Reunion

Lisa V. recently (or not so recently) had a post about imagining where you want to be in 5/10/15 years. [I can't find the post now, either because I'm too tired or it's one of the ones she took down.]

I’m not ready to do that quite yet, but as I am heading off to my 20th college reunion, I can look back.

I did not attend the 15th reunion, because between a wedding planned shortly afterwards and my husband’s recent job loss, we didn’t have the time or money. 2003: We got married. My husband got his diagnosis. I stopped being vegetarian.

At the 10th reunion, I had recently defended my dissertation, but had not yet landed my tenure track job. After I got the tt job the next year, I attended my 11th reunion before driving cross country, since it would be the last time I’d be within driving distance of the college. What? Your college doesn’t have a reunion for every class every year? Your reunion probably hasn’t been on the cover of Psychology Today either. Anyway, I really only stopped by for part of a day, and mainly spent the weekend with a friend nearby.

At the 5th reunion, I had recently been discharged from the “behavioral sciences unit” of a hospital. I was about to take a year off from graduate school for full-time language study in Taipei.

20 years ago, I was finishing up my last semester of college. My senior thesis had been handed in in April, but I had comprehensive exams and term papers to write. I didn’t get the offer of the internship in Old Colony until sometime in May, so I was deciding between that and a position in the Peace Corps.

I only go to the reunions when I am sure a couple of my closest remaining college friends will be there, because I tend to get flashbacks to feeling like a complete social misfit freshman year. The people I know best tend to have a love/hate relationship with our college. When we arrived on campus for the 5th reunion, as we were parking the car, both the people with me said they got stomach aches every time they came back, yet one of them had been back every year since graduation and the other had been to a couple of reunions already. In my case, I think I got an excellent education, but I was also very unhappy a lot of the time. It is where I first ended up in therapy, though I didn’t get the big Major Depression diagnosis till graduate school.

Question

Google has failed me on this:

I was looking forward to the lack of periods while breastfeeding (that is, if the lochia ever stops), but I just got a prescription for low dose birth control pills, so does that mean they will take over my hormones and I’ll have a period every 28 days?

Outside the Box?

I have an appointment with a second psychiatrist (long story), who sent me the paperwork to fill out ahead of time.

For “current and previous counseling, psychotherapy, treatment,” there are four lines. For “current and previous psychotropic medication,” there are five lines. The fact that I need a lot more space, despite being off meds for the past four and a half years, is making me feel like a sicko.

Really, it is just that in the past, I had to try a lot of useless medications before we found ones that worked for me. And I had to find new therapists and psychiatrists when I moved.

June 4, 1989

Back on the day of my embryo transfer, I tried to write about being in NYC on 9/11. I mentioned that one way in which my reaction to the attacks was different from that of people my students’ age was that “Emotionally, I had already been completely devastated by a different tragedy more than a decade earlier.”*

What shook my world was a completely non-American tragedy: the massacre of the student democracy activists in Beijing in 1989. I was twenty-three and living relatively close by, though not in China. Two good friends of mine were teaching in China. I marched with my students a few times, starting on May 4. I learned how to chant “The spirit of May 4″ in Cantonese, and later, “Support the Beijing Student Patriotic Democracy Movement” and other slogans. I learned the words to the songs people were singing at the marches. I was caught up in the optimism, that Chinese people could effect change, that the protests were working. Then suddenly it was over, and all hopes were dashed. On June 4, I received a letter from one of my friends in China, written a week or so earlier. Things had quieted down at her university because most of her students (some of whom I had met when I visited her over Christmas) had gone to Beijing.

I was devastated by 6/4, but I didn’t realize until recently how much it had affected my world view. If I am a pessimist, 6/4 is one reason why. If I am cynical about government and politically apathetic (I vote, always, and I keep informed, but I do not act very often) 6/4 is one reason why. I realized this year that I had not participated in a protest march since 1989, though I remember at least attending one “Take Back the Night Rally” in graduate school.

Logically, this does not make sense, because as a citizen in a democracy, I am in a better position than Chinese citizens to influence my government. But I’m not talking about logic. In fact, much of my reaction to 6/4 was so far from logic that I didn’t even recognize it.

*I started writing this post back on 9/11, thinking I would revise it eventually. Now I’m too tired to go into detail, except to say that I cannot overstate how much the 1989 democracy movement affected me at the time, and that I do realize it is a bit self-centered to write about it only as it relates to my own feelings.

40w1d

Still here, still pregnant.

But enough about me (or rather, I’ll update if anything interesting comes up at my doctor’s appointment later today).

My little sister is getting married! Soon.

So, just how feasible is it to travel half-way across the country by air with a 10-12 week old baby?

I already missed my little brother’s wedding when I was in the middle of my first ivf cycle on the other side of the country. I’d like to make this wedding, and since I won’t be teaching in the fall, the fact that it is scheduled for the weekend after classes start should be less of a problem (can I hope that the Dean will have more urgent things to do than hold meetings that week for the project I’m supposed to work on?)

These are my younger half-siblings. I remember when they were born (one of them was four weeks postdate, yikes). I barely know my older half-siblings, but am relatively close to the younger ones, having spent every-other-weekend-and-a-month-in-the-summer with them in junior high and most of high school. Living in the same state helped too, as did knowing of their existence from the beginning. (And now I’ll probably end up deleting this post on the basis of containing excessive personally identifying information.)

So Lazy I Forgot the Title the First Time Around

39w0d. Still pregnant, no baby in sight.

Some links.

Dooce on Ikea. We also have a newish Ikea, but I haven’t been there, because it is 45 minutes to an hour away from me, depending on traffic (well, if I timed it particularly poorly, I could easily spend a couple of hours to get there on the Death-trap Interstate) and I am afraid of spending too much money. Also, this way I can continue to tell people that I have only been to two Ikea stores in my life, one in Hong Kong and one in Edinburgh. The Container Store is closer, but not too close. Having just spent $230 there last Saturday, I think I’m glad it is not on my side of the city.

Dean Dad and Dr. Crazy on blogging ethics, developing a blogging voice, writing about students, and the apparently eternal desire to police other people’s blogs. I’m just doing links, because I am too tired to write coherently just now about my thoughts on this. I will say that I think Dr. Crazy’s post and her comments at Dean Dad’s blog add important thoughts to the discussion. I do think there is a difference between complaining over the copier and complaining on a blog, because audience of a blog is more likely to include students (which doesn’t mean we should never write about students, but as Dr. Crazy says, we need to remember that blogs are public).

In fact, it reminded me of recent posts at Life and Times of a Labor Nurse. She had written about a patient who was rather pushy and also inconsiderate of other patients. Brooklyn Girl commented on her own experience at her first birth, and even though the Labor Nurse pointed out that the situation was different, in that Brooklyn Girl had had good reason to be assertive, BG wondered if somewhere a labor triage nurse had blogged about her. Life and Times seems to have gone private or been taken down, which may have something to do with another post in which she received threatening email about the ethics of writing about patients at all (she pointed out that she disguised identities in the same way that doctors do when they present case studies at conferences).

The pushy patient post brought up a lot of issues for me about medical care and self-advocacy that I have not been able to blog about. Maybe I’ll give it another try soon.

Synesthesia

Thanks to a recent post by Emmie at Better Make It a Double, which had a link to Wikipidia’s synesthesia article, I now have a name for my own mild version of it: ordinal linguistic personification.

When I was a kid, I used to play with a deck of cards in the way some kids play with dolls, telling stories about them and so on. Obviously, each suit was a family, with the king a and queen as the parents. The ace was the nanny. I don’t think any of that counts as synesthesia, but each of the numbered cards had a specific personality to me, which is what the article on ordinal linguistic personification describes. It’s notas poetic as music-color synesthesia, but it works for me.

One of the reasons I am trying not to obsess to much about when my kid will actually be born is that I don’t want to get to attached to a particular combination of numbers. It’s bad enough that 2007 is an odd-numbered year, because I just don’t think odd numbers are as trustworthy as even ones.

And no, I am not into numerology. But do you remember those old workbooks or composition books that had the times tables printed on the back. I loved the pattern of numbers in those tables.

Telephonophobia

I can’t believe I missed this post by Bitch, Ph.D. back in February:

Why is it that making phone calls for appointments–haircuts, doctors, dentists, etc.–freaks me out and I’ll put it off forever?

Me too!

It’s not the only reason I don’t get things done, but the amount of effort it takes me to get on the phone is one of the reasons that:

• I haven’t gotten my hair trimmed since September
• I haven’t talked to any doulas yet
• I haven’t gotten the carpets steam-cleaned (which for our apartment falls into the category of nesting-means-I-should-have-done-it-years-ago)
• I haven’t signed us up for a class on newborn care
• I haven’t called to find out if the store we bought it from can fix the broken chair
• I haven’t talked to a lactation consultant so I can have her number on the fridge in case I need it, as per Moxie’s recommendations
• I never called the bank or credit union about an appointment to get prequalified for a loan

All those examples are just from the little sticky note on my desk labeled “calls.” I did make two of the calls on the list. I called and signed us up for a class on breastfeeding (also recommended by Moxie) and then called the first-choice pediatrian’s office to discover that the only time we could meet the doctor was the same night as the already-paid for class. (I thought I blogged about this, because I ended up in tears at my ineptitude, but I can’t find the post). That was a while ago.

A couple of these things could be done by email, but the sad part is that I am not much better at email than I am at making phone calls.

Also, I know not everything on the list is superimportant, but the minor things would be easier to do now than later.

Mr. Luo did take over the calling of pediatricians, so we will be meeting with a couple this week.

P.S. I should mention that it was a mention by Orange that sent me looking for Bitch, Ph.D.’s telephone post.

Quick Update

The last time I went away for nine days, I wrote up posts and dated them to publish while I was gone. This time, I not only didn’t do that, I didn’t write even though I had internet access part of the time I was away, as I got too obsessed with catching up to the hundreds of new posts in my Bloglines feeds. Please excuse the general laziness. (Not that I feel obliged to post while at a conference or on vacation, but I always get nervous when I don’t hear from third-trimester real life friends or bloggers.)

Since the last post, I:

delivered my paper in The Country Next Door

spent time with two grad school friends at the conference

revisted some tourist sites with my husband, who hadn’t been to either Conference City or Country Next Door’s Megalopolis

acquired a bunch of baby clothes from one of my friends

caught a cold

missed three prenatal yoga classes, and one more this morning, because it occurred to me that the other pregnant ladies might not want me around right now

got too big for my regular pants, finally (for those keeping track, at 34w, I could still get them on, but they were uncomfortable enough that I only took skirts and dresses on the trip)

turned 41

Matchmaking

A post at Unfogged (no, not the redacted one, a much less exciting one about relationships-Jody’s got a post about it too…) got me thinking about myself and Mr. Luo. On the topic of criteria for dating, one person had mentioned dating women who didn’t wear makeup. Somebody else had brought up not dating a vegetarian as a more substantive criteria, since there were practical difficulties with a veg/non-veg pairing.

When I met my husband, I was a vegetarian, and he wasn’t. I don’t normally wear cosmetics (neither does he).

We met at a monthly dance in Our Fair City that I started going to the January after I moved to this state. I don’t know exactly when I met him, because I didn’t really start to get to know anybody and learn names until I went to a weekend-long dance event the following autumn. I remember dancing with him then. A few months after that, when we were chatting at a dance, he asked if I’d like to go out with him sometime.

In a way, the whole meeting-at-a-dance thing seems cheesy to me. After all, it is just the sort of thing Dear Abby and Ann Landers used to recommend to the lovelorn: join a group, do an activity, meet someone who’s interested in the same things. I have to say that if I had started doing this kind of dancing back in Grad School Town specifically in order to get a date, I would have quit a long time before I got together with my husband. The dancing was fun, it was newcomer-friendly, it had good live music, and you didn’t have to bring a partner to dance with, because the custom was to switch partners for each dance. That’s why I sought out the local group when I moved to this area.

It turns out that we had a lot in common. We both have Ph.D.’s. Although it is not his native language, he grew up in a place where people speak the language that I teach. He even used to live in Grad School Town during part of the time I was there, and worked very close to where I lived.

Then there are the differences (It’s a good thing I’m not writing a paper for the Little Professor here.) He is an engineer. I am a liberal arts gal, who didn’t even realize that computer scientists counted as engineers when I met him.

Politically, he is more conservative than I am. This means that we both say we are Democrats, but he has been known to vote for a Republican, whereas I have voted for Green candidates. He thinks Bill Clinton was the saviour of the Democratic Party, and I do not.

I am much more suspicious of Big Business than he is; he is more distrustful of government (not so much its intentions as its inefficiencies).

He is entrepreneurial (he has founded three start-ups). I am risk-averse.

I was a vegetarian for the first two and a half years we were together, including a year when we were living together, then married. It was never a problem. We ate vegetarian dinners, and he cooked himself meat-heavy breakfasts to get the animal protein he needed. He was very good at adapting recipes from meat to vegetarian.

We’ve never discussed cosmetics (except possibly “I’m going to wear makeup at the wedding” “Uh, okay, whatever”).

I don’t know the best way to screen one’s potential dates. During the dry spell before I met Mr. Luo, I would sometimes imagine a list of screening criteria based on previous failed relationships. The criteria usually ended up eliminating all men (and I wasn’t romantically or sexually attracted to women):hmmm , no Americans and nobody from another country. No older men, but no younger guys either. No classmates, no workmates, and no cute waiters. Two strikes against computer geeks (although I don’t think my high school boyfriend actually ended up with a career inInfoTech). It’s just as well I never tried the personals or online dating, because I would have been paralyzed with indecision.

It all worked out just fine in the end, though.