This is a silly picture of me in the bathroom last night, amazed at the belly expanding in front of me. I haven’t really gained any weight in about 3 weeks, which I find strange, but maybe I gained enough in the first trimester that I could taper off for a little while. I’m not complaining – the less weight gained, the better as far as I’m concerned. As long as the baby’s healthy. Ooh – we find out the sex of the baby in exactly one week! Next Tuesday! This is all flying by REALLY fast. Hey, so if you are a reader of this silly blog here, and you talk to me in person or on the phone ever (i.e. family/friends/coworkers), I think we’re going to have a party next Saturday to celebrate both my birthday and the independence of our nation (ha!), so let me know if you’re interested in coming (email me, call me, text me, comment on this page – doesn’t matter). Dude! Back to work.
I love this thing. It really is an outlet I haven’t had before, and I can’t imagine going through a lot of the things I go through without it.
For instance, talk of my pregnancy. Stuff from sympathetic women, or men who are generally polite or have had pregnant wives, is normally well tolerated. They ask questions like “Have you thought of names yet?” or “Do you have a theme for the room started?” They are sometimes mindless questions, I’ll admit, but they are targeted toward what they know to be an emotional mess of a human being, constantly in some kind of discomfort, and ready to lash out at the first thing that tips them over the edge (my brain is stuck on the nervous system lately, so if you know anything about action potentials, they closely resemble what goes on when I erupt on someone from being bothered too much).
Most others, however, just bug me. Just BUG me. They love to comment on how fat I was the first time, and I mean, I just DEAL with it, but should I? Or should I act like I’m a different person without a sense of humor and really BITE at them? Probably I should do what I am doing, because the latter would take too much energy and I don’t feel like giving them the satisfaction of knowing they’re bugging me. But geez, if you knew that someone had… let’s say… been in a car accident. And they had, at one time in your acquaintance with this person, been getting skin grafts or something equally painful, and maybe even it was on a visible part of their body, like their face, or ears, or arms. Ok, so now you have the vision of someone you deal with on a regular basis, going through something extremely uncomfortable, painful, and something you generally wouldn’t want to have happen to you at any point in time, so you try not to dwell on it too much when you see them.
Or you’re a jerk and you do dwell on it every time you see them, saying jackass things like “Hey, how’s it going Quasimodo?” and shit like that.
But say you’re not a HUGE jerk. That doesn’t exists here, but pretend it did. Then, that person SO unfortunately (this part of the analogy doesn’t quite correlate to my situation, because this second child definitely a blessing not a curse, but you get my point, right?) gets into another car accident, and they once again have to go through painful procedures to fix whatever it is that was hurt this time.
Where I’m going with this is that during my first pregnancy, through no fault of my own (and I tried EVERYTHING to stop it from happening), my ankles swelled from so much retained fluid that it literally felt like they were going to rip up the sides. Especially after a long day, I would wish that something catastrophic could happen and my legs could just be amputated, to prevent me from having to feel that pain anymore. It was not fun, it was not funny, it was not something I wanted to ever go outside and be seen with, but I did it every single fucking day until 3 days before I delivered. Once again, I coped.
So now, another miracle is about to happen, and Craig and I are having another baby. Well wouldn’t you know it, the total assholes that I worked with before are still my fucking coworkers. GOD. It’s funny, because they’re all like “uh oh, watch out, you’re gonna make her mad”, but it’s so obvious that it’s exactly what they want to see, and it’s just completely and utterly disrespectful and rude. But I’ll deal. I will deal, and I’ll do it as gracefully as possible, because like I mentioned in my conversation with Ravneet the other day – there is a light at the end of this tunnel. A bright light, a blinding light, and it is that we will soon have a beautiful addition to our family, and at the same time I’ll be out of this place.
I actually have work to do. The potluck was fun, but I don’t know that I liked the brief moments where focus was on my pregnancy, and instead of being nice and excited for me, they were jerks. That wasn’t fun.
But it’s not really so random.
I hate people treating me like I’m dumber for any reason whatsoever, even if I am truly dumber than they are. And I hate office etiquette and email, they are the scourge of the devil.
I’m getting annoyed at belly comments already, and they’re just beginning. I know I have to deal with them, but I don’t want to – I want to just tell people to lay off, it’s normal, it’s a freakin’ pregnant belly. And mine, so don’t touch. Why as a pregnant woman are we expected to allow comments on our appearance and allow people to touch us randomly, all with a pleasant smile on our faces? It’s as if we can be less protective of the things we may have valued before: common courtesy, personal space. I don’t get it, and I don’t agree. Just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I lost my face. And just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean my body is “HANDS ON” for whoever feels like gracing my body with their freakin’ presence.
Thank God it’s Friday. I was going to stick around and do stuff that probably I should do (study, take the quiz that’s due today, etc.) but instead I’m heading out of here, to enjoy freedom for an hour.
I woke up with a Tom Petty song in my head today.
I’ve posted quite a bit this week, and I don’t really know how I’m finding time to do it. Perhaps it’s in waiting for huge databases to restore that I find a quiet moment or two to reflect on how much I hate it here. Yes, yes, that’s it.
I talked to Craig a while ago about discussing moving Connor into the bigger kids room at preschool instead of being stuck in the little kids room. I also briefly mentioned a few days ago that maybe I would consider talking to Scott about working a day or two a week after I deliver this baby, part time, just from home. I don’t see a whole lot of action on Craig’s part as far as getting financially stable before this baby is born, so of course, my options are to sit by and wait until the roof caves in, or go and fix things myself, metaphorically speaking of course. So I suggested this new option, which probably I should have kept to myself so as not to give him any glimmer of hope of getting off easy on this one. Anyway. My mistake. So I’m talking to him about Connor being at preschool in the bigger kids room, and he said something like “Well, especially if you’re going back to work after this baby’s born, we’re going to need some childcare.” GOD DAMN IT. I’m NOT GOING BACK TO WORK AFTER THIS BABY’S BORN! Maybe, possibly, I’ll work PART TIME, after about 4 months off, and that’s only a MAYBE right now. I mean, I don’t want to! I don’t want to AT ALL! And I don’t want Craig to think I’m going to, because whenever he is given ANY slack, he takes it all and doesn’t work hard enough to do things good for our family (like MAKING MORE FREAKIN MONEY TO PAY THE HUGE STUPID BILLS.) I flew off the handle at that comment, probably a bit more than necessary but I’ll attribute it to the pregnancy hormones and the fact that I have a really yucky stomach ache that won’t go away. I hate men.
SO THEN. I’m looking at the stupid status messages on this Pandion thing at work, and people generally have really stupid ones, like “Oorayhay orfay ednesdayway” and other random shit. But one person has “Thinks using the EEADDR studr was an error. Address user record would have worked.” And although that doesn’t mean anything to anyone but people in this god forsaken office, that’s enough to really make me mad. And I’ll explain.
Everything I do here involves generalized crap that everyone can just steal and use at will. They think it will work because I wrote it, and for the most part, it does. HOWEVER, I am human. And I do make mistakes, silly mistakes, stupid mistakes that I can’t blame anyone for except my own stupid self. AND I DO, I take the blame for errors, I fix them, I republish the scripts people are stealing and everyone, for the most part, is happy. THEY SHOULD BE HAPPY, because if they had any fucking clue what goes into the scripts I’m writing for them, they’d know that I saved them hours and hours and hours of work. Work that, if given the chance, I would gladly throw right back in their smug faces and smash all around so they can’t BREATHE because of the work that I’m doing for them. But no, I do my job, and I do it as well as I can (though lately I’ve been spending more time blogging and studying than working, I’ll admit).
So this little stupid comment about something foreign to everyone but us is extremely frustrating, because what it means is this: some turd in this office has had his plans for some asinine testing paused temporarily because something doesn’t work in the code I wrote. This thing that doesn’t work in the code I wrote is complicated, and it doesn’t work not because I didn’t write it correctly, but because in the basic software itself, the developers decided not to allow a certain function. This function is necessary for what I’m trying to do. So now, I have to figure out 1) how to do what they want me to do, and 2) how to ask the developers how to do it, without pissing them off for asking for something that would “never happen”. So, this thing that will “never happen” is apparently happening en masse for the client that this dummy with the status message is working on. And he wants someone else to fix his problem. Poor baby.
I know that’s probably all Chinese. The gist of this all is this: people here suck. They don’t even realize their laziness, or that their complaints are so minuscule and obnoxious it’s almost more effort to make my ears listen to their complaints than it is to fix them and get on with my life. And THIS is another reason why Craig’s comment about me coming back to work made me furious today. I DON’T FUCKING WANT TO, NOT TODAY, NOT TOMORROW, NOT EVER. I do, because it’s necessary. Someone else in this marriage HAS to take the responsibility for doing unwanted things once in a while.
Here’s an email I wrote to DTE the other day when our power was out, and it was impossible to get ahold of anyone, and I was a little perturbed at our food all going bad:
EVERYWHERE I LOOK, the only phone number I can find for DTE is the silly 4747 number, and EVERY TIME I CALL IT, nobody answers! We’re given a “this call cannot be completed as dialed” message! Now, I’m not an expert, but you’d think that the power company that supplies power for MILLIONS of people throughout the state of Michigan would have a FRIGGIN BACKUP PLAN!!! We’re out of power. We can manage, of course, but all of our food is going bad, and I’m absolutely certain none of the big wig turds that work for DTE are going to do anything about buying us a refrigerator full of groceries to restock what we’re losing. I’m also sure they don’t care that we’re hot, that our 3 year old son can’t sleep all night long, and it’s going to be another brutal day as far as humidity goes. We’re leaving our house, we’re going to find other things to do, and it’s all we can do to hope that our cats can manage in the heat of a closed up house. If I could, I’d take all of my rotten food and throw it at someone’s house that I KNOW is not working fast enough to AT LEAST provide a phone number, or a working website, so that we can be assured that our complaints are being heard.
The website won’t work either. I keep getting fatal errors SIMPLY when trying to see if there’s ANY progress getting our house back online.
PLEASE RESPOND, if there’s ANYONE at DTE with any kind of dedication at ALL to customer service. At least let me know that you’re not sitting in your air conditioned houses watching the rest of us fan ourselves with what paper we can find in the dark.
So, they wrote back today. And I think their answer is funny. I should go through the claims report to get some money back for lost food, I think it would be fun to go buy $20 of groceries on DTE’s bill.
Dear Elizabeth Beckman:We apologize for the inconvenience with our website and the phone lines.It was extremely unfortunate we did not have a back up to the phone system. We worked expeditiously with the phone company to get the phone lines back up.We also are working hard, around the clock, to get all our customers restored.We will send you a claims form to report any loss of food.We value your input and your e-mail has been forwarded to management for review, to help make improvements with future catastrophic outages.Our records indicate your service was restored on 6-9, approximately 2:43 PM.
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- Almost 17 weeks
Here’s me today, standing out on the deck after a really cool storm. I love being able to go outside and see the awesome views on the deck – it’s really pretty sweet. Anyway, there’s the belly. There’s me, with the belly. I just hope it goes back to being small and cuteish again, someday.
So, I haven’t posted in a while (a week?), because it’s been a really busy week. Or two. Or more. I’ve been crazy at school and at home, with the deck and having dad at our house for a week and the warm weather and the pool opening – it’s been nuts! Our deck is finally finished though, and it’s pretty awesome. Now we need to buy some furniture to stick out there – I was thinking that maybe Connor and I would go to some garage sales on Saturday after soccer practice and look for cool strange pieces of furniture to stick out there. We need to find a cooler weekend, very soon, to actually water treat the deck, and after that, all we have to do is enjoy it. Thanks Dad, Craig, and (ahem) Neil!
Speaking of Neil, I once again have good reason to completely despise Craig’s parents. When Craig’s dad was here briefly to help out with the deck, I think I may have gone a little overboard with my hatred of him. I try as hard as I can to keep that kind of stuff from leaking onto the outside of me; I have been pretty good in the past at keeping up appearances while silently wishing plague on certain people.
On the first night Craig’s dad was in our house, I came home feeling feisty, so after hearing and seeing the way he was treating his own son, I addressed both him and my father on the couch about the situation. My dad wasn’t really doing anything wrong at all; he designed, planned, and built our deck – much of it single-handedly. So anything he was doing that could have normally bugged me was not bothering me at all, and I was happy to clean up after him, cook for him, get him water or tea or whatever. Craig’s dad, on the other hand, was asked to come to our house to help with CONNOR, not with the deck, and instead of doing what was requested of him, he went outside and chatted with my dad, acting like he was helping out. Craig ended up taking care of Connor, cooking food for all of the men, and once in a while being asked outside to do some heavy lifting or something that his own father couldn’t handle because he’s old and has had a stroke. In general, Craig was given little chance to do anything with the building of his own deck (initially, at least, but he made up for it later). I think his dad has little regard for his own son’s pride, only his own, so the old man let a young man feel like crap without thought of the consequences. AND Neil was leaving his shit around, not taking his shoes off, leaving his plate on the table and walking away, and making sexist and/or racist remarks about whatever he was seeing on the TV. I got fed up, and I told them that they better not treat Craig like he’s a little woman of the house (I tried as hard as I could to mostly direct this at Craig’s dad), and I expect that each “man” take care of his own crap; nobody was in our house for a vacation from doing what is required of them normally. Neil defended himself, acted like he’s such a good helper boy, and really ignored me. I hated him from that minute on, but I kept my mouth shut (to him, at least). I then started talking to my sisters – Carole especially, and started realizing that Neil’s not only shitty to his own son, but he’s really icky around me and my sisters! Long lingering kisses, and icky squeezy hugs that are inappropriate for a man to give a woman that is not intimately involved with him, so ESPECIALLY inappropriate for a man to give to his daughter-in-law or her sisters. ICK! So toward the end of his stay, his sexist comments, disgusting looks, comments about pregnancy or childrearing, and idiot remarks about building as if he knows anything about construction at all, really got to me. So, I told him! He said Ann wanted him to stay at our house to help build the deck, and I told him that I wanted him to go home! GEEZ! My dad didn’t even notice that my comment may have been rude, so I don’t think it was. I tried to say it in a joking manner, like Neil likes to say everything, and I felt a lot better after saying it. Then, two hours later, he actually did leave. I invited him and Ann over for Ashley’s birthday dinner, and he said they’d discuss it. Then he was gone. Whew!
Now I come to find out that he was really offended by my treatment of him, and he felt “unwelcome” in my house. Well he was unwelcome, but I had no choice but to let him come over because like I’ve said before, I couldn’t take an entire week off so that I could watch Connor while Craig and Dad built the deck. I was stuck with him being at my house, and he’s always been a jerk I didn’t really enjoy being around, but I have a knack for dealing with things that I don’t like. I do! I mean, look what I’ve been through in my life (ok, it’s generally been really pretty good, but not *easy*), and then tell me that you think I’m not a resilient person.
Then I find out that Ann is mad too, that we would be so callous and rude to her wonderful husband. WhatEVER. It’s so ridiculous how quickly she changes her mind about something just to bother me and Craig. She hates Neil. She says it all the time – in fact, I hate having the two of them over at the same time, because it’s all you can do to STOP from hearing her tell of her hatred for her husband. Now I have to feel badly for being a bitch to her asshole fucker of a husband? NO THANKS. I’m not apologizing, nor am I backing down. I’m fucking pregnant, and anything to set me off WILL set me off, and in this particular circumstance, it’s set me off for good. When Connor was born, and before he was born too in fact (I was reading an old journal entry the other day full of fury and hatred for them, and it was from about a month before Connor arrived), I bit my tongue and coped with having crappy in-laws. I prevented them from coming in the delivery room and for the most part got my way, and I enforced the “we’re not going to have you around 24/7″ rule when we finally got home. I actually upset them pretty good at that time too, because Ann was (of course) being pushy and bitchy and just GOT THE BEST OF ME, so I blew up at her. And I’ll do it again, I swear I will, they better just TEST me so that I get the chance to. UGH. Ranting ranting ranting.
I know they’re Craig’s parents, but I really would not be very upset if they didn’t exist in the human form anymore. I’d show my condolences for a loss of a human life, but I wouldn’t miss them much. It’s so EVIL, but it’s so true. I don’t even know HOW to stop myself from feeling this way toward them.
So the reason I’m writing this huge long ranting post is that now, apparently, Craig’s parents are insisting that we bring Connor out to some sure-to-be-backwards campground in mid-June, because they’re doing their first camp thing of the summer and they just NEED to have us there. No apologies, no recognition of the fact that I’m angry and frustrated and it’s THEM that’s causing this feeling. Or maybe it’s caused by them and pregnancy, but either way, fucking RECOGNIZE IT and try to do something about it! Not them. Not those fucking pride-filled assholes. And Craig wants me to GO! What they really want is for me to drop off my 3.5 year old beautiful son to be in the presence of their dangerous shit – every fucking time he’s left alone with them something happens that clearly would not have happened if he were with me. I’m not a protective parent, either – I let him climb stuff, jump off tall stairs, try hanging upside down, jump in the pool and go underwater – but I make sure he doesn’t touch the stove or play with knives or near fire. They don’t – they’re retarded, Ann’s often drunk, and Neil’s oblivious to EVERYTHING if it doesn’t directly affect him or what he’s doing.
So no, I’m not dropping off my kid. And no, I don’t want to go. And no, I don’t want to say “maybe”, because it’s not like between now and then they’re going to suddenly come to their senses and realize they’re selfish pricks that I don’t want to have anything to do with, ever. Ann’s the type of woman that I hate anyway, always concerned with the gossip in someone else’s life, too little concern with intelligence, politics, or world events. Too into jewelry and makeup and “products”, too little care with anything real, anything emotional, anything based in reality without the extras. Neil’s a pervert, and a sexist racist pig pervert at that. The world could do well with a lot less men like him in it.
I read today that a little stress in pregnancy is actually good for the growing fetus, but I’m not so sure a LOT of stress is any good for anyone.
