Anne Nahm

Last night at dinner, I had one of those sabotage PETA moments, where they kidnap you and throw you in the back of the van and force you to watch how food is made.  Except, you know, the whole experience came via a box of fishsticks.

I get sick of making homemade food three times a day, seven days a week is why.  Soooo boring.  I mean, fun if you have a spanky new apron and you feel all cookish.  But boring as hell when it is like the 250th consecutive meal and you’re tired and man, why is it not OK for our whole family to pretend like we are a bunch of bachelors, and we can bond by eating tuna out of  a can over the sink?

Plus, sometimes, when I’m wheeling around the grocery store and the kids are three hanging monkeylike creatures, howling and threatening to tip the cart with their swinging body weight, asking for cookies, the smallest one rips off her diaper and waves it in the air like a big white SURRENDER flag?  Except, clearly, I am the one who is supposed to do the surrendering.

Well, I must admit that on occasion, I just throw shit in the grocery cart and call it a day. Later, we eat whatever I got.  But not over the sink!  Just to show you that I haven’t totally thrown in the towel.

I know a lot of you meticulously plan out the whole week and then shop for every little thing with your print outs with neat little boxes to the left and ordered by location.  Check!  Check!  Check!  So satisfying, I assume.  But chaos groceries is how we roll in this household.

Anyway, I do kind of half heartedly try and buy the processed food that is least processed looking.  I now realize this is a big mistake.  If going for processed food, you should go for the most processed.  Like on a one to ten scale where tomatoes hanging off the vine are at one end and hotdogs are at the other, if you are going for processed, you should go 11.  That’s my thinking this morning anyway.  Because otherwise, you are halfway through your fishstick (that you are enjoying!  Because all you had to do was pop it in the oven and make a side salad, instead of season some stuff and simmer it and think about it and make sure you had all the ingredients and stuff.  Hallelujah!  Oven ready!  Processed!  Fishsticks!).

Yeah, I should just cut right to what was waiting for me inside the fishstick, right.

My half eaten fishtick!  With homemade tartar sauce!

And Right Here! Under this Cut! The WormoftheOcean that I wrapped around my fork, thinking, Hmm, that is unusual color and texture for a hunk of fish, and then pulled slowly out of the rest of the fishstick, until it freed itself with the tiniest plop! sound.

So as I’m sitting at the table, mostly thinking Ctrl-Alt-Delete over and over like some kind of purification ritual, some small part of my brain is thinking I need to go vegan.  Because this stuff always happens to me.  I am always finding the chicken embryo swimming around in my scrambled eggs or that one big vein that’s always hanging out in a leg of chicken like rubber tubing.  It’s not that I care about the animals so much as my squick factor is taking over.  Maybe after a month of no animal product, I’d lose my skittishness.  Maybe I’d miss it so bad I’d eat the ass out of a horse or something.  But I don’t think I’ll ever eat the ass out of a fishstick.  At least not again.

I should know by this point that it is never OK to post about how I’m getting extra sleep and I don’t know what to do with myself.

Because now it’s four days later and I’ve had two hours of sleep total.  I’m sitting here after the baby is finally done marathon nursing, examining my poor marbles-in-an-old-tube-sock boobs and seriously considering posting macros of nipple blisters.  For artistic/scientific purposes.  The skin of nipples is so thin, and when it is in blister form, it is translucent – almost beautiful.  They kind of look  like if rock candy, hemorrhoids and a piece of chewed bubblegum went to an orgy and nine months later one of them had a baby, and the father was so undeterminable as to require some kind of genetic testing.

Anyway, after three days of 102 fever and me starting to wonder what the hell was going on, the baby woke up covered in spots this morning.  Signaling she is either a red-headed, red-spotted cheetah shape-shifter OR she has Roseola.

Lately, it feels like these boulders of emotional issues are shifting around inside of me, leaving me off kilter.  My parents left for Texas a few days ago.  My dad turns 70 next year, which means he has to divest retirement money for legal reasons I don’t understand.  Anyway, he ran the numbers on how much the state of California is going to tax him, and suddenly he is dragging my mom around all the various tax shelter states in the country with great enthusiasm.

Every time I have seen him in the last month, he has been pushing TEXAS!  Wouldn’t You Like To Move To TEXAS?!  Have you seen the size of home you could buy in TEXAS?  Also, he has been muttering unpleasant things about California under his breath.

From the time I was ages 6 to 12, I lived in 4 different states.  Hell, since I’ve been 12, I’ve lived in 4 more.  I do not ever want to move again.  I certainly don’t want to uproot my kids and do to them what was done to me.  It is hard to express how much I do not even want to discuss moving without backing up and unloading a dump truck of Childhood Grievances on my dad with a loud Beep-Beep-Beep sound as I do so.  I am old enough to be over those injuries now.

The shiny hook in the shit-bait of moving is that when I was 14, my parents sent me to boarding school.  Of all the moves we made, that was the one in which they jettisoned me personally away from the rest of the family.  And then, for whatever reason, after I was gone, they stopped moving.  It was true/it was untrue that something was wrong with the way our family worked, and when they got rid of me, that chaos evaporated and they became stable.

During that time I was away at boarding school, the movie for Joy Luck Club came out.  I remember watching it on video with my family over the Winter Holiday.  At the end, there is a scene where a mom leaves two babies alone because she believes she is going to die.  My little sister was watching with us.  She did not understand, and she asked what the lady was doing.  After my mom explained, she said, “I would never do that.  We would all live or die together.”

As a teenager, I only remember feeling gut punched.  It took a long time to reconcile the idea that my mom, who loved me, was saying she would never let her kids go, even though she had let me go.  It was true/it was untrue, if you get what I mean.

I’m trying to be cool as my dad looks at all his finances and thrashes about 10%.  I told him to use my part of the inheritance – I would rather my kids have grandparents around than money at the end.  I make sure to say these things in a calm voice and not like some clingy, weepy child.  I try not to point out that for the first time in 15 years, all my dad’s relatives are in the same state, and all he can talk about is leaving.

I don’t even want to think about the idea that maybe this is not the money at all.  My dad gets aggravated I don’t want to consider the idea of moving.  I don’t want to tell him how it feels like there is a caged kindergartner living inside of me, and how when he talks about uprooting my family and going somewhere new, it rattles the bars of the cage until the kid freaks the eff out.  I don’t hardly want to open my mouth, because that kid will scream and sob her way to the surface, and holy shit.  I’m not 5 anymore.  I’m 35.   It gets so old to have the same stupid issues.  It would be nice to wake up one morning and have someone push that button and find out it didn’t work anymore.

***Both videos are fairly NSFW****
*** Somewhat spoilerish talk of True Blood***

I kinda suspected something was up when I said I thought Bill had a cute butt, and comments were unanimous No way, Annie, Eric is the Shizzle.

And now I’ve gotten to the point in the books where I can no longer think sexy thoughts about Bill.  This realization was shortly followed by throwing the tiger cover book across the room and stalking over to Youtube to take another look at Eric.

Here’s the analysis so far.  The guy who plays Eric is hot as sin.  With the sound down.  But, uhm… Am I the only person who thinks he kind of sounds like a muppet?

(Sorry, this was the clip I found that had the most muppet on the front end.  The rest is just fap shots and music).

Like if Fozzy and Kermit had a love child.  My naughty thoughts are starting to look like Kermit singing Hurt (Right around 2:47).  And that would translate into VERY DISTURBING. To me. And NSFLife, unless your life is safe with reluctant muppet oral.  Enjoy!

PS:  I do think I have a small thing for Pam though.

PPS:  VERY SPOILERISH (in white type, highlight to view): Did I miss something between Dead as a Doornail and Definitely Dead – suddenly H is a vampire and dead and has willed everything to Sookie?  When did this all happen?  Halp!

I’ve hit that strange hormonal crossroads of post-baby.  My smallest child turned 16 months yesterday.  She’s started sleeping a little more reliably, and she’s hit that developmental milestone where she can occasionally entertain herself quietly for fifteen minutes or so.

This is causing me to freak out.  Some tired, beat-down portion of my brain is now occasionally freed up for thoughts beyond caring for another human. Can you feel me?  It’s not a big portion or anything, but some axons are no longer firing on AIR RAID mode anymore.  My hair has stopped falling out.  When a car backfires in the middle of the night, I only wake up gasping for air and half out of bed, instead of finding myself standing above the baby’s crib, arms outstretched, nursing bra unlatched, and leaking milk on my toes.

Of course, the sleeping/entertaining herself combo arrives jaggedly, with two awesome days followed by three nights filled with screaming, or some family wide illness that throws everything into the toilet.

You know that feeling when you go to Vegas and gamble?  And everything is exciting, and sometimes you lose, but you are always thinking about winning on the next game and everything is kind of drunken and magical?  Well, if that feeling was a sock, what I am going through is that sock inside out.  The sock’s evil twin.  El Diablo Legging.

On the good days, I don’t know what to do with myself and all the energy suddenly available.  So I sleep and lie fallow.  The baby can sit in the bathtub and entertain herself while I sit on the toilet with the lid down and read instead of watching her hawkishly or staring at the bathtowels and drooling on myself as I’ve done in months previous.

I’ve read Sookie Stackhouse books like they are crack (possibly doubling the amount I’ve been able to read this year.  Whoo-hoo), and OMIGOD.  After years of being clean, I have gone on a Tetris bender that has left me with claws for hands and twitching in my sleep. Yesterday, I hallucinated the refrigerator landed on the linoleum in the kitchen and the whole floor blinked out of existence.

Of course, the moment I get it into my head to actually do something with all this extra energy, the baby goes on a two day crying jag, or gets shots.  And then I am back in Vegas, watching somebody sweep away the very last of my free time chips that I foolishly laid down on the PLAY TETRIS FOR TWO HOURS square and wishing I had placed those tokens somewhere useful.

Sorry.  I had to leave the writing of this post for a few minutes and go play Tetris.  AM back.

This is the third time I’ve been at this crossroads (what with this being the third kid and all), and I am always stunned at how base and animalistic it is, the time when my body has recuperated enough to get pregnant again*.  Have periods!  Am preoccupied with sexy stuff.  Have noticed guys looking at me – for a while I was completely invisible to the male population (maybe it was my special Amulet of Baby Carriage, or my Sweatpants of Invisibility, but I could have robbed an all male bank and no one would have been the wiser.  Too bad that the brain power needed to come up with this idea arrives just as my physical body seems detectable again.)

It is somewhat unnerving – like despite all the polite society, and me obviously being married and teeming with children, I am wearing a sign that says Womb for Rent:  Inquire Within.  Like somehow this is the opportune time to get me knocked up again, when I haven’t really had a chance to get my wits about me.  Anyway, I get the feeling this is overshare: y/y?  Oh well.

*Oh, I would beat my own uterus with the Detroit section of the Yellow Pages, screaming Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?!? If I thought it would help.

Earlier last week, I had some free time, and I found myself staring at curtains blowing in the breeze. For like 20 minutes.  Some small part of my brain was all, “Dude, this is a complete waste of time.”

But most of my brain was whispering, very quietly, “wheeeeeeeeeee!”

Twenty. Minutes.

Also:

Waste of a Fight
Last night my husband and I got in a fight because I thought he said, “OBEY ME”.  But after much ruckus, it turned out he said “eBay Me!”  Which, somehow, also made perfect sense within the context of the conversation.

Also: You guys have the funniest assed smackdown anywhere.  Have been whispering to myself all morning:  I AM VOLDERMORT!  and giggling.