Okay, I really do have half (read: three throat-clearing sentences) of a Come and Eat post written, only now it's time to leave the house for a day trip to the beach! (Read: Sugar is going to photograph someone's house, like she do, and I am going to drive to the nearby beach in our borrowed car and lie there.)
...which in turn means, via the Law of White Pants and its corollary related to bathing suits, that today looks very much like it's going to develop into CD1.
Thank you to my darling Clitty for the heart-warming, vag-affirming shout-out.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
Roselle's Tree
Thank you all for you kind and thoughtful comments on the Memorial Day post. It means a great deal to me that you took time to read it and to think of Roselle. A college friend read it today and concurs: she really was that great.
Said friend also thought to take pictures of Roselle's tree at reunion, and she's said I can post them here.
Said friend also thought to take pictures of Roselle's tree at reunion, and she's said I can post them here.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Bullets
- I have to admit they look more bullet-like than I'd imagined.
- ...almost. Can you spot what's missing?
- How about if I name them? Pictured:
- Progesterone bullets
- Sharps container
- Alcohol swabs
- Syringes I hope I won't need (for PIO)
- Gonal-F
- Ganirelex
- Prednisone
- Not pictured?*
I had figured I would write one of those peppy, everything's-moving-forward!, I-am-gonna-get-a-baby! posts when the meds arrived. Like ya do. Instead I spent the next several hours trying to decide whether to hide under the covers and cry, or drop everything and join the Russian circus. (I opted for just plain crying -- too hot to get under the covers today.)
So! Peppier bullets!
- Lookie! Jane Lynch got married! To a Smithie! The heart resounds with gladness.
- The mind reels at her fashion choice, though. Satin tie-blouse? C'mon Jane. Go butch or go home -- this shirt falls into the uncanny valley between butch and femme formal wear.
- But then the heart warms at the thought of a big famous star wearing awkward wedding clothes. Clearly no stylist was involved. They're just folks after all. Group hug!
- (But seriously, Jane, at least ask a friend next time, 'kay?)
OMG UPDATE: Kym says in the comments that HCG is used for body-building. So does this mean that if I do get pregnant, I can sell my pee? 'Cause I could really use the money. And I have plenty of practice peeing in cups.
An Ad for FedEx, In The Form of A Short Play
[Scene: Brooklyn apartment, summer morning. BIONIC is stuck inside, waiting for packages of refrigerated medicines to arrive via UPS and FedEx.]
[sfx: door buzzer]
BIONIC: Hello?
Voice Over: UPS!
BIONIC: Please come up!
[BIONIC presses door buzzer for a good minute, just in case.]
[Two minutes pass.]
[sfx: door buzzer]
BIONIC: Hello?
VO: FedEx!
BIONIC: Please come up!
[BIONIC presses door buzzer for a good two minutes, just in case. BIONIC opens apartment door, finds FEDEX.]
BIONIC: Oh, huh. Did you see the UPS guy by any chance?
FEDEX: Yeah, he just drove away.
So, yeah. I now have 40 coochie-bullets of progesterone and no stims, antagon, or trigger shot. I do have a UPS InfoNotice saying delivery was attempted.
Even the customer service lady at UPS agreed this was a good advertisement for FedEx.
UPDATE: Okay, several panicky/annoyed phone calls later, the UPS driver returned. And was totally nice and said he was sorry and so on -- apparently the super was working on the elevator so he went to deliver a package next door. Which is reasonable (and thank goodness about the elevator, because I was bargaining with God in there just this morning), but how's a girl to know?
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Memorial Day
Hello, internets. Welcome back -- physically, mentally, whatever -- from the holiday weekend.
Sugar and I took a last-minute trip to New Hampshire with Womb Buddy, stayed in the 200-year-old house she moved to after leaving our hometown when we were both little. I visited in the summers for a few years, sliding in the swimming hole under the covered bridge, getting locked in a horse stall full of kittens, and generally living the country life, oblivious to the fact that W.B.'s parents' marriage was collapsing. (The packet of old photos I found at my parents' house this Christmas suggests I was oblivious to everything except kittens. One picture of a person in the whole batch: a fuzzy me, holding a kitten.) Until last summer, I'd never been back, though I picture the house and its yard whenever I read Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle In Time books, remembering lying on the glacier-scraped granite outcropping to watch the sky as Meg lies on the stargazing rock.
The house is different in some ways, despite its familiar creaking floorboards and narrow stairs. Parts have been remodeled, and its denizens now include W.B.'s step-mother and step-siblings. But the town is old and small and slow to change. There is still no mail delivery to houses, no stop light, no noise or light at night. Its valley of green fields and shuttered houses is still watched over by blue mountains, the postcard-perfect New England town.
On Monday, we walked down the road to visit a woman we met last year, who with her son raises alpacas and shetland sheep for wool. Last year, her fluffy tom cat herded geese away from us as we walked the road towards the swimming hole, and she insisted on taking us out back to meet the animals. We loved it, of course. She's a single mom, and she explained that this is an inexpensive way for her to keep her son close -- the animals themselves were gifts from 4-H. We wondered, a year later, if they'd still be at it, if her son ever was as invested as she, if he might have grown older and started racing dirt bikes or chasing girls.
W.B. and Thumper, July 2009
We found the shepherdess at work in her front garden, spending her birthday putting in new perennials. She was happy to see us and happier still to usher us back to the barn and pastures, where her son showed off two-day-old lambs with evident pride. The alpacas were overdue for a visit from the shearer, who is behind in his work. Our favorite ram, Thumper, died of bloat over the winter, but nevertheless, the little farm carries on.
Mostly, he looked happier than this, but I chose this picture because OMG I AM HOLDING A LAMB!
We continued down the road, over the covered bridge, and into the old part of the cemetery, where flags marked graves of those who served in wars all the way back to the Revolutionary.
The cemetery is beautiful, shaded by ancient maples, in sight of lupin-covered hillsides. It is not so hard to think of spending eternity on the high banks of the fast river there, visited by hikers on their way down from the mountain behind it. We hiked there this weekend, as most of those buried here must have at one point or other. The forest shifts from dark hemlock to brighter groves of beech and maple. Where sun creeps through, forget-me-nots cluster around the path. From the bald on top, you can survey the valley.
Hiking in the eastern mountains this time of year always makes me think of a college housemate of mine, who hiked the Appalachian Trail the summer after she graduated. I remember how excited she was for the trip, and also the quiet confidence that ran under her talking about it, the knowledge that she had the skills for the trip but also the right mindset, that she knew well how to break big projects into steady, determined days.
That attitude was typical of Roselle. She was so steady in every way, like a sturdy tree you know will always be there to be counted on. She was pre-med, and it was clear that she excelled in school not by lucky flashes of brilliance punctuating long weeks of sloth but by day after day of orderly studying. She got her work done without panic, and yet never shook her head over those of us who were grasshoppers to her ant when it came to laying up stores against the coming winters of exams and final projects. Her professors noticed, too:
If Roselle was a more diligent student than most of us, she seemed thrilled with the clownish ways we were different from her. If I close my eyes, I can hear her sudden, full-throated laugh, surprised at whatever we living room layabouts had invented to amuse ourselves while she studied in the dining room, somehow untroubled by the cacophony we regularly raised. And we all loved her. Of all the women I lived with those four years, Roselle is the only one I can think of no one's complaints about (unless you count her old roommate's assertion that she closed her dresser drawers too loudly in the early mornings). There simply wasn't anything to complain about.
Roselle died in Iraq in 2007. She was an Army doctor, and had volunteered for overseas duty because others in her group had small children. She was by all accounts tender and devoted as ever.
The news of her death was a shock. When another housemate forwarded me the email she'd received, I thought the dead Smithie in the subject line must be Madeline L'Engle, who died close to the same time. I didn't expect it to be someone I really knew -- but why not? Exactly how naive am I, that I expected to go without losing a friend with our country at war for so long? Did I think that the pins I'd worn (paltry activism), the letters I'd written (never enough) would somehow protect me? Did I think this was all just an intellectual debate? (Answer: of course not. Knowing how our volunteer army works, I instead counted on my race and class to insulate me.)
Soon, nausea set in. The Army would not release the details of Roselle's death, only that she'd died in Kirkuk not long after arriving there with her unit, that her death was not combat-related. Another soldier in her unit, a man, died the same day. I hate what I know of what women are too often subject to in our military. I hate that they are often raped, hurt, killed by their fellow soldiers, that the military doesn't seem to care enough rid itself of its old habits of misogyny (that seems too weak a word). Rape is twice as common in the military as in civilian life, a statistic all the more disgusting because the Army purports to teach unit cohesion, to protect one another. I hate that the only big name who ever seems to talk about this publicly, to admit that it exists, that it's not just isolated incident after isolated incident, is Garry Trudeau. Shouldn't we be reading about this outside of the comics section?
I didn't know that's what happened to Roselle, of course. I knew it could have been anything. A munitions accident in a warehouse somewhere. A car crash. A fall down a flight of stairs. But knowing that it was far from outlandish to imagine her attacked by a comrade is unacceptable.
The Army has since released its report. They say that she was overwhelmed, unprepared. That a senior officer berated her, that she told a fellow officer that she couldn't do it anymore. That she returned to her barracks and shot herself.
I can't tell you how difficult I find it to square this story with the Roselle I knew, who seems just like the one described by medical school classmates and hospital colleagues who wrote messages of condolence after she died. Yes, I know that suicide is often an impulsive act, that there is no "type" of person who attempts it, that it can happen out of the blue. Maybe she was sent overseas without proper training, a less awful negligence on the Army's behalf. Maybe she was that thrown by whatever was said to her, though that's hard to imagine. I keep trying to build a version of Roselle in my head that allows me to believe this story, but it hasn't worked yet.
Instead, I am left with doubt and with anger at an Army that promises to take care of its own. At an Army I can't trust to tell the truth, when it has tried so hard to cover up or ignore other problems. At a war we had no business starting, made possible by jingoism and racism and calculated lies. It's not politic, I realize, to say such things on Memorial Day. We are to wave the flag and believe sacrifice makes every cause noble. We are to "Support the Troops," which means ignoring the kinds of support the troops may actually need, if the real circumstances of their service don't lend themselves to blockbuster movies. But Roselle didn't heroically give her life to keep us free and I refuse to forget her that way.
We college housemates, classmates, teammates, and friends of Roselle pooled money to have a tree planted on campus in her honor, a Cladrastis lutea "Rosea" -- pink-flowered Yellowwood. Sugar and I saw the young tree this month, growing on the street where we all lived together. It takes several years to begin blooming, but when it does, it sends out surprising, wisteria-like clusters of pink. I hope it will stand watch on our street for many years, steady and lovely and sometimes laughing with flowers.
Thanks to Tom Gill for the picture of a blooming Yellowwood.
Pictures of Roselle's tree are up here.
Sugar and I took a last-minute trip to New Hampshire with Womb Buddy, stayed in the 200-year-old house she moved to after leaving our hometown when we were both little. I visited in the summers for a few years, sliding in the swimming hole under the covered bridge, getting locked in a horse stall full of kittens, and generally living the country life, oblivious to the fact that W.B.'s parents' marriage was collapsing. (The packet of old photos I found at my parents' house this Christmas suggests I was oblivious to everything except kittens. One picture of a person in the whole batch: a fuzzy me, holding a kitten.) Until last summer, I'd never been back, though I picture the house and its yard whenever I read Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle In Time books, remembering lying on the glacier-scraped granite outcropping to watch the sky as Meg lies on the stargazing rock.
The house is different in some ways, despite its familiar creaking floorboards and narrow stairs. Parts have been remodeled, and its denizens now include W.B.'s step-mother and step-siblings. But the town is old and small and slow to change. There is still no mail delivery to houses, no stop light, no noise or light at night. Its valley of green fields and shuttered houses is still watched over by blue mountains, the postcard-perfect New England town.
On Monday, we walked down the road to visit a woman we met last year, who with her son raises alpacas and shetland sheep for wool. Last year, her fluffy tom cat herded geese away from us as we walked the road towards the swimming hole, and she insisted on taking us out back to meet the animals. We loved it, of course. She's a single mom, and she explained that this is an inexpensive way for her to keep her son close -- the animals themselves were gifts from 4-H. We wondered, a year later, if they'd still be at it, if her son ever was as invested as she, if he might have grown older and started racing dirt bikes or chasing girls.
W.B. and Thumper, July 2009
We found the shepherdess at work in her front garden, spending her birthday putting in new perennials. She was happy to see us and happier still to usher us back to the barn and pastures, where her son showed off two-day-old lambs with evident pride. The alpacas were overdue for a visit from the shearer, who is behind in his work. Our favorite ram, Thumper, died of bloat over the winter, but nevertheless, the little farm carries on.
Mostly, he looked happier than this, but I chose this picture because OMG I AM HOLDING A LAMB!
We continued down the road, over the covered bridge, and into the old part of the cemetery, where flags marked graves of those who served in wars all the way back to the Revolutionary.
The cemetery is beautiful, shaded by ancient maples, in sight of lupin-covered hillsides. It is not so hard to think of spending eternity on the high banks of the fast river there, visited by hikers on their way down from the mountain behind it. We hiked there this weekend, as most of those buried here must have at one point or other. The forest shifts from dark hemlock to brighter groves of beech and maple. Where sun creeps through, forget-me-nots cluster around the path. From the bald on top, you can survey the valley.
Hiking in the eastern mountains this time of year always makes me think of a college housemate of mine, who hiked the Appalachian Trail the summer after she graduated. I remember how excited she was for the trip, and also the quiet confidence that ran under her talking about it, the knowledge that she had the skills for the trip but also the right mindset, that she knew well how to break big projects into steady, determined days.
That attitude was typical of Roselle. She was so steady in every way, like a sturdy tree you know will always be there to be counted on. She was pre-med, and it was clear that she excelled in school not by lucky flashes of brilliance punctuating long weeks of sloth but by day after day of orderly studying. She got her work done without panic, and yet never shook her head over those of us who were grasshoppers to her ant when it came to laying up stores against the coming winters of exams and final projects. Her professors noticed, too:
"Roselle was smarter and more capable than the rest of us, and she held an almost tender benevolence toward others. She did not ask anyone else to work to the high standards she herself was working to achieve. "Tender is the word exactly. She paid attention to you in such a quiet way that you could easily miss it, until you sat with her at dinner and discovered she remembered everything about that play you were in, that joke you told once. When I watered her plants while she flew to Texas for a med school interview, she brought me back a packet of bluebell seeds, having remembered a small picture of a blue-blooming field I'd had up on my wall.
If Roselle was a more diligent student than most of us, she seemed thrilled with the clownish ways we were different from her. If I close my eyes, I can hear her sudden, full-throated laugh, surprised at whatever we living room layabouts had invented to amuse ourselves while she studied in the dining room, somehow untroubled by the cacophony we regularly raised. And we all loved her. Of all the women I lived with those four years, Roselle is the only one I can think of no one's complaints about (unless you count her old roommate's assertion that she closed her dresser drawers too loudly in the early mornings). There simply wasn't anything to complain about.
Roselle died in Iraq in 2007. She was an Army doctor, and had volunteered for overseas duty because others in her group had small children. She was by all accounts tender and devoted as ever.
The news of her death was a shock. When another housemate forwarded me the email she'd received, I thought the dead Smithie in the subject line must be Madeline L'Engle, who died close to the same time. I didn't expect it to be someone I really knew -- but why not? Exactly how naive am I, that I expected to go without losing a friend with our country at war for so long? Did I think that the pins I'd worn (paltry activism), the letters I'd written (never enough) would somehow protect me? Did I think this was all just an intellectual debate? (Answer: of course not. Knowing how our volunteer army works, I instead counted on my race and class to insulate me.)
Soon, nausea set in. The Army would not release the details of Roselle's death, only that she'd died in Kirkuk not long after arriving there with her unit, that her death was not combat-related. Another soldier in her unit, a man, died the same day. I hate what I know of what women are too often subject to in our military. I hate that they are often raped, hurt, killed by their fellow soldiers, that the military doesn't seem to care enough rid itself of its old habits of misogyny (that seems too weak a word). Rape is twice as common in the military as in civilian life, a statistic all the more disgusting because the Army purports to teach unit cohesion, to protect one another. I hate that the only big name who ever seems to talk about this publicly, to admit that it exists, that it's not just isolated incident after isolated incident, is Garry Trudeau. Shouldn't we be reading about this outside of the comics section?
I didn't know that's what happened to Roselle, of course. I knew it could have been anything. A munitions accident in a warehouse somewhere. A car crash. A fall down a flight of stairs. But knowing that it was far from outlandish to imagine her attacked by a comrade is unacceptable.
The Army has since released its report. They say that she was overwhelmed, unprepared. That a senior officer berated her, that she told a fellow officer that she couldn't do it anymore. That she returned to her barracks and shot herself.
I can't tell you how difficult I find it to square this story with the Roselle I knew, who seems just like the one described by medical school classmates and hospital colleagues who wrote messages of condolence after she died. Yes, I know that suicide is often an impulsive act, that there is no "type" of person who attempts it, that it can happen out of the blue. Maybe she was sent overseas without proper training, a less awful negligence on the Army's behalf. Maybe she was that thrown by whatever was said to her, though that's hard to imagine. I keep trying to build a version of Roselle in my head that allows me to believe this story, but it hasn't worked yet.
Instead, I am left with doubt and with anger at an Army that promises to take care of its own. At an Army I can't trust to tell the truth, when it has tried so hard to cover up or ignore other problems. At a war we had no business starting, made possible by jingoism and racism and calculated lies. It's not politic, I realize, to say such things on Memorial Day. We are to wave the flag and believe sacrifice makes every cause noble. We are to "Support the Troops," which means ignoring the kinds of support the troops may actually need, if the real circumstances of their service don't lend themselves to blockbuster movies. But Roselle didn't heroically give her life to keep us free and I refuse to forget her that way.
We college housemates, classmates, teammates, and friends of Roselle pooled money to have a tree planted on campus in her honor, a Cladrastis lutea "Rosea" -- pink-flowered Yellowwood. Sugar and I saw the young tree this month, growing on the street where we all lived together. It takes several years to begin blooming, but when it does, it sends out surprising, wisteria-like clusters of pink. I hope it will stand watch on our street for many years, steady and lovely and sometimes laughing with flowers.
Thanks to Tom Gill for the picture of a blooming Yellowwood.
Pictures of Roselle's tree are up here.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Great Moments in Smartitude
Receptionist: Kips Bay Baby Factory, may I help you?
Me: May I please speak with Andrology?
Receptionist: Regarding?
Me: [pause] Sperm?
I mean really. Do they get a lot of calls about anything else?
Me: May I please speak with Andrology?
Receptionist: Regarding?
Me: [pause] Sperm?
I mean really. Do they get a lot of calls about anything else?
Monday, May 24, 2010
Bullet-y Roundup
Hey gang. There's been way too little about hoo-has on this blog lately, no? Sorry about that. We're in a period of hoo-ha dormancy at the moment, ending soon. To whit:
And I'll get a new Come and Eat post up soon. Meanwhile, try playing this game. (Tip o' the nib to Geek and Lawyer.)
- We've been on TTC break, but IVF commences in round about 2 weeks. (This protocol begins on CD2, and all signs point to my ovulating about now.) I'm excited and totally freaked out. I am trying not to take my lunacy out on Sugar, but dreaming of needles every night is getting old (and tiring).
- Speaking of needles, I have been going to acupuncture every week for some time now. I really like the practice, Brooklyn Acupuncture Project. It's clean and nice and cheap. The practitioners are friendly and no one's tried to talk me into changing my diet. (I have a history of disordered eating and know from experience that even small, reasonable changes lead me directly to the place of hypercontrol, which leads directly to the place of not eating. Which can't be a good move, health-wise.) I'm not sure how much it's helping with my chief complaint, anxiety (see dreams above). It does chill me out on the day of the appointment, and I suppose I am moderately less crazy than I was in April, so that's something. What I don't like about acupuncture is how it wears me out for the whole day. Do others of you have this?
- Have any of you done IVF at NYU? Know any bloggers who have? Since it looks like Nicole will have to wait a few months, I've lost my cycle buddy -- and I was selfishly hoping she'd go first and give me the lay of the land.
- I've ordered the meds. Still need to sort out whether Dr. Baby Factory will stick to his statement that he'll let me try the progesterone coochie bullets, since the shots freak me out.
- We need to order more sperm. This week, yo.
- We found a church hall to have our wedding party in! Now we just need to get some food and invite people....
- A veritable bevy of my aunts is in town. My mother, too. This has led me to blurting out things about my vaginae, cervices, and so on many times in the past few days. Since living in New York means living in public, said blurting has occurred in inappropriate places: the check-out line at the food coop, a busy sidewalk on 35th street.
- My mother and her sisters are all deaf to varying degrees, so said inappropriate blurting has also been very loud. And repeated. Continuing to do my bit to keep city life interesting.
And I'll get a new Come and Eat post up soon. Meanwhile, try playing this game. (Tip o' the nib to Geek and Lawyer.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)