metaphortunate son

even less fun

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:33:15 GMT

Also, I motherfucking hate Mother's Day now. It means for a week the entire newsocommentarianet has been full of pieces and comments and forwards and bullshit based on the respected peer-reviewed journal of Pulling Opinions Out of My Ass about motherhood, and how awful it is, and how we are screwing up our children's lives, and our own lives, and the world, and blah blah blah, and while normally I just let that kind of opinion from people I don't know slide right on by, it turns out I am extremely insecure about parenting, and motherhood, and so this shit gets to me. It gets me right in the unknowable. So I've spent this week anxious and depressed. Bastards.

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baby jokes aren't funny

Sat, 12 May 2012 19:25:29 GMT

It is hard to know how much it is reasonable to anthropomorphize the baby.

I mean, yes he is a little human being. But on the other hand no he's not. He doesn't do things for human reasons, he does things for his own baby reasons, he has baby reactions. He doesn't think of me as "his mother" in the same way that I think of my mother, I am something different. But he is becoming a human. At some point it will be accurate to ascribe normal human motivations to him.

The other day he finished nursing, looked me in the eye, took my nipple between his teeth - he has teeth on the bottom AND TOP now - bit me, and grinned. Because it's funny. Baby joke! I did what I do on these occasions, which is: yelp in pain, angrily say DO NOT BITE MAMA, put the baby down someplace safe, and leave the room for two minutes while he cries and cries. I put him down in his crib, and I did it roughly: I think I actually dropped him half an inch or so. It scared him. It brought home to me just how vulnerable he is: if I want him to go in his crib, in his crib he goes. He can cry and writhe all he wants: there is nothing he can do about it. In his crib he went and out the door I went, and Mr. E, who had gotten home while I was nursing him, talked me down because I was extremely upset. We waited a minute and a half and then he offered to go get the baby. And I said we'd both go, because I didn't want to be mad at the baby. I wanted to make it up. Was I anthropomorphizing? Does the baby understand that I'm mad at him? We went in the room. The baby was frantic. I picked him up, and he stopped crying. I hugged him and told him I wasn't mad at him anymore.

I gave him to Mr. E, who hadn't seen him yet that evening, and...he started crying again. Normally, and again since then, if he's hungry he keeps laserlike focus on me; but if he's not, he likes me and Mr. E equally, and does not prefer one of us holding him over the other. And he wasn't hungry then, because I had just finished nursing him. But he cried until Mr. E gave him back, and quieted when I held him. It really seemed as if he knew that I had been upset with him and wanted to be reassured that he and I were okay now. So I told him we were and held him for a while.

It's fascinating. I wish I knew what was going on in his little head!

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the darkness so far

Tue, 01 May 2012 22:51:16 GMT

So, we began our no electrical lights experiment last Sunday.
In no particular order:

God damn, is our apartment gloomy. We’ve been trying not to use electric lights during the day except when necessary, and Christ it is dark and depressing at my place. Also, even in a room that is not very sunny, candles during the day are also pretty depressing looking.

The baby got a terrible cold and subsequently another ear infection. It was probably unrelated to the experiment, though. Poor baby. He’s feeling better now.

It turns out that if you want to actually use candles for illumination, buy tapers. We bought a bunch of pillar candles because you don’t need holders for them, you can just put them in a saucer. But the flame in pillar candles sinks down in the middle, becoming hidden behind a rim of glowing wax. Very pretty, if you want to create atmosphere. Fucking useless, if you want to read or cook by it. Tea lights are better than pillar candles because they don’t sink as far before you replace them, but they still sink. Tapers are the way to go.

One interesting feature is that I can’t help being aware of how many resources we are consuming in order to produce light. Intellectually I know that turning an electric light on burns, um....coal....or gas...or something in a factory far away, which is, like, bad...for the Earth. And will cost me money a month from now. But it’s deceptive like Amazon Kindle app 1-click ordering, really what happens as far as I can perceive is that I flip a switch and light pours out of my house inexhaustibly for free. Whereas with candles, I see how far the candle burns down in an evening. I know how often I have to replace the tealights. It’s obvious.

I will be interested to see what happens to my power bill these two months. (We started last week so that we could do this for a full four weeks before Memorial Day weekend.)

I am not getting to bed as much earlier as I had thought. The baby goes to bed at 7:30, and then I get in my half-hour of computer usage, and then I still have to cook and eat dinner, and clean up, and do a chore maybe, and talk to Mr. E for a bit, and pump, and hello, it’s 9:30 or 10:30. Wasn’t I going to get some reading in before I went to sleep?

We had people over for boardgames by candlelight this past weekend! It was fun! But it is REALLY hard to distinguish colors. We had to not use the green pieces (of Ticket to Ride) because it was impossible to tell them from the blue ones. And it was quite hard to tell the difference between orange and pink.

Unsurprisingly, turning off the computers at 8 is an even bigger deal than turning off the lights. Oh god, I miss you all so much.

My phone is an even bigger deal than the computer. I do a lot of casual reading on my phone: while waiting for water to boil, while snacking, while nursing the baby, most especially while pumping, I’ll be reading Twitter or a book on my Kindle app or something. And now I can’t. Pumping is the worst, because it really is awful without something to distract me. And I can’t really read a book while pumping, because I can’t get enough candles set up to give me enough light. Maybe I can get another taper holder and rearrange shit next to the sofa sometime this week.

I think Mr. E and I are talking more now that we are prevented from staring at our separate computers all evening, though. And it’s nice! I actually had a bit of worry that we’d drive each other mad if we were locked up with each other for several hours each evening with no computers and it being hard to read. :) Actually yesterday he came home and told me of eavesdropping on three younger women on the bus to work who had been talking about how awful it would be to be married: dinner with the SAME PERSON! Every day! And maybe on the weekend you go out on a date, but you go out with the SAME PERSON! Argh, how dreary! But somehow it is working out okay for me.

Anyway, I have to go pick up the baby, and I also just accidentally drank a whole cup of regular coffee. Shit. So tonight should be interesting.

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bump in the night

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:14:46 GMT

Earlier in the week we had a friend over for dinner. This friend is in her midtwenties, and single, and at some point we started talking about doing spontaneous things (as in, how one ends up on beaches in one's underwear) and she said that she was trying to really do that, because now was the time for that in her life. And I thought about how once upon a time I might spontaneously decide to drive to Oregon with a friend and call Mr. E from Redding where we stopped to buy clean underwear and tell him I'd be home at the end of the weekend, and now we leave parties at 8 pm so that the baby does not miss his bedtime, and I somewhat grimly said that yes. Do it while you can. Because our days of spontaneous crazyshit are over for now.

Which is of course how we decided to spend the month of May in the darkness on two days' notice.

See, I ran into this blog post on spending a month without artificial light, and I thought it was fascinating, and I sent it to Mr. E, and he thought it was fascinating, and we thought it might be fun to try it sometime...and then we stared at each other...and thought, why not?

Though first let's just get it out of the way that DUH, candles are artificial. But 1) the spectrum is different, and 2) the amount of light produced is an order of magnitude less. The idea is not to eschew the Works of Man, the idea is to cut down on the amount of artificial light in our life for a month and see what effect it has on our sleep patterns and anything else.

Another issue is that unfortunately our apartment is so dark that unless it is early afternoon on the sunniest of days, we have lights on during the day just to be able to comfortably read. We decided that we will work around this by allowing ourselves to have electric light on between the time of official sunrise (6:30 am) and sunset (8 pm). But we're going to do it as little as possible. Another exception: if we have to change the kid's diaper in the middle of the night, as baby happy butt is more important.

And then there's computers. Big source of artificial light. Big source of interesting things to keep you up late. Those are gonna go off at 8 pm too. The big problem here is that the baby's day lasts from 6:30 am to about 7:30, 7:45 pm, which you will note does not leave a lot of time for any necessary computer-reliant tasks. So we may have one slightly later computer day a week. Or maybe we will stay inside all weekend trading off watching the baby & being glued to the screen. If this motivates us to go outside less because we need to spend the daylight hours indoors on tasks that require computers or light it will have backfired. Only one way to find out! In any case, my recreational computer use is gonna go WAY down - especially since we are counting our smartphones as computers - so I won't be around much in May. Unless we decide this is bullshit a week in, of course, but we do want to give it time enough to have more than just the immediate effects.

Also, I'd be lying if I said it didn't cross both our minds that we are gonna have so much sex in the month of May. \o/

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what if they suddenly started making porn for guys?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 05:21:28 GMT

Faith Erin Hicks had some pithy commentary on this week's Newsweek cover article.

(Original photo is from weloveguys.net. Do you know how many photos I was able to find of a dude sexily modeling canonical masculine insecurity on the net? Zero, that's how many. Sexy dudes, yes. Dick measuring, the entirety of Reddit. (Rimshot.) No, seriously, dudes measuring their dicks on camera, just turn off Safe Search, or for that matter check your spam filter. Sexy, worksafe dick measuring, big fat ZERO.)

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Quick note

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 05:39:26 GMT

CRAAAAAAAAWLING. MOTILE BABY. Doom has come upon us! Adorable, happy doom! Seriously, the very first thing he did? He crawled over to the nail clippers and chewed on them. Time to remove everything from the bottom 30" of the world!

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self-negating descriptions

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:29:57 GMT

brownbetty asks if there is a name for things you cannot say about yourself without inherently conveying the idea that they are not true. For example, "I'm a classy guy" = you are not a classy guy.

I find this sort of thing endlessly fascinating, as I am fascinated by things which cannot be communicated by saying them! Another example is "Please only do [x] if it is absolutely vital." If you say that, everyone who wants to do [x] will decide it is important enough and will do [x]. If you want people to only do [x] if it is absolutely vital, say "No one can do [x]." People for whom it is vital will do it anyway, because they have no choice.

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incompetent parenting

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 04:42:28 GMT

This past weekend we took the Junebug to Florida to meet his great-grandmother, who, alas, is not in the best of health. Basically, although we hope it is not the case, this might have been her only chance to meet him. She did get to hold him and play with him a bit, so I'm glad we went.

But given that we were in Florida - land of warm ocean! We thought we must also take a couple of hours out of our day and take the Junebug to the beach. Total, massive failure. This was our fault. We did not make sure he was nice and full before we introduced him to a scary new environment, and like most of us, the Junebug has way more emotional resilience when he's not hungry. Also, I pushed him too fast: he was okay with sitting in the sand, and seemed to kind of enjoy it, but then I took him into the water, and the WAVES ATTACKED HIM and then he was frightened and miserable. And then it occurred to me that he might be hungry! So I fed him right there, which made him feel better, except that I had not moved far enough up the beach before I sat down and I didn't want to move once he was latched on because it would involve pulling him off so Mr. E laughed his ass off about how Californian I was, sitting in the surf in my underwear nursing a naked baby, but every once in a while a particularly big wave would make it up far enough to splash us, and the baby would pull off long enough to sob heartbreakingly in terror and then SCHLOOMP back onto my boob, and basically the giant neon arrow floating over my head blinking WORST MOTHER EVER manifested again. I hate that damn thing.

And then after that of course we had a baby entirely covered in sand. We washed him, but the sand would not come off his scalp, because it was stuck to his cradle cap. Yes the Junebug has had oily yellow scales on his scalp. I realize this is gross, but in the grand scheme of baby grossness, it hardly even registers, so we had not done anything about it because it hasn't bothered him and our pediatrician says it just goes away eventually. So I was willing to live with it. But I was not willing to live with it once it was gluing sand to his head. So I sacrificed an old t-shirt and a new clean toothbrush and poured mineral oil all over his tiny head and scrubbed it with the toothbrush. Which got rid of the sand and the cradle cap! And then I shampooed him. Four times. And then Mr. E washed him the next morning. And the Junebug still went off to daycare looking like the Exxon Valdez ran aground on his head. Greaser just doesn't really do his look justice. It's possible I used too much mineral oil.

Also, I don't know about you, but nursing still makes me feel like Wolverine.

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Inda's Game

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 05:52:17 GMT

On a rec from badgerbag I've just read the four books in Sherwood Smith's Inda series.

It is unfairly reductive but just like when you are trying to describe Motherlines and you say "second-wave post-dystopian female separatist sf" and people are like "Oh, Gate to Women's Country?" - "No, lesbian female separatist" - Oh, Ammonite?" - "No, I said post-apocalyptic - with the evil men -" "Oh, Daughters of a Coral Dawn?" - "No, look, it's - it's the one with the horsefucking, okay." "Oh right, THAT one." Nobody ever forgets that one! Anyway, in the same way I will forever think of these as the Nobody Poops books. And I understand there's a reason, I'm pretty sure it's because the author was trying to think of what people would use magic for if there was only a little bit of very limited magic in the world and only women used it; i.e., magic is used for what the author considers would be important to women. So nobody poops, or pees, instead they do a Waste Spell and vanish their biological wastes from inside. Presumably this also works on mucus and phlegm as I don't remember any adults blowing their noses at any point in the book. Bodies don't get buried, instead they are Disappeared. Stored water is magically kept fresh and clean, there are light spells, heat spells on the baths, Birth Spells, it's all very housekeeping-oriented magic. Which I guess can be seen as women's work. Two problems with it, though: one, babies are a huge part of traditional women's work, and the Waste Spell doesn't work on babies, babies still wear diapers. What the fuck, that misses, like, 80% of the point. And two, in this book, all the women go around armed, and their traditional job is to defend the castle while the men are out defending the fields or possibly attacking the other people's castle, and they spend all their time doing wargames and running half the country, so you'd think really that in this particular universe, women's magic would include things like intruder detection and possibly document printing.

I was on a Wiscon panel many years ago where someone, and I forget who, which is probably for the best, insisted that the traditional dramatic structure was sexist because the exposition, rising action, climax, denouement, etc. mimics the male experience of sex. They claimed that what we needed was more female-identified narratives with structures more like the variety of female sexual habits. I hope that person, wherever they are, has read the Inda books. Not that this is the only way women have sex, but there is a not unheard of female sex pattern of, so to speak, exposition, rising action, falling action, rising action, falling action, deciding that it's time to do something else, taking a shower, going out for Chinese food. No real climax; more intense bits, less intense bits, but essentially messing around having fun until you decide that you're done. And that would describe the narrative structure of these books. They're all kind of the second book in the trilogy. They're not bad! I read them all! But they kind of ended when...the author...decided she was done? I mean, that's cool? Okay, I would kind of like to know what the deal was with Norsunder...and the question about the Disappearing Spell...and what happened to Jeje...and with Jeje and Tau...and Signi...and Nugget...and Ramis...oh, but okay, whatever. Sure, I could go for some Chinese food.

The first book does leave me with a slight suspicion that the series started life as a Medieval Times* AU of Ender's Game. Inda, like Ender, is an innocent killer: a Holy Badass, the best general and strategist and fighter and all-around incredibly nice guy, bullied by the older kids, abused by the System, inherently and unwaveringly devoted to what is Right, who never wants to be a war leader, it just naturally happens that way**. He is, however, the most boring character in the story, which I don't remember Ender being. That's okay, though; the cast of thousands that surrounds him is pretty awesome, starting with his protective older sister Valentine/Hadand and abusive but ambiguously helpful older brother Peter/Tanrid. It is kind of tough to keep the thousands straight though; there seriously are a shitload of characters, and they all have like three names, plus nicknames, which sometimes get switched around. It is one of the things that makes me think that Inda's world is not based in Vaguely Europe but instead in Vaguely Russia. I'm not sure, I'm American, I don't know shit about Russia, but I have run into the name/nickname problem in what little Russian lit I know. There are also Definitely Vikings.

One thing I liked about these books is that they are not gritty or grimdark; and that is a sign of how much the grimdark Overton window has shifted, because they do include war and torture and mutilation and child death. But at least in this universe, the people notice that these are bad things! There's a bit near the end, not to spoil too much, where one set of characters has killed a bunch of people in a particularly bad way, and wherever they go, everyone is extremely pissed at them and refuses to deal with them because of what they did. I half expected them to start going "jeez, are you all STILL harping on about all those dead people, that was like a YEAR ago! God! If this was a GRRM book no one would have even NOTICED!" People in Smith's book notice! Also, pretty much everyone is more or less cheerfully polyamorous, and no rape (seriously! In four books! When was the last time that happened in a fantasy series?) and no homophobia either: some people are gay, some are straight, some are bi, and the only people that care are the people who are trying to bang 'em with greater or lesser success. It's really nice! It's shocking how enjoyable it can be just to spend time in a fictional world where you can just let go of all that bullshit for a while. It's okay, there's plenty of other bullshit in the world to provide conflict! Let's spend some time meditating on war and violence and why humans can't get away from it and sometimes it seems like we don't even want to! Let's spend some time thinking about how to make the best of a life in which no one ever gets what they want and that is beautiful. Then hey, let's go get some Chinese food.

-------------------

*They live in castles, they travel by horseback, they don't have guns. However, they also don't have religion, plague or other diseases, much of an economic system...it's pretty vague, as Ye Olden Tymes settings go.

**Making him the exact opposite of Dag Erkric, who is the only mustache-twirlingly one-dimensionally evil character in the whole book, which is nice.

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good morning, gorilla

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:18:55 GMT

Last night I dreamed (vivid, fever dreams) that the Junebug was not an actual human baby; I dreamed that we had adopted a baby gorilla. And I was looking at him, lying in his crib in his diaper, all furry, and thinking that right now he is adorable and everybody loves him but what is going to happen when he is a full-grown male gorilla? We won't be able to control him! Full-grown male gorillas are dangerous! He'll have been raised as a human, but he'll never be able to live alone - what happens when we're gone! And in the dream I was thinking that maybe I wanted to have a human baby of my own - but what would the Junebug think, would he think that we loved him any less, would he hate his sibling for being so different and being able to do stuff he'd never do?

Hello, my anxieties about having a special needs child!

(No reason as of now to think that the Junebug is special needs - but these things happen sometimes.)

It's really ugly how having a baby has forced me to confront some of my own -isms. I want my child to be able to walk, I want my child to be able to read! How different is that from saying "I want a child who is able to walk?" I think it's different? But maybe not that different. Argh. But I want all these things for him, I want his path to be easy! I guess it's just really important not to project disappointment on him for the harder paths that he may end up having to take in some way.

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come back, Ms. Tepper

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:08:13 GMT

It occurs to me that one of the annoying things about the GOP's war on women is that I miss feeling like Sheri Tepper was over the top.

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two things about the Junebug

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 04:32:10 GMT

1) He clapped!

We went to library story hour with shaix and her little dude; the Junebug's first library visit! He loved it! There was really terrible singing, and a nice librarian read us a couple of books, and one of the songs had clapping in it, which he did not do, because up till now he has not quite gotten clapping. He loves it when I sing and clap to him, but his reaction is not to clap himself but to try and nom on my hands because something cool is happening with them and all cool things must immediately be put in his mouth. And when I try to clap his little hands together he clasps them and grins. It's adorable. So he didn't clap during the clapping song. But afterwards when the librarian was reading a story - he clapped. All by himself. And I freaked out quietly to shaix and kissed him all over his little head and the librarian noticed so the Junebug got his own little round of applause. And then yesterday he did it again at home and Mr. E got to see it.

2) Communication!

Yesterday we missed the bus coming home from daycare. It was so full that it just went right by us. So I said, fuck it, with Daylight Savings (I love Daylight Savings!) it's still light out, let us go to that little park on the way. So we went to the little park, where there were a bunch of dogs running around, and I put the Junebug down on the grass. There were no dogs near him, but he still looked around, looked extremely worried, and then waved his arms frantically at me - and I knew that he wanted to be picked up. So I picked him up and sat him on my knee and he was fine. I tried putting him down again and same thing: worried waving, it was perfectly clear what he wanted. So we sat on the bench and as long as I was holding him he was happy and excited to be watching the doggies run around and bark and play with each other. It was lovely. I had originally thought that we were supposed to be trying to teach him to understand us, but hell with it: it's all good!

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bad, good, bad

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 03:42:59 GMT

Blehhhh. I have so much crap, oh my god, so many things. And all the things I own need to be cleaned or folded or restocked or wiped or sorted or hung up or mailed or filled out or run through the wash or Lord, thrown away, or sharpened or mended or mostly just moved from one place to another. They all need to be moved from one place to another. The sweaters need to be moved to the shelf in the closet so that the tights and long underwear and pyjamas can be moved to the sweater drawer so that the summer clothes can be moved to the pyjama drawer so that the electronics can be moved to the summer clothes drawer. The books need to be rearranged on the shelves. The shoes need to be moved to the shoe rack. Why can't anything be in the place that it needs to end up in? Why must it all be somewhere else?

I dreamed the other night that Mr. E and I moved to a new house and we were fighting because I wanted to throw away at least half of everything we owned. I woke up and it still kind of seems like a good idea. Imagine all the space we'd have. ♥_____♥

In reality what Mr. E and I have been fighting over for weeks on end is what to feed the baby. :(

The baby did eat though! Yesterday! He deliberately opened up his little mouth and moved his little head forward and ingested some prunes! He's done it twice! I think he likes pureed prunes! And FURTHERMORE, today he deliberately opened his mouth and took in some chile verde! He immediately spat it back out again, but that's okay - if he gets the idea that you put food IN your face before you decide whether or not you like it, that would be a huge step forward!

In other news, the Republican war on women....I can't even deal. Just wondering which state legislature is gonna be the first to pass a law requiring a woman to carry around a dead fetus in a jar for three days before she can get an abortion. Or birth control pills.

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c'mon, universe

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 01:58:30 GMT

Tell me someone's made a Due South vid to "Dear Chicago."

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QOTD

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:45:57 GMT

Me: "Did you notice he's babbling now, like proper babbling? He says 'ba ba ba' and 'ga ga ga' all the time. Like a real baby!"

Mr. E: "Yeah! Sometimes he accidentally says words! Like, the other day he said 'Gaia'! But there wasn't any thought behind it. It was just a random set of syllables without meaning, just like when any newage hippie says it."

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pop quiz

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 05:34:17 GMT

Play along at home! Pin the number on the Venn diagram:

1. Factory farming
2. Diabetes
3. Parent-child relationships
4. Classism
5. Public health policy
6. Health At Any Size/Fat Acceptance
7. Depression
8. Hanne Blank
9. Rush Limbaugh
10. Race
11. Science
12. Feminism
13. Slutwalks
14. Sexual/romantic relationships
15. Family meals
16. Michael Pollan
17. Whole Foods
18. Lesley Kinzel
19. Paleo
20. I'm not really hungry, but my God do I need a drink

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wish in my heart it was Sunday

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:07:40 GMT

Today I went to a huge flea market with the Junebug and zdashamber and we ate a deep-fried Twinkie and got a sunburn and got mistaken for lesbian mommies! AMERICA, FUCK YEAH.

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Junebug updates

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 04:47:58 GMT

no fun for you
Today on the couch I had to explain to the Junebug that he is not allowed to grab my Girl Genius collections because he is too little. He can't have them! He can't have anything fun! Then we lectured him about how he is too little for fun. This led to tossing him up in the air to keep him as far away from any fun as possible. Judging from the expression on his tiny face, however, that backfired somehow.

probably not dead
Child, in the middle of the night: HACK HACK COUGH COUGH WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH COUGH COUGH WHEEZE COUGH HACK CRYYYYYYYYY.

Me (mentally, slowly swimming my way up to consciousness): Oh. Crap. Baby's awake.

(long pause)

I guess I should check on him.

Child: COUGH COUGH WAAAAAAAAAAH wheeze AAAAAAAAAAAAAH - truly terrible death rattle CHOKE.

Silence: [REIGNS THROUGHOUT THE HOUSE]

Me: Crap.

C'mon kid, make some noise.

Silence: [IS UNBROKEN, UNLIKE ANY OF THE BABY'S OTHER THINGS]

Me: Okay. Um.
Probably he fell back asleep. In which case if I go in there it would be useless. And possibly counterproductive, because I might wake him up.

Or possibly he's dead. Maybe I should check on that.

(long pause, as it is 2:30 am and I am having about one thought a minute)

It would be a terrible tragedy if he were dead. But you could make the case that I would be more able to deal with a terrible tragedy after a few more hours of sleep. Crap, that's probably not the right way to think about it.

(long pause)

He might be only mostly dead though. How long can you be dead and they can still rescuscitate you? It's like half an hour now or something, right? How long was Buffy dead? The first time, I mean? Crap, how long have I been lying here thinking? Did I fall back asleep? Shit, maybe I should check on the baby.
------

Anyway, long story short (too late!) sometimes I get up and check on the baby, sometimes I don't, but either way he's always been fine, and we are starting to suspect that the horrifying death rattle thing is actually how he has learned to clear his throat, for maximum parental terror.

(I am doing more night-baby-checking now because Mr. E has managed to tear a tendon in his foot and is in a boot for a couple of months now, goddammit. Which means that if he checks on the baby, he has to put the boot on, with the baby wailing while he gets it on, then he has to clomp in there and accidentally kick the crib with the boot, which for some reason the baby is not a big fan of, then once the kid is quiet he has to come back and open the velcro to take the boot off which is quite loud and has been known to rewake the baby. So I'm doing more night-baby-checking. Goddammit.)

worst of both worlds
We were told that once the kid started eating solids his poop would immediately become smelly. And it has, Lord, it has. But we were also told that the good part was that it would become more solid, like ordinary poop, and easier to clean. This has so far failed to manifest. So now that the Junebug is taking in solids in homeopathic amounts (you want dilution? A standard dilution is the amount of applesauce ingested by a raspberry-blowing baby. He is really not taking to food. So far we do our best to make him laugh, or give him something he actually wants to put in his mouth, like an acrylic ball or a chunk of wood, and sneak the spoon in there when he opens his mouth to chew on the other thing) we still have the Lake of Whole Grain Mustard effect, but now he also smells like he is factory farming hogs in his shorts. Ah, parenting. I do it for the glamour.

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apparently I'm tired. Or something.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:21:40 GMT

I was just in a conversation where I was trying to make a point, but I was having trouble nailing down exactly what it was, in fact the only thing I am quite sure of is that I didn't manage to say it, whatever it was, which is so FRUSTRATING, and makes me feel like I CAN'T just leave it at that, I've totally managed to misrepresent myself, surely if I just keep talking I will eventually manage to say what I think, right? Right? Even if there is the creeping suspicion that although I am sure that my elusive point is a good point, I really am, but just possibly it might not, strictly speaking, be a relevant point? But it's a good point, I swear it is! If I ever managed to say it properly you would all be struck by the force of my rightness! Maybe I will try one more time! Shut up and let me finish!

How do you stop yourself when you get like this? Do you ever get like this?

Also I continue my streak of shame in only ever pulling crap like this when I am stone cold sober. Although it is true that this week I have had too much to think.

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sleeping & reading

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:03:50 GMT

So apparently sleep training is a bad word? J. said that she went to a mom-baby yoga class and during the bit where you go around and say what's up with you, one of the moms said her baby was up all night forever and she was about to die and one of the other moms suggested sleep training and apparently all the other moms would have reacted more positively if she had suggested boiling the baby in oil for twenty minutes before bedtime*. Seems they practically shamed the poor woman out of the room. I did not know this! If I had, I - okay, I probably would still have told people at my moms' group 8-month meetup that we had started sleep training, but at least I would have had the chance to get all defensive about it pre-emptively.

Anyway, we started sleep training the little dude on Friday night. Friday night was horrible. Saturday night was better than it had been before we started. Last night was aces. Although we are doing the Sleepeasy Solution thing where you gradually take down the amount of time he nurses, so I am still nursing him 3x a night, only now I am setting an alarm to do it which is extra annoying. But in less than a week if all goes well it will be 2x a night. And in less than two weeks if all goes well it will be only once, and my current plan is to keep one feed in the middle of the night for a while. So we'll see how it goes!

I read Sacred Games I think because someone recced it to badgerbag in one of her recs request posts, though I can't find it now. If you learned about India only from this book you would believe that India was a one billion person country made entirely of sadness and gritty misery and corruption and really, really depressing sex. (Well - I would say it's only really depressing for the men in the book about, maybe, um, 65% of the time? But it is clearly depressing for the women and little boys about 98% of the time, and I believe that if sex is depressing for even only one of the parties involved, it is depressing sex. Also, by "depressing" I mostly mean "no one ever considers it rape because somebody is getting paid - although not necessarily the person getting fucked - or else the people are married, but if you happen to believe that rape can happen under those circumstances, this book is about as rapey as Game of Thrones.") But then if you learned about England only from the works of P.D. James you would come away with the impression that England was a tiny country made only of despair and crippling social anxiety and tiny amounts of desultory, depressing, although at least mostly consensual sex. Having been there, that was not the impression I got. What I find interesting is that if you learned about Chicago only from the works of Sara Paretsky you might actually want to visit Chicago some day!

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* Note: don't do this. Your baby will be dangerously undercooked unless you boil it for at least 40 minutes, and 45 is more likely for a baby of about 12 lbs.

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that sucked so bad

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:40:39 GMT

Well, this has been the worst weekend in a long, long while.

( It started off relatively innocuously on Thursday morning, with the Junebug screaming in a small puddle. )

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makeup

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:52:03 GMT

So to follow up from our earlier conversation, one afternoon I did take myself to Sephora and get a willowy person to put makeup on me and show me how it was done. First she told me that I had great skin and barely need foundation at all. Then she put this liquid foundation from Make Up For Ever on me, to take out a bit of redness in my cheeks. Then she put blush on me, presumably to put the redness back in my cheeks. I decided that this seemed unnecessary. I also worked out why people are always telling me they thought I was younger. It's because when you put makeup on your skin you instantly add five to ten years to your age. Seriously: I went around the store trying different kinds of concealer and foundation and such. Do the same thing if you don't believe me! Put a bit on the back of your hand and blend it in. Marvel at all the tiny wrinkles and lines in the skin there that you never, ever could have noticed before. So when this person was finished making me up I definitely looked fancier and maybe even prettier but also ten years older. So I decided that foundation is not for me. The promise of concealer sounds really nice (as if I could erase all the night wakings!) but again, suddenly it gives me all these wrinkles under my eyes so it's no go.

I did buy some mascara, and I think it looks nice on me. I also bought some eyeliner but the truth is that my life is not currently really fancy enough for eyeliner, so I haven't worn it yet. Someday Mr. E and I will go out on a date again and I will try it out. Maybe I will buy some eyeshadow before then, too! There will probably be time. Though I have no immediate plans to go makeup shopping again.

I did find this fantastic makeup primer online. Finally I understand why I used to pick lip glosses in colors that appealed to me and some of them worked and some of them didn't and I never knew why! Now I know that it's orange undertones that look like clown makeup on my olive skin. I used to think that purple was exaggerated and clownish and now I come to discover that purple undertones just look neutral and natural on me. And Clinique divides up their lipcolors into reds, pinks, nudes, and violets, so that was extremely helpful.

Going around with lipstick and a skirt on, I have gotten a bit of a "your hair don't stick up no more!" vibe from a couple of old friends. Maybe butch is cooler because you have to be a little brave to be a butch woman? Maybe butch is cooler because it rejects girl stuff and is more like being a guy? Maybe because I used to look more gay? Eh, I'm still just as gay as I've ever been, which is obviously only sort of. Though it's funny, now that I think of it: the first girl I ever kissed, really properly kissed, it was at a goth club, after she had spent the earlier part of the evening doing my makeup, and I had spent it silently vibrating out of my skin. Having a gorgeous femme do your makeup is piercingly erotic. Competence, steady hands, her attention on you, her face three inches from yours, her breath brushing your cheek, as she tells you, "Look up. Perfect. Beautiful. Now open your mouth."

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milestones

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:18:41 GMT

The Possibly In Some Light Charming Milestone

On Saturday, at the age of just over 7 months: having achieved sufficient head control, the Junebug, for the first time, was juggled.

(There's a baby-juggling pattern, where you hold the baby in the left arm and throw two balls up with the right hand and shift the baby to the right arm and catch the balls with the left hand and so on. You don't toss the baby over your head, guys! At least, not if you're not standing right over the bed!)

The Not Charming In Any Way Milestone

The little dude is congested, and the Nosefrida was soaking in soapy water, and, well, today was the first time I got myself a tissue to spit into and just tried sucking out his nose without benefit of technology. (It worked some, but not very well.)

To think I once had qualms about parenthood because I thought it was gross the way parents hold their palms out and order "Spit it out, whatever it is."

When I went home for Christmas this year we had dinner with my friend and her pregnant wife and obviously spent all evening talking about babies. There was one very special moment where they were laughing in disbelief that there would be a nonzero amount of vomit that you would be prepared to just wipe off your pillow with a cloth diaper and go back to sleep without changing the sheets, and we were laughing in nostalgia about the days when there wasn't. I know all my nerds love "You Ruined Everything" but the song that keeps running through my head about parenting is the Dresden Dolls' "Sex Changes".

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more Google stuff

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:35:17 GMT

Either Google doesn't know a single thing about me, or it knows enough about me to know that if it told me everything it knew about me I would freak out and never touch a Google website again.

It's weird. I mean, of course Google taken as a whole knows basically every single thing about me: it has my email and my calendar, plus I'm sure my entire search history. (I've turned off Web History. Anyone who thinks that means they actually don't keep track? Yeah, don't all put up your hands at once.). What I'm looking for is confirmation that the left hand doesn't easily keep track of what the right hand is doing.

Mr. E and I have been talking recently about the difference between public and publicized, and levels of anonymity. I mean, in one sense, no account that's not free can be anonymous for me, because once you start paying for stuff it is tied to your credit card or your bank account or whatever. But I'm not a Chinese dissident, right, I don't need that level of anonymity. I just need enough anonymity that random assholes can't get my address and my parents don't find me bitching about them with a quick web search. Some companies seem to think that if they can't guarantee government dissident levels of anonymity protection there's no point in offering the lesser kind. But it's not true.

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Babies of Gor

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:16:55 GMT

"The parent picked up the tissue. 'No! Do not wipe me!' wept the baby. But he was baby, and so he would be wiped. Such is the way with babies."

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