attitude. That must be it.

What did Christian say about prom on Project Runway? "I think prom is horrible and tacky and gross!" Yeah.

*Actually, I do not think this. Not entirely. It's just that the good parts of high school- my kick ass volleyball team, my English teachers, the drama stuff, the going out and dancing, the actual friends I eventually made- NOT AS INTERESTING. Who wants to read about that? GIVE ME THE ANGST!

More thoughts on school

Like I told my mother last night, "Sometimes you ask the internet what is wrong with your screaming barfing baby, even though you kind of already know the answer and the comments aren't that helpful. But SOMETIMES you ask the internet something and THEY REALLY KNOW." Reading all your stories was so helpful! Even though we won't be making this decision for a while (and I do mean "we", as I had to reassure Phillip who wanted to know why I was asking the internet where to send our child to school without even asking him first) it's good to know this stuff.

By the way, my mother would like you all to know that she does not declare her Catholic school experience to be representative of all Catholic school experiences. That said, she went to school in the Olden Days and her nuns were big fat meanies. Also, she would appreciate it if I stopped writing about her without asking first.

Overall, after reading your comments, I have a much better impression and idea of what Catholic schools are about. I mean, as much as you can after reading Long and Terribly Interesting Reader Autobiographies. Which is a lot!

I don't really have any context for private school, other than my mom's and my aunt's stories about the nuns. Until we moved overseas I went to an elementary school where both of my parents taught previously and all the teachers knew me and treated me like a princess. When we moved overseas there was one available schooling option- the Single American School On Base where your parents worked, where all your friends went and where all your parents' friends worked. At my last school we had a couple of Italian students who paid through the nose to attend the American school (and after visiting a couple of Italian high schools aka giant communist concrete boxes of boredom, I would have too!) There were also lots of international schools in Italy, which I know about because we often kicked their butts all over their fancy basketball and volleyball courts. Those diplomats' sons and embassy workers' daughters were no match for the spawn of the American Military. I had strings of rotten teachers in my Department of Defense-funded public schools, but I also had a handful of truly stellar teachers. My chemistry and physics teacher conducted real estate deals from his desk while we goofed off (I am pretty sure he owned over half the town), but my senior English teacher had as much an impact on me as my best college professor. Also, when you are attending a small public high school dripping with government money, you get to do a lot of stuff. I was a member of pretty much everything there was to be a member of. I went all over Europe with sports teams and bands and speech and drama geeks. I mean, we went to VENICE for field trips.

As my friend Lee noted in the comments, it's true, I don't really know anything about the local public schools. I've heard vague unfavorable comments about the Seattle school system and many, much more specific comments about the district my mom and sister teach in, which Jack won't be going to anyway. There is always a huge struggle to pass school levies (although that may be true anywhere?) unless you are living in Rich Microsoft Suburbs or something. I know there are a couple of local standout high schools, but I know next to nothing about the elementary schools.

But the fact that my church has a little school next door has always been attractive to me, even before we had a kid. It shows that your church is active in the community and the annual school fund raiser is a HUGE neighborhood event. The school just recently started a pre-K program and while we haven't really decided anything, I think it's probably a given that we'll enroll Jack when it's time. We love our church community, we love our church, we already know a dozen of Jack's future classmates and all of that adds up to, what seems to me, an excellent place to be.

Also Catholic elementary school is really attractive. I've dropped things off at the school before and snooped around in the hallways looking at all the displays. Displays for All Saint's Day as well as President's Day. We like the idea of Mass and religious education as part of his normal school day. Again, we are fans of the community and the school itself seems to have a Rah Rah St. Urban Wealthy Neighborhood! attitude anyway. I can easily see us sending Jack to this school if we are 1) still living here and 2) can afford it. Neither of which are for sure.

But I have more doubts about Catholic high school. I have fewer now that I've read your comments, but there's still something about it. I really REALLY don't like the idea of a little insular Catholic world. It's the same kind of thing I noticed in some of the more "sheltered" kids in the non-denominational college fellowship. Having this perception of non-Christians (or non-Catholics in this case) as The Other. But I suspect that has more to do with the kind of kid you have and what kind of world you provide for him outside of school. It might even be more important to send your kid to a Catholic high school, according to you guys, what with the quality of education and all that. I guess this shows that environment is an important concern of mine. I'm not particularly worried about the racial make up of classrooms and things like that, but diversity of thought is important to me.

While I'm bringing that up, I have to say that I am not at all afraid of accusatory fundamentalist types putting a not-parent-approved fear of God into my kid. For one thing, we live amidst and attend church with Good Seattle Liberals and Good Seattle Liberals would rather die before making snap judgments about your belief system- unless, of course, you are driving an SUV to work, by yourself, every day of the week. I have heard about this stuff happening in religious schools, but I really don't see it at this school. We are hippy dippy Let's Learn About All The Wonderful Cultures and Their Wonderful Customs and Incorporate Them Into Everything We Do types. We are not, however, hippy dippy about church teaching. My priest is the most vocal and open I have ever heard about The Controversial Stuff. Oh my God, you should hear him in the marriage classes. I have to hide my face behind my hands.

I feel like I am forgetting all sorts of stuff, but the baby is awake ALREADY and I have not taken a shower and now my day is ruined. Ruined!  I do want to try to respond to your comments, although I haven't been very good at that lately. Anyway, I really appreciate your stories. Honestly truly. Although my mom is disappointed no one had anything to say about the WASL, the Bane of her Existence. Oops, there I go writing about her again...

I need a nap

No baby today. What he lacks in size he makes up by rocking the non-stress tests.

I'm exhausted. I barely slept last night (third trimester insomnia?) and spent the entire day explaining 400 things to the new girl, which made both our heads spin. There is nothing like trying to train your replacement to make you realize how very complicated your job is, even though complicated is the last word you'd ever use to describe what you do. I called Phillip twice, once because I didn't want to do what I thought I had to do (reinstall Windows) and wanted him to tell me what I should do (which was reinstall Windows) and once to tell him no baby today. And both times he was certain I was in labor, coworkers cheering in the background.

Last night we went to Saxaphone Night at the University of Washington, a bunch of solo performances by undergrad saxaphone students. I can't remember the last time I was on campus and it's been years since I was in the school of music building, even longer since I sat through my last Saxaphone Night, watching my boyfriend play three movements of some concerto I've never heard of. I used to wish he'd play jazz, like any normal person who plays sax, but no, he studied classical saxaphone which meant I had to go to Saxaphone Night and symphonic band concerts and quartet performances and pretend I was enthralled. Phillip reeeeeally wanted to go and I think we're both feeling the "let's do everything we can possibly think of before the baby comes" pressure, so I agreed. As long as we left at intermission.

We sat in the back and made faces at the kids who were just there because they're taking Concert Series, which just means you go to random performances on campuses and write stupid reflection papers. For credit! The musicians were sweaty and nervous and I remembered Phillip being up on stage, with his pony-tailed piano player, his unfamiliar parents sitting across the auditorium. It occurred to me that I am ten years older than the freshmen. At intermission Phillip shook hands with his old saxaphone professor and introduced his wife and mentioned his almost-here baby and the two of them chatted about getting a real job and other students who've graduated and put their saxaphones aside. I wondered what a few of my professors are doing now. I ducked into the bathroom on the first floor and remembered ducking into bathrooms between classes, the cold metal doors installed into old brick walls. I remembered washing my hands and trying not to stare at the other college girls putting on lipstick and adjusting their clothes. I was so in awe of college. I never felt cool enough or urban enough or confident enough. I wanted to be the girls with the funky hair and the thrift store clothes and the bags full of interesting books. By the time I felt I'd arrived, it was time to graduate and now I'm old and married and expecting a baby. How did that happen?

I am so tired today. I passed off everything I know to the new girl. She is totally overwhelmed and I don't blame her. I want to say, "I tried to tell you what you were getting into..."  Then I remember that everyone has a miserable first day, even if the person showing them around tries her hardest to make it easier. I'm suddenly possessive. These are my coworkers. This is my computer. These are my responsibilities. I may even miss a thing or two. I don't want to be replaced.

I've never felt so aware of impending change. Maybe when I got married. Phillip and I are what my neighbor once called "old fashioned". We went from recent college grads with crappy jobs who said goodnight over the phone to married and living together and fighting over how to properly load the dishwasher in one weekend. We had no idea what it would be like, but we were doing it anyway. My dad told me that getting married was one thing, but having me- that was what turned the world upside down. And I feel like, okay, fairly soon the world will be upside down. I'm just waiting.

I still don't want the baby to come early. My brother, father of two, says this is because I am not uncomfortable enough, just wait. I see his point. But I did feel a tiny bit of disappointment when the nurses sent me home tonight. Proud of my baby for acing the test, bummed that I had more ultrasounds and NSTs and furrowed doctor brows in front of me. It's going to happen sometime, right? I'm okay with it happening now.

I should write some thank you notes, but I think I'm going to crawl into bed. Poor Phillip. He must think I'm never going to make him dinner again.

Witching hour

I've decided that I have too much free time. My friends snorted at me when I said this yesterday. And I know those of you with babies are either rolling your eyes or firing up an email to order me to take advantage before it's too late!, but I've decided my free time is not a good thing. Or, Phillip decided this late Saturday night as I sat blubbering on the couch about the myriad of tiny miserable things I shouldn't even think up, much less freak out about.

For the record, I don't think I've been the hormonal scatterbrained mess people say women are when they're pregnant. Except for a whole new slate of strange aches and pains, I feel mostly like myself. I don't know what Phillip would say about this, but I'll have you know there haven't been any random blowups or more than one or two sudden crying jags, which means in my estimation, my mental health is as usual: questionable. People say, "Oh, it's just pregnancy hormones," and then I have to say, "No, actually, would you believe this is an improvement?"

So anyway. I get home from work around five and Phillip tends to get home around six-thirty, which means I have a whole hour and a half of wintry late afternoon before Distraction shows up in the form of dinner plans or errands or plain old "work sucked today" conversation. I bake, I watch TV, sometimes I make dinner. I think about writing, I might do some laundry, I flip through whatever arrived in the mail. Mostly I sit and attempt to stave off the anxiety that always shows up to fill in the blank space.

Phillip said, "I haven't seen you read anything in a while. Why don't you get some books?" So yesterday I went to Barnes and Noble and bought three fat novels. This one, which I've been wanting to read for a long time, this one, because I saw "lives on an air force base" on the jacket, and this one, because it looked funny. I also went to Pottery Barn Kids and did not buy anything, are you proud?

I made a list of friends who are home when I get home from work, mostly a growing number of friends who stay home with babies.

I thought about what things I need to do to get the baby's room ready, but in an orderly one-day-at-a-time way, not the ohmygodmayislikeTOMORROW way I've been favoring. Most of it Phillip has to do- move furniture in our bedroom to make room for my new desk, move my computer to the new desk and set it up, get rid of the old too-big desk, haul a to-be-purchased glider up two flights of stairs and set up where the too-big desk used to be. You know, dirty work. But I need to buy (or sew? am I seriously considering sewing?) curtains, put the little clothes away, hang up the cute little paintings I bought in China two and a half years ago, thread ribbons through the hooks on the wooden moon and stars I bought in Germany and pin them to the ceiling. (There is also a giant poster of Italy on the wall that I am not taking down. We may never have enough money to take this kid anywhere, so I have to stuff it all in his room.)

I wrote out my church meeting schedule, doctor appointments, retreats, parties, weddings, birthdays, showers and deadlines on my calendar. That makes me feel busy.

I bought more butter and chocolate chips, even though Phillip's office is beginning to expect him to show up with cookies. But I suspect my 89-year-old neighbor likes cookies too. She also likes to snoop inside the new townhouses they're always building in this neighborhood, just like me. I filed that away for the future.

The sun is not supposed to set until after 5 tonight.

I might have a new person available to walk around the lake with me after work. And I'm thinking about signing up for prenatal yoga classes at the yoga studio a few blocks away. I took yoga a few years ago in an attempt to "achieve a state of relaxation" like all the anxiety books advise, but I think the endorphins helped a lot more. My early morning class woke me up, made me feel stronger, put me on a schedule.

I feel like I do a lot of stuff, see a lot of people, commit to a lot of things, but there's still that hour after work when the sun is going down and all the things that make me nervous set up shop in my head and start their roundtable discussion. Phillip said, "It'll be hard when the baby gets here, but it'll be okay," and I said, "Maybe I'll be too busy to worry."

Old ladies

I have a new best friend. She lives across the street from me, she is 89 years old, her three granddaughters are among the smartest and most accomplished young women on earth and she has been going to my church since 1942. I knew none of these things until I talked her into letting me visit Friday evening, lemon poppyseed bread and stewardship intention form in tow. I was only planning to be there twenty minutes, thirty minutes at most, but at the hour mark she asked if I wanted some coffee and I had to say no, I was supposed to be home half an hour ago because we're having friends over. Turns out she walks five blocks to catch the bus every Sunday and has to leave directly after communion to catch the next one home. And, well, that's ridiculous. We live across the street. So we drove her to church on Sunday and sat next to her and gave her a hug at the kiss of peace and that's what we'll probably be doing for the next dozen Sundays and the dozen after that. Bet she's glad she let me visit, eh?

Now. Let it be said that I am not feeling particularly saintly, feeling irritated, as I do, about hauling an 89-year-old lady to and fro on Sundays. It's definitely going to interfere with our spontaneous after-Mass coffee hour and dim sum plans, not to mention the odd Sunday or two when we can't possibly get ourselves out of bed and half-heartedly promise to go to the seven o'clock service. On the other hand, 89-year-old ladies should be driven to church, dropped off at the front when it's raining and promptly taken home without a second thought. My 84-year-old grandmother never learned to drive and she's all I could think about during my visit (although my poor grandmother is certainly not bragging about her brilliant PhD candidate granddaughter who speaks three languages and works overseas for Peace and Justice, I assure you.)

I used to think I would work with elderly people. For all my social traumas involving small talk and strangers, I've never had problems getting old ladies to chat (though most of them, it should be said, wouldn't care if you had the conversation skills of Animal, they'd talk your ear off.) I spent a summer changing sheets and cleaning up after breakfast at an assisted living center and my senior year of college doing much more disgusting things than that for six or seven elderly women at an adult family home. I quit that job because I happened to be working for the Bride of Satan and found a less, uh, manual job in another downtown office building. I missed my old ladies though, even the crazy ones and the frighteningly sick ones. 

Eventually I hooked up with a local organization that paired people in the community with retirement and nursing home residents. I was paired with a woman I'll call Bev who lived at a city-funded retirement facility just blocks away from my waterfront office. I pictured a sweet fuzzy old lady like my grandma or Ann, my favorite (and least crazy) resident at the adult family home, but Bev was a sprightly Alzheimer's patient with a blond pixie cut and a sailor's vocabulary. She wore a monitor on her ankle and wasn't allowed out by herself. I'd go visit her for an hour on my lunch break and most of the time we'd take a long walk. It was the same route every week, but Bev never got tired of the furniture stores and the smells from the Thai restaurant and if it was nice weather and I had some cash, we'd eat ice cream cones on the waterfront. She'd hold onto my arm and we'd walk at a snail's pace, but I always got tired before she did. She asked me the same question every week: Did I have a nice man? And every week I would say: Oh Bev, you remember, I have a boyfriend. Even when this switched to: Oh Bev, you remember, I'm married, she never remembered. I think she even met Phillip once or twice, but I was always that dark-haired girl who came to rescue her from the stuffy boring packed-with-old-people building to take her outside where there was fresh air and all kinds of people and everything to look at. I'm not sure if she ever called me by name, but after the first couple of visits her face would positively gleam when she saw me walk into the lobby. She'd immediately head for the elevator to get her coat.

I had to stop seeing Bev when I stopped working downtown. I wasn't able to commit to seeing her on a regular basis and I felt so guilty telling the volunteer coordinator I wouldn't be there anymore. I still feel bad about that. I hope they sent someone else to take Bev outside.

Anyway it appears I have a new old lady, if I want her. Not that she needs a new best friend. She has family nearby, three future Presidents for granddaughters and all her wits about her. She needs a ride to church, which we are happy to provide, but I'm excited to have met her. When I'm bored at home with a baby, maybe I can walk across the street to her house and talk to a grown up, even if I have to hear about the granddaughter traveling across Europe before she starts her teaching position at the fancy East Coast university.

Happy new year?

I had one of those Depths of Despair moments yesterday. You know what I mean. As someone who has never been truly depressed, I can sometimes imagine what it might be like during my fleeting moments in the Depths of Despair. It was about nine thirty last night. I was sitting in front of the TV, having watched the last acceptable hour of television on TiVo, having no interest in anything being shown on real-time television, and realizing that although we put away the Christmas decorations, the house was clean and I'd made a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, I was surely the laziest most boring girl in the entire world and this Sitting On My Ass-ness did not bode well for the new year. It came to a head when Phillip looked at me with concern and said, "Don't you have a book to read?" I shook my head and then he said, "Do you want to work on your story?" And I thought about my two writing projects hanging out on the USB drive upstairs, two things I have barely bothered to think about since I got pregnant, and then I started to cry. For it is horribly sad when one's extremely-not-interested-in-writing husband is the person who reminds you that you used to have this idea that you might, you know, write something some day.

GAH.

Anyway, first things first: I do not have a book to read. I have two Flannery O'Connor books I planned to read eventually (with Theresa, who I have not emailed back and probably hates me, therefore negating any chance that I will actually read these books, sorry Theresa!) and a mystery novel I just can't get into. So I am taking recommendations. The requirements are: does not make my brain hurt, is entertaining but not so entertaining that I can't put it down to go to sleep, does not beat me over the head with The Lesson and fits inside my purse. Go at it, Internet.

The second thing is that I am not one to be in the Depths of Despair for very long, so I scurried over to my bookshelf, picked out an Inspirational Novel and crawled into bed, determined to have my writerly instincts aroused by the stunning and glorious language. My Inspirational Novel was The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt, about an eleven-year-old girl who plays the cello, and is one of my favorite books ever.  Actually, nearly all of my favorite books are about eleven-year-old girls. Do you have one of those to recommend?

The third thing is that I am fully entrenched in Miss Snark's latest crap-o-meter. (Are you not familiar with Miss Snark? For shame!) 700 or so crazy people wrote 'hooks' for their unpublished novels and emailed them to Miss Snark for her comments. The hooks and comments were published on her blog and I have read each and every one of them. I know nothing about the publishing business, how to acquire an agent, what an agent actually does and how you convince anyone other than your mother that your work is not a steaming pile of you know what. But 700 hooks later, nearly all of which were unmercilessly ground into the dirt by Miss Snark's stiletto heel, I am anxious to get started on my own. The crap-o-meter may have taught me more than my 8 frillion creative writing classes combined. My two unfinished projects should probably be tossed into the incinerator by now, so I've started thinking about my third project, a combination of my favorite parts of the two other projects, something "hook-able", something someone other than my mother might want to read.

Whether or not I get off my butt and work on this new idea is up for debate. 

Last year I had a gigando list of resolutions (most of which I kept and/or achieved, thank you very much!), but this year I think my only resolution will be to write more. And by "write" I do not mean "blog". Sigh. Besides. If last night's Dance Dance Revolution competition taking place inside my abdomen was any indication, I don't have much time left before I'll be devoting most of my free time to chasing the most hyperactive kid in the universe up and down my stairs.