Freakundity

fre KUN dit ee, n., the horrible, heart-stopping realization that you may be pregnant
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DH casually mentioned the other morning that he was feeling a bit off. "Hm, weird," said he, "I feel a little dizzy today. Maybe I'll drink some extra water." Once the water was down the hatch, he proceeded to carry on with his day as if nothing had ever happened.

He felt dizzy. In the morning. And it was no big deal.

I had to sit down for a moment to fully allow my brain to grasp the joy and peace that clearly is life without a uterus.

If I feel dizzy in the morning, the automatic logical leap is that ohmigawdmylifeisoverIamfuckingpregnantagain. This also applies to headachy in the afternoon. Or nauseous in the evening. Or at unprescribed random intervals, just to keep me on my toes. Aunt Flo a day late? Might as well start buying diapers. Gas bubble in the gut? Surely must be a baby kicking (never mind how I got to be four months pregnant without previously noticing).

The point is, everything in a woman's life points toward pregnancy. I can never be casually nauseous, offhandedly dizzy, coolly "a little late". Pregnancy is lurking behind every corner, waiting to jump out and deface me with yet more stretch marks.

If it can find anywhere that doesn't already have some.

Admittedly, the extreme paranoia may hearken back to my old pot-smoking days, but the first step is admitting I have a problem, right? I find meditation helpful in dealing with my myriad anxiety-related issues, and have perfected a bit of a mantra that assists me in finding my centre - balancing my life - shutting up my inner voices. You can borrow it if you like. Goes something like this:

Incision. Clip, tie and cauterize. It's like a Tupperware seal in there.
They can't get out.
They can't get out.
They can't get out.

Repeat as necessary. Vasectomies are da bomb.

Dead Car: The Musical

Watcha gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?
I'm gonna pile it, pile it up with all the other junk in my basement.

Frecklepelt: She just, you know, hasn't been feeling right. Sluggish. A lot of greenish goo. For a long time now. And then... no. No! I can't talk about it any more! (bites fist)
Mechanic: (gently) Go on. I'm here to help.
Frecklepelt: (deep breath) And then - the other day - she just died. Right in the middle of Crowchild. It was horrible - took the paramedics three shocks with the defibrillator to get her going again.
Mechanic: You mean someone stopped and gave you a boost?
Frecklepelt: Um, yeah, exactly.
Mechanic: Don't worry, ma'am, we'll take good care of her during her stay with us.

Watcha gonna do with all that gas, all that gas inside your tank?
I'm gonna be cheesed that I filled it up, filled it up right before my car died.

*telephone rings*
Frecklepelt: Hello?
Mechanic: Are you sitting down, ma'am?

Should'a known better than to forsake my car
And take the train when I could'a driven
Now I'm never gonna drive again
The way I drove with you-ou-ou...

Mechanic: 'I'm sorry, ma'am - the rust, it's metastatized. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.'
Frecklepelt: Noo! (sobs into hands) It's all my fault, it's karma, languishing in the driveway all day while I... while I took public transit! (more sobs)
Mechanic: Well, it's certainly fixable. Let's see, new water pump, exhaust leak, coolant leak, few other things - could get her back on the road for about $9300, including labour.
Frecklepelt: Are you kidding? That old piece of shit? Nuts to you, man. (hangs up phone)

Baby you can tow my car, 'cause you won't be able to drive it far
Gettin' me a tax break from, the Kidney Foundation
Beep-beep beep-beep yeah!

Testicle Festival

Being that I'm female, I've never given much thought to the problematic nature of "outdoor plumbing" - so to speak. However, through my various adventures in cohabitating with males, it has come to my attention that they, in general, have given the issue some thought. A LOT of thought. Entire Speedo-loads of thought.

The Junk (that being the preferred terminology 'round these parts, for the collective manly Parts) is a high-maintenance beast. It can be sweaty, achy, itchy, too hot, too cold, too hairy, compressed, confined, constricted, grazed, bumped, zippered, sat on or crushed betwixt the thighs. It can hang on the wrong side. The troops can become separated. Mosquitoes can attack.

I think if you cobbled it all together, men spend something on the order of hundreds of hours on itching, bitching, whining, scratching and general assorted rearrangement activities.

And then! If they should so deign to take their reproductive potential into their own hands and get fixed, by golly it's a whole new ballgame (oh yeah, I totally meant that): the procedure must be rehashed at least thrice monthly, in addition to regularly scheduled activities as described above. I've discovered I can usually make DH shut up about his "terrible ordeal" by airing my various feminine trump cards (there are so many to choose from - I find "giving birth" is an excellent standby), but if you bring something up often enough it's a statistical certainty that the topic will eventually collide with another feminine trump card I like to call hormonally-induced rage. Or, "Fuck Off Already with the Vasectomy Stories!" for short.

So, yeah, I snapped a little. What is with the stupid snip stories, anyways? How many frigging permutations of the same locally-anaesthetized two minutes of someone's life can there possibly be? And for the love of all things dangly, why?

Frankly, we may never know for sure, but one thing is certain:

Gravity.

And if those things are just going to keep getting longer, I doubt they're going to get any less annoying with age.

Nuts.

Encumbered in the Mouth

I work with a lovely fellow - let's call him Cornelis, just for the heck of it - who is consistently, inexhaustibly positive. Under even the most trying of circumstances the worst you can get him to admit to feeling is "medium". Though incredibly irritating at times, it's an admirable quality, and I've left many a thwarted bitch session in his office wondering what the secret to his endless optimism is.

All was made clear to me the other day, when Cornelis revealed to me that he maintains a Feel-Good Folder in his email account - every time he gets a really good email, he files it there so if he's ever feeling down he can read through a few and recharge the ol' wellspring of happiness.

Totally lame, eh? Buuut... actually not a bad idea. So because I like making lots of resolutions, I resolved to start jotting down compliments in a little feel-good record of my own, beginning on my thirty-first birthday last week.

So far I've collected three, all from DH, and it has come to my attention that in my enthusiasm to get my resolution off to a good start, I've perhaps not been discriminating enough in choosing what compliments to record for posterity:

July 9, 2009 "I like your wavy hair. It's wavy."

July 10, 2009 "You really stack the dishes nice."

July 11, 2009 "You don't fart in your sleep as much as you used to."

Dubiouser and dubiouser. On reflection, it's obviously the quality, not the quantity, of the contents of your feel-good folder that count.

User discretion is advised.

Incontinental Drift

Sometimes, as a parent, you just have to lie a little bit to your kids. Yep, all you newbies with babes in arms or still in utero, give a little sanctimonious gasp, I'll wait. Because ultimately, when some jackass five-year-old tells your Precious that there's no Santa one day in preschool, you'll be falling all over yourself trying to keep the magic alive for just one more year. (And I guarantee you have no concept of how insanely many questions a three-year-old can produce over the course of a single day - I dare you not to say 'Because I said so!' at least once.)

Hm, that's coming off a bit confrontational - it's not all bad. I have always tried to be honest with Medium Fry, but there have been times when it has seriously backfired on me and, conversely, times when a little (or large) white lie has saved the day.

There are loads of crazy things I remember my parents saying when I was a kid. Those black-and-white posts you sometimes see on the sides of roads? My dad told me they had bees in them. Who knows why he said it, but I was terrified of those posts. And I think I was about 15 before I understood how it was "the mailman" had brought me my red hair. But maybe the most frightening thing they told me wasn't a lie at all, it was actually intended as a riddle (or exceedingly lame joke, tough to tell with parents sometimes) - goes something like this:

Q. What is the one thing that everyone in the world is always doing?
A. Getting older.

And truthfully, I didn't find that terribly frightening until recently. We're all getting older. All of us. Always. Right there - I just got older. And there! I did it again.

And so did you.

Yuck, eh? Just one big downhill, with removable teeth and a package of biggie size diapers waiting for you at the end.

So when I hear people talking about humans living to 120 if they follow some miraculous calorie-restricted diet I can't help but wonder: why the hell would anyone aspire to be 120 years old? I canvassed some seniors to find out:

10) I never liked calories anyways. - Mitchell, age 80
9) 120 is the new 110. - Doris, age 94
8) I always wanted to be alone. - Alton, age 91
7) Rheumatoid arthritis: now eligible for medical marijuana. - Glenda, age 79
6) These dentures cost me five hundred dollars back in 1978. I want to get my money's worth. - Ben, age 102
5) Who would take care of my lawn flamingos if I weren't here? - numerous respondents
4) It's so convenient to be able to tuck my breasts into my waistband and head out for the day. - Matilda, age 85
3) Freedom 105! - Maurice, age 67
2) I just can't get enough of cat food on Ritz. - "Frankie", real name and age forgotten
1) To punish my children. - Beatrice, age 88

So am I sold on the idea of extreme old age? The medical marijuana thing is a solid selling point, but like so many of the big questions in life, it just Depends.

Who Lives on Drury Lane?

There exists in my mind - as I suspect there does in everyone's - a certain hierarchy of household chores. Face it, some chores just feel better than others. For instance, I don't mind folding laundry, but I despise putting the clean and folded product away. And vacuuming, total barf. Ooh, and making the bed - that seems more futile than just about anything in the world - I can cling to the faint delusional hope that no one will leave slime trails on my sparkly clean windows tomorrow, but I know for a fact someone is going to muss up the bed tonight.

If you're lucky, the person with whom you're sharing a home has a hierarchy that runs more or less opposite yours, so while s/he's picking dead gnats out of the light fixtures and you're degreasing the range hood, you're both able to be thinking, 'Hehehe, suck-ah'.

Fortunately for me, DH actually doesn't mind vacuuming, and he can't fathom how anyone could happily crawl into a tangled disaster of a bed every night, so things work out pretty well for us.

Except when it comes to baking.

In my mind, Little Red Hen fully held the moral high ground. I'm not exactly grinding the wheat here, but I did do the baking and damned if I am going to wash the muffin pans after all that work.

DH hates washing the muffin pans. His man-brains instinctually grasp the Little Red Hen-ness of his wanting to partake of the muffins, however, so he grudgingly upholds his end of the unspoken bargain.

If you want to know a little secret, I sometimes bake muffins when I'm pissed at DH just so I can enjoy his not enjoying washing the muffin pans. "M'mm, I made your favourite, honey! Too bad we were out of paper liners!" Admittedly it's a pretty elaborate sting operation, but it makes the relationship work, you know?

Things could be worse for him, though. My ex-husband adhered to no such moral standards as cleaning the muffin pans, so my options for revenge were never so subtle as, say, buttoning all his shirts to the top so he couldn't pull them off the hangers. So I cleaned the toilet with his toothbrush.

The divorce is finalized now, so I can tell you that much.

The rest you'll have to buy me a couple of drinks to hear.

Satisfy Your Epicuriosity

I like to cook. Perhaps more accurately, I like to eat, and cooking results in food for me to eat. Better still, I'm actually a pretty good cook, which means I get to eat delicious food. Everyone wins!

Now, if I could just massage my own back my life would be complete.

But I digress.

I also like to try new recipes. "Try new recipes" is a perennial fave of mine when it comes to making New Year's resolutions. (It's in direct conflict with the also-perennial "lose some weight", but I figure this gives me a 50:50 chance of living up to at least one of my resolutions.) So I like to surf recipe websites and magazines and cookbooks, always keeping an eye out for something new. I even snagged a few promising titles from the library a couple of weeks ago.

Have I ever mentioned that DH has a bit of a food fetish?

As soon as I got those suckers home from the library, he tucked them under his arm and scuttled off to his happy place. Was gone for hours. Practically needed a smoke afterward.

But what really tipped me off was his wholesale and rather gruff rejection of the ones without pictures. Cookbooks without pictures are frowned upon in my home.

He is not, I suspect, reading them for the articles.

But then, who can blame him? The glossy full-page spreads, artfully arranged, styled and airbrushed to perfection - just look at those incredible (chicken) breasts... ooh, baby, you can almost taste those (sticky) buns... m'mm, don't you just want to dip your meat in that special sauce...

Kneading. Greasing. Grinding. Pounding! Stuffing!

Hope they don't mind a few pages stuck together. You know, from all that cooking.