you know the in-loves are in town when...

...the dog no longer sleeps with us on our bed, hogging the entire foot of the bed, but with them in an even smaller bed.

...the yard looks prefessionally maintained.

...when the entire house is clean day to day and the kitchen is immaculate.

...when one or more house project, taht we deidn't know needed doing gets done, (yet more subflooring in the attic, trenches dug so that downspouts drain away from house, outside electrical sockets get installed)

...the tupperware is never where it's supposed to be.

...i can't get to my office/library, which cuts down on the books and papers strewn about the house.

...the dining table only has stuff on it during meals.

...the plastic shopping bags completely take over the laundry room (they do store runs every 3 hours and never take our reusable bags)

...there is some sort of sticky, sweet, store-bought desert at every meal.

...corn and potato chips can be found in the pantry.

...there is salted butter instead of saltless butter in the fridge.

the in-loves have been here and it's been great...they hold and spoil the child and cook and clean for us.

they will be here till monday, and have been an enormous help...but, i am about to go stir-crazy, and i feel guilty even admiting it. i should've been catholic.

posted by Jeremy at 1:54 PM

a praise to midwifes and birthplans

birthplans and midwifes who respect birthplans are a wonderful thing.

tracy (yes, she can now come out of the no-name closet) had written that she wanted to labor at home as long as possible because statistically the longer you are in the hospital the closer you are to a caesarean.

we called at 10pm after an hour of 5 minute contractions...but the midwife said try and labor at home until they are 4 minutes apart. at 1 we called again and they had just moved from 4 to 3, so we came in.

we left home at 1:20, leaving a very confused and disorriented dog, and arrived at the hospital at 1:40. she was 5-6 cms.

the nurse checking us in said: "so this is going to be natural...what classes have you taken?"
we looked at each other; looked at the nurse; looked at each other, and said: "none."
a look of dismay came across the nurse's face; a sort of naive little bastards look that said you won't make it or i wish they wouldn't be so dumb.

i will spare you the particularities, except that tracy felt immense pain in her back which prevented her from taking full advantage of her contractions. she never had a good middle push because the pain would be too intense after the second one. normally back labor is a sign of the child presenting in the anterior position (face towards mum's tum, instead of towards her bum) but she had spent the whole first part of labor either standing or on all fours, positions which make the baby line up correctly.

right before the pushing started, tracy stood up and said..."i can't do it...get me drugs!" and the midwife said, "well, lets get you back to bed and see what our options are." and she checked and things had progressed to the point of pushing and past the point where most drugs were advisable.

after 2 hours the baby still hadn't crowned and she was so tired that her contractions were slowing down. tracy wasn't pushing effectively...for one, the backpain got in the way; for two, and this is something that we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives, she said an hour or two after the baby was born that one would think that pushing is instinctual and that you push and it's effective...but you have to learn how to push. (just like you would think that breastfeeding is instinctual, that both parties know what to do, but you have to learn and cry and almost give up at least once before you get the hang of it.) so they put her on a minimal dossage of pitocin to get the contractions back up to speed. and a half hour later, and some very stern talking from the midwife, little Evan Lorraine was born.

for those who want to go natural...i would suggest a class (something we didn't do) and anything by Ina May...we read Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. the midwife said i had great instincts, but it wasn't that, i had read the book.

who knows, maybe next time we will actuall go to the farm.

we just took her to her first pediatrician...he said she was great...no jaundice and she has gained 8 ozs. since leaving the hospital on Sunday.

posted by Jeremy at 10:12 AM

on the grand puba's knee

here she is, right before coming home on grandpa's (t's dad, who still doesn't have an official name) knee.

they have been darlings. they came in and mom cleaned and dad put in a dimmer light in her room. as we have nested he has painted all our rooms, fixed all our exterior lighting problems and added track lighting above the sink.

this'll be the last image...maybe.

posted by Jeremy at 5:23 PM

the hands of a hero

here are the hands of mother and daughter.

mom was a true champion. one of the nurses that came in to attend right near the end of the ordeal (2 1/2 hours of pushing) asked..."is she still natural?"

tracy yelled: "haven't you heard my screams?"
and the nurse said: "women on epidurals still scream."
and tracy said: "yes, this is natural."
and the nurse replied: "you are my hero."

posted by Jeremy at 5:15 PM

at peace

here she is in her coming home outfit. t wore it when she came home 32 years ago! yes both her name and the blue blanket will solicit many "ohh, what a strong little boy you've got!" and they'll be almost right. she is little and she is strong...but she's all girl. i hope that the green outfit and blue blanket won't make her ape for pink later on.

posted by Jeremy at 5:10 PM

CONSPICUOUS ABSENCE EXPLAINED!!!!

posted by Greg at 10:09 PM

scholarship interview

i just did my first scholarship interview. all the higher-ups in social science and psych were out of town, so i gamely agreed to fill in. i have no idea what i was supposed to ask, so it was definitely interesting. i think it lasted for 15 minutes...with me talking more than the student. i never want to be a dean.

posted by Chris at 2:49 PM

55.

55. I am almost never bothered by pains over the heart or in my chest.

false. when i sometimes have pains in the heart of chest (e.g., indigestion), it bothers me. both of my grandfathers have experienced heart trouble. one died from a heart attack, and the other one has a fighting chance of doing the same.

in other news, i found out yesterday that a former officemate of mine has a new baby. the baby, who lives in heidelberg, is a girl called coralie. i am overjoyed for the new papa, who is one of the most effervescent and smart people i have ever known.

posted by Chris at 9:08 AM

54.

54. I am liked by most people who know me.

true. i think most people are liked by most people who know them. otherwise, those other people wouldn't take the time to get to know them.

posted by Chris at 9:58 AM

53.

53. A minister can cure disease by praying and putting his hand on your head.

true. for example, it could be a distal cause of some sort of placebo effect. or, his hand might be covered in topical ointment.

posted by Chris at 9:27 AM

52.

52. I prefer to pass by school friends, or people I know but have not seen for a long time, unless they speak to me first.

true. this is because i am a socially anxious person. however, in a deeper sense of the word prefer, my response to this item would be "false." in the ideal world, i would prefer not to be socially anxious and therefore would prefer not to pass by people i know, etc...

posted by Chris at 10:20 AM

the waiting game

no desire, no desire to read my students' essays. no desire to prepare for my classes.

but, sitting around waiting for the baby, who is perfectly happy in t's warm, round belly, snug as a bug in the original hortus conclusus, is even more maddening than than adding the tilde (ñ) to the n so that ano (anus) becomes año (year).

just gonna have to keep her on eggplant dishes, spicy tacos, primrose pills, raspberry teas that aren't doing anything...but, by god, when the baby comes will be able to assign the cause to one or all of these homeopathic inducers.

posted by Jeremy at 10:06 AM

elle m'interview?

i just got contacted by a reporter from the Toronto Star. she wants to interview me about some research i published about solitude a couple of years ago. i am supposed to call her back collect, but i have no idea how to do this on the phone system in my officenor am i even certain that i should pretend to know a lot about this particular topic.

in an unrelated news, the last paper that interviewed me (on a totally different subjecti.e., foreign students doing research in belgium) left me on the cutting room floor...in no small part because all my responses came in a mix of english and french.

posted by Chris at 1:32 PM

51.

51. I am in just as good physical health as most of my friends.

false. how do i know about other people's health? how do i know about my own health?

posted by Chris at 12:31 PM

50.

50. My soul sometimes leaves my body.

false. i have never noticed a soul in my body.

posted by Chris at 11:13 AM

49.

49. It would be better if almost all laws were thrown away.

false. i suspect there are plenty of unnecessary laws and some with bad consequences. however, to me, throwing almost all of them away implies throwing about 90% or more of them out. without 90% of our lawsunless we came up with some new mega-commandmentsit seems like we would have an equal-parts mix of anarchy, monopoly, and gay-married teachers instructing children in evolution, while their pupils malevolently pulled the stickers from their textbooks. and who would regulate the meat packing industry? (ed.'s note: those last two sentences are totally not supposed to form a double-entendre. no joke.)

posted by Chris at 9:36 AM

48.

48. When I am with people I am bothered by hearing very queer things.

false. i long to hear very queer things. my heart leaps at the sound of queer things. that people can say and do very queer things is one of my reasons i think that god exists.

have a smurfy day.

posted by Chris at 1:11 PM

a poem for my grandmother

You arrived, dazed and seven months pregnant,
in the middle of a Texas plains' January;
and all the residents of Lake Victor,
this accidental town of cotton growers,
came to greet you at the station.
The Portorican is coming, the Portorican.
They'd gathered to see an Island native,
expecting a grass skirt rustling about your hips
and leis draped around your olive-hued neck;
and off you stepped in your machine-sown clothes,
pregnant but looking like a socialite from a faded Photoplay.

You were baptized Lucía Hortensia.
Lucía for the virgin-saint whose name means light
but whose eyes were gouged out by lustful Roman soldiers,
and Hortensia from the Latin hortus, or garden,
and also the common name of the hydrangea macrophylla,
a hardy, shade-loving shrub with delicate globes of lacey flowerlets.

Los Estados Unidos was not supposed to be this frozen
hinterland; flat red earth, brown prairie grass,
and in the distance the solitary skeleton
of a gnarled oak or cotton wood scratching
the hard, gray, empty sky, in the distance
a scraggly clump of mesquite and a wooden farm house.

You'd married a man with a thousand acres
to his family name; a gallant master sargeant
in the Army Air Corps, not this farmer family;
not this strong mother-in-law with hands
hardened from washing and hoeing in the garden.

You'd left Ponce, La Perla del Sur,
founded in 1692 by the grandson of the intrepid
Juan Ponce de Leon, Puerto Rico's more beautiful,
more temprate city, with fruit vendors
daily peddling their wares in handpainted carts
to solidly middle class mothers
for this frozen village of cotton pickers.

Lake Victor, little more than a railroad camp in 1901,
still had it's man-made lake, still had its depot
in 1945, but this town with little more than
twenty-five farmer families, still had no in-door plumbing.
You went looking for the toilet only to discover
that they didn't even have an outhouse,
that out there, honey, really meant out there
hovering above the frozen ground, ass to the chaffing wind.

You'd met him strolling around the city's plaza,
with it's ornate colonial beauty;
you and your gaggle of Ponceña girls,
each with your buscanovios, a lock of curled hair
dangling between ear and temple, bouncing
with every step. You and they arms woven together
moving clockwise around the promenade,
your skirts rhythmically swaying, coquetishly,
with your shoulders half hidden by your handmade lace shawls.
And he with the other Americanos, dressed in crisp
army kahkis moved counter-clockwise talking about the war and girls.

Your Latin father did not like this quiet American boy,
come to steal his beautiful daughter and take her with him
to Seattle, to Okinawa, to the Texas plains;
these Americanos always coming, always taking.

posted by Jeremy at 10:21 PM

lunchtime reading

yay for Arnold! this sounds like a good idea.

i've often wondered why people in power get to draw the lines that determine whether or not they stay in power. in representative democracies, politicians and parties should tailor themselves to the people they represent. it is silly that districts are now tailored to fit the politicians who represent them.

it seems perfectly reasonable that a set of rules or algorithims could be created that could draw the lines in a more-or-less automatic way. it seems like a job for demographers and geographers rather than politicians.

posted by Chris at 3:17 PM

47.

47. Once a week or oftener I feel suddenly hot all over, without apparent cause.

false. anyway, i didn't know oftener was a word?

posted by Chris at 9:48 AM

46.

46. My judgement is better than it ever was.

true (i hope). my desire is that every day my judgement is better than the previous. i know this is unrealistic, but, in this case, hope does spring eternal. at any rate, i am convinced that my judgement is better than it was a few years ago.

i hope your weeks are off to good starts!

posted by Chris at 9:27 AM

45.

45. I do not always tell the truth.

true...umm...i mean false.

posted by Chris at 11:06 AM

my tea

i heard the coffee shop girl rave about it the day that she got held up at gun point.

"oh, it's simply the best tea ever!", she told the guy breathlessly.

but you can only get it at co-ops or whole paycheck. it just so happens that last night t and i went there...she wanted to get a tea that will "ripen her cervix" so that this child will leave her body. i saw this particular flavor and thought..."hmm, that sounds interesting."

and it is more than just a tea...as most things are these days.

on the box a wise, be-turbaned indian looks over his shoulder with a peaceful yet picaresque smile hidden by his beard. next to his shining image of holiness, a story places the tea in their proper context...these are healing teas.

on the lid of the tea, accompanied by an image of a woman in the lotus position and the disclaimer, Before doing this exercise or participation in any exercise program, consult your physician, is a description of how to practice The Cooling Breath, a breath technique especially suited for detoxification and rejunvination.

on the back a little story is supposed to tell the drinker all about the history of this particular tea.

the intrepid tea adventurer has arrived in cairo and tomorrow will, as the box says,

meet the Pharaohs in the hypnotizing heat of their tombs. My suitcases sit unattended next to my sandy boots and my camera. I've shed my travel clothes and now lie quietly listening to the city. The smell of spices for sale on the street below moves into my room with the curtains and the welcome breeze. The sun has turned my room to gold and the fading light plays on my ceiling. I float down the Nile and hear the fluttering of bird's wings as the water moves me gently past strange flora on soft beaches. Across from me a lovely woman holds out a golden chalice, steaming in the setting sun. I inhale the scent of sweet licorice and refreshing mint so real I can almost taste them. She moves her lips and I hear the river whisper to me. I reach out to take the cup she offers and find myself back in my hotel room. I must have fallen asleep. A cup of steaming tea sits by my bed; don't know how it got there.

It's good to know that even if you are an organic, vegetarian, yoga loving person sex still sells. It's good to know that a company that markets specifically to woman (look at the website again) exotic, river sex still sells.

posted by Jeremy at 2:05 PM

name change

with more and more bloggers actually believing that they compose an important site for cultural production and political dialogue...i hereby officially change my name to the undersigned

posted by Jeremy at 1:58 PM

for the heck of it

posted by Greg at 10:00 AM

44.

44. Much of the time my head seems to hurt all over.

false. i have had series of intense headaches in the past, but i haven't experienced one for several months. i haven't ever had recurring head pain that hurts all over, which must be excruciating.

posted by Chris at 9:48 AM

43.

43. My sleep is fitful and disturbed.

True. Baby's fault.

posted by Chris at 9:36 AM

two indie flicks

There's a certain kind of flick that can only be set in NYC, not because of the need to have the city-scape as background, but because of the pretentiousness of the dialogue. Think of "My Dinner with Andre," think of "Six Degrees of Separation," think of, but to a lesser extent, any Woody Allen movie. Allen finds himself in this category and outside this category because he has a real feel for dialogue...both the absurd and the utterly mundane aspects of day-to-day conversation. So that, if there are moments of "Is this all there is?" in Allen, there are equally just as many revealing conversations about such things as the killing of spiders ("Annie Hall"). Not so with what I am calling the New York genre. In these films intelligent people do backflips in their conversations to bring up weighty matters...and things like a dinner, which I won't deny that there can be very meaningful conversations over dinner, turn into "life-manifestos," and big words are used, and physics (quatum, string, Heisenberg, chaos) explains everything. And in a strange way, certain New Yorkers, middle to upper-middle class New Yorkers who are intelligent run around the U.S. trying to be characters from these movies (at least the New Yorkers that I've met in other places).

"13 Conversations about One Thing" is such a film. There are moments (such as the snippets of office dialogue) when the writers show their true genius for capturing "real talk" but mostly the movie is about a bunch of people (all too old for college) obssesing about the meaning of life in a very sophmoric way. It is a movie about dumb luck and chance encounters and how dumb luck touches some for good and others for bad. The question that each character must ask themself is what are they going to make of chance...how do you read it? But it is also more than just dumb luck, though there is the gust of wind that blows the shirt and causes the girl to run after it and get hit by the car, there is also the guy who, out of guilt because he fired the "smilely office guy," asks his ex's husband to hire him and never tells smilely. Smilely, in turn, believes this be a miracle.

The movie follows 4 lives and how they intersect. The stories are interspliced with one another and chronologically out of order, but this is done in such a way as to show how all lives are connected. In this sense, it very much reminds the viewer of "Six Degrees of Separation." Like "6*" the interconnectedness of our lives tries to say something about our responsibility to others; it also presents the contact of lives as a sort of interruption of one's daily and set routine. Only in "13" the interconnectedness is presented as a sort of "butterfly effect." The chance encounter leads to this or that unexpected event that has these or those consequences. It has the feel of a play that is trying to be deep thought-provoking movie. Unfortunately, for the most part one feels that one has seen the movie before and that the only thing keeping one intersted is the cutting and splicing of the stories. There is the goodie-two shoes who almost kills someone and believes himself to have killed her. The eternal optimist that looses her faith and regains it in the end. (Which wouldn't be so bad if her faith weren't so banal. She deeply believes that "everything happens for a reason.") There is the crochety old man who thinks that life's a bitch and then you die and so goes his empty, pathetic life.

Great actors make themselves known not by their melodrama, but in how they handle the small scenes. Tom Wilkinson, Sissy Spacek and Marisa Tomei are such actors. We've just recently seen "In the Bedroom." There's a scene: Marisa and Nick Stahl, the guy who plays her love interest (Tom and Sissy's kid), accidently lets on that he is deeply in love with her. So in love, in fact, that he is planning not to go do postgraduate work in architecture, instead he will take a year off to be with her and her boys. They are talking about architecture and Nick is dazzling her with his knowledge and passion. Her face speaks of being enthralled by him. Nick changes the subject of his education to her boys. One apparently told him that he is convinced that his brother doesn't get girls. They laugh and she asks Nick what he told her son; he tells her and asks "What are we going to do with them?" And both of them know that the "we" was more than just a slip of the tongue and that they have to talk about "them." It is the first point in the movie when they both acknowledge to each other, albiet accidentally, and for the most part wordlessly, that this is more, or has the potential to be more, than just a summer fling. And Marisa's face moves from joy in him and her boys to pity and terror, to a realization that this can't really last, that there is too much of an age difference, that she and her boys would hold back Nick's education. It is a scene you can watch over and over again. Much like the scene when Tom shows up at the country story to talk to Marisa after the murder and neither he nor she can look at each other nor can they express themselves despite having so much to say. The beauty of this flick is in the weightiness of the unsaid, of subtle movements of cheeks and lips and eybrows, of joy draining out of eyes as they fill with desperation.

posted by Jeremy at 1:45 PM

now that gay marriage is ruled out (not that anyone was trying to rule it in)...

the new hot topics in arkansas legislative/moral news are the following:

1. putting stickers on marriage-mentioning textbooks. these stickers point out that marriage, as defined in arkansas, is between a man and a woman. (in case you polygamists, polyandrists, and others didn't know, arkansas has defined marriage for every culture all over the world.)

2. moving arkansas's presidential primary up to early february so it can have more of a say in the parties' nominees.

3. making sure that no illegal immigrants get any government assistance we can keep them from. although this movement is led by a pair of moral-conservative/christian republicans, the baptist minister/governor of arkansas has denounced it as unchristian. also, the two moral-conservative/christian legislators who have been in front on this issue have handed over some of the p.r. duties to an actual anti-semitic racist who has compared the bush administration's tactics to those of nazi germany. details here at the site of a freelance journalist.

posted by Chris at 12:15 PM

42.

42. My family does not like the work I have chosen (or the work I intend to choose for my life work).

false. MB, both of my parents, and both of her parents have spent most of their working lives as teachers. now my mom is back in school to become a counselor. last semester, she called me to give her help with her research methods homework, topics that i am now teaching to some of her former junior high school students.

with respect to the work i intend to choose for my life work, i hope my next career will be part-time architect/designer and part-time computerized dance music composer. i am optimistic the family will support that one, too.

posted by Chris at 9:57 AM

On just finishing Being Dead

Such a reverent contemporary book I cannot remember reading as Jim Crace's Being Dead. Even though it is a book of exposureit displays its protagonists most ignoblyCrace places mirrors in front of the open-mouthed breaths taken beside a corpse and explains that that breath, even if labored, is wonderfully living. There are stories that claim a cat will steal a baby's breath if given the chance. Perhaps he covets the trace of milk there; perhaps it is from the baby that he gains his more than fair share of lives. Once I fell asleep on the futon with my mouth wide open. Suddenly I woke to find my cat's nose between my teeth. The air he drew was cold on the roof of my mouth. Being Dead reminds me of that moment: when life is stolen and time borrowed, the the story is at its most loving.

Celice and Joseph, two odd doctoral students of zoology, met at a study house on Baritone Bay. There they fell in love, and they made love among the dunes the last day of their study trip. Years later, gaining swiftly on old age, they return to Baritone Bay, nostalgia in tow. Their daughter is estranged from them. They no longer share three-quarters of the passion they once had. Yet awkwardly Joseph pulls Celice there in hope to relive their first lovemaking. And there they are murdered. For six days their bodies decompose while crabs and gulls pick at their flesh and flies lay eggs in their opened wounds. Eventually they are found, identified by their daughter, and removed from their repose. It is a wrenching removal: it breaks the couple's final connection to each other, symbol of longstanding love. Yet their decomposition is recognized throughout as the natural fact of their deaths. "This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology," claims the narrator once, yet it is a claim that reverberates through the dunes as surely as the baritone voice of the bay.

But to tell the narrative from beginning to end as I have told it is to commit a great injustice to the novel. The novel follows rather two parallel lines. The first runs from the novel's epigraph, Sherwin Stephens' "The Biologist's Valediction to His Wife":

Don't count on Heaven, or on Hell.
You're dead. That's it. Adieu. Farewell.
Eternity awaits? Oh, sure!
It's Putrefaction and Manure
And unrelenting Rot, Rot, Rot,
As you regress, from Zoo. to Bot.
I'll Grieve, of course,
Departing wife,
Though Grieving's never
Lengthened Life
Or coaxed a single extra Breath
Out of a Body touched by Death.

I could stop here: what novel isn't great that begins with such poetry? (And even so, as I investigate furtherI first wrote just after finishingsuch wild appropriateness is not accidental luck, since Crace wrote the epigraph himself. Why would I doubt it? Point of fact: Crace references Italo Calvino.) But the novel follows a second line, that of the quivering, in which all those who knew the deceased would sit through the night to recount his life in death. Every proper quivering ends at daybreak, Crace claims, so he begins at the scene of their death and works chronologically backwards, to the morning before Celice and Joseph died, asleep before the sun rises.

Being Dead crosses and recrosses through the world in which meaning is made and the world which has only life, time, and death. How do we attach meaning to life? Why to death? How meaningful sex? Guilt? Memory? Biology is the processing of our cells, as the poem goes, "from Zoo. to Bot.," and Being Dead makes no apologies for it. Nor, however, does it regret the meaning taken from it.

I recommend you read it over spring break.

posted by Greg at 1:51 AM