Posts from — January 2010

I learned some good lessons the hard way from my oral surgery last week. Luckily, I get to do this at least two more times this year, therefore, I’ll get lots of practice.

1. Clear my schedule: I had the surgery on Tuesday and I didn’t really feel up to doing anything until Saturday.  Set aside at least three days for each surgery.  Set aside at least five days to not run.

2. Ask for help: Josh originally hadn’t scheduled in to take time off, but did so when he saw that I was a fucking wreck.  My mum took the twins one day too.  I need to schedule the surgery next time on a Thursday, ask Josh to take off Friday, and spend the weekend healing.

3. Don’t feel guilty that I asked for help: I felt so badly that Josh was taking off on Wednesday that I went downstairs with the twins for a bit to give him some time to work from home.  I probably could have healed faster if I had just allowed myself the space to heal.  Next time, y’all are on your own.

4. Take the Vicodin: there are no points for getting through oral surgery with wimpy painkillers.  No one jumps out of the shadows and gives you a prize for having a high pain threshold.  And I believe that in all facets of life–there is no point to being a martyr.  Next time, I’m going to have a steady stream of Vicodin and drool and not feel guilty or wimpy doing so.

Those are the lessons I learned this week.  What has been up with you since we last chatted at the Lushary?

As always, it has been about a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.

My sister-cousin was here for the weekend and on Saturday, even though I felt like shit, we jumped in the car and headed out to Shepherdstown, WV.  It was warm enough to walk around town without our jackets.  We didn’t have an agenda beyond tea at Shaharazades before we headed back home.  We shared a tofu dish at the Chinese restaurant on the corner, talked about a Michael Pollan book, dissected the relationships of people we know.

After lunch, we were wandering up the street and we decided to make good on a promise we made to the ChickieNob before we left to bring her back something interesting.  We ended up in a bead store, purchasing her a single turquoise stone that the woman threaded on a string for me gratis.

On a whim, inspired by some jewelry we saw in the bead store, my cousin decided that she wanted to buy herself a ring so we ducked into a little store called Plum on the main street.  The owner was busy helping another customer, but my cousin immediately found something she liked right upon walking in.  And then another.  And after that another.  We literally kept pointing out every piece of jewelry to one another: necklaces, cuff bracelet, a tiny ring made from a vintage sugar tong.

And then my sister-cousin started to second guess the purchase because, after all, it seems really indulgent to buy yourself a piece of jewelry for no reason.  And suddenly, it felt like the most important thing in the world to buy that piece of jewelry for precisely that reason.  Because we should all make ourselves happy instead of waiting for someone else to do it.  When we have the means to do so, we should buy pretty things that make us happy every once in a while instead of only buying practical things.

As my cousin settled on the two rings she ultimately purchased, we chatted with owner who was so kind and creative that I decided to make her jewelry my go-to present this year for birthdays.  And as I squatted down to peek at a ring my cousin was considering on the bottom shelf, I saw the one I wanted.  Four plum-coloured stones set in a funky silver design, with a darker purple stone in the center.  It looked like my little family of four.  I tried it on, and of course–as these things go–it fit perfectly.  The price was perfect too.

Every time I complete a big project or go through a life change, Josh buys me a piece of jewelry–usually a ring or a necklace.  The tradition began back when we were doing treatments the first time (though, I guess the engagement ring sort of counts too).  I really wanted the Tiffany’s bean necklace (thank you, store credit) because the bean was supposed to represent a beginning.  We weren’t getting our beginning, and I began to think that we needed to buy the necklace to get the beginning rather than waiting the other way around.  But Josh stood firm and said that it was bad luck to get the necklace until we had a pregnancy progress.

But that raised the question–when was the right time?  Obviously not the day we had a positive beta because one beta was meaningless.  And not the day we had our second beta because there were too many other hurdles to jump over.  And not the day we had our first ultrasound because we hadn’t seen the heartbeat.  And really, could we let out our breaths after we saw the heartbeats because there were too many things that could still go wrong.

And I guess that’s where Josh drew our line in the sand (thank goodness for sand’s shifty qualities).  After we saw the heartbeats, he drove me to Tiffany’s and we bought the bean necklace and I wore it home, sobbing as he played a song on the CD player that had come to represent everything we had been through prior to that point.  We were terrified of believing in anything anymore, but at the same time, if we didn’t grab happiness during the moments when it reared its head, how would we ever have a happy life?  Life is too tenuous, too fragile, too shifting and frail.  There is never a perfectly firm happiness, so we need to create those foundations ourselves or there would be no place to erect our lives.

And that’s where the line has always been.  When we get past the immediate hurdles, the ones that either always trip us up or the ones where it feels foolish to crow about something prematurely, we buy the piece of jewelry and say to ourselves, “right now, we’re happy.  We’re celebrating.  This may change, but we’ll never regret having this reminder because on this day, we were incredibly happy.”  He bought me a necklace when the twins came home from the NICU, bought me a ring when I sold the first book (only once I had a contract in hand since an oral offer seemed like a first beta).

I am waiting for news right now (and no, it is not of the family building variety), wavering between the glass being half full and the glass having a slow leak somewhere that is staining the table with water. But at lunch, my cousin and I got the same fortune, one that speaks volumes to me right now, and I was feeling optimistic as I stood by the counter with the ring on my hand.  Optimistic enough to ask the owner if I could leave my phone number and ask her to call me if someone bought the ring during the week.  I explained that I was waiting for news, but couldn’t bring myself to buy myself a gift prematurely.

Maybe the owner has the same arrangement with her own husband, because she offered to tuck it behind the counter for me until next weekend.  If I got good news this week, I could come back for it next weekend.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have that ring haunting me every time I looked down at my hand.   If the news took longer to receive than next weekend, I’d let the ring go and buy myself a different piece of jewelry there when the time came.  That was the best point about the store–there were dozens of pieces I liked.  I didn’t need to wrap my heart around a single piece to feel whole.

I took a photo of the ring and emailed it to Josh, asking if he’d buy it for me if I got good news.  He offered, in the moment, to just get me the ring now as a whatever gift.  Something pretty that would make me happy when I looked at it.  But that didn’t feel right either.  In the twenty minutes I was in the store, too much meaning had been already wrapped up in what the ring represented–a beginning–and I didn’t want to jinx things even if I know that causality doesn’t work that way.  What I mean is, I can wait if the fortune is true.  And it usually is because bad news is followed by good news which is followed by bad news, and the universe chases its tail again and again.

I drove home smiling, not just because I had an amazing day with my sister-cousin, but because I had already formulated a wordless blog post in my head for some time in the future when I simply post a picture of my hand, and a gorgeous, four-stone ring.

How do you mark special moments?

If you are not friends with the divine Ms. Cecily on Facebook, you may have missed this point made by one of her friends who responded to my question about the point of spam comments.  I’ve never really understood why spammers do what they do, why they desperately want a bunch of gibberish on my blog.

Apparently, though they know most of us will go through and delete out the comments (and hopefully, most will be caught by a spam filter before they go through), they are hoping that if they post them on older posts, we will be feeling lazy and not go back to delete them, figuring that few people will see it anyway.  But you should, and this is why:

Apparently, every time you leave a comment with the url for your blog (or in the case of spammers, a link to their site as well as extra links within the comment), Google counts that as a link (or multiple links) to your blog (or website).  The more links to your blog, the higher up you appear in a Google search.  The gibberish left by spammers are usually key words.  Or, sometimes, they’re just a cut-and-paste message such as “nice blog!” that they hope you’ll leave on because it seems harmless enough.

Therefore, if I ran a porn site online (you know, just speaking hypothetically.  Though I must make a note to reserve the url www.hotjewishinfertilebabes.com) and wanted people to find my porn site, I could get a bot to leave 10,000 comments on 10,000 blogs and hopefully, 10% of those people wouldn’t delete them, ending up with 1000 links back to my porn site.  Which would quickly bump my porn site in a search engine past all the other porn sites with fewer links.

The more widely read the blog is, the more enticing it is to get spam on there because their high ranking will help catapult you into a higher ranking.  Therefore, if I could get my spam on the Huffington Post or BlogHer or even A Little Pregnant (damn you, Julie, why are you always deleting my comments about a great place I know to get Viagra?), I could possibly get a lot of traffic to my porn site.

So please delete out spam and let reputable porn sites who pay for advertising on kinky blogs receive the most traffic rather than allow scummy spammers to use your hard-working blog to bring them new pervs.

That said, even if you are getting and rejecting a tremendous amount of spam, no one needs both comment moderation and a captcha device on their blog.  Take one or the other.  Rather than pass along your frustration with spammers to everyone else who reads your blog, simply go back and delete spam comments once a day.  Think about it–if you make people jump through too many hoops, they are less likely to stick around and give you feedback on your posts.  And spammers can still get through, even with a great spam block in place.  So, my advice–just delete.

But, there is also a good side to this.  If you’ve ever wondered why other blogs get so much traffic from Google searches, it’s because they leave a lot of comments.  It’s not just that people then follow you back when you leave a comment to return the favour by reading your blog, that comment also serves as a link and therefore raises the status of your blog in the search engine.  Some someone Googling a keyword on your blog–let’s say, “uterine anomalies”–is finding your blog because you left a lot of comments around the blogosphere; or, at least more than another person who also writes about uterine anomalies.  So people who are bitching that no one is reading your blog–are you leaving comments as you read?  If the answer is yes, I can’t help you because this is how it was explained to me.  If the answer is no, get commenting.

And yes, there are other things that determine SEO, including the url for your blog, the url for your permalinks, the placement of keywords or links within a post, and the number of times people link to you within a post.  Hence, Julie and Cecily just got a boost from this post because I linked to them.   It’s a nice thing to link to other people and I try to do it as much as possible.

Perhaps this will be an impetus to leaving more comments (hey!  And join up with IComLeavWe–I’ve always said that you’re doing something for others when you leave feedback on a post, but it turns out that you are doing something for yourself too).  I know that learning this yesterday kicked my ass to leave more comments last night as I cleaned up my Google Reader.

So now you know why the spammers are like mosquitoes, always flying around and trying to suck the life force out of you to feed their own bloated bodies.

Not a great analogy?  Perhaps I should stick to coming up with urls for new and amazing possible SEO-rich porn sites.

One time, when they were renovating one of the satellite offices of my fertility clinic, I had to have my blood drawn in the doctor’s office with my arm across his desk.  The nurse drew my blood while my arm rested on some memos, open folders, telephone message slips, and his desk calendar.  That was my most non-traditional blood draw until this week.

The periodontist needed to draw blood before the surgery, but all he had was the normal dental chair.  So he had me drape my arm across his lap so he could stick in the needle.  Except my stumpy little arm ended right at his crotch.  So I literally have my fist resting up there and the periodontist–who is seemingly oblivious to this–keeps telling me to “pump it!  Pump it harder!”

Oral surgery with full release.

*******

After a long hiatus from blogging, Josh has decided to start back up his original blog, though at a new url.  This is incredibly helpful for me because now I don’t have to listen to him whine on and on about his feelings at 11 p.m.  He can just tell it to you and leave me to watch the Daily Show in peace.

Oh…wait…that’s me.

But if you do want a 360 degree version of our lives, please head over and start reading Not-for-Profit Dad.  He is very funny and very cute.  I have tried to convince him that we should do a once-in-awhile he said/she said post on a pre-chosen topic.  He doesn’t think this will be interesting.  I disagree.  What are your thoughts?  And what should we both state our side on first?

*******

The Weekly What If: I was reading the year-end issue of People Magazine (don’t judge) and Robert Pattinson had a quote about the girls who scream and fall down when they see him.  And of course, Daniel Radcliffe has experienced the same phenomenon though for different reasons.  People scream for “Edward” because they think he’s sexy and they scream for “Harry Potter” because they find him lovable.  If you were a celebrity, would you rather have people screaming when they see you because they think you’re sexy, or because they think you’re lovable?

*******

I got very behind on reading blogs in the here and now due to the Creme and I had to declare bankruptcy this week and start over with a clean slate on Reader.  I realize that this means that I missed leaving comments during Delurking Week.  So I guess it shall remain a mystery.  Am I there?  Am I not?  Sorry, it’s the trade-off for the Creme blurbs.

Reading into the past was sort of like that Gedanken experiment with the light clock where the astronaut is aging slowly and everyone back on earth is old.  I came back from space this week, taking a break from the Creme because I’ve been moving through the blurbs at a good clip, to realize that life went on while I was mentally back in your past.

But here are a few things I read…

By which I mean, and now, the blogs…

Mrs. Spit has a post about the stuff she’s not talking about.  It’s a post about blogging, about setting that internal line in the sand and not crossing it no matter how tempting or how intertwined your story is with the other person.  But this post is about more than that–it’s about why we do or don’t feel comfortable revealing certain aspects of ourselves, and what happens to our writing when there are enormous things going on in our lives, but we can’t write about them.  It was just a very interesting read.

Busted Plumbing as a two-part post, mediating the tense ground that grows between the giver and receiver of a pregnancy announcement.  She does so without judgment, giving space to admit that no one is perfect and we’ve all broken the social contract at some point.  This it about attempting to create a situation where everyone’s needs can be partially filled, though everyone’s needs might not be fully satiated.

Feh, it was technically from the week before, but I read it this week since I’m late on everything.  Love, Hope, and Faith has a beautiful post about deciding not to pursue adoption again.  It is heartbreaking when the reason is financial, and Christy admits that she can’t really wrap her mind around this decision right now.  I love this post for its blunt honesty.

Mama Said Know You Out has a post about her son’s teacher having a miscarriage and how this event opens up a conversation with her son about her own history.  I was particularly struck by the principal’s advice not to talk to the teacher about the loss and thankful that Yo-Yo Mama is in a unique position to help her son be supportive of others.

Lastly, Bottoms Off and On the Table has a post about how Julia Child processed her infertility, wondering if she was lying when she breezed past it or if Julia Child knows something else about life that keeps her from getting bogged down by unproductive emotions.  Megan writes: “When I live to be eighty plus years old will infertility be merely a paragraph in my life? A footnote?  In a way I am offended by the offhand remarks minimizing the role infertility played in her life, but in a way I find it hopeful.”  I loved this post because I once met an old bird who told me the same thing, and while I was incredulous at the time, this post makes me look back on that conversation and smile.

The roundup to the Roundup: Oral surgery went fine though I’m not looking forward to having parts two and three this year.  Josh is blogging again–what do you think of a he said/she said type feature?  Answer the Weekly What If about being sexy or lovable.  And lots of great blogs to read, even while the Creme is continuously being updated (check the top right sidebar under “Today” for a note each time I update.  I’ve been trying to remember to Twitter it too).

I need about 45 more Creme de la Creme submissions by March 1st to meet the goal.  Go submit your best post of 2009.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

I had oral surgery yesterday and survived.  I was going to photograph my revolting mouth, but decided against it in case anyone is eating while reading this.  So you get this fun site which I shamelessly stole from Julie instead.

At formspring.me, you can set up a program that collects questions and then posts your answers.

I think what is most interesting (to me, at least, since I don’t know if I actually have anything interesting to say) is what is asked by the sheer fact that it’s anonymous.

The problem is that even though I have checked a box asking for the program to notify me when I have a question, it doesn’t.  Therefore, it becomes one more place to check and frankly, the last thing I need on the Web is one more place to check.  So I’m not sure how long this space will last, unlike my beloved Posterous spot where I am still posting several times a week, especially whenever I’m with other ALI bloggers and we are talking about chicken sex.

So, in honour of my new Formspring site, either ask me a question there.  Or, if you’re feeling infinitely braver about standing behind your question, ask it in the comment section below.  And I may even answer it.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.