It’s like a moshpit for blue-hairs September 3, 2008
Posted in: LookitThrow down a hur-hur
Matthew and I are pretty excited about this whole McCain/Palin business. Matthew figured out where to get tickets to see them at the rally in Albuquerque this coming Saturday, so it looks like we’ll be going, along with my parents. Hopefully it won’t be too chaotic. Standing and walking are becoming increasingly difficult since I’ve transitioned into a perfect sphere.
I am curious to see if Matthew and I represent far-field demographic data. I have this predisposed visual stuck in my head that there will be all these blue-hairs wearing all manner of Republican buttons, sashes, and wee hats kicking in the convention center doors so they can rush the stage in a clatter of canes and walkers. There’s nothing better than a bunch of righteously-indignant elderly folks with a nursing home day pass and a free Saturday night. I’m going to ask Matthew to bring the video camera so we can film it, if it actually happens!
Crisis? Confusion? or Negative Self Indulgence? August 31, 2008
Posted in: MiscThrow down a hur-hur
This has been a time fraught with reflection and, pardon the cliche, soul searching. Not so much regarding having a baby or being a parent. That is its very own compartmentalized panic attack that I only take out and play with when I’m overly tired and know I won’t be able to control it.
No, what I’m talking about has to do with my professional career. If one could call it a career. It’s really been more of a series of dares and dumb-luck payoffs that demonstrated whether or not I had the guts, curiosity, capability, tendency, or vague skill to blob a solution together and pass it off as a success. I’ve always felt conflicted, though between what it absolutely takes to be mad-dog-style successful and whether or not my real passion lies along that road. Then, there’s the compounding conflict about what my real passion is. There was one time when I thought I knew what my passion was, but I was helped, shall we say, to see that pursuing that passion was impractical. So, in seeking out that which was practical I found myself on a strange, circuitous road lasting these 10 years. Reflection of those 10 years I can see giant doors and windows of opportunity for advancement or education that I somehow idled past or convinced myself weren’t appropriate for me at the time or even simply ignored. Now, with all the embarrassment that hindsight provides, I’m kicking myself for not making the sacrifices then that would be helping me now. I’m 31. Only just marginally competent. No degree. No real prospect of being able to complete the engineering degree I started. Not sure if I would be capable of finishing an engineering degree. Not sure if I want to. Not sure what it would gain me, except the possible obligation to stay in the workforce.
The crux of the matter is that I find myself increasingly frustrated that, no matter how hard I feel and believe I am working, no matter how much comprehension I try to apply to the work, the reality is that I’m always 10 steps behind where I need to be in order to secure complete success. I keep finding myself in a terminal loop of asking myself where I belong: Do I want to stay in the “technical” field? If yes, why aren’t I making the “correct” decisions to do what it takes to be successful? If no, what do I want to do? What am I even qualified to do?
To be successful in what I do (or nominally do, I should say), I know exactly what it takes and here it is:
- The heartfelt desire to spend every waking moment learning about the work. How to do it. How to do it better. How to do it best.
- The single-focused drive to sit in front of a computer all day at work, all night at home, and throughout every hour of the weekend reading, practicing, trying, learning, searching to the near-total exclusion of all other things. One could describe it as rooting around the internet like a truffle pig, and like the truffle pig, doing it because it is what I am trained and like to do.
- Replace reading for pleasure with reading for education and restocking the nightstand with applicable technical books.
- Foregoing personal relationships or the maintenance thereof in favor of learning how to do this work, because socializing interrupts the flow and application of study.
- Acknowledging that this is a permanent, ongoing behavior pattern that cannot be interrupted or slowed. It is a permanent fixture of my future until the day I retire from the workforce. (Moreover, it should be an example of how I should approach all other endeavors that may erupt along the sidelines.)
Now, here is the fully-funded-retirement question:
- Is it worth it, to me, to take those steps to be the best at my job?
And, here’s the follow-up 25%-return-on-investment question:
- Am I lazy, a loser, or a quitter if the answer is, “No.”
Career crisis? Hardly. Career confusion with a small dollop of negative self-indulgence is probably more accurate. I have to get to the bottom of this, and soon. Currently, I am far too dependent on smarter people than myself to ever advance on my own and it this dependency dangerously strains those relationships. It’s got to be career-style fish-or-cut-bait time within the next year or so.
More baby as produce August 27, 2008
Posted in: Thank you, and GOOD NIGHT!Throw down a hur-hur
I had cataloged the list of produce (or grocery store) items that a baby website associates to the growth schedule of a gestating infant. I thought I’d update the list to where we are, as of this week: banana, length of a carrot, spaghetti squash, a large mango, length of an ear of corn, the average rutabaga, length of an English cucumber, head of cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, butternut squash, head of regular cabbage, 4 naval oranges, a large jicama, pineapple, an average cantaloupe, honeydew melon.
Come to me, mommy superpowers! August 26, 2008
Posted in: MiscThrow down a hur-hur
I don’t like holding someone else’s newborn. The pressure is too great. The parents are too paranoid. The mother is watching. Judging. The baby is too little.
Last night I held (more accurately, I was passed the baby from another classmate who made it look like the easiest thing in the world to hold a curled up wad of baby.) the newborn of a fellow classmate in our birthing class and felt completely inadequate and dangerous. I was relieved after only a couple of minutes they reclaimed the infant to feed. The varmint was only 6.5 lbs and less than 48 hours old. I realize he probably fussed with me because I was projecting a very clear “I’d rather not be holding this baby” vibe, but it was true. I didn’t really want to hold the baby. I was watching the newborn’s mother very closely, and other than looking a little dog-eared, she seemed relaxed when she was holding her baby, and considerably more tense when someone else was. I didn’t want her shooting laser beams of disgust through my body because I may have been holding her baby incorrectly.
The littlest baby I’ve ever held was my sister’s baby and she was (I think) 3 or 4 weeks old at the time. I also held my best friend’s baby when he was about a month old. Both of those times, I felt normal. Relatively competent. At least, feeling like if the baby erupted into pukes or shits or tears I could pass it back to its mother knowing I couldn’t possibly make anything worse. But, after the brief interlude with an actual newborn yesterday, I started to think about my own baby. It’s supposed to show up here in the next 5-6 weeks (hopefully closer to 5 than 6). How will I feel about passing my newborn infant around to other people? Am I going to be OK with that? Am I going to prefer everyone keep their damn mitts to themselves? Am I going to barter services for baby time (leave your casserole in the kitchen, and you can hold the baby for 5 minutes. Leave an entire cooler of food and you can hold the baby for 10 minutes.)? How am I going to feel about holding my own newborn infant? Competent? Natural? Normal? At the moment of birth, is that when the great mom superpowers kick in, and I can gratefully kiss my klutzy past farewell? Or, will a heightened sense of awareness carefully descend from on high protecting both of us from tripping, dropping, slipping, or worst of all, forgetting?
These questions (among many, many others) swirl in my head with great number, variation, and frequency lately. Sometimes having the baby kick and jab me in the bladder and lungs simultaneously so that I cough and nearly pee myself has a certain comforting factor. Because the baby is in there, fully supported and cared for. But, one can’t stay pregnant for ever. Pretty soon my baby will be released upon the world and I’ll be fully responsible and it will be fully dependent. And when that happens, I fully intend to stand over the crib, holding a bottle of baby powder to the sky and calling upon the powers of Greyskull to aid me. Hopefully, that won’t turn Matthew into Battle Cat.
I.O.U.S.A. August 21, 2008
Posted in: LookitThrow down a hur-hur
I want to see this film more than I want to see Tropic Thunder. Of course, it’s not coming to Albuquerque, so I’m probably going to have to wait to Netflix it. It is, however, showing in Denver, which is apropos given the existence of the Denver Mint. It smacks of alarmist propaganda, but given its sources (Warren Buffet and Pete Peterson) I’m guessing it may actually prove to be quite a balanced and accurate representation.
You can also read about it at CNN.
Self Portrait August 19, 2008
Posted in: hur-hur, Lookit1 hur-hur so far
I’m calling it, “An Egg With Legs and Tyrannosaurus Arms”
And it accurately reflects what I look like. On a good day.
Bummers of Pregnancy: Spacial Distortions August 12, 2008
Posted in: hur-hur1 hur-hur so far
I am like a cat whose had its whiskers clipped. I keep trying to fit through spaces that simply won’t accommodate me without a generous application of PAM cooking spray and some serious grunting, heaving, or splaying.
Case in point: Matthew and I bought a second car on Sunday. *gasp!* No! Surely not! Oh, yes. We bought my brother’s 2002 Infiniti QX4, which I am going to start calling Hudson because it is so luxurious that it reminds me of what it might be like to have a British butler. Anyway, we had grown spoiled having one compact little car parked slightly askew in the middle of the garage, so when we tried to pack an SUV next to the itsy GTI it took some doing. Matthew parked the GTI and I parked the QX4. I opened the door, assessed the available space and, against my knowledge of geometry, tried to get out of the car. While my legs kicked furiously out from below the drivers side door trying to reach the ground, my hands hopelessly groped for some type of leverage and my ass demonstrated surprising agility by clinging desperately to the edge of the slick leather seat all because my pregnant belly was very-nearly permanently wedged in the wee door opening.
You might be asking yourself, what’s Matthew doing during this whole spectacle? He’s watching the whole thing unfold. And laughing. And pointing. In between snorts for air, he points out that I might need to back out and repark the QX4 to create more exiting space between it at the GTI. Secretly, I already knew this, but my subconscious, always the dedicated showman, wanted to put on a good episode of “Watch Your Wife Deduce Her Growing Limitations Through Action” for my husband and convinced me that I should be able to fit through that opening with No. Problem. Clearly, it wasn’t working. Stymied, my body went limp and I hung, indelicately suspended by my stuck belly, gasping for air and sweating slightly. I manage to unstick (unstuck?) myself by crawling back into the QX4 and did repark it to create the much needed extra inches to just only barely allow my entire body to exit the vehicle.
After I got out, clutching my gestating child and trying to catch my breath from the exersion of it all, Matthew assessed the relative position of each vehicle, patted me on the shoulder, and in a compensatory tone, said, “I guess I could’ve parked the GTI closer to the other side, huh?” After which I took all the Infiniti keys and stabbed them into my ears.
Al Gore is Jor-El August 8, 2008
Posted in: hur-hurThrow down a hur-hur
Via The Onion: Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet
Bastardized iced decaf mocha August 6, 2008
Posted in: LookitThrow down a hur-hur
Even the most stalwart among us has cravings once in a while. Those who deny it are probably lying somehow. Today, I was craving an iced vanilla latte, but let’s face it. The stats for one of those is pretty horrible. I’ll grant you, they’re not as horrible as, say, a caramel frapuccino or something like that, but still, the numbers are a little stark if one thinks that some people drink these every day.
A Starbucks grande iced latte has
130 calories (40 fat calories)
13 g carbohydrates
11 g sugar
Add in a flavored syrup and:
+20 calories = 150 calories
+5 g carbohydrates = 18 g carbohydrates
+5 g sugar = 16g sugar
Today at work, in a fit of curiosity and driven by desperation, I made my own “iced mocha” of sorts. I understand that a mocha is officially thus because it is made with milk an espresso. Technically, I made an “iced coffee drink”, but, it holds closely to the flavors that I enjoy without being nearly as detrimental. Or expensive. Or trendy.
In an average 12-oz coffee cup combine:
2 rounded teaspoons of Foldgers instant coffee (I used decaf)
2 packets of Splenda Mocha Flavor packets
1 packet of regular Splenda (only if you prefer it sweeter)
1 TBSP Coffeemate Lite powdered creamer
Add 12 oz hot water and stir together. Pour over ice cubes in a regular 12-16oz drinking glass and enjoy.
The damage works out to:
38 calories (0 Fat calories)
6g carbohydrates
0g sugars
Even adding an extra TBSP of creamer only adds another 10 calories and 2 grams of carbohydrates. I estimate the cost of the beverage to be somewhere around $1 per serving. Maybe $1.50 if you get liberal with the creamer and flavorings.
This also tells me that it may be possible to still have certain indulgences which I periodically enjoy, only in modified formats. Except for pasta. There’s no way to re-engineer that into a permissible condition.
Tropic Thunder
Posted in: hur-hurThrow down a hur-hur
So rarely does a movie come down the chute that I really want to see. This is one of those movies.