So, about that baby ...

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out how I want to handle my knocked-uppedness on this blog. It's certainly something that's happening to me — this can be proven best by the human head floating around in my abdomen — and while I understand that women reproduce every day, sometimes ill-advisedly, it's pretty huge for me seeing that this is the first human head I've ever grown in my innards. There are plenty of mommy blogs out there and there are plenty of baby blogs out there and there are plenty of pregnancy blogs out there, and I read those and enjoy them for those purposes. But this blog has never been any of the three, and I kind of like that it's nice and random. I think I'm going to keep it that way. I started writing this whole shebang at a time when I was quite depressed and needed to remind myself that there were things in the world to notice and note other than my own misery, and now that I've come so far that I now have pregnancy-induced dementia and can think of nothing beyond that human head, I desperately need this blog to remind me that there's life going on beyond the belly.

So here's what I'm gonna do:

I'm going to continue the randomness. I will, however, be sharing pregnancy-related shenanigans, but I will be doing this under some sort of subhed, kind of like a spoiler alert, probably at the ends of posts — unless the dementia has taken over an entire post, in which case, this cannot be helped, for I will have succumbed. I know you guys are a diverse group age- and life-stage-wise, so for those of you who couldn't give a shit about procreation and some woman's tales of ankle-swelling, I shall not alienate you. For those of you who are into it, huzzah, welcome to my world of TMI: Pregnancy Makes You Fart a Lot.

OK.

That said:

As far as I can tell, these are the answers to the FAQs so far:

1. I'm due March 26.

2. The working in-vitro name is Comfy. This name is multi-tiered: We would like for our child to be comfortable with itself and others and its place in this world; we would like for our child to possess unsurpassed creativity and achieve success, much like, for example, Louis Comfort Tiffany; and we would like our child to be comfortable in its current location and stay there until at least term. I was brutally overruled when I pitched my preference for the in-vitro name, by the way: Josh would not agree to refer to the fetus as Awesome Banks. I'm still pissed.

3. We don't want to know the gender. I think it's sort of beside the point, really. This is making arguments about what to name the kid lengthy and hilarious, and also disturbing, because Josh has the worst taste in names ever. I would like to ensure that Comfy has rhythm, though, so if it's a boy, I'm voting for Carlton Banks.

4. I'm feeling good. The nausea was manageable, the fatigue was completely unmanageable, the massive zit cluster on my forehead is almost gone, and I've either been freezing cold or boiling hot every minute for 15 weeks. I'm not showing yet nor have I gained any weight (I don't think), but I woke up this morning feeling like someone had taken out the contents of my stomach and filled it with clay. The one thing that has truly surprised me is that my boobs have not yet taken over the planet. (Josh says they're not bigger, they're just more "buoyant," which I can get behind.) I think my body is sympathetic to the fact that all through middle and high school, I had to schlep around The Breasts That Ate Pittsburgh.

5. No, I will not tether a giant mylar balloon in my backyard and make my kid barf on national TV.

6. I have no food cravings. On the contrary, I've had zero appetite. Actually, my appetite is starting to come back, but I'm still never in the mood for anything, so I stand around hoping to feel inspired and then end up hating whatever I'm eating. I'm eating a lot of fruit and drinking a lot of juice, though, so I must be an independent vitamin C source at this point. When I had first trimester nausea, I was OK as long as I ate a carb before I ate anything else, but then my pee started smelling like crackers. I am so hot.

7. This whole experience is very, very surreal. I'm hoping for a kick soon so my brain can finally connect with what my body is doing. As if it's not enough my kid is going to be saddled with a Jewish mother, by not being able to fully connect with this science project I've become, I have guilt that I've failed Comfy and now feel like I have to overcompensate with an extravagant bar/bat mitzvah in which my child rides into the party on an elephant and we hire whatever the 2022 version of the Black Eyed Peas will be to sing whatever the 2022 version of "Let's Get It Started" will be.

8. Suddenly, I'm good at math. For instance:

people on the Internet are crazy + women are crazy x pregnant women are crazy = pregnant women on the Internet are crazy

9. I can smell absolutely everything. Therefore, people riding public transportation should refrain from using Vicks VapoRub. It's just mean.

10. Don't ask me about labor. Doing so will make me cry.

So there you have it. Comfy. Bloat. Zits. Crackers.

Insane.

The First Annual Marla Garla Song and Poetry Contest

OK, so here's the deal:

I have writer's block.

My friend Scott Who I Love tells me that it's because I'm happy right now, and that could very well be true, but it doesn't address the problem. The bloglem. See? This is what I come up with. I should be ashamed of myself. So it doesn't address the problem of the fact that I seem to be relying heavily on filling this site with random photographs because words and ideas escape me. But I'm happy, so at least I'm not overwrought about it. I'm all, "Words? Who needs 'em! Lalalalallala pretty bird!" And at least my writer's block isn't as debilitating as Dan Brown's — poor Dan Brown, who is shouldering the blame for his entire publishing imprint going kaput because he hasn't produced another Da Vinci Code for Doubleday. Pressure.

So here's what we're gonna do.

When I was in Boston at the beginning of November visiting The Nephew, I had a tendency to sing to him. I sang to him a lot. I sang to him nonstop, I danced and sang to him. I sang this song when I was changing his diaper:

This is what we do
When you make a poo
We clean up your bits
And we clean up your butt
And now you're good as new

I sang this song when he got fussy:

There's no need
To be so sad
You've got a great mom
And you've got a great dad

But because I have writer's block, that's all I could come up with. No second verses, nary another stanza. Stephanie tried to build on the poo song and write one about pee, and it had potential and some clever rhyme patterns, but we just couldn't get it, you know?

Now it's your turn. You don't have to write about poop, you don't have to soothe the savage infant soul, you don't have to rhyme. Just see what you can come up with on any topic you choose, lyrics or poetry, haiku or tofu, and I'll send the one that cracks my shit up the most a prize. So easy! And I don't have to write! Fancy that! And if you do want to write a song for The Nephew, who is exceptional in every way, that would indeed be awesome.

Here, I'll start you off with haiku, my favorite form:

Isn't the blogger
supposed to do the writing?
This chick sucks my ass.

Ode to Assface

The train was crowded on my way downtown tonight, and it's a given that when the train is packed, the ratio of Displays of Bad Subway Etiquette skyrockets. It's simple math: The more people who jam themselves into a train car, the more people there are who can rub their crotches against your ass, ignore pregnant women and refuse to give them seats, keep their bodies planted in front of the doors so commuters can neither enter nor exit without a maddening forceful collision, blast whatever on their iPods, and other various boils on the behavioral butt of society.

So I was grateful to get a seat, because I could just bury my face in my Entertainment Weekly (a shockingly interesting piece on the bursting of Jessica Simpson's Grand Ole Opry cherry and similar forays into country music by pop artists) and ignore the sneezers around me who didn't cover their mouths. If I hadn't had a magazine with me, I might have picked my nose and wiped it on a pole the moment before someone was about to grab it, just to fit in.

Upon hitting the 14th Street station, the two commuters on either side of me got up and left the train. A man in a dark grey suit who had been standing in front of me proceeded to turn around with his back to me, bend over so his ass was directly in my face, pick something up, and move to the empty seat to my left, whereupon he sat, spread his legs as wide as he could, pushing me over to teeter on the ridge between the seat I had been in and the one next to it, and open his newspaper fully (instead of folding it in half or quarters, which is proper subway etiquette; takes up less space). He was totally oblivious to his egregious violation of any social code, and if you live in this city, it behooves you to have some idea of the code we all live by. Or not. Ignorance is bliss, and then everybody hates you. C'est la vie.

Anyway.

So I'm sitting, well, not in my seat but on the narrow between-the-seats spine that did the very opposite of containing my substantial posterior or my balance, and I'm stewing. And I start staring at him. And then I catch sight of his right hand.

There was a pink Hello Kitty Band-Aid on it.

I softened.

So then I started to think: He's in a responsible grey suit. He's carrying a briefcase. He's on his way downtown, toward the Financial District. Or he's on his way home from Midtown, where one can find many, many of the glass office buildings of the elite moneymaking set. He's reading the Business section. He's paying absolutely no mind to others around him. Holy Hell, I thought, he must work for Lehman Brothers. Or Merrill Lynch. Or AIG. Or [insert bankrupt/festering/defunct financial institution here]. And he's totally stressed out. And when he got home from work last night, he sunk into his favorite easy chair, head in his hands, bemoaning the uncertainty to come. And his four-year-old daughter tugged at her mother's shirt, and the man's wife bent down to their little girl and said, "What is it, sweetie?" And the little girl said, "Mommy, why is Daddy so sad?" And the wife looked at her forlorn husband, her heart aching for him, and said, "Daddy has a boo-boo and he can't make it better yet." And the little girl ran to the bathroom, dug out the Hello Kitty Band-Aid, and quietly tiptoed up to her father. He slowly looked up when he felt her tiny body standing next to him and said, "Hi, button." She unwrapped the bandage, put it on the top of his hand, and said, "There, Daddy. Now it's all better."

I loved this man. This man who, 30 seconds previously, pushed his ass in my face and shoved me out of my seat with the power of his right thigh.

We got to the next stop. The doors opened. He hurriedly shoved his newspaper under his arm and disembarked.

All that for one stop. And we were nowhere near any of the neighborhoods I'd decided he was going to to live the life I'd decided he lived. He probably sold watches or something and had 50 cats.

And there I'd been, creating a sad little scene that might have actually happened to an awful lot of folks in the past two days, and I got pissed all over again. Gah. Wasted sympathies: so frustrating. At least I was able to shift back onto a full seat once he left. Sitting on the ridge-thing makes your butt go numb.

It did make me recall this post, about the gorgeous Adonis with the ugly shoes and whimsical candy. How do you decide if you adore someone you don't know but who has let you down terribly with bad taste or bad manners and then makes up for it with fun accessories? Do I malign the suited fella for his space-assaulting ways, or do I love him for his cartoon Band-Aid? Maybe he did work for Lehman Brothers. Who the hell knows. I know it's surprising for me to do such a thing, but I'm really overthinking this.

So: To the man in the grey suit, if you work in the financial sector or were screwed by the financial sector and sport the Band-Aid to soothe your anxieties, you have my sincere sympathies. And if you are just a douchebag who exercises no courtesy to your fellow commuters and wears a Hello Kitty Band-Aid because you picked a mole off the top of your hand while you were watching porn, suck it. I have a bottle of lemon juice and I'm not afraid to use it.

In other news, apologies for the sparse (or, really, not at all) writing lately. I just got back from a truly excellent trip to San Francisco to meet Stacy's son, Bass, and dontcha know, I have pictures. They'll land on this here page toute de suite.

And speaking of this blog, I suppose I should say something about Sarah Palin, because everybody and their mother who has a blog has written about Sarah Palin. And I imagine there's nothing new I could say that hasn't been said, and I'm also sure you folks don't come here to read about politics (I have deduced this because you read my blog, and I have never written about politics; I is shmart). And I hate talking about politics because it makes me violently angry, which I also suppose completely conflicts with the fact that I'm writing about it at this very moment. And I've created this blog in the spirit of very few heavy things being discussed ever. In any case, it shouldn't surprise you that I'm pretty liberal and proud of it, so I guess I'll just say this: Don't vote for Sarah Palin. She's a twat.

Oh! Alan Alda is on Craig Ferguson right now! And Ferguson said "fucking cock" on air! Double attractiveness and an embrace of blue language! My hormones are going berserk. I'm unreasonably happy. May you be as well.

Who wants to play?

Seeing how I have no news to speak of that I believe is worth sharing (I think my therapist is even tiring of me: When you sit down, in tears, saying you can do nothing except think of the one horrible thing happening in your life and you ask her to help you find a way to refocus so it's not monopolizing your brain and giving you anxiety attacks, and she says, "Try not to think about it, " perhaps it's time to reassess), I've decided we're going to play a little game.

I'm going to start a story and you're going to keep it going. I'm sure you've all played this before, but since I'm having anxiety attacks, I can't possibly finish it. More important, I think that, together, we can write the most scintillating tale of love, betrayal, adventure and questionable sartorial decisions ever recorded.

So, whoever takes on the next chain of events, make sure you end it at an intriguing point so the next genius reader can take a stab at it. I can't wait to read what you come up with ...

Here we go:

*****

It was a cool 64 degrees outside, and despite that and the fact that skin-burning raindrops had begun to drizzle onto her front porch, dotting it with acid-tinged steam, Jessica Simpson hiked up her very favorite yellow striped tube dress, glossed her lips with cherry-infused gloss, fluffed her golden mane, and waited by the door for her ride. Daisy, her Maltipoo, barked at her strap-wrapped ankles, clawing at her espadrilles in warning not to go outside, but Jessica paid Daisy no mind.

"Shoo," she said, wiggling her dog free. "I know what you're trying to do, and it's not gonna work. Today is gonna be the best day ever."

Within seconds, Jessica heard a honk in her driveway ("Daisy, did you sneeze?" she asked the apoplectic boutiquedog, before realizing the sound came from the waiting SUV). She squared her shoulders, grabbed her tent-size leather Louis Vuitton monogrammed umbrella, and stepped outside.

"One, two, three, four, milk does a body good," Jessica chanted to herself as she skipped between raindrops and dove into the car. She collapsed her umbrella, smoothed out her dress, and sighed.

"I know, I know. Don't say it," she said to her driver.

"I don't mean to give you a hard time," he said, "but you promised you would

*****

Your turn! Fun! Right? Fun ... ?

Please play with me ...

Apparently, you cannot lie, either.

I subscribe to a service called Stat Counter, which tabulates how many hits my blog gets. It doesn't tell me everything — something with cookies and something-or-others — but I can see how some of you come to my site. (It doesn't give your names, so don't worry about me invading your privacy or stalking you or assuming you're all my ex-boyfriends who are dazzled by my thirtysomething droopy form of beauty of late. But it gives cities and, sometimes, server names. I apparently have a lot of readers who work in law firms. I should be careful that all my claims are true, then, dammit.) Mollie explained how it works much better here. A good explanation and Lawrence Welk jokes. This cannot be beat.

In any event, in some cases, I can see what you Googled in order to find me. Or, more accurately (lawyers!), what you Googled when you happened to find me.

For example, several months ago, someone fell upon my blog when they Googled stick figure fellatio. It was then that I realized that I'm just dirty.

On my current menu are three that piqued my interest:

GARLA MAN
big butts photos
conjoined twin myslexia Mexican forehead

Hm.

I really don't know how I feel about that. I do have several thoughts, of course:

1. While I think my mother, for one, always wished I'd been more girlie, I am not, despite arguments to the contrary, a man.
2. I'm certain of this, as evidenced by my womanly bazooms.
3. I will never post photos of anybody's big butts. Unless they're mean to me. So if that happens, ba-donk-a-donk.
4. But what this finding says to me is that I talk about Sir Mix-a-Lot way too much.
5. I think I might be weird.
6. I'm fine with that.

While you're muddling together your explanations for why you're Googling big butts photos, please enjoy this. It is extremely important to watch the commercial, especially since you'll be a witness to real-life fishing emergencies.

I like big butts. I cannot lie.

This morning, I was telling Stacy this story:

Last night at work, one of our eagle-eyed copyediting freelancers, Steve, caught an inconsistency that almost made it into the magazine. He was reading a headline that had the word A-list in it. Being a hed, the A was capped, as it always should be anyway because you wouldn't spell it a-list, but in this case, list was lowercase. He brought it over to me and the following exchange occurred.

STEVE: Hm. I see that we're lowercasing the l in list here.
ME: Yes. A-list is hyphenated in the dictionary, so even in a hed, the list would be lowercase.
STEVE: But earlier today, we had boo-boos in a hed and we capped both Bs.
ME: [thinking] Oh my gosh, you're absolutely right. I totally missed it.
STEVE: So the second B should have been lowercase?
ME: Yes, because boo-boo is hyphenated in the dictionary. We can still fix it. Thank you so much for catching that. I completely missed it.
STEVE: OK, so just so I'm clear: If a compound is hyphenated in the dictionary and we're using it in a hed, we only uppercase the first letter of the first word, but not the first letter of the word following the hyphen. But if it's not hyphenated in the dictionary, then we cap both first letters.
ME: Yes.
STEVE: For example?
ME: OK. Well, like we said, boo-boo is hyphenated in the dictionary, so in a hed, it would be capital B, little o, little o, hyphen, little b, o, o. But if the headline was, say ...

[pause in conversation while I make up a headline]

ME: If the hed was, like, "Jennifer Lopez Is Butt-Heavy," you'd cap the H.
STEVE: [looking at me funny] OK.
ME: [starting to blush] Because, uh, butt-heavy isn't in the dictionary.
STEVE: [silent]
ME: So, um, the B and, uh, the H should both be capped. So.
STEVE: [grinning slyly] You just made that up, didn't you?
ME: I really, really did.

We started laughing, extolling the truth of the made-up hed, and went about our merry way. I fixed boo-boos. All was well.

So I told Stacy this story, as I've told it to maybe four other people. She said the exact same thing they all said:

"You have to put that on your blog."

I said I wasn't going to, that I much prefer to post other people's witticisms than my own, because I feel that patting myself on the back about how brilliantly hilarious I am is just a little too conceited, even for me, an admittedly conceited person. Aren't I pretty?

"See, though," she said, "you have to post it because it's the epitome of the kinds of conversations you have at work. Most people don't have those conversations at their jobs. Their work conversations go like this: [drops voice] 'Yes, uh, are you almost finished with your PowerPoint presentation?' [pitches voice] 'Almost, I can have it to you in two hours.' [drops voice] 'Well done. When you're finished, just download it to the share drive.' [back to Stacy-self] See? That's what people talk about at work. They don't talk about Jennifer Lopez's heavy butt."

"I guess."

"That was so true, by the way."

So there you have it. Because more than anything, Stacy's use of share drive made the whole thing worthwhile.

What's the most bizarre conversation you've had at work today?

An odd turn of events

I've just realized that I much prefer the derogatory-against-the-female-posterior use of the word booty than the treasures-pillaged-by-pirates-or-won-by-landlubbers use of booty. It sort of goes against everything I stand for, but I would rather shake my booty than count my booty. Although it would be nice to have some booty to count.

You know what? Never mind.

Also, when I typed in the title of this post, I accidentally typed An odd turd of events, which is far superior than what's there. Shake your booty on that.

Many apologies for the sparse postage. We've been dealing with post-Thanksgiving regrouping (dinner went great, despite all 22 guests showing up 40 minutes early ... and yes, we were up to 22) and acclimating kittens, both of whom have been battling nasty respiratory infections that have forced us to shuttle them to and from the vet with alarming frequency. Plans are to post with many pictures this weekend. You too shall enjoy my fuzzbombs. (Dirty!)

Happy post-Thanksgiving, y'all.

Mmm, cookies ...

So I've had to enable comment moderation on my blog until I get this whole spam thing straightened out. If you read the comments, you'll notice there's been a delightful surge in sexy teens, diabetics and self-promoters posting on this site. I've deleted most of them, but I'm screening posts as much as I can and am contacting Blogger to figure this shizz out. Hopefully once it's sorted, I'll be able to disable the moderation thingy to eliminate annoyance for you. And for me. Cuz this really sucks.

If any of you are technosavvy, please share any tips, chips, chains, whips. (Name the movie for five points!) Because I really have no idea what I'm doing. Post-it Notes I understand. HTML and cookies? Not so much.

Confessions on a dance floor

I was watching "Merge" yesterday when one of those Lifetime "Real Women" scenarios came on, in between the "what did they protect?" and the "throw it in the shredder!" segments. For those of you not well-versed in the structure of the Lifetime Television for Women commercial break, before the regularly-scheduled program comes back on, a "real" (i.e. non-celebrity) woman tells a brief story about how she came about doing something that provided necessary balance to her life. It's similar to the kinds of stories I liked working on at "Real Simple," except now I can enjoy them. Anyway, last night's Real Woman was a yoga instructor named Bertha. She was doing downward dogs on what looked like an inner-city rooftop. She said that while she doesn't look like the generic tight-bodied, youthful yoga teacher (she's a bit older and a lot fabulous), she takes what she's learned from yoga and tries to help her students find peace. She said something to the extent of how yoga has taught her to take challenges and move through them as opposed to taking challenges and suffering through them.

That really spoke to me. I feel very much like I've been suffering through challenges in the last two years, and it's become painfully obvious that it's a terribly ineffective way to approach adversity. And it drove home a recurrent theme in my life, that I have to change the way I approach stress. Anyway, I love Bertha. And I also feel like I've confessed a lot about myself here. To wit:

1. I love "Merge." It makes me want to repurpose all of Josh's old furniture that I hate.
2. I think Lisa Rinna's adorable, probably because she was Billie on "Days of Our Lives." She seems like a happy, pillow-lipped person.
3. I haven't figured out yet how to address the heavier goings-on in my life on my blog, or if I even want to. It's not why I started doing it, and it certainly doesn't make for a cheeky, breezy, fun read.
4. You know what is fun? Fry Orgy! (See previous post.)
5. It's a sign of the times when culture dictates that we differentiate between celebrity and non-celebrity women as "famous" and "real," respectively. So, by turns, celebrity women are not real. (Quite a few aren't, anyway. Say, for instance, Jennifer Aniston.)

On that note, I've taken about 510 billion pictures in the past two weeks and I'll start posting them tomorrow. Chicago! Autumn in Brooklyn! The New York City Marathon, my favorite day of the year! Chris Noth's ass! Yay! And don't forget Fry Orgy. We should never forget Fry Orgy.

A nice place to visit

Today I was talking with my friend Anne Who Is Awesome about a guy we used to work with. He's an interesting man, well-read, flies by the seat of his pants in his own grizzled, stylishly-wrinkled-trousers, paperback-in-the-back-pocket fashion. I said that scores of women in our office had secret crushes-from-afar on him, and she said, "Yeah, but in a 'it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there' kind of way."

I thought that was one of the most brilliant descriptions I've ever heard of a person.

So I started to think about blogging again — which I've been thinking about on and off for a while — thanks to Anne Who Is Awesome: I love the idea of spreading around the insights of the cool folk around me. Beyond that, I love the idea of taking random pictures and posting 'em (once I learn how to do it) because visuals are meant to be shared. I'm deeply attracted to jotting down random observations so I remember them, because as I get older, my memory gets what was I saying again? But then again, I've wondered who would be interested enough to read this drivel, if I would even have enough to say to keep it going, is it a cry for attention, would it replace my already sub-par efforts to keep in touch with my friends, would I get too personal blah blah blah needycakes. But apparently, my adoration for the genius people in my life won out.

So, basically, I thought, Fuck it.

And here we are.