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.

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.

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.

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.

And speaking of perfection....

I've decided to fail. Now this isn't exactly brought on the really funny website called www.Failblog.org, but I could pretend that is where I got my inspiration. Still, in my last post I wrote about perfection, and I realized that I've been working on everyday kind of failing recently.

Take today, I failed to stop playing Bejeweled after 10 min. And yesterday, I failed to make a roast chicken for dinner when a friend came over and we just had pizza and some tomato cucumber salad to eat instead.

Often these failures just happen and, after the fact, I try not to give myself a hard time about them. Certain cases are harder than others. But at other times (and this is what I'm working on increasing), I decide ahead of time to fail. Like with the pizza vs. chicken. Or with not having a spotless apartment for visitors to come to. Or, on a larger scale, I decided recently to fail at writing an article from my thesis.

Now that one is a big fail for me. But it has been hanging over my head, as something I've wanted to do for a long time, and it was just making me feel bad. No matter what otherwise productive good day I'd had, I still hadn't started on an article for a peer reviewed journal.

But who am I kidding? I did the research in a department which wasn't mainly focussed on either that topic or the methodology, it was not really in any of my committee members' specialty, I'm not in a research group now and really have no mentoring for that kind of project, and I don't plan to go into academia anytime soon. So it really isn't that big of a fail considering the circumstances, and my days are really much more pleasant when I decide that it is off the list. (That is another nasty feature of this...I sometimes have to decide to fail on the same item more than once).

Anyway, I'm going to go walk the dog now, and then I'm thinking I might win (instead of failing) at doing some online research, sending out some emails and working on a short little article based on my research which is due in mid-November. I told you I was still working on the failing.

Oh, and tonight I'm making that chicken.

Perfect babies and flawless performances

Remember the movie "Shine" from a few years ago? About the piano playing prodigy who almost got lost to the Australian psychiatric care system? Geoffrey Rush played him as an adult in the movie, but the person on whom it was based is named David Helfgott. Well Helfgott gave a concert
in Zurich the other night and we went to go hear it. And see it.

I know that his playing has not received top critical acclaim, but for my ear I thought it was quite good. I don't know the pieces well enough to tell otherwise. But it was much more of a reflective event for me than musical. He is probably bout 60 years old, he wears a shiny red tunic on stage, and sort of shuffles out to the piano in short steps. But as he goes, he looks at every orchestra member he passes, giving everyone a handshake or two thumbs up, stopping many times before making it even close to the piano. He looks at the audience (who is clapping at this point), giving thumbs up and smiles to half a dozen directions, back to the orchestra and hand shaking, before the conductor gently helps him to the piano bench.

And when he plays, he is hunched quite low over the piano. His lips move, and once in a while you hear a sound coming from him while his fingers pour over the keys. He squints, and moves
his head. He smiles a thumbs up to himself when he's gotten through some piece of the piano part. While he waits through parts with no piano piece, he seems to speak to himself, almost puts fingers to the keys and then pulls back, looks around to watch other orchestra members playing their parts.

You almost start to doubt that when he starts playing again it will be coherent, and then....it is. And smooth, and beautiful.

What is still in my mind about the performance is how different that behavior is from what is "expected." And yet there is no reason it was wrong. But it shocked both the audience and orchestra a bit. He kept violating the "i don't see you here" rule, where the orchestra members don't really acknowledge each other in the way they might on their way home on the tram, and there is almost a glass wall between the musicians and audience where interaction doesn't pass until the applause. He looked at people, smiled, gave his "thumbs up" commentary straight into the gaze of specific people. And this man who lives with mental illness played beautifully.

Right in front of people. In public, out in the open. You don't see that so often. Or at least that is how it felt to me and I found it mesmerizing. And perfectly acceptable.

Whether it was a flawless performance, I don't know. Like I said, I don't have the ear to discern that. But he gave an extremely human performance. I loved it.

Especially since it overlapped with a book I've been reading on the birthing culture in America (and Western Europe) as a rite of passage. Great book by an anthropologist about the loss of control women have gone through in terms of giving birth, and how much of it is managed by doctors in hospitals. How many procedures can interfere with natural birth but are used to make birth seem (this is the key to ritual) controllable and safe, thanks to modern technology. Practices which don't necessarily help the health of the mother or the baby. But that this ideal of a doctor delivering a perfect baby to society (the mother not really being in control, but more of just a carrier) has shifted the focus of birth. It is a great book, especially for a pregnant sociology geek like me.

And somehow, in a stroke of luck, I find myself in a country where most of my options for giving birth are actually more empowering of me than they might have been in the US. And with that same stroke of luck, I found myself in a music hall, entranced by the behavior of a decidedly unperfect baby, all grown up, playing piano. It was wonderful.

Medicine vs. midwives

Switzerland's public hospitals have as many options for homeopathic remedies and natural birth as some US cities might have through birthing clinics. They tend to adhere strictly to UNICEF breastfeeding guidelines (meaning the baby goes straight to the mom to help establish feeding, no being cleaned or weighed first), where some of the private, swanky hospitals do not necessarily. There are midwives in charge of most of the birth process and doctors get to do something mostly when there are complications. You stay in hospital for a 3-5 days after a natural birth, get help with learning to take care of the baby, and then there are 5-7 more law-mandated days of a midwife coming to visit your home to keep helping and answering questions.

My point is, there is a lot of support for doing things with less medication, less surgical interventions, and less help from Nestle.

There is still, however, this divide between MDs and midwives. Some tension about who is in charge, who to believe, etc. It sort of runs along the "medical research says" vs. "hundreds of years of experience with women and with our own childbirth" divide. Which means there are often two differing viewpoints on what you should do about some problem or other.

Dang. Still no obvious right answer. :)

I like the midwife approach on may things, though. And I'm glad to get to take advantage of a system like this, where high-tech hospital doesn't have to mean grey walls and metal instruments. Where I can have aromatherapy and a tub in the birth room.

As a scientist, though, it amuses me how strongly I react to some of the literature from the midwife side. About the efficacy ("a strong effect has been shown") of Red Jasper Stones for contraction pain, or about the "energy imbalance" that the masseuse felt between my left and right sides. I bristle a little at these phrases at first. Really? What part of my energy? How do you define energy? And who has long known about the Jasper stone? How does that work exactly?
My inner skeptic comes out.

But then again, the wording is actually very similar to how medicine says things when referring to research. They use similar language to persuade you to listen to them. And on some issues, like breastfeeding vs. formula, medicine got it wrong, too in the past. And medicine hasn't done too much to explain certain things to us very well when we were having problems getting pregnant. So neither side gets my trust automatically.

And I realized that when it comes to my masseuse (probably not the Jasper stone, though!), I trust her, I like her sense of touch and body work, so maybe she does feel something that is different in my left and right sides that corresponds to the pain in my left and not right. And even if I wouldn't choose to call it energy, that doesn't mean she won't do well adjusting things. I trust her physical sense and don't need to agree with her vocabulary. That used to happen in dancing, too. I didn't necessarily see dance in the same way as a partner, but that didn't mean we didn't really connect on the dance floor.

So you can keep your baby formula (as a given better alternative) and your Red Jasper Stone, and I'll see what I can do about integrating some doctors and some midwives into this whole birthing experience.