Smokey the Magnificent

Nearly every famous speech from history and the arts can be given new meaning by adding “like, so“. Like so:

“I came, I saw, I, like, so conquered”. -Julius Caesar

“Frankly my dear, I, like, so don’t give a damn.” - Rhett Butler

“A woman without a man is, like, so like a fish without a bicycle.” - Gloria Steinem (attrib.)

“E, like, so equals M C squared”. - Einstein

“Make it, like, so so!” - Jean-Luc Picard

“Unfortunately, no-one can be told what the Matrix is. You, like, so have to see it for yourself.” - Morpheus.

“Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak’d meats/Did, like, so coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” - Hamlet

“It’s, like, so a trap!” - Admiral Ackbar

“We are, like, so not amused.” - Queen Victoria

Amirite? It’s nice to know that my $12,000-plus-extras-for-Cookie-Times-from-the-library-vending-machine degree in English didn’t go to waste.

You, like, so shall not pass...

Tonight the snortlepig threw up. It was a cough that went wrong, not actual nausea, and it didn’t seem to faze her. Nevertheless, Helpdesk Man prudently presented her with an ice cream container, saying “This is for you to be sick into”. Whereupon, without missing a beat, the snortlepig took it and obligingly attempted to hurl once more.

Now, bear in mind that this is not a child given to unquestioning obedience. When we say “Jump”, she does not say “How high?” But apparently when we say “Vomit”, she says “How chunky?”

Discuss.

Also, I apologise to my occasional reader who has emetophobia. I did try to be euphemistic in the title. If you read beyond that, well, heaven help you.

So, yesterday, someone dissed mah pig. I was at the supermarket with the snortlepig and the auxiliary pig, feeling vaguely skilly because I managed to wheel them around the supermarket with minimal tears and make my new credit card work on only the second try… actually the third, if you count having to push it in, not swipe it, but still… and as I loaded the goods into the boot, an old Chinese couple approached me with clipboards. At least, I assume they were Chinese - the clipboards were for a petition asking the Chinese government to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, it being (according to the leaflet) a peaceful religion, with no post office and very few exports. This petition has been circulating around our fair city for approximately ten years - you can’t walk down to the Indian grocer in our suburb without being accosted by it, and again on the way back. I must have signed it about forty times. (And, side note, what’s with that anyway? Is an evil Communist regime really going to go “Oh, ten thousand people in New Zealand think we shouldn’t persecute a religious minority? Well, right-o then”? I mean, as I say, I sign the thing when asked; it seems like the pukkah thing to do; but it seems like there must be more effective methods of persuading governments. Nuclear methods, mebbe.)

Anyhoo, so I smiled benignly at the couple and said “I think I signed that one yesterday”, and the chap approached Miles in the trolley and began to make fond faces at him and chuck him under the chin, the way one does with pleasing infants. And then he said “How old?” and I said “He’s four weeks today”. Whereupon both petition-holders began laughing their heads off. There was a brief pause, and I said “Yes, he’s quite big” - because he is, and people do frequently make comments to that effect, which is fine. But they kept laughing and laughing. And after a moment it became Awkward, and eventually I gave them a smile of vague, frightened goodwill and hefted my laughably enormous baby into the car and drove off, thinking: they totally done just mocked my pig. And they were still laughing.

Suggestions? I mean, yes, he’s fairly sizeable, and possibly babies run smaller in China, but I wouldn’t have thought he was mirth-inducingly big. And is that really the way to raise support for Falun Gong?

Also, look at him. Who would mock such a pig? He’s squashy in the face and says “pla” when he sneezes.

In other news, the cat of Helpdesk Man’s dear friend just died. So, being a Woman and therefore full of Tact and Empathy, I made a commemorative mousse. It was less blurry in real life. Helpdesk Man’s dear friend didn’t have much to say about it, but he did eat the mousse.

RIP, Oogley.

Blow it all, I’m three and a half weeks postpartum and not up to my usual searing political commentary: so I shall amoose you all, Gentle Readers, with a series of quotations, melodies and other such media which I have recently found pleasing to the spirit.

DOMBEY sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

That was Charles Dickens. This next one is Iron and Wine. It is a song I discovered from an online discussion about labour playlists, in which an individual - presumably one with a somewhat bleak outlook on parenthood - suggested it and everyone was all “Ooh, yus, that’s a nice song”. Which it is. Smashing, in fact. But would you really want to listen to it while giving birth? You decide.

Thirdly, I am very tempted to post some juicy quotes from Withnail and I, but some of the language is not quite the thing, and there are children present.

This one, for example. So I will instead merely link discreetly to IMDb’s Memorable Quotes, and those with unshockable dispositions can see for theyselfs. But don’t blame me.

[Some hours later]

Actually, I have some things to say after all.

1. The pig is learning tact. Her usual method, when faced with a nourishing dinner, is to eat three bites and then begin whining “I don’t want my dinner”; an attitude which wins her no friends. Last night, however, she switched tactics and said in a tone of polite regret, “Mummy, I love you and I’m very sorry, but I can’t finish my dinner”.

2. One hundred per cent of the friends I have thus far polled on the matter say that for $100,000, they would never eat peppermint or peppermint-flavoured foodstuffs again. I would scorn them for money-grubbing, but I’m sad to say I agree with them. I like peppermint, especially in the form of after-dinner mints and mint chocolate chip ice cream; but I could live without them. Chocolate-covered Turkish delights are a good substitute for after-dinner mints, anyway.

3. My knuckles grew during pregnancy. I tried to put my wedding rings back on the other day, and they wouldn’t go. And then I tried a week later, and they still wouldn’t go, and I made them, and it was a mistake. It’s mighty odd. My fingers don’t look swollen or indeed, in any way distinguishable from my pre-auxiliary-pig fingers; but there it is. The rings do not lie. Unless Helpdesk Man cunningly switched them during my pregnancy in order to mess with my postpartum head and cause me to off myself so he could collect the insurance and flee to Spain; which would be nasty, but I once knew a lady whose onetime husband would hide the rubbish bins just to mess with her head, so it just goes to show there are few depths to which humanity will not stoop. Flatmate Man consistently leaves numbers up on the microwave display so I can’t see the time without pressing “Stop/Reset”… for instance.

4. Still craving milk. I had two big glasses today and I yet I do not feel sated. Maybe that’s why my knuckles grew… calcium deposits. Anyway, it’s regrettably expensive, especially as Helpdesk Man has touchingly taken up the habit also. (Unless he’s just doing it to mock me, real subtle-like. See above. It’s not unpossible.)

5. I have to go now. I made Caesar salad and must eat it. This will be the second time today I have eaten poached eggs, although the first lot was in the context of toast. Did you know, you can poach two eggs at once? They separate beautifully after cooking, and it saves time. Once I get my Vitamin D levels back up and I’m brimming with confidence and self-esteem, I’ll try poaching three at a time. I should, like, televise it.

Since you asked, although I note you didn’t, we had many reasons for choosing the name Miles for the Auxiliary Pig. Firstly, we felt it conveyed a cosy, homely, English-old-man-in-a-tweed-hat-with-a-pipe vibe, which pleased us. Secondly, there was Miles O’Brien on Star Trek, and he is awesome. Thirdly, Liam was the most popular boys’ name in New Zealand last year, so that was out. Fourthly, Helpdesk Man vetoed evey other suggestion I came up with - a sprawling and venerable list including such gems as Lachlan, Llewellyn, Brock, Leander, Mason, Morris, Hunter, Firth, Finn, Fionn, Linden, Lincoln, Lewis and Hugh. (Yes well, I wasn’t unquestioningly keen on all of them.) Fifthly, and this is actually true, Helpdesk Man has an ancestor known in his day as Miles the Slasher, whose coat of arms features a severed hand dripping blood.

Sixthly, the name Miles reminded me of a pleasing poem we once studied at university: “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, by the venerable Robert Frost. It is a sweet poem, made all the more awesome by being quoted in a few seminal episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and goes like this.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Charming, no? Anyway, my sister was asking about it; so this evening I emailed it to her, and on reflection sent the link also to Helpdesk Man, who being an undereducated philistine had not read it (I rightly assumed).

Some minutes later Helpdesk Man leaked out from the bowels of his office, and we had the following conversation:

ME: Did you read the poem I sent you?

HELPDESK MAN: Yurs.

ME: Did you like it? Isn’t it nice?

HELPDESK MAN: I thought it was a bit suggestive. It had sinister undertones.

ME: What? It’s a nice poem.

HELPDESK MAN: What do you think it’s about?

ME: Stopping by woods on a snowy evening?

HELPDESK MAN: I think you’re being naive.

ME: What do you think it’s about?

HELPDESK MAN: Well, “I have promises to keep” strongly implies that he was burying a body.

I don’t think he was joking.

So, yeah. I had a baby.

Not that one. That one’s a bat.

It probably would have been easier, though. Maybe next time I’ll have a bat.

Anyhoo. Baby. Yus. Miles David. Nine pounds six, if you don’t mind. Cute in the face, poops a lot, not a tooth in his head, and doesn’t know squat about the South Beach diet; in which respects he reminds me strikingly of his dear papa. I would show you a photo of his newborn self, but my midwife took them and managed to include the more salacious parts of a Smokey in every single shot; not to mention the waters of the birth pool, which are enough to convert one to dry-cleaning for life.

Miles is coping well with life. Between the civilising atmosphere of the birth centre and our natural desire to impress him with our excellence as parents, we have been unusually polite in the face of his sometimes unreasonable demands; and he has responded by being as amenable as his digestion allows. It is an artificial and probably short-lived truce, but it works.

MILES [2AM]: Parents, I have a complaint.

US: What is it, my sweet sugar lumpkin? Do your insides pesk you? Let us walk you around and pat you lovingly on the back.

MILES: Boip. Boip. BOIP. Boip.

US: Oh dear, you have the boips. You are brave and soulful in the face of adversity. Have you perhaps completed the boips?

MILES: No. Yes. …Boip.

US: What a clever and precocious child you are! A spot of milks?

MILES: Thanks. I will.

[All slumber.]

MILES [2:25AM]: I’m sorry to bother you again, but I think I may have pooped.

US: What an admirable boy! We shall turn on the lights and leap to your sanitary aid.

HELPDESK MAN: Let me, wife of my bosom, for you are weary with the exertion of birthing our marvellous boy.

ME: K.

MILES: AAAAH! MURDER! TREACHERY! MAYHEM!

US: Ach, tish and piffle, little sweetness; coochy coochy, hey nonny nonny etc.

MILES: Sorry! Sorry! I don’t like having my nappy changed.

US: Think nothing of it, son and heirling; it is a distressing event indeed. Come, let us sleep. Have some more milks.

[All slumber.]

MILES [2:40AM]: I have more boips. Also, I was sick on your face.

[Etc.]

As you see, this pleasant interchange is unlikely to continue for more than a few days - I’m ballparking Helpdesk Man’s breaking point as Wednesday - but it is merry while it lasts.

I’m, like, totally in labour.

I always wanted to blog that. It’s the small things in life.

1. I am forty million years pregnant.

2. I want to drink ALL THE MILK IN THE WORLD.

3. I am paralysed by a mental inability to make baked custards, which I desire muchly, and to finish sewing a bunch of winter clothes for the snortlepig, which she sorely needs.

4. I watched LA Confidential the other night and was left with the impression that it was a Good Thing, but if held at gunpoint would not be able to tell you who most of the corpses were or exactly what was going on with the bad guy, who surely can’t have been all that bad anyway, because he was Zefram Cochrane and also the farmer in Babe.

5. Braxton-Hicks remind me of when the Enterprise on Enterprise does that weedy hull polarity thing instead of having proper shields. Kinda cool, texture-wise, but it won’t keep the Klingons out.

6. When was the Holocaust named the Holocaust? During? After? Was there a poll? Did some people have an alternative title?

7. The pig made up a song yesterday. It went like this. To get the full effect, you must understand that she has trouble pronouncing the word “fat”, so she says “flat”:

“Mummy’s so flat

She has flat cheeks

She’s so squishy

She’s got a baby in her tum

It’s very very very very very very very very squishy

It’s the squishiest baby I ever seened”.

8. Still haven’t settled on a name for the Auxiliary Pig. I’m thinking Gaviscon.

9. A small and unworthy part of me sort of wants to get into a minor fender bender of dubious faulthood with another car, so when the chap gets out to yell at me I can go into labour and disconcert him all to hell. Wouldn’t you?

10. Just finished reading Love in the Time of Cholera. Good book, but a surprising lack of cholera. I kept waiting for someone to die of it, and nope. It could just as well have been Love in the Time of Eggplant, eggplant featuring rather more promimently in the text and having less sphinctery connotations to boot.

11. I bet a good bout of cholera would get the Auxiliary Pig out.

Last night my computer died. We were innocently watching an episode of QI when it let out a long-drawn-out scream, went “kbbbpt” and perished. According to Flatmate Man, who knows these things, it’s either the power pack or the motherboard; either way, it don’t sing no more, and I am reduced to typing this on Helpdesk Man’s laptop, which I despise.

On the bright side, the loss of easy entertainment did mean I accomplished things last night. I sewed a good portion of a baby shirt, and then spent an amusing half-hour trawling through my past, in the form of a bag full of childhood memorabilia foisted upon me by my mother, who is moderately sentimental about such things but has, after all, six mostly-grown-up children, and who has the time?

The contents were as you might expect: immunisation records, a second prize for needlework, recommendations as to my character wheedled out of parishioners. There were a large sheaf of school reports, all of which stated that I was bright - which was probably true - and a pleasure to have in the class - which was at worst and likeliest a bare-faced lie, and at best teacher-parlance for “has not yet actively committed arson”. There was also a fulsomely enthusiastic assessment of my brainials by a child psychologist, which might have been more flattering if I hadn’t been sent to see him on account of my temper tantrums; but still. Apparently most of my problems were due to the ineptitude of my peers. Yes, you. I hope you’re sorry.

Lest all this praise go to my head, I also discovered two sobering truths about myself.

1. A while back I started toying with the idea that I had had, as a teenager, a mild form of body dysmorphic disorder; a psychological condition in which one views oneself as far more hideous than objectively warranted. Aside from the natural pleasure of diagnosing oneself with a condition of any kind - this year I found out I have megalophobia, and the pleasure this gave me almost outweighed the crippling paranoia I get upon seeing the Free Willy DVD case at the shop - it explained, I thought, why I spent my adolescent yeas hiding behind my hair, unable to respond to personal compliments from Helpdesk Man for the first two years of our relationship with anything other than a muttered denial and ungracious scowl.

Unfortunately, last night I happened upon some photos of my teenage self, and let it be sadly stated for the record:

I did not have body dysmorphic disorder. Just a hella unfortunate face.

2. From somewhat earlier in my lifetime, but perhaps foreshadowing Point Number 1, I came across my birth notes. I have a bit of a thing for birth notes; I find them fascinating; so naturally I perused mine with great interest. The snortlepig’s moment of birth, for the record, was heralded by my lovely midwife with the words “Baby girl born at 6:33; well done Mum! Beautiful girl; welcome [name of snortlepig]“. Not strictly scientific, perhaps, but charming. What did my OB-GYN have to say, in the section marked “notes on newborn”?

“Vernixy”.

That was it. A single, dismissive word, dripping with disgust. One could imagine him dangling my infant self distastefully by one arm, remarking to the nurses that he would skip lunch after all; perhaps then striding down the hallway with a pained expression on his face, heading for the dispensary for the first time since he promised the wife. Maybe he jumped off the carpark. I don’t know; but it seems he could have reflected a little on the ignominity of being thusly summed up in one’s earliest moments of life. “Vernixy”. I should put it on my tombstone.

So there that is. In other news, I am now officially 39 weeks and 1 day pregnant; and if I make it four more days without giving birth, I shall be the most pregnant I’ve ever been. Oddly enough I’m not, as pregnant women are expected to be, impatient to meet the baby. I have a lot of sewing to do; all my Hypnobabies practice has yet to convince me that childbirth will be a fun and Christmassy event; and when it comes down to it, in the words of the immortal Jean Kerr, whoever she was - “Now the thing about having a baby - and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this - is that thereafter, you have it”.

Well said, lady. Anyway, Super 8 comes out on my due date, and I want to see it. And I stood on a small sharp shard of something the other day and cut my foot, and I object to going into labour with a cut foot; it might throw off my whole vibe. (I felt similarly about last week’s flu, but that seems to have mostly disappeared, save for a hacking cough; thank you for asking.) Worse things do happen; I know a lady online who broke her leg a few weeks before going into labour, and can you imagine? Horrid. Even a bad sunburn, really, would put a damper on things. Or ebola.

You know what pretty much defines misery? Running out of Gaviscon in the middle of the night, while coming down with a sore throat. Not just a sore throat, neither, but a full-blown leak-from-the-face teeth-aching winter cold. When desperately wishing to sleep, however, it is the combination of a throat rasping with infection at the top end and being sizzled away by gastric juices at the bottom end that really makes life worth living.

So this morning, I sent Helpdesk Man out on a mission to bring me back pizza, which I was inexplicably craving, and enough Gaviscon to neutralise a citrus grove. Poor man, he tried. First he went to the Warehouse, which didn’t have any; but brought back the pizza as a peace offering, which the pig and I contentedly ate. It was a good one - pine nuts, apricot sauce and cubes of cream cheese. Then he kindly took the pig for a walk to the pharmacy. It was shut. In a burst of right-brained brilliance he headed for the local Indian grocer. The woman did not stock Gaviscon, but pressed upon Helpdesk Man a number of Indian herbal heartburn tablets. Unfortunately she did not specify what was in them, nor whether they were safe for pregnancy, so I didn’t quite fancy them (and Helpdesk Man, having been forced to taste one by the lady, was sympathetic. Apparently they were vile.) So he valiantly made a fourth trip to the supermarket, where the life-giving elixir was finally found and brought to justice.

That was several hours ago. Thanks to the Gaviscon, I managed a few hours of fitful, fevered sleep in a semi-upright position. Then I woke up rather suddenly, bleated a shrill and unwifely demand at Helpdesk Man, and was flamboyantly sick all over the bed while he was hunting around the kitchen for a bucket.

I do not reveal all this out of a base desire for pity, Gentle Reader. Rather, it is mere preamble to the next event, which was probably the highlight of my year so far. Several minutes after divesting my innards of chunder, I blew my nose in a fretful way… and a pine nut flew out.

Helpdesk Man is a lucky guy, I like to think.