Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The size of the container

I thought that, as usual, it was about 6am. I've been getting up then, getting my multivitamin
and getting back to sleep. But no, 3:30am and there is a bird singing somewhere in the dense fog outside. Not that that woke me up, but i was really hot so I opened a window.

And now I'm up, and waiting for the juice and half a pear to digest enough that I can lay back down without the heartburn. In the meantime, I've been to a number of websites, and found this great visual blog on NYTimes.com:

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/bathroom-art/

Anyway, back to that heartburn thing. I need to eat more because I'm not gaining as much weight as I should be right now. However, given that my stomach is currently about the size of a mandarin orange, it can be hard to fit much more than a mandarin orange in there at any given time. So I have to pace my eating. But this then means I need to pace my laying down, too. And since I can no longer lay on my back (too much baby weight makes breathing hard), and stomach lying has long ago exited my repertoire, and side lying is not so effective at making my back feel better or keeping me propped up, I have entered a strange minimization problem. Eating spaced out, but napping spaced out more. (And thinking about the correct usage of lay and lie is definitely not on the list once those issues come up.)

Which brings me to all the advice out there about enjoying things now that will be impossible when the baby is here. Like quiet dinners out with M, or sleeping a lot, or the feel of the baby moving. I understand these will change, at least intellectually I do. But at the same time, I can't have more than a mandarin orange at one time, nor is sitting for a long time all that comfortable, so I'm not sure which quiet restaurant I'm supposed to choose.

Taking "a last trip together" has also fallen off the list. Sure, I get that this will change once the baby is here, but too late. I sleep in the guest room right now because the mattress topper supports my weight better. I need to nap in the middle of the day. I don't feel very comfortable in upright train seating. Walking gets my back pain going. I'm not sure there is a destination left that is really that appropriate for me, other than the guestroom.

And as for the baby kicking, or the being pregnant feeling, I get kicked a lot. In all sorts of directions that don't make for fond memories - lungs, ribs, cervix. And I can't remember what it was like not to have this belly. So I know it will probably be the same when the baby is out and I can't remember what it was like to have this belly.

My point is, even though people can say that greater suffering is coming, with lack of sleep and exhaustion and never being alone again, they also say I can't imagine what those things will be like. So how am I supposed to enjoy this time in some way that makes up for the coming time. I have nothing to compare it to. I can't sit here and flip back and forth between pregnancy back pain vs. sleep deprivation. I can only know the discomforts of now.

There was a book I first read in highschool, about life in a concentration camp (don't worry, I'm not about to compare any of this to that....not really), written by Victor Frankl. I think it was called Man's Search for Meaning. And I think he was the one who talked about suffering as gas-like. In that it fill whatever container it has. That you can't say someone who suffered one thing suffered more than someone who suffered another thing, because suffering expands to fill us up. So I have a minor ache or pain, and you have something which involved going to the hospital. Since I can't experience your pain, my pain can fill up my container (me, my experience of pain) as fully as your fills up your container. I have nothing to compare to.

I don't think I explained that very well, but the point is this. I can't experience any postnatal things right now. I can't even imagine them. I still do appreciate people giving me a heads up on some last things to relish. But it isn't worth me trying to relish them as if I also knew what postnatal land was going to feel like.

So I'll have to settle for being excited about sleeping on my back, and being able to drink a whole glass of water just before I do it. Or about being able to walk up our hill without back pain later. Right now, my container is shaped differently than it will be in a few weeks, so for now the best I can do is imagining my current aches and pains and minor complaints being gone. Instead of feeling like I should be enjoying this time more.

I'll do my best, now and later, to enjoy life as much as I can, and put up with the container-full of whatever it brings.

Friday, November 6, 2009

My dog thinks like a 2-year-old human.


I was reading this article on NYTimes website about yet another study that has "surprised" people by implying that animals, in this case dogs, are smarter than we thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/weekinreview/01kershaw.html?_r=1&em

I'm starting to get a bit tired of the way these articles go. Always this surprise, or stated surprise, that humans aren't so unique, that we aren't somehow different than "all the animals." Duh. We are animals. And invariably, the dog or crow or parrot or elephant being written about gets compared to humans as if we represent some gold standard. They have emotions "like us," language skills "like us," or problem solving skills "like us." In this one, they study how many vocabulary words a dog can learn and talk about how dogs can be as smart as 2 year olds.

Two year olds don't exactly get wide recognition for being extremely smart. Neither do they sniff out cancer and impending epileptic fits (another thing the article talks about).

Why can't dogs, or dolphins, or primates, or any of them get respected on their own terms. In terms of the things they have evolved to do, and humans just get added to the animal list as yet another example?

It reminds me a bit of Aristotle's going on and on about how the female is inferior to the male, and her body represents some sort of "failed" male, where even conception was considered successful if it produced a male and flawed if the child was female. And if you start there, well you sure have a lot of studies you can do which will continue to surprise you, about how women are almost as "rational" as a 15 year old male, or almost as strong as a 12 year old male, etc.

The point is, which I've made a few times now, that even medicine can be biased in terms of what is normal, and in the case of women and giving birth, having that "males are the norm" view hasn't helped much. It may sound like a silly complaint from me, but extend it to something like breast development and take male anatomy as the norm (ever wonder why males even have nipples?) and complete the phrase "women's breasts are like _______ male breasts." What is even the point? Obviously silly.

So back to dogs, or rats, or whatever other animal is in the news as being "more human than we thought." Maybe it would be nice to look for some other way of comparing animals (including humans), just to give a slightly different viewpoint. Otherwise, it seems like animals are only as worthy of respect if they can be shown to be kind of human, and honestly, given all the other news headlines, I'm not seeing the undisputed upside of human behavior or intelligence or any of it.

What I love most about the pupper, in terms of her skills, is that she is always asking for what she wants. In this way, I often feel much less "honest about wants" than a 5 year old dog. I worry, I weigh the consequences (real, but more often imagined) of what I am about to say. I spend so much time not just saying what I want, that the pupper is my role model on this. She asks, takes it in some sort of stride (like not pouting or lashing out) if she is denied what she asked for, and then 2 minutes later, asks again.

Her napping skills are pretty fierce, too. Someday, I want to learn to nap like a 5 year old dog as well.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Bright "fall" color in Zurich






We took a long walk last weekend, on Saturday, because M had to work on Sunday. This was one of those walks that has no other purpose than taking a walk and seeing a new part of the city.

One of the buses I regularly take passes by the river where a lot of brightly colored trees stand. So I thought we'd ride that bus for a bit, get off and walk to find those trees. It wasn't the sunniest of days, but we did see a lot of color. Even if not all of it was from those trees.


There were trees.





But we also stumbled on a great stretch of walls near the river, covered in really colorful grafitti. The kind that I'd love to have someone do on a vinyl shower curtain for our bathroom (ok, not now that we have the colorful rug perhaps, but when there was no rug it would have been great to have that much color!).
You can see M and the pupper looking in the other direction...apparently dogs don't really get grafitti. At least not the visual kind. She leaves her own "tags" in many parts of the city, just with a different kind of "spraying" mechanism.




And then at some point, we started seeing people actually doing the grafitti. Of course, my first instinct was to think "you can't do that!" But I had just beeing enjoying what was up there already, and it seems like these walls are constantly being changed. Maybe every weekend, maybe more often?

There seem to be some rules, as individuals have some set amount of space to start spraying over the previous artwork. They work slowly, stepping back to look at their work. And the stuff they come up with is beautiful. I thought it was. Especially on a chilly, kind of grey day.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

All the bright red orange things in the apartment

Somehow, I guess in a quest to lighten up the white walls and grey tiles in the apartment, we started collecting bright orange/red accessories. Like this cutting board - there is also a red one.






















And these pillows which sometimes sit on the back porch and sometimes on the dark grey sofa.














Of course, we've had this rug for a while, and that may have started the whole process. Matching the crazy orange red in the rug.








And what better way to accentuate that rug than with....a bright orange-red table.













Because, honestly, the red/orange table lamp over on the side was feeling lonely. It needed the company.
















Which brings me to the bathroom, which, like the kitchen, started out all white and grey (and remember how I really liked that red water kettle in the bathroom?).





Well, now there is a lot of orange/red in the bathroom, right down to some hand towels and even a toothbrush I got at my last dentist visit.


Who says there is no recovering from having to return a really great orange-red water kettle. Didn't leave a mental scar at all, or any sort of purchasing behavior which might imply a desire to "regain" that color elsewhere in the house.

phew. That's good to know.

Happy Halloween.