Nov
15
Reason #290583 I love Warren Ellis:
“Hi. I’m your host, I’m out of my brain with exhaustion, and I’m going to be seriously polluting your inbox for the next few days. Think of this email as a vast ethereal Mind Penis, spasming like a dying pig and hawking up great steaming discoloured bucketloads of Brain Semen into the tender womblike cavity behind your eyes. And when it gets too much, it will leak out of your tear ducts, and your friends will say, how is it that you are crying Warren’s Brain Semen?”—from his November 8 Bad Signal email newsletter, titled “Seriously”.
Is it wrong that I consider both Anne Tyler and Warren Ellis to be my personal writing heroes? I wonder what would happen if you got them in the same room. Other than the unholy rift in the space-time continuum, of course.
I have no good segue from that little intro, so let’s just casually move on to the subject of zombies, and my fierce, undying (HAR!) love for them. Zombies have been (feasting) on my mind lately, starting last Saturday night when in JB’s absence I happily settled in for an evening of 28 Weeks Later. Just me and a dark room and my giant belly and about an hour of wide-eyed pre-bedtime lock-checking.
That is one satisfying horror movie, I must say. I liked it when we saw it in the theater, but I think I may have liked it even more on a second viewing. I highly recommend it for the first teeth-grinding twenty minutes alone.
While 28 Weeks Later is not technically a zombie movie (Nerdy Zombie Clarification: they’re afflicted by the rage virus, they’re not dead), it kick-started my zombie-lovin’ heart, and I immediately started reading the first few collections of The Walking Dead, which is a comic a few of you have suggested. And now I am going to go broke collecting the whole damn series, because what happens next? I MUST KNOW.
I also read The Road, which kept me up for two nights biting my fingernails and blinking back tears and generally becoming way too involved in the story’s main characters. This is not a zombie book, exactly, but it involves a nightmarish post-apocalyptic world where some of the few remaining humans have become monsters, and there’s this man and his young son traveling the dying land, and oh my god it is so good. There is horror, and faith, and inhumanity, and love, and despair, and hope, and—listen, you should read it. Bring tissues.
Lastly, there is Fido, which is a sort of zombie comedy set in the 50’s. With Carrie Ann Moss. It is really, really weird, and sort of surprisingly non-sucky. I think I enjoyed this more for the nearly fetishistic attention to detail they put into the set designs than anything else.
Oh and ALSO, here are some cool zombie-related things some of you have alerted me to:
• Grody knitted brain purse!
• Zombie plate and mug set!
• Intramural zombie hunter shirt!
• Human meat cut diagram shirt!
• Zombie escape plan journal!
Okay, I think that concludes my periodic declaration of zombie-love. Until next time, remember: always aim for the head.
Nov
13
Would you like to hear about how large I feel? Because I feel large. I feel like the song Shelly Duvall sings in Popeye, except instead of it being he who is large it is ME. Large.
I am one week away from officially being in the third trimester, and like clockwork my body has started complaining in a number of ways. The heartburn I thought I might have been spared from during this pregnancy showed up this weekend, all “Hi! What’s up? Say, you don’t mind if I just sort of hang around creating a miserable seared-flesh sensation in your upper chest, do you? Great, how does 2 AM sound?”
My lungs feel like wadded-up deflated balloons, crushed beneath the weight of what surely must be a 20-pound fetus. I find that mild activities, such as breathing, cause me to lose my breath. Combined with the ongoing sinus congestion, my inhalations have started stripping nearby pine trees of their needles as I lumber past.
Sleeping is a drag. I gruntingly arrange myself into the most comfortable position possible, with my pillow clamped between my legs like it’s George Clooney and I’m Jennifer Lopez and we’re going to re-enact that hot-ass bathtub scene in Out of Sight, and as soon as I start to drift away I realize that my burning desire for a career bank robber with a heart of gold has been trumped by an even more burning desire to empty my bladder.
I have been dreaming about boring a hole into my mattress so that I can sleep on my stomach again. I miss sleeping on my stomach more than I miss my size 6 pants, and that is SAYING SOMETHING.
Smalltopus seems to be in a much lower, weirder position than Riley was, at least as far as I can remember. With Riley I remember often feeling a foot/hand/tentacle pressing against my upper belly, with Smalltopus I am getting kicked in areas that I didn’t know it was anatomically possible to be kicked in by a person living inside your body. I keep feeling an appendage poking out from directly above my pubic bone, or way down inside my hip. Oh, and there’s the occasional sensation of having the baby press on the inside of both hipbones at the same time, then give an immediate, irritated kick afterwards—like he’s trying to stretch way out and thinking, goddamn all these fucking bones.
My boobs are so ridiculously enormous I can barely fit into most of my maternity tops. Even the ultra-stretchy ones. Also, I spend at least half an hour every day furiously scratching them after I take off my bra. You’re welcome.
Even though I’m wildly uncomfortable and desperately looking forward to the day when I can bend over without fear of toppling onto my face, there is still a part of me that really enjoys all this nonsense. Even as I’m being kicked in various sensitive internal organs (what the hell WAS that, my spleen?), the knowledge that my second child is in there doing the kicking completely blows me away. It is the craziest, most incomprehensible thing, the fact that a baby is in there, a real human baby (note: human factor not yet fully confirmed, possibilities of cephalopod physiology suspected) who is going to join the world soon. I know no other word for it but miraculous, I already can’t imagine life without him.
-
My product review site:
[