been a while
I haven't written in quite a while now. Largely, it comes down to how sick I've been and just feeling overwhelmed. The support and help I have been offered have been really amazing, but nevertheless with the baby coming and the slowness of my recovery it has often seemed just too much to think about in any organized way.
There is no doubt that I have been getting better, there are many signs. I am able to maintain energy and focus for hours at a time, my skin color is much better, I have been able to work and best of all, I have been able to really start looking forward to the new baby. I'm still a bit yellow, still itchy, still tired a lot but the Baby is due tomorrow and I'm excited to meet her.
My other girls have been so understanding of my limitations. They haven't made me feel guilty for what I haven't had the strength to give. Tonight Lily asked me to tell her about the day she was born. It was such a pleasure to tell her the story.
I don't really have much to say, I just wanted to say something. To affirm that I'm still around and that I'm getting better. It has been a rough four months or so, but I'm getting better. I hope you all are well. And I hope to be out and around more soon.
intermission: obserations from a hospital
The human body is a strange, wonderful miracle of an instrument. And its really, really gross.
All the rooms are named “in memoriam”, presumably for people whose families gave the hospital significant amounts of money. Personally, I much rather be in the room of somebody who survived.
In light of how little there is to do and how much anxiety is present, it is amazing to me how quickly the time passes each day.
A simple pair of pajama bottoms do a great deal toward making you feel like a person rather than a patient. Ditto a shower.
Being mysterious and enigmatic is great when hitting on women at bars; not so great in medical settings. If one is to be a character on "House", it is best to be one of the doctors. Maybe the really hot, bisexual one.
it's not easy being yellow
I have been away so long that it's difficult to know what to write. I think most people in my life know that I have been sick; only some know the degree to which this illness has swallowed my life.
On April 3rd I began having some flu-like symptoms. Nothing so unusual: swollen glands, chest congestion. I went to the doctor on the following Monday who assured me that I simply had a virus and should drink lots of fluids and try to just power through it. The next day my mouth dried up. In the course of a couple hours all the saliva in my mouth just went away. I couldn't speak for more than a few seconds at a time without drinking. The doctor thought I was de-hydrated and gave me a little speech about fluid consumption. I drank more -- what choice did I have now anyway? The dryness in my mouth was waking me up every ten minutes throughout the night anyway.
I'll omit the minute-by-minute details, but I woke up on Sunday, April 15th in crisis. I was exhausted and sick but it was my daughter's forth birthday party. The first party we have given her outside the house. She was so excited to see her friends at Chuck E. Cheese and I was having a crisis of conscience. How could I go and expose children to whatever it was that I had? Was I contagious? No one else in my family had gotten sick, but still.
I pried myself out of bed and went to the living room to say good morning to my already-awakened family. My 10-year old's first words to me were "Daddy, why are your eyes yellow?" She was right. I was now jaundiced in addition to bereft of saliva. What was going on? All I knew was that I wasn't going to Chuck E. Cheese. I was going to the hospital.
one way or another
It's one of the great tragedies of this life, that the ones most in need of a good thrashing are always enormous.
- John D. Hackensacker;
The Palm Beach Story (Screenplay by Preston Sturges)
even rainbow sky princesses get sleepy
An exhausted girl following a free concert at Chelsea Market in NYC last Sunday. We had gone to see friends of our who record and perform some of the best kids music I know.
They record under the name
Erin Lee & Marci and have two CDs out. I have a strong preference for
Snowdance (link is to CDbaby where you can hear tracks off the album.) It is their second album and is pretty much a song cycle with one song thematically related to each month of the calendar.
It starts off with This Year, a fantasy/promise that the year would be "a very good year" where the singer wouldn't "Bury the car keys in the snow/Where no one can find them/Not that that happened". The songs have humor and even occasional pathos as they work their way through Snowdancing to summon snow, boring family car trips, the irresistible siren song of Spring mud puddles on through the year. Fun stuff.
If you had heard the act that followed them you would know why I like their music so much. Anyone who listens to hours and hours of kids music knows that most of it is just marginally talented singers who cheaply re-record the same public-domain kids songs we've heard all our lives. Some venture into original writing but usually they seem to be, for lack of a better term, pandering -- singing silly rhymes to spare, cutesy instrumentation.
I'm not saying that this is a crime, or even necessarily a bad thing -- the music is for small children after all. But I will say that I have a preference for the kinds of songs that Erin Lee & Marci write and record. I sounds like reasonably contemporary pop music. The melodies are catchy, the lyrics are fun but mostly nicely written. They have a lot of story-songs on very kid-relatable subjects.
I guess all of this wouldn't matter if the kids didn't like it -- but they do. In fact, they've totally messed up my
Last.fm most-played charts -- I get recommendations based more on Erin Lee & Marci than I do for the music I listen to. I just can't compete with a 3-year old's love of repetition.
Definitely worth checking out.
welcome to the future
"There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary."
- Ladies Home Journal
Via Digg.com today I came across this
link. It is a scanned page from a Ladies Home Journal circa 1900; a discussion of what life 100 years hence might be like. They don't claim prophetic powers and, sure enough they get a lot wrong.
What was most interesting to me though, is that the needs they make predictions about are really the same sorts of needs that the last hundred years did deal with -- not always well and not always successfully. Reliable transportation of goods and information, eradication of vermin, sanitation, basic education are all still on our minds. War doesn't seem to be a topic of discussion, although whether that is because the world wars had not yet occurred or because the brutality of the recent Civil War had made it seem like an inescapable fact of life I don't know.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of Britney Spears either. I also recommend Tex Avery's wonderful animated looks forward into
the world of tomorrow if you have a few minutes to spare.
no, that's not why you never see us together
When I was in college I had a friend who was terrible at keeping plans. She was constantly canceling at the last minute or occasionally even standing me up. I was a lot more tolerant of such behavior back then and although she was never my girlfriend, she was really interesting so I usually let it slide. A side effect of this unreliability though is that she never met my other friends. Whenever a group even was planned she would never make it. It got to the point that one of my friends, John, began to doubt her existence.
To make matters worse, she had an unusual name – Barnwell -- in and of itself unlikely. But then when you factored in the detail that at the time I lived in an off-campus apartment on Barnwell St… well I can’t say I really blame him for his skepticism. His friend had a girl who he had never met, who never seems to show up for planned activities, whose odd name that just happens to match the street on which the friend lived? Yeah…sure.
The teasing about the “imaginary” Barnwell got old pretty quickly to me. I became more and more determined to get all three of us in one place at the same time. Each time I tried, fate (or Barnwell’s unreliability) intervened. It got to the point where, had I not needed so desperately to prove her existence to John, I might have just ditched the friendship entirely on account of her flakiness about plans.
After one such abortive attempt to get John and Barnwell to meet, he and I were chatting while driving through the crowded downtown area of the small city in which we lived. Negotiating pedestrians was always an issue in the Five Points area and this day was no different. He was making one observation or another when I cut him off in mid-sentence. “There she is!” I screamed. Startled, he almost ran off us the road. “Who?”
“Barnwell. That’s Barnwell. There. She exists. Right there.”
“Which one?”
“There! She’s walking with her sister.”
“Sure.” He said.
“No, really. That’s her.”
“And her sister’s name is..?” He prompted.
“Kemp. Her sister’s name is Kemp.”
Note: For those who don’t recall the losers of each Presidential contest of the last 20 years, I should probably mention that at the time the Republican Party was sorting out which candidate it would field against Bill Clinton. Bob Dole ended up being that candidate – selecting as his running mate another primary candidate, Jack Kemp. There may have even been a Kemp sticker on the car in front of us at the time.
“Yes, I see…” He said.
“Just look. There she is.”
“Um, hum. I’m sure that is her.” He said, gesturing around in various directions, “And there she is over there. And over there.”
Defeated, I stayed silent for the rest of the drive.
The final indignity came after we got to where we were going. John and I were doing our laundry together at a local laundromat. Someone must have done an incomplete job of removing her delicates from the dryer I had been using and as I pulled my clothes from the machine into the basket out tumbled a bra and several pairs of panties.
John paused for a moment, looked at me seriously and said, “Now I think we know who Barnwell is.”
