I’m a generalist, or maybe just undecided.
Another pithy blog post that was written before I had a blog. This is from May 25, 2006, during ivf2.
We went to see Latin American paintings at Sotheby’s.
I now classify all the reserve prices listed for the artwork in relation to the price of an ivf+pgd cycle.
Today we went to the Met. I wanted to see the Chinese calligraphy exhibit. Mr. L had his eye on the armored horses display.
In the Chinese exhibit, I was trying to see which characters I could still recognize (answer: very few). When I saw the character for “star,” I thought of Karen’s daughter Chaoxing.
This is how it is since I started reading blogs. When I see cute books in the museum store, I think of bloggers’ babies. If I read an article about autism, I don’t think first of my cousin’s kid, whom I’ve never met, but of Leelo. Same thing with adoption. I know more about the experience of first parents, adoptive parents, and their kids from blogs than I do from people I know in “real” life.
About the exhibits. The Chinese calligraphy was great. The armored horses didn’t really seem like a separate exhibit; more like a highlighted part of the arms and armor section (the description makes it sound much more extensive-maybe we missed a lot of it somehow, despite Mr. L spending a long time in those galleries). Mr. L was entranced, especially by the opportunity to compare different types of chain mail to the kind he helped make in some high school project. My attention waned, so I went off to look at my favorite medieval Madonna and Child sculptures. I hate being stereotypical
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When I first got to NY, I went to the Met alone and saw the Mayan Kings exhibit, the Raphael Colonna Altarpiece (gone now), and the Rembrandt prints. Thumbs up, though trying to see them all in one day meant glazed-over eyes by the end.
During ivf2, my favorite special exhibit was probably the Ikat textiles, because I have always loved the textiles I encounter while travelling. The exhibit of Tibetan armor was interesting. I needed to have JenEx with me at the Anglo Mania exhibit. I don’t think I properly appreciated it. I’ve also spent a lot of time on the roof, and in the regular exhibits. I can’t remember which special exhibits were on during ivf1, but I spent a lot of time in the medieval section.
These days, when I see baroque or rococo art, I keep thinking of the characters in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. Is this the kind of cabinet Eliza would have had in her castle? Is this the type of decor that horrified Daniel Waterhouse? One of the guns in the arms and armor exhibit had damascus steel on the barrel: just like Jack’s sword! If I associate some the things I see with fictional characters I read about, no wonder I associate other things I see with real people I read about on blogs.
Yesterday, I was so tired that I walked to the subway station and then realized I was not up to going anywhere. So instead I waited until today to go to the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas in Chinatown. It’s only two rooms right now, and there were three three mothers with their daughters doing some kind of craft activity in one of the rooms. It made me think of all the China adoption bloggers. These days, I wonder what percent of Chinese immigrants to the U.S.A. are adopted children. One of the exhibits was about oral histories collected by local school children (I can’t remember if they were in high school or younger). I imagine someday kids of the bloggers I read making an exhibit for the MOCA about their own experiences. It will be in its new and bigger space by then.
Well, why sleep when I can google. According to this site, which seems to be using USCIS as a source, there were 69,967 legal immigrants from China to the US in 2005. Immigrants include people with legal permanent residency. According to tables at the USCIS site, there were 31,708 people from China who were naturalized in 2005 and there were 7,906 immigrant visas issued to orphans (their term) from China that year. So it depends on whether you are comparing the adoptive children to the total number of people from China who entered the US legally in a year or the total number who became citizens (who have been here a while as legal residents in the case of adults). It looks like 11% of people who immigrated to the US from China in (Fiscal Year) 2005 adopted kids.
OK, I just cried at the finale of “Who Wants to Be a Superhero”. A few minutes after injecting 300 units of Follistim.
Yesterday when I was channel surfing and saw a promo for it, I thought it sounded silly and uninteresting, but somehow today I ended up watching a couple of the repeats they were broadcasting and then catching the finale after poking myself in the abdomen with a couple of needles.
Did I mention cable tv is one of the perks of this whole out-of-town ivf for me? I told Mr. Luo that cable was the real reason I wanted to do a third cycle, but I was thinking of Dr. Who and Stargate and The Daily Show. I’d never even heard of this superhero show. Fortunately I knew a little bit about the esteem in which Stan Lee is held from watching Mallrats, or I wouldn’t have really understood the attitude of the contestants towards him.
Oh, and I blame those bloggers who rave about Project Runway for the fact that I watched many hours of it last night. That and the fact that I was coming off of a cross-country flight and 3 hours of sleep. I was shocked, shocked that someone got kicked off for using linen in a travel outfit, especially since I am quite the jet-setter myself, and approximately 60% of the clothes I brought with me are linen. Wrinkles are good!
P.S. Just so you know my cultural diet has some balance, I spent the morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (My other reason for coming back for this cycle: I got an out-of-towner’s membership at the Met the last time I was here.)
I have done all my ivf cycles far away in a metropolis (let’s call it “New York City”), at a fancy clinic that is associated with a branch of my Ph.D.-granting institution. I got all nostalgic the first time I saw the college logo on their stationery, but that didn’t last long-they’re not even in the same city. While I appreciate the chance to traipse around the city while confirming the ascendance of the B*g*boo stroller amongst those who can afford it, doing the ivf there instead of here adds all kind of inconvenience and expense to the project. In fact, I just figured out that it added 12-24% to the cost of the cycles. Why travel, then?
Well, first we needed a clinic that could do preimplantation genetic diagnosis. (Another post needed to explain why). Secondly, the clinic that is close enough to drive to (let’s call it the Clinic I Hate, CIH) would not work with me because my weight was higher than their limit. “Studies have shown,” they said, that obese patients do not respond well to stims. Strangely enough, that has not been my problem with the first two ivf cycles. Perhaps not so strange, given that my reproductive endocrinologist and his colleagues are the authors of a study on ivf and obesity, yet when I called the clinic the first time and timidly asked if there was a weight limit, the woman who answered didn’t know what I was talking about. “Do you mean the wait?” she asked. In any case the study does not say obese women cannot succeed at ivf, but that they may need higher doses (I don’t) of stims, and that pregnancy rates per transfer are not affected.
When CIH first told me I needed to lose weight before I could cycle there, I figured I couldn’t lose fifteen pounds (approx) in a month in any kind of healthy way, so I gave myself a year. I needed to do the cycles in the summer to work around my teaching schedule. By the next year, I had gained ten pounds. Thank you, CIH (to be fair, the tenure review year may have had something to do with it, but never underestimate my rebellious side). So I called Alma Mater Clinic and cycled with them at the end of the summer (no problems with weight or wait). Thank you to Cecily at Wasted Birth Control and the mental health professionals in my life for encouraging me to be assertive about finding a clinic. Thanks for nothing to CIH for the year I wasted. Of course, if I had not just accepted that I was unsuitable when they told me so, I could have call AM clinic a year earlier. I read enough blogs to know that clinics have different criteria for accepting and rejecting people. But (and this is also why it is scary for me to even mention my weight in a blog with a comments section) because my weight is a big topic for my self criticism, I accepted CIH’s rejection of me as entirely appropriate.
For the record, I am back at the weight I was when I first talked to them. Over the past year and a half, through two ivf cycles, I lost ten pounds. I am contrary that way: when I read in my ivf materials that I was not supposed to engage in strenous exercise once I started stims, I joined started swimming and joined a gym a few weeks before that in addition to the weekly dancing and twice-yoga I was doing. I had some vague idea that “strenous” might be a relative term, so that the higher my activity level before starting, the more would be ok during the cyle. I was wrong. I think it is funny, though, that “walking is ok,” even though a normal amount of walking in NYC would be a lot to people where I live and drive.)
Now, I am off for Lupron injection #6. Next post may be: my brain on Lupron.
