Guest post for blog share

Friends and readers! As promised, here's the post that was written by an anonymous (not me) blogger taking part in blog-share. Enjoy!


After signing up for Blog Share, I realized that the idea of writing anonymously about something I wouldn’t normally share is terrifying. It is not as if I am loaded with dark secrets and shameful thoughts. Overall, I feel fairly normal with a hint of quirk and a slight case of crazy. But my dirty little secrets probably aren’t so secret. In an age of full disclosure via Facebook, blogs, and My Space, there is little left to the imagination. Sexual escapades and hospitalizations are quite the norms. Stories of child birth and very sadly death are shared. What is left?

For me, it’s my insecurity. Since middle school, I have been insecure about being the odd girl out. I felt that I was never quite part of the “in” crowd, although I never really wanted to be part of a clique. It continued through high school where I felt constant worry that my friends were deliberately excluding me from parties or social gatherings. It might have been all in my head but I didn’t think so. Any slight felt like a deep stab to my heart. I knew they really did not want to hang out with me. After all, I’m not that interesting, or that funny, or that pretty.

College seemed better. I found a group of friends, joined the debate team, and started dating more guys. I felt more confident than ever. Or so I thought. But the hint of: “We like you but . . . we rather do something without you” kept being whispered in my ear. Before my junior year of college, one of my best friends went to England for the semester. She came to college before departing so we could hang out and have some fun together. Of course we ate, drank, and laughed until it happened. The big slight. One of our friends, with whom I was not as close, invited Esther and Gertrude (not their real names) to a party but not me. This time that cold knife sunk deeper. I could not face Esther and Gertrude. I especially could not face Bertha. Yes, Bertha and I had our differences but when they left after dinner to go to a dinner without me, a party that I could have been invited to go as well, that whisper became a shriek.

Time passes but wounds don’t always heal. Eventually I forgave them but I still feel the slight now when I think about it. Esther and I talked about this situation years later and she told me how badly she felt and wished it had never happened. She apologized and I accepted.

As a woman, I feel the insecurity less. I feel like I have “come into my own.” I suppose confidence grows with age but now there is a new world to feel the old lack of confidence: the blogging world. I’m not blogging necessarily to make new friends but for some reason, the little whisper comes back into my ear. Am I not interesting enough? Are my posts not worthy of comment? Are my comments not worthy of response? Certainly, I am no great writer. I enjoy blogging and really am doing it to counterbalance my intense and pressured work environment. But still. The whisper is in my ear no matter how many times I bat it away. Despite my dislike of cliques, I want to be a part of greater community, and the world of women bloggers is just amazing.

And then I remember. I am a woman blogger. I am part of this group. I have the confidence to say what is on my mind and publish it along with the thousands of other young women who do so.

So I will say it: I am proudly part of the inspiring, eloquent, irreverent, sarcastic and a delightful group of women bloggers.

The immediate future

I’m getting a psychic feeling that I won’t be posting on my blog for a while. I have this crazy intuition that I’m going to have a baby within the next week and a half. In fact, something tells me my mom is flying into town tomorrow night and will keep me busy beyond blogging until I have the baby.

But fret not! I’m participating in something called blog-share whereby I write a post and publish it anonymously on someone else’s blog, and that person writes a post and publishes it anonymously on my blog. As a new blogger, the whole thing is slightly confusing to me, but it seems as if some strange person I’ve never met before (and whose blog I’ve probably never read) is going to write a post on my blog. This whole thing goes down the day after tomorrow, so even if I’m passing the equivalent of a 32-ounce bag of flour through my hoo-haa, someone at least will be writing a post for my blog. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Porn for pica sufferers

It's amazing what a good photographer can do with even the most mundane material. My friend Thursday sent me these unbelievably juicy pictures today. How is it possible to make cement look pornographic? I don't know, but she did it.

And did you notice the new background behind my "New Duck" header? Guess what that is. CEMENT!!! Courtesy of Thursday. Magnified about a zillion times. Yum.

The Swedes strike again

I plan to use cloth diapers on my baby, and even though I don’t typically broadcast this fact, I’m shocked at the amount of criticism I’ve gotten over it. I’ve heard everything from, “Cloth diapers are actually really bad for the environment” (um, have you done the research?) to, “New Duck thinks she’s going to cloth diaper.” (This from one smug already-mom to another smug already-mom, both of whom were eating lunch with me at the time. And by the way, I’ve been to the speaker’s house and it’s filthy and she has no hand-washing facilities in her bathroom.)

Given the amount of criticism I’ve already received over this issue, and given that I value other people’s opinions so dearly, I’m going to have to say that if you have any negative thoughts about my cloth diapering my baby, you can… let’s see, how do I put this politely? Shove it up your ass. Maybe it will give you a flaming diaper rash.

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, back to the Swedes.

Even though I’m using a diaper service that conveniently whisks my dirty diapers away and delivers fresh new ones every week, I need some special wool conditioner for some diaper covers I bought. But because the last throes of pregnancy have left me sick, weak and exhausted, I chose to buy my wool conditioner on the internet instead of getting it at the grocery store like everyone else. Brilliant move. I ended up with a product made in Sweden whose instructions read:

Pour 30-45 ml into 2 litres of 37 degree Celsius water. Allow water to cool to 30 degrees. Add wool cover, soak overnight. Rinse with 20 degree Celsius water, add 15 ml vinegar, rinse thoroughly.

After nearly an hour on the internet trying to figure out what a milliliter is, how to convert my existing measuring cups to liters, and what 37 degrees Celsius might feel like, I gave up and went to the grocery store. I found what I needed (along with grasshopper cookies, a huge jar of green olives, mango in a can, breakfast sausage, Junior Mints, six avocados, goldfish crackers, and a big bag of marshmallows) and, shockingly, the instructions were written in English. They said something along the lines of, “Put this stuff in water with your diaper cover. Then hang the cover up to dry.” [Insert “God Bless the USA” theme music here.]

My problems are solved, but I don’t plan on making a trip to the post office just to return a $4 bottle of wool conditioner to Sweden. So I visited the company’s website with the hopes of getting at least some use out of the product. I found some slightly simplified instructions, along with a few highly entertaining tidbits. Did you know that, in Sweden, disposable diapers fill 23,000 rubbish lorries each year? (What is a rubbish lorry? I still don’t know. I googled it but got distracted by a story about an Australian guy who fell into one after a night out.) Also, children who use cloth diapers potty train early “because the child can feel when they do a wee.” Does this strike anyone else as hilarious? Maybe it's just pregnancy hormones messing with my brain again.

But their “myths and truths” section was the best. My favorites were “MYTH: Cloth diapers are fiddly” and “MYTH: Only bohemians and skinflints use cloth diapers.”

Bohemians and skinflints? I love the Swedes.

First attempts

Given that I’ve only changed one diaper in my entire life, I thought I might need some practice, but the diaper seems a little small. I called my mom and she said my baby won’t be this fat. At the thought of something this big coming out my hoo-hah, I hope she’s right.

An ode to Wisconsin

The municipal snow plow that's supposed to be plowing my street? It's stuck. In the snow. At the end of my driveway.

Mini Spring Rolls With Dipping Sauce

I may be stepping out on a ledge here, but I have to confess that I hate Wheel of Fortune. I can’t really say why, but something about that show bugs the hell out of me. Nevertheless, I had it on last night while I was catching up on my Evidence reading. It was just background noise, until all of a sudden I heard someone say, “Mini Spring Rolls With Dipping Sauce.” I looked up and there on the TV, blazoned across the screen in capital letters, was the answer to a Wheel of Fortune puzzle and the answer to all my problems: Mini Spring Rolls With Dipping Sauce.

For the past twelve hours I’ve been able to think about nothing else, and last night I dreamed about mini spring rolls with dipping sauce (please keep any predictable comments with Freudian references to yourself). I am now even more intent on getting some mini spring rolls with dipping sauce than finding some wet cement to run my hands through. If any of my Wisconsin friends are reading this, will you please call me up and take me out to get some mini spring rolls with dipping sauce tonight?

Author’s note: I’m hideously allergic to shellfish, and there’s a variety of Asian roll that contains shrimp, and I’m not sure if it’s called a spring roll or something else. Whatever it is, I obviously don’t want that. Just the other kind of roll. Like an egg roll or something. But it should be mini. And it should have dipping sauce.

Author’s note 2: Now I’m probably going to get a bunch of comments from my huge contingent of Swedish readers who drive Volvos, live in Argentina, love lactation porn, and watch The Amazing Race. Turns out they also love Wheel of Fortune and I’ve managed to insult my readers YET AGAIN.

Author’s note 3: Why aren’t there any good Chinese restaurants in Wisconsin?

Author’s note 4: Did I seriously just ask that question? Did I move to Wisconsin with the expectation that it would somehow be chock full of good Chinese restaurants?

More proof that I'm losing my mind

I’ve been taking Flintstone vitamins lately (chewables are the only ones my stomach can handle) and it made me wonder, do the Brits have the Flintstones? If so, do Fred and Wilma speak with British accents? I can see where they might transplant the Flintstones to, say, Spain, and dub the dialog in Spanish. But if they broadcast the Flintstones in England, do they bother to change the accents? And what about the Family Guy? Do Peter and Lois speak with British accents, while Stewie speaks with an American one? Because if they don’t, how can the Brits possibly get how funny Stewie is when his accent must seem perfectly normal to them?

Furthermore, if the Brits don’t have the Flintstones, do they still have Flintstone vitamins? If so, what on earth do they think of the strange characters they’re chewing on? If not, how do they get their kids to take vitamins?

One of my favorite bloggers, The Life Laundry, is a British girl with an amazing talent for photography. You should check her blog out because it’s fantastic, and also maybe she’ll answer these questions for us. Of course, if they don’t have the Flintstones in England, she may have no idea what I’m talking about and simply think I’ve lost my mind. (Which I have, but that’s beside the point.) Call me naive, but somehow I can’t imagine there’s an entire culture out there that has no idea who the Flintstones, the Jetsons, or the Simpsons are. Next you’ll be telling me the Brits have their own version of Jeopardy.

The pregnant woman’s guide to nutrition

Disclaimer: For those of you who found my blog through a google search about eating the sponge off your sponge hair rollers, or anyone else trolling the internet for legitimate advice on nutrition in pregnancy, you’re in the wrong place. I don’t actually know anything about nutrition in pregnancy, nor do I particularly care. I’m just doing the best I can and desperately trying to keep it together through what feels like the 100-month pregnancy from hell. Oh, and I’m pretty sure my fetus weighs about 25 pounds by now, so find a better source for your nutrition information.

Throughout this incredibly long pregnancy I’ve been picky about where I got my pregnancy advice. After reading such internet drivel as, “Staying hydrated will prevent you from going into premature labor,” and “If you’re uncomfortable in your third trimester it’s because you have bad posture,” I pretty much stuck to advice from my doctor, my mother, or the National Institutes of Health. Occasionally I would look for something in babycenter.com or WebMD, but they always seem to imply that if I don’t eat 95 servings of cauliflower per day my baby is going to come out of the uterus hooves-first. Not to mention that Linda Murray, the executive editor of babycenter, pissed me off by saying in a New York Times interview that pregnancy “ruins” women’s bodies. (I sent her an e-mail saying that if she feels that way she probably shouldn’t be the executive anything at a pregnancy website. To my everlasting surprise I never heard back.)

Somewhat frustrated by the existing advice out there, I decided to compile my own list of nutritional tips for pregnant women. Here’s what I have so far:

• Activia prune yogurt. I’m not going to elaborate on that. If you’ve ever been pregnant you’ll understand.
  
  
  
• That dark brown liquid in my Starbucks cup? It’s decaf. I swear. Totally. I wouldn’t dream of potentially endangering the health of my baby just because I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in eight months, am carrying a 25-pound bowling ball with me everywhere I go, had over a hundred pages of Evidence reading and five student journal articles to edit last night, and got up this morning at 5:45 to clear three feet of snow off my car in negative 33 degree windchills. Uh, yeah, it’s definitely decaf.
  
  
  
• Dear Wiki Answers: I bought a container of toffee caramel “cafe scones” from Whole Foods. I don’t know what a cafe scone is, but I ate nineteen of them this morning. Do you think that’s a problem?
  
  
  
• If you’re craving booze I don’t have much advice for you. But one thing you shouldn’t do is make a big batch of chili and put an entire can of beer plus several shots of tequila in there with the hopes that the booze will boil off and you’ll be left with something that tastes deliciously alcoholic. Not only will your house smell like a brewery for a week, you’ll end up with a huge pot of chili that tastes like something you bought at a bowling alley.
  
  
  
• Who are you kidding? Throw those vegetables in your refrigerator away before the weird mold growing on them somehow infects the rest of the items in your fridge.
  
  
  
• Check this out: Bacon, cheese, butter, mayonnaise, mustard, black olives, sour cream, guacamole, ranch dressing and tomatoes, on a tortilla.
  
  
  
• Sure you could stop eating butter straight from the stick, but why would you?
  
  
  
• Beware of the Velveeta Shells and Cheese that purportedly contains 2% milk instead of regular milk. I’m not saying the regular Velveeta is actually good for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure someone could successfully sue Velveeta for false advertising and make them change their name to Velveeta Shells and Chiz. I was forced to buy the 2% version when my local grocery ran out of the full octane, and the “cheese” came out of the package in thin, oily clumps. The end product, although yellow, tasted like someone had poured a cup of skim milk over a bowl of pasta.
  
  
  
• If you weren’t supposed to eat six Snicker’s ice cream bars at once, they wouldn’t sell them six to a box.

That’s all I have for now folks. I’ve been bad about posting lately due to a combination of overwhelming fatigue, an out-of-control workload at school, and having to shovel my car out of the snow every single morning before 6 a.m. I keep telling myself I’m not the first 8-month pregnant woman to shovel snow, but I still pretty much feel like I’m going to pass out every day by noon. But I’m certain things will improve once the baby is born. BWAAAHAHAAAHAA. (Sorry, that’s just me laughing my ass off.)

Meme

Yesterday Someone Being Me tagged me for my first meme. I'm supposed to provide links to five of my old posts, then you're supposed to read them and give me some comment love. The first post should be about family, the second about friends, the third about myself, the fourth about something I love, and the fifth about just anything.


There are a couple of problems with this meme. First, I just started blogging in October of 2007,* which only gives me 54 posts to choose from. Second, after carefully reviewing my blog, I have discovered that I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS. In other words, I only ever write about myself. I should work on that.

Anyway, since nobody's ever tagged me for a meme before, I'm going to give this my best shot.

First, a link about family. I don't write about my family. But I did once peripherally mention my mom (who is amazing), so check out my sad birthday story. Next I need a link about friends. Either I don't have any friends, or I don't write about them. Okay, the truth is I have plenty of friends, and to prove it, you can read about the disastrous dinner party I once threw for them. Next, a post about myself. Gee, that's hard. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm an angry little woman. Next, something I love. Since I spend the majority of my blogtime bitching about things that irritate me, only things I love Bangkok in spite of will do. Finally, for just any random post, here are my thoughts on female role models. It's the only semi-thoughtful post I've ever written (and I won't make that mistake again).

Wow, that was a lot of work. I have to go dig my car out from under three feet of snow now.

*It looks like I've been blogging much longer since I posted and back-dated some old e-mails I sent to friends, (i.e., Fear and Loathing in Law School, and Tail of a Grey Rat), but I've really only been at this a few months.

I am so, so normal

This has to be the best internet search ever. Someone clicked on my blog after typing "pica cement" into google, which tells me there are probably people out there who want to do even weirder things with cement than squish it through their fingers. Following the search, I found this entry on Wiki Answers:

Question: Is eating cement bad for you?
Answer: Are you kidding? Do not eat cement.

Even better was another entry on Wiki Answers entitled, "Is eating the sponge part of sponge hair rollers a form of pica?"

There's nothing like cruising Wiki Answers to make you realize how normal you actually are. At least by comparison.

A Super Bowl guide for the ignorant

Welcome to Wisconsin, where football is the preeminent religion, followed only by binge drinking and ice fishing. I moved here three years ago from Manhattan, where the most competitive sport is Pilates, and I’ve pretty much stuck out like a Mormon at Mecca ever since. My first week here, I was having lunch with some fellow law students and one of the cattier girls in the group said, “I HATE the Yankees,” then glanced at me with a sideways smirk, as if to see my reaction. I was like, “Uh, the Yankees… that’s, um, basketball, right? Yeah, yeah I totally hate the Yankees. And also those damn Houston Cowboys. With their big hats.” From the reactions I got around the lunch table, you’d think I’d broken out in Klingon.

Three years later I’ve managed to find a group of friends who are at least somewhat tolerant of my complete and utter disinterest in sports, although this doesn’t get me out of going to parties at their houses where football games on ten-foot t.v. screens dominate the night. Surprisingly though, the quality of the food at these parties is excellent and I’ve determined to wrangle as many invitations as possible. In my efforts to blend in and look like a football-educated kind of person, here are some handy hints I’ve learned in the last three years:

• Despite its name, the Super Bowl doesn’t actually involve bowling. You can wait around all day and you’ll never see any bowling. Don’t mention the bowling or people will laugh at you.
  
  
  
• If someone says, “Do you want to come to our Super Bowl party this weekend?” don’t ask if it’s on Saturday or Sunday. Apparently this is the equivalent of asking whether Labor Day will be held on a Monday or a Thursday.
  
  
  
• There’s a bunch of other games that end with the word “bowl.” Like the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, and the Tostitos Bowl (I swear I’m not making that last one up). To the best of my understanding, the teams who win the most of these “bowls” go to the Super Bowl.
  
  
  
• If you win the Super Bowl, you get something called a Heisman trophy. Or maybe it’s the Stanley cup. Whichever it is, it should never be confused with the America’s cup, which pertains to horse racing and which we lost to Canada a bunch of years ago and can’t get back.
  
  
  
• The only really interesting part of a football game is the cheerleaders, but the t.v. doesn’t show them very often. I think the networks do this deliberately so we’ll keep watching with the hopes of seeing those cheerleaders. Especially the ones at USC who wear white sweaters and look so good I want to put them in my purse. Or maybe take a bath with them. Did I just say that?
  
  
  
• Apparently the New York Patriots are not a team. But my friend Robert says it’s what you’d get if the two teams playing this year had a love child.
  
  
  
• I want some pudding. Wouldn’t pudding be good right now?
  

Another question

I have another question, but this one is definitely not entertaining like the last few (meaning I will not ask you to ponder the origin of underwear, nor will I send you a picture of my boobs if you answer it right). In fact, I'm going to have to chalk this entire post up to bad blogging because it doesn't even begin to entertain, inform, or serve to ventilate my ongoing irritation with the world.

So here's the question. Do I have any readers who are in law school or who have graduated from law school at UC Davis or UNLV? If so, would you mind e-mailing me at ka4037 at yahoo? (Someone told me if I formatted my e-mail address like that I could avoid spambots* that troll the internet looking for addresses.)

Barring that, are any of you currently in law school or graduates of a law school in Colorado or Utah? If so, will you e-mail me? I know this seems really random, but I have a question I really need answered.

(Okay, it probably doesn't take a genius to figure out what I'm looking for, but if law schools didn't make our lives so difficult I wouldn't have to be so sneaky about it.)

*Is it just me, or does the word "spambot" make you think of those hot girls with gun-boobs from Austin Powers?