The Power of The Belly

Although I whine and moan and bitch a lot, there is a certain power that comes with the pregnant belly. I liken it to the power of a phaser to to stun (not kill). It's as though an invisible force emanates from the belly, cutting a swath through crowds and silencing the unworthy. It's really good for getting through bunches of people milling about - I just point the belly and a path is cleared as though by magic.

It's amazing, really. I can be waiting in line for the bus, and all I have to do is point the belly and blam - I am in the front of the line. Then I just have to point it again, and no matter how crowded it is, someone gives me a seat. Sometimes I will be sitting at the front of the bus, and someone will give me, young thing that I am, a dirty look, and all I have to do is casually pat the belly (much the way a police officer will oh so casually rest their hand on their gun) to shame them into going away.

I've noticed that this nochalant belly rubbing has a multitude of uses. It works really well on the men delivering my groceries as they swear their way up my apartments three flights of stairs. By the time they hit my door and the shadow of the belly falls across the floor, they are turned into the most solicitous delivery people ever. My groceries no longer get dropped in an unceremonious heap on the hallway floor and actually get carried all the way into my kitchen. It's even made my job more pleasant. Not that customers aren't still obsessed with asking me personal questions, but no one is mean to me anymore. It's fascinating how much nicer people are now that no one wants to be the evil person who yelled at the pregnant woman.

Of course, it may seem a little wrong to shamelessly bask in the glory of such a power, but I figure that soon enough I will be stuck with that annoying "breeder" label, and will have to fend off eye rolling and angry mutterings as I struggle with a stroller up the steps of the bus, or my poor child dares to make a sound in public. Pregnant women may be revered and get to cut in line at the grocery store, but mothers just get dirty looks and well meaning "advice" as to how they are doing it all wrong. So I think I can be forgiven a little, as I take full advantage of this newfound power, fleeting though it may be.

I Love Lists, I Really, Really Do...

Got this from Meagan.

College Board's 101 Greatest Works of Literature:

Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you want to read.
* indicates personal favorites.



Beowulf (a translation)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness *
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (in translation)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust *
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies*
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis*
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved*
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm*
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar*
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye *
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein*
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I'm Not So Sure About This Pregnancy Thing

It has occurred to me that this whole pregnancy thing is completely illogical.

Seriously.

Never mind the absolute stupidity of how they come out - they barely fit in the first place. There simply isn't enough room in here. My stomach, my bladder, my lungs and various other organs have all been pushed aside to make room for little baby head and hands and feet. My yoga teacher has had to teach us techniques to help us breath around the baby pressing into our lungs. When else would you have to learn how to breath?! Breathing is supposed to just happen, and the only time we humans have to relearn how to do it is when we are doing incredibly unnatural things like floating deep in space or leagues under the sea.

Then there is my poor stomach, and the indignities inflicted on it. Stretch marks, itchy skin, amazing reversible belly buttons and stomach muscles that might never meet again are just the start. What no one ever mentions is how this giantly protruding stomach is an accident waiting to happen. This month alone, I have acquired a scar from where I scraped my belly on the edge of the bathroom counter, a gash from the tape dispenser at work, and am constantly knocking it into walls, chairs, tables, and people.

Now, my high school biology classes were long ago, but it just doesn't seem like nature planned the allocation of this particular space very well. Pre-baby, there seemed to be just enough room to fit everything - all my organs snuggled in together without a whole lot of wiggle room. My skin fit quite nicely over the whole deal, and everything seemed happy. Now my organs are all squished up and my skin is stretched so tightly I keep having nightmares that you can see the baby through my translucent belly. You would think they could have planned this whole baby making thing a little better and just started out with enough room to begin with. Maybe then I would stop getting kicked in the pancreas. You know, I'm not entirely sure what the pancreas does, but I am pretty sure it's important, and shouldn't be kicked.

The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that marsupials have it all figured out. This is what we need - a conveniently located pouch, not only allowing enough room for the baby to lounge comfortably without using any important organs as a pillow, but also allowing for a much more civilized delivery. Post baby, we would be lift with a nifty pocket for spare keys and loose change. We would never have to match a purse to our shoes again!

Random Notes From The Crazy House

- Nesting has officially begun. Last weekend all the dressers in the apartment switched bedrooms and were rearranged. I started putting wedding photos in actual photo albums. (Wedding was four years ago.) Last six years worth of photos are arranged and sorted and ready to leave their shoe box.

- As a side note, why are replacement sheets for photo albums five for four dollars, but a photo album of fifty sheets is 7.99?

- Putting the hamster cage in front of a mirror is apparently the same as having two hamsters. Either that, or my hamster is very, very vain and has fallen in love with his own reflection.

- I am so pathetic that a free jumbo container of laundry detergent can make me smile all weekend.

- Although I only managed to stomach twenty minutes, "The Swan" has just won the "most appalling show ever" category.

- Has anyone else seen these new plastic flip flops with the tiny high heels? What exactly is the point?! Seems about as attractive as those platform running shoes someone tried to convince the world was a brilliant idea several years ago.

- Apparently some of my friends were laying bets on when I would graduate to the "small tent" style of maternity fashion. So glad I could make it past 30 weeks, and that my fashion hell amuses someone. I live to entertain. (Insert eye rolling here: ______ )

- Speaking of fashion, I really didn't anticipate it being this freakin' hot this freakin' early, and I am beginning to worry that I won't have anything to wear for the next eight weeks, but I don't want to buy yet more maternity clothes. This could be interesting.

- The belly that ate Manhattan and a few other boroughs (31 weeks):