Resisting...the urge...

Damn the Oxygen network.

I want to hate Tori Spelling and her stupid show ("Tori and Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood") and her stupid family. I do. Her head looks like a potato and she can't act, and I hate her for getting me sucked into all those stupid movies on Lifetime. (Yeah, since when do I actually watch Lifetime and Oxygen?) And fuck Donna Martin and her virginity. Fuck her virginity -- yeah, I said it.

But...damnit... I think I really like Tori. Like, if I knew her in person, I think we'd be friends. I hate myself for loving this show and liking her.

There. I said it. Now we're never going to discuss this ever again.

But at least my biceps look amazing.

Everyone has irrational fears and hatreds. For some, it's midgets. For others, it's Wayne Newton. (And yes, I actually know people with these fears.) For me, it's grown-ass adults in full costume.

I know I've discussed it before, but the notion of adults in costumes -- especially ones that require some sort of face mask -- puts me VERY ill at-ease. I can remember back to going on a vacation to Disneyworld (Land? Whichever one's in Florida. Fuck it, I'm too lazy to open another tab and Google it.) and being very uncomfortable around all of the characters. You can totally see it in the pictures my parents took -- I am not happy, pleased, amused, or filled with joy and wonder.

Adults in costume are just damn weird, and even as a child I knew it.

This isn't even about furries. Dear holy Christ, don't get me on that topic. I can't even bend the logic of my brain around that one, and it encompasses everything I've ever found weird about adults in costume and then adds sex and rubbing and...no. No, no, no. I'm sooo not going on that one. But those people are fucking weird, man. WEIRD. And now that I've mentioned it, I'm sure some fucked-up Google search is going to land those people here too, along with all the usual run-of-the-mill self-help-searching freaks that wind up here looking all bewildered while diddling themselves and wondering what the hell I'm talking about.

Anyway. I had a point here.

So I get really ambitious today and decide to venture to Sam's Club. The thing I've noticed about Sam's Club, particularly in the summer, is that they always have someone hocking something out in the parking lot. Today they featured a Port-A-Pit barbecue in the parking lot, with one employee out soliciting new business.

Dressed as a chicken.

Now, a normal, rational human being would be able to just continue walking past such a person. A normal, rational person would maybe smile politely, maybe with a little bit of sympathy since it was like, 80 degrees out. A normal, rational person would not be shitting their pants over the mere sight of this guy, and a normal, rational person definitely would not do what I did.

Rather than just be a big girl about the whole thing, I wound up walking more or less the entire perimeter of the parking lot, in 80+ degree weather, lugging a big-ass purse and 25 lbs. of child and car seat, all so I wouldn't have to go anywhere near the Chicken Guy. And when it came time to leave? I did it again. I must've walked a good half mile, all in the name of avoiding the creepiness.

And the cart boys stared at me the entire time. I know they were mocking me, but you know what, they had carts to protect them from the Chicken Guy. Get a good amount of force behind a cart -- a Sam's Club cart, no less -- and you could probably land him in a coma. But I had nothing but my child, and contrary to popular thought, I will not physically use my child as a defense against a grown man in a chicken costume. I'm such a crazy, unconventional parent, I know.

You know, I really don't know why people look at me like I'm crazy. Just because I sit in my house all day plotting my mode of attack on Creepy Cat Guy, basking in my god complex I get from giving stuff away on Freecycle, and going to Sam's Club to walk around the parking lot like a looney trying to avoid some guy dressed like a chicken. I'm just a normal girl.

I'm just like you.

They're plotting our demise as we speak.

So A and I have had an ongoing war with Creepy Cat Guy across the street and his army of feline minions that roam the neighborhood at will. Despite semi-empty threats, nothing has changed in the last year. The cats are still everywhere, mocking me and A and the rest of the neighborhood. And I hate cats. HATE.

Last night we heard the lids to our trash cans clatter on the driveway. In response, A grabbed his air rifle and headed to the back deck. Of course he was only planning on shooting at the cats pellets into the air to frighten the cats. Part of me wonders if I should discourage such behavior, but as I said, I hate cats, and I really just don't care.

I hear A go out onto the back deck. The door shuts. There is a pause. Then I hear him shooting his rifle in rapid fire, but I don't hear any cat yowling or anything to indicate he actually hit anything. But he did come running back in through the back door, slam the door shut, and press himself against the door, eyes wide and filled with fear and his heart pounding through his shirt.

Apparently, what happened was A made it as far as the back deck, was peering around the back yard when something -- an ominous, ambiguous shadow -- came running at him. He freaked out and proceeded to shoot blindly into the dark at it. While he doesn't think he hit it, he's hoping he at least scared it.

Damn those cats and damn their evil overlord, Creepy Cat Guy. They know we're plotting and have arranged defense armies. I'm waiting for the morning A leaves for work and I find his rotting corpse on the front lawn that afternoon, with cats eating his eyes. It'll happen. I swear it will.

For your consideration.

I swear I don't regularly patrol my ex-boyfriend's blog, but he's a nice boy and writes funny things, and has become quite the name in sports blogging, not that I care, I'm just saying, is all...

But if you're bored, you should probably check out this little web gem. It made me spray an impressive amount of apple juice out of my nose, and I'm pretty sure it did considerable damage to my laptop keyboard as a result. There, Matt. You got your revenge. Damn you.

Mama said they was my magic boobs...

You gotta read the title like Forrest Gump. Remember, in the movie, he talks about his scoliosis-correcting leg braces and shoes? And Mama said they was his magic shoes? And... oh never mind. Anyway.

Punky's four month check-up was yesterday and my kid continues to grow at monstrous rates that continue to turn her into a huge freak of nature. Okay, my kid isn't a freak of nature. She's absolutely adorable and 100% healthy, which hey, rock on. But the current stats are now:

• 17 lbs., 8 oz. (up from 15 lbs., 3 oz. last month) = 100th percentile in weight
• 26.5" long (up from 25.5 last month) = 98th percentile in length
• 16.5" head diameter. I don't know what percentile that is, they didn't tell us. I'm just glad I didn't have to push it out of my bagingo.
  

So she's perfectly proportionate. Just big. And could probably crush your house. So really, you probably shouldn't piss me off, or I will send my giant baby to eat your dog and destroy your house. She doesn't have any impulse control because she's like, you know, a baby.

Queen of the Cheapies

New on my list of passing fads and shenanigans is my membership in FreeCycle. It's part of my efforts to stop being so damn wasteful and lessen our household's ecological footprint, and all that. For those unfamiliar, FreeCycle is a grass roots movement of sorts, localized to various cities and regions, exclusively for the purpose of giving away and receiving free stuff from others in your area. Things range from old magazines to boxes to lawn mowers and grills to clothes. I originally joined looking for baby things, but my summer project has become to declutter our claustrophobia-inducing house. And because I'm a huge gas whore, I don't want to drive across town to drop things off at the Salvation Army. So if some crazy cheapie wants to drive to my house and take my stuff, hey, that's cool.

But the more involved I've become, the more I have realized that the majority of people patrolling a web site for free stuff are, for lack of a better word, FLAKES. About a week ago I cleaned out our -- no joke -- foot-tall stack of magazines in the bathroom. The majority of them were mind-numbing supermarket tabloids that A subscribed me to while I was pregnant, but heck, why not, I put them up on FreeCycle. Within hours I had a lady interested in them. I gave her my address, told her to come by whenever, they'd be on the porch waiting for her. She never showed.

The next day I had an email from her telling me she'd driven up and down our [relative short cul-de-sac] street and couldn't find our house. I e-mailed back a Google map and a very, very, VERY detailed description of our house. There is no other house on the street even close to the description I gave. I tried to be nice, and told her that I'd leave the magazines out again for her. She wrote back and said she'd be by that night. Again she flaked out on me.

Morning after that I get another e-mail from her LAYING INTO ME and losing her proverbial shit, telling me how she doesn't appreciate being led on a wild goose chase for a house that doesn't exist because THERE ABSOLUTELY IS NO HOUSE NUMBER 2014 ON OUR STREET. I was told I am rude and cruel and condescending (because how dare I send her a map trying to help her out).

I e-mailed her back and said, "Um, the address is 2012. As I mentioned in two previous e-mails." I even forwarded the e-mails to her, highlighting where I mentioned the address correctly. If this psychotic woman wanted to see condescending, well by gum, she was going to get it. And I told her not to bother because I threw the magazines away. So there.

Did I mention all of this was over a stack of old magazines where the content is hardly worth the ink to print it on?

She never responded. I'd be a little worried that someone so unstable has my home address, but I doubt she'd be able to find it even knowing the correct address. Idiot.

I've given away a few other random things with little to no incident. I leave the things on the porch and tell people that I won't be home for one reason or another, just because I can't look people in the eye who are taking my random shit. I just can't. That, and after my incident with Magazine Lady, you never know what kind of freaks you're dealing with. And I'm home alone most of the day with an infant. Safety first, ya'lls.

I got A a new grill for Father's Day and we put his decrepit, P.O.S., rusting grill on FreeCycle. I got an e-mail from some guy wanting to know if it included a gas tank, how many BTU's, and if I could send a picture, among a few other requests for information that I've forgotten. I mean, DUDE, seriously, it's a free grill. If you're chasing after a free grill, you really can't be too picky. I fought the urge to send him back a response telling him to suck a dick. I just ignored him.

But I love the god-like feeling I get when I post something being offered, then sit and wait for the response e-mails to come flooding in. If you don't say please, I don't respond. If you misspell, I don't respond. Damnit, if I'm going to be giving away my half-used bottles of Bath and Body Works body sprays and lotions, they are going to go to whomever appeals to me the most! For that brief time, I play god. These people's desires hang in the balance. I have what they want, and they must come to me to get it. Muahahahaha...

Yeah. This is what my days have become.

Poetic justice.

I decided yesterday that I missed being tan. I've been so consumed with The Punky that I have failed to recognize what a pasty, sickly looking beast I've become. Tanning beds are out of the question, namely because all of my mad money got spent on A's Father's Day present, so I decided to take advantage of holes in the O-zone layer and lay out to tan.

I laid Punky down for her nap. I grabbed a book (currently reading "A Million Little Pieces" -- so what if it's all fake, it's still a good book). I popped open a lawn chair and I sprawled out, sitting on the chair with my legs kicked up onto the ledge of our deck. And I tanned for a glorious hour.

And I burned. God, how I burned. My whole front side is burned and sore, but that's not even the worst of it. My stomach looks like this:


If you're wondering what you're looking at (besides my second belly-button, the result of prego stretching on a navel piercing, it is gross) -- in the middle you can see where my fat folded over, that's that big pasty white strip. And then those two elipses above it? Yeah, that would be boob shadow.

Not a single stretch mark to be spoken of, but all you fellow moms out there cursing me can keep looking at that picture and laughing. If it wasn't my stomach, and if the burnt area didn't hurt so goddamn bad, I'd laugh, too...

Photo album politics

Disclaimer: I'm wine buzzed right now. Bear with me.

A and I are heading to Indianapolis tomorrow to house warm with his brother and celebrate his/our brother-in-law's birthday (his sister's husband) and Father's Day all at once. As a still relatively new member of the family (aside from being the slightly awkward girlfriend for a while), the whole "bundle o' celebrations" is a new concept. Considering I come from a family where a phone call and a three-month-late, $20 gift card to Best Buy suffices as birthday observance, it's still new to me.

For my birthday last month, A's brother got me a photo album for Punky Photos. I love it, it's adorable, and it's about 25% filled now with adorable pictures of my needlessly adorable daughter. So I thought that I'd bring it along, not only to upstage her 4-month-her-senior, much-less-cute cousin, but also to show BIL that I appreciate the gift. Plus, come on, you've seen the pictures. She is ridiculously cute. On a scale of 1-10, she's throat-punchingly cute.

So I'm not a huge fan of A's BIL, husband of A's sister (I guess he's my BIL now too, but either way -- he's non-blood BIL, or NBBIL). Neither is A. It's a lot of long stories and long-standing resentments, but whatever, the guy's sort of a pretentious prick, and doesn't fit into the family like the other *cough cough* in-law child. Everyone sees through his pretentious charade except A's sister, who happens to be married to and have (admittedly cute but not as cute as mine) children with him.

Okay, okay, enough with the backstory. I have the photo album and filled it with pictures of Punky and her birth and development, including being held by various family members. But I conspicuously left out a certain member of the "family" holding her. Ah yes, NBBIL. But because I want to bring the photo album with me tomorrow, and because I don't know who will look at it, I'm faced with the quandry.

I have to put the picture of NBBIL holding her in the photo album. I just have to. I can't ignore his presence at her birth now. I don't have intravenous drugs to allow me to ignore him now. So I have to put his picture holding her in the album. But I can't just stick it at the end of the current four months' worth of photos either, because then that just screams, "I kind of think you're a dick and this picture's presence in the album is only temporary." No, I have to put it in its chronological place.

So I take out one of the many gratuitous fresh-out-of-the-womb pictures of Punky with a picture of NBBIL holding her. (For the record, he was the only family member that she cried while being held.) But then I'm forced to further acknowledge him with a caption. All the other photos around this photo place have a caption "Punky and Aunt A" and "Punky and Uncle C" -- so now, NOW!!! I must give this photo the caption of "Punky and NBBIL" or else it just looks like, 'Hey, we are only sticking this picture here temporarily, therefore are not giving it a caption because we don't want your picture in our album for all posterity!'

And so, I have to caption the photo. And now, because of photo album politics, I now forever have a picture of Punky and NBBIL in the photo album even though it was never my intent. This would all be so much easier if NBBIL wasn't so unfortunate-looking, plus it's a bad picture of Punky (who is newborn and weird looking AND screaming). One day I hope to look at this photo album with her and remind her, "That's your uncle NBBIL. Don't worry. you're not related by blood."

Poop.

I had explosive, gut-wrenching, stomach cramps so bad you swear you are seeing Jesus, jet-propelled diarrhea tonight.

How's that for an opener?

I don't know what caused it, other than karmic retributions for yelling at an old lady in traffic to "go die with dignity already" last week, but dude, it freaking SUCKED. And not only did it suck, but it occurred on the one night that A was working late, so it was me, my furious anus, and the Punky, who was in no mood whatsoever to go along with Mommy's constant bathroom runs.

Punky does not DO being "put down." At least not for the 45 minutes required to completely expel the angry, liquidy contents of my bowels and read through an entire issue of Star magazine. So I utilized the only viable option I had -- I plopped her in her walker (oh my god, that thing is a godsend) and put her in front of the bathroom door. Watching me. As I pooped.

I mean, I guess it's only fair. I've cleaned her butt enough times that statistics have proven accurate and she's pooped/peed on me. At one point she started laughing -- yes, my daughter was laughing at and mocking me as I was doubled over in diarrhea-tastic pain -- and I groaned in pain, "Look, everyone poops, kid."

It's a strange feeling, having an infant laughing at you while you are in pain with explosive diarrhea. Give it five years and she'll probably be killing cats and hiding them under the back shed. Which if we're still living in this house in three years (please, if there is a god out there, PLEASE NO), there will be plenty of random irritating cats running around courtesy of Creep Cat Guy, and I don't know if I'd necessarily discourage her behavior. Dear God, I may have a mini-sociopath on my hands.

This is because we had sex while she slept next to us in the bed, isn't it?

Sulk.

I didn't get the PR job I interviewed last week for. I got the "Dear John" letter in the mail today. On top of already feeling a little unwanted now that Punky is successfully sleeping through the night in her own bed, this was just the kick in the nards that made me feel especially worthless and pissy.

So I did what I needed to do to make myself feel better. I plopped Punky in her walker in front of Baby Einstein and, as I hummed along to synthesizer Mozart and fingered the concertos on my right hand like I could still play them on the piano, I drank a good stiff glass of Valpolicella. And felt thoroughly, completely, and utterly sorry for myself.

I don't know why I want a job so bad. Well, I do, I just can't pinpoint one particular reason. A and I have been househunting, and I know that we could look for an entirely different tier of houses if we had two incomes. He says we're okay financially, and maybe we really are, but I hate not contributing financially to the household. I hate seeing him dumping hard-earned money on my student loans, which were taken out to pay for that really expensive piece of paper hanging on the wall that I've yet to use. Did I waste four years of my life on a degree that I don't know if I'll ever use? Should I just suck it up and go back to The Restaurant, as much as I truly do love it and everyone there? Is that it? Am I just destined to be a degree-holding waitress the rest of my life?

Then I start wondering if my job search would be this difficult if I hadn't gotten pregnant a week after college graduation. And it's at this point that the whole world turns shit sandwich because that's when I REALLY start hating myself and my thought process, and where it will inevitably turn if I don't have another glass of wine to divert myself.

I'll get over it. I'm trying to convince myself that I really didn't care about the job, and that it just means I get an indefinite extension in playing with The Punky all day. And really, I can't complain too much.

But in the meantime... I'm going to drink and sulk.

... And then there were two.

A and I spent last night curled up together in our bed, spooning and canoodling and...*coughcough* anyway... like we did in the glorious, early days of our relationship. It was great. What was missing from this picture?

Our daughter.

Yes... the Punky has been expelled from our family bed. Contrary to popular belief, she does indeed have her own room, complete with crib, and this is the current scene in that crib:




It's kind of bittersweet, to be honest. I mean, sure, I missed cuddling with my husband in bed. But much to my amazement, I missed not having tiny little feet lodged in my ribs. I missed little hands pawing for my boob and I really, REALLY missed having a little noggin snuggled in my armpit. She seems to be adjusting much better than I am. Our evening ritual has turned to rocking for about 45 minutes, watching TV and having a goodnight boob, and then I carefully, so very, very FREAKING carefully, lay her in her crib, turn on her crib "aquarium", turn on the monitor (which is actually being used for the first time), and quietly tip-toe out, threatening the dog with his life if he even remotely considers the mere possibility of barking at anything.

(Seriously. For the first time ever, I hissed through my teeth at my dog: "I swear to God I WILL KILL YOU.")

While I'm glad that I can finally rest a little easier, not frantically waking up and checking to make sure she's still breathing (you name the SIDS risk, this kid enjoys it with GUSTO), I'm a little sad that she's adjusted so eagerly to her own crib. You're supposed to WAIL, kid! You're supposed to miss me, yearn for my armpit and my motherly scent, the closeness of the all-powerful boob! Now wake up, right now, and MISS ME, DAMNIT!!!

I feel like a totally selfish asshole for thinking that. I should be thankful, oh so very thankful, that my kid is such a good sleeper. And I am. I just miss having her sleep with us. But for all intensive purposes, it really is the best for everyone involved, and the longer I put off switching her to her own crib, the harder it's going to get. So I just need to suck it up and deal. Seriously -- how dare I have an infant who is abnormally well-behaved, low-maintenance, sweet and funny AND a good sleeper.

Too bad, though... I'd always keep her in bed between me and A if I didn't feel like having half-awake middle-of-the-night sex. Babies are a good and useful cock block. Not that we had sex if she was on the other side of me, either. No. We definitely didn't have sex with her in the bed ,that's what bad parents do...

... but do you think she'd develop emotional issues later on in life if we did have sex with her in the bed? I mean, I'm not saying we did, but just hypothetically?