@chicago-geniza

I should be allowed into every museum's archives actually

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no active health insurance + very ill spouse + 2 month old + supposed to go back to work in a month is making me so sad..... I get overwhelmed every day at the thought of being away from my baby and missing him getting bigger and doing things and I have this deep fear that he won't know that I love him or he will think I am gone forever when I'm not with him. I've never been away from him for longer than the time it takes to have a long shower and do some chores while someone else holds him. I would literally quit my job and burn through my savings for a year, but if I quit this one, I won't have any references to get another in a year. and this one gives me summers off which I want to keep.

enh

my partner is so sick he can't help much with the baby and he's on such high doses of prednisone it's making him crazy + depressed + paranoid which is much worse than just him being sick. aaaah.

we are truly just mammals... my baby gets fussy and I put him in his wrap against me and he goes right to sleep. instant KO. ridiculous.

rewatching House MD like everyone else (it is free on roku in the US right now) and damn. it is for sure a product of its time. you can see cultural priorities completely preserved, things that are sort of memory holed for those of us who were young when it aired, but are basically still cultural priorities for large groups of people.... the cultural obsession on being skinny is so prominent! as you would expect. not that the culture is actually any different now, just stealthier.

anyway, what a good show. cannot believe how captivating a procedural where the audience can't follow the clues was for years.

also, when I was a kid and teen and this was airing, I completely missed how blindingly hot Lisa Edelstein is. damn.

when my husband and I, his ex, the Harvard grad with a stick up her butt, AND the chill mother all agree that this teacher sucks... validated I guess. because 8 yr old is "behind" on reading comp we HAD to have a parent teacher conference and she didn't say anything that couldn't have been an email and also didn't really answer our questions and also visibly didn't give a fuck about our kid and also multiple times said "well I have another meeting coming up" and also answered the phone during our meeting. glad we had this mandatory meeting that I dragged my one month old to so that you could talk in a monotone and say nothing!!!

Tongariro National Park New Zealand

© Harry Pope

Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!

stepson's teacher has apparently been insisting that he stand and say the pledge at school and he's been refusing... should be an interesting parent teacher conference next week.

to be clear we haven't even introduced the idea of not standing for the pledge to him, he came up with it on his own and then we had a dinner table discussion about why people don't say the pledge.

there's lots of things about my gender presentation and body and cishetero conformity that I am crazy/troubled about, but luckily none of them are the common ones that people on blogs seem to have... I just do not care about whether my belly skin is sort of wrinkly now. I wear a bathing suit like 10 times a year to swim in a variably putrid creek with my immediate family and a bunch of drunk rednecks.

went for a long walk with my baby... it was nice!

"You should be at the club" Direct exposure to the club would kill me instantly

"You should be at bar trivia night" This I cannot deny

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I think I found pregnancy and childbirth, respectively, uncomfortable and unbearable, but not as bad as they could have been. Probably somewhat down to luck, of course, but I don't think I'm developing PTSD about my labor, which had several complications! Perhaps because I was so tired, my memory is bad, but: I had premature rupture, back labor, baby turned the wrong way, slowed labor which required hormonal augmentation, a full hour and a half of pushing, and tearing, and I had been awake for about 40 hours by the time I delivered. Also the baby was big. So while I was certainly screaming things like "I'm going to die" and "just pull him out" I don't think I'm traumatized at the end of it.

having my baby has not fundamentally altered my personality or sense of self (I don't think!) or become my one singular source of meaning in my life, but I can definitely see that if, for example, everything else in my life that creates meaning were taken away, having the baby would without a doubt still provide sufficient meaning? I don't know. I definitely can see how people may devote their entire lives solely to their children and be, even if not "happy," contented or fulfilled with that decision or that outcome, even if they didn't choose it on purpose.

Bear In Snow, 1940 (colour woodblock print) by Takeuchi Seiho