We are getting to the final stages of Lil' S2's gestational period. It can't come to an end soon enough, frankly. This pregnancy has been really difficult on S -- she's carrying around more extra weight than last time, she has a groin injury (described as a "shooting pain") that forces her to lie down frequently, her blood sugar is high, it's hot as Dante's Inferno outside, her jimmy leg is constantly acting up, and she has a three-year-old whom she can't keep up, and who gives her hell, because he doesn't really understand any of this. Also, unfortunately, she has a husband who isn't very sympathetic. It's not that I don't want to be; it's just that I suck at sympathy.
I've said before that S and I have the same two or three fights over and over in different forms. The "tone fight" is probably number one on the list (although it's getting better; we haven't had that one in a while). But the "sympathy fight" is a close second. This is where S finds herself in a position where she is struggling and just needs somebody to listen to her -- a shoulder to cry on -- so naturally she turns to me, but this is probably a bad idea, because I'm not a good crying shoulder (I'm the anti-Edwin McCain). My natural disposition is to treat things analytically and dispassionately and try to "solve" them. But in some cases there is nothing to solve, because the only real problem is that S is feeling unhappy or stressed, and just wants somebody to say "I understand" and rub her back. Sometimes I can recognize this and act as such, but most the time I don't, because that's just not the way I'm wired. You can only fake the funk so often, for so long. Eventually you are who you are. And so sometimes -- usually when one of us is hungry and/or tired -- everything boils over into a big explosion. It sucks, but it happens. We are married, therefore we fight sometimes. I think that's as true an axiom as there ever was.
Anyway, plenty of other things going on in the world. Another unarmed black man was shot and killed by a police officer for a minor offense. Ho-hum. A big difference between this case and others, however, is that the offending officer was almost immediately arrested and charged with murder. This shows what happens when America's two worst qualities -- its racism and its trigger-happiness -- meet. We seriously need to work on these things, but we won't, at least not the way we should, because there are too many people who are in total denial about these problems. I could (and probably should) write twenty more paragraphs about this, but I'm not going to, because Lil' S is going to wake up soon and there are other things I want to get to...
...like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. He died. It's unfortunate. I just heard him on the Sklar Brothers podcast a few weeks ago, and it was a fantastic interview. He was not that old (61), and he had a wife, and kids, and grandkids, and sounded like a decent dude. (If we ignore that one time he painted himself half-black to mock a biracial opponent -- speaking of racism, check out some old WWF story lines. It's not very surprising the biggest star from that period has little qualms throwing around the N-word.) Sadly, Piper is another in a long list of dead wrestlers. As a kid I always dreamed about being a professional wrestler. (My name would have been "The Greco God," and my shtick would have been that I was a master Greco-Roman wrestler, who eschewed legit wrestling aspirations to beat up WWF bad guys.) But now it's probably a good thing those dreams were never pursued. It's a brutal gig (and obviously it attracts people more prone to self-destruction). Here's an account of the staggeringly high number of people who died who participated in Wrestlemania VII. It was less than 25 years ago. We can add another one to the list.
Anyway...
In other news, happier news, a friend of mine from high school was featured in an article in San Diego Magazine. She's a chemistry professor, and one of the things she talks about is our culture's absurd fear of "chemicals" (later she calls out Jessica Alba for her phony "honest" brand -- though I must say, they make a solid diaper). An excerpt:
I've said before that S and I have the same two or three fights over and over in different forms. The "tone fight" is probably number one on the list (although it's getting better; we haven't had that one in a while). But the "sympathy fight" is a close second. This is where S finds herself in a position where she is struggling and just needs somebody to listen to her -- a shoulder to cry on -- so naturally she turns to me, but this is probably a bad idea, because I'm not a good crying shoulder (I'm the anti-Edwin McCain). My natural disposition is to treat things analytically and dispassionately and try to "solve" them. But in some cases there is nothing to solve, because the only real problem is that S is feeling unhappy or stressed, and just wants somebody to say "I understand" and rub her back. Sometimes I can recognize this and act as such, but most the time I don't, because that's just not the way I'm wired. You can only fake the funk so often, for so long. Eventually you are who you are. And so sometimes -- usually when one of us is hungry and/or tired -- everything boils over into a big explosion. It sucks, but it happens. We are married, therefore we fight sometimes. I think that's as true an axiom as there ever was.
Anyway, plenty of other things going on in the world. Another unarmed black man was shot and killed by a police officer for a minor offense. Ho-hum. A big difference between this case and others, however, is that the offending officer was almost immediately arrested and charged with murder. This shows what happens when America's two worst qualities -- its racism and its trigger-happiness -- meet. We seriously need to work on these things, but we won't, at least not the way we should, because there are too many people who are in total denial about these problems. I could (and probably should) write twenty more paragraphs about this, but I'm not going to, because Lil' S is going to wake up soon and there are other things I want to get to...
...like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. He died. It's unfortunate. I just heard him on the Sklar Brothers podcast a few weeks ago, and it was a fantastic interview. He was not that old (61), and he had a wife, and kids, and grandkids, and sounded like a decent dude. (If we ignore that one time he painted himself half-black to mock a biracial opponent -- speaking of racism, check out some old WWF story lines. It's not very surprising the biggest star from that period has little qualms throwing around the N-word.) Sadly, Piper is another in a long list of dead wrestlers. As a kid I always dreamed about being a professional wrestler. (My name would have been "The Greco God," and my shtick would have been that I was a master Greco-Roman wrestler, who eschewed legit wrestling aspirations to beat up WWF bad guys.) But now it's probably a good thing those dreams were never pursued. It's a brutal gig (and obviously it attracts people more prone to self-destruction). Here's an account of the staggeringly high number of people who died who participated in Wrestlemania VII. It was less than 25 years ago. We can add another one to the list.
Anyway...
In other news, happier news, a friend of mine from high school was featured in an article in San Diego Magazine. She's a chemistry professor, and one of the things she talks about is our culture's absurd fear of "chemicals" (later she calls out Jessica Alba for her phony "honest" brand -- though I must say, they make a solid diaper). An excerpt:
Everything we eat, the air we breathe, everything in nature, and everything man-made is made of chemicals. People are very afraid of chemicals today, so much so that they spend large amounts of money on supposedly “chemical-free” food and household products. In reality, chemicals are neither good nor bad. Some are toxic in extremely low doses (like hydrogen cyanide), while others are only toxic in very high doses (like water). Moreover, “natural” chemicals (that is, chemicals derived from nature) are not intrinsically any safer than “artificial” ones (those made in a lab). People could save themselves a lot of anxiety (not to mention thousands of dollars) if they understood that!
Preach, girl!
Uh-oh, I think I hear something stirring upstairs. Better wrap this up.
Until next time ...
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