Shit that happened while I was snowed in
Interneeeeet! What up? You’d think that while I was chillaxin’ with my homies snowed in for the last four days that I would have churned out post after intelligent post. You’d be wrong. I’m going to make a list now that will enlighten you about what I’ve been doing since Friday night’s crippling dusting of snow major winter storm.
1. I watched the news for school closings, only to discover that our website updates quicker. Go us, because usually our website announces closings about 10 minutes before the work day is scheduled to begin. Fuck ups.
2. I watched most of the stuff on my DVR. I’m down to 42% full. Trust me, this is like empty in my house. I caught up on Big Love – oh! – and I totally should mention this, because if you watch Big Love on HBO, you totally have to read this book. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (do you love how I just correctly titled this book without quotation marks or italics? English majors RULE!) by Jon Krakauer. It’s about this woman and her child who are murdered by two Mormon fundamentalists and it gives this big long history of Mormons. I will mention here that I grew up with a slew of Mormons and those in the regular garden variety LDS church are super nice people. But it’s those Big Love Juniper Creek creepies that this book talks about. Anyway, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff it’s a good read.
3. I started watching The Tudors. Shut UP that shit is good. First of all there’s some hot sex in it, which kept BB interested of course, and then there’s Henry VIII who is eight different kinds of beautiful and then there’s Sam Neill who does a decent British accent and then there are all the jewels and fabulous fabric in the costumes and do you get Showtime? Catch up. RIGHT NOW. They’re showing seasons 1-3 and you should catch it while the catching’s good.
4. I slept. I slept in in the morning, I took naps, I permanently squished the cushion down in my Archie Bunker chair in the den, so now it looks like a butt pancake. I laid around on the couch. I stretched out with the ottoman and listened to BB hand wash dishes because our dishwasher melted. I waited for him to cook dinner. I showered occasionally. I was a ROCK STAR.
5. Our dishwasher melted. So now BB we have to hand wash our dishes and dry them and hope we rinsed the soap off good because I can tell you from experience that soapy Cheerios are not so tasty. Yesterday we ventured out into the scary world of icy parking lots and bought a shiny new Whirlpool stainless dishwasher. It’s so pretty. And supposedly you can put dishes in there WITHOUT SCRUBBING THEM FIRST! That would be a miracle. And BB bought it with his own money that I didn’t have to contribute to. It was a great moment in my life.
6. I made whole wheat bagels. Those fuckers are N-A-S-T-Y. They are hard as rocks, dense as rocks and taste like rocks. I asked my good Interweb friend Ashley Gross to come up with a recipe to replace these things. She’s working on it.
7. I played 1,764 games of some kind of Solitaire variation on my iTouch. Maybe not that many games, but it seemed like it. Once I found myself in the kitchen looking for Diet Sunkist and I couldn’t see the fridge because my eyes were blurry from looking at the screen too long. I need an intervention.
8. I started The Lovely Bones last night and almost finished it. I had to stay up until almost 1am though and by the time I got good and asleep, the alarm went off. Good grief. I have to say though, after all those days of slugging it around the house, it was a little bit nice to get back into a routine this morning.
9. In case you haven’t gathered by now, North Carolina shuts down completely when it snows and sleets. COMPLETELY. Schools closed, businesses on delays, snow plows doing their best but not enough. It’s enough to make an outsider nuts, but it’s what we’re used to. They’re calling for more Friday. I might shoot myself.
10. BB tried to tell me what to do. I shut him down. We’re headed to the beach for an early Valentine’s vacation Friday, and if his ‘tude doesn’t change, I’m shutting him down again. On vacation. In a fancy hotel. You know what this means, people. SHUTTING IT DOWN.
On the Internet, there were good recaps of the Grammys (holy shit Pink!) and there were friends that joined Twitter and Tom and Lorenzo of Project Rungay did some super funny posts about Kelly Cutrone (Kell on Earth) and RuPaul.
OK. That’s the shit that happened while I was snowed in.
5 comments February 3, 2010
Mama needs an easy button
I’m feeling a bit contemplative today, partly because I know I’ll be snowed in this weekend, and partly because it’s Friday and I have nothing better to do. There was an article this morning on Good Morning America’s website about a recent study done on women over the age of 30 in the UK. The study found that after 30, 90 percent of a woman’s eggs are gone. Like, poof. Vanished. Vamoosed.
This disturbs me more than a little. I have written here extensively about the fact that I don’t have children and am not sure that I ever want any. But, as my friends and I discuss often, we don’t want to get beyond childbearing years and regret that we didn’t take the opportunity while we could have. Yes, there is adoption, and yes, we could try all kinds of fertility methods, but the bottom line is that over the age of 30, being pregnant is a whole new ballgame.
So what’s a girl to do? Who knows, I say. Go ahead and slap my hand now, because I haven’t been to see my ob/gyn in 3 years. (Shocking, yes.) A) I’m scared of doctors which stems from my anxiety and I still don’t feel yet that I can go to a doctor’s office and not fall down screaming from a panic attack. B) I am terrified that on such a visit my doctor will find some god-awful disease like endometriosis or diabetes or high blood pressure or heart problems or something related to the fact that I am overweight and lazy.
Phew, there, I said it. Right now today, that is my biggest fear.
In all honesty, I would love for Brian and I to have children and raise them together to be little hoodlums just like us. I would relish hanging out on a Saturday morning watching cartoons and playing with Legos and screaming my head off because I haven’t slept and there’s crusty cereal in my bra. (This is all how I imagine parenting, of course.) What’s holding me back from all of this is my fear. In addition to my overwhelming fear of a doctor’s appointment, I am also terrified that childbirth will kill me. I don’t know, haven’t read the statistics, how it goes for overweight pregnant women. Do they die? Do their babies survive?
The easy answer to this is, of course, to just lose a bunch of weight and then try to get pregnant. Except there’s that whole pesky problem of the fact that I’m about to be 32 and so statistically more than 90 percent of my eggs have hit the road and headed off to greener, more fertile pastures. So in the time it takes for me to lose the weight I need to lose, that just makes me older and more moldy on the inside. What gives, people?
On top of the worry that I carry around on my shoulders is the knowledge that my parents aren’t spring chickens anymore. My father will be 70 in April and he has wanted a grandchild since I got engaged. His snarky comments have lessened in the last year or so – I think because he’s resigned himself to the fact that he may never get one – but the guilt remains with me that he could live his entire life without a grandchild of his own.
I don’t have a simple solution to this, and I doubt you do, too. But pregnancy seems so easy for some people, and so difficult for others. I know in my heart that if it happens for us, it will surely be difficult – that’s the way things usually go in the Baker house. I just wish someone could have a baby for me, design it to look just like BB and hand it over at birth.
Where’s the easy button when you need it?
13 comments January 29, 2010
Mark this day in history: I kept a promise
Justin Timberlake (MTV Hope for Haiti/AP)
So I realize that in the grand scheme of things, my promises have a long track record of going undone. I told you that I’d write such-and-such post and it never showed up. I said that I would webcam myself talking and drinking wine while ranting about something stupid. Never did that either.
Then I told you that for every comment you made on one of my posts last week, I would donate $1 towards Hope for Haiti.
Hallelujah Justin Timberlake I DID IT! I counted up your comments, I added in what I could, and during the Hope for Haiti telethon, I called and waited until I got the greatest celebrity ever! this guy named Josh who happily took my money off my hands. It’s the best money I ever spent, except for the time that I got my mom to give me money for a formal dress, and instead used it to pay off my traffic ticket in Appomattox, VA.
But anyway, thanks to all of you who visited or commented last week. You should keep doing so, even if I don’t give money away this time. It’s just the nice thing to do, people.
2 comments January 27, 2010
The one where life goes on and someone forgot to tell us
We are sitting in the middle of the floor, in folding chairs in the middle of a row of people whose faces I never even noticed. It is dark, except for the stage, lit up with single harsh lavender bulbs here and there to show her at the piano. She is singing, her background singer just behind her, and she is hitting every single solitary high note. Not pitchy at all, before we knew what pitchy was. You are holding my hand and I stop occasionally to look down and make sure they are still there, our hands. When the music is especially good, you look at me to see if I’m looking at you, and I am.
It feels good to be on our own this night, out on the town, freedom being a newly-won privilege. I drove, you rode. We knew what to listen to and we loved riding with the sunroof open, driving too fast on the highway between the mountains. They came with us, too – part of the deal – and we don’t mind, for they can entertain themselves without noticing the electricity we have. It is palpable and we can hardly contain ourselves, set to set, during the intermission, during the drive home. Sometimes it is hard not to smile when we say goodnight to each other, because we know it won’t be too long before we say hello again. Minutes, even.
You recall that night years later and you smile a little, as if that place was long ago and far away. It was. No one likes to admit that though, least of all me. For a while we hung in suspension, no safety net, no tethers holding us together. Just two people, drawn together in one time and space by what? Fire? Lust? Hormones? All of the above, we say. We look like shadows of ourselves when we talk about those days. I change, you don’t. You move on quickly, I don’t. A soundtrack of those days plays in our heads over and over, and we don’t even have to conjure up images or sounds – they are just there. The people are gone, moved on, moved forward, left us. Our lives have done the same, but one of us tries mightily to hold on longer than the other. Funny, because it is opposite of all those years ago – one of us pulling away, the other holding on tightly.
Then a game, just like all the other games. The same players, but different in a way this time, because you don’t make a bet. You don’t place a gamble like always – you let the days and weeks slide by, likely hoping that I will forget. But I don’t forget. One of my worst faults, you said, always remembering things that should be forgotten. I have tried, very hard, to forget the things that should be forgotten, and to remember the things that are important, but the mind works in ways we tell it not to. My mind, anyway. I don’t know about yours anymore.
We are both happy, if forgetful. We are both hanging in new suspension now, after years and love past, and while we are burned into each other’s memory, we are somehow not there at all. It is just as well, because our friends tell us that life goes on and that we shouldn’t look back – the road behind us always looks different from this angle.
But tonight, when I hear her singing just as she did that good night, I think of your face, young and unlined and hopeful, and I wonder what happened to the girl I knew then. That girl had dreams and hopes and plans, and now – tonight – I ask that girl if she is what she thought she would be. She is not, she answers, but she is not sorry. The road ahead looks different from this angle, too.
And amongst the cliches and weepy sad stories is one bottom line: we had a good night, we had a few good years, and then life went on. She sang about it; seems like we should have known.
3 comments January 26, 2010
