…parenting ruins everything

I did make an unrealistic promise to myself when I started writing again. I promised my bad self that I wouldn’t make this a mommy blog. I find myself unable to keep that promise so I can only say that I will limit the mommy jabber as best as possible.

Early this morning, my FecesBook feed was filled with comments about a little girl named Skylar who lives in my old stomping grounds. Within less than a day, the little girl went from playing outside to being abducted and murdered. As a rule, I would find this incredibly upsetting. Being a parent only magnifies the horror and pain.

One of the more peculiar aspects of parenting that I have found is how dramatically your frame of reference is altered and how much more profoundly you feel things. It’s as if the little baby takes all of your ambivalence with him/her when he/she leaves the womb. You’re left with nothing but a bundle of raw nerves and feelings.

I have always been an extreme worrier – so much so that I end up physically ill. It has been said that I’m Worst Case Scenario girl. I will envision the absolute worst outcome of any situation and plan backwards to prevent it from happening. It’s a great talent and wonderful ability, if you’re my employer. It’s tedious and exhausting if you have to live with me.

My propensity for constant worrying has been changed since Milkface was born. There are certain things that I can flippantly dismiss with the wave of a hand – things which I would agonize over before Milky. Then there are new issues which are so considerably troubling that I become paralyzed with fear.

I could very well say the same about sadness. That which would reduce me to tears in my previous life seems mostly irrelevant. Show me a child that has been mistreated, a parent who is grieving or the impact of illness on a family and I’m a blubbering, non-functioning mess. Outside of the terrible two-tantrum, watching my own child cry is something I cannot bear. I consider myself very fortunate that our experiences, thus far, have been easily solved by a snuggle, hug and a kiss. Let’s hope it stays that way.

On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, parenting has brought me joy unlike anything I have ever experienced. There is no better sound in the world than the genuine belly laugh of a pleased toddler. No psychotropic medication can elevate your spirits quite like the smile of a child. Nothing makes you feel as if your troubles have melted away quite like a hug and drooly kiss.

For someone who has spent the past eleven or so years carefully analyzing every emotion, every response – the dramatic shift in outlook is mindboggling. I had long thought that I was hypersensitive. I had long tried to manage that. Now that I’m a parent, I realize it’s all go-with-the-flow. If you’re blessed with a child, the intensity of feelings defies description. You shift from pessimist to optimist at the drop of a hat. You fear things you previously thought impossible. You fall in love a million times a day.

WOTD: balaclava and other confusing words…

For some reason our British cousins have adopted this word, which according to Bill Bryson (author and keen observer of all things British from an American perspective), is a “truly bad word.” The American term is the decidedly less poetic but much clearer ski mask. Its “badness” lies in the fact that it really doesn’t sound like what it is:

“[It] could be almost anything – an obscure root vegetable, a type of geological formation peculiar to the Tibetian steppe, the basic unit of currenty in Albania, the sound of a large load of rocks coming out of the back of a dump truck, almost anything at all. It certainly doesn’t sound like something you would want to put on your head. No, the word you want for a kind of pull-down hat is haggis.”
Excerpt from I’m a Stranger Here Myself

He then goes on to explain that “haggis” has a warm and furry sound to it and that it doesn’t sound at all like a food. Furthermore, anyone who has ever tried it will attest that it doesn’t taste much like a food either.

This got me thinking about how many other words there are in the English language that don’t sound at all like what they are, and how confusing this can be for learners of it as a second language.

For example, why do we drive on the parkway, and park in the driveway?

Why do we say we’re getting ON or OFF the bus/train/plane when we’re really getting IN or OUT of it?

A pineapple is nothing like a pine nor like an apple. It doesn’t even come from a pine tree. How the hell did it get named that? And what about a grapefruit?

I’m sure there are many examples of weird words in Swedish as well, and the one I can think of at the moment is smörgås (sandwich) which translated literally into English means “butter goose.”

Finally, and with apologies for the indelicacy of the following language, why do we say we’re taking a shit when we’re actually LEAVING it?

Feel free to post your own examples of weird or inaccurate words in comments. Until next time…

I need a technological miracle…

I’m slightly inundated.

Apparently, I’m supposed to be in three places at once this afternoon so I’d appreciate any advice or instructions on how to open a rift in the space-time continuum. I need to arrange this for the hour of 16:00 GMT+1 when I’m supposed to be teaching a lesson, offering extra help and tutoring for ninth graders and attending a staff meeting.

I also have a stack of national exams that keeps increasing in size. Right now I have about a hundred exams to grade, but by the end of this week it will have increased to 300. The deadline for getting all these exams graded is the 22nd, but I also have a full time teaching schedule to maintain. Therefore, additionally I’ll need further instructions on how to stop time for at least a week in order to get this done on time.

If you cannot offer me any assistance in breaking the laws of physics then some booze will be greatly appreciated.

‘kthanksbai

…one day

I digress.

I had an entire post scribbled about Mother’s Day. When writing about things that hit really close to home for yours truly, I like to have someone edit it to make sure the rambling nonsense is kept to a minimum. Naturally, that didn’t happen. For my mere post was tabled in lieu of guitar forums and Facebook.

I woke up to a nice shower of kisses from my darling Milkfaced boy. We had some quality time in the big bed where I answered a lot of “What’s that?” questions and sneaked in a random snuggle here and there. So far, pretty good.

Then comes chaos.

When you’re married to the least organized man in the universe, things can wear on your nerves pretty quickly. When you’re married to someone who travels for a living, all patience is tested by having to run a household by yourself. I don’t care for Mother’s Day, as a rule, but I certainly welcome one day out of the year where I can let down my guard, not have to think about what to plan for meals, not have to think about a day’s activities and not have to think about the laundry list of shit that never seems to get done.

Alas, my sans souci day lasted all of 2.5 hours. One iPod disappeared and the entire world had to come to a screeching halt. My ever constant coaching, my unending pleas for organization unanswered – I sneaked out to the deck while the house was being upended in pursuit of whatever has gone missing at this particular moment in time.

At the risk of sounding entirely frustrated and ungrateful, can a girl not catch a break? Particularly a working mom who has to go it alone more than she cares. Like many, I feel like I’m juggling way too many balls than I’m qualified to juggle. It wears one down very rapidly and doesn’t do much for the overall carriage and demeanor. Maybe if there was just one day a year that someone could recharge without interruptions, life would be a little more manageable.

As solutions normally lie at my feet, next year I vow to have everything organized and within arm’s reach. I will draw up a list of nifty ideas well in advance. Then I’m going to round up a few of my other mommy friends and run away for the weekend. Kids welcome. Husbands, not so much.

Kitties

(To be sung to the tune of “Piggies” by the Beatles.)

Have you seen the little kitties,
Lying on the bed?
And for all the little kitties
Life is getting sad.
Always having beds,
To lie around on.

Have you seen the bigger kitties,
With their scratching posts?
You can see them all day scratching,
With their little toes.
Gripping with their claws,
To make them sharper.

Eating food and without paying,
Human slaves they bring it all to them.
Running, sleeping, licking, playing.
What they need’s a damn good spraying!

Everywhere there’s lots of kitties,
Living kitty lives.
You can see them outside hunting,
Little birds and mice.
Trying to entice,
The little mice in.

For The Record

A public service message,
To set a few things straight,
To conspirators and doubters,
And haters that gotta hate,
Osama’s dead, shot in the head,
Then buried out at sea,
Barack Hussein Obama,
He was born in Hawaii,
While we’re at it let’s set straight,
Some other twisted views,
12 men do not control the world,
Nor the Vatican, nor Jews,
The lunar landing happened,
And Darwin he was right,
(though the way you nutters think,
puts that in a different light),
There often remain questions,
About how people die,
But a simple lack of answers,
Won’t make conspiracy fly,
We wonder about detail,
When the elite pass on,
Except in the case of Elvis,
Whom we know was on the john,
Reptiles are not aliens,
Though you may think it so,
I’m also pretty sure,
2012 will come and go,
Believers of this stuff,
Leave one question inane,
How is it really possible,
To live with half a brain?

I still love my Original Amazon Kindle

I’m what you call an “early adopter.” This means that if a new gadget or technology comes to the market, I have to be one of the first ones to have it. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how I roll. I was one of the first to own an Amazon Kindle, an iPad, a Macintosh clone even! Being an early adopter is risky. Not only will you pay a premium price for something new, but you run the possibility of getting a lemon technology. What’s worse is when you paid all this money and a year later the company closes or decides to no longer support the device. That really hurts…

Anyhow, sometimes you pick a winner, and the original Amazon Kindle, or Generation 1, is still a winner. Not only does it still work, but it’s still compatible with Amazon’s Whispernet download service. I even think it has a leg up on the next generation of Kindles because the user can change the battery. In the grand scheme of things, that might not sound like much, but I always like electronic devices where you can replace a failing battery without having to ship the unit off to the manufacturer. Cough, cough, Apple…

I also like the fact that on the original Amazon Kindle you can switch out SD memory cards. This means that if you have enough SD cards, you can carry with you an unlimited supply of books. The new Kindles do not have the SD card expansion capability, they are stuck with the internal memory. That’s a real shame in my opinion.

That’s not to say that the new generation of Kindles are bad. They are slimmer, faster, and have some new improvements like the ability to read Adobe Acrobat .PDF files, and a long battery life. No, the new Kindles are wonderful, it’s just that the original Kindle is still so good, I feel no need to upgrade. Sometimes an early adopter picks a winner.

WOTD: Agnotology

Here’s a little something off the request line. I’d like to dedicate today’s WOTD to Cissi, Shark and the other upstanding members of Random Misanthrope.

Today’s word is a relatively new discipline, developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger. Agnotology is defined as of the study of “culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.”

There sure is a lot of bullshit masquerading as scientific research these days, which is why I’m not surprised to learn that this is such a new discipline. It used to be that scientific cranks could rarely get anything published because, well, they were hacks and quacks, and everybody knew it. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, just about any nut with any nutty idea can publish that belief for the whole world to see. One can find websites that offer definitive proof that 9/11 was a government plot, the Apollo 11 mission was a hoax, vaccines cause autism, homeopathy can effectively treat any disease including cancer, there are huge and powerful “lasers” currently orbiting the earth, and of course that President Barack Obama was not only born in Kenya, he’s also a Muslim.

Just look around. If you want confirmation for any crackpot idea then the internet will provide it.

My ex was a real tin-foil hat club type who was frequently out of work and spent his days reading about various conspiracies on the internet while I was at the office. One day he arrived to pick me up at work wearing a surgical mask. The explanation he gave was that there were a lot of jets flying over head that day and he read on the internet they were secret government planes generating “chemical trails” which rain down toxic chemicals that penetrate our bodies and control our minds.

I said that if that were really the case, then a surgical mask probably wasn’t going to provide very much in the way of protection.

Until next time…