Irresponsible

One of the graduate assistants at my work is a budding photographer and asked me weeks ago if she could photograph my burgeoning gut. I told her that would be great, knowing there was zero chance of my documenting my pregnancy myself and figuring that when I'm nine months pregnant, I will remember being five months pregnant with fondness. "You thought you knew what sciatica felt like then!" I'll think to myself. "You fool!"

Being myself, I figured the most sensible time to arrange a photo shoot would be the day after the semester was over, which is also the day Ryan and I are supposed to be getting ready to leave town for several weeks. Do other people's brains work better than this?

So, this week I logged all my hours, finished a Medicaid application, saw eleven clients, facilitated three groups, went to class, wrote a client conceptualization, entered the last two months worth of client notes including three infamously time-consuming intakes, gathered the documents required to reinstate my driver's license, gained two pounds, and slept through the night once. When I crashed through the door last night at 7:30 and announced I would be showering, Ryan looked relieved.

Since I hadn't showered since Monday. Seriously, who has the time?

What he didn't know was that the reason I was showering is that I am to be photographed in public today and my haircut is so bad that last week when I showed my own sister and cherished oldest friend what it looked like pre-curling iron, they both looked genuinely concerned. Like how you would look if your sister or cherished oldest friend came before you after having had a run-in with a four year old and a pair of scissors. Because that's what my uncurled hair looks like. The curled version doesn't look good, mind you, but it does somewhat diminish the weed-whacker effect.

At least that's what I tell myself.

Where was I? I'm really tired, people.

Ah, yes, showering. So I emerged from the shower ready for Ryan to take a swing at cutting my hair. I had not received his consent to proceed with this plan, as I imagined it would be difficult to obtain. I strategized that dripping-wet, urgency-infused coercion would more likely achieve compliance. You see, we had tried this before, and it didn't go great, but, I figured, when your hair looks as bad as mine currently does, probably having less hair will be an improvement. Also, I have unwarranted faith in the ability of a curling iron to mask pretty much the entire spectrum of bad haircuts. I was uninvested. When I announced the plan, he looked panicked.

He should have known better than to attempt to resist. I am incorrigible.

After a few different methods of haranguing, he took our dull scissors and gave it his best shot. After one trip around my head he decided he had had enough, and left me there, sopping wet lunatic that I am, to finish the job.

I didn't mind. He had already cut the back.

My hair doesn't look worse, though I can't say it looks better. Again, sans curling, the effect is comical at best. But, there is less hair, and that was the only goal, which makes the event a success!

Good thing I will have my driver's license picture taken in two hours and then spend a couple hours this afternoon being photographed in public. It's nice to know you can count on yourself to be someone with consistently good judgment and plenty of dignity.

I must be missing something

Do you use Flickr to store and share photos? Or Picasa? If so, why? Aren't there equally user friendly sites that offer unlimited storage, like Snapfish or Shutterfly?

Sincerely,

Perplexed

A Moment of Triumph

Sometimes you get a moment that helps to redeem all those other moments and this here moment is one of them.

Today I spent most of the morning amassing the paperwork that we need for our Medicaid application. I spent most of the afternoon logging my internship hours so I can get them signed off before winter break and to make sure I can get my hours completed before Dweezil shows up. As tallying hours is one of The Logistics of Life, I should have been entering them weekly, but haven't entered a single one since the last week of August.

I finished entering the hours a few minutes ago, so I went to the summary sheet to see how my progress was coming along. I discovered I have enough hours to graduate.

Now.

Meaning, I have been working way more than necessary, but I can stop worrying, leave town for the holidays without a care in the world, and have time next semester to meet my obligations to my internship sites without any concern about getting my requirements met.

Because they are met.

Now.

I recognize that this could also be a tragic tale of how I pushed my pregnant self way too hard, losing undue sleep, and being irresponsible in a backward sort of ill-planned way, but I'm in a half-full sort of mood because...

the Medicaid stuff is all in a pile, ready to fax in on Monday...

And Ryan just emailed me this:

At the time, I was so sad that I didn't have the energy to make Pumpkinfest happen, but I did insist that Ryan's 399 lb. champion be carved. At 6:00 pm on Halloween. And I made us set up the self-timer so there would be proof that even though we were tired, stressed, and almost dead, we still had the biggest Jack O' Lantern in the neighborhood, and we grew it ourselves.

It can be hard to predict which days will be the good ones. Today definitely wasn't slated that way, but as I sit here awash in triumph, I'm happy it snuck up on me.

Maybe this is kind of how it feels when after a long, crappy pregnancy, you realize you get a baby at the end because you're holding one in your arms.

Sorry for comparing you to a nearly-completed Medicaid application, Dweezil. You'll understand when you're older.

Please Advise

Hello friends.

As previously declared, The Logistic of Life are not my strong suit. I am working hard to rectify the situation in the next four months before it starts to impact the innocent.

I am creating a baby registry. It seems like the responsible thing to do. Trouble is, I don't have a baby, so I'm not too hip on baby needs. Do you need 5 onesies or 500? Do you need a swing or will one turn my child into a sociopath? Are Moby wraps really as easy to use as people say, because to me it looks like they require the complex skill of self-mummification?

If you have recommendations for things you have really found useful in the care and rearing of your small people, please leave them in the comments. Think broadly here, or I will have a newborn wrapped in newspaper come Spring.

Thank you.

As payment, I hope you enjoy reading this. I thought it was quite funny and also accurate.

Incredible

It is already clear to me what will be my greatest parenting weakness, other than putting my children in doggy crates. It will be The Logistics of Life.

A few examples include my driver's license (expired one year as of my birthday), a tuition reimbursement I need to petition for (which would amount to $600), a class in which I have an "incomplete" (which, if I don't complete by May will preclude my graduation), the cars whose expired registrations only come to my awareness when, annually, they are ticketed in front of my home, and...

Ryan and I are pretty much uninsured. I have catastrophic insurance that will pay to sew my leg back on if it falls off, but only after they have collected all of our assets, including our firstborn. Ryan has a preexisting condition that makes him ineligible. I have been able to ride the cognitive discomfort of knowing that if anything bad happens we are screwed because everyone involved who has the potential to get screwed is an adult who should know better. However, having taken on the task of creating a separate-yet-dependent human being, I feel keenly my sense of responsibility for making sure that he, and his incompetent parents, don't die needlessly.

Which brings me to this moment in time. This moment, where I sit where I have been sitting for TWO! hours on hold with the Utah Medicaid office from whom I have been disconnected TWO! times. I am ready to kill someone but, as is so often the case with bureaucracy, my only hindrance is that I don't know who to kill. What a pickle!

I am practicing my deep breathing.

I know that this step isn't optional; there is no other forseeable way to insure the kid I decided to conceive. His existence wasn't his idea. I took him on, and now I will sit on hold until I am eighty five, entertaining homicidal fantasies and considering the possibility that it might actually be better to die than to complete this process. Paperwork makes my brain melt. This is not a maternally advantageous trait.

I think I have the potential to be a fun mom. I'm pretty sure I can cook food that will sustain life and I can teach my progeny appropriate table manners and grammar. Pumpkinfest alone should earn me some mom-points. What I foresee is being the mom who spends weeks planning the most fun, elaborate field trips ever devised but then forgetting to sign the permission slip so the kids stay home and watch Dora.

I can see how parenting is a refiner's fire. I'm not even a full-blown parent and already, my weaknesses! How much more difficult they are to deny!

With a little help from my friends

To those who take pictures, I salute you.

I do not take pictures. Maybe if I have a baby and a nice camera and a good night's sleep simultaneously, I will take one someday. But for now, I rely on the kindness and cameras of others.

Behold, 21 weeks:

Don't believe a second of that cheesy grin. Homegirl is a faker.

Now, at 23 weeks, I have doubled in size. By the end of this, I will require a crane to get off the couch.

Many thanks to Kate and Neil, whose combined resources made this picture happen. If you want future updates, you will have to come take them yourself or wait until I see Kate again, hopefully in January.

Also, you people need to start telling me when I need a haircut. I can't see these things until I see a photo, and, as I may have mentioned, this doesn't happen often.

Wishful thinking

Someone remind me that I found this insightful enough to post here when you catch me putting my toddler in a doggy crate and threatening never to feed him again if he makes another mess.

What? Self-reflexivity is a parenting strength.

I just need to say this

Since I'm awake and bored, I decided I would peruse the Internet for Thanksgiving recipes I won't be making. Sometimes, just for kicks, I check out what The Pioneer Woman has been up to, or, in other words, how many pounds of butter she has crammed into otherwise innocent foodstuffs. As I gawked at this mornings obscenity, French Onion Soup Stuffed Mushrooms, I whispered to myself "Good LORD, woman!" and realized that I make this same exact utterance every time I allow my gaze to fall upon her newest incarnation of heart disease. She is a funny woman, and so shameless with her use of dairy. It just makes me want to call out for divine support.

Sometimes, as I revel in my recently recovered ability to eat spinach smoothies and salads dressed with vinaigrette, I find my mind wandering to the women I know, or know of, who have abandoned even the vaguest pretense of restraint in their use of ingredients I only buy once a quarter. People who throw a cup of cream into the recipe, you know, for good measure. People who say, with singularity of purpose, "I just always use butter, because the flavor is so much better!" as though I hadn't realized that butter is generally a tastier addition to a soup than lentils.

I like my virtuous foods, don't get me wrong, and I certainly eat foods that don't boast a disease-preventing nutrient profile, but from time to time, I just wonder how life must be on the other side, the land of no guilt. It's kind of how I felt as I watched, googly-eyed, from the sidelines as my friends in high school and college were getting to know boys in the biblical sense. I knew it wasn't for me, but there was something captivating happening and I knew that, too. Those boys were like a pound of cream cheese; I didn't know what to do with them, but I had to respect the women who did.

It's probably a good thing I still don't know what to do with a pound of cream cheese. I'll take my chances with lentils.

A morning treasure

As I crouched vomiting for the second time on this morning, the twenty first week and fourth day of my pregnancy, a haiku sprang to my mind. This is the only place I can share it, so here you go:

To be pregnant is
to vomit gut foam as you
pee on your own feet


In other things that resemble updates (there are no actual updates here, in case you hadn't noticed), if you were thinking you might ask Ryan or I what we plan to name our unborn, you won't get a straight answer. I'm giving you fair warning. When I was newly pregnant, Ryan announced that he doesn't think names matter much because regardless the name itself, within twenty four hours it just becomes the kid's name and everyone gets on with their lives. I tend to agree, and I also maintain that if my kid is going to get teased for his name, he would probably get teased about something meaner otherwise and would probably benefit more from boxing lessons than a new moniker. Still, on occasion we do halfheartedly attempt to have an adult discussion about this increasingly relevant topic, and it deteriorates so quickly it even makes our own heads swim.

Me: "Ryan, we are having a child and it is our responsibility to name him. We also need to get him insurance, but I'd rather talk about names."

Ryan: [stares blankly]

Me: "What about Oliver?"

Ryan: "Ok."

Me: "What about Ebenezer?"

Ryan: "EBEN EBEN!!!"

Me: "Iago? Carlos? Ichabod!!"

Ryan: "ASSMAN CLOBBERFINCH! SPORKEN JORSENHEIMER!"

Me: "Assman might be a good choice. It's at least likely to be a good description of any child with our combined genetics."

Assman it is, folks. Don't bother asking until Child Protective Services demands an name. There won't be one.

The roof is leaking.

I blame pregnancy.

My professional life

Perhaps it takes a person who does fifty hours per week of unpaid work as a clinical intern to fully appreciate this, but I thought I'd share, just in case it's as funny to the general populace as it is to me.

Even though I really am enjoying the work I've been doing, I'm excited to move on to a different kind of unpaid work taking care of people who need extra help when April rolls around.

The Wee Lee appears to be a boy :)

Pregnant bodies only do one thing right...

and that is make babies.

They wake up when they're still tired, throw up when their tummies are empty, and hurt when they're not injured. It's easy to see how such a process, normal though it may be, has been pathologized over the years.

Good morning! I've been up since two!

I will now share a story that Ryan advised me against posting, in the interest of my readers' delicate dispositions. Apparently, he has never met any of you. That said, this is your chance. Overshare ahead. Abort mission. Code Red. I'm going to talk about pee again.

I've had early-waking insomnia most nights this week (makes the thirteen hour workdays a real picnic), and normally I just enjoy a routine of thrashing and thinking murderous thoughts. The other night, as I punctuated my thrashing with drinks of water, email checking (more people should email me from 2:00-7:00 a.m.; they would get timely responses), and making pitiful noises of misery, I got notice that it was my favorite time, vomiting bile time! So I hiked it to the bathroom to give it my best.

As I don't anticipate my continence improving over the next months (or, who am I kidding, years), I have begun keeping a bowl beside the toilet so that when my heaves become strong enough to completely overwhelm my urinary sphincters I am prepared. I have found the sound of full-blown peeing on the floor is shocking enough to interrupt even the most violent vomit, so the bowl has been helpful. Vomiting half-way is worse than not vomiting at all.

Or something.

Still reading?

Back to the other night. So, long story short, I threw up like a champ and peed in my bowl, and finished feeling somewhat relieved but also horrified and a bit disgusted. Keeping a bowl beside the toilet, you must admit, is a pretty significant admission of defeat.

I brushed my teeth in hopes of still having a few to chew with at the end of the pregnancy, and decided that, as it had been four days since my last, I might feel better if I took a shower. I have been using a non-toxic tea tree soap lately; I love the tingle. As I warmed up, sudsed my ever more voluminous hair, and worked up a nice, cooling lather, I peeked my eyes open to discover I was sharing the shower with a spider about the size of a nickel. Maybe even a quarter.

Problem-solving in these types of situations is not naturally one of my strong suits. Compound my innate deficit with a pregnant brain and chronic insomnia and you have a person barely capable of walking straight; spider removal is a goal impossibly out of range.

So there I was, shampoo running into my eyes, tea tree tingle turning to injurious burn, without a brain in my head or a shred of dignity in my heart. I considered my options. Finish quickly and hope for the best? Emerge from the shower, dripping and frothy, to obtain...what? Toilet paper? Too flimsy for this task, especially once the toilet paper is soaked wet. As I pondered and burned, eyes transfixed on my enemy, it began to do some kind of spider dance that nearly put me over the top. How do you know which spiders will kill you? Which spiders will leap onto your naked self? Are spiders attracted to tea tree oil?

Finally, devastated by the morning's events and out of energy for my obviously incompetent attempts at thinking, I simply began shouting for rescue. In retrospect, a woman eighteen weeks pregnant should probably use discretion when shouting "Help!!" from the bathroom at five a.m. Her spouse may think there is an actual emergency, not merely a tiny enemy invader. A tiny enemy invader with no central nervous system.

"Help!!"

And there he was, in a flash. The poor man looked so confused. He took a shampoo bottle, executed our arachnid friend with a few quick taps, guided it down the drain, simply stated, "Well, I'm awake", and returned to the bedroom.

I don't love being a pregnant spouse, but having a pregnant spouse is no bowl of cherries. They pee on the floor, wake you up for no reason at all, and then they tell the whole Internet about it.

Happy Halloween

Or, in other words, a lamentation.

Pumpkinfest, a day heralded above all other days, was not to be this year. Between my work schedule and my sick schedule, life is too unpredictable to invite everyone I know to dress as pumpkins and come eat pumpkin pie with me. Tragedy.

Next year, though, it's on.

The sacrifices we make!

Glamorous

My glamorous life has taken a turn for the less-glamorous in several ways that may entertain you. In the past three months I have:

1. not done one single dish.
   
2. vomited over fifty times (in case you were jealous about the dish situation).
   
3. gained twenty pounds.
4. eaten fifteen slices of pizza from Costco.
5. tried Taco Bell for the first time.
6. not slept through the night once.
   
7. missed all of tomato season.
8. read eight books about babies, give or take.
9. begun having freaky nightmares every night.
10. convinced myself that I will give birth to an intersex child and move to an intersex-friendly community (maybe Portland?).
11. tested the limits of Ryan's time-management skills and overall obedience.
12. shaved my legs and underarms for the first time in about five years. Strangely, it helped.
    
13. heard a heart beating in my body that isn't my heart.
14. realized I have to find a pediatrician.
15. felt grateful that I had an upper respiratory infection because it meant I had to call in sick to work.
16. felt astonished that I could get an upper respiratory infection when I had drunk a Coldbuster at Jamba Juice every day for the past six weeks. False advertising; they should have a pregnancy clause.
    
17. noticed that people want to tell me either why parenting is wonderful heaven or miserable hell, though I suspect a combination might be most accurate.
18. peed on the bathroom floor due to the forcefulness of my dry heaves. I was kind of proud.
19. had sore abs from vomiting. Again, pride.
    
20. contracted a bladder infection.

The scope of this blog's misnomer title seems to be expanding by the minute.

A few things

First of all, you're welcome.

Second of all, I'm pregnant.

Third of all, this was my father's response:

Just a suggestion-

1. If it is a boy, don't name him "Lee".

2. If it's a girl, don't name her "Lea".

Also, hippie-era names such as "Moon Unit" have not stood the test of time well.
It's your choice, of course.
Keep me posted.

Love, Dad

Roger that, Dad. We're pretty sure we're going with Dweezil anyway.

I regret the time that has elapsed since I last posted. We took a most wonderful and memorable road trip through the pacific northwest and had such a marvelous time that I came home in a state of incubation. I spent the entirety of August and September rolling on the floor in agony, vomiting intermittently, marveling at the masochism of women who host more than one bloodthirsty blastocyst in their lifetimes. Adding insult to injury, our house was burglarized (all computers stolen) cementing the impossibility of blogging.

Your patience is appreciated.

I have made the unfortunate discovery that cheese pizza from Costco buys me several hours without the gags. Hopefully I'll feel better soon enough that this kid doesn't emerge composed entirely of cheese.

Comin' atcha April 2011...

On the road again

As previously indicated, I have a pretty severe thing for the open road. It sparks my creativity and makes me feel alive.

I have a spouse who, left to his devices, would spend the rest of his days sitting in our living room reading, only occasionally venturing outside to check on his giant pumpkin.

If I were more independent (read: less codependent), I could just hit the road by myself, but I'm not. The result is that for every fifty trips I mentally plan, Ryan agrees to just one, so I have to make it good. The one has been determined. We leave Thursday.

In celebration of four years since our nuptials, we will be driving across Nevada to the west coast, driving up on the 101, and spending a few days each in Portland and Seattle. We drive home through Montana and Idaho. I couldn't be happier.

So, friends, I have a request of you. If you have been to any of these places, do you have recommendations for things to do, visit, eat, etc.? I have only been to Portland once, I was attending a conference so I didn't get out too much, and I've never set foot in Seattle. Lay it on me.

Goodbye Utah, land of the hot heat. Please don't kill Ryan's pumpkin while we are away or he may never agree to leave again.

I used to be so funny

Behold!

Best part is, we stole that Vanilla Ice portrait out of a not-quite-friend's house and then sent each of the featured photos as a postcard from each location. Every day dude got a postcard in the mail from his own poster of Vanilla Ice. I can't believe I was ever that funny.

Now I just do dishes.

My People

I periodically decide that I am going to deviate even more sharply from our culture's hygienic norms, and typically regret it.

For example, several months ago, I, newly and perhaps irrationally wary of sodium lauryl sulfate, decided I would stop shampooing my hair at my thrice weekly rate--hardly a burden, some would argue--opting instead for the baking soda and vinegar treatments I had investigated online. After about three weeks of smelling like salad (bad salad) and enjoying hair that increasingly resembled dreadlocks despite having been blown dry and curled with an iron, I marched to Costco and bought a six months supply of generic brand, lethal-yet-effective shampoo.

I daresay my spouse was somewhat relieved. The acrid stench of my noggin had begun to make it difficult for him to sleep. And he was complaining of headaches.

But, as with most irrational behaviors to which I am prone, I just can't seem to stop myself. A few weeks ago I came across this and determined that I would like to make my own deodorant.

I am a fortunate soul who, despite forgetting to wear deodorant for days, weeks, and even months at a time, never quite manages to establish a solid stink. I use it occasionally anyway, mainly for amusement, but, upon realizing that my deodorizing habits were an area of my life I had not yet complicated into oblivion, I set about to solve a problem I don't have. I sent out an SOS email to some friends I thought might be game to go in on the ingredients with me and got a great response. Turns out I was not the only person I knew pondering her armpit wellness.

We arranged who would purchase the ingredients, discussed all the details, decided to potluck. Yesterday as I hovered over a pot of soup in preparation, Ryan hollered to me from the other room, "What does draconian mean?"

Draconian. I should know this one. Something about being mean? Harsh? In a medieval kind of way? I remembered a professor using it in my capstone class in college and I had looked it up then and committed it to memory. I like the word, but I couldn't readily define it.

I thought to myself, I wish my friends were already here. They would ALL be able to define Draconian, I'd bet my life on it.

Then I paused to reconsider. The friends coming to the party--which friends were they? It was the deodorant-making party; they were the quasi-hippie friends. The ones who sprout things and massage kale. The friends who email back and forth with me about the pros and cons of elimination communication and send me links to social justice projects I'll want to support (more on that one soon...). Cognitive dissonance, but just for a moment, and then a smile crept across my face and right down into my little heart.

They were the quasi-hippie/NERD friends. Hallelujah. It's a fine thing indeed to realize you have found your people.

My face stinks

I have worse acne now than I did as a teenager. In fact, as a teenager, I enjoyed (read: took for granted) a nearly perfect complexion. Although I do not have a serious problem now, it is enough to have made its way onto my self-consciousness radar which, for a woman who cuts the back of her own hair without using a mirror, should be regarded as at least somewhat significant.

I have been fighting the good fight with benzoyl peroxide and have in the process created many, many bleachy spots on towels, shirts, and various other things that contact my face. Miraculously, the fuscia pillowcase from Ikea has been spared. Ryan likes to point out that slathering my face in a carcinogenic goo every night may be sabotaging my efforts to prevent all disease using primarily blended spinach as prophylaxis. Perhaps, he suggests, I should increase my chances at disease-free success by not dipping my face in toxic, bleaching, burny solutions.

He may have a point.

Thus, last week at the supermarket, I decided to take a gander at the offerings of the "natural" products aisle (I scoff at and enquotiate the word natural because uranium is natural, people, and we need to be conscientious enough to read our labels, but I digress). I found a vial of tea tree zit prevention somethingorother and determined that all of its ingredients were edible, so I bought it. I anointed my face with it. It is more effective than the benzoyl peroxide ever was, and the linens will thank me.

But it makes me smell like a hippie. I don't care how many times I have been accused of actually being a hippie for reasons including my distaste for meat, political views, or thoughts about western medicine in general, though I do think it strange to be a called a hippie when I don't smoke pot. I do, however, mind that my own face smells like the love child of a health food store and a Phish show.

But I don't mind it enough to stop, at least for now. Sorry if you have to smell me; at least your eyes won't be offended by my blemishes. Blemishes!

His and Hers

Hers:
1 spinach smoothie
1 giant salad with strawberries, red onions, and homemade fat-free dressing
1 small bowl of cooked vegetables

His:
4 plates corned beef and cabbage with potatoes
2 large protein shakes, double thick
1 large spinach salad with roasted vegetables
1 acorn squash stuffed with quinoa
1 tabbouleh side salad
1 southwestern bean salad
1/2 of an artichoke
1 garden burger with all the fixin's
1 pint strawberries
1 fruit punch gatorade
1 giant oatmeal raisin cookie
2 bowls chocolate cheerios
1 orange
1 handful sunflower seeds
1 peanut butter sandwich

If there is a famine, I win.

International Women's Day

An interesting discussion of the relationship between feminism and animal rights activism here.

Now go hug your mom :)

Guest

Hello everyone.

A delightful friend of mine, Ann, is doing a series on her blog about woman-love and asked me to participate. The post is up, and you can read it here. While you're over there, I recommend you check out her photos which are beyond beautiful. The whole blog is beautiful.

Also, if you are so inspired to write a list of your own, please send it to Ann at lady.of.lorien9@gmail.com. I know she'd love to read them all!

Beloved Community

Ryan is out of town.

But it's ok.

I have my blogs.

For the last couple weeks, Ryan and I have managed to eat dinner together every night. This habit has been facilitated by his unprecedented and much-reinforced willingness to make the dinner. While I am out fretting around town, cursing the day I applied to my Masters program instead of getting knocked up like a normal person, he is home making vegan split pea. I come home in a panic; he washes the salad. We sit down to eat and I light candles because this, this is special, and who knows how long it will last.

Having a wife rocks.

Tonight I am sitting at the table alone. I made my own salad, and I candied the nuts to make up for the hug that wasn't there when I walked in the door. I sat down to my dinner, and lit the candles. And then I busted out my computer. I'm not one to eat alone.

In high school and college I had things just as I liked them. It was All Friends All the Time. I love friends. I love facebook, superficiality be damned. I love reading blogs. I like to know where you people are. Some of the time, I even like updates on how the toilet-training is going, although I maintain you should keep those posts to a minimum. I read your blogs, even though you most likely don't read mine. I read about your Valentine's Day traditions, your job frustrations, your recipes. I read what you're reading about and why. I read about Ryan's cousins, hobbies I'll never take up, people I hardly know. I read all of it and I read it every day. I love it.

It is only now, in this moment, as I chew my spinach and miss my man, that I realize very nearly all the blogs I follow are written by women. I'm not surpised. I do so love the women.

One day I hope to live in what bell hooks calls beloved community. I want to live intentionally, and I want to live with all of you. In a giant cul-de-sac. We can have potlucks. Ryan will bring the split pea soup.

Until then, ladies, keep blogging.

Helping Others

I have been awake since 3:00 this morning.

This is not unusual. I decided today at 5:15 am that 3:00 am- 6:00 am are my least favorite hours of the twenty four I have access to, and yet I experience them more than hours I find likable, like 6:00 am- 9:00 am, for example.

I only slept for four hours last night, too.

I generally wake up, spend several hours thinking of Very Important Things, compose a list of Action Steps, finally get out of bed to Take Action, and get on facebook instead. After exhausting facebook's entertainment potential, I go back to sleep for just long enough to ensure I will be a complete zombie for the rest of the day.

As soon as I am done with this inane post, I will read the assigned chapters for my class tonight. I will read about theories of career counseling, an assignment designed to help me help others.

At 3:00 this afternoon I will see a client. For some sick reason, I never seem to sleep more than four hours on nights when I have a client scheduled the following day. I don't think the waking is caused by anxiety about the appointment; it feels more like a sick twist of fate to me. Either way, the consequence is that instead of listening to my client and providing helpful feedback or asking relevant questions most likely my focus will remain on willing my body to stop yawning. Can you imagine anything worse than seeing a counselor who keeps yawning through the session? I can't.

I got an A in stats, a class required for graduation. On the other hand, I fail to maintain basic life functioning fairly often. Lucky for me, this is not a graduation requirement. I question the legitimacy of giving a degree in helping others to a person who can't even sleep through the night herself, but I didn't make the rules.

Not a universal solution

Sometimes leftovers taste better on top of a pile of lettuce. The greens have a way of bringing new life to an old grain, or roasted vegetable dish.

Some leftovers just ruin an otherwise perfectly good salad.

I made raw carrot falafel out of carrot pulp leftover from making carrot juice. They looked good and tasted horrible. Consequently, I have a huge bag of them frozen, waiting for inspiration to come along and revive them. Today I tried slamming four of them on top of a pile of mixed greens with tahini dressing. It was completely sick. Out of laziness, I still ate all of it.

Laziness is the trump card in my culinary hand, as it turns out. Bummer. I wish the trump card were a grilled cheese sandwich.