Flotsam

I must say, I am enjoying this “free time” business. I have managed to exercise, and to bake a batch of cookies, and I am planning to catch up on email this weekend and possibly clean the house. Sadly, this will be the first time I have thoroughly cleaned since we moved. In June. Perhaps I will even get around to unpacking the last of the boxes. Though, come to think of it, those boxes are all of books, and we still don’t have any place to put them.
Well, perhaps I will buy some extra bookshelves this weekend.
Or maybe I won’t, and will instead spend the weekend walking around my neighborhood looking at the pretty, pretty leaves.

These are all possibilities I may toy with, because with the exception of a flurry of end-of-semester paperwork due this weekend, SCHOOL IS OVER until November, and the world is my mollusk.

The problem with doing so many things at once is that you end up doing all of them poorly. School, work, this website, my personal hygiene—all have suffered over the past semester. But none of that matters now, because I have a whole month to catch up on all that I have neglected.
Even work has slowed down a bit, and I took advantage of this by beginning to clean off my desk. I eventually had to stop due to exhaustion and also lunchtime, but I did manage to uncover my giant desk calendar (which, no lie, said “APRIL”), so surely the actual desk surface cannot be far behind.

I saw two wild turkeys wandering around on a neighbor’s lawn this morning. A turkey or two seems to show up every year around this time, and they confound me. First of all, don’t they realize that fall is a dangerous time for turkeys? And secondly, where do they come from? I do not live in a rural area. The skyline I was in the middle of for my recent vacation can be seen from my neighborhood. It is peaceful and residential where I live, to be sure, but there are no wooded areas or secluded fields of the sort I imagine wild turkeys to frequent. And yet there they are, gobbling along. Last year I saw a turkey walking down the middle of the street, all succulent like, in November. Very mysterious.
I am choosing to view the turkeys as a symbol: the seasons are changing, and while that does mean I will be subject to my seasonal passing-of-time (turn, turn, turn) melancholia, it also means potential for a fresh start and the occurrence of unexpected things. If turkeys can waltz through urban neighborhoods, surely I can get pregnant, or keep my kitchen clean, or finish an essay.
Next week I am going to start writing again—real, live writing, with narrative arcs and everything. And my next semester is all writing credits, no more biology or evolutionary theory. I am back to autobiography disguised as essayistic insight, and overuse of the em-dash!
Huh. When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound nearly as appealing.

Still, I am full of plans and ideas, and am in the throes of feverish list-making. I am so determined to make this month count, and not fritter it away as I am wont to do. I want to get enough done that when I start school again in November I will not be frazzled and desperate-feeling. Last semester I moved in the first weeks of class, and I never quite recovered my equilibrium (or, you know, finished unpacking).
It is difficult, because after the brouhaha of the past few months I am So. Very. Tired, and it is tempting to curl up with some pasta and my Tivo-esque and doze happily until the start of the next semester.

But for now, I am optimistic and content. Also hungry, but that is beside the point.
Things would be even better if Hacky McHacksalot, the editor adjacent to me at work (and yes, that is her real name, why do you ask?) would stop launching phlegm loudly at her computer screen every fifteen goddamn seconds. This has been going on for weeks and weeks. Shouldn’t she be dead by now? When the Actually calls me at work he thinks it’s HILARIOUS that he can hear her Hack! Blech! Achgrhugh! noises through the phone, but believe me, it is significantly less amusing when you can’t have one minute of peace uninterrupted by the sounds of mucous tearing it’s way out of the throat of a disagreeable coworker, punctuated by the wet honk of vigorous nose-blowing. And she smokes, which I normally couldn’t care less about, but as it is obviously prolonging her cough I grimace each time I see her heading for the smoking area. I have taken to clenching my hands around my stapler and pretending it is her fat, snot-filled neck.
My god, there she goes again. As if she knows what I am writing and is coughing for emphasis!

So, when we last saw our heroine, she was whining unbecomingly about not being pregnant. Nothing, she thought, typing her insipid blog entry, has the power to ruin a girl’s day like a negative pregnancy test.
How wrong she was (the narrator muses darkly).

I have a stash of tests, of various brands, in my bottom desk drawer. Once I start taking them, I tend to keep on doing so until my period arrives. Usually this only involves testing once, as everyone knows the most reliable method of inducing menstruation is not a course of Provera, but rather peeing on a ten-dollar stick.

At eleven days past “ovulation” my tests were so negative as to emit a black hole-like sucking sound from where the second line would have been.
The next day I took two tests, which were both, again, resoundingly negative. Cue flouncing, whining, etc.
I am no fool, after all. Stories about persons who tested negative until a child was actually expelled from their vagina notwithstanding, a pregnancy that hasn’t implanted by 12 dpo is statistically behind the eightball.

Two hours later, I looked down into the trash to see a positive pregnancy test beaming up at me.

One of the tests had remained negative, but the other, the ept brand, had developed an unequivocal blue plus sign. This was no evaporation line. This line was the color of the cruel Bluejays that swoop past our windows to bother the cats. No jeweler’s eyepiece and headlamp were needed to see it; the line was visible at arm’s length. Faint, yes. But there.

The next morning, I eagerly peed on another assortment, including an ept.
All. Negative.

And they stayed that way. No matter how many times I took them out of the trash and stared at them, no matter how I pleaded and offered backrubs, chocolate, a room of their own, they remained resolute.
“Infertile twit,” they said, in a chorus of tiny voices, “Barren Fool.”

I know that home pregnancy test results are invalid when read after ten minutes. I also know that the other explanation for a positive followed by a negative is the unpleasantly named “chemical pregnancy,” which makes it sound as if I was involved in an accident with a tanker of radioactive goo, and instead of superpowers I received a tiny, glowing embryo in my midsection.

I tried not to think about it, which was easier than it sounds, because I had twenty pages to write on postpartum depression, twenty pages that were due on Sunday.
And boy, did that cheer me up! There’s nothing like reading about misery and infanticide to keep a girl chipper.
(That was a little joke, there.)

I didn’t leave my desk all weekend, and though my weekend may have been easier if I had started my paper, say, a month ago, it certainly wouldn’t have been as exciting.
Besides, procrastination has a long and noble history. Lincoln was a notorious procrastinator–as you probably remember from history class, the Gettysburg Address was improvised. Abe had meant to write it weeks earlier, but instead he sat around whittling and throwing spitballs at Mary Todd, and the next thing he knew there he was, everybody staring at him and nothing to say.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he began, stalling for time—“four score and seven” takes much longer to say than “eighty-seven,” you see—and happily, the rest came easily. Though of course in the end, procrastination is what killed him. The fateful night he attended the theater, Mr. Lincoln was supposed to be working on a speech he was scheduled to give at a veteran’s hospital the next day.

But that’s all beside the point. The point is, I finished my paper last night, and then I may or may not have Googled “ept false positive” and “ept positive after time limit” and “ept criminal negligence false hope.” And I may or may not have drafted a slightly insane letter to the Better Business Bureau. And finally, I may or may not have begun muttering “‘Error-Proof Test,’ HA!” until the Actually came over and wrapped his arms around me, at which point I may or may not have started to cry.

What a refreshing break from the workaday world that was.

Update: …And I just got my period.
Am I on Candid Camera or something?

Do you know what two things do not go well together? Final papers and newly installed Dish TV with Tivo-esque. I have vast amounts of schoolwork to complete, but on Saturday two nice gentlemen with a ladder and several hundred feet of cable facilitated our transition from the one-channel-or-two-if-the-sky-is-cloudless HELL we have been living in since our move to a dizzying new world where not only may we watch three or four distinct episodes of Law & Order per day, we may also pause, rewind, and record live television. And, no, it is not a coincidence that I had this installed just in time for premiere week. And yes I do realize that the fact that I have marked my fall viewing schedule on my calendar is singularly disturbing, but then I was not allowed to watch much besides NOVA as a child, so perhaps I am merely making up for lost time.
The problem, you see, is that I am supposed to be spending my evenings hunched joylessly over my studies, writing about estrogen rhythmicity and the evolutionary roots of postpartum endocrinology. But let me tell you, in a contest between endocrinology journals and America’s Next Top Model, Tyra wins every time.

Besides, I need cheering—for forty-five minutes this morning I managed to convince myself that my still uncharacteristically high temperatures mean I ovulated ten-ish days ago, rather than that I am coming down with something (the Actually is feverish too, and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t ovulated in a while). As a corollary, I decided that my constant cramping and tiredness are indicative of pregnancy, despite the fact that I am ALWAYS CRAMPY AND TIRED.
And then I looked back on the two years since I was last pregnant, and remembered the umpteen other times I have been sure I was gestating a baby, despite the fact that I was anovulatory, or on birth control that month (oh, I wish I were kidding), or practically celibate. And then I regained my grasp of logic.
I am not sure why I do this, but there is something about the week before my period is due that turns gas pains into implantation cramps and indigestion into incipient morning sickness. I suspect the past week of cramps is less “baby” and more “cyst”–which means I will be going back on the pill next month to settle things down until possible Letrozole this winter.

I have good news for those who wish I would update more often (for those who wish I would update less often…well, you’re on your own): On October 3rd my semester ends, meaning I will no longer be juggling a more-than-full-time job and an eighteen-credit course load (doesn’t that sound insane when I actually write it down? What was I thinking?), which means I will have more time to devote to this woefully neglected website of mine. My next semester starts a month later, and I do have a few writing projects due in the interim, but it should be much calmer around here. Or rather, calmer in my non-computer life, enabling my entry-writing and blog-commenting to whip themselves into a whirl of activity.
Of course, at last count I have something like 870 email messages I would like to respond to, but how long can that possibly take? (Don’t answer that).

Tomorrow, at work, I have to give a presentation to twenty strangers. I am not looking forward to this, possibly because the only preparation I have done is to scrawl a few key points onto a post-it note. It is probably safe to assume I will not be hired to give any “business presentation skills” seminars in the near future.

This may be the most resoundingly boring post I have ever written, but I am too tired to think of anything else. So allow me to present–in lieu of a well-formed, morally uplifting entry–a foodstuff recommendation:

I tend to enjoy anything “salt and pepper” flavored–the pinnacle being the salt and pepper shrimp I had at Ken Lo’s Memories of China, in London. I am also fond of rice crackers, so as you can see, for me Tiger Tiger Rice Crackers, Salt & Pepper Flavor are a perfect storm of snack food goodness. I can not explain to you the love I have for these diminutive disks of salty, peppery taste.
They are available at SuperTarget, in the “Asian” aisle (Well, not if you go to the SuperTarget nearest me, because I bought the last two tins, but any other SuperTarget should have them).

That’s all I have. Is it time for bed yet?

Five years ago I had just moved back to Minnesota from New York. I was taking what was intended as a semester-long sabbatical from Sarah Mawr. It would turn out to be a five-year academic hiatus, during which I would start a magazine, be hospitalized for mental illness, quit smoking, have an ill-advised fling, publish an essay, attend a hobo convention, make and lose friends, miscarry two pregnancies, freelance as an event planner, write instructional copy about pacemakers, adopt five cats and witness the deaths of two, survive a bout of unrequited love, live in five apartments, and meet the man I intend to marry.

Most details of my life have changed in the past five years. But not everything.

In a bizarre, see-how-we’ve-come-full-circle coincidence, five years ago I had an internship at the publishing company where I now work full time. I spent about fifteen minutes of each day writing marketing copy and the rest of my eight hours on the phone to my friends at Sarah Mawr. I had not a single friend in Minnesota, despite having grown up ten miles from my new St. Paul apartment. In an attempt to meet people and keep myself writing I enrolled in a nonfiction workshop held at the University. The first class was scheduled for Tuesday, September 11th.

But of course, I spent most of that Tuesday trying vainly to reach my friends in New York through glutted cell phone signals, crying, and feeling impotent. I imagine my ensuing week was the near equivalent of most outside the immediately affected zones: There was a lot of CNN. There was a sudden tendency to tear up at the National Anthem, and an increased tolerance for flag-bearing garments worn by others. There was much speculation about what I could do to help—give blood? Learn Arabic and join the CIA?

Watching the familiar scene of plane into building night after night, I kept thinking there must be some use for my meager talents. There must be something writers could do. Eventually, I hit upon an idea:
“Writers could go places,” I said aloud to my brother as the idea took shape, “New York, or Afghanistan, or wherever. We could go there and write about it, so that other people know what’s going on.” I was glowing in the reflected light of my own brilliance.
“You could…report,” my brother said.
“Yes!” I exclaimed, “Exactly.”
“Congratulations,” he said, “You just invented journalism.”

The two things I felt most clearly after the September 11th attacks were the aforementioned sense of impotence, and a fury at what I saw as a cheapening of the tragedy by the news media. I am not sure that this was entirely justified—after all, they had to cover the story. But I wanted silence. I wanted people to stop blunting the horror of the day with their painfully inadequate words.

My nonfiction workshop would meet the following week. My professor sent an email requesting that we write something for the class. We could address the events of the 11th, but were not required to do so.
When the time came to read our pieces aloud, one by one my classmates read essays about what they had been doing when the first tower fell, about our changed world, about explaining terrorism to their children. I found I was the only member of the workshop who had chosen not to write about the attacks. I felt embarrassed, certain my classmates were wondering whether I burned flags in my spare time.

I would like to think that my reasons for avoiding the subject were noble, but they were not. I didn’t write about 9/11 because I knew I couldn’t make it funny, and because I had nothing new to say. I wrote about something else because I have a difficult time writing about difficult things. Because I find emotions a tad embarrassing, and have a pathological fear of being cheesy. Because I am uncomfortable with the vulnerability that comes with saying something plainly, with my tongue nowhere near my cheek.

And this is the thing that hasn’t changed much in five years. I very nearly posted nothing at all today, because it felt disrespectful to write about my weekend of sex and crabcakes on a day when, five years ago, people’s fathers, mothers, and children died. More accurately, I very nearly posted nothing at all because there was no way I was going to open myself up to the minefield of cliché that a serious post about September 11th might be.
I wish I were the kind of writer who could convey unflinchingly her sorrow and fear about our national tragedy. But all I can do is reiterate what others have said—how sad it was and is. How terribly sad.