Chirky

I know exactly when I began fearing the prospect of giving birth. It was more than 10 years ago, and I was in a bible study with four of my good friends. All of whom, at the time, were Baylor nursing students. And I don’t remember much about that bible study, other than their weekly war stories – stories that made me certain I never wanted to experience a vaginal birth. Ever.

Most of the stories that stuck with me were about ripping. DOWN THERE. They were about pain, large amounts of pain and screaming and blood and pushing and pressure and then the TEARING, and then the weeks and weeks and weeks before it healed, before it no longer hurt to do something as simple as using the restroom. That was 12 years ago. To this day, I cannot stand the thought of an episiotomy. To the point that I generally stick my fingers in my ears, squeeze my eyes shut and mentally sing “la la la” if anyone so much as mentions one around me. In fact, I’ll admit that the idea of having a c-section has almost sounded dreamy to me. With drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Just in case.

Then, last night Roger and I turned on the television and happened to find a documentary about giving birth. A documentary about giving birth naturally. A documentary about giving birth naturally at home. With a midwife. Not a doctor. Just to clarify.

At first it was kind of a freak show to me – who in the world would want to subject themselves to that? That is the sort of thing for ultra-granola women, not the sort for women like me. I like modern medicine. I like to be pampered. And maybe, I am even a little bit girly. I do not like to writhe around the floor, under a table, grunting and clutching my abdomen. (For anyone who has had a home birth, please accept my apologies: I don’t know why this is what I imagined home births are like. After watching this documentary, I am slightly less ignorant.)

Continue reading "Fear Factor: Childbirth Edition" »

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Hello, my name is Jes and I have irrational fears.

Several times a day, I hear noises that sound like someone is knocking on our door. On the way to the entryway, I always glance behind me at the massive wall of windows in the living room, which looks into our backyard. Each time I'm convinced that someone is going to back there, standing around or sitting at our patio table watching me, despite the fact that we have a 10' privacy fence and two locked gates. Sometimes at night I sneak up and BAM! turn on the lights outside to catch whoever might be out there. No one ever is. Thankfully.

From where I stand in the entryway, I am visible through the dining room, where one full-length window and two smaller, chest-high-to-ceiling windows face the front yard. I love natural light so the blinds are always open during the day, which gives away the fact that I am walking around at home. So if I don't open the door, there's always a chance someone will peer in through the windows and see me standing there, very decidedly not answering the door.

Because of this, I've begun sneaking around our house a lot, peeking around corners to make sure no one is actually looking in the windows, then tip-toeing past them. But by the time I get to the door no one is there. This is annoying because I bothered getting up in the first place, risking window exposure for someone who has already left. I am beginning to think that I am crazy, but then I remind myself that the moment I stop with my charades, someone will be looking in my window. It is creepy to imagine, because in my mind the person is always wearing black, carrying a stick to break the window, and has narrow, dark eyes.

I've recently discovered that our ice maker sounds perilously similar to someone knocking on the door. I could just turn off the ice maker, but that is too easy. My brain prefers my quickened pulse and the shock of my heart dropping into my stomach every time I hear the loud, rapping noise. Instead, I'm considering whether I should mount a video camera on my front porch, which I could monitor from my computer. That would be much more convenient, because then I wouldn't have to worry about someone drilling my eyeball out when I peered through the peephole. That, and I can't count on the noise always being my ice maker. Sometimes people really do knock on the door.

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(This is a series in Weird Things About Me. Part One is here.)

Two weekends ago, Roger and I went to see two movies: Wall-e and Wanted. And – I can’t help this sickness of mine, it’s like a plague – every time I go to a theater, every time I wander down the dimly lit aisle to find my seat, every time I gingerly lower myself into that seat, I can’t stop thinking the same thing. I think about it during the movie, and when the credits are rolling I’m still apprehensive about it:

I worry that I’m going to get lice.

Do you do this? Do you worry that you’re going to get lice every time you sit in a seat that is not your own? Particularly in a dark room, when you don’t know who sat in that seat before you? There’s really no reason I should worry about this, since I’ve never actually gotten lice from a movie theater, but I am still concerned nonetheless.

Most people worry about – I don’t know – whether someone with big hair will sit in front of them (though I suppose that has been eradicated with the wide-spread adoption of stadium seating, thank goodness), or whether those people over there are going to be talking throughout the entire movie, or why the person sitting in front of you insists on sending text messages during the movie. Honestly, you texters! Your phone’s backlight is bright in that dark theater. BRIGHT AND ANNOYING.

Ahem.

To be fair, the people running rampant with lice may not even realize they have vermin nesting in their hair – and that’s when it gets really scary. Think about the hats you try on in stores, the restaurants booths you sit in, the subway and/or taxi seats you touch on a daily or weekly basis. And then think about how far I’m imagining those little suckers can jump. (Which is to say: at least 12 inches. I can’t prove it, but I bet they can at least jump a foot. And I bet they have good aim, too.)

I’ve never really considered myself a germophobe, but right now I'm entertaining the option of wearing a shower cap the next time I go to the movie theater. It certainly wouldn’t be as distracting as that text-messager in front of me, I’m sure of it.

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A couple months ago, The Mike Stand tagged me for a Six Weird Things About You meme. I wrote a similar entry a while back, but it was actually a photoblog of Six Weird Things About My Home. I wasn’t feeling vulnerable enough at the time to share six things about myself, I suppose, even if it was just about my addiction to chapstick. (Foreshadowing!) Without further ado, here is another weird thing about me:

I’ve since purchased a home and moved, and those six weird things probably all still apply, but to a different space. Our remodel is a never-ending project, one with dusty concrete floors and unpacked boxes and holes in the drywall. We’re loving our new house more and more with each change we make – though at this point we’re still living with blank white walls (to be remedied soon-ish!) and we still have all those dachshunds.

As I thought through weird things about myself – and believe me: there are a lot – I concluded that everything requires explanation. Isn’t that the way it always is? And so I’ve devised a plan to make each tidbit I expose into its own post, which seems like a much better idea than describing everything in a single post, an entry that would undoubtedly be more than eight pages of text. Lucky you.

A few months ago I purchased a lip gloss at Holly’s suggestion, though I want to make this clear: I bought it because (a) it was cheap, so if I hated it I wouldn’t have wasted much money; and (b) she lauded its ability to look good on anyone, which – you know – kind of seemed like a challenge. Would it look good on anyone, including me? (It did. And I’m still wearing it.) However, I didn’t purchase the lip gloss based on her explanation of why she bought it: she wanted her lips to look chapped, because they turned “the most perfect shade of pinky-red.”

I mean, a perfect shade of pinky-red sounds great, but Holly is a unique case. To wit: her lips look good when chapped. When MY lips get chapped, I can barely pay attention to the color because I’m too concerned with all that skin peeling off. And then the cycle starts: I lick my lips, I bite them, I mash them together. I soak my lips in chapstick and lip balm and lip gloss and anything else I can find that promises to relieve chapped lips. I don't care if I buy it at the drugstore or the grocery store or a department store. I just care that it works. (Which, incidentally - I'm always open to suggestions if you have them.)

I squirrel away several chapsticks and lip balms in my bathroom drawers, at least two in my purse, two on my nightstand, one in each car. I keep spares at my parents’ homes, in my desk at work, in winter coats that are stashed away in the closet. When Roger and I go out and I leave my purse behind, I fill his pockets with my tubes of lip gloss. And when I find that I’m mysteriously without? I stop and buy some. I am addicted. And maybe that’s not so strange.

What IS weird, though, is that I cannot fall asleep without covering my lips in a protective layer of balm -- I mean, it makes sense, perhaps, considering Roger cannot sleep without a fan blowing on him (which subsequently blows air on me) -- and I know this because I have tried. I have tried, to no avail, to break myself of this chapstick habit, and the result is always the same: I lie awake for hours and all I can think about is how dry my lips are going to get if I don’t roll over, unscrew that cap and swipe the applicator over my lips.

Am I alone in this? Tell me I’m not alone.

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It's been over a year since I've publicly aired any of the feedback I get on this site and, frankly, I don't know why I've waited so long. I often get precious gems from crabby people who take the time to sit down and write me, and it seems like a disservice to my readers that I don't divulge these trinkets more frequently.

I seldom have the opportunity to respond to the feedback because most people don't have the nerve to leave an email address. That is why a particular remark left on this site yesterday was so appealing to me. The comment was in response to an entry I wrote about the Texas Snakeman. I recommend that you read my thoughts on the Snakeman for context, and also to see a really unpleasant image of a man who purposefully dangled ten rattlesnakes from his maw.

From Steven:

I know Mr. Bibby personally and for you to sit here and act all high and mighty is such a load of crap. You act as if he is truely harming the snakes. I guess you have never harmed anything in your life, well I call BS. I bet you have done more harm to any living creature than Mr. Bibby has to any of those snakes. Get off your high horse before you fall and break your neck.

Whoa there, cowboy.

When I saw that Steven left his email address, I found the REPLY button irresistible:

Hi Steven,

I appreciate that you took the time to leave a comment on my site. Please know that I had no intention to offend you or the integrity of Mr. Bibby's pursuits, and that the entry you read was merely my exaggerated opinion (as is often found on my site).

I don't at all think that he was harming the snakes; in fact, I'm quite certain that he was very careful in his handling of them. And you're right about one thing: I am also certain I've done more harm to a living creature than Mr. Bibby did to those snakes. To wit: just last night a mosquito landed on my arm and I killed it! I doubt that Mr. Bibby killed any of the snakes that were hanging from his mouth.

Still, that last sentence completely rattles me (forgive the pun, I couldn't resist), which is obviously why I wrote the entry in the first place.

Dismounting,
Jes

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Filed Under: Irrational fears

For the past two years, nearly every time I sit down on the toilet, I have a sudden and irrational fear of snakes. Snakes, guilefully lurking in the plumbing, waiting until my posterior is exposed, and then lurching upward, striking quickly, and biting me.

And then I'll be dead, with my pants down, and I'll probably have hunched over and fallen to the ground and my husband, Roger, will have to find me like that.

And that's not how I want him to remember me.

Look at these pictures! Also, these articles! How could I not be afraid? THERE HAVE BEEN FATALITIES!

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I am haunted by purchasing feminine care products to such a degree that merely saying the word gives me the creeps: Tampons.

I'm the woman who can't just buy a box at the grocery store - I have to buy other unrelated items, like a pound of asparagus and six apples and 93% lean ground beef and a loaf of freshly-baked sourdough bread and maybe some finely shredded cheddar cheese and a few bottles of contact solution just to make it seem as though I haphazardly found myself on the feminine care aisle and casually threw a box of them into my cart, without so much as checking the price or the brand or the size(s). Gross.

I feel like vomiting now, just admitting that.

Continue reading "Dispensers: dispensable" »

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Qiao Yubo, who is pregnant with at least five babies, walks with her husband, right, in Songyuan, in China's northeast Jilin province, Sunday, June 11, 2006.

Qiao, who is 1.67 meters (nearly 5'5") tall, has a waistline measurement of 1.75 meters (nearly 5' 7.5"), five months into her pregnancy.

Qiao's excessive bulk is causing difficulties in getting around (you're not kidding), with taxi drivers too afraid to take her in their cars. Her clothing is all custom-made and she eats up to seven meals a day. (AP Photo/EyePress)

UPDATE: It was later announced that this story was a hoax. Qiao's made up the story after suffereing two miscarriages and each day stuffed quilts and blankets inside her clothing.

(Italics my own)

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I've noticed that 82% of the time that I drink Sprite, I begin to hiccup. And I think that hiccups are scary. I know! That's absurd!

But it's true.

Continue reading "Irrational Fears" »

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