Saturday, April 29, 2006

Screw all that jazz!

I've come about face and decided that I'm not going to hide my blog from anyone, anymore. That was a gut reaction, an instictive response to an invasion of privacy; I've reconsidered now. Do you want to read my blog? Then welcome! Enjoy! It's in the public domain and I'm not sheltering it. When I first started this journal, I grappled a little with how much to say, how honest to be. My inner writer and inner editor were at odds until I finally decided that full disclosure was the way to go. I got shaken up again with everything that happened last week, and couldn't post freely-- I wanted to censor myself again-- what if this gets read by the wrong people? It's why I didn't write for a week; I was going through something very personal and didn't want to put it "out there". Well, screw all that! It's behind me now--I'm over it.

My period was a week late, last week. A whole week, even starting on "day 31". It was just enough time to get worried, freak out, and . . . get really exited. Enough time to start conjecturing due dates, daydream about a warm little bundle in a sling. So, getting my period really sucked. The universe's way of saying "nyah nyah nyah," I guess. It's not like we were *trying*, of course, but still...brought me crashing back to earth. It really made me realize how much I want to "start a family", which sounds too sterile to describe what I really want; something warmer, gooeyer, more complicated. It feels like an illicit desire, even though I'm 25 now, not 17 or something. Wanting kids just doesn't seem "done" by my age-group, unless in the context of "down the road someday." I think I'm gonna have to put the pressure on Don full-strength, haha, because who is ever financially 'ready'? If having babies had ever depended on male 'readiness', this species would have died right out. "Not this year, darling, we really just don't have enough mammoth jerky stored up yet, and this cave is too small, we'd have to move, and who knows what next year's hunting is going to be like..."

I'm so ready to move away from Dallas. It was supposed to be a temporary stop, just a couple of years, but it's starting to feel as though if we don't get out soon we'll settle here forever. Don is looking for a promotion this year or he'll start looking outside his company; I'm always at this website http://bestplaces.net/ that lets you compare all these statistics about various places to live. So you can figure that where we live in North Dallas area has a cost of living of 94.1 (of the national average) while, Seattle, Washington's CoL is 145.6 with a median house cost of $459,800 (good grief); but that Seattle votes Democrat (yay!) and has a climatic "comfort index" of 72 compared to our 25. (higher is better). Repeat this for every locale that sounds interesting; North Carolina, New Mexico, Colorado, back to Vermont (I wish). I promised Don after the last time that we'd never move again without having jobs lined up in advance-- those months of unemployment were hell on the savings, not to mention the relationship. The poor guy has up and shipped across country twice now on my account, jumping in head-first. This time the ball's in his court; we won't go anywhere until he has a position there. The only hard part will be leaving my family, again.

2 comments:

Benjamin said...

That's more like the Mara I know and love! Give 'em hell, sister!

Unknown said...

Yeah! Don't let anyone push you around! Work shouldn't be able to terrorize you in your private life!

And on the subject of Mad Cow disease, the chances of you having it are extremely small. However, it is possible that an infection could occur 18 years after coming in contact with the pathogens. Kuru, for example, has an incubation period of 2 to 23 years. It's highly variable, and keep in mind that TSEs were, before it was determined that the infectious particles are proteinaceous in nature, called "slow viruses."

I guess whoever makes the rules just thinks it's better to be safe than to be sorry. vCJD can be acquired from blood transfusions and it's possible that new infections dating from the height of the BSE epidemic could surface, so maybe they think it's better to careful even though the likelihood is very low.

Where did you live? I lived on a base in Germany for three years in the 80s so I can't give blood either.