Smart Immunity, and other random thoughts on (still) being pregnant

Well, I've been using the MySpace blog recently more than this one, and today I thought I'd redistribute some of the love. Here's a quick update on what's been happening. And what hasn't been happening. In the latter case, I haven't gone into labor. I'd heard from everyone of the having-born kin and read in all the books that by the end of this marathon, I'd desperately want to finish, even if this meant leaping off the intended marathon track and tearing ass across a cornfield on the side -- cheating. It turns out that moms everywhere are correct.



It seems at odds with nature to be impatient for something that you, if not dred, at least fear to your quivering core. And I don't even mean the physical labor; I mean that endless stretch of time following labor that begins when you're shipped home with a small human being who will eventually become a large human being. What's that all about? Who treats that prospect to a pumped fist and a celebratory glass of champagne? Geez, it's an intimidating load for someone who has heretofore mothered only a few once-stray cats who basically took over the job of mothering themselves, even finding a small hole in the corner of a cabinent by which to let themselves in and out. With that said, it's happening, and I'm excited. More accurately, it's not happening, and I'm excited for the moment when all hell and water break loose.



Interesting points for those of you who have been pregnant and can commiserate, along with those of you pondering the virtues of becoming this way one day yourselves:



-- You know you're close to delivery by the volume of unprovoked hatred that fills you for almost everyone and everything. I commented recently to someone that all the money we've unloaded on the war would've been better spent annihilating those jackasses who play their music too loud in parking lots. Now, I have always considered this behavior rude and worthy of a solid kick to the hubcabs, but I don't think I honestly wanted to pummel the loud intruders until threeish weeks pre-due date. When the only thing that makes you smile is a daydream of yanking someone's hair or watching someone slip on something wimpy, out of place and emabarassing, such as cooked asparagus, you know that you're almost ready for motherhood.



-- A thought I shared with my friend Kristina today: trusting your body for the task ahead is a nice step to reach. I've joined virtually everyone I know in having a cold, and it taught me this important lesson sometime around three o'clock this morning. As I lay there attempting to breathe, becoming increasingly aggitated as I thought of how bum it would be to go into labor while fighting off these germs, I came to the realization that I had to stop griping and worrying about it. What I've come to know as my voice of piercing logic (which shows up maybe once a quarter, sometimes less) reminded me that I've had a fine immune system since birth, which has only become toughened and better armed since then, and that I had to trust it to do its thing. I couldn't take any medicine, which would only squelch a symptom or two anyway; I could only bow down to my immune system's instructions--blow nose, rehydrate, cover up, rest, etc.--and align myself in support of its complex workings. Then the voice of rare logic informed me it was a good damn thing I was sick, actually, because I was receiving a cram-course in trusting the intelligence of the human body. While that makes perfect sense, I think it runs counter-intuitive in a way. I think a lot of us want to wrap our heads around the process of something and thereby, somehow, gain a smidgen of control.



In a way, though, this is like reaching the peak of a roller coaster track and deciding you need to understand--intimately understand--how and where the track was built, which laws of aerodynamics apply, and what the guy at the control stand did to qualify as a carnie before you're willing to plunge. The car is plunging regardless. If you try to fight it, you'll most likely lose some vertical vomit and peeve off everyone around you who decided to move when the car moved and have a good time.



-- For the doctor, you spiff up areas of your body you never would've imagined paying attention to again. You cannot imagine making this same effort for a lusty, on-the-rebound Johnny Depp unless he were to become a doctor and take up touching you inappropriately between the styrups.



-- The dreams get zooey. When I told my sister-in-law that I'd dreamed of delivering, after all this time and effort, two puppies and a kitchen, she told me that she'd dreamed of having a litter of alligators while pregnant with my nephew. Jenny McCarthy, if I remember, dreamed of something green and drooling slime.



-- Many women, even the previously modelesque, end up packing on 50-70 lbs. The only ones who freak out about this are doctors who were taught to freak out in medical school and your occasional boomer, who was taught during her own pregnancy not to gain more than 15 pounds and to satisfy hunger pangs with a pack of Marlboro lights. If you happen to experience any part of your pregnancy during summer or, say, stand upright occasionally, you can attribute a happy hunk of your gain to water weight. You will feel like a sea cow, but you'll be in the company of a fine herd of empathetic sea cattle.



And that's all I have for now. Maybe it's part of that nesting instinct, but I've felt the need to write out a few of these pregnancy thoughts before everything changes and pregnancy becomes a strange, bodily memory. I don't plan any more gross ramblings about my body (my gestating body, anyway; there might very well be gross ramblings about my regular body still), but I will try to update regularly from here on out. I'll be home with baby girl for a while, and once we (led by she) fall into any sort of routine, I'll climb both timidly and sorely back in the writing saddle.

Stodgy News Killed the Campy News Star

And so it was one Friday night, in the cross of a heat-storm, that creeped-out, perverse and otherwise prurient imaginations everywhere were shattered: The World's Only Reliable Newspaper went out of business. Yes, for those of you who haven't witnessed the tradegy yet yourselves, Weekly World News is now bust. The August 27th issue is now on stands, with a friendly persuasion to buy it and, hell, "sell on eBay tomorrow!" A black-and-white farewell to Bat Boy, Manigator, world's fattest cat, Big Foot, alien surgeons, still-kickin' and sea-logged descendants of Titanic victims, Kangaroo/Godzilla, disembodied but cheerful heads and so many more. At the fold of a classic relic, I'd like to suggest that anyone who writes for the fun of it (as everyone should -- this upstaging quest for money, chicks and immortality) could find no better idea bin than that special kind created from interspersing Weekly World and Time quips of journalism, back and forth until the realization becomes lightning bolt-clear: for our intents and purposes, they are the same damned thing.

Ah. If only I'd appreciated fly-eyed babies and nouvea Armageddons a little bit sooner. So, be advised: spend the $2.99, share it with a friend, try to smoke and drink something that'll make you belch while you enjoy

I'd also point out that there's now a blank space in the world of fictitious, pulp rags. And I mean, yes, common cures for the writing fever might be pulitzers, newberrys, Book Circles and a cubby on Oprah's shelf, but those trite buggers can only satisfy to an extent, I think. Isn't Weekly World what we all wanted to do when story-telling was still the freshest, hippest thing in the neighborhood? Wasn't it all about the wall-eyed beasty and the fish-pony hybrid ten times the size of a G.I. bulldozer?

Thanks for years of upstanding reports and great photography, Weekly World. You shall be missed.

Green Apple Alter

Sorry so long since the last post; I found myself too haried to think straight or sideways or any other way for about a week: have been handling some of the business end of writing, trying to get my jungle-bodied yard in walkable condition and trying to stay awake past 7:00 at night. This baby-building business makes that last thing improbable, I'm finding out. Enough complaining though.

Here's a new something I wrote the other night while in a bath not even lukewarm anymore while listening to Disk One of the Eagles' Greatest Hits. Just so you know.

Some of the best times are rampant with rebirths, or reawakenings, or first-time-ever awakenings. The beauty of this phenomenon, whether it's conciously facilitated or not, makes for an understanding of those deep-South Bible tents -- roadside revivals meant for one and all who want to feel the ferver of Jesus washing over them as though in the font of immersion. As though for the very first time. For me, where once there was Jesus now are good words, sharp movies, woo-hoo witching music and moments of waking up to the smallest things. A green apple in a triangular patch of roadway this morning, at first matte and two-dimensional, next thing as freshly pungent as the woods during a lone, naked hike. There's a change in background noise and resting room temperature when it happens: when a quiet something comes to a head and, for it happening, you break bold and see what you didn't see before.

The green apple makes a relevant how-for here, I think, because seeing one of those on the same old patch of asphalt you're by now cloyed to doesn't technically transform the asphalt. Other than sprouting a sour leak if it's run over, the apple doesn't impose itself on the constitution of the road. Should you happen to be ready, uncaffeinated-lively and hushed and thereby able to catch the moment, the apple changes your perception. From my experience, the stages of this are accomplished in the most fleeting sort of way: recognition of Object A and Object Out-of-Context Apple, split second decision to hesitate rather than heave the moment backward into a catchall filing system more equate to the musky abyss, a hodge-podge rifling through feelings associated with any past memories of this or any combination similar to fruit-on-blacktop with the time-saving caveat that replay of the memories themselves is not requried, and then. Then there's the candy tossed to you for noticing this float in the parade: being inside the moment of seeing where the only distraction, if you wanted to be a bummer and call it one, is feeling excited to be in the moment of seeing.

Since I don't intend on sermonizing Buddhism here, I'll skip this whole next paragraph starting to flesh together in my head and just note that it's one of my favorite traits of the chummy, ol' Buddha that he suggested these moments as the handles and footholds of revival rather than anything more ceremonial. No need to burnish off the grit and grim; sing, drink, chew and bow accordingly; take it to an alter in suchandsuch a building at suchandsuch a pin-dotted hour because, as Rebecca Wells would agree, there are little alters everywhere.

Here's how Buddha, apples and Cameron Crowe all braid together in the name of writing, if you ask me: for far too much of the time, I find myself sucked onion-first into a filthy vacuum spool known as concern for the everyday. Something "big" happens and is thrown the bone of a comparable slice of attention, this pattern sweeps on unchecked, then the entire day has dissipated and what the overstimulated hell was the point of it? Happenings -- the cross-breeds between myself and the Out There -- dictated the employment of my mindspace. The solution I end up viewing to this discombobulated stench, again quite often, is that the output of my writing will shrivel, plumment and otherwise waste away if I don't control the input. No going with the flow and later taking out abject pissiness on inanimate objects. The output will be made into bright, healthy stock if aggregated in the input is good reading, time management and observation of spectacles known to astound and inspire all humankind. The last of those is hard to come by where I live, the former two easy enough. And they do help. At the same time, I think there's a discrepancy between semiconciously absorbing the goodies while waiting for backend rewards to kick in, and being ripe and teachable by the moments sought out.

This evening, even after the fantastic Apple Alter in the morning, I felt bone-tired and somewhat insecure hanging from the fray of my creative rope. I didn't want to mope about it, and I couldn't, it seemed, flip the current by sheer force of a demanding will. So I boiled some raspberry leaf tea and put in Almost Famous. It should be noted and then druggedly shouted from the rooftops (see Billy Crudup, his golden godliness) that I did these things knowing that I, rather than ephemeral "things", needed to change and feeling hungry with the enthusiasm of a baby bird open-mouthed to regurgitated worm entrails to be taught something by the moment. Moment here taking the form of Jason Lee, Kate Hudson and company.

I'm not and couldn't in any way write this to boast: really waking up is a rare enough thing with me that when it happens, I feel like I've been winked at by the flirtacious universe and have been privvy to a moment that needs writing about. Some people manage to stay awake and don't need to hum and hem and haw through the afterglow by writing about it. And goody-goody for them.

Point of the previous flotsam is: the inspirational movie, the Eagles song that makes the heart blush, green apple sitting there on black road, whatever -- all are similar to herbs that facilitate a certain action from the body's immune system, provoking the body to heal thyself, brother, but never performing the salvation themselves. Understanding the disease, selecting the herbs and getting your contaminated ass to bed so that all energy goes into herbal responsiveness would be the receiver's way of being ripe and teachable by the moment.

Arg. I think others will agree with this point: the longer you're steeped in the domineering activity, have-tos and negativity of the experience here, the more coughing up energy to handle it becomes like beating blood out of limestone. As soon as we get somethign down pat, it can morph into that unwanted incarnation of stale dogma, then we're warming up a spitfire under fake smiles just to bear this thing which was once a decent enough idea. Changing things never helps, except with the bare practicalities.

Hey, thanks Jane! I actually had a mad craving for some Obvious.

And it is obvious, but no less poetic and no easier for its purported transparency.

To me, the momentary alters are the best source of creative energy, best way to stay alert, relevant and attuned to the point and power of this whole writing business, which sometimes resembles crawling through a sludgepit.

Thanks for reading, take care & good-day.