kdiddy.org

Dudes! Double-yoo-tee-eff is up with still not being able to write here on the regular?

Spring semester is officially over and I’m happy to report that I did very well, grades-wise. However, I’m taking a summer class and that started Monday. It’s only six weeks long and it’s the last required course that I have for my MA (just one more elective in the fall!).

The class itself is fine. It’s an organizational behavior course through the business school that is mostly made up of undergrads. I am the sole humanities dork. The rest of those guys are in engineering and chemistry and computer science and iwillmakemoremoneythanyouism.

There are many hilarious bits in this whole thing. Like how someone actually snickered when I stated that I was a professional writing person. And today when we were talking about these principles of human resource management that touted such crazy notions as paying good wages, not treating them like shit, etc. The instructor asked what the overarching philosophy was of the principles and the undergrads were pulling out big words like…uh…”derivative” or something. And I raised my hand and said, “Uh, that employees are people and not batteries?” My classmates got that look of faint recognition on their faces. I hope I didn’t blow their minds too much.

There’s also a vague (so far) anti-union feel to the readings, which isn’t at all surprising. I’m just mostly amused by the language used. Like, “Such-and-such manager was successful because he was able to communicate with the labor people.” I get the impression that these young business students are, perhaps indirectly, taught that people in unions are all barbaric assholes who want nothing more than to harsh your capitalist mellow.

Me, my mom, and my dad, circa 1992

I am not union and, because of my line of work, probably never will be. But many of my family members and friends are and it’s a little troubling to think that their future managers are being brought up with this attitude. I’m not saying that all unions are perfect and I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of assholes in unions. Just…you know…remember that these are PEOPLE (there’s that word again) that we’re talking about.

ANYWAY, I was going to tell you all about this little confrontation that I had with the manager of this bar that the husband was playing records at on Saturday, but I’m almost over it. And, yes, I wrote angry and vulgar couplets about him and his mother and it made me feel better.

We’re going to Detroit this weekend for the music festival and I kind of agreed to take one of the quizzes online at 10:30 on Friday morning, when I will most likely be hungover from our first night in Detroit and post-Penguins festivities, so that should be cute.

Still here. Still trudging through the last bit of this semester.

My cat sometimes sleeps on my pillow and half the time he accommodates my head, curling himself around it. The other half he somehow manages to push my head off of the pillow.

This morning saw us in the latter configuration. When my alarm started going off, I started hitting the snooze button. This apparently annoyed my cat because not only was I crowding the spot he wanted to sleep on, but my stupid time-telling thing was making noise.

He let me know of his displeasure by putting a paw on my head and lightly digging his claws into my scalp every time that the alarm went off.

All of that is to say: at least one being is looking out for me (kinda). I’ll be back around here soon.

Still more rough days trying to get through this semester. Yeah, there’s light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s some old lawn furniture and a bear and some marbles and a field of sharpened bamboo between here and there.

But obviously, what I have to go through in the next few weeks is nothing compared to what other mamas have to go through the rest of their days. So, in recognizing how very, very lucky I am and how not even the greatest deed would make me worthy of my kid, I want to remember this goofy little moment that we shared earlier this evening that might otherwise be forgotten if I hadn’t gotten that harsh reminder to do whatever I can to relish it.

For Easter, we gave the baby a few books out of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, including the Do-It-Yourself Book. He was filling out the page on his predictions and got stuck on, “In twenty years, cars will run on ________.” The baby thought about this for awhile and finally said, “Cars will run on…sidewalks!”

Thanks, dude.

Posting is still slow around these parts, I know. I’ve been working my dupa off this semester, this past week in particular, and had a mini-meltdown Wednesday morning. Just one of those, “I…just…don’t want to do all of this anymore! Hwwheeee!” kind of crying episodes that I have at least once a semester. I met with one of my instructors this morning to go over some XML basics and was wildly comforted that she didn’t think that I was a total moron. She has a daughter around the same age as the baby, and works, and teaches, so I think she recognized that, “I’m falling apart,” look in my eyes. I don’t honestly think that I’m going to crash and burn, but I guess I don’t always believe it.

Anyway, when I do have a minute here and there, I don’t feel like voicing anything, preferring instead to retreat to quiet. I spent a few hours the other day looking at the pictures on Shorpy and marveling at how alive the pictures seem and how a little twitch in the universe could send me there.

I love this picture of Pittsburgh in 1941 so much.

rainy pittsburgh 1941

It’s raining, of course, just as it has been here for the past few days. But if you lean in, you can almost hear the drops slapping onto the street and bouncing off the roofs of the cars. I can almost smell the refreshment of an early summer storm and grin because it’s almost here.

I turned on Toddlers & Tiaras a little bit ago because nothing else that I wanted to watch was on and I thought it would be a good release to watch something really stupid/infuriating.

This shit is boring. I mean, yeah, fucking freakshow parents and hideous clothes, but it’s…too easy? I don’t know. This particular subculture is so self-contained and weirdly populated with seemingly “normal” people. The problematic aspects of it are just so blatant it’s not even worth thinking about.

Plus, the top prizes in these pageants have titles like “Grand Supreme” and it’s all just getting way too close to some KKK shit for me.

Anyway, I’m watching crap to decompress. I had a HUGE paper due today and had to give a presentation on it. I later described the presentation as a cautionary tale. I got all freaked out beforehand and saved like 5 different copies of my presentation all over the place and I guess uploaded the wrong one in my frenzy. So, halfway through my presentation, I was out of slides. So I said, “Uh…my slides are missing. This is just like a nightmare I once had.”

Luckily, I had printed out hard copies of the notes pages so I just kept going without slides, lubricated by the five gallons of sweat that came pouring out of me. But my professor said that I did really well so COOL.

My back is killing me and has been really achy for the past couple of days. I think I’ve been holding the stress of the paper there or something. I’ve also been spending hours hunched over my computer writing the damn thing.

How are you?

My paper is done. The accompanying presentation is done. I just have to look at both with fresh eyes in the morning for any glaring errors, upload them to Blackboard, give the actual presentation and that will be one more struggle under my belt. The other large-ish assignment was moved back a few days so that gives me some time to breathe and then next week is spring break. Of course, that means that I only have to work full-time and be a mom but seriously that seems like a vacation sometimes.

Anyway, with that major assignment pretty much done I will actually be able to hang out here some more! At least until finals start crushing my will to live but for now it’ll be just like old times! Remember when I used to post here more than once a week? Those were the days, eh?

But for now, I think we’ll keep things light and look at some of the notes I’ve scribbled to myself in the margins of my notebook:

“* talk to Heather”

Uh, okay, self. About what?

“* bring HW2 assignment, task analysis”

I totally forgot to do this.

“Pizza Hut”

Uhhhh. Then in the same margin as “Pizza Hut,” it appears as though I do a little word association:

“zone out
streets
fighter
baby
oscar
trailer park
gorgeous
bride
radio
head”

I think that might actually be the mathematical formula for Radiohead’s video for “Street Spirit,” but who knows.

There’s also this doodle that consumes the word association:

It’s like a…maybe a…It’s like my inner child was eaten by a coral reef or something.

The baby had an allergic reaction last night. For those of you who are new to this corner of the internet, my son has a tree nut allergy. Luckily, we haven’t had much trouble with it and tree nuts are not as pervasive as peanuts, so he doesn’t have to live in a bubble or whatever. Last night was actually only the second time that his allergy flared up, the first time being when we found out that he had a food allergy.

When we go to restaurants, we always ask the staff to check to make sure that no nuts are used in whatever dish the baby is getting and so far this has kept us in the clear. But probably what happened was there was something nearby that got in his food. We had his EpiPen with us and for a few minutes had this vague panic of, “Do we jab him?” But we didn’t since he wasn’t having any trouble breathing. Our poor waitress stopped over to see how our meals were (they were delicious, rogue nuts be damned) and had the misfortune of coming upon the scene of us sitting in silence, watching the baby’s lips swell and uncertainly holding a large, green shot near his thigh. We drove to the hospital and just kind of waited. Eventually the swelling started going down and the baby reported that he felt fine. We took him home, gave him some Benadryl, and put him to bed and checked on him every couple minutes.

I am, of course, tremendously relieved that he is okay and am hoping that these symptoms are as bad as it gets. Avoiding anaphylactic shock would be tops.

It was just one of those moments where it was like, “Of COURSE you’re having a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction. WHY THE HELL NOT? I haven’t had a panic attack in at least 15 minutes, so I was due.” I’ve been working on a mid-term paper for one of my classes for several days now and to say that it’s stressing me out would be an understatement. On Tuesday, around 11 a.m., this particular academic nightmare will be over. I have another, large-ish assignment due on Thursday that I haven’t even looked at because I just can’t deal at the moment.

I never got this stressed about school until I started grad school (and I have the QPAs to show for it!). But I guess the stakes are just much higher this time around. Plus, I have to juggle so much more. It’s really wearing me down. After this semester, I have one class I’ll take in the summer and then one in the fall. Obviously, not having to deal with two classes at once will be a huge relief. I’m just trying to hang on until the end of the year when I will finally be done. It just sucks because I’m wishing for the time to go faster so I can get to a relatively easier phase in life, but in doing so I’m wishing away large chunks of my kid’s childhood. I actually apologized to him the other night for being so grumpy and impatient and busy. I’m doing all this so that I can make a better life for me and my family, but I guess in the thick of it the cost seems way too high.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get all morose and I didn’t mean for this to sound like, “My kid had an allergic reaction and it was really scary for ME ME ME IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!” I’m glad my kid’s okay, obviously. And I know that this will all be over soonish and it will all be worth it. I will have a pretty kick-ass MA at the end of all this, after all. It’s just that this particular gauntlet of job + writing + school + school + school + being broke + whatever other crap has gotten really old.

I think, as an adult, I’m suppose to get all grumpy about the snow and gripe about how difficult it makes life, but I have to be honest. I love snow. When I was little, I can remember it snowing like this all throughout winter. Now it doesn’t seem to dump the white stuff like it used to, so I get even more excited about snowfall than I did when I was a kid.

The husband played at a club last night and I wasn’t feeling so great so I just stayed home. I ended up watching a couple older movies, namely For Keeps and Hackers.

I had seen For Keeps a couple of times when I was a kid. It was one of those semi-crappy movies that were on HBO constantly in the 80s. This was obviously before I was old enough to really get what was going on in it, but for being a rather melodramatic Lifetime-ish movie, it’s surprisingly bold in its depiction of an unexpected pregnancy and the frightening ways people behave when trying to deal with it. I’ve yet to see anything from pop culture that really accurately depicts how it feels to know that you’re in an icky situation with a pregnancy at a young age, and at the same time struggling with how impossible it is to convince everyone around you that you can make the right decisions for yourself. Juno came very close in many ways. I think both movies hit me in the gut most with some of the things people say to a woman when she’s pregnant and they don’t approve. It’s amazing how honest people get and how ugly that honesty is.

Hackers was another movie I hadn’t seen in years and it was almost painful in its 90s-ness. And it seemed entirely plausible that the people who wrote and directed the movie had never been in the same room as a computer. I nearly choked when they were drooling over a computer’s kick-ass 28.8 bps modem and the constant dubbing of people as 1337.

Errgh, I think I could probably replace this whole post with, “I’m a loser x300.”

Anyway, the Steelers play the AFC championship game in just a few short hours, then the new season of Big Love premieres, THEN The United States of Tara premieres. Just to illustrate how excited I am about those things, I’ll point out that I did nearly all of my reading for this week’s classes yesterday afternoon so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it today at all.

I started this post the other day. Go ahead and read through and then I’ll meet you down at the bottom.

As I mentioned the other day, my semester is finally over. It’s a relief, sure, but I find myself uneasy about my final grade. But there’s nothing I can do about it now, so let’s discuss parties.

The baby had his birthday party this past Saturday and it was rather awesome. The Oaks Theater is available for parties so we booked that and showed one of the baby’s favorite Godzilla movies for him and his buddies. It was especially fun for the kids since they got to talk and giggle and wander around the theater during the movie. A taste of the forbidden! The guy at the Oaks also wrote a happy birthday message to the baby on the marquee, which was really cool for him to see.

It was a small group. The kids in the baby’s class don’t seem too big on birthday parties. But that was fine. Less noise, less stress, etc.

So, I highly recommend the Oaks for special events. I will note that it was a tad pricey (not surprising, really) and I’m thinking this will be our last big birthday party for awhile.

Of course, the baby started feeling crappy right as the party was ending and spent the rest of the weekend fighting off a nasty head cold.

I made cupcakes for the party, continuing in my deranged domesticity. Amber requested a picture of a cake wreck and I’m happy to deliver.

Those are chocolate cupcakes with mint icing, as per the baby’s request. I bought this pastry bag set the other day and it’s one of those crappy home baker sets, not a professional one. I don’t harbor any delusions that I am hiding a cake decorating superstar, but the pastry bag experience was rather frustrating. This is as far as I got the other day.

Anyway, yes, cupcakes. I went at them with the pastry bag set not really looking to make them fancy, but it just seemed easier to ice them with that than a butter knife or whatever I normally use. Not so much. But they tasted awesome.

AND I got my final grade for grammar and it’s an A minus. I’m not really sure how I pulled that off but I will so take it.

The title of this post refers to a story I was going to tell you about this yinzer baby shower I went to on Sunday and how I cleaned house during the loathed shower games. But it’s left me.

In fact, I am totally sapped of writing energy. I had an article due on Monday and I guess that and the usual end-of-semester meltdown have rendered me useless. I’ve been sparing you and subjecting the readers of MamaPop with my semi-coherent rambling. Lucky them.

Aaand I’m out of nothings to say. Instead, I’ll leave you with this clip from Sade’s Lovers Live DVD, which we started to watch last night and were stunned by it’s awesomeness.

You know what I LOVE? I love studying for an exam for hours and hours and trying to tell myself that it won’t be that bad in an attempt to calm my test-phobic self down and then sitting down to take the test and seeing that I have no fucking idea what the first question is talking about.

That’s what just happened in my grammar final. I eventually guessed and worked my bullshitting magic to justify my guess and, of course, when I finally left and checked my book I came to the totally shocking realization that I was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy off.

I have no real idea of how well I did on the rest of the test. I had such a panic over that first question that the rest is a blur and when I went through my answers I found a couple more that I had totally screwed up. I fixed them. But I have to wonder how many I missed in my glimpsing. Now I just have to wait and see what my grade is and hope that I did well enough that I don’t have to take the class again.

Ugh. I’m just so tired of this whole thing. I just want my fucking degree. I think about having to deal with this for another year and I want to cry. I want to quit so bad. I just want to have a job and to take care of my family. I don’t want to burn the candle at both ends, I don’t want to impress people with how much I’m able to juggle. I just want to actually finish more than one load of laundry per week. I want to actually go grocery shopping instead of grabbing two or three things (that I can’t afford anyway) after work. I want to spend time with my kid without worrying about all of the other stuff that I should be doing. And I want a drink, dammit.