That Damn Cat

Let me start with the cat.  Her name is Sasha, which my son pronounces "Sassa."  He sort of lisps when he says it, which I guess is standard two-year-old pronunciation, and normally I think it's cute.  Right now, though, nothing is cute, and I can't decide if I hate my hair more than my cat.  My hair falls into my eyes whenever I look down, and I am annoyed by this 75093-485-74597324 times a day.  (Please ignore hyphens.  I don't have a number pad on my laptop, which means my frustrated large number creation spaz attacks don't even work properly.)  Anyway, back to the hair.  I would  cut it, but there is the aesthetic.  Luckily, I don't usually have sharp objects in my possession during my fits of irritation, because I would probably stab own eyes out in attempt to cut hair off.

But I said I was starting with the cat.  My mother in law is visiting, and she keeps forgetting her glasses.  She cannot read, see, walk, or hear (I know.) without them, so I am unsure why she ever takes them off.  When I ask her she says, "Stupid habit" and then takes them off again.  I am learning to avoid the topic.  I love my mother in law.  I truly do.  She is sweet and eccentric.  She loves my son, and Ari loves her.  She spends time playing with him when I and my wife are sick and/or exhausted.  She tries to teach him to read.  She cuddles him and brings him large bags of clothing and the best toys he's ever gotten.  But I swear to God if I had a staple gun, I would staple those glasses to her eyeballs.  And if I had a tube of Superglue, I would glue them to her face.  Because every time she enters a room, even somehow if it is THE ROOM HER GLASSES ARE IN, she says "Oh, I forgot my glasses" and turns around (which takes her 15 minutes) to go back for them.  The only way to avoid her long disappearance is for me to leap up, race to the place where I know her glasses are, somehow get around her (She invariably is blocking the door in these crucial moments.), and retrieve her glasses before she leaves.  Alternatively, I can try and distract my son who wants desperately to play with her until she returns, but this is time consuming and he typically likes her better than me, so I take one for the team and race off to fetch them.  I do this several times an hour.  It is exhausting.

But I said this was about the cat.  In the midst of my glasses retrieval missions, I have the cat to deal with.  She is crazy.  She wants fresh water, with ice cubes, 57924852098-6235543 times an hour.  She meows and meows at me for this.  She inserts her fuzzy little body in front of my feet, tripping me, yearning madly for fresh water, which must be cold, and must have left the Brita within the past ten minutes, or is rejected.  (At the reject times, she digs with her paws on the linoleum to "bury" her water bowl, I guess to protect it from other animals in case she is ever desperate enough to drink the abhorrent, 11-minute-old water.)  My mother in law has taken to giving Sasha fresh ice cubes whenever they are in the kitchen together.  The two of them stand there in the kitchen, my MIL making mishaps by dropping ice cubes and knocking over cups of fluids and then slipping on the spills and banging her head accidentally on the freezer door with Sasha weaving lovingly through her legs.

I know to stay out of the room.  Still, I am grateful at these times to have them occupying each other.  Nobody needs their glasses.  The water refreshing is happening without me.  My son looks on from the safety of the living room, giggling happily.  I am not stupid: I know a gift when I see one.  I sit on the couch and take a breath, and all, for now, is well.

Secret Gossip

I just saw my former friend, whom I will call "T."  She was once a good friend of my wife and I.  Then she was rude to my beautiful wife in a convoluted way I no longer remember, and now I hate her.  She came into the bookstore I run.  I thought people should know that she:
a) is fat, with more chins than both the baby (who is supposed to be fat) and his recently-pregnant mother (i.e. me, who has a damn good excuse)
b) wore a hideous scarf with roses (!) on it, in attempt at cool-pseudo-old-lady-retro, but instead appearing like actual-old-lady-doesn't-know-scarf-is-gauche
c) was mistaken at her work place for a republican (probably because she looks like one now, what with that scarf, which I think I saw on Cindy McCain the other day)
d) is miserable at her job and cannot find another one
e) STILL hasn't gotten married to that slacker fiance of hers
f) is not even living with that slacker fiance of hers, who is too "southern" to live with her, which is bullshit because I know "southern", and we shack up without marriage like nobody's business.

I was super-nice to her, in that way we are with the people we hate.  And I elicited all of this information without directly questioning her.  But since she thinks I am dumb, she probably bought it and walked off wondering why she ended up telling me all about the many loser things in her loser life.

The Final Stretch

In my first trimester I thought I was tired, but really I was just sleepy.  And then in my second trimester I thought I was tired, but really I was just a little piqued.  NOW, I am tired, and I am having cravings.  I thought I had cravings before, but I was mistaken.  I went to Safeway for my Smores ice cream, and they were having a sale on both Ben & Jerry's and Haagen Daaz, so I bought four tubs.  Also, a frozen pizza, a frozen burrito, a bunch of diet soda, bananas, two boxes Pop-tarts, one bag doughnuts, one bag Oreos with double stuff chocolate filling, a Blue Machine, chicken parm Hot Pockets, a grapefruit, and I think much more.  I cannot help it.

I have been hungry since last week, and in spite of my stomach being squashed into a space the size of a grape, I never seem to be full.  Some man in a suit was considering (I could tell. . .) giving me a look while I was in the cookie aisle debating for ten minutes over whether I needed 16 bags of cookies and if so what kind.  I think, as is usual with simpletons, he was confused by my 4 cases of diet soda and many boxes of Pop-tarts co-mingling in cart.  I glared at him and stuck out my belly and thought, "Don't you even look askance, you skinny mother-fucker.  I will kill you.  I will sit on your stupid head."  So, he left without bothering me.

The cashier (another skinny white man) was wiser when I told him to hurry up and scan the doughnut bag so I could eat it.  He did not dare consider giving me a look--just smiled and did what he was told.  Good boy.

So then I took all to car, and somehow it seemed safer to drive to the residence office to pick up my package of baby gear with a Poptart in one hand and a doughnut in the other than to delay eating for a single second longer or to delay driving and risk melting the ice cream.  And of course I had to bring them inside the office with me, where the woman asked when the baby was due and commented on my foods without realizing her life was in jeapordy.  Poor stupid woman did not know whom she was messing with, so I didn't kill her.  I just picked up my package and left.  I hope that these people are grateful when I refrain from killing them.  I hope that they appreciate it.

Then when I got home I had to unload everything one at a time so as not to break pregnant self, and it took like ten trips, and of course then I was starving all over again.  So I put pizza in oven and ate cookies in the meantime. 

Those people--the ones who say pregnant women only need 300 additional calories a day are nimrods.  Just like the people who said pregnant women's heartburn doesn't increase later in the pregnancy.  Why are we even doing studies about these things?  All you have to do is ask any of the 4895723905720582348 women who've ever made it (somehow) through an entire pregnancy, and she will tell you that she needed no additional calories in the beginning and 6000 extra per day in the end, and that the heartburn gets worse as the baby gets bigger.  That is that.  What's to study?  They just don't believe us because we're pregnant.  Grr.

I spilled on myself twice already today, trying to eat too quickly I guess.  Funny how everyone says you will need six outfits a day for your newborn, but nobody tells you that you'll need just as many for self in last trimester, due to clumsy food shoveling.

Pregnancy Is not for Sissies

Today, I told my friend Everett that they must call it morning sickness, not because it only happens in the morning, but because it is the morning (as in, the instant you become conscious) when you realize that you are sick.  And it is not until the next morning that you have a chance to recover.

I was doing quizzes on the internet about whether I will have a boy or a girl, and one of the questions was which do you crave: meat and cheese or fruits and vegetables?  Who the fuck craves fruits and vegetables?!?  The only two people I can think of are Mother Theresa and Ghandi (him with all that fruitarian nonsense, and she's such a goodie-goodie), and I don't think either of them was ever pregnant.  Today I craved pizza with onions and green peppers, but that doesn't count as craving vegetables.  If you gave me a green pepper or an onion without the pizza, I'd just look at it.

Yesterday was my first official day of morning sickness, and it is really and truly like motion sickness, no matter what you eat or don't eat, nothing matters.  Everything reeks horribly, and I wonder what is wrong with people.  Why are they so desperately, hopelessly, insistently self-hating that they would ON PURPOSE go without deodorant or dental visits or clean underwear and then sit in that stench, again ON PURPOSE, WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT?????  And how can people drink tap water?  I can barely stand to shower in it.

Apparently, pregnant people have more saliva than non-pregnant people.  There is a name for it.  It's called "always about to puke".  No, I'm kidding.  It's actually called "ptyalism".  They actually don't know if pregnant people produce more saliva or just have more because we're so sick we can't even swallow our own spit.
Furthermore, no one has any real solution to morning sickness, but evidently it's more common and more intense than anyone expects.  AND SOME WOMEN HAVE IT THE WHOLE TIME! I only had one day so far, and I am already contemplating suicide except that every possible method of offing self makes me sick to think about.

I am truly not amused that the Mayo Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy thinks that merely vomiting a couple of times a day is no cause to call a doctor.  It thinks I need to be vomiting several times a day with inability to hold down fluids before I bother the medical professionals.  That is crazy.  In what other situation does one take vomiting so in stride?  If men had morning sickness, pregnancy would be like knighthood, bad breath would be a felony, and there would be places to brush one's teeth with bottled water supplies all along the streets like parking meters.