Here is an incomplete list of things I suspect I'm going to miss when I'm no longer a pregnant person:

 

Being warm 80% of the time, even in winter; eating what I want, when I want, without images of diet consultants breathing down my neck and chastising me for that soft pretzel I ate at 10:00 at night; letting myself rest when I need to; having an excuse to do things I want to do, like clean my house, and get out of things I don't want to do, like hunt down and try to consume books on critical theory; simple foods that taste amazing, much more so than I remember; peace and quiet.

Here's an incomplete list of things I miss about being a non-pregnant person:

 

Prosciutto, turkey sandwiches, going to fancy restaurants and ordering goat cheese with wild abandon, booze, sex (pelvic rest is a major bitch), spending less than 60% of my time in the bathroom, not worrying about regulating the amount of fiber in my diet, rare meat, sleeping on my back and/or stomach, Coumadin, the lack of twice-weekly doctors' appointments, joints that don't feel like they're on fire, the ability to walk more than a block at a time, going to Vegas on a whim, not being terrified of everything, visiting European countries where they don't always pasteurize, having my brain back in working order.

Wow, I can't believe it's been so long since I've posted here.  Needless to say, lots and lots of things have been going on--2007 was a mighty big year, for Dave and me both.

 

In terms of writing stuff, I had quite an up and down season.  Two journals requested rewrites of some of my work, and then both publications ultimately turned the pieces down.  (I'm not going to name names here, but one journal that was interested in a short story of mine really needs to change their editorial policy.  First, they sent me raw editor notes, which included comments that were rude, uninformative, and sometimes wrong--they called the past progressive tense "passive voice" and would jot down little quips like "I don't buy it."  Then, after I'd set aside quite a few hours of work time so I could "fix" all of their weird little quibbles with things, they sat on my draft for a month and subsequently told me I hadn't done exactly what they wanted, but they were now too far into the layout process to wait for more corrections.  As an editor who worked in medical publishing for 3 years and did some academic editing as well, I was pretty pissed off.  There's nothing worse than to be edited by people that don't know what they're doing.)  But the good news is that I also won 2nd place in the Whiskey Island Magazine poetry contest (that came with actual money--woo hoo!) AND I got a chapbook manuscript accepted at Finishing Line Press.   My very first nearly-full-lenght publication.  Yay!

 

Right now, my chapbook, She, can be preordered at www.finishinglinepress.com (it's listed under the "New Releases and Forthcoming" link).  There's free shipping if you order between now and Feb. 29th.  And the book features some awesome cover art by Rosemont design student (and one of my former creative nonfiction workshoppers!) Liz Tetzlaff, and a great author photo by Rosemont design student Katie Reing.  So check it out!!  You'll be supporting a great small press, and you can witness my very first solo writing endeavor, after a loooong time of waiting and keeping my fingers crossed:

 

 

The OTHER big news in my life is...I'm pregnant!  Yes, Dave and I discovered this about the middle of September, and it was a big, whomping surprise for both of us.  The whole process has been something of a roller coaster ride, because since I have lupus and APS, a blood disorder that makes my blood clot too much, I've been considered a high-risk pregnant person and thus have been going to doctors' appointments about once every other week.  We're now regulars at Maternal-Fetal Medicine (the nice way of saying "high-risk unit") at HUP, we've had numerous fetal ultrasounds and echocardiograms already (this will probably wind up being the most scanned baby in the Philadelphia area), and since I found out I was pregnant I've been taking shots of blood thinners in the stomach twice a day.  Right now, I'm almost at 23 weeks, and I will say that, despite the fatigue, brain fuzz, joint pain, crazed hunger pangs, and constant trips to the bathroom on my end of things, the baby seems to be doing fine.  We did an amnio that came out normal, and his ultrasounds and echos have been reasonably good, too.  And I did say "his" on purpose--we found out the baby is a boy!  A Y chromosome, little boy bump and everything.  So now Dave and I have to learn how to be parents.  Yikes!!!

 

Anyway, those are the big mega-updates of my life here in Bryn Mawr.  There will definitely be more to come, so stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The past few days have been great.  Temperatures in the 70s.  Sunshine.  Definitely sockless weather.  No more confining cloth around my toes!  No more huddling under seven layers of blankets every night!  No more lugging a twenty-pound, synthetic-down-filled coat everywhere!  Yay!

 

In other news: two of my very favorite poems of mine, "Pearl" and "Dorrit on Santorini" are finally being re-published in the summer issue of the Adirondack Review.  Here's the link for the journal: http://www.adirondackreview.homestead.com/. 

 

In other, other news: as everyone else has this past week, I've been following the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.  My ex-boyfriend's dad is a professor at VT, so at first I was watching just to see if he was all right.  (He was, thankfully.)  Then the whole story--the hypnotic repetition on all the cable news channels, the photos of everyone that was lost, the ever-accreting information on the shooter--sucked me in, and I've done a lot of thinking about it since.  Along with everyone else in the country, I extend my deepest sympathies to all the students, professors, staff, and family members affected by what happened on April 16th.  I honestly can't believe something so terrible could take place on such a quiet, unassuming university campus.  I seem to remember going to visit my ex's dad one day as my ex and I drove from our school in suburban Philly to his family's place in Johnson City, Tennessee.  At the time, VT struck me as a typical state university in a sleepy little college town--open spaces, stone buildings, sprawling grounds and the like.  We ate lunch in Blacksburg, at a barbeque place if I remember correctly, and we discussed big, sprawling, scientific issues like global warming and ecosystems and how long humanity has left to save itself before the sun goes nova.  Even though the topics were anxiety provoking, the talk we had was laid back in that abstract, academic way.  It was a conversation not unlike the ones I'd been having with my school chums for years.

 

I can't imagine how such an open, relaxed place bred so much hatred in Cho Seung-Hui, but then it sounds like his anger started long ago.  He probably was so absorbed in his own psychic landscape that he didn't realize his surroundings had changed once he arrived at VT.  Clearly, he wasn't able to recognize kindness even when his fellow students offered it to him.  I want to make sense of him, make sense of the whole incident, just like everyone else.  But of course, we're going to run out of little illuminating details at some point.  We're going to have to admit we'll never know for sure.  (I'm not even convinced that Cho fully understood what he was doing.)  So all I can say is, I'm sorry.

This is what they're reporting from Omaha and parts of Iowa.  I actually remember the 1998 snowstorm because it happened while I was lying in a hospital in Ames, Iowa, with a blood clot in my head.  I was 24 years old at the time, so my clot was quite the dramatic event.  No one could say why it happened, at least not at that point.  Then the day after I was admitted to Mary Greeley Medical Center, the blizzard hit, and everything shut down.  My mom, who'd flown in from Pennsylvania before the storm, said she'd never seen anything like it: the snow came down continuously, building up and up and up until my little hospital window was almost completely buried.  The nurses were stranded with us for days.  In a weird way, the blizzard was also really fitting for my personal medical drama--a symbol writ large of what was going on inside my veins.  It's not often the weather follows the cues of your life.

 

Usually, I forget that this time of year is the anniversary of my hospital stay, when I was first diagnosed with lupus and officially introduced to a life with chronic illness.  I can hardly believe it's been almost a decade since this happened.  It feels the way most important events hit you: like it was yesterday and eons ago.  This year, the weather reminded me by circling back to its starting point, dumping yet another heap of snow on the plains states.  I wonder what will happen next year when this anniversary rolls around.  I expect I won't need a blizzard to jog my memory.

I went to see Linda Bierds last night at Bryn Mawr.  She's an outstanding poet who works in scientific and historical narrative, and (she said) is even inspired by T.V. documentaries, which have been a big source of material for me (particularly on those insomniac nights when I flip on an A&E biography or an E! True Hollywood Story or some other calming, easily digestible infotainment program that often contains some bizzare bit of trivia).  Linda also has a harrowing poem about Zelda Fitzgerald's letters to her husband, which she happened to read last night.  I, too, wrote a poem several years ago about Zelda Fitzgerald, and I think the journal that published it (Black Water Review)  is now out of print.  So here it is again: my modest contribution to the Fitzgerald mythology...

 

Zelda Fitzgerald Dies in a Sanitarium Fire

 

 

Light swells under my door

like a cymbal crash

 

a chain of gold ripples

in the sea near the south of France

 

smiling, sun-stained

holding its breath.

 

This life was much too quick

diamond glint dangling

 

from an ear refracted

through gin and crystal

 

into a perfect green eye.

My death will not be rushed.

 

I will smolder.  Clouds will lift

to let my gray inscription pass.

Wow, I just found myself on Yahoo.  That means that I should probably start posting on my blog.  So it looks like I'm being productive, you know.  Problem is, spring semester is in full swing, and as a perpetual PhD student, I have no life to speak of.  Or, to be more specific, the shape of my life is a plateau of dreadful dullness punctuated by brief bursts of terrible stress.  I've also discovered over the years that no one (apart from other grad students) is interested in listening to a grad student whine.  So in future posts I promise to try to keep the school-related bloviating to a minimum.

 

But for this post, let me just say that Henry the Fourth Part 1 is one wacky play, that Prince Hal is kind of an arrogant asshole and doesn't deserve Falstaff (I mean, Hal picks on the kid who's manning the beer taps--why mock the fact that this boy's life will never amount to a hill of kumquats just because you're the king's son and you're bored?), and I can see why Ben Jonson criticized Shakespeare for his characters' manic verbal spews.  (Oops, did I say that?  Harold Bloom and his cronies will have my head on a pike by sun-up...)  On the other hand, the vulgar name-calling smackdowns that Hal and Falstaff get into are priceless.

 

 

I've finally gotten around to posting some content on my "Creative Work" page.  This includes some old, old poems that have been moldering away in my documents folder, and several pieces that have never made it to the Internets before...

This one helped me get 1st runner-up in the Philadelphia Stories poetry slam last Sunday. 

(Read the blurb at http://www.philadelphiastories.org/poetry/slam2007.php.)

 

If I Could Move Like Jackie Chan

 

 

If I could move like Jackie Chan,

I would twist ten times in the air then walk up a wall before you could take one

       breath;

I would open windows with my forehead and never bother to scream;

I would dangle by my toes from a hundred-foot billboard to make sure you

       noticed my legs;

I would hang weightless in a right-snap lunge while a jagged city sparkled at

       nightfall;

I would run into scenery just to make you laugh;

I would weave your name in the scrolling motions of my hands;

In a dark alley, I would lure our enemies toward me from right and left, then

       double-backflip onto a fire escape and watch heads knock together, an

       old Stooges routine;

I would spin through the stars like a satellite, and, if you cared,

I would catch you out of the sky and lay you on a mountain of pillows,

look deep in your eyes and open my mouth,

and a voice reading lines in perfect English would flow over my lips, flailing,

praising a passion you have never really shown me,

pouring out phrases you will never translate.