February 2008 Archives
Yuck!
I have finally found out that there actually is a limit to how much I want to hear myself talk.
C-Man, to baby: Your mom's mad at me.
The Princess: It happens. You get mad at me too sometimes.
C-Man: I get mad at you less often than you get mad at me.
The Princess: You have low standards.
So y'all know that wedding dress poll I did? The one that now has 32 comments? Even after someone posted identifying information about the apparently quite popular GILT dress, people keep posting asking where to find it. But then I got this comment:
The "Gilt" is the worst wedding dress because the bottom half looks like a GIANT VAGINA!
I had never thought of it that way.
We here at Flooded Lizard Kingdom pride ourselves on our high journalistic standards. Accordingly, we wish to issue a correction to the post from February 13th.
It is the Xbox that allows online play of Virtua Fighter. The PS3 does not.
(The Xbox, though, makes so much noise that C-Man refers to it as the chipper/shredder.)
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
This one's going to take a bit of backstory, but stick with me.
C-Man plays Virtua Fighter, which is a video game where people beat each other up. He bought a PS3 because it offers online play against other people, which can be more fun than playing against the computer on the XBox.
He also spends a lot of time on an online forum about Virtua Fighter. In this forum, each person can include a tagline at the end of every post.
(Side note: He was talkin' smack one day to people on the forum, like he does, and getting belligerent with folks, and threatening to scan and post his law license so they would RESPECT HIS AUTHORITA. One of the moderators sent him a private message and he was expecting to get a warning about being such a jackass. Instead, he was invited to be a moderator. I was astonished. I've actually told him not to come over to my blog and act the way he acts on that forum, since it would be highly embarrassing to ban my own husband from commenting on my blog.)
Apparently, now that people are playing against each other online, there are a few people who feel the need to explain their lack of prowess at the game. The most popular explanation is something like this: "If you see me online and I'm not doing very well, it's because my little brother is logged into my account."
So C-Man has a new tagline on the forum:
If you see me online and I'm not acting like myself, it's because my five month old baby is KICKING YOUR ASS.
I love that man.
When last we left me, I had read six books for the Writers of Color 50 Book Challenge. It looks like those first six books broke down into three novels, one memoir, one graphic novel, and one anthology with a significant number of pieces by writers of color.
Here are the next 11 books I've read, bringing me to a total of 17.
Novels: The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, a Mexican American author who was born in New Mexico. Hopkinson's book is set in modern times, and even when the main character was being atrocious I was rooting for her. Anaya's novel is one of the classics of Chicano fiction, set in the 1940s. They're both about magic, and I enjoyed them both very much.
Nonfiction: Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina by Rosie Molinary. I almost didn't make it through this one, because Molinary's prose didn't click with me. However, the voices of the many Latinas she and her team interviewed shone through in the quotes Molinary highlights throughout the book, and they kept me going.
Anthologies: Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, edited by Amy Sonnie, and Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image, edited by Ophira Edut. I think I would have done better not trying to read either of these straight through. Revolutionary Voices was more diverse in the approaches and themes used by the various contributors, but there were so many pieces that it got overwhelming. Body Outlaws started to feel repetitive towards the end, and I think the final essays didn't make as much of an impact on me because they blended in with earlier ones. However, I found a lot of great writing in both, and a lot to think about.
Memoirs: The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey by Toi Derricotte, an African-American poet. I can't even describe how powerful and painful this book is. Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman, examines what it means to be black in America and finds a lot of self-hatred and shame. Reviewers seem to think this is controversial, but I couldn't figure out how a black person in America wouldn't have those feelings after all the garbage our culture says about them. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios by Cherríe Moraga, about being Chicana and a lesbian, was hard for me to get through. I was frustrated by the mix of poetry and prose and by the Spanish that's mixed in throughout, since I am Spanish-impaired. But I got to a passage where she described wondering how much of herself she could bring to her writing before the market got so small that she couldn't sell any books, and I realized I needed to keep going. When I was Puerto Rican: A Memoir by Esmeralda Santiago was a more traditional read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Children's Books: I Had A Hippopotamus by Hector Viveros Lee is great. We're buying it for the baby. The Road to Mumbai by Ruth Jeyaveeran didn't grab me. I could see what she was trying to do with the story, but the narrative tension just wasn't there. Since we currently read to the kid mostly for our own amusement, our standards are pretty high.
I originally thought I wouldn't include kids books in this challenge, because it seemed like a cop-out since they're so short. But then I remembered I'm raising a middle-class white boy and we need to start early with the diversity and respect.
Short Stories: The Best of Simple by Langston Hughes. What I knew about Langston Hughes before reading this would have filled a thimble, which is really shameful. I only picked up The Best of Simple because I was walking around the library with the baby and it was easily accessible on an endcap. (Do they call them endcaps in libraries?) Honestly, though, I have not had as much fun reading a book in a long, long time. It's a collection of newspaper columns that Hughes wrote about a Harlem "everyman" and his thoughts on women, race, employment, and other day to day issues. I absolutely loved it. Kind of scary how many of the observations on race issues are still 100% true today.
Erg, remind me not to stack up 11 of them before I post next time. I want to say more about some of the books, but I've been working on this for ages and I just want it to be done.
- I am trying to eat and my feet won't stop wiggling and they are DISTRACTING ME.
- I am trying to eat and my hand won't stop rubbing my eye and it is DISTRACTING ME.
- I was eating but then I stopped eating but I WANT TO EAT.
- I don't want to eat WOMAN STOP TRYING TO FEED ME.
I just caught the baby staring at the Bernina with a huge grin on his face.
Our good friend SBW has been working to ensure that baby's first word is "quilt," with "craft" as a backup. Perhaps it's working?
Normally I try to avoid mentioning my boobs on my blog. I'm making an exception today. If this makes you uncomfortable, please step away from your monitor.
I woke up at 2:00 a.m. because my left breast hurt. A lot. I thought it was just a really, really big backlog of milk because the baby had been asleep since 8:30 and my body is used to him waking up to nurse more than that. I fell back asleep, and woke up again at 3:00 when he started crying. And I started crying, because I was in even more pain. In fact, I woke C-Man up and had him get the baby out of his crib and put him in my lap in the rocking chair because I didn't think I could do it.
At that point, I still thought we had a supply and demand issue. The baby finished nursing and went back to sleep, and I was still in pain.
Then I started to shake uncontrollably.
Then I threw up. And threw up again. And threw up again. And threw up again.
Then my temperature went up to 104.
Then I took some acetominophen and it didn't come down. Then I sat in a cold bath for at least half an hour and it came down to 101.
Then my head started to pound in a way that made me wonder whether dying might not be preferable.
At this point, I had figured out that a little extra milk was not the culprit. And as it turns out, I have a breast infection. C-Man stayed home today, but his boss is in Japan so he really needs to go back tomorrow and I will be here with baby all day. My sister says the antibiotics will make me feel better in 24 hours, which is about 11:00 a.m. tomorrow. I'm no longer throwing up, shaking, or wishing for death due to headache.
But I am really, really tired.
And I have to say, sending C-Man for a vasectomy is sounding better and better.
The Princess: What are you whistling?
C-Man: Mad World.
The Princess: Oh.
C-Man: You don't believe me?
The Princess: I thought it was The Dreidel Song.
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