Fun in the Triage Room

Thursday, October 15, 2:00 a.m.

Me:  Hmmm.  That was a contraction.  I shall time them!  10 minutes apart–well, I’ve got some time.

Thursday, October 15, 3:00 a.m.

Me:  Hublet, I’m thinking we should be able to wait until 5 or so to get The Boy to the neighbor’s house.

Hublet:  Okay.

Thursday, October 15, 3:30 a.m.

Me:  Huh.  These contractions sure are a lot stronger than they were at the beginning of The Boy’s labor.  And I think they’re 6 minutes apart.  And I think I’m having smaller ones between the big ones.

Thursday, October 15, 4: 00 a.m.

Me:  (In shower)  4 minutes apart.  Hublet, call the neighbors and tell them we’ll be there at 4:30.

Thursday, October 15, 4:30 a.m.

Me:  3 minutes?  Are you kidding me?  Drive faster, dear.

Thursday, October 15, 5:00 a.m.

Me:  Hublet, I seem to be having trouble walking to the registration desk.  Help me out.

Thursday, October 15, 5:05 a.m. Triage room.

Me:  It was awfully hard to get undressed – I feel a lot of pressure.  I may need to push.

Triage nurse:  Hold up a minute, let me check you…that’s the head!  Call the doctor!

Me:  So no drugs?  I think I should push.

Nurse:  NO DRUGS!  DON’T PUSH!

Me:  I don’t really have a choice here!

Doctor:  Good grief, that was fast – weren’t you at 10 minutes apart 3 hours ago?  Okay, completely done and the head is at plus 2! 

Me:  Can I push?  I really need to push!

Everyone in the room:  Uh, sure, I guess.

Flailing ensues as nurses try to grab supplies and doctor tries to get gloves on.

Hublet (entering with suitcase):  What?

Me:  OW!  JESUS CHRIST!

The Girl:  WAAAAAAA!

Nurses:  Holy crap.

Doctor:  Well, that was quick.

Hublet:  (cuts cord)  Holy crap.

Me:  Great.  Can I have a Motrin?

Nurse:  You can have a percoset if you want.

Me:  See, that would have been nice before I pushed the baby out.  

The Girl entered the world at 5:11 a.m. on Oct. 15.  She has 10 fingers, 10 toes, one lovely little round head, and no antlers or other obvious radiation or advanced maternal age-related mutations that we can see.  The Boy is very excited to be a big brother, Hublet is holding up quite well, and I’m just pleased that I didn’t actually give birth in the car.  All in all, life is good.

Still Here. Still Pregnant.

And becoming exponentially more irritable every day.  Watching the news is not helping on the irritability front, so I’m trying not to do that, and I have no patience for sports teams right now, either.

Basically, I will be sitting in the den eating salsa and watching “reality” ghost shows until The Girl decides it’s time to show up.

Like this one:  Celebrity Ghost Stories.  It’s got everything I love about cheesy t.v.:  Unintentionally humorous re-enactments, using blurred focus so that it’s REALLY obvious that the celebrity in question is not actually doing the re-enactment!  Overwrought celebrity prose!  Proof positive that perhaps these folks have had too much easy access to pharmaceuticals for far too long!  Awesome.

Or this one, which I’ve just filed under WTF:  Paranormal State.  It’s way too plot-involved to be an actual reality show, in my humble opinion.  It’s more like a low-budget version of Supernatural, which is itself a low-budget t.v. version of a whole lot of low-budget horror movies.  But I watch it anyway, so it must be doing something right…

And then there’s the classic Scariest Places on Earth, which I still love.  I mean, come on, how can you resist?  It’s hosted by Linda Blair with voiceovers from the teeny tiny psychic woman from Poltergeist!

But if you want something a bit more highbrow that still contains the super-cheesy fun elements of classic History Channel television, might I recommend this one:  Clash of the Gods.  Watching Thor battle the serpent of Midgard–with all the opportunity for bad CGI and overwrought tiny hammer-waving that it represents–is totally worth the price of admission.  Seriously.  If Thor’s actual hammer was that small…well, SOMEBODY was overcompentsating in the comic books, is all I have to say about that.  Plus, it features a medievialist blogger that I like as an expert!  Bonus!

In other news, finished reading the entire Twilight series.  Feral Girl, while I understand and empathize with your desire to not suffer through bad literature alone, you owe me big time.  Dear GOD, that was bad.  The entire second book’s plot is based on the fallout from a paper cut, for Chrissakes!  And no, I am not kidding.

Yuck.

I already have this New Year’s Eve planned.  I am going to express enough milk to get The Girl through a day or two, and then I am going to put The Boy to bed, sit down with Hublet and an entire bottle (or more) of champagne, and play a drinking game of my own devising entitled, “Thank God 2009 is OVER.”  The rules are simple:  every time you think of a stress-inducing event from the previous year, chug. 

It could take a case of champagne to get through, now that I think about it.

So the radio silence this week has been caused by The Boy’s acquiring some sort of virus.  He hasn’t been too bothered, and in fact was pleased by one aspect of being sick–it meant that when I took him in for his 8-year-old checkup he didn’t have to get the flu shot.

The doctor said it was either some random thing or a very mild case of flu, so I’m just trying not to breathe while inside the house for the next few days.  I would much rather The Boy spend a couple of days sofa-bound prior to the Blessed Event rather than afterward, but on the other hand the prospect of giving birth with the flu doesn’t really appeal to me. 

And speaking of things that don’t appeal…I’ve been following the Polanski/Letterman/yucky people threads on the intarwebs and I must say that it has all left me with an unpleasant yucky feeling, and one that apparently isn’t obvious.

Lost in all of the “the rich get treated differently,” “rape-rape,” “hollywood is moral because it has compassion,” “is it harrassment or not,” “but he isn’t a politician”  parsing of the standards to which we should hold people is this question:  if we’re spending all of our time defining standards downward in order to spare someone we may like personally, haven’t we then lost our standards?

Polanski is in a realm of his own.  In the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “turn that rooster into a hen.”  That’s all I have to say about that, notwithstanding Harvey Weinstein’s inability to understand that compassion by itself isn’t the same as morality. 

The Letterman issue is where I get puzzled about the parsing.  See, if we have standards, then that means that NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE, or HOW FUNNY YOU MAY BE, or HOW CONSENSUAL THE CHEATING WAS, or HOW MUCH OF A VICTIM OF EXTORTION YOU ARE, or HOW THIS IS A PRIVATE AFFAIR, if you cheat on your wife (or your girlfriend of approxmiately eight million years) you still are wrong.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  And kind of a yucky person, to boot.

Yes, human beings are fallible.  Yes, forgiveness is possible and that issue is between Letterman and his wife and/or Letterman and God, though I doubt he’s the type to believe in any authority he doesn’t see in the mirror on a daily basis.

But going on t.v. and admitting you were wrong doesn’t make the behavior excusable or okay.  And it certainly doesn’t make it okay because you’re an entertainer as opposed to a cleric or a moralizer. 

Wrong is wrong.  Sorry if that harshes your mellow.

A Future Note to my Son

In light of all the current hoo-ha regarding a certain has-been film director, and the perplexing apologias for his behavior, I’m writing this down now, so that when the time comes for this particular heart-to-heart I will have the text ready.  Feel free to pity The Boy in advance for having to listen to this particular diatribe from his somewhat blunt and outspoken mother.  Text is below the cut, to shield delicate eyes from repeated use of the “p-word.”

Things I will not be doing anytime soon

Visiting Aspen.  And no, not because it’s just another overpriced yuppie tourist trap.  I would like to see Colorado and points West someday.

I will not be visiting Aspen because their public authorities recommend that, when you are confronted by one of the many black bears who have figured out that leftover KFC takeout is tastier than nuts, berries, and carrion, you should:

a)  Throw a rock at the bear.

b)  Make yourself look “big;” and

c)  Stand your ground if it charges you.

Um, no.  If I am confronted by a bear, I plan to shoot it repeatedly with a very powerful gun.  Sorry, bear, but my ancestors didn’t spend milennia clawing their way up the food chain to be usurped by a bunch of citified Ursa.  I’m on top and my boomstick and I plan to stay there.

But since I don’t pack heat while vacationing, and since I think that randomly opening fire on wildlife is verboten in Aspen in any case, I shall leave that no doubt lovely town to those who believe that they can dissuade a hungry bear with rocks and good posture.  Good luck with that!  Love, BAW.

All I have to say about this is – thank God it’s not me.

Getting pregnant while pregnant.  Yow.

Your Wednesday Nutbar

It’s an easy target, but still an amusing read, if you find borderline personality disorders amusing:

Ralph Nader’s Time Magazine interview.

Proving that constant exposure to money, more than anything else, removes people completely from reality.  Best quote: 

By the time the thousand-page monstrosity of complexity and ambiguity gets to his desk, it’s going to be a shred of what the majority of doctors, nurses and the people in this country want — which is full Medicare for all.

I don’t mean to nitpick, but has Nader been paying any attention to anyone outside of his 14 friends who are doctors?  Sentiments among the medical community are mixed about this issue–and I’m softpedaling reality here.

Wow.  I will at least give the headline writer some props here for a headline that works on many, many levels.

And I will give Nader props for making me laugh out loud at the premise that we can all be saved from ourselves if only YOKO ONO gets involved!  Yeah, that’s what this current cluster has been missing–an aging, irrelevant performance artist.  It’s all so clear to me now.

Check List of Checking Things Off

Let’s recap 2009 thus far, shall we?

• Go for 40-year-old mammogram.  Check.
• Discover I am a 40-year-old pregnant woman.  Check.
• Freak out.  Check.
• Quickly schedule a Disney vacation so that my son will be able to go while still young enough not to find the Magic Kingdom lame, and so that I will actually be able to ride the fun rides.  Check.
• Put house on market.  Check.
• Have entire medical community conspire to make me believe I was going to give birth to a two-headed mutant.  Check.
• Medical community’s follow-up one month later:  just kidding!  Check.
• Sell house.  Check.
• Have one month to buy another house and move out.  Check.
• Mortgage insurance companies all suddenly decide to be conservative nit-pickers approximately 5 years after it would have done anyone any good.  Check.
• Freak out about possibility of homelessness.  Check.
• Manage to work out all the trauma–ON THE DAY OF CLOSING, FOR GOD’S SAKE–which involved the loan agent coming to the new house to get the final bits of paperwork AFTER we had closed and begun moving in.  Again I say, dear God.  Check.
• Commence fall baseball season for The Boy.  Check.
• Consider investing in stadium cushion for bleachers, because added weight makes sitting on aluminum for an hour intensely uncomfortable.  Check.
• Throw belated birthday party for 8-year-old two weeks after moving, involving 10 adults and 10 other 8-year-olds armed with lightsabers and nerf guns re-enacting Lord of the Flies on my lawn.  Plus Lego activities. Turn 41 the day after the party. Check.
• Greet vanload of house painters this morning at 8 a.m. to get my home painted with super-expensive low-VOC and no-fume paint, b/c of my delicate condition.  Check.
• Head to Babies ‘R Us at lunch to pick up last-minute odds and ends including new crib mattress and baby monitor, some bottles, breast pump, and crib linens.  Check.

So if you’re wondering why blogging’s been light–there you go.  And now we wait.  The Blessed Event is supposed to take place Oct. 16;  if I get there in time to get drugs and they have wi-fi, I may force Hublet to blog from the hospital so that you are updated on the number of heads The Girl actually possesses.  Or I might do the blogging myself.  I fully intend to make use of the nurses and the nursery this time–my sleep deprivation can commence AFTER I leave the hospital, thank you very much.

In the meantime, I shall attempt to shoehorn in the occasional outraged rant about the fact that BabyCenter.com hates me and wants me to be miserable.  Or maybe I’ll whine about whiny academics – God knows I’ve had plenty of experience with that this summer.

What is an Independent to do?

A.K.A. “Your daily dose of Paglia,” wherein she does a fine job of explaining why, exactly, I am in danger of yelling “A pox on both your houses!” and setting fire to something.  I’m not sure yet what I’ll be setting on fire, but I’m open to suggestions…

Here’s why the democrats are problematic:

Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

There’s also some stuff about all those drugs everyone did during the ’60s, but hopefully those have worn off by now…

And now, lest you think the Republicans are blameless:

What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women’s control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

Yeah, it’s the usual laundry list of evil from the democratic side of the aisle, which is fair, but I’m also looking at you, Governor Sanford, you ginormous, Argentina-addled, oversharing toolbag.  Holy cats.

So.  Since both parties seem completely infested with sanctimonious asses and invested in ignoring reality–specifically, that the reality we’re living in now is one in which WE CANNOT AFFORD all their nifty new government-backed proposals which won’t work the way they’re advertised and all the super shiny neato-keen freedom-limiting bureacracy that will come with it–what’s next?

Besides fire, I mean.

The Limit

I have finally discovered the limit of my tolerance and patience.  No, not with politics, child-rearing or academia.  I have discovered the limit of my ability to understand and empathize with mental illness.  Not all mental illness, mind you, just one permutation.

What is the occasion of this journey of self-discovery and shame, you ask?

Hoarders, on A&E.

Just–Oh My God.  Usually when I watch these shows about addiction or depression or schizophrenia, I may be baffled by the people on the screen, but I can muster empathy for them because they are obviously suffering from a debilitating illness.  But there is something about the hoarding–even though you can obviously argue that it is a debilitating condition–that completely shuts down my empathy valve and has me yelling at the screen, “For God’s sake, stick her in a padded cell and CLEAN THE FREAKING HOUSE!!!!”

Maybe it’s due to the fact that I grew up in a house where my dad’s idea of a fun way to kick off Saturday morning was by vacuuming at 8 a.m.,  followed by raking the shag carpeting.  (Yes, I am a child of the 70’s.  Deal with it.  We had lovely, fluffy shag carpeting, too.  It never got matted or ratty looking.)  My parents, due to their Depression-era raising, were super-scrupulous about taking care of stuff and keeping it clean.  They were too poor to hoard, so they went the other way–you want poster people for “reduce, reuse, recycle,” look no further than my parents.

Or maybe it’s due to the show itself, which does an admirable job of illustrating the kind of denial hoarders live in, without being an hour-long “fix-it” show.  No one suddenly sees the light at the end of the show, no sassy british ladies show up with baking soda and feather dusters to make inappropriate sexual jokes and scour away soap scum–it’s just the same person, insisting that they aren’t hoarding, they’re going to get around to selling the stuff/repairing the stuff/giving the stuff as presents/reorganizing the stuff for an ENTIRE HOUR, while simultaneously refusing to actually get rid of/organize/fix or sell ANYTHING, even when an entire army of mental health professionals and a Haz-Mat team have shown up to help out.

News flash:  Here’s how these stories are probably going to end.  The hoarders are going to lose all their friends and family, die covered in cockroach crap when a pile of ancient newspapers falls over and crushes them, and then the four dozen cats they “rescued” are going to EAT THEM.  But they don’t get it, or they don’t care. 

And instead of empathy, it produces blind, frustrated rage in me when I watch.  Gah.

Is it compelling television?  Definitely.  I just don’t think I’ll be able to watch it anymore, because of its effect on my mental health.