GOLDEN BIRTHDAY

Now I am 31 years old.

Which means I'm officially out of my mid-twenties, right?

KING CORN

I'm wearing brown cloggy shoes today. Walking from class to class this morning, I noticed some piece of debris found its way into one shoe. So I slipped it off and discovered a single kernel of corn.

Which reminds me, earlier this week I saw a documentary called King Corn. It's all about the hidden costs to corn (subsidies, feedlots, obesity) and I quite enjoyed it. Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma is a more comprehensive report on this topic but this one is distilled and a little more animated.

Good stuff.

RAISE BOYS AND GIRLS THE SAME

I have a 20 week ultrasound scheduled next Thursday. The Steady and I decided to keep the sex a mystery. Knowing will not make us love the kid any differently, and besides, not knowing will cut down on all those obnoxious "gender appropriate" infant clothes relatives love to buy. I don't want any pink outfits speckled with twirling ballerinas or blue outfits dotted with boxy trucks. Thanks, but no thanks.

Boy howdy, people love to guess though. And they love to ask about my suspicions, as though I posses some magical intuition. Some folks insist dreams will reveal the sex of the child. But lately, I have been dreaming about international espionage, circus elephants, and masturbation. Does that mean the kid is going to grow up to be a spy or an animal trainer?

Or a masturbator?

KUGELIS: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Last weekend The Steady and I went to my parent’s house to visit and do a little snow shoeing. Often, my dad will use these gatherings as an excuse to make some Eastern European dishes. It is kind of a political move, actually. Mom's dinner lobby is weaker when her children are in town and dad knows it. This time he made Kugelis, which you probably already know, is the official Lithuanian national dish. He used to make it when we were kids and we love it. It's a potato/bacon/onion loaf that is eaten with copious amounts of sour cream. I mean who are we kdding? Most Eastern European dishes are simply vectors for sour cream.

My brother actually bought a t-shirt from an eastern European deli in Chicago that exclaims, Kugelis: Breakfast of Champions!

Good lord, what a nerd.

My dad also makes homemade sauerkraut from the cabbages he grows in his garden. It's really good stuff and we were fortunate enough to take a 32 0z container home with us. Last night we ate it with Polish sausage, rye bread, and zingy mustard.

SKIING WITH SIGUR

Cross country skiing on city lakes at sunset while listening to Sigur Ros is fantastic. I highly recommend it.

NEAR WEST #10

A few nights of back country camping in Theodore Roosevelt State Park.

NEAR WEST #9

We hiked around Devil's Tower in Wyoming.

Sadly, we had no encounters with the Third Kind.

NEAR WEST #8

First we camped on the banks of the French Creek (above) where we consumed a bottle of wine and dodged poison ivy. And then we bathed in Sylvan Lake (below) where the very deep, very cold water was enough to give me an earache.

NEAR WEST #7

Black Hills wildlife from top to bottom: feral donkey, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep

NEAR WEST #6

Free beer samples at the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado quickly turned into drunken hula-hooping in front of future in-laws.

NEAR WEST #5

Dioramas from Denver's Museum of Natural History.

NEAR WEST #4

Thin air in Estes Park, Colorado.

We drove/hiked to a point 2.5 miles above sea level.

NEAR WEST #3

Predator and prey in close proximity at the Omaha Zoo.
I'm guessing the arrangment keeps both parties sharp...

NEAR WEST #2

Tapirs resting at the Omaha Zoo.

NEAR WEST #1

So Pony was the reason why I failed to post in August. The Steady and I were traveling around the Near West. We drove down to Omaha to visit his sister and then out to Colorado to stay with his parents. On the way, we did some camping in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wyoming. It was a splendid trip!

Here, I'll post some pictures so we can all remember what summer looks like:

LITTLE RED TOYOTA

Great snakes! I don't think I ever mentioned: I bought a car last August. It is the first car I've ever owned. Well I suppose I co-owned a car when I was married those four years, but this is the first car I ever purchased myself. And I'm thirty years old! For shame, what a bad American I am.

It's a Toyota, Yaris.

Here she is in the Black Hills:

Sometimes I call her Pony Girl.

Sometimes I just call her Pony.

MAY YOU GET A RASH

Just a quick note to the person who broke into my gym locker (how?) at the YWCA and stole my half-used bottle of shampoo (okay) and my half-used stick of deodorant (euch):

Why you do that?!

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING

And found my left eyebrow completely disheveled.

DUB-YA ON THE RADIO

They broke the news this morning on my way to work so we could hear George Dub-ya Bush hold his last press conference. Had I given in to my impulse to changed the dial I would have missed him saying, "And many of you misunderestimated me."

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Mr. President.

PET PEEVE #4

I hate it when people overcompensate their excessive inexperience, ignorance, and inadequacy with haughtiness, bravado, and snobbery.

KISS MY ASS COMCAST

The alleyway behind our house is narrow. Last Wednesday, after a 12 hour day at work, all I wanted to do was come home, park my car in the garage, and eat the hot, crispy, spicy pork chimichanga that I planned to fetch from the neighborhood joint.

But alas, as I turned into the alleyway, I found it occluded by a rather large, vacant Comcast truck. For those of you that don’t live in my neck of the woods, Comcast is the current ruling cable mafia family. They own our city and for that, I hate them. In fact, our combined loathing of this company is the reason why The Steady and I still don’t have basic cable TV. But now as I am faced with this empty truck illegally parked in the alleyway, I hate them a little bit extra.

I can see the headlights of a car on the other side of the van, trying to access their garage on my side of the van. I honk my horn and unleash an impressive string of expletives. The person on the other side honks their horn too. But nothing happens. So we both concede to backing our cars out of the alleyway to drive around the block.

After I park the car, I go inside the house and vent my frustrations to The Steady. He listens and shakes his head in allegiance while he puts his coat and shoes on. Then we leave out the back door to pick up our take-out food. When we get back from the restaurant, maybe twenty, twenty five minutes elapsed.

The van is still in the alleyway.
But what’s this? As we pas the inert beast, some young punk bounds out of a nearby apartment complex and starts to hop into the van. I put on my best New York Attitude and ask him what the BIG FUCKING IDEA is, leaving his van in the middle of the road like that. He says there wasn’t any parking on the other side of the street. In fact, he insists, there was not a single parking spot for two and a half blocks! This is bullshit. I live here. There's parking all over the place. This kid was obviously too lazy to find it and then walk one block to the job. Yeah, it’s winter. It’s cold. I get it, but you can’t just park where you want Cable Guy. You are not a fire truck or an ambulance. In fact, you are not any kind of emergency vehicle. You're just a lazy dumb ass. And I hate the people who sign you meager paychecks.

THAT'S ABOUT THE SIZE OF IT

I lost more than five pounds before I knew I was pregnant. Not because of the nausea/puking, that did not kick in until the middle of the second month. No, I suppose it was because I was burning more calories. All of the sudden coffee for breakfast and yogurt/granola/fruit salad for lunch was just not enough. I was amazed to find my own gurgling stomach rousing me at 3 AM and it would not let me rest until I offered up the sacrificial banana or bowl of Trader Joe Ohs.

It was difficult getting used to these new demands, considering my dicey history with food. I felt like such a piggy at first. For the past four years I worked hard to establish a healthy relationship with meals. Then without warning, the parameters changed. And all those idiot pregnancy books love to admonish, "Don't over eat!" "Don't gain too quickly!"

Psssssh. Fuck that. I am eating this entire carton of cottage cheese, and not one of you stupid shit bags (jabbing the air with a spoon) is going to make me feel bad about it. Here, at the foothills of month five, I am roughly seven pounds heavier than my average weight. And that's just fine.

Interestingly, I asked The Steady's mom how much she gained during her pregnancies and she (5 ft 7 in) said 15 pounds! These days doctors "recommend" 25-35 pounds, so that's hardly anything. So I asked my mom (5 ft 2 in) what she gained. She just howled and exclaimed 50 lbs.

You go mom!

CHINESE JAPANESE DIRTY KNEES LOOK AT THESE

So those squirrely immature boys I mentioned on 12/15. Man, they crack me up. Today I was showing a video about affluence in China. Shockingly, there are Chinese people on the program and they are speaking in, you guessed it, Chinese. And apparently, some of these guys find the Chinese language rather funny.

Ching! Chang! Chong! Wing! Wang! I'm sure that's all they hear.

Whatevs. I don't care. If anything, I find it funny that they find it funny.* But while they're giggling uncontrollably into their balled up fists I have to ask, "What? Are we, like, twelve or something?" They all look at one another, unsure how to respond until someone says, "Well Jim is post-secondary, so." To this I say, "Well, I guess that means Jim has a good excuse.  What's yours?"

I'm no fun.

* Funny in that sad, bewildered I-can't-believe-you-are-so-young-and-inexperienced-that-you-still-take-someone-speaking-another-language-as-hilarity sort of way.

PET PEEVE #3

I hate it when I am listening to the news on the radio and I can hear the speaker's sticky spit smacking around in their mouths when they speak. Aaaaaaagh! Why don't you remove the microphone from your swampy, Tropic of Capricorn mouth and swish with some Listerine or at least drink a tall glass of water.

All those smacky-smack sounds between your words make me want to punch myself in the ears!

DEMOGRAPHICS

A couple weeks ago I received a telephone call from the hospital that will help me to remove the little bun from my oven in about five weeks [sic]. They said they needed demographic information. First, they asked me to define my race. God I loathe this question, as all of you should. Are you Black? White? Or perhaps you are one of those Asianorpacificislander? I mean, who can answer this accurately? The steady, for example, has fair skin but he's also 1/16 Cherokee. Does that mean he should identify as Native American too?

Scheisse.

But what really made me hoot was their second question:

NURSE: What is your religion?

WREN: Atheist.

NURSE: Hmm…

WREN: That’s not an option is it?

NURSE: No. How do you spell it?

WREN: Ha-ha! It depends who you ask. How about S-A-T-A-N?

NURSE: ...

WREN: I'm just kidding, check "none."

THE HIGH COST OF LIVING

Yesterday I had my third prenatal visit. The physician let us listen to the heartbeat and wow, talk about a speedy metabolism!! My word, what a hummingbird! What a little water shrew! I still can't believe that thing is actually renting my womb. And who wouldn't considering the numerous paid utilities (food, garbage disposal, water, and heat)? FYI: phone, high speed internet, and satellite TV are all your responsibility, little friend.

E-gads. No wonder I have been eating like a hyperphasic bear.

DESIGNATED DRIVER

PRADA: So how are things going? How are you feeling these days?

WREN: Eh, I'm all right. The nausea is over but now I get headaches.

WREN: And I miss drinking beer and wine, especially over the holidays.

PRADA: But you can have a small glass of wine now and then, yeah?

WREN: Let me rephrase that.  I miss getting drunk on beer and wine.