Yesterday I was making Jello (the industrial kind–is there any other?) for Wizard  because he’s been in a Jello mood lately. I feel it necessary to add that I have to cook anything involving boiling water (e.g. pasta) because his coordination is so off that making him do it himself would result in a trip to the emergency room.  No, really.  This isn’t one of those “oh, honey, let me do it!” scenarios.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that he’s one of those genius-y people who can’t tie his own shoes.  Yeah.  So that problem extends to things like pouring hot water into a bowl, tying anything into a knot, and standing on one foot.  It’s weird.

I’d think this was just some huge ruse to get me to do shit around the house, except that I’ve heard a neurologist tell him that his scores on a series of hours-long tests were so abnormal that something should be wrong, except that it wasn’t, and it was probably just the same wiring that helps him compute things reallyreallyreally fast, so go along your merry way, and by the way I hope you don’t want a pilot’s license because there’s no way in hell anyone would sign off on one of those.

He was sad about the pilot’s license thing, surprisingly, not so much because he wants one as that he doesn’t like feeling “differently abled.”  And I’m, like, dude, I hate to break it to you, but you are the most differently-abled person I know, in all the senses of different one might imagine.

But anyway. Jello.

It’s pretty simple, that jello.  Powder in bowl, plus a cup of boiling water, followed by two minutes of stirring, followed by a cup of cold water and refrigeration.  If you came here looking for jello directions, there you go.  But it struck me last night that my mother always screwed up jello.  Either it got thick on top, or all the powder was clumped at the bottom, or something.  And as a kid, it annoyed the crap out me.  Who screws up jello?  Why does this taste so bad?  Why is it either watered down or gritty or both?

And then last night, I figured it out  While raising two kids, working full-time, keeping a house, and doing all the other crap you have to do to function as a human in the U.S., my mother didn’t have two spare minutes to stand there stirring the water into the powder. She just dumped it all together, shoved it in the fridge, and ran off to supervise sentence diagramming, or iron clothes, or grade math tests, or whatever.

It’s facebook, actually, that’s making me think more about time and how we use it, as people and as parents.  My facebook is divided rather unevenly into college/grad school friends (lots) and women I knew in high school who had two or three kids and are now trying to finish their college degrees (a few). At this time of year, you see a lot of status messages by grad students complaining about staying up all night, and not having a minute to do anything but write, and the rest of the hell that is a full schedule of course papers and teaching and grading at the end of the semester. I used to complain about those things too.  But now that I’m trying to write a dissertation and co-run a tutoring lab and take care of The Baby and sometimes even be a partner to a person who has yet to submit his dissertation revisions because he’s busy working full-time so the rest of us don’t starve AND because he takes the baby from me the minute he gets home so I have some time to work…(RUN ON!!!)…sometimes it’s all I can do not to post something snarky, like, hey y’all, why don’t you bring a thermos of coffee on over to my house and spend your overnight reading hours watching my baby, who tends to like chilling in his exersaucer at 3 in the AM?

That is, until I read the statuses of my old high school crew, whose lives involve getting three kids to three different places and doing  part-time work to supplement their husbands’ two or three jobs, all while busting ass to meet the demands of college coursework that will hopefully  score them a decent job in five years or so.

What am I trying to say here?  That it’s all relative, I guess?  That I thought it was tough being a student until I was a student-mother?  That any and all sets of circumstances are often difficult?  That I whine too much? That my friends whine too much? That my friends think I whine too much?  That my friends don’t want to whine to me because they feel guilty, even though I remain a good listener and am not nearly as judgmental in real life as I appear in this blog?

Maybe I’ll just say big ups to those of us trying to live in the mind and in the world at the same time, whatever that may mean. And good luck with finals.  And try to resist the urge to fail the kids whose full schedule of sleeping off their heavy drinking is the only thing preventing them from turning in their portfolios on time.

AKA, Somebody stop me before I unleash my pent-up fury on not just the MIL but my own parents as well.

All three of them are in the house.  In the livingroom. Right outside my door, the door behind which I’m supposed to finish at least another quarter of this fucking chapter before I send it off (days late) to my diss group.

I’d fare better if there were three elephants out there.  Or one ovulating monkey.  Or a clutch of finger-painting four-year-olds.  I could go on.  I’m not proud. Or tired.

Today’s barely suppressed scream is brought to you by: “Your mother came here to help with the baby, not clean your house.”

Um, yeah.  But see, I didn’t say clean the HOUSE.  I said it would be good if she could CLEAN THE BOTTLES.  Because I need to sit and work, and if I start in on household chores I’ll just keep going.  So yeah, it would be helpful if she washed the bottles while MIL plays with baby and Wizard goes to work and I go to write and my father, I don’t know, sits around watching Turner Classic Movies. It would be abundantly helpful.

But apparently it’s only okay–with my father–if my mother does something on her own; I’m not supposed to ask.  My mother, meanwhile, doesn’t care.  I could ask her to paint the ceiling and she’d do it.  She’s like that.  So I’m careful to not ask too much, because she’s naturally inclined to do too much.  I figure cleaning the bottles isn’t anywhere near too much. I see where my father’s (over)protective impulse comes from, but, really? Dude? How big of an asshole do you think I am?

A pretty big one, I guess, since what was once a diss blog is now a “Listen to me complain about my family, everyone!”

But it’s that or scream and throw shit, and that kind of stuff you can’t do around infants.  Dammit.

So I mentioned below that I plan to embark on Infinite Summer in a few days.  I’m also planning to take Wizard along for the ride.  We’ve never “co-read” anything, partly because I read for work and partly because our tastes diverge quite a bit (oh, and partly because we’re not really the co-reading type, by which I mean we don’t tend to bathe in the sicksweet vomit of our love).  He’s mainly a space opera sort, though the range of what he reads outside that genre is wide (Plath, Rimbaud [really?], Coupland, etc.).  I’m more narrow-minded because of the whole exams/proposal/dissertation hole I’ve been stuck in the past few years.  This project will actually be the first time I’ve read for “fun”–not for the diss, not for conference work–in a long time.

I’ve taught post-1945 lit, and I spend my days and nights with millennial lit, and yet I’ve read little DFW beyond a few short pieces that were thrust upon me by an enthused officemate awhile back.  I know what I’m in for–the footnotes, the loopdiloopy plots, the heft and weight of 1000 pages–and yet I don’t look at DFW with the same glare I usually direct toward popular young white male authors (though to be fair, I don’t glare at Franzen or Foer either, so maybe I’m getting soft).  The fondness I have for him, I think, stems from the fact that I don’t think he’s a trickster for trickster’s sake.  That is, I don’t think the footnotes, the plot jumps, the confusion, are inserted into the story because he desperately wanted to earn his pomo cred.  Rather, I sense that he felt those things were integral to the story itself (whatever that story is–I haven’t read any of the overviews or reader guides, and I haven’t brushed up on Hamlet, either).

That said, who knows if I’m going to get through it.  I have a lot of excuses:  the baby, the diss, the advisor I’m currently avoiding.  Oh, and there’s also the abhorrent lack of discipline that has characterized me and my work since, like, September.  Maybe if someone made me a set of bookmarks to guide me through the dissertation I’d have a chapter written by now.  Oh, and I don’t actually have a copy of the book yet because I haven’t made it to the bookstore (thanks, baby!).

So.  Here we go.  75 pages a week.  Back in the day, 75 pages a week would have meant I was rapidly failing out of school.  Back in the day, kids.  Now it’s a fair but possibly unreachable goal.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Now that I’ve moved from high-level “baby’s gonna die” worry back to the normal low-level “hope baby comes out okay” worry, I’ve got to get some work done.  Namely, I’ve got to teach a real class tomorrow instead of doing my usual tutoring sort of gig.

I’m used to teaching. That’s all cool.  Problem is I’m getting observed (by my diss director, who is also department head), and I haven’t started preparing until today because last week I thought I might not even be in work this week due to baby stuff.

So.  Anybody have any ideas on how to teach Pynchon’s “Entropy”?  Do tell.

They are not technically “co-,” since I “manage” them.  Yet without the power to fire those I hate, what good is this title, anyway?

This fulfills my blogging requirement for the day.

ETA:

1. I ended up yelling at the despicably happy young people and not feeling bad about it.  Not even embarrassed, which is my usual M.O.
2. At least three people asked, “Why are you being so mean?” today.  I don’t know whether to blame this on some sort of pregnancy hormonal thing or on the license that said “hormonal thing” has given me to be n-a-s-t-y.
3. I said I was done talking about the fetus and his troubles.  I lied.  Oh, and I’m calling him “him” but I don’t have any proof of that yet.

Being on the edge of maybe having a kid, and having, as I do, shit health insurance, it occurs to me that someday, maybe sooner than I think, I might have to get a “real” job.

And by “real,” I’m not at all saying that what I do right now isn’t work, or that it isn’t hard, or that the relative flexability of my schedule makes up for the fact that even when I’m home, I’m “at work.”  What I mean by real is a job that starts around 9 and ends around 5.

I’m outing my somewhat-privileged self when I say that I’ve never done that.  Ever.  In my life.  I’ve always worked an academic job of some sort, and my hours have always been…weird.  So, I might work three 16 hour days and then have a four-day weekend.  Or, like now, my departmental assistantship requires 15 on-campus hours a week.  The rest of the time is mine to manage, whether that means spending a day watching every Bravo show I DVRed or researching like mad.

I like this lifestyle.  It suits me.  I know nothing else.  My friends, on the other hand, have “adult” jobs.  They get on the bus at 7, spend the day doing jobs with titles that end in “analyst” or “manager,” and then come home to do…I don’t know, whatever the under-thirty set does when they don’t have “homework.”  I don’t know what they do, actually. I can’t imagine it.

How do you narrow the living portion of your life down to the few hours of the evening?

Hi.

So if what I wrote below is true, and it might be, I’m going to try to undo my bad bloggery by posting every day. We’ll refrain from contemplating my likelihood of success until after I’ve failed.  Here, then, in handy list form, is what I’ve been up to in October (and before that):

1. I finished the proposal.  People approved it.  I am now ABD by all standards, not just my own.  The whole process only took six months, which means that even though I am behind everyone else in my year, I took the “right” amount of time to get through this stage.  This marks the first thing I’ve done “right” in about two years (school things, not life things).  All of this has gotten done despite the fact that:
2. I’ve been going to the doctor.  A lot.  More than I’ve gone in the past so-many-years-of-my-life combined.  Why?
3. Because in August, I was diagnosed with a condition called pregnancy.  It is reportedly fatal to dissertations.  But I’m trying to pretend this is not true.  I’m trying to pretend, in fact, that you can go through an entire pregnancy and actually work harder than you’ve worked in the past two years (see #1).  So far so good, except for this one glitch, which is:
4. Abnormal fetal anatomy results at the 12-week ultrasound.
5. Fuck.
6. No, really, fuck.
7. How the fuck does this happen?  I’m under thirty, healthy, blah blah blah. Might one apply one’s skills of analysis to one’s ultrasound report?  Let’s see.  What does “possibly evolving” mean?  It means the fetus has been diagnosed with a conditionally conditional condition.
8. Fuck.  What now?
9. Wait and see.  Wait until week 18, and see if the conditionally conditional condition is an actually actual malady.  In preparation for week 18:
10. My parents are coming and staying with us.  My mother-in-law is flying in from Country of Origin to stay with us.  Everyone wants to be there “just in case.”

After about three weeks of waiting, we’ve got two more to go.  I used to like October.  But this one?  Not so great.  Last year?  Ditto.  I didn’t post about all of this in October because…posting makes it more real, and I’m not a fan of overshare, and there were no results so what’s to say, really?  But, really, there’s a lot to say.  Stay tuned for posts on: discussions you’d rather not have with your advisor, what happens when crying doesn’t make your obstetrician stop yelling at you, and more.

One note:  things might get dark around here.  Hell, might?  Probably going to.  So if you are pregnant, or want to be pregnant, or are afraid of the troubles of pregnancy, you might want to check out now.  Same goes if you aren’t prepared for frank discussion of a major life decision known to doctors as “a procedure.”  I’m just sayin’.  This was supposed to be a dissertation blog, and it still is.  It’s just that now, it’s also about this other thing I’m trying like hell to produce.

P.S.:  If you’re like me and are doing the post-a-day business, this might help:

In my “about me” section, I mention that I like to make “jacked-up stuffed animals in my spare time.” Today, instead of using my written-off day to catch up on emails, and work stuff, and dissertation stuff, I made a starfish. Like me, he wishes to maintain his anonymity, so you only get to see his back side:

He looks a little like he’s trying to escape from somewhere.  I’m sure that’s not some kind of fleecy manifestation of my feelings about work.  No.  Not at all.

You mean the whole point is they’re trying to get married? There’s not going to be any…action…or anything?

–my father, after watching the first hour of Pride and Prejudice

So I was supposed to be out of town this weekend, but instead I’m stuck at home with a cold. Despite my best efforts and liberal use of hand sanitizer, I wasn’t able to avoid catching some germs from the plague-invested students with whom I was forced into close contact. Oh, how I wish it were socially acceptable to wear a re-breather and rubber gloves to work. Yes, I’m a bit of a germophobe. Don’t go feigning surprise.

Since I’m stuck here, I might as well catch up on blogs and such. No sense getting ahead on work or anything like that.

On…everything.  I’m behind on my proposal, my article submissions, prepping for my job.  And I don’t think I’m procrastinating.  I think I’m overestimating my potential.  I haven’t been able to cross anything off my list (except going to the dentist, which, let’s face it, took about an hour and little effort from me) in a long time.

I am freaking out.

Which is not to say I don’t have enough time to watch the Olympics.