Pauvre Nous*

* This is where I teach Nola French AND how to whine.

Long ago, pre-BabyLady, we had a choice between two apartments. One was kinda small, and kinda dark, and kinda far from the train, but had an awesome gourmet kitchen and central air. The other, the one we chose, was large, very sunny, and right near the L. We loved all the southern exposure windows, even if it got a little hot in the summer. And I really hated central air anyway, having grown up in Maine and gotten used to feeling a part of nature in the summer.

Well. Now we *do* have BabyLady, and boy my outlook has changed. I spend all day now in this hot, hot apartment. Because the rest of the apartment has an open floor plan, the only rooms we can air condition using window units are the two bedrooms. And we're afraid to install AC #2 in the second bedroom because we're not eager to go through all that trouble when, used in conjunction with AC #1, it might blow a fuse. So poor Nola hasn't seen much this past week besides the inside of our 12X14 bedroom.

I suppose I shouldn't complain; some apartments in New York are not much larger than our one little bedroom. And surely many people in Burma/Myanmar would just love to have our problems. But it's humid and I'm cranky, so here goes with a few more complaints:

-- The wonderful southern exposure is made possible by the fact that our entire apartment faces the street. It never really seemed that loud before, but when you've got a 4 month old napping, every rumbling diesel truck, booming car stereo and barking dog could mean the premature end of said nap, and a cranky baby.

-- The quaintly 80's-themed kitchen (mmm... wood laminate... tan tile...) never bothered me until I had to spread out bottles, lunchbox and dinner fixins all on its 6 linear feet of counter space. The floor is permanently filthy; I've tried scrubbing and scrubbing at its darker patches to no avail. Water somehow runs from the dishrack and pools in front of the sink, but I always forget this, leading to a nice, urine-sized stain on the crotch.

-- Filth in general, now that we have a baby, tends to bother me more. Little pieces of Bella litter now seem like enticing choking hazards. Our messy office area, once tucked away in the second bedroom, is now out in the open, in the sunroom, for me to see and sigh over every day. And let's not even speak of the bathroom.

One thing that's almost universally true in America is nobody's ever happy with what they've got. I don't really blame anyone but myself for my less than glamorous apartment hovel. I made a whole bunch of choices that valued being the moment instead of preparing for the future and saving gobs of money. I still stand by those choices: I've had an amazing life and paid attention to every minute of it. I know Charlie feels the same. We would rather be slightly under-privileged in stuff and yet privileged with lots of time for our little girl. It's a hard current to swim against in this country, but we're trying.

311 Is a Joke

While Nola sleeps off her latest vaccine bender, I thought I'd hang out in our sun room, listening to the lovely babbling brook below. What? you say. I thought Svendlor lived in Chicago, and not near the river -- what is this brook you speak of?

Well, we had a big rainstorm last weekend. Drains were overflowing, water was pouring down the streets. Fine, but this kept going on our street well into Monday, and then Tuesday, etc. Charlie investigated, and found something cracked near a fire hydrant up the street. He said it actually looks like a natural spring, just a couple of holes in the street with water streaming up and out of them. A dutiful citizen, he called 311 and was told, oh, we already know about this; we're on it.

So here we are, on Friday, and gallons of water per second are still rushing down our street, pooling for a moment at the corner where we live, then running down a storm drain. It really is an authentically brook-ish sounding babble. But an ecological nightmare. OK, maybe nightmare is too strong a word. An ecological misfortune? Disappointment?

Which makes me wonder: why do we live in the city? Certainly not for the great night life, which, while it exists, is not particularly baby-friendly, and our whole lives revolve around a certain little girl at the moment. I guess I just don't picture myself as a suburban person. I've never lived in a suburb (unless you count Berkeley, California, as a suburb; I don't). They just seem a bad combination of blandness and neuroticism about the blandness. Yes, I'm sure you can live a decent, happy life in the suburbs, just so far, it hasn't been our style.

We'd like our kid to see different kinds of people and different ways of living. For instance, today on the bus, Nola got to see a huge cross-section of Chicago humanity. She sat in her stroller in a corner, scoping out the passengers, looking entranced the whole time. We met a nice old lady named Angie who was a gerontologist/sex therapist and knew allll about babies. It was fun. I don't think we'd have had the same experience sealed up in a car, puttering down some exurban boulevard to one of those box-like office complexes.

So, we put up with the babbling brook for now. And, if the city stays true to form, they'll find the loudest way possible to fix that water leak bright and early at 7:30 a.m. (See: November 2004, gas goes out just as we're cooking Thanksgiving dinner).

The Many Names of Nola

This weekend, a fellow parent we had just met asked us, well into the evening, "What's her name again?" The confusion was totally understandable -- other than when we introduced her, we probably didn't call her Nola once. Here are some of the many names of Nola.

Nola
Noles
No-No
Baby Lady (we love this one)
Big Girl (she loves this one)
Disi (Cherokee for "little bird")
Little Bird
Ms. Opposite
Fuzzy
Sweetie Weetie
Droolie Christie
Julie Crusty
Crankazoid

Baby's First Earthquake

Who would have thought, here in the Midwest, that Nola would feel the earth move? We had a 5.3 earthquake last night; mom was in the middle of feeding, and got very excited. She'd sort of missed the periodic shifting of the earth from her Bay Area years. Dad woke from sleeping to see the radiator shaking. Nola, however, was oblivious.

Our dear, sweet baby, of course, has been a monumental first for us. Every day she is a delight and a challenge. Just as active "on the outside" as she was in the womb, Nola can be very demanding in her own little way, but -- and we can't emphasize how grateful we are for this -- she hardly ever cries. She squeaks and fusses in her sleep, though, all through the night, which is hard on mom, a light sleeper. But we love her squeaky songs. Someday we have to record them.

Mystery Lady

Well, we are at due date plus five now, just waiting for the mystery lady to show herself. Really, who is this creature residing in my torso area? She rolls her little body around all day and night, has sneezed twice (totally cute) and hiccuped possibly ten thousand times (not so cute after hiccup 10,001 at 2 o'clock in the morning). She certainly has made her presence felt. And yet we both know she will be so much more captivating/beautiful/tiring/scary once she's here with us in the outside world.

If mom and baby can't get in sync by the weekend, labor will be induced and we'll force you to make your entrance, Nola! Everyone is so excited to finally meet you!

Susan Jacoby Don't Know Nuthin'

Probably the most annoying interview we've seen on the Bill Moyers show (and that's saying a lot) was shown last weekend: Susan Jacoby shilling her new book, The Age of American Unreason.

For Charlie's take on it, go to the interview comments on Bill Moyers's Web site:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2008/02/bill_moyers_rewind_susan_jacob.html

And here is mine; I used it for fodder in my Literary Journalism class:

Last week, I caught an interview on Bill Moyers Journal with Susan Jacoby, author of the new book, The Age of American Unreason. She called various segments of the American public “dumb” five times in the interview, always punctuating this word with that unique combination of frustration and relish that exposes the inner dilemma of the unpopular class egghead. How to compassionately display concern for your less intellectually endowed classmates, while remaining triumphant and superior?

The next day, I saw an article about Jacoby’s book in the New York Times, which allowed me to flesh out her argument a bit more. She mostly declaims lowered expectations and anti-intellectualism in the public arena. Both pieces featured a sadly entertaining moment from reality television where a “celebrity” contestant, Kellie Pickler, says “I thought Europe was a country,” and “I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.” In Jacoby’s interview, other examples of the debasement of American culture include the use of the word “folks” in political speech, which she finds condescending (or maybe the language has simply changed?), and the fact that maps sold out during FDR’s fireside chats (but now, can’t we use the Internet? If maps are all over the Internet, does that really point to less interest in the larger world?).

These are classic straw man arguments. Of course there will always be ill-informed people in any society. Shine a light only on them, and you will never see the real picture. To quote the Times article:

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels [emphasis mine] is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

What I would like to know is: are Americans really becoming less informed and anti-intellectual? Hasn’t this charge been leveled in the past? For instance, I’ve read arguments against full democracy that reason that the people, as a whole, really aren’t smart enough to make decisions that affect their country. I’ve also read that the difficulty of IQ tests has been raised several times since their inception in order to keep the median score at 100. Wouldn’t that make a case that Americans are actually getting smarter?

If this has been a common complaint throughout history, is there anything unique about the current situation? Or, as I suspect, have we accurately “tagged her as a crank,” one of a long line of a less than lovable species?

Does this make me look fat?

"You look great!"

This compliment is almost always closely followed by, "You can hardly tell you're pregnant!"

I hear this all the time, and I know it's meant as a compliment. But it always sounds weird to me -- is "looking pregnant" supposed to be the equivalent of "not looking great"? That seems to be the implication.

Before I got pregnant, I always thought that the pregnant women I knew or saw on the street looked like goddesses. They were bringing new life into the world, they had the special clothes, they were plump and happy about it. Who wouldn't be? I thought. A woman is supposed to gain weight to feed her baby. She's supposed to get the glow and ignore the scale.

I guess this is just another fiction that formed in my head because I don't spend enough time with other people. It seems like, in this country, weight is *always* a concern, and body image *always* tied to looking thin, no matter what the circumstance. I mean, why else tie "looking great" with "hardly looking pregnant"? We don't actually hate the growing baby, just the way she detracts from the idealized image of a woman as thin, athletic, yet still curvy, or whatever it is we're supposed to be.

I know I'm lucky in that I escaped these pressures growing up naturally thin (although, wearing a back brace, I didn't exactly conform to the feminine ideal, either). I never had to worry about dieting, and my mother, thankfully, didn't ever talk about dieting. So, for the most part, I was never indoctrinated. I tend to think of most women I know as pretty attractive, whether fatter or thinner, taller or shorter.

My whole life, mostly I've heard, "you're so thin!" expressed kiddingly or approvingly, but with an undertone of something, I'm not sure what. But I hear it again in "you can hardly tell you're pregnant." To me, it's not a compliment -- I want to celebrate my big, huge belly and the little girl that's growing inside it.