tums: the after-dinner mint.
Allen Funt was a great American.
Man, there is so nothing going on in the world (as far as US papers are concerned). Use this time to concoct conspiracy theories about how the government and industry are going to use the recent "smurfing" or denial of service attacks on websites such as Ebay and Amazon in order to further commercialize the net.
(Don't send me your theories. This is just a suggestion on how to increase your paranoiac tendencies.)
I bet you didn't know heartburn could keep you up at night. Well, it's 3:48am, and let me assure you: it can. Really bad heartburn. The kind where you can feel the acid eating away your stomach and occasionally your esophagus. The kind where lying down is impossible and sitting straight up doesn't seem to make things any better, though you'd think gravity would help you out a little. You wonder if you should quickly down a glass of ice cold water and then stick your finger down your throat, just to relieve some of the discomfort of feeling the waves of acid going back and forth.
(That was a trick I learned about in Seventeen magazine, by the way, in a story ostensibly about the horrors of anorexia and bulimia but was really more kind of a roadmap of how to be a successful anorectic or bulimic. In case you're wondering if girls do get ideas from magazines like that, they do. And frankly, I think that was the point.)
And I don't know if it's the temperature in the house or the climate (because it's been raining so darn much here in the Southland) or my hormones, but I'm sweating like the devil. Darin threw off all the covers, which tells me it's probably one of the first two, since I don't think sympathy symptoms of pregnancy extend to hormonal fluctuations.
In case you're wondering, despite all this horrible discomfort I'm not in that much of a hurry to have the baby. If I have a baby, then I have to take care of her, and she's way easier to take care of right where she is. No diapers, feeding by tube, and if she wakes in the night she can rock herself to sleep.
I'm nesting like crazy. Tomorrow -- rather, today, but after I've gotten some of the sleep that's eluding me right now because of the, well, you know -- I'm going to go to Costco and buy toilet paper and toothpaste and paper towels and everything we're going to need around here for, oh, a few months.
Darin keeps trying to remind me that we're having a baby, not a castle siege.
I've told myself, No more visits to Target or Babies R Us. We don't need a stroller right away (although getting a baby sling to go for a walk might be good). I don't need any more pregnancy clothing of any type -- I have to highly recommend the Target leggings, by the way: very soft and very cheap. Actually, I've discovered Target has diapers for pretty cheap as well, although I have not as yet discovered what Costco's prices for diapers are.
I cannot believe I am becoming the kind of person that not only comparison shops at Target and Costco but tells you about it.
Today (the 15th) is the 8th anniversary of the day Darin first asked me out. It serves, for me, as the marker for the length of our relationship because I can't remember any of the other important dates, such as when we first actually had a date or first moved in together (which wasn't too far after the first date, in point of fact).
I have trouble remembering when we got married, to tell you the truth. People ask, "How long have you been married?" and I have to say, "Well, let's see, we got together in early 92 and we got married a year and a half later..." I always ask people how long they've been together, not how long they've been married, because the former seems far more important to me than the latter. Of course, I always run into people who feel the need to explain that their relationship is "long and complicated" but they're sure I'll be fascinated by the recounting of each break-up and recommittment that finally led to them being married.
I was going to get a Valentine's Day card on Monday -- except the greeting card racks at Target had approximately everyone in the store at them (and the card racks looked as though they'd already been attacked by wild vultures) and I didn't want to go out of my way to a stationery store if I didn't have to.
I'm not particularly big on Valentine's Day, actually. I disliked it for all the usual reasons for the first twenty-odd years of my life, because I never had a sweetie. Then, when I finally had a sweetie of the Valentine's Day persuasion (as opposed to someone I was sort of dating, except we weren't going to call it dating and God knows we weren't going to use words like "boyfriend" and no one's parents were met), we had the kind of relationship where Valentine's Day was just kind of superfluous.
I picked lunch up for Darin (at Gelson's: sashimi and a Nibby chocolate bar, made by Scharffen Berger), although this doesn't really count as a Valentine's Day gesture -- I get him lunch fairly frequently. He often doesn't eat anything in a given day until dinner time unless a)he makes firm lunch plans with a friend or b)I bring him something, so I feel it is incumbent upon me to bring him food. He brings me everything else, so it's pretty fair.
(He's actually been known not to budge from his chair for an entire workday. I don't know how he gets into the zone like that, but he does on a fairly regular basis. I wish I had those concentration skills. Of course, of late I've wished I had any concentration skills whatsoever.)
Given our 8 years together, my delicate condition, and the fact that I can be very, very temperamental when woken up, I hope Darin is full of love and understanding in the morning. I mean, he's going to explain that it's afternoon and perhaps I should get going, and I'm going to respond by screaming, "Hey, I couldn't sleep last night!" and making mewling noises. Then I'll probably get dressed and go get him some lunch.
Dammit, I don't think the cold water trick has lessened the problem any. It's going to be a long night. I'm trying a glass of milk, balancing the knowledge that this is 8-10 ounces of fluid (and therefore a few trips to the bathroom) against the idea that milk can counteract the acid.
It's 5am though. I'd really like to sleep.
Oh, I forgot to mention: Stee informs me that Michel Richard does have, as I advertised, great pastries and omelets, but their eggs benedict sucks and you mustn't, under any circumstances, order that.
I, of course, think it's amazingly cool that Stee went to Michel Richard because I mentioned it.
The answer to Friday's question: Britain solved the current problem of Northern Ireland's power-sharing government by suspending it and returning control of the province to London. There are doubts as to whether the Ulster Unionists will agree to share power in a coalition that contains the Sinn Fein party even if the IRA finally gets around to scrapping its secret arms stockpiles. One thing I don't know (and haven't done enough searching on): have the Unionists scrapped their weapons?
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com