what a girl's gotta do

There's a whole subgenre of mostly country songs about girls who end up betrayed, abandoned, cheated on. The girls are sad, maybe even heartbroken, but they're also brave and clear-eyed and resilient and they speed off in a little red car or head out on the town in a little red dress. They'll fall in love again, next time with someone better, someone who loves them the way they deserve to be loved.

I like those songs and, if one comes on the radio while I'm in the car, I sometimes sing along. But they're not about me. It's hard for me to fall in love, but it's just about impossible for me to fall out of it.

Without much effort, I can remember all of Steve's faults and catalogue the things I hated about him. But if I wouldn't take him back, I also can't stop thinking fondly about him. Back when we were dating, I used to smile whenever I thought about him and now I smile to remember how blissfully naive and happy I was.

I know that the girls in those songs have the right idea. While they're moving on and getting over it, I'm stuck in place, wheels spinning pointlessly in my head. I can see the road ahead of me, marked with impossible-to-miss signs. I have a map and I know exactly where I'm supposed to end up. But I'm not going anywhere at all.


What about you? Is there someone you just can't get over?

half a cake

So, today is my half-birthday, a day that we always used to celebrate because I just couldn't wait a whole entire year between birthdays.

I (or, when he was little, Gray) would have half a cake (bake a round cake, cut it in half, frost and stack the two halves), top it with six or seven or eight and a half candles, sing half of the birthday song, and get half a present (say, a single sock or half a chocolate bar). It was almost more fun than a real birthday, which, exciting as it was, generally ended in someone's tears.

Do/did you ever celebrate half-birthdays in your family?

psa

If you have a wordpress blog and you're wondering why I haven't been commenting on it, it might well be because, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, all my deathless pearls of wisdom are being re-routed to the spam bin. So, if you care about these kind of things, you might want to recalibrate your filter. Because if it's happening to me, it's probably happening to other prospective commenters as well.

Another helpful hint: As I learned through sad experience, given its unfortunate sequence of letters, no matter how apt the term might be, it's not a good idea to use the word "socialism" in a comment. Try "sociali$m" instead.


eta: Not surprisingly, Mcpolish asks exactly how to recalibrate a spam filter for a wordpress blog. I admit that I have absolutely no idea, but if anyone knows, email me and I'll edit this post to add that info.

coloring inside the lines

Here's the obligatory photo of crocuses blooming.*

Followed by the requisite ruminations about spring, beginnings, endings, the great circle of being, metaphor, meaninglessness, irony, synecdoche and anacoenosis.

A year ago, I was feeling lonely and sorry for myself and posting a recipe for rosemary bread. Where were you (metaphorically or otherwise) the last time it was spring?



*And I didn't steal this crocus-picture-thing idea from luna. I swear I didn't.

by popular demand

The justification: Someone (and I'm pretty sure it was Christine) asked to see a picture of Cole in his fuzzy pink suit.

The back story: I bought this outfit when I was pregnant with Gray. Because I knew the baby was a girl.

The moral: Intoowishun. I don't haz it.

this is not a political post

I never, ever, ever blog about politics and this post is no exception.

But you just know that somewhere, someone is printing up t-shirts that say: I destroyed the global financial system and all I got was this lousy $1.3 million bonus.

What's your take on the whole AIG/bailout/Great Depression 2.0 thing?

first day

So, yesterday was the first day back at work for me and the first day at daycare for Cole. It was much less traumatic than I had worried it might be -- no tears for either of us. I had taken Cole in last week to visit and meet the other kids, so when we arrived, a little girl in pigtails yelled out, Look, it's baby Cole! Hi, Cole! Is he going to stay with us today? I told her that he was and smiled all the way to work. I think everything is going to be just fine.

easy as π

Don't forget -- today is pi(e)* day! If you can't bake one, at least try and eat a slice or two (preferably à la mode) to celebrate!


*'Cause π is 3.14. And today is 3.14. Well, at least in the US. I realize that just about everywhere else it's 14.3. But what fun is that?

seeing things

If you have a few spare minutes, go back to this post and click through some of the links where people have posted close-ups of one of their eyes. There's something incredibly eerie and compelling about the set of photos -- as if all those people inside your computer are peering through your monitor, eyes pressed to keyholes.

And another thing. This is a little complicated, but, I promise you, it's worth it.

1. go to this site.

2. using the site search feature (at the top right of the screen), type in u.y.l (without the dots or italics, of course).

3. click on "collections"

4. choose the first item in the collections, a breakfast still life.

You'll see a painting that, at first glance, looks like a typical Dutch 17th century still life -- muted colors, almost photographic realism, the remains of a breakfast, a collection of precariously balanced glasses, cups and plates, abandoned at the table.

But keep looking and you'll starting seeing them. Hidden in the folds of the tablecloth, nestled in the bowl and base of the overturned golden goblet, staring from the bottom of the silver plate in the middle of the table, on the seemingly empty wall to the right, in the shadow of the niche, in the small glass of beer to the right and the larger, tilted glass to the left are dozens and dozens of staring eyes.

Some are huge, some so tiny that you'll need to use the zoom feature to see them. Once you start finding them, you can't stop.* And you'll imagine the painting hanging in a white-walled museum gallery, with hundreds of people looking at it every day and the painting staring back at them.

Basically, this is just about the most disturbing picture ever or I'm really and truly going off the deep end. And, yes, I'm aware that those two things aren't mutually exclusive.



*It's a little like the hidden pictures game in Highlights magazine. Which, come to think of it, kind of creeped me out too.


eta: For those of you having trouble seeing the eyes, try zooming in on the silver platter in the middle of the table. Right next to the upside down spoon is an eye.

don't look back

I felt a kind of grim nostalgia for my own childhood, even before I'd fully left it. I didn't want to grow up, didn't want to be seven, nine, twelve, fourteen. I had read somewhere that sleeping children breathe at a different rhythm than adults and so I would sometimes sneak into my younger brother's room at night and listen, comparing. Was my own breath in and out a little faster than his? A tiny bit slower? Had I already grown up, but just hadn't realized it yet?

Strangely, none of those feelings of regret and loss seem to apply to my son Gray. As he's reached each childhood milestone, I've felt nothing but relief -- one more hurdle crossed, one fewer thing to worry about. Now, he stands, long-limbed and touchingly self-confident, at the brink of adulthood and I keep thinking it should be harder than it is to let him go.

Today Gray got his very first college acceptance letter -- sent by one of those traditional schools that apparently doesn't believe in email notifications. It's probably not his first choice, but it's a school I'd be very happy to see him at. By September, he'll be gone, living in a dorm, eating at a long table in a dining hall, telling his roommates things he'd never dream of telling me. And what I feel is a wild sense of expectation and what I see is a bright and boundless future, a future that, somehow, I never was able to conjure for myself.

honest

Circles Become Me and Virginia were nice enough to nominate me for the Honest Scrap award. Many thanks to both of you.

I think you're supposed to share ten honest things about yourself, but right now I have only one: I've been having these intermittent wellings up of panic, doubt, dread. They don't seem to really have an object or a focus. Instead, it's an unsteadiness that makes the physical world seem to tremble and go out of focus, like a craze of tiny lines in the glaze of a china plate.

It's like the time I was standing in a library, reaching for a book and the floor buckled under my feet, lurching like the deck of a ship. It was just an earthquake, a tiny one, but, just for a second, all I could understand was that something had gone terribly wrong with the world.

Does that ever happen to you? What do you do?

useful advice

I wanted to make sure I thanked everyone* for their thoughts on day care. (check out the comments to the post for some interesting perspectives, as well as lists of things to look for and questions to ask).

I found a list of home day cares in my town that have been accredited by the state (thanks, Rachel) and have been going down the list, interviewing the ones with space for infant. Maybe it's because I have an older kid, who had his share of less-than-ideal child care situations, but seems to have turned out just fine, but I'm pretty relaxed about the whole thing and feel pretty confident that I'll be able to find something I'm happy with.


*Special thanks to Clementine who shared some of her experiences and answered all of my sometimes incoherent questions.

useless advice

Useless, if only because so few of you are going to find yourselves involved in a surrogacy, either as a surrogate or as an intended parent. But, if you do, my completely unsolicited advice is that you have a fair amount of contact with the hospital where the baby's scheduled to be born prior to the birth. Stop by, maybe take the tour, at a minimum, call. Talk to as many people as you can, introduce yourself, explain the situation.

As you might gather, I didn't do any of that because -- well, because I wasn't at all sure that there was actually going to be a baby and I felt like doing anything that suggested I thought that things might work out would jinx me. So, without getting into the boring details, the hospital has been having a very difficult time wrapping their collective minds around the surrogacy, which has been a source of far too many problems.

Like, for example, despite my repeated phone calls, no birth certificate yet, because "it's a very complicated situation." Which wouldn't really bother me except for the fact that we need one for insurance purposes. Immediately.

Still, I'm sure everything will work out. It's just taking a lot longer than I expected and, I think, probably could have been made easier by a little advance planning on my part.

What's your best piece of useless advice?

what's next

Just when I've finally gotten the hang of this staying-at-home thing (plan each day in detail, make to-do lists), it's just about time for me to go back to work. Which means I need to set up a daycare arrangement. Until Gray was about a year old, we had a nanny who came to the house every day. After his first birthday, we put him in a daycare center affiliated with the local university. I was very happy with both arrangements, but I'm thinking more of home-based care this time round.

Daycare at a center isn't practical for right now. For one thing, most centers in town charge upwards of $2000/month (no, that is not a typo) for a baby under 15 months. For another, the wait lists are such that you really have to apply before the child is born, which, for a bunch of reasons, I wasn't willing to do. And, while I loved Gray's nanny, in retrospect, I think that, after the first few months, he would have benefited from an environment where he was around other kids.

So that's why I'm looking at family daycare. Advice or thoughts, anyone? What should I look for? What questions should I ask? And (just out of idle curiosity), what does infant daycare at a center run in your neck of the woods?