What Are You Afraid of?

Last night I saw a snake.

I am rational enough to know it was a small snake.

I am still squirmy today though.

I was on the phone with my mother and I exclaimed (but did not scream) "oh, there's a snake." My mother said what? and I said, "there's a snake, I just walked right past a snake, it was small but it was a snake." My mother, who hates snakes far more than I do said, "ew, ew, ew" I pointed out she was 6,000 miles away and that it couldn't possibly come near her. She still didn't like it.

She went on to tell me a story about a tv show she watched on a snake doctor though. While she thought it was gross it was so fascinating she couldn't turn it off. The man heals snake bites, but also keeps a garage (since his wife made him move them out of the house when they had a baby) full of poisonous snakes (perhaps for use if business gets bad?).

After awhile I asked her to stop talking about it. She asked why and I said because I've now seen a stick and nearly jumped and a leaf blew across the ground and I almost screamed, I'd rather not talk about snakes any more. She laughed at me.

I pointed out I didn't even yell when I'd seen the snake and she should be proud, she said she was and pleased I hadn't blown her ear off on the phone. So she switched to talking about weddings and still today every so often I feel a shiver go up my spine as I think of the snake slithering by.

I don't like snakes.

God Bless You

So this is probably blasphemous, but I loved a stand up routine I saw Dane Cook do some time ago (we watched it because for the second or third time tivo hadn't worked for me and it was my consolation prize -- and not a bad one really). Anyway, they are currently filming a movie outside our library that he's in (and I saw him run across the street at one point). I haven't felt the urge to go see any of the movies he's in, but I still think it's kinda cool (my co-workers heartily disagree, they find it an annoyance :)).

Final Wedding (at least for awhile)

My boy and I went to our last wedding of the season. It's been a long wedding season for us, while I have a friend who goes to at least eight a year, I have a much more moderate number, usually. We had two in a row this month and I am looking forward to a weekend without a wedding and to a long time before the next one starts (so far the next one I know about that I think I'll be invited to is way off in August 08). I have liked all of the weddings I have attended this summer though, and I have learned a lot about keeping guests well fed and hydrated and how often that equates to happiness.

At the office we're deep in the throes of planning our yearly event and it took my boss and I about an hour (and a couple of seating charts) to get a tentative seating chart put together. It's very much like a wedding; certain groups are too competitive to sit next to each other, and this group should be seated near the front or they'll be hurt and this group is more than happy to sit in the back if you place them near the bar etc.

When we finished this job I told my boss I am not getting married. I said, earlier, I'd thought about how I was certainly not making my own wedding invitations if I ever got married-- I almost posted about the tediousness of the 100 invitations I folded (I gave up after that many and left the rest of the folding for someone else) for our event and the 500 post-its I had carefully printed (they require precise placement on the paper you're feeding into the printer) but, at the time, even the post was tedious. The difficulty with the seating arrangements have nearly clinched it. If my landlord lets us get a cat, I may jump the rack from the librarian action figure, over to the crazy cat lady skipping soccer mom altogether (she doesn't have a good action figure anyway).

This weekend will be a good break from both activities. My well traveled friend is visiting again. Tonight we're getting sushi and tomorrow, after our soup kitchen, we're planning a trip to Portsmouth and Kittery. Who knows what Sunday will bring. . .

100th Post and a Guest Blogger

So my friend sent me the following and I so thoroughly enjoyed it I asked if I could post it. To be clear, this really is a friend, not me saying it's a friend. I am still at the stage where when engaged friends stick their rings on my finger I flip out because I fear that the ring will never come off and I feel terribly constricted and tied down. . . .

Dear Bitter Friend,

So, after a few months of social disconnectedness, accompanied by much unplanned weight loss in an unwillingly bulimic sort of way, I'm finally feeling human enough to do productive things like read the last 20 weeks or so of getting bitter and thereby getting some sense of what other people did all summer while I threw up. I am strengthened in this endeavor by the fact that as of this week I've finally managed to reattain the weight I was at in April when the unpleasantness began.

See, despite repeated assurances over many years by many physicians that such a thing was medically improbable, if not impossible (for lots of dull reasons), it came to pass that I got knocked up. And just to make sure that I didn't come to doubt the continuance of this unlikely state of affairs, God has allowed me to experience every possible disagreeable pregnancy "symptom" (if it's not a disease, why are they called symptoms, I ask you?) during the last four months. The highlights? Well, next to the constant nausea, bizarre food/smell aversions, and daily (sometimes hourly) opportunities to throw up what little I had managed to consume, they'd have to include boobs so sore and swollen that they've actually popped the underwires out of my bras, horrible acne, and blood vessels bursting all over my face. Are you really excited about being pregnant someday? It's so, so much fun.

Pregnant. With a little hiccup-prone person swimming around inside me, accruing a wealth of things to resent me for over the next 50 years, like the fact that the only thing I've been able to keep down is that nutritional paragon, the mocha frappuccino. Weeks and weeks of daily injecting my unborn child with caffeine, refined sugars, preservatives, and non-organic, hormone-studded dairy. Also, a wealth of early pregnancy health violations including the consumption of sushi, hard liquor, lunch meat, soft cheese (oh, how I miss you, soft cheese) and salami, which I blithely ate, secure in the knowledge that I was incapable of conceiving. Ooops. I've made up for that by managing to eat as little as possible after those first 4 weeks, and the poor thing must be starving, because it kept trying to shove its hands in its mouth during my last ultrasound.

Other than that and getting laid of from one of my two jobs (the other had obligingly promised to lay me off in December), it's been a pretty low-key summer here. I'd say the highlight was when my in-laws came to visit and my father-in-law ate some bad clams. For once, I wasn't the only one getting sick, though I did have to cede our one bathroom to him and throw up in a bucket for a while. Babies. Doesn't the thought of it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

In truth, I'm not bitter about being pregnant. I'm delighted about it. Really. I'm just bitter that every woman I meet says something like, "Oh, yes, I felt a little queasy for a day or two early in my pregnancy. No, I didn't throw up, but my tummy was just a bit upset once, I remember." Grrrrr. Or, even better, from a friend who's busy growing her second mini-me, "Oh, well, I haven't thrown up with either of my pregnancies, but I'm just a trooper about that sort of thing." A trooper? A trooper, you say? No, you haven't thrown up because you haven't been sick. It's not something one does because one is a pansy, or weak-stomached. (Before this, with one exception, I hadn't thrown up since third grade!!!) It's something that happens when one's entire body convulses in a horrible paroxysm of rejection over the mutant you're making it sustain!

Forgive me, I begin to rant. Therein the root of my bitterness.

Love,

Your Acerbic Friend Plus One.

Like a trapeze act, timed to the second and high flying fun

Okay, so I am still working on the maine post and a post on this weekend (which includes such highlights as me being terribly confused when we visited Sandwich, MA and I would see things like the Sandwich Ship Shop and think what does that mean?! Do they specialize in subs?). But in the mean time, I have realized that my weekend is planned down to the minute. I am a planner, so this doesn't bother me too much, I am concerned that if one thing goes wrong though, it will set into place an irreversible domino effect (I am also planning on being exhausted when this weekend is over).

Friday, I am going to be participating in a wedding rehearsal at 3:00pm in Newport, RI. This means I have to actually take the whole day off work because I can't find transportation leaving at a time early enough to get me there, but not so early that I am only missing half a day (unless plans have changed again).

Saturday I am trying to convince my boy (who is being decidedly practical at this point) that we can take the car we rented for Friday and visit both Restaurant Depot and Costco so early we can drop the stuff at the church (which will hopefully be open at noon) and then drop the rented car back in its appointed spot. We will then take the train back to my house, quickly get dressed and then pick up the next car we reserved and possibly my roommate from class. We will get to the wedding (also in Newport which is an hour and a half away on a good day) by 5:00 and party like it's 1999 (or something like that) and then drive back home completely exhausted.

Sunday we'll sleep in till 9:00 and then start roasting a pig for my contribution for the welcome dinner my small group is hosting next Fri and hopefully get to nap on the couch for the next 5 hours as it roasts. Then we'll go to the 4:00 service at church and out to dinner for my boy's friend.

We'll see if it all works out. . . .