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Last night, I watched some French movies on IFC, namely L’Auberge Espagnole and Les Poupees Russes.

They were mildly entertaining, but I find that if I don’t understand the language, I’m much more easily distracted. All I know is that I want Audrey Tautou’s apartment. And to make sounds from the back of my throat without sounding like I’m gagging.

The baby stayed at the mother-in-law’s house last night since she picked him up from school and watched him while we schooled and worked. He has off today, so instead of taking him home, putting him right to bed, waking him, and then taking him right back to the MIL’s house, we just let him stay put.

I miss him.

My body is also acting very strangely today. I was ravenous and scarfed down my lunch a little after 11 and I’m still kind of hungry. I anticipate foraging for food by 3 p.m. That should be fun.

I’m also simultaneously craving sex and sleep and I can’t do much for either craving at the moment. Argh.

The baby kept asking me over the weekend why we don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. My explanations ranged from, “It’s not really a holiday here,” to “I don’t need an excuse to drink,” which isn’t really true. I do need an excuse but I’m usually able to come up with on on my own without resorting to stories about snakes, leprechauns, or paganism.

But specifically, we didn’t go to the parade or anything. I guess that makes me a party pooper. I used to go to the parade with my family all the way up until the time that I was legally allowed to go and do what all of the other adult parade attendees do, which is stand outside in the cold, get drunk, and then screw in an alleyway downtown.

Call me crazy, but I’d rather just sit at home, drink on my warm couch, and then diddle the husband in our room. I mean, I guess we could move that party down to the basement if we wanted to celebrate.

But the last time that I was downtown on St. Patrick’s Day was in 2001. And what was notable about that particular St. Patrick’s Day was that despite my well-documented love for booze, I was in no mood to drink. I sat at a crowded bar with my mom and grandparents and assorted cousins and bemoaned the upset stomach that I had been dealing with off and on for a few days. I played some pinball before finally convincing someone to take me home since I really wasn’t having any fun.

A few weeks later, I realized I was pregnant. Dur.

Aside, I switched over to a “full feed” upon the suggestion of the MamaPop betches. So you lazy people won’t have to go through the arduous task of clicking a link to read my amazing posts. No need to thank me.

Hi, there.

So, the good news is that my tooth is fine. The dentist didn’t see any evidence that any of my teeth broke or chipped and thinks that it must have been some excess from one of my white fillings that fell out. The husband speculated that maybe it was someone else’s piece of broken tooth that fell in my food.

I think I’m going to stick with the dentist on this one.

In any case, he better be right because if I have to go have a root canal in three months, I’m not paying for it nor I will pay for the general anesthesia and the huge bottle of Vicodin that I will insist upon. (Read: I really don’t like painful dental work or oral surgery and do what I can to prevent it.)

In other physical malady news, the baby has some nice excema on his face. It’s not too bad; you can’t tell by looking at him that his skin is all gross. I only discovered it the other day when I was grabbing his face to squish it. My exclamation of “Ew!” startled him, but I reassured him and told him the truth about the situation: “Son, you’re turning into a lizard.” Anyway, I’m slathering him with cortisone as much as he’ll let me.

He’s watching Ultraman right now, which is totally educational: he needs to either learn to read much faster to catch the subtitles or figure out how to speak Japanese. I’m practically homeschooling the kid right now, you know?

We went to Incredibly Strange Video last night to take advantage of their liquidation sale. Sadly, Bruce, the owner, has decided to close up shop. We’re all very bummed about it, since the experience of going to the store and finding weird little movies to enjoy is very fun and, I think, very valuable for the baby. I want him to know that whatever is presented and advertised to you isn’t always the best thing available, that sometimes you have to search for the things that really speak to you.

I stocked up on a few campy cult classics because I think I have some deep-seeded desire to open a drive-in. The baby talked to Bruce about Godzilla for awhile and they posed for a picture together.

Of course, none of this ruminating about the loss of an indie gem has been helping my mood as of late. This crap was only the precursor to a few days of emotional fuckery. I feel better today overall. But a lot of times it feels like I’m short-circuiting.

My kid is my favorite person on the planet.

But it’s possible that I will strip him of that title if he doesn’t stop with the bullshit.

How was your day? Aside from a rainforest’s worth of toilet paper down the toilet thanks to my *&@#(# child, mine was alright. We had a staff morale-boosting activity at work today, which isn’t as frightening as it sounds. We got to watch the remake of Hairspray and eat candy. Consider my morale boosted. The movie was cute, but now I really just want to watch the original.

Also, I would like to state for the record that I get highly annoyed when MTV says it’s showing True Life when it’s actually showing Cribs.

The baby, the sister-in-law, and I went to the record store on Saturday and spent a good bit of time in the Jerry’s portion of the store. The baby wanted to get some records to add to his tiny starter collection.

He dug through some crates.

Then he had to, of course, listen to his selection before purchasing. His pick? “La Di Da Di”.

When we got home he wanted to watch his Kraftwerk DVD and then went about fashioning his own little Kraftwerk performance set up, complete with stand, laptop, keyboard, and mic headset.

Crappy video of his performance here, although I didn’t capture the cutest part, which was the baby cupping his hand over his mouth to sing just like the dude from Kraftwerk.

I love that kid.

I’ve been extremely productive so far.

That’s me, grabbing my cat’s face. He hates that. Note the wet hair, though. I showered!

That’s him getting up to leave, since he doesn’t really like having his picture taken. Plus, he’s pissed at me because I promised to replace the litter in his box and I haven’t yet.

Not pictured is the baby who, at the time that these pictures were taken, was downstairs in his pajamas at 3 p.m. and watching corny movies about snakes that are not Anaconda (and all star Pat Morita for some reason) on the Sci Fi Channel. Clearly, I’m setting him up for success in life. At the moment, he’s upstairs yelling his argument for wearing the same underwear for the second day in a row.

We’re supposed to go to the record store later to partake in their “grand re-opening festivities,” which I imagine consist of the husband arguing with Arnie in Squirrel Hill as opposed to East Liberty.

Since I started grad school, there have been certain periods that are more hectic than others. There’s more homework for both the husband and I or a test or a paper is due and conveniently those periods tend to coincide with especially hectic periods at work. During those times, I chuck real cooking to the side and feed my family convenience foods, stuff not purchased from the healthy, whole perimeter of the grocery store, but rather in the bloated and evil middle shelves where the processed and boxed and pre-cooked items that shamelessly flaunt their preservatives and their sodium and their high fructose corn syrup live.

This week we have a perfect storm of food challenges: busy at work, busy at school, taxes for tuition are coming out of my paycheck, and we’ve not yet received our tax refund or heard any word on the student loan that I applied for. So we’re busy and kinda poor (more than usual). Last night we had to go to the store. Not only were we out of dinner options, I was out of contact lens solution, the cat was out of litter (stink), and the baby was out of waffles and dear lord that kid can not go a day without waffles.

Since we weren’t going to get home until about 7:30, I grabbed a boxed, Complete Meal to make for dinner. I started “cooking” that while the baby and the husband worked on homework. The box called for 2 1/4 cups of hot water. I measured that out, then had to pour it out because there was a cat hair in the measuring cup, then once again because I used cold water instead of hot.

Dudes. Cooking is hard.

I decided to add some “nutrition” to our meal by heating up a can of green beans and then we sat down on the couch to watch TV and eat our all-American meal by the light of the Penguins game.

Looking at the bright orange Three Cheese Chicken and the dull green beans, I felt pretty bad I wasn’t feeding them all things fresh, organic, and nutritious. But the baby dug in and turned to me and said, “You cook things the best, Mum.”

And that right there made me feel like Anthony fucking Bourdain. Sure, the food is shitty, but I cook it with love. And that’s what matters.

Plus, we don’t starve to death. Always a good result.

Later, after I started to drool in bed, the husband came in and whipped the covers off of me to “fix” them, since he insists that I don’t do it right. I groaned at the shock of the cold, but in my sleepy state, I felt him lay the covers back down on top of me and then brush the hair out of my face.

I think those guys might keep me around, even if I’m not going to win any Woman/Mom/Wife of the Year awards.

Could somebody explain to me why my son’s school has a 2-hour delay this morning? It’s in the mid-30s and the only thing they’re predicting for today is some rain. If I’m not mistaken, we live in Pittsburgh and rain is kind of a given. I’m left to believe it’s because the school officials exist to screw up my mornings.

The baby is doing much better today and is just thrilled to be doing shots of that pink, bubble-gum-flavored amoxicillin. I believe his exact words were, “God, I LOVE this stuff!”

It is good and I don’t see why all medicine can’t be flavored that way.

I am also feeling a little bit better. I scolded myself this morning for phoning it in as far as school goes the past few weeks. I know I’m behind, but I don’t know exactly how far behind because I don’t want to look and face the facts. Mature, no? But I’m doing some reading and stuff now…well, aside from this short break to write about how studious I am.

I’m just really burnt out on my bloated schedule. The past few days I had tossed around the idea of dropping a class, but realized that would be pretty stupid since I’m practically halfway through the semester now.

In the fall I’m only taking one “real” class and that will be such a huge relief. Then I’ll take two courses in spring 09, probably another required course in summer 09, one more elective in fall 09 and then I’ll be done. Somewhere in there I have to squeeze in an internship, which will probably end up being some kind of project through my job since my grad program knows that I can’t exactly do an unpaid internship for 3 months. I have a taste for the finer things in life, like eating and having a roof over my head.

The husband and I watched The Crazies last night, which is a George Romero flick from 1973. It’s set and was filmed in Evans City, which is also where he filmed Night of the Living Dead. I’ve always loved NotLD and Dawn of the Dead, but I’m really starting to get into the look and feel of Romero. We watched Martin a few weeks ago, though admittedly I didn’t make it to the end. It was getting late and I find that I get panicked watching movies in which someone breaks into a house because, uh, someone broke into our house. But anyway, that’s not the point. Romero’s films that are set in and around Pittsburgh are so very Pittsburgh. The actors all seem to be fairly local and there doesn’t seem to be any alterations made to the sets.

What is so striking about the films from that time period is that they seem to be plucked from my memories of what Pittsburgh looked and felt like around the time that I was born, when the steel industry was gasping its last breaths and the city was depressed and kind of…stale. Watching those movies I can almost recall the smell. Beer and work boots, metal lunchboxes, and the scent that men have when they’ve been outside. It’s uncomfortable but at the same time pleasingly nostalgic. It’s really hard to describe.

Grunt. I should get back to being a hardcore student.

The baby was up at least three times last night crying due to the pain in his ear. I gave him Tylenol once but the subsequent times he came to me in tears I had to turn him down because I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed since his last dose due to me being unconscious. I try not to encourage ODs in my kid. I’m a good parent, what can I say?

So, that was kind of heartbreaking. And so was telling him that I wouldn’t be able to stay home with him because I have both of my classes today. Sigh. But the mother-in-law took him to the doctor and he has not one, but TWO ear infections. Amoxicilling we will go.

Oh, but on the upside, my mom stopped by and brought me samosas and they’re sitting next to me making everything smell all heavenly and potato. I’m trying to save them for dinner tonight but drooooooooooooool….