Wednesday, May 11, 2005

dreamweaver

Looking at my computer screen in the harsh light of day, I'm noticing it's covered with the remnants of dried spittle and god knows what else, propelled at high speeds towards the glass by my allergy-season sneezing. My allergies are actually slightly better this year than usual--which I credit to the relative immunosuppression of pregnancy, since none of my other allergy-suffering cohort seems to agree with me that this Spring is somehow less pollen-y. Well, regardless of the improvement, I'm still more itchy and sneezy than my wild-type control, hence the spittle screen. Which is gross. Got to get some Windex up on that.


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I had a restless night last night, which I can partially attribute to a number of anxiety dreams that I've been having about The Kid. I can also partially attribute the anxiety to the fact that Joe was on call last night (Ophtho residents take home-call, which means they get paged in for emergencies, but barring that don't have to physically be in the hospital overnight) and every time Joe's on call, I get less sleep because I'm all tense and attuned for that 3am page that will wake us both up. He puts is pager on vibrate, but it doesn't help, because a vibrating pager on a nightstand just makes a really loud VIBRATION noise (which I think is even worse than the beeping) and then an even louder CLUNK as the damn thing vibrates itself off the table onto the wood floor.

Yes, but anyway, the anxiety dreams. I haven't been having too many of those up to this point (unless you count the bizarre dreams where I see the outlines of hands and feet stretching six inches out of my abdomen, like a surrealist performance art piece), but I guess the reason for that is that I was saving all of my real anxiety dreams for last night.

Dream #1: Don't know how to breast-feed baby.
Trying to breastfeed. There is no juice. Baby getting mad. Boobs are dysfunctional. Am bad parent.

Dream #2: Baby is very heavy.
Am carrying baby. But baby is monster baby, or perhaps made of lead, because despite being very tiny, weighs about 1.5 tons. Cannot carry 1.5 tons. Drop the baby.

Dream #3: Baby is mutant baby.
Baby is mutant baby, and not in that hot sexy X-Men way. Enough said about that.

I think I get these anxiety dreams shortly before most big events in my life. They're pretty transparent too, it doesn't take Sigmund Freud to interpret my dreams of forgetting to book a florist or neglecting to pick up my dress shortly before our wedding two years ago. So I think I'm nervous about the baby. Duh, you think?


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So our downstairs neighbor smokes pot. I know because we can smell it quite strongly in the computer room when he lights up. I don't know if this is a quirk of the heating system or how the windows are arranged or what, but apparently all the pot smell is channeled up from his apartment into our computer room, establishing an olfactory herbarium. There could be worse smells, I suppose, like the time that mouse died under our floor, but it's still pretty strong. I was worried that the smell might actually channel up into Cal's room too, since his room is right next to the computer room, and might therefore spend his formative years in a pot-smoke haze, all mellow and giggly with pseudo-profound insights. But so far as my nose can tell, his room is a drug-free zone. At least until his teenage rebellion years.

Currently reading: "The Trixie Update," a website kept by a stay at home dad chronicling the feeding, diapering, and sleeping habits of his kid. Aside from being fantastically informative data-wise and very graphically snazzy, I love these people because the mom returned to work 5 weeks after the kid was born during the first year of her pathology residency at UNC. Thus normalizing my entire existence, you see.

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