Dec

4

As stupid does

I am doing a lot of mouthbreathing lately, thanks in part to the Cold That Will Not Die (aka the Virus That Caused a Thousand Cough-Related Pants-Peeings). My nose is officially FUBAR and I’ve grouchily resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably only breathe halfway normally again once the nice doctors hack me open like a gutted walleye and yoink out this sinus-distrupting baby. It’s enough to make a person look forward to major abdominal surgery, the notion that it might provide the ability to inhale without sounding as though I were crowning the Hillary Step on Everest. Well, that and the whole ‘magical birth of my second child’ thing.

Mouthbreathing makes me feel incredibly stupid—I mean, even more so than normal. I feel like a cross between a three-toed sloth and Paris Hilton, panting laboriously as I contemplate the most simple task. The other day I was trying to reduce a recipe and I stood in the kitchen for fifteen minutes, mouth slackly hanging open as I attempted to figure out what half of one and a half cups might be. I am not even lying when I tell you I finally used a calculator.

I received an email yesterday that included the phrase “f2f is high bandwidth” and even though I think of myself as being fairly well versed in silly tech jargon I found myself staring at the screen wondering if the person had accidentally sent me part of a text message zen koan.

Also, in the last several days I have 1) cut my finger while chopping vegetables, 2) rammed my toe so hard into a table leg I think it has permanently retracted into my foot by an inch or so, 3) shut my car door on my own leg, and 4) burned my hand not once, not twice, but three times on the edge of an electric skillet while making one (1) batch of pancakes.

I am officially so dumb I am a menace to myself and society at large. JB, who came home the other day to observe my car parked in the driveway with the passenger side door absentmindedly left wide open in the pouring rain, can probably attest to my reduced mental capacity, although hopefully he will keep those opinions to himself unlike the observation made to his brother over the phone WITHIN MY EARSHOT that Linda sure is getting big, I bet it’s going to be a hyoooooge baby.

(Note to male readers: mentioning your wife’s expanding girth in any way other than passionately crying out “My god, my god, she is a GLORIOUS VESSEL OF BEAUTY!” results in major deductions from your Yearly BJ Allowance. You can work yourself into a deficit situation in no time here, fellas, so tread carefully.)

Between the mouthbreathing and the Placenta Brain I’m hoping to make it through the next two months without earning myself a Darwin Award, but things are looking dicey. Even Riley had to help me out this morning: “Mommy keys right DERE.” And that was after I watched Blue’s Clues with him, where I found myself unable to walk away from the television before Steve did the Thinking Chair thing and revealed what the clues were—because I couldn’t figure it out for myself.

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Dec

3

Rant and rain

I wasn’t going to get a flu shot this year, mostly because I am a giant pussy and the memory of last year’s post-shot achy upper arm (what? IT HURT LIKE HELL DAMMIT) still lingers, but at my last OB appointment the friendly nurse drawing blood for a test asked if I wanted to go ahead and get the (mercury-free) injection at the same time and I couldn’t think of a good non-wimpy reason to say no, thanks anyway, I’d rather do something less painful to my arm, like whack it fifty-seven thousand times with a meat tenderizer.

For whatever reason this shot didn’t hurt at all afterwards, and I instantly felt both virtuous and impervious to disease. Foolishly, I assumed that one injection would have the power to keep me snot-free throughout the long winter months, while all around me people were felled in droves, hacking and sneezing and futilely gnawing at zinc lozenges.

This is why I am totally pissed off that I’ve had the same damn cold for DAYS AND DAYS ON END over here, thanks to Typhoid Riley. I got the shot! I’m supposed to be the picture of health, not a consumptive shadow-eyed mucus machine trailing disgusting little piles of kleenex wherever I go. I CALL BULLSHIT.

I will also note that my son and husband, neither of whom received a flu shot, have merrily bounced back from this shared virus and I—the only one fortified by anti-flu fairy dust—am the one that still sounds like a phlegmatic elephant seal.

(BULLSHIT.)

Adding to my general feeling of goopiness and malaise is the weather, which has turned from snow (pretty!) to a nonstop aggressive downpouring of rain (sucky!). I mean, it’s not like rain is exactly an anomaly here in the Northwest, but this is a deluge of the build-the-arks variety—on each of my (eight thousand) lumbering trips to the bathroom last night I could hear water cascading from the skies and smashing into our house. Our rain chain that hangs outside the bedroom window has been jangling frantically, totally overloaded and tinkling a desperate little oh dear oh dear chime.

So while I ponder my cold-symptom-relief choices (Mucinex, steamy shower, lustful piglike rooting in leftover Halloween candy stash) and the rain transforms Seattle into a traffic-snarled swampland, distract me from the dreariness, will you? What’s the one thing you would like most this holiday season, and I’m talking selfish materialism here so no “world peace” type answers allowed. If you could have any boxed-and-wrapped present this year, what would it be?

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