From the Archives: That's it, I'm Reading the Riot Act

(2007)

 For anyone around me who has had their head stuck in a gofer hole for the past 9 months, I’m pregnant. I’ve tried not to be the knocked up chick who just can’t manage to talk about anything other than her “bump” with a decent amount of success. However. It’s not a secret. As of the past 3 months, you would have to be blind to miss it. Seriously. All I need is a shaved head and a lotus position to pass for a laughing Buddha. My due date is also a well advertised fact. That and the fact that I am not having a comfortable pregnancy. I want it over with. So why in the world do people just not get it?   Now I wasn’t really planning this out well last winter when we started trying to conceive, but having a baby around Thanksgiving when you have another preschool aged child who also has a birthday around that time is a BAD idea. I’m a nice person. Well, most of the time anyhow. I’m polite to people and usually smile and say please and thank you because that’s the way I want to be treated. However, I’m pregnant. Knock on wood, this will be the last time, and I really am finding myself giving less than 1 whole flying granola bar about being nice. There are a 

few people who I really want to knock upside the head for just not getting it.

To My Over Eager Friend who is Living My Pregnancy Vicariously:

I understand that you are done having kids and miss the whole pregnancy and baby thing as your youngest just turned 3.  You also happen to be related to me through marriage and I consider you to be a Fantastic in-law and friend. I know you are beyond thrilled to have another niece to add to the growing herd of girls that is our family. However. You really need to take a breath. I can barely make myself get out of bed in the morning and waddle into the kitchen to make my daughter lunch for preschool.  I know you are excited, but I really do not want people at my house. I love that we only live 2 hrs apart. Our kids will be close and it’s great to have family around, but please. I really do not even feel like making polite conversation with my husband right now. None the less having people over that require that I get up and get dressed in a normal fashion. I love my nieces, but having 3 girls at my house imitating a tornado instead of 1 is just something I’m not up for. Not only that, but you seem to want to come over EVERY weekend. I have had company my entire pregnancy in the form of your parents and your family. The. Entire. Pregnancy. I am loving my peace and quiet right now.  Don’t take it personally, but I’m leaning toward emotional basket case and would rather while away my time in peace and quiet.

To the Guilt Trip Peanut Gallery RE Excitement:

Yes. I am excited to be adding another daughter to my family. Having a baby is lots of fun, and it’s been a long time since I had a baby in the house. 4 years. However, I am not the type to go bouncing off the walls from excitement. I’m just too tired and uncomfortable. Please stop making me feel like a freak because I am not showing my excitement in the same way as you. We have a name for her, plenty of clothes/diapers/socks etc. We’re very ready for her. However, I am just ready to be done being pregnant and have the baby around. The excitement has lasted for 9 long months. I’m ready to end the anticipation and just get on with it. I’m not a very excitable person to begin with.  Add 6 months of discomfort, and I tend to just come off ornery.

To My Daughter’s Preschool Teacher:

I understand that you are a very busy person. We love you. You take good care of our daughter while she is at school. However.  I warned you before the school year started that I was having a baby in early December. Why in the world would you assign me snack week at the end of October? Did it not occur to you that an 8 month pregnant mom would not be really thrilled to have to make some extra trips to the grocery store and get up early to cut up healthy snacks for 12 children? The look on your face was priceless when I brought in potato chips the first day. Give me a break! I love to cook and bring things in, but the timing was just wrong.  Did you really need to have me bring stuff in for Thanksgiving too? I finally gave up and just brought store bought cupcakes for my daughter’s birthday (I would usually label this sacrilege) but I just don’t have the energy or inclination to bend over and retrieve things from a hot oven right now. I also don’t want to go and sit with 12 other moms and dads tomorrow and eat Thanksgiving dinner. My husband has abandoned me in an effort to bring home the bacon, so I will have to sit and make polite conversation by myself. I just don’t want to right now, but if I don’t, you will convince me my daughter will be scarred for life. Again, it really is a matter of bad timing. Anyhow, she’s going to be scarred for life with the arrival of her new sister. Siblings do that to you.  If I hear any crap about not being there for the Christmas program – which by the way is directly ON my due date, well, I just better not hear anything about it.

To my Husband:

You have been stepping up to the plate in a fantastic way, even if I have to remind you of certain things every once in a while, and I love you for it. Just a few things we need to iron out.  You really need to stop the guilt trip issues. If I choose not to get completely dressed on a certain day – butt out. I don’t walk around nude and our daughter is not going to be warped seeing me walk to the bathroom in the morning in just my underwear and a tee. If I decide that I can handle picking up our daughter from preschool after the baby is born and I expressly tell you that, do not bully and nag me into calling someone to arrange to have her picked up. I will start chucking heavy objects at you.  Now is really not the time for you to decide that you know what is best for me in terms of socializing. I really don’t want to talk to anyone. I’m not particularly good at shooting the breeze with people in general – now I am not even going to put forth the effort. Heck, I really don’t even feel like talking to you, my best friend, or even my mother. Do not abandon me in social situations in a misguided attempt to force me to make friends, especially if I have specifically told you how I feel about it. If you do, I am going to sit there and pass time and mentally throw objects at you for making me sit there without an easy person to talk to. I just don’t want to talk to anyone right now. They may be nice people, and I will make more of an effort when I don’t feel like a hippo, but it just ain’t happening right now, so I consider this to be especially cruel. P.S. Just because you have a job to go to doesn’t mean you automatically get excused from school nonsense like Thanksgiving dinner. If I have to sit there, so do you.

From the Archives: Pregnant with a Capital P

Please note: this is from 2007. I am not pregnant right now. Although I would love to be.


(2006/7-ish)

I'm currently having a mental crisis. I'm either pregnant, or stark raving mad. Neither option is really that attractive to me, but I'd have to prefer pregnant since that would only last 9 months. I guess the theoretical baby would last much longer, but come on, insanity instead? No thanks.  After all of the months of wondering am I pregnant or am I crazy/have PMS?, I'm positive that there must be a better way. Mother Nature should provide women with a fail safe way of knowing and not having to guess. I guess we have the EPT, but when I was pregnant with Akhila, it took 3 of those suckers and about 2 weeks. 2 weeks is WAY too long to sit and wonder. I think we should have some physical obvious sign that could not be attributed to any other cause. Something like a big blue spot on say our stomachs. Exhaustion, headaches, tender boobs, and puking can all be symptoms of other things. A big blue spot could not. So, I'll have to wait and see if I have a parasite in the oven (kidding!) or if I'm just leaning a bit to the looney side of life.

Becky

From the Archives: Playboy Athletic Wear on Fat Chicks

Mood: Discouraged, but calm

Listening to: My own typing

So I’m just passing some time. A little bummed out that my daughter has not decided that I can be relieved of this awfully uncomfortable state of late pregnancy, but generally content.  I just had to blog about this because it represented to me one of those perfectly ironic moments in life where you just sit back and say to yourself, “You have to be kidding me.” Now I don’t want any hate mail. I know it’s not PC to call anyone fat. Well, tough. My blog, my wording. And I calls them how I sees them.  Anyhow, since I so resemble a laughing Buddha right now, I reserve the right to laugh. I’m a fat chick too. All right, it’s pregnant fat, but still fat.

 So I was out recently in a bout of warmer weather and I noticed an overweight chick wearing a playboy bunny on her shirt. Now I’m not talking a healthy, curvy chick with a few extra pounds, I’m talking a chick who had some serious rolls hanging out of this outfit. Which happened to be WAY too tight, but come one, it was a playboy wear.  We were out on the street, so it’s not like we were in a gym or anything. So I’m okay with that. Hell, I love the playboy bunny myself. I happened to turn around after she passed me and noticed that she had “Playboy Athletic Wear” plastered on her oversized behind. (one of which I also possess, but anyhow…) I seriously thought was going to roll down the street laughing. Having the playboy bunny on your shirt is one thing. It’s gutsy, and it doesn’t matter much who you are. Having their athletic wear on your biker shorts that are a few sizes too small for your overweight frame is quite another.  Let’s dig in, shall we? Since when does playboy make athletic wear – or any wear for that matter – that heavier people can fit into? I never could fit into anything of theirs, and I was a curvy chick before getting knocked up for the second time. Second of all, does she not realize the almost unholy irony in wearing that? Playboy idolizes (and yes, trivializes) women in general by turning them all into plastic, blond, size 0, shaved, bimbos that are glorified sex toys. You. Do. Not. Fit. The. Description.!   Not many people look good in spandex. Pulling it off is one of those things that only uber skinny women can do. Kind of like wearing skinny jeans and looking good in them. Why would you draw attention to your ass by advertising playboy athletic wear?  I mentioned this in another blog. Everyone has a mirror. Please to look in it before stepping out of the house. If you are not sure, enlist an honest friend. One who doesn’t want you to go out of the house looking like a supreme idiot. We all have at least one friend like that.

Hope everyone is having a good week. Hopefully next time I blog I can spread some good news about having a baby. I’ll warn you first so you don’t have to sit through a mom blog if you don’t want to. 

Arrivederci.

Becky

From the Archives: An Ode to White Plains

Listening to: Def Leppard – 2 Steps Behind

Mood: Apathetic

2 Blogs in 1 day. Aren’t you lucky!! J Just kidding. I’ve been meaning to write about my fantastic residence in White Plains for a while now.   I don’t want you to get me wrong in this blog. White Plains is a fantastic city to live in. We get the city thing without having to live in NYC. We have just a touch more of the small town feel without the hillbilly thing of smaller towns further north.  However, there are some things that drive me bananas.

Driving:

I just wrote a blog on a near accident that I had today called Near Misses. Check it out. Now nearly getting in an accident is not an unusual thing here, I just usually don’t come so close to a serious accident.  People here are on some heavy duty crack when it comes to driving. Seriously.  The law of the jungle decides who goes where. Don’t know where you’re going? That’s ok. Just pull right in front of the person in the next lane to get to where you want. Or feel free to stop in a driving lane and think about it. Don’t feel like waiting in line to merge? No problem. Just jump to the front of the line in the next lane and push your way in. Feel like driving really slow until you get to the yellow light and then going through real quick so the guy behind you has to wait? Sure. No problem.  Needless to say, there are some pretty inconsiderate ass hats out there.  What gets me is the people who live here pull dangerous stunts. I have a decent level of tolerance for people who don’t live here who actually don’t know where they are going. Sometimes cities and one way streets suck. Been there done that. Problem is, everyone drives like that. It’s a constant worry that someone is going to pull into you because someone else stopped in a driving lane and the other car just doesn’t want to wait to scoot over.  White Plains is a city. There is a LOT of traffic. Especially at rush hour. Between the sheer volume, construction and stop lights (I’ll get to these in a minute) racing to get ahead of 3 cars just makes you look like a douche.

Pedestrians:

I’m a suburban girl by upbringing. I am not used to the sheer  volume of people randomly wandering the streets and crossing them for fun. None of the other places I’ve lived (and most of them were cities) have had so much foot traffic. It really astounds me. I applaud it actually. Who needs a car when you can walk?  It reduces the number of cars I have to deal with on the road. However. There are certain rules and indeed, common sense principals, that everyone should be mindful of.  We have an excellent system of stoplights and cross walks. They are NEVER more than a block apart. So why in the name of the Great Bunny (remember him?) do people insist on strolling across the street between the lights? I’m not even asking you to wait for a green light if there aren’t cars. Why are you so freakin lazy???  Let me tell you something. If you randomly wander  across the street when I have a green light and you are not at a corner, I am not going to slow down. I refuse. And you had better not glare at me or I’m speeding up. You wouldn’t try this in NYC, someone would actually run you over. Why is it ok here?  This leads me to the people who totally ignore the stop lights and saunter across the street at the corner or not. You have got to be kidding me. You know the light just turned green for the cars you are trying to walk in front of, why in the world would you randomly stroll into the road and make everyone wait for you while you wander across the street.  It really comes down to courtesy and arrogance. You are not the grand Pooh Bah. You do not have the divine right to make everyone wait for you to cross the road just because you weren’t paying attention or didn’t feel like waiting. Pedestrians have rights, but just because no one is willing to go to jail to hit you doesn’t mean you should act like an ass hat.  On another note. Yes, there is a LOT of construction in the city right now. If one side of a busy street doesn’t have a sidewalk and the other does, for the love of god, people, cross the street and use the sidewalk.  Not only is it extremely annoying for all the cars that have to slow down to wait for you to get out of the road, (and yes, you are IN THE ROAD! Even if you are right next to the barricade) it’s also very dangerous for you to generally walk between moving cars that weigh a couple tons and concrete blocks that aren’t going anywhere. This should be common sense. Up against cars or concrete blocks, you are going to be the one who ends up as hamburger. Please, don’t be so frickin lazy and just cross the street. Thanks!

To the City Suits :

Thanks for making White Plains such a nice place to live. You really have done a bang up job of developing the city and making it a great place to live.  Just tell me a few things. Who designed the stoplights?  And how much crack where they allowed to ingest while they planned how to program them? I understand the need for so many lights – after all W.P. is a big city with lots of cars. But seriously. I have my moments when I could swear it was a diabolical plot to prevent people from driving above 20 in the city. It is literally impossible to drive down any random street and get more than half of the lights green.  Yeah. And the side streets that turn red even when there are no cars there. Not cool. I really don’t like waiting my turn for cars that aren’t even there. One more thing. What the heck is the deal with the construction on EVERY SINGLE FRICKIN STREET??? I was okay when it was just Main street for the new Ritz hotel, but seriously. It’s November and over half the down town streets are torn up in some manner or other. Do you really think you can get all those projects done before winter? And what’s up with all the metal plates on the roads? Are we having a sewer crisis?  Why else would you dig up SO many sections of road at a time and cover them with metal plates? There should be at least 2 or 3 cross town streets that don’t have construction. Give the people some freedom to drive down a street that isn’t going to take them double the time to get down because you tore up both sides for god knows what. I know you have a budget and want to use it all so you have money next year, but how bout a little planning. I’m going to be extremely pissed if you leave all the roads half torn up all winter because you couldn’t plan out the projects a little better.  Now the Lake Street Bridge project – that really is a diabolical idea. It’s pretty much the only convenient way to get out to West Harrison and the airport. Meaning lots of people drive out that way. The corner of Kensico and Lake is already a mess. Why the Sam frickin hell would you work on the bridge and tear up the intersection too?  Perhaps the bridge needs to be replaced – no one really knows – but how in the world are you justifying this? It’s such a busy area, there has to be a better way of doing it.

On that note, I’m done kvetching about my fair city. It really is a great place to live.

Have a good week.

Becky

From the Archives: An Ode to my Building

Listening to: Guns N Roses – Civil War

Mood: Ornery

 

I figured I should just keep the train rolling today. It may be a while before I blog again.  I decided to write a little something about my neighbors and my building. I like living here. My apartment kicks ass and it’s a decently nice neighborhood.  Most of the people I’m writing about I haven’t really met and don’t really know. I just know them as the people I share a floor with or pay money to every month to live here.

To the Bird Lady next door:

I don’t really know you that well. In fact, the only thing I know about you is that you’re African and that you have birds. I didn’t think we were allowed to – but whatever, I don’t really care if you do.  I like birds.  Let me tell you something. I don’t bite. Most of the time.  If I smile at you in the hallway, I’m not being creepy. I’m not going to try to convert you to Jehovah’s Witness or force my way into your apartment. I’m just being neighborly. Smile back.  You might like me if we ever get to talking.

To the violent people next door:

I don’t know what it is about that apartment. I think it may be cursed or have bad karma or something. Every single person who moves in here has domestic issues. We’ve had 3 or 4 neighbors since we moved in and every single time they get into nasty, loud, violent fights.  I seriously thought someone was going to get killed before you moved in when they had a 7 am fight and started throwing furniture.  Then there were the people after them who tried breaking down the door to get at the person inside.  Another loud screaming match ensued. Then you moved in. You have quieted down some. I was really worried when you had a fight and asked me to call the police. I HATE getting involved with other people’s drama.  You get locked out by someone, it’s your problem, not mine. I know it sounds cold, but this is not the ghetto. Do not involve me in your drama.  One more thing. Everyone can smell your pot. You may want to open a window.

To the chimneys by the stairwell:

You have been the bane of my pregnancy every morning. You have got to have the nastiest, smelliest apartment ever.  All I have to do is walk by and I can smell the stench of old, concentrated, cigarette smoke. Seriously, you make the hallway smell like a dive bar. I cannot imagine what it smells like inside. You really stink.  I don’t have any recommendations for you because I don’t think that smell will ever come out. After all those cigarettes you can’t have that much longer left anyhow. Would it be too much to ask you to open a window and air it out a bit, or at least when you smoke?  The rest of us don’t want to have to worry about getting cancer just from walking by your apartment.  And we really don’t have much of a choice seeing as to how you are right by the stairs and elevator.

To whomever it is who cooks fish/seafood every night:

Whatever it is you are cooking, I’m going to assume it tastes good. But it makes the hallway smell like a commercial seafood dock. It’s just nasty. The smell is SO strong! If I’m not eating it, I really don’t want to smell fish and seafood.  Again. Open a frickin window or use a fan.

To whomever cooks dinner with all that garlic:

Seriously: I’m going to invite myself to dinner if you don’t stop making it smell so yummy!

To the lady with the 2 little boys at the end of the hall:

We met at the dam once and I’m ashamed to say that I can’t remember your name. I don’t think you remember mine either. It’s okay. I love saying hi when we see each other in the hall or elevator. It would be fun to have a play date with you and your kids sometime. I’m afraid, though, that between your boys and my daughter, the building might get torn down.  It has little to do with being boys. My daughter is just as wild, but there’s only one of her.  Put them all together and we may be taken hostage. J

To the owners of the building:

Sigh. Where do I start? My main gripe with you is the porch renovation project going on right now.  What in the world where you thinking? I’m hoping this project was necessary for safety. Otherwise I might take hostages. I don’t’ think you are aware of how extremely LOUD it has been for the past few weeks. It’s like living in a construction site. It is such a loud, jarring noise I can hardly hear myself think. Don’t jackhammers cause hearing loss? Let me tell you, you don’t have the walls or windows insulated enough to cut out ANY noise pollution. It’s enough to give someone a migraine. If they must drill like that, can you please tell them that 9 am on Saturday is a BAD idea. I almost threw some very heavy candles at them when they started that last weekend.  That is just not right.

Have a good week.

Becky