I don’t have much to say today. Or at least I am not in the mood to say it so I thought I should point you to Oso’s thought-provoking post on happiness. It’s worth the read.
I commented that I tend to be less happy when I’m free and he replied that he does that, too, but it’s mostly due to avoidance. I agree with him partially. Sometimes there is a genuine issue brewing under and in that case it’s really a bad idea to avoid it and repress it down further so it’s harder to recall next time. Some stuff gets represed so much that we don’t even know it’s there anymore. That’s bed news cause it is bound to come up eventually and it’s not a pretty picture when it does.
Having said that, I do think that sometimes it’s best not to have too much time to think. There are times when I have nothing better to do and so will take a small thing and blow it right out of proportion. I will spend a huge amount of energy stressing about it and I will make myself miserable. All this not because the issue really warrants being sad, but because I have too much time on my hands. How pathetic is that?
The good news is, once the baby comes, too much free time won’t be a phrase I can utter until the baby is in college.
One of the saddest things for me is to realize when a friendship has deteriorated so much that all of our conversations are empty. It’s one thing to acknowledge that it’s over and stop calling each other, but an entirely different ballgame when we continue the appearance that all is fine but we both know it’s not.
Recently, I’ve begun to notice that some of my oldest friends have become such acquaintances. We can talk for 50 minutes about absolutely nothing. And I don’t mean that in the nice way where you are chatting about the random fun stuff you did that day. I mean in the way where you both know the conversation is dragging. You’re not saying anything of substance and the conversation will never leave the realm of “fakeness.” I know that I should let go of this friendship regardless of its history. I know we both already have. But it’s so hard to take that last step.
To admit that sometimes things just fall apart for no reason and when people don’t stop to recognize or address it, it gets to a point where there’s no turning back. Where you wonder what held it together to begin with. Where you can’t remember the beginning, only this very sad ending.
Having these conversations physically pains me. But at the same time, I am loathe to let go for some reason. I don’t want to admit it’s over. It’s as if my admittance will make it end.
So I just sit there and play along.
Since Jake and I moved to San Diego a year and a half ago, we haven’t made a huge number of friends here. It’s a combination of a lack fo effort and lack of circumstance. We both work from home. My office has a total of seven people and he works for himself. Having come from huge Wall Street firms, our current setup isn’t condusive to making work friends. We attempted to go to a few meetup events in the beginning but just got lazy.
This is why I had assumed that I wouldn’t have a baby shower. I figured I wouldn’t have anyone to invite. But four different people offered to throw us a shower and in the end we had fifteen people over on Saturday for the baby shower. It turns out we have more local friends than we thought. It’s amazing how little things make you realize the day to day things you take for granted.
Major thanks go to my friend Cynthia who really did 99.9% of the work. To Ashlie who surprised me and came all the way from St. Louis just for the shower. To Jess and Chris who, even though they didn’t actually get to make it since the weather was extremely uncooperative, had intended to drive all the way from San Fran for the day. And to Stacey who drove down from Palm Springs in torrential rain. And to everyone who came and intended to come.
It appears we, and our soon to be, are luckier than I ever imagined. We are surrounded by amazing people.
We’re down to four weeks left. Fact is, only 5% of pregnant people actually deliver on their due date. So most people say that our potential delivery period is somewhere between two weeks from now to six weeks from now. Either way, it’s coming sooner than we can imagine. The most popular question I’ve been asked latety is: Aren’t you curious?
Don’t you want to know if it’s a girl or a boy?
Of course I’m curious. This baby has been growing in me for over 8 months now and I am curious about all of the details. Does s/he have long legs? Are all the organs in the right place? Everything ok with the limbs, the brain, the eyes? Will s/he have blue eyes like Jake? Will s/he have colic?
I am desperately curious to meet my baby. I pray that all is well and she or he will be born and live to be very healthy and happy long after I’m gone. I have a million worries and another million hopes. And in my list of ‘things I really hope for,’ gender isn’t number one. It isn’t even in the top ten.
When I seriously sit down and think about it, I’ve decided that I don’t have a significant preference of gender. I know some pretty awful women and some pretty awful men. What I care about much more is that our baby turns out to have a mild and pleasant personality. That she or he is a moderately easy baby and child. That we do right by him or her. Those are the things I care about. I’ve met enough atypical examples of each gender that I know having a girl doesn’t guarantee any information about the sort of girl we’ll end up with. And same goes for the boy. We already have too many assumptions on the toys our kids will like or the life they will lead depending on the gender they are and I want to make sure I don’t fall into the typical pitfalls.
So when I am honest with myself, it really doesn’t matter to me what gender the baby is. The main reason I am annoyed we don’t know is because, in English, I have to refer to the baby as ‘it’ since we can’t justifiably use he or she yet. Whereas, in Turkish, we don’t have gender-specific pronouns, making the ‘it’ equivalent not such a derogatory word to use. This is one of those cases where pronoun ambiguity would be in our favor.
So, any premonitions? Girl or boy? (Oh, and we’re 99.9% positive that there’s only one so don’t even go there!)
This is one of those weeks when I wish things could slow down a bit. I have too much catching up to do with my life and I can’t seem to get it all working. That’s partly why I haven’t updated in a while. I have many things I want to write about but I don’t seem to catch up ever. I have too many emails and only more are piling up before I get through the list.
I’d say downtime will come with the baby but we all know that’s a lie. I figure I should do it all before the little one comes since life as we know it will most likely be over with the arrival. Hope to catchup and get back into the groove in the next few days.
Hope your holidays were fun.
Since New Year’s is my most cherished holiday, I have an inclination to make a lot of resolutions. I tell myself each year that this year will be the year I turn the corner on many things. This year I will learn to ride a bike. This year I will drive completely on my own. This year I will learn to take things less seriously. Less personally. Less emotionally. And, of course, most of it never happens.
I’ve come to believe that things happen one of two ways: out of severe necessity or because it’s time. In 2004, I quit drinking Diet Coke because I got pregnant and I knew that for a person who drank 8 to 10 cans a day, switching to 1 a day wasn’t a realistic option. I started drinking a ton more water, eating healthier, trying to keep my yoga to a regular schedule, stress less, and give up the need to lose weight. All for the same reason. The baby to come.
I moved leaps and bounds in driving in that I’ve become a lot more comfortable and can hold animated conversations while I’m driving. This didn’t come out of hours of practice like one would think. It actually seems the less I drove, the more I became okay with it. I still have a huge way to go on that but somehow the time must have come for me to relax a bit because I did without a personal effort or vow to do so.
As for reading more, learning more, being happier and calmer. Those came and went with the hormones in my body. To be fully honest, I can’t even remember the first four months before I was pregnant. I can’t remember how it felt not to feel so big and clumsy. Not to have to pee every five seconds. Regardless, most of this year felt like it wasn’t in my control and I learned quickly to keep up with the necessary and let go of the trivial.
Which brings me to 2005. I am now wise enough to admit that I cannot make a single resolution that I am guaranteed to keep in 2005. I cross my fingers and toes that the baby will come close to on time and the labor will be as bearable as possible and, most importantly, the baby will be healthy and happy. If all those things happen, I am willing to consider 2005 a good year.
Most of my wishes for this coming year involve others. I wish for Jake’s business to prosper. I want us to have a happy balance and a healthy approach to building our family. I hope the baby has an uneventful, happy, colic-free year. We will be starting the year with a lot of visitors which means that we’ll be surrounded by family more than we’ve been in the last ten years. I hope that it strengthens our bonds and starts us off in a good track.
I know that I won’t be able to control most of what goes on this year (and probably all the others after this one). I hope I learn to relinquish the need to control quickly and learn to live my new life as wonderfully as possible. I make no resolutions this year, except for one which I think is necessary:
I will learn to go with the flow.
May 2005 bring all of you prosperity, luck, health, and ample joy. Thank you for stopping by.
I never considered myself to be a creative person. I always wished I were but never really thought I was good enough. Nonetheless, I constantly felt the pull of the artistic world and minored in Art when I was in college. Most of what I did then was two-dimensional digital art. I tried my hand in calligraphy and design as well.
After college I took several three-dimensional graphics courses. I took a clay course and another college-level design course. I never has the guts to take a drawing class, so the last time I did that, I was around ten years old. Having taken so many courses, I still had never tried anything that would be considered crafty since elementary school.
My last year in New York, I took a current affairs class at the New School. The class was huge and the teacher lectured all but the last ten minutes. It wasn’t the kind of course that required note-taking, mostly active listening. In my second session, I noticed a woman knitting during the class. It seemed to me that knitting was a perfect way to multi-task in this case.
I went out and bought some yarn and picked up basic techniques here and there. Since then I have knit a lot of scarves and I am now working on a baby blanket. Ten months ago, my friend Cyndi and I decided we wanted to try making jewelry. We went to a bead store, bought a whole bunch of beads, took a free class and got started on our earrings. She did a lot more and I still have catching up to do but it didn’t take us too long to get the hang of it.
Last week, I decided to try another crafty project. When the baby comes, I want to scrapbook the first year of the baby’s life. My dad has albums from our birth that has cards, baby teeth, our umbilical cords, locks of hair, etc. I always thought those albums were fantastic and I want to make one, too. I didn’t want the baby to be my very first scrapbook ever so we went to the scrapbooking store, which is a place you can leave entire paychecks without blinking an eye, and bought a whole bunch of stuff for me to scrapbook our cross-country trip. I printed around 100 photos and made an outline.
What I should have known is that the cross country trip is a huge project and it will take forever for me to finish it. I have been working on it actively since Thursday (hence the lack of updates) and I am on page 41 of 58. When I reach 58, I still have to go back and add all the text. I am not exactly sure what I was thinking.
At this point I will be all scrapbooked-out by the time the baby comes.
I don’t dance. I used to years ago but I never enjoyed it. I always felt uncoordinated and awkward. My friends used to time their moves to the rythm of the song and I felt stupid and out of place. Eventually I just gave it up. I decided it wasn’t giving me the joy or sense of freedom people talk about. I’m sure a shrink wouldn’t approve of my giving up but I don’t miss it much.
My baby, it appears, loves dancing. S/he is already dancing and s/he’s not even out yet.
One of the things you’re supposed to start doing in the third trimester of pregnancy is to keep “kick logs.” These are typically done after dinner while you lay on your side. You take thirty minutes or one hour and count how many times the baby kicks in that time frame. Or you can count up to so many kicks and find out how much time it took the baby to kick that many times. This is so the doctor can make sure your baby is okay. A moving baby is a healthy baby, they say.
I’ve never had to do one of those logs. As soon as my body is in bed, the baby decides it’s time to dance. I generally count until 100 before I give up. We seem to reach three digit numbers in less than 20 minutes most nights. Just to give you a sense, they say to worry if the baby kicks fewer than ten times in a 24-hour period. Obviously, that’s not a problem we have.
Last week, I had a long week at work and noticed that the baby wasn’t kicking as much as usual. We were still easily over 50 in a day but for my baby that’s not a lot. I decided to wait until Friday to see if it was work-related. As we guessed, come Friday night, the minute my vacation began, the baby began dancing. S/he didn’t stop all weekend. At points it was so strong that you could see my entire belly shift to one side and come back or stretch in ways that look like they must hurt. But they don’t.
The kicking never hurts me. I love it. It’s like a way for the baby to talk to me before we get to meet each other. I know s/he can hear me now but I can’t hear the baby yet and such we communicate through the kicks. As long as s/he doesn’t keep it up once s/he’s on the outside, we’re good.
Firstly, I apologize for the lack of updates. I’d blame it on my exhaustion, my lack of time, my lack of ideas but this time it was something much more mechanical than that. Our not-very-bright ISP forgot to pull out the static IPs from the DNS pool last week causing major net problems for us all week last week. Which meant our connection went down every thirty seconds. I had a hard enough time working from home and didn’t have the energy to fight the ssh connection that allows me to post my entries. We’re back now, though, and all should be fine.
When I first got pregnant, other mothers told me that everyone would now touch my belly and they would all tell me what to do. I figured since I still don’t know that many people in San Diego, the chances of people touching me weren’t very high and also I have no problem telling people to get their hands off of me. However, I wasn’t prepared for how hostile I would really feel.
It seems that I automatically have a negative reaction to people’s comments regardless of the intention with which it’s delivered and how close or foreign that person might be to me. A few months ago, a friend told me that I really should get some maternity pants instead of unzipping the regular ones I wore. Instead of agreeing with her logical comment, my first hunch was to say:
“Fuck You.”
Thankfully, I didn’t actually say it out loud. But since then, I’ve noticed that everyone’s opinions on what I should and shouldn’t do is automatically greeted by my inner reluctance. I feel like telling them all off. For some reason instead of interpreting the information as helpful, I am processing it as confrontational or patronizing. And I am way too exhausted to be patronized.
So that’s how it goes.
“You really should have the baby’s room ready by now.”
“Fuck You.”
“You really should be exercising more.”
“Fuck You.”
“Are you seriously not taking any time off work? That’s crazy; you should take off starting the beginning of January.”
“Fuck You.”
I know some of this is good advice but I can’t seem to acknowledge that right now. What I need more is someone to spend time with and laugh with. I need a lot lot more sleep. I need to relax and know that everything will be okay with us and with the baby. I need someone to have fun with and not unsolicited advice. I am sure I will regret not listening to these wise people some day real soon, but for now I really just want them all to fuck off.
Something that I often run into in my work is people telling me how amazing it is that I know how to do it. “I can’t believe you did this! You’re so bright!” I hear such compliments over and over again. Which, while being very nice, aren’t really warranted 100%.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. More to my point, we each have our unique set of knowledge. Things we’ve learned at some point or another, some through formal means and some practically. To the people who know them, the things they know often seem easy. Especially if it’s something they’ve done frequently. For example, I’ve been doing database design for almost ten years now, and such there are basic principles of design that I know like the back of my hand. Same goes for using a computer or writing UNIX shell scripts. These are things that others might value and feel are difficult but most of the time they are not to me.
On the other hand, I can’t cook to save my life. I wish I were more creative and artistically talented. I wish I knew how to do real advanced math or physics. I can’t ride a bike. I am still struggling with driving. To someone who can ride a bike, that skill is no biggie. Just cause you can do it and have been able to do it since you were six, doesn’t make it easy. It just makes it something you know.
If we all realized that the world comes in two categories: stuff we know and stuff we don’t know, we could all relax and know that things can be moved from one category into the other. Some items may take longer to transfer. For example, I imagine it would take me much longer to learn the details of string theory than it might to learn how to cook peas. What matters isn’t how long it takes me, it is the fact that almost any item can be moved from the “i don’t know” column to the “i know” column with the right amount of time, resources, and attitude.
In my opinion, attitude is the biggest factor. If you have the right attitude, you can create the time and find the resources. Every bit of improvement starts with believing in yourself and your ability to accomplish your task. That’s why I cringe each time someone says “Oh, I could never do that.”
You most definitely could, dammit!
I spend a certain amount of energy every day thinking about what I’m going to write here. I formulate the idea in my mind and then think of how I will put it all down. It doesn’t all come together until I sit down to type it all up.
The last few days have been even more hectic than usual. I have started Childbirth Preperation classes and I have CPR and Breastfeeding coming up, too. I now have to go to the doctor once every two weeks and not monthly since I am much closer to delivery. I’m having an even harder time sleeping since my belly is heavy enough to strain my back muscles and give me random cramps. I pee even more than before, if that’s possible to imagine. So I am so tired that I do the typical bored student thing at my desk: my head falls over as my eyes close and I jerk myself back up.
My company will be closing for the holidays in ten days and by the time they come back I will be 36 weeks or so and possibly too tired, too big and too stupid to function. Thus, I am trying to squish in all the big projects I’ve been meaning to do. This makes my days full of frenzy and I don’t have enough personal time to get my own projects done. Thus the website suffers.
I am sure stuff won’t get easier when the baby comes but I am hoping I will eventually learn to organize everything back to some sort of schedule. Cross fingers.
All this is to thank you for visiting even when I don’t update regularly and to let you know that I am going to do my best to update regularly.
Ten years ago, today, Jake and I kissed for the first time.
We’d been friends for a while but it was just that. And then it wasn’t. We laughed a lot and spent hours and hours talking until wee hours of the morning. We hung out doing nothing, playing computer games, listening to music, watching bad TV, talking with friends. Basically what you do in college. I don’t think either one of us thought it was more serious than a nice relationship.
But then I graduated and we lived together that summer in New York. Then we did the long distance thing for a year. Then we moved in together permanently. Then we did the long distance thing again when I lived in Japan. Then we got engaged and then married. Now we’re expecting a baby. All of which started with that semi-innocent kiss ten years ago.
It’s amazing to me how we never got into the relationship thinking it might be the last one we ever have. How we never really evaluated each other as potential husband/wife all those years ago and yet we managed to get a solid, lasting and wonderful marriage out of it. If I had met Jake two years ago, at 28, I would like to think that I’d still have had the wisdom to recognize that he’d make a wonderful husband and a great father, but I am not really sure. I feel like as we get older, we look at relationships more critically. We’re older and in a different place in our lives and have different needs and wants than we did at 20. Thus, when in college I might have prioritized choosing someone who is fun to be with and makes me laugh, today I might have been looking for a man who’s successful and responsible and has a long term plan. Or something like that. I think the extra level of stress and requirements that we add, make it much harder to find and keep a successful match.
Maybe I’m just thinking that cause I don’t know what I’m talking about.
What I do know is that I’ve been in the United States 12 years and have spent 10 of them with Jake. I’ve now spent a third of my life with him and I can’t wait to spend every single moment of the rest of my life with him.
I love you, Jake and thank you for being with me.
ps: This post was written on Thursday, December 2. I’ve left the text as is and will be posting it as if it’s that day. FYI.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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