weird dream

I dreamt last night that I was taking an exam in an outdoor classroom with mountains in the middle distance. There were lots of chairs with fold-down desks in rows, but I was the only student, and Javier Bardem was proctoring. The exam was an essay question on the Odyssey in which you had to take a stance on whether you thought Penelope was faking a major illness or whether she genuinely had something organic wrong with her, and you were supposed to back your arguments up with medical details hidden in the text (which, please note, I have never actually read). I freaked out because I had no idea how to answer the question, and so I ran up the road into the mountains to escape, and Javier was cross with me.

rain rain go away

SO, it's absolutely pouring down rain here in gorgeous (not) sunny (not) San Francisco... flights from Seattle are delayed which is both:

- bad (parents have to cool heels in airport for hours, will not get to spend _quite_ as much time with baby as previously hoped, I can't f****** go OUT because it's so incredibly wet out; ironically one of the things I need to go out to do is buy a replacement brolly) and

- good (I have more time to cross things off my to-do list before everyone arrives, including think about supper for tonight. Notice I am using my valuable to-do list time while baby is hallelujah praise the lord sleeping to send blather into the blogosphere... hmm, maybe not so sensible).

I had my first day back at work on Tuesday of this last week; it was sort of a calm fiasco in that nothing went as planned but it didn't particularly bother me. I was slightly offended (but not really) that I had multiple new patients on my schedule - you'd think after four months away, there would be at least one clinic-ful of faithful stalwarts who'd been saving up all their rectal boils and disability paperwork and oxycontin refill requests specially for me, just because they love me so much - but turns out that, no, the underworld of Belleville can cope just fine without me, and in most cases, probably didn't even notice that I was gone.

(Pumping milk at work is a grotty experience, I just have to say - I have to lock myself in the lab to do it and then smuggle my bottles of milk through the back hallway to stick them in the freezer, so it feels somehow as if I'm doing something reprehensible and pornographic. So much easier if I were allowed to bring the baby to work with me - of my two boob decompression devices, she is more efficient than the pump anyway...)

My disorganized day in clinic was then cut short by (hoorah!) an admission, so I drove half an hour to the hospital in pouring pouring bucketing bloody miserable wet wet wet rain to admit a guy to hospital who had given himself a raging urinary tract infection by (squeamish readers beware) catheterizing himself to relieve his blocked-up prostate with a Foley catheter he had pulled out of the rubbish (worse: the rubbish bin of the Sonoma County jail). eeeeeuuuuuuuuwwww. And then home to see how my lovely baby had gotten on with the babysitter, and it turns out she'd been happy as a little piglet in shit all day (with photos to prove it) without me. Hunh.

Yesterday I went w/ babydaddy's friend A. to go see the Voyeurism exhibit at the SFMOMA - a collection of mostly photos w/ a handful of videos of people photographed without their knowledge and/or consent and/or awareness of the photographer - ordinary people out and about, factory condition exposes, sex stuff, military stuff, etc. Some of the images were unexpectedly lovely and/or interesting - my favourites were a series of women from the 1940's on a train, a photo of a fake Arab town constructed for Israeli military purposes, a series of stills of a couple sleeping, and a bizarre little illustrated narrative in which a woman hired - via a third party - a private detective to follow her for the day.

I also had a mini-revelation about moving image "art" and why it is that I can never be bothered to sit and watch video installations in art galleries: the indeterminate duration annoys me. What I mean is this: I always want to give every piece of art a fighting chance to convince me that I like it, and I don't think you can judge a piece of art until you've seen the "whole thing". That takes at most a few seconds with still image, and once you've seen it, you can then (if you like) spend more time in front of the ones you like appreciating the details. With a moving image, not only does the _artist_ decide how long it takes to view the whole thing (can be seconds vs minutes vs hours vs days...) but the viewer isn't given that information and thus has to either be willing to stand there for potentially hours OR decide at some point that based on the first few minutes/seconds of this video installation that this piece of art is _probably_ a piece of shit and therefore not worth wasting any further time on, risking missing what might be a phenomenal exciting/beautiful/interesting twist in the video that comes up seconds after you have cut your losses and abandoned it.

One hour later: I am now the proud owner of a clear bubble umbrella, something I have been coveting ever since my trip to Japan last year. Which reminds me: everyone who reads this please think good thoughts for the people in Japan right now - and consider donating e.g. at http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/japan_57914.html. It is hard to not to think that our collective chickens re: irresponsible environmental policy are coming home to roost in the form of natural disasters...

cabo wabo woot woot

Day three or possibly four or possibly even five (?) of lowest ambition holiday ever: we are on Operation: International Travel with Baby: Start Low, Go Slow.

We were met at the airport on Saturday afternoon by

1. Glorious warm sunshine

2. The knowledge that our daughter had poo’ed through every layer of clothing she was wearing

3. Five thousand guys in polo-style corporate T-shirts wanting us to go on time-share real estate presentations, and

4. Our limousine (I am not making this up; I promise I had booked only a “private car” from the airport, but turns out “private car” means full-on stretch limo, complete with plastic champagne glasses in holders, paper napkins, television, and faux-leather seats in the back. My only regret was that I hadn’t thought to wear a shiny magenta satin prom dress, preferably with ruffles.)

Onwards through dry deserty cactus-y hilly rocky landscape on one side of the road and gorgeous blue ocean on the other; as you get closer to town, there start to be more and more giganto-mega-resorts on the beach side of the road, some more architecturally innocuous than others. The town itself (or what I have seen of it so far) is a tourist schlock-o-rama, catering to drunken spring breakers (two-for-one Tequila Happy Hour at Senor Frog’s!) and middle-aged large-middled middle-America (Sport-Fishing Cruise - We Pack and Ship Your Catch!), with grubby run-down Mexico evident around the edges. The hotel we are staying at is a higher end, even more giganto-mega version of the other resorts that line the shoreline; it’s all polished granite and koi ponds and gleaming blue swimming pools and mini-golf course. We are the VIP area of the hotel - accessible only by special key card - so we feel extra fancy, although I am disappointed to report that we have yet to spot Britney Spears or Celine Dion. The crowd seems to be mainly wobbly wrinklies with loud voices, mid-range I.Q.‘s, and a much higher tolerance for continuous pop music than I have…

Saturday evening we spent just settling in: dinner at one of the resort restaurants, followed by our Welcome Margarita at the bar (I would be really interested to know how many jillion liters of tequila gets consumed per 24 hours in this town; I have never been anywhere where they are so eager to get you sloshed on cheap liquor except for perhaps my brief stint as a pole dancer in a frat house (joke)). Sunday morning we held our noses and spent an hour and a half with a schmoozy paunchy real-estate agent called Scott M., who did his earnest bonhomie-ish best to chat up babydaddy (“So! You golf at all?”) and wild papa H. (“What do you do, sir?” Papa H.: “Ping pong! You got anywhere to play pingpong here?”). He took us to buffet breakfast and tried very hard to sell us on the joys of living part time in Cabo (our favourite was when he described the enormous dome over the lobby of the hotel as “an architectural marvel from 2002”. We have a miniature version of the brick dome over our bedroom, and it’s kind of fun, not unlike being inside a tandoori oven) but his desperate chumminess was no match for our snarkiness. Baby began to cry at exactly the ninety-minute mark, proving that she has a good instinct for schmooze-avoidance, and we escaped with our coupons for $420 in free food and spa services, despite poor old Scott M.’s protestations that he ‘hadn’t had time to show us the floor plans yet.’ Whatevs, dude, you should have been more efficient.

The rest of Sunday afternoon we spent taking a quick spin around the town to see what there was to be seen (not a ton that we couldn’t have guessed at) and buying groceries at the Soviet-style supermarket (which almost makes up for the very depressing manky produce section by selling fantastic fresh salsa and playing Chopin on the overhead loudspeaker). We also went for a little walk down the length of the beach from where we saw WHALES!!! Wowee!! So cool. Right off shore, too, maybe a hundred yards away (it gets very deep very quickly) breeching or breaching or whatever it is that you call it. We also saw a sign warning in English and Spanish not to swim for danger of riptides, and I was interested to learn that the Spanish word for riptide is the same as the word for hangover - clearly both occupational hazards of residence in Cabo San Lucas.

Monday the grandparents took the bambina, and babydaddy and I went on a mountain climbing expedition - we found what the real estate agent had referred to as ‘the Mexican beach’ (i.e. the little beach where the locals hang out - grubbier but much friendlier feeling than the mega-resorts beach), from where we did some bushwhacking and rock scrambling over the big hill towards the point of the cape, where the famous arches are, passing some magnificent little deserted white sand coves along the way, until we arrived at Lovers’ Beach, which was taken over by a party of sea-kayakers and water taxi touts. I snoozed on the sand in the sun with my book (which I am hugely enjoying - a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay) and babydaddy went for a run (aren’t you impressed? I was) and then we scrambled back over the rocks to get home just in time to go on a Sunset Dinner Cruise that mama & papa H. had booked for us. The less said about that the better, I think - beautiful water, beautiful sunset, beautiful boat ride, food OK, drinks vile, blaring music and DJ person horeeeble. My favourite part of Monday apart from seeing the whales was that wild papa H. randomly came home with forty pounds of fresh-caught tuna and started cooking it up. We’ve been eating a lot of tuna the last few days.

Tuesday we decided we were going to opt out of the Tourist Industrial Complex completely for the day - we sat by the pool with books, swam, snoozed, sunbathed, garnered compliments on our delisquicious baby, and ate fish tacos (mmm) in the morning, and then to the beach in the afternoon for more of the same. Exciting events of the day were mainly baby-related: baby has now officially learned how to roll over from front to back (rendering us unsafe for elevated flat surfaces), and she has gone swimming (full immersion in the pool, partial immersion in the Pacific). I would also like to report that my Chinese vocabulary is getting positively expansive: I can say, “good morning,” “Did you sleep well?” “stinky,” “thank you,” “hello” and “pineapple.” I think I’m pretty set for linguistic survival.

OK time to go see if I can get the internet connection to work…also, I just re-read this, and realized that it is sounding very snotty and as if I am not enjoying myself, when in fact the opposite is true; the tourist infrastructure here is icky and non-sustainable and disturbing, it's true, but it has been absolutely blissful to have several days to just sit in the sunshine next to the water with my lovely baby and babydaddy and a book and feel happy.

Remember the Alamo! ... wait, the Alamo was what again?

Posting from semi-sunny San Antonio, Tejas, where the entire travelling circus of baby, babydaddy, babydaddy's sister, brother-in-law, and niece have all come to pay a visit to ancient greatgrandmother - fully marbled but quite weak at 93 and counting. We arrived on Wednesday (fussy babies + delayed flights = horrible) and got ourselves to the car rental place where we had a zippy silver MINIVAN!! waiting for us. So so suburban. I feel like a soccer mom already, even though my baby doesn't do much more, athletics-wise, than kick me in the boobs when we're cuddled up together.

Highlights of the trip (since it's late, we're leaving tomorrow, my computer has limited battery life left and I'm too lazy to get up and plug it in:

- Extremely potent margaritas and hand made tortillas at dinner the first night we were here. I was having trouble walking in a straight line after, I am not kidding, approximately one third of a margarita. Hooray!

- Ancient grandma commenting obsessively on how 'large' (by which I think she means Caucasian-looking) baby's eyes are. But I think we're in - on the third visit (this afternoon) she gave me a big chunky ring set with an enormous faux pearl and (according the box) Genuine Crystals as a keepsake, as well as a fluffy blue knit scarf. Baby luckily cooperated quite well being passed around like a parcel and beamed gummily at ancient grandma. Toothlessness apparently runs in the family.

- Butternut squash ravioli with crumbled amaretto cookies and sage butter for supper last night at Il Sogno (San Antonio foodie hot spot) (the cookie business sounds a little peculiar, but molto bene. Due thumbs up from me.)

- The temperature. A weird thing to include on a best-of list, but really, the temperature has been unbelievably pleasant. Neither too hot nor too cold but exactly perfect, such that you walk around in short sleeves saying, ah, gosh, the air feels so nice on my skin! I went for a run this morning and it was perfect running weather. (Although architecture/landscape not so inspiring: we are in a neighbourhood full of monochromatic grey/beige 1950's ranch style bungalows with dead grey lawns, no inhabitants in evidence, and the landscape is so flat that the elevation gain between Basin Street (where I started out) and Mountaintop Boulevard (highest point) was all of about six feet.

I don't know that I can quite include it as a highlight, but it's certainly worth mentioning - we went to the Smokehouse this afternoon, for authentic Texan pit barbecue - $32 at a glorified roadside shack will buy you a pound of sausages, a pound of short ribs, a pound of brisket, a pound of pork, a big bucket of potato salad, a big bucket of beans, and a pint of barbecue sauce. I am beginning to understand why so many people here clock in over three hundred pounds. You could get seriously fat here in not very much time at all.

We also went to the Alamo, aka the shrine to extremely selective Texas history. We (or at least I) did not purchase any shot glasses, coffee mugs, T-shirts, or key-rings in the gift shop, although I was tempted by a little plaster model of the front of the Alamo, mostly because they came in two sizes, labelled for convenience as "Small Frontalamo" and "Large Frontalamo" and I thought the German conciseness and precision of the noun "Frontalamo" was worth a keepsake. However, a lemon sorbet at the icecream shop across the street was calling to me more loudly, so I went and blew some of my hard earned cash on that.

ok, eyes are starting to close involuntarily...

pics of my primary cause of insomnia these days

An added bonus, lovely friend/delivering doctor rang me to read me poem by Robert Browning, shortly after baby was born:

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hillside's dew-pearl'd;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in His heaven-

All's right with the world!

Fashion fascism

I read recently that many high-end fashion houses refuse on principle to make their ready-to-wear clothes in large sizes, on the grounds that they don't want fat people wearing their stuff, thus presumably making the brand-name clothes more desirable. I am tickled therefore by the fact that many of these same high-end fashion houses make baby clothes - including snaps down at the bottom end of the clothes expressly for ease of nappy-changing: what does it say about high fashion when being fat is considered less attractive than being incontinent? I think I'd rather be fat...

random thoughts about pregnancy and philandering artistic husbands

the countdown is getting scarily close to D-day. a week left before my due-date. there are still conflicting parts of my brain which fervently believe that a) there's not really a baby in there or b) that i will be pregnant forever (which would be OK, really, as long as i didn't get any bigger. every week i think, nah, i can't possibly get more enormous, and then poof! i get more enormous...)

projects remaining to be completed prior to arrival of parasite (apart from the metaphysical ones, like "acquire large amounts of patience and wisdom" and "reconcile self to complete mindfuck of having children") are to spray my fruit trees with horticultural oil in the vain hope that that will protect them from next summer's onslaught of evil buggies, finish painting mural in the bebe's room, and finish the bebe quilt. oh, and probably getting another little pedal bin for bebe's room would be a good idea too. "nesting" is such a euphemism; it sounds so cosy, when actually it means things like "buy a pedal bin into which you will be chucking your kid's smelly crap-stained nappy wipes." hmm.

the last two nights have been a cinematic lesson in the artistic value of having a philandering husband: last night we watched a biography of frida kahlo, and tonight i watched "sylvia," gwyneth paltrow/daniel craig film about sylvia plath and ted hughes. i have to say, if i was going to be made miserable (and by extension, more tortured and creative) by one of the two philandering husbands, i'd so go for ted hughes/daniel craig any day. diego rivera looked like an obese toad. he must have had one impressively charming personality, is all i can say, to be such a successful seducer of women. (whereas frida kahlo really was quite lovely, i think; she totally overexaggerated the unibrow in her self-portraits and in the photos at least had very delicate features). plus ted hughes had his whole sexy working class northern lad accent thing going as well. i don't know about the whole being-married-to-a-poet business, though; that sounds kind of exhausting. that said, i really, really don't buy the myth that an artist must be unhappy and/or alcoholic in order to be productive, and i wonder what the relative proportion of mental illness among professional artists to the general population is.

ok time to frapper le sac; i only had one two hour nap today so am completely wiped :)