Jeaun Blogs

Now I just need some wings — large wings. Or, maybe I’m aerodynamic like a bumblebee.

Thursday marks the rollover date for The Soybean. It’s kind of like an estimated birthday, or reverse-birthday, since the actual birth day hasn’t arrived yet. Conception day sounds too creepy. Conceptión Day sounds better.

Anyway.

Yesterday marked the 28th week of my beknocked uppedness. I was always irritated by people who spoke of their pregnancy (or children’s ages) in terms of weeks, because it meant I had to divide by four to get a number that was meaningful to me. Much like how much a salary is, or how much a house costs, my ability to understand the numbers is something that came with age. 28 weeks = seven months, which would then mean that I have two months to go (8 weeks), but in reality, human gestation is a bit longer than that (40 weeks total), so I actually have 12 weeks to go.*

So what does this mean? The Soybean is over two pounds now, and if she were born now, she’d fare … ok. My plan is to keep her in for another 12 weeks.

What does this mean for me? Month 5.5-6.5 was kind of crappy, body-wise. I really couldn’t sleep in any position other than my sides, and I started getting back aches when standing or sitting for too long. This meant I was uncomfortable no matter where I was. I also was waking up a lot at night, unable to fall asleep. That may be par for some of your courses, but not me. I’m a good sleeper, and I want to get as much of it as I can NOW.

I thought (and even admitted to Jason) that if this is how crappy it is now, there’s no WAY I was going to be comfortable again for the next 3.5 months.

Starting mid-way through month six, I started being able to sleep better, and my back stopped hurting. I recognize that it’s not that much to complain about, since I’m bringing some effing life into the world in exchange.

What I’ve learned is that there’s a fine line between feeling like myself, and feeling like an incubator. When I’m not achey, when I can sleep at night, when I can wear jeans and a hoodie, I feel like myself. (I recently acquired maternity jeans and a maternity hoodie — my standard uniform, expanded.) If I’m uncomfortable, I feel so radically different, it’s surprising. It’s not like when I’m sick, even really sick. Maybe it’s knowing I’m not just outpacing a cold, I’m running the equivalent to a marathon, and it’s nowhere close to over yet.

*I’ll save all irritation at the whole gestation length being off by 2 weeks, because doctors count from your last period, instead of when you actually got pregnant, but whatever. It’s a joyous occasion, and I can’t get my panties in a bunch anyway. They’re stretched too tight.

As an update to my first set of belly photos, here’s the updated set.

(That’s 7, 14, 18 and 22 weeks.)

And, just for fun, the cat for size reference:

Avert your eyes now, if you don’t want to know the sex of The Soybean.

When we had an ultrasound, we were given the choice to know the baby’s sex*. We opted to find out. The ultrasound technician must have figured out a long time ago how to best handle this event, because she told us before she put the wand down on my belly that she’d be doing all the measuring, counting and observing she needed to do for the doctor, then she’d try to check the baby’s sex.

She plunked the wand down, and on the monitor, we saw a baby. Specifically, we saw the crotch of a baby. The Soybean was ass-up, legs splayed. The technician said “Well, usually we wait, but it’s obviously a girl.”

I looked over at Jason, and saw the most amazing thing. I could see his expression change, and I could hear the thought in his head (which was the same thing that was occurring to me), which was to say “I don’t have a baby, I have a daughter“.

It was a brief, subtle moment, but I will never forget it.

*Jason pointed out that we won’t know the baby’s gender until they’re old enough to tell us.

So, I think I’m going to put this blog into semi-retirement. I just don’t update it enough anymore to feel right calling it “my blog.”

Most of my posting these days is on Tumblr. So that’s where I’ll turn my attention, while reserving this space for the sort of longer-form writing for which it’s best suited.

Until I figure out the difference between this blog and my Tumblr—and decide whether to continue maintaining one, both, or none of them—you might as well head over there. If you return to this blog it’ll be because I linked to it from there.

• Blogocalypse!
• An entire blog entry about pesto
• Tumblr? I hardly know hr!
• Biennial
• Cyberendangered Blogspecies

I wanted to make a personalized onesie* for my friends’ baby, Emerson. First I had
thought of a heat-transferred or screenprinted image of Ralph Waldo,
but decided against anything that you couldn’t wash a million times,
or that might feel unpleasant against the skin.

This was the fastest craft I have ever crafted. Here’s how to make an
embroidered monogrammed onesie in 15 minutes.

1. Go to the thrift store and buy a onesie. I got this one for a dollar.
2. Using a pencil, draw the letter(s) you want to embroider. One of
the appealing factors to this aesthetic is the simplicity, so don’t
overdo it with the serifs.
3. Using sewing thread (I knotted the ends together, giving me a
doubled stitch), stitch over the pencil marks. I went for longer
outward stitches and short back-facing stitches. If the fabric were
see-thru, it would look like this: -•-•-•-
4. Knot the thread and trim ends.
5. Feel the bask of pleasure that comes with crafting.

*Jason’s taken to calling onesies (like this one) "singularities". I
think we are going to be awesomely nerdy parents.

One of the common things that happen to pregnant women (I prefer not to use the term ’symptom’) is that the round ligaments that you never knew you had will protest as they stretch to cover the increasing distance between their points A and B.

I read that it’s usually a low groin or thigh ache. For a few months (mos. 3-5) I had a really strange sensation just to the left of my belly button. It felt exactly like a beam of sunburn the size of a quarter was being aimed at my belly. (Or, the sensation of being tattooed.) It recently went away.

Now, mirrored on the other side, but still way up high next to my belly button (which is way up high, far from where it lived before), I occasionally get the sensation that someone is poking me gently with a colored pencil.

Strange, that I so specifically recognize the feeling as a colored pencil. There must be something about the sensation that matches some childhood memory of the feeling of sharp colored pencils against the skin.

My yoga DVD has an excellent workout.* But I hate the music. Like much yoga music, it ranges from bland to treacly to offensively annoying. So I recently took the routine’s instructions from the DVD and combined that audio with my own mix of downtempo instrumental electronic music, leaning heavily on the artists you’d expect, like DJ Shadow and Boards of Canada. (This is where music geekery and yoga assholery converge.)

But at the end of the program, during the “constructive rest” segment, comes “Bad Days,” by Timo Mass, the gorgeous closer to his all-killer-no-filler 2002 dance freakout, Loud. And while it’s ideal music for “letting my body undulate on the waves of my breath while my brain sinks into my heart” (the DVD’s words, not mine), I may have to swap it out with a less potent, emotionally loaded piece.

Because “Bad Days” actually connotes very good days: the sunny spring of 2002 when I didn’t have much of an agenda beyond drinking beer with Neil and playing drums in a party band. There were some bad days back then, too: I wasn’t so much on a career track so much as wildly derailed from it, and I was letting a number of personal relationships deteriorate for various reasons.

But euphoric recall allows me to only remember the sunny afternoons and the bacchanalian nights in Iowa City bars, and seeping in through the cracks between the dance anthems and the sweaty rock songs was this one—bright, patient, searching.

* That is an actual sentence I typed, on a blog with my real, full name on it; a blog that anyone in the world can read.

• Songs 2009: David Bazan
• New Music: St. Vincent
• Hell's Bells
• Songs 2009: St. Vincent
• 12 Rods: "Accidents Waiting to Happen"

For several years I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Minneapolis supermusician Shawn Neary, whom I first met when his old band, Boy With Stick, played with my old band, Nolan. He’s from Iowa too, and when I moved up to Minneapolis he’d already been here a few years, playing with Boy With Stick but also with a little band called Tapes ‘n Tapes (whatever happened to those guys?), the delightful pop trio Seymore Saves The World, and finally taking on bass duties for beloved local juggernaut Cloud Cult. Shawn is the best evidence I’ve seen that a person can have a successful career in music while remaining a genuinely nice guy.

He’s also been quietly carving out a (side? solo?) project called The Wapsipinicon, named for a river in Iowa. The other day, Shawn walked straight into my workplace and handed me the band’s first album, San Geronimo, hot off the presses, and I was abundantly grateful. The Wapsipinicon is playing a CD release show at the Kitty Kat Club on March 6. Here is my favorite track from San Geronimo (so far), called “Get Out of My Town.”

• Prescription: Iowa
• Songs 2009: Cheer-Accident
• Captain Courage, roll up your thick sleeves
• My Verbs are Causative
• Me, On Shuffle

I’m 31 today. I’m 6 months pregnant, I just agreed to buy a condo, and
I’m in the Bahamas*. I feel like I’m getting adulty real fast.

Jason feels similarly. We planned the pregnancy, but the trip and the
home buying were very recent decisions. Everything fell into place. We
thought about taking a quick trip, and found cheap flights. We have
friends who recently bought a place and had a kick-ass realtor who
they recommended, who helped us find exactly what we were looking for
in less than a week. We’ll get the home-buying tax credit, and will
have our own home before the Soybean arrives. It feels overwhelming,
but all of our decisions have a great deal of logic behind them.

Now my brain just has to catch up.

*I was only mildly horrified to learn that people refer to our trip as
a "babymoon". Really, it’s our belated honeymoon. We never took one
when we got married, mostly because I had a no vacation days during my
first year at the Millicent library.

I want my reading regimen for 2010 to be at least more robust than last year’s, which isn’t saying much—I’d have to read more than five books to beat last year’s total (hey—these YouTube videos aren’t going to watch themselves).

The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.

So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine I’d be able to do a much better job, nor am I about to tell her how, so I’m more than willing to set aside a few qualms when the bulk of the book is so satisfying.

But I, like Christa at Minnesota Reads, had ulterior, perhaps more sordid, motives for grabbing at Lit so eagerly: I wanted a glimpse at those disappointingly few pages where she addresses her short, tumultuous relationship with David Foster Wallace, whom she met during a smoke break outside a 12-step meeting. The ugly details of their brief courtship are admittedly quite lurid, though nothing you wouldn’t already know from reading DT Max’s profile last year.

But what I didn’t know was the extent to which Ennet House, from Infinite Jest, was modeled after the house where Wallace lived, and where Karr visited him. Here’s poor Burt F. Smith—whose fate is so grisly I just assumed it was one of Wallace’s dark imaginings—in the form of “a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated.” And Ennet’s crippled matriarch, Pat Montesian, is a hyperbole of the Mustang convertible-driving, shaggy dog-owning, house director Deb, partially paralyzed by a cocaine-induced stroke.

Lit bears other, more shadowy echoes of Infinite Jest—Karr overhears Wallace, after a meeting, bemoaning the logical fallacies of the 12-step model in much the same way that the too-smart-for-his-own-good Geoffrey Day does. And Boston isn’t rendered quite as vividly by Karr as it was by Wallace, but you see her scrabbling through the same dirty, cold city that the residents of Enfield and Ennet do.

So there we go. A slightly deeper glance into the world that DFW mapped. And that, my friends, is how to hijack an already half-assed review of a pretty great book.

• Lit
• Our Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment
• A Finite Sum (or, Why I Won't Re-Read Infinite Jest This Summer)
• A Large Dark Billowing Shape
• And the tide was way out.

Get Your Cyborg Name