The Evacuation Zone
It’s a rare morning when the child is out, at the zoo with our next door neighbor, but the parents are home. We both work on our projects, drinking in the quiet like, like, like a gin and tonic at the end of a hot summer’s day.
Like a juicy succulent wine.
Like coffee.
I work in the backyard for a while, then suddenly it rains big fat drops on my feet and on my laptop, and I run inside before I can even get my sandals on. Once in, I check my email. I see that a preschool meeting slated for this weekend may be rescheduled, because some families may evacuate because of the hurricane.
Huh? I’ve heard vague talk of the hurricane on the news, but I’m so busy with work this week that it hasn’t even registered.
I think about how crazy it is to leave New York because of a storm, and then how crazy it would be if, um, a lot of people got that idea. I mean, getting out on a summer Saturday is nearly impossible.
I decide to check the weather.
And, whoa. Hurricane Irene is posing an “extreme unprecedented threat,” etc. etc. I check the cities that are listed as needing to possibly evacuate. New York City. Again, whoa.
I peek into the kitchen and say to my husband, “My computer is taking forever to load the maps, but I checked the weather and we might consider leaving this weekend. I think we’re in the evacuation zone.”
When I say this, I’m not crying. I’m quite calm. I’m even cheerful; despite the weather, I’m having a cozy morning where I’m getting things done. Still, I’m married to a journalist and without “facts,”—and by the way, I do not count as primary source material—he interprets my mild suggestion as mass hysteria.
Ever the reporter, he decides to check into it himself.
Ten seconds later, looking at his own computer screen, he’s the one who says it.
“Whoa.”
“See?” I say. “I just told you. Didn’t I just tell you?”
“Yes, but you saying it and Bloomberg saying it: there is a difference.”
He goes back to his computer, and follows it up. “But you know honey, if you look at the map, we’re just BARELY in the evacuation zone.”
“Just barely in the evacuation zone.”
This exchange says a lot about marriage and how Person A can be interpreted as hysterical by Person B, who is in turn recognized by Person A as probably being a danger to themselves and to society at large.
(And you know it’s the same for you guys.)
I checked, though, and infuriatingly, he is right. Where our car is parked, one block up? That’s in the evacuation zone. But our specific building is not in the zone. It ends a block north, and starts again three blocks south.
Grr.
So over and out, I am off to stock up on Spaghettios, which are the only canned food I remember as being palatable to children, or anyone, when at room temperature.
We may still leave, though: we have to move the car, anyway.
I’d Like to Eat Like an Eskimo, Please
During my first pregnancy, I had aversions rather than cravings. Mostly I ate carbs.
Now I’m not *excited* to eat broccoli, as I normally am, but I wouldn’t drive my car into a tree on purpose if some ended up in my mouth. It did tonight. I ate it. No big deal!
Mostly, I’m craving, rather than averting. Lately I’m craving grilled steak or lamb.
I started in with my craving a few weeks ago, while we were on vacation at a lake in New Hampshire. I started to think about a strip steak my brother-in-law had grilled for me a few summers ago. We’d gotten some Italian bread to eat it with, and we had cold butter on that bread, and the steak was juicy and perfectly chewy and salty and there was the butter on the bread and the steak juice on the bread and I think we probably had some salad for contrast.
Man, I could fall on the floor thinking about that steak.
For a freelance job I’m reading a book about Eskimo life, and how they have all of this frozen deer meat around, and then hack some off and heat it up — maybe in seal fat, or maybe just in some snow, depending — but just ’til it’s warm, not ’til it’s hot, because that way you can still taste the blood.
While they are eating, they put a hunk of meat between their teeth, and saw off the part hanging out of their mouths with a little saw called an ulu.
When the meat is gone they drink the “blood-water soup” that leached out when they heated it up.
To me, at this stage, this sounds about right.
In New Hampshire, we stayed on a lovely organic farm with my husband’s family. We had a plan to grill one night. I said to my husband “maybe we could grill steak!” and he told me that we already had bratwurst in the fridge. Ah, ok, it was really good. We also grilled some chicken that night. The chicken was delightful in its own regard, in other words, as pieces of what the Eskimos call “light meat.” They don’t bother to feed light meat to the dogs, by the way, who have been running hard for all three hours of daylight over the ice and snow. I suspect they don’t feed it to the child-bearing women, either.
I looked longingly out the window at the brown lowing beasts grazing between the farmhouse we’d rented and the barn, teasing me with their rippled necks and well-marbled rib regions.
I knew we’d be going through Connecticut on the way back home and I emailed my brother-in-law about getting together, ostensibly to see him and my beloved niece and nephew, but you know the truth. He already had plans in place, though.
I emailed my parents to see if we could grill a steak over at theirs, but their grill isn’t working.
Finally, last Sunday, a friend decided to take Henry and I out to dinner.We went to a neighborhood restaurant. I must have brightened when the waiter told us about the steak special, and though it was expensive, she urged me to order it.
In between eating a piece of bread they’d brought to welcome us and the arrival of my steak, I needed to, in no uncertain terms, hurl. But the restaurant is small and someone was in the one-seater bathroom. I changed directions and ran outside and threw up into the street. Sorry, street. Sorry, passersby, sorry, horrified people sitting on a bench trying to enjoy your evening.
Sorry, blog readers.
It may have been a dramatic exit, because after I’d come back in, the waiter stopped by the table to ask if everything was alright. “Oh, yeah. I’m pregnant,” I told him.
“But you looked so cool and composed when you came back in!”
“Yeah, well, it’s my second time being pregnant,” I explained.
Then he handed me my rare rib-eye with jalapeno jam and fried green tomatoes and spinach.
I ate a whole lot. It was lip smacky.
I brought some leftover steak home and offered it to my husband, who agreed that he’d like to eat it. Before he could, I changed my hormone-addled mind and finished it myself.
The next day, I felt like one million dollars — which is enough to buy more steak.
Monday, I made steak tacos, and then on Thursday, I ate the world’s largest lamb chop, a shoulder blade chop, at a restaurant. On Friday, I shared a hangar steak with another friend.
My last baby wanted crackers and bread. This baby spits those things out into the street. This baby wants meat.
Where is my ulu, I need my ulu, somebody grill me a steak.
This Whale and I Are the Only Ones Who Love Mariachi Music
Nothing makes me happier on a subway ride than a group of Mariachis serenading all of us. I’m so pleased by their music that I reach for my wallet and try to make eye contact with other people about how great life is that we have this lovely music by these lovely men in and their guitars and horns and special outfits. To me, it feels like we are suddenly all together at a moving event, rather than just commuting or going to therapy or god only knows why everyone else is on the train, because though we are together, we are expert at being alone.
Invariably, no one but the rogue tourist and I will act like anything special is happening.
Apparently, it is just me and this whale and perhaps whoever hired these guys to play at their wedding who are truly moved.
Thanks for captainkickstand on Youtube.
My Cup Runneth Over, Also, I Need to Empty My Cup
or
Pregnancy Redux, Part 2: Ptaylism
I overheard my husband say to our son: “Look, Mommy’s like a pitcher for the Phillies!” I’m not even sure that baseball players dip anymore, but I am unfortunately keeping the tradition of spitting alive and well on this continent.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I know that pregnancy is a blessing. I am lucky and happy to be with child. But like many women, I find myself exhausted and even alienated by the attendant symptoms, and they are nothing if not top of mind, and I am going to write about them, because that is how I process things.
The latest is ptyalism, otherwise known as excessive salivation during pregnancy. It’s a strange condition that I got last time around, though this time it’s more extreme. I know this in part because in that piece I wrote back in ’08, I reference both taking a bath and riding a bike, and both of those are totally out of the question for me now.
In sum, I overproduce saliva and I need to spit it out every few seconds that I am awake. If I swallow it, I lose my lunch.
It’s quite uncomfortable, and it requires icky props and poor attempts at subterfuge, and it’s humiliating. It only goes away when I am sleeping or sometimes, if I am eating. But should I dare to eat sugar, the spitting escalates to an Olympic-level event.
So these days I carry around a bottle, or a cup, or I run into the bathroom to spit every few seconds. I also spit like a sailor onto the street, into the corners at the playground, into the plants skirting a building. Here, I will offer a brief and yet sincere blanket apology. I seriously cannot help this.
Sometimes I use a washcloth. The washcloth method of coping makes me feel like a mysterious lady with a clandestine ether-on-a-hanky addiction, rather than a rabid lady, powerless to her own salivary glands, who should be put down.
The problem with the washcloth method is that I end up carrying around washcloths soaking with my own spit. This is better than it sounds, and yet not great.
I’ve been severely limiting social interaction. This weekend I was scheduled to go to a party I was particularly looking forward to, and started to cry on the way out the door. Three weeks of spitting every 20 or so seconds really is getting to me. How was I going to manage, um, partying with others?
“Keep coffee grounds under your tongue,” a possibly deranged fellow-spitter on the Internet advised. However, if I’m retching up a storm as part of my daily life already, I do not see how sublingual anything, let alone grit I associate with trash, could help. Though I admit, the acids and tannins of coffee do seem to keep the spitting at bay better than anything else. Sipping a decaf iced coffee, and then another one, and then another one, actually seems to be the best state I can be in, other than sleep. Normally coffee is a no-no during pregnancy: hormones keeps your esophagus from closing properly so acid peeps up into your throat, but I’ve already shut down acid production with a wonderdrug called Prilosec.
My obstetrician said that all that she can suggest for the spitting, in fact, is Prilosec. Good God: what would this be like if I weren’t taking Prilosec? I upgraded to Prilosec after I started regularly throwing up the ice cream I needed to keep down my Mylanta.
Do you see what I am getting at? I am a damn mess: the Amy Winehouse of pregnant women, if you will. But I know that I am not alone.
First, I know that some other women are going through these other crazy weeks of spitting, though I primarily know this from the Internet.
But also, I felt some familiarly fluttery kicks over the last week. At first I dismissed them, knowing that it was too early. But then I read about it, and I was wrong: for the second time around, it is most certainly not too early to feeling kicking.
So when I get miserable, it helps to remember: I’m not alone, and I’m not doing this for nothing. My cup runneth over, in many many ways.
The Octopus: A Delight of Science
You might want me to write about how the US credit rating was downgraded, but that makes my face hurt and my brain shut down.
Instead, a topic everyone can enjoy: have we discussed how much I love octopuses? I wanted to get one painted on Henry’s wall before he was born, but my therapist thought it would scare him, and I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to do it.
Anyhow they are a crazy, delightful, not to mention . . . delicious . . . animal.
Also, artistic and talented!
I can’t figure out how to embed this, even with the embed code, but if you don’t see the movie embedded, click on the link. Thanks to the the Science Friday people for sharing this really fun thing!
Church Avenue Chomp 