Update to Spawn of Jennsweb

Went for our 3rd ultrasound last night and got to see the spine. It looked like an animated H. R. Giger drawing.

On a similar note, everytime I eat anything close to a full meal, I start feeling like John Hurt in the scene in "Alien" where the little alien baby starts to force its way through his chest. On Thanksgiving, I thought I was going to explode like Mr. Creosote after eating the ill-fated wafer thin mint. And forget trying to sit down on the floor to color with my niece Mary. Luckily my mom and my sister have both gone through two preganancies each so they started telling her that "Aunt Jennie can't get down on the floor like she used to." Speaking of that, I can't imagine going to a club looking like this.

The baby is now about 7 inches long and weighs about one pound. From what I could tell from a fuzzy ultrasound photo, she looks like her daddy. She's a show-off too. While the technician was looking at the monitor, she stuck her leg up over her head.

Overall, the strangest thing about being "with child" is the loss of control over your body. Not that I've taken to flinging my arms around or swearing uncontrollably, but my belly is expanding at a rate that is starting to outpace all sense of normalcy. At any other time, I'm pretty good at being able to adjust my weight. Jeans getting too tight? Cut back on the doughnuts. Fanny bones starting to ache after sitting for more than an hour on a firm chair? Eat more doughnuts.
But now, it's becoming a phenomenon. I'm actually eating less at one sitting than I used to, and I'm still waiting for all those cravings for ice cream to kick in, but I'm outgrowing my clothes like when I was 10. And I'm waddling like a duck. It's hard to move your legs around a 15 pound pillow strapped to your waist.

Getting kicked from the inside is wierd too. Every once in a while, usually after a meal, it feels as if there is a tiny kickboxer inside my abdomen practicing side kicks. I am also turning into a total baby about stairs ever since I went up three flights at work and actually had to stop and catch my breath.

At one point, about a year ago, I thought it would be fun to try writing a column for Inside Kungfu Magazine about being a pregnant woman doing martial arts. Unfortunately, the reason there is so little out there on the subject is because jumping up to do a hurricane kick and then dropping into three spinning floor sweeps followed by rising up into a tam tui is not recommended by most obstetricians. For now, I just try to do stuff in slow motion, or in my head.

Update to Spawn of Jennsweb

A Very Simple Rule

On one hand, this is from the BBC news website. On the other hand...

Australians have been told by their New South Wales Food Authority (kind of a funny title, like Nuclear Safety Commissioner), to not be alarmed by a recent report of glowing porkchops. So if you are one of those people who take their medical reportage from radio call-in shows, and you live in Australia, and you eat pork, you can breathe an enormous sigh of relief and throw away the rest of that luminescent loin cut. It's only a benign, naturally-forming bacteria, Nature's gentle way of letting us know that some organic matter is "a bit gone".

But if you are like me, you are probably wondering under what set of circumstances would you be able to see meat glow in the first place. If I ate pork, I would probably make sure I only saw it in brightly lit conditions. Was the Australian carnivore bathed in an un-holy glow when they opened their refrigerator? Was it being eaten under a moonless night sky or in a dimly lit restaurant? Was it an eerie glow, or a cheerful radiance? Is that why undercooked pork can kill you, the deadly bacteria are attracted by the benign's soft beacon of imminent corruption?

A Very Simple Rule

Book Report

It's been a month since my last entry, but my mother always said: "If you can't say anything nice..."

I've actually spent the past 3 weeks ingesting and absorbing Howard Zinn's book, "A People's History of the United States". I was planning to insert a lot of excerpts in this post, but, you really need to pick it up and read it yourself. Plus, I had to return it to the library so I didn't get a chance to xerox all the passages at work. Every time I came across something that seemed like what we've seen in the news lately, I would dog-ear the page and read on. After 670-odd pages I had a lot of dog-ears.

In case you've never heard about "People's History", it's Zinn's reaction to the Board of Education sanctioned history that he was taught from elementary school through college. It's history from the perspective of those who lacked the power to enforce their version of the story. The good news is, you can avoid having to read a two pound paperback book by paying close attention to a wide variety of news outlets. The bad news is, after 500+ years on this side of the pond, rich white males, and the rest of us, haven't appeared to learn a damn thing.

Here's the basic plot: A bunch of Caucasian guys backed by an economic superpower, on a mission to expand their financial control over the global economy, encounter brown people who have natural resources that are highly valuable commodities in the global marketplace. Through propoganda, treaties, and failing the first two, brute force, the Caucasian group wrests control of the resources away from the brown people. Then, having depleted their pool of cheap labor, the Caucasians realize they need to get more people to do their dirty work. By various methods, they import labor into their newly aquired territory, but economic imbalances create tension and the situation often erupts into chaos. Order is restored enough so that trade can continue and the status quo, at least on the surface, remains intact. For the most part, this status quo is maintained through two methods; a journalistic component that is heavily promoted as being free and fair minded, and cultivation of competion between various groups of people who are at a cultural and/or economic disadvantage.

That's pretty much it.

Book Report