Great News, with Inevitable Mindmeanderings on Money and the Academicness of this Blog

I don't have gestational diabetes! Apparently, the official number of diabetes for a glucose tolerance test is 140 -- and I'm at a meager 99. Ha! The midwife is genuinely surprised, considered the diet of lattes and ice cream I showed her. (Of course, the diet didn't show that I was eating reasonably healthily when I was still going to the farmer's market -- until my CD player died and I lost my inspiration, which was Barbara Kingsolver, et al's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. My CD player died like 2 months ago, I think.) When I showed her my new diet sheets, she was also impressed and said it was a good diet, except that I need to eat more protein, which, I have to tell you, is not easy when you're poor and trying to eat organic or at least natural food. (One of the supplements she put me on cost me a whopping $150! I have bills for things like power and cable that total that much that I can't afford to pay. But trying to explain to people who'd drop $20 for themselves on lunch what $20 is to people like me is sort of the continuing saga of what's going on between my family and me. Case in point: my step-mother continues to prod me to go to Ikea to buy baby furniture. She tells me how the furniture is actually better built than it used to be and "so cheap!" -- just $150. Now, of course this is cheap for furniture. Of course, it would be great to have a chest of drawers for the baby. But we don't have $150 for anything, except, apparently, supplements, which I took out of the health fund from Grandma, which is now totally dry. But I don't want to make this post about money, because money so absolutely runs Absurdist Lover's and my life at this point -- and I have to remind myself that most of the really wonderful things in life do not depend on money. I say this on a day when he ran out of the house at the prospect of his dad being able to give him some money. Oy vey.)

So I am to drink some protein shakes with low-glycemic fruit! The midwife thinks I don't have to worry about having a big baby or anything (since what causes the huge baby syndrome is unrestrained sugar in the blood kickstarting the baby to become bigger -- to get unrestrained sugar in one's blood, one's insulin/pancreas has to not be working well, a typical problem during pregnancy, hence gestational diabetes) -- and I asked her about eating granola with yogurt to satisfy my sweet tooth cravings and she said yes! And I probably will go ahead and give myself one latte a week anyway. I'm okay! The baby will be okay! Life is good!

Another piece of great news is that when I was waiting at the birth center for my appointment with the midwife (I love that she's always running late -- she's like me that way), I started reading the article that I need to revise and get to my collaborator. I had some new ideas and got all fired up about revising it! So today I'm going to Nearby Research University to poke into their library and snag some quotes from some books that, sadly, I have locked away in a storage unit in Grad City. Now, I realize that it's already well into the afternoon. But Absurdist Lover has only recently left -- and I'm going to go to the library and work -- and it's all good! I'm excited! I wish I had a library card there so I could get the books and come home, but I don't and can't afford to buy the card for community members and it will be fun to be sitting in a nice cold library working again in any case, even with my belly so huge and this baby having the hiccups. I want to work! I feel clearheaded enough to work! I feel motivated to get over to the library whose parking costs too much in order to work! How often does this happen! I've got to harnass it and get this article revised! Wooohooooo!

(Who'd a thunk last year when I was revising my dissertation for my readers that I'd ever be so excited to work on anything. It does happen, folks! I would not have put money on it, but it does happen!)

P.S. Absurdist Lover brought home his cat from up north. Apparently, she was living in a garage with four kittens (not hers), all of whom she hated. So now she's in our apartment. Mr. Tabby is surprisingly not so worried about her. The first day we kept them separate. But now the door is open between them -- yet she still pretty much stays in the bedroom/baby room, where we don't sleep. (We sleep on a fold-out in the living room, ironically imitating our camper life where bedroom, living room, and kitchen were all connected.) I haven't yet come up with a good blog name for her. I keep thinking of calling her Ms. Thang, since every time she sees Mr. Tabby, who has much more reason to be affronted by her presence that she does, and hisses at him. She's sort of black and orange, not striped, but just mixed in a way that looks just sort of messy. I don't know -- maybe she's a tortoiseshell? Then I could call her Ms. Tortoise, which fits her personality as long as the tortoise is grumpy to her own kind and likes people. Help me out people!

P.P.S. I swear when I started this blog, I thought that "absurdist paradise" referred mainly to academic life. Now I realize it refers to my life. Two totally impoverished adults, one of whom is ridiculously overeducated and underpaid, barely scraping by in one of the most flashy cities in the world that lots of people would like to visit but which the two adults really dislike, living in an overpriced (but cute!) fly-ridden one-bedroom apartment with not one, but two old curmudgeonly cats and a baby on the way. No one could make this stuff up. My life is absurd! Sorry to those who came here looking for good academic kvetching, when this blog has definitely taken a turn toward a mom blog (when I first saw my blog listed on another blog's "mom blog links," I was surprised, even alarmed -- maybe just to think of myself as a mom, though maybe that this blog has become a mom blog). I think I always just felt I was focusing on important things in my life -- and whereas those things used to be the academy because I was very much in the academy, now they are not. But I still think that this is an academic blog to the point that I hold a more academic point of view than your average person, so when I encounter websites that infantilize pregnant women or everyday marginalization and bias against those who don't have enough money to buy the latest baby gadget or academic book, I think I look at it as an academic (a certain version of an academic) does -- an academic loose in a crazy consumerist culture trying to get back into the academy. (There's no doubt that this digression was inspired by Dr. Crazy's discussion of blogging and the comments to that post. Ooh, I see she's put up another post about the comments to that post. Gotta go read that! Then, I really must go to the library already! Bye!)