I Throw My Bullshit Flag at You, John McCain!
Current mood: bitchy
Via Wonkette:
John McCain 'Suspending' Campaign by Campaigning More
It really depends on what you mean by "suspend," doesn't it? John McCain's maverick move to suspend his campaign so he can grandstand on something he knows literally nothing about — the American Economy — isn't actually a suspension of anything. It's a stupid stunt to get more campaign press coverage. And nothing is suspended at all. Go to McCain's website, and you'll see he's still collecting campaign contributions and still running his trashy anti-Obama video spots. He's still doing interviews (just not Letterman!) and he'll almost certainly still do the debate on Friday. Also, he pulls this crap all the time.
The old gimmick McCain loves is to run standard dirty hyper-partisan campaigns, funded completely by lobbyists (who also literally manage his campaigns). Then, every few weeks, he does some showboat bullshit about being "above politics" or whatever, and an ever-decreasing number of political reporters briefly note this stunt, and then it's all totally forgotten again.
Try to remember an example from, say, three weeks ago. Right, the GOP convention. Hurricane Gustav looked like it might pound New Orleans and the Republicans sure didn't want to share prime time with the poor black people drowning, again, so McCain's campaign decided it was all about "country first" and just canceled the first night of the convention and most of the second night.
It was cheap and cynical and of course it intentionally kept the hated monsters Dick Cheney and George W. Bush back in Washington, and by waiting out the hurricane the campaign also managed to bridge the gap between the exciting stunt of announcing Sarah Palin as the running mate on Friday — the morning after Obama's epic nomination speech/spectacle at the Denver football stadium — and Palin's carefully scripted "hockey mom" bitchfest/acceptance speech about how black people and their "communities" are really just ghettos of black people.
McCain also "suspended campaigning" when he ran for president eight years ago. After telling the press (his base) that he was going to announce his run in March 1999, he melodramatically "postponed" the announcement because of the U.S. bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo.
On a single day during this brave non-postponement, McCain appeared on Fox News, MSNBC, Larry King, Charlie Rose and the business channels to talk about Kosovo and his suspended campaign.
I copied this from my amazing friend, Peter, who copied it from someone else. Pass it on! _____________________________________
I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....
* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."
* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.
* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. * Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.
* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable. * Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.
* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience. * If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.
* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian. * If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.
* If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society. * If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.
* If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America's. * If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.
Does the current economic shitstorm have you scratching your head?
Current mood: aggravated
Does the worst financial crisis since The Great Depression confuse the hell out of you? Are you asking yourself, "How did we get here? Who is responsible for this?"
Well, fear not, kittens! Get out your pencils because James Moore is going to break it all down for you in this handy-dandy, why-my-money-market-savings-account-is-in-the-toilet Economic Shitstorm Primer, which I have marked up to display the most fundamental and easy-to-comprehend parts: __________________________________________________
A Nation of Village Idiots
.. --> /Inline toolbox -->
Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.
Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses. Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures.
Let's just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that's more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of money would also pay for health care for every man, woman, and child in America for at least six months.
How did we get here?
That's pretty easy to answer, too. His name is Phil Gramm. A few days after the Supreme Court made George W. Bush president in 2000, Gramm stuck something called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into the budget bill. Nobody knew that the Texas senator was slipping America a 262 page poison pill. The Gramm Guts America Act was designed to keep regulators from controlling new financial tools described as credit "swaps." These are instruments like sub-prime mortgages bundled up and sold as securities. Under the Gramm law, neither the SEC nor the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) were able to examine financial institutions like hedge funds or investment banks to guarantee they had the assets necessary to cover losses they were guaranteeing.
This isn't small beer we are talking about here. The market for these fancy financial instruments they don't expect us little people to understand is estimated at $60 trillion annually, which amounts to almost four times the entire US stock market.
And Senator Phil Gramm wanted it completely unregulated. So did Alan Greenspan, who supported the legislation and is now running around to the talk shows jabbering about the horror of it all. Before the highly paid lobbyists were done slinging their gold card guts about the halls of congress, every one from hedge funds to banks were playing with fire for fun and profit.
Gramm didn't just make a fairy tale world for Wall Street, though. He included in his bill a provision that prevented the regulation of energy trading markets, which led us to the Enron collapse. There was no collapse of the house of Gramm, however, because his wife Wendy, who once headed up the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, took a job on the Enron board that provided almost $2 million to their household kitty. And why not? Wendy got a CFTC rule passed that kept the federal government from regulating energy futures contracts at Enron.
If John McCain gets elected and chooses Phil Gramm as his Treasury Secretary, which many politico types see as likely, they will be able to talk about the good old days when Gramm was in congress and McCain was in the senate and they were in the midst of the Savings and Loan crisis.
The S and L scandal, which may look precious when compared to our present cascade of problems, isn't hard to understand, either. But it is impossible to take John McCain seriously on our current financial Armageddon since he was dabbling in the historic collapse of 747 S&Ls that occurred during Ronald Reagan's era. In the early 80s under the Republican president, congress deregulated the savings and loan industry in much the same way that Gramm made sure there were no laws hindering our current financial malefactors on Wall Street. S&Ls simply lobbied until they had less regulation and then began making rampant, unsound investments.
The guy who was going the wildest with financial freedom was Charles Keating, who headed up Lincoln Savings and Loan of California. Because the S&L industry had managed to get congress to increase FDIC insurance from $40,000 to $100,000 on deposits, the irresponsible investing of people like Keating began to put taxpayer insurance funds at great risk of loss. Keating placed money in junk bonds and questionable real estate projects and because so many other S&Ls started acting the same way the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) began to push for a regulation that limited these dangerous speculative "direct" investments to 10% of an S&L's assets.
And Keating didn't like it; he called on a private economist named Alan Greenspan, who promptly produced a study saying that there was no danger in "direct" investments. But that didn't convince the FHLBB and as further scrutiny showed Lincoln Savings and Loan was making even more historically bad investment decisions, a federal investigation was launched.
So Keating called his home state senator John McCain.
McCain and four other US senators (known to history as the Keating Five) met with Edwin Gray, then chairman of the FHLBB. McCain had been hesitant to attend but had reportedly been called a "wimp" behind his back by Keating. The message to the FHLBB and Gray from the Keating Five was to lay off Lincoln and cool the investigation. Gray and the FHLBB did not relent but Lincoln stayed in business until 1989 when it collapsed with the rest of the S&L industry. The life savings of more than 20,000 elderly investors disappeared with the failure of Lincoln. Keating went to prison for five years.
Charles Keating was John McCain's pal. They met in 1981 and Keating dumped $112,000 in the McCain campaign bank accounts between '82 and '87. A year before McCain met with the FHLBB regulators, his wife Cindy and her father,according to newspaper reports at the time, invested about $360,000 in one of Keating's shopping centers.The Arizona Republic reported McCain and his wife and their babysitter took nine trips on Keating's private jet to the Bahamas to stay at the S&L liar's decadent Cat Cay resort. The senator didn't pay Keating back for the plane rides until years later when he was under investigation.
McCain wasn't found guilty of anything but bad judgment, which is an historic understatement. Republicans, who led deregulation of the S&L industry, delayed the bailout until after the 1988 election to make sure George H. W. won the White House. The cost to taxpayers for helping these 747 bad actors in the S&L industry was finally estimated at $1.4 trillion. If the bailout had begun in 1986 instead of after the presidential election, the cost would have been contained at $20 billion.
And now the Republicans who engineered our present crisis and got us into the S&L debacle of the 80s are before us saying the markets need regulation. No, actually, they don't need regulation. Why don't you Republican capitalists who believe in the free markets get out of the damned way and let them work and allow these various financial nuthouses be crushed by the weight of their own stupidity? When it is all over, we'll have sane and sober people create laws to make sure it doesn't happen again, assuming we survive this chaos. (Note -- I don't agree, I think the investments of elderly people, etc, should be protected. It's not their fault. I think we should take money out of these ri-fucking-diculous, quarter-billion dollar "severance packages" that these bank leaders are taking and cushion taxpayers investments with that money. Jessica)
Also, while you are handing out our tax money to idiots on Wall Street, save a little of the long green for the unemployed auto and construction workers and all of the other people who have lost their jobs because you were too stupid to notice what Phil Gramm was doing and you were convinced everything was going to be just fine because the markets work.
These, then, are the people -- the Republicans -- who want to run our government for four more years. John McCain isn't just one of them. He rides their jets. He takes their campaign donations. He makes them his campaign advisors. And he tells us to trust him.
Sam and I will be canvassing in VA and anyone who wants to carpool from MD is welcome.
Current mood: excited
If Sarah Palin can use her baby as a political prop, so can I.... mwahahahaha.... no one can slam the door in a face like Sam's! No one, I tell you!
"On the Herndon border, but in Loudoun, Oak Grove is an important precinct that has the potential to really help swing the Dulles District. Because it is small, we have the ability to canvass the entire precinct in a single night! Join us to spread the word about Senator Obama. Connect with neighbors and friends and canvass in teams. Meet in front of the 1st Stop Food and Deli. Bring a friend, a water bottle, and comfortable shoes! Training will be provided. First time canvassers welcome!! RSVP to Sophia Chitlik, your local field organizer, if you have any questions at 703-786-0837 or by email at SChitlik@vaobamaforchange.com"
Tuesday, Sept. 23rd. at 5:30 PM 1st Stop Food Store (Sterling, VA)
46000 Old Ox Rd Sterling, VA 20166
My cell is 443-766-0894 if anyone needs to get ahold of me for carpool info.
Sarah Palin: The Face of Ugly Americanism
Current mood: aggravated
By John Seery:
I know, I know: Sarah Palin is receiving rosy plaudits for her speech last night. She is being heralded as the savior of the GOP, someone with enough moxie to sustain the party's unholy alliance between the oil plutocrats and the oily preachocrats.
Many pundits in reviewing her polished performance claim to see an unflappable and gung-ho winner on stage. My honest-to-goodness visceral reaction was quite otherwise. What I saw on that stage was the personification of small-minded smugness, an utter lack of humility, a kind of self-righteous entitlement based on little more than puffed-up narrowness. She struck me not as plucky but, rather, as stunningly immodest--to the point of arrogance. Some people are arrogant and maybe deserve to be. They know it, and flaunt it, while everyone else thinks they are jerks. But there's another kind of arrogance, perhaps harder to spot at first, an arrogance that apparently doesn't even recognize itself as such, a sanctified, self-satisfied presumptuousness that flows from sheer naïveté about oneself and the world and manifests itself in giddy ambition.
Hey, I'm all for hockey teams, motherhood, snowmobiling, and small-town virtues. I grew up with such charms [indulgent personal digression here along those lines: Forty some years ago, whenever my family visited my grandparents' farm in Ossian, Iowa, that "event" would always make the front page of the Ossian Bee, right next to a story about someone's canned tomatoes going bad, which was positioned right next to the Ossian Bee's front-page obituaries column. Or, one time, among many, when we visited my father's parents' farm in Coggon, Iowa, we asked, fishing poles in hand, a local young boy for directions to a Bait and Tackle shop, and he gave us elaborate directions, about turning at this corner, and then at that stump, and then winding around some bend in the road, and looping back at the half-mile marker--directions that were almost comically complicated for such a small place. And then he ended his on-the-scene peroration: "But I don't think it's open today." As for snowmobiling, my daredevil cousins used to run snowmobiles on the (hopefully) frozen Cedar River, jumping over cracks and breaks in the ice if they encountered such. Heck, as for credentials, I still have my NRA shooting awards from Cub Scout summer camp.] Such small-town charms and virtues notwithstanding, I also recognize--especially when it's beaming right at me from my Chinese-manufactured television screen--small-town thinking when I see and hear it. What the world--what this country--doesn't need more of right now is Sarah Palin's defiant brand of self-assured provincialism.
Palin and McCain want the United States to consume more and more of the planet's energy resources--in the names of God, country, and industry. Palin believes that the Iraq War was God's will, even though she admits that she hasn't been paying close attention to that war (oh my Lord!). She believes that drilling in Alaska's natural splendor is blessed with Providential Approval. She promotes policies based on her unshakable belief that she herself has a direct pipeline (no pun intended) to the Almighty's intentions. What hubris! How dare she hijack and besmirch true belief for the sake of her particular economic predilections.
She mocks community organizing in Southside Chicago--but has she ever set foot in Chicago? She has no idea what it means to organize on the south side of Chicago--nor, I imagine, does her slickly sarcastic speechwriter. How many African-Americans lived in Wasilla during her tenure as major? She hasn't traveled through this great country of ours. She doesn't know its people, doesn't know its amazing and oftentimes vexing diversity. She hasn't traveled anywhere in the world, except one place. She presents herself as an all-American gal, but does she genuinely understand--beyond her own PTA-to-Juneau story--our country's rich and varied and complex history? She recently confessed that she doesn't even understand what the Vice President of the United States does, and her admirers heartily approve of her perversely willful ignorance.
Yes, she can bring a bunch of white people to their feet chanting USA, USA, USA. Good for her. But true leadership in these difficult times will require actual knowledge, not just personality. This world of ours, the past hundred years, has too frequently witnessed the dangers--nay, the evils--of compensatory nativism. Citizens in our own country should have learned one of the major lessons of these last eight years, namely that conviction should not serve as a trump card over competence. To me, Sarah Palin's grin looks like the grin of someone who doesn't feel she needs to think twice before pulling the trigger.
This is one of those things that is so funny, you kick your own ass for not thinking of it first. From 23/6.com:
"Why can't you be more like Michelle Obama?" - The "Michelle-Shock" effect on America's women
It's just too much to expect from a woman.
In the wake of Michelle Obama's very personal, and at times heart-wrenching keynote speech she delivered at the DNC's opening night, American women are suffering from "Michelle-Shock," a condition wherein wives and mothers start to experience feelings of inadequacy in comparison to the example set by Michelle Obama.
.. --> Mrs. Obama gave a soul-baring personal statement that painted a portrait of a powerful woman and a loving wife and mother who struggled to rise to the top, and cherished every moment of the journey. She is an inspiration, but also something of an impossible role model for the women of America. -->
To help American women cope with Michelle-Shock, 23/6 has created this handy guide to help you make it through when it's clear that everyone is comparing you to Michelle Obama, and they can see all the ways in which you're falling short:
I used to be so strong....
Current mood: indescribable
Yeah, I know. I hardly write anymore.
Being a mom leaves you in a strange juxtaposition -- you have a million things to wax poetic on, from societal upheaval to belly button size, but you have only a few brain cells left after 9 months of pregnancy, 21 hours of labor, and 2 hours sleep. You find yourself instead making up songs to the tune of any song ever written, but with different lyrics, most of which are various and sundry variations on "La-la-la" and your child's name. A favorite example is:
(sung to the tune of 'Bonanza') Dun-da-da-dun-da-da-dun-da-da-dun, Samantha! Dun-da-da-dun-da-da-dun-da-da-dun, Samantha Isabel!
It's silly, but it makes her smile. Anything to make her smile.
In other news, Patrick and I are closer to settling on a house. We're negotiating to buy a foreclosure, a fixer-upper in every sense of the word, that needs -- at the very least -- new carpet, new paint, a stiff dousing of bleach, and for every. single. appliance. to be replaced, from the stove to the sump pump. Also, all the pipes in the house are made of polybutelane, a craptastic substance marketed to homebuilders in the 80's before it was realized that the average life span of said material is 18 years.
This house is 19 years old.
Since we're settling on our ticking timebomb in September but our lease isn't up until December, that gives us a few months to work on it. With what money, I have no idea, but I was laughing at myself earlier for thinking (dreaming) that we'd be moving into our new home in December and it would be completely beautiful, from top to bottom, and furnished with all the furniture of my dreams. Ha!
The funniest part is what a sell-out I feel like. Not depressingly so, just enough that I laugh at the 20-year-old me. 20-year-old Jessica would roll her eyes at 28-year-old Jessica, married with a baby and buying a house in the 'burbs, growing herbs on the deck that aren't illegal, watching my mouth in front of children and staying home on Friday nights to play Scrabble with her husband. It makes me laugh to think of that.
So that's our house update, but back to motherhood.... it's funny. And by 'funny' I mean 'terrifying'.
Not all of it is terrifying, most of it is hilarious and awesome. But there are those moments where you realize just what the hell you've gotten yourself into.
Trying to explain motherhood or parenthood to someone who isn't one is like trying to explain the Grand Canyon to someone who's never been. It can't be done. No picture or movie can do justice, so why bother? So why am I bothering writing all this down? I don't know really, but I think it has something to do with forming the most coherent thought I've had in the last 4 months. And that is:
I'm a mother.... therefore, I am a mess.
There are certain things I can't do anymore. I can't read a newspaper. I can't watch some TV shows or read certain books. Things I used to find funny are now too painful to even think about, much less laugh about.
Things hurt.
Thinking hurts.
Not in the sense that I'm sleep-deprived and get headaches, which I do sometimes, but in the sense that I feel so deeply and so intensely now that a sad thought will crush me.
A perfect example is just about an hour ago -- I was reading a book. Simple, right? I used to do it all the time. I was reading a book I loved and read and re-read when I was in high school, a thick, gory true-crime book about Miami crime in the 70's and 80's. I'm getting rid of old things before we move and decided I'd read this book one last time before I sell it at our yard sale, since I loved it so much as a kid.
Over the last few days I really made a dent in it, all the stories about drug deals gone wrong, controversial defense attornies being murdered and the like. I made it a little over three-quarters of the way through, but had to stop. I looked over at Patrick, managed to squeak out, "Can you please hold me?" and then crumpled. I was crying so hard I could barely breathe.
I had gotten to the chapters about the missing kids, the kidnapped, the child-killers that go free on a legal technicality, babies murdered by their own parents, and a little girl who went brain dead after crushing her head in a recliner chair accident. It was too much. I couldn't do it. I couldn't bear the thought of all those atrocities actually happening, to any parent, ever. And they all did. It is so scary. "I couldn't do it," I kept saying to Patrick. "If anything ever happened to her I would just shut down. I couldn't go on." My chest still hurts at the thought.
Sitting there, sobbing, I realized something -- I am stronger for being a mom, but I'm also crippled by it. This tiny being with no eyebrows and a button nose has completely cut me to the core, without even trying, in more ways than she will ever understand... until she becomes a mother herself. Seriously -- 40 minutes prior to crying on the couch, book in hand, I had been crying because she's out-growing her bassinet and will have to sleep in her own room soon. Before I got pregnant I couldn't say enough about the virtues of having kids sleep in their own rooms.... "but she's still a baby!" I cried, now on the other end of parenthood.
I cry at everything.
Through my tears, I managed to laugh at myself. "I used to be so strong!" I said, out loud. "What the hell happened to me?" I mean, wasn't I the girl that braved cold nights in Wal-Mart parking lots and rescued animals and escaped angry bears and slept with a knife under my pillow and actually used it once? Wasn't I the tough chick who riffed on politics for hours while getting drunk on whiskey while all the other girls sipped fruity drinks and gabbed about purses? Where did that girl go?
Now I find energy I don't have to do things I wouldn't do otherwise, like lie on the floor clapping my hands like an organ grinder monkey for hours at a time, or work odd hours while she's sleeping so we can buy groceries and gas, but I'm realizing there is a large part of me that is weak, and always will be now, forever. I will never not be a mother. I will always know how high the stakes are, how far I would go for her, and how much it would kill me if anything tragic were to happen to her. I have eaten from the Motherhood Tree of Knowledge and I can never unlearn these things. I will always be 50% cast iron and 50% warm jello. It's just something I'm going to have to learn to live with, and try not to dwell on the "what-ifs". The "what-ifs" will kill you.
And if one day Sam catches Mommy crying while reading the paper, she'll understand.
Someday.
Currently
listening
:
Mule Variations
By
Tom Waits
Release date: 1999-04-27
It's been a week, I'm finally getting around to updating my profile. Thank you to everyone for the sweet comments and messages -- I'm trying to write everyone back individually, but if I don't, I'm sorry. They do mean a lot to me.
I'm still trying to find words to even begin to describe how amazing this all has been. With only 3 minutes here and there to get online, it may be awhile.
She is perfect and I'm so madly in love with her and motherhood in general. Like, 8 or 9 times already I've just looked at her and started bawling. Hope to talk to everyone or see everyone soon.
Well, by tomorrow I should be a mommy. Based on my stress test this morning, the midwives are inducing me tonight because I have PIH -- pregnancy-induced hypertension, or high blood pressure. Samantha's heart monitor looked fine, but it's me they're worried about, so tonight's the night! Patrick and I are going to the hospital at 6 PM for 12 hours worth of meds meant to prepare me for the meds they have to give me to make me contract, so it could be as late as tomorrow afternoon or evening before she's finally here, but at least it's a start!
We're excited and can't wait to share the good news with everyone, like birthweight and if she has hair and all that. :D And thanks to everyone for the well-wishes and congratualtions, they mean a lot to us!
Much love from the 2 1/2 of us! More news soon! Jessica
No, I haven’t had the baby yet. **UPDATED**
Current mood: everybody shut up
I'm going out of my fucking mind. And I really don't mean to snap at people when they make obvious comments like, "Haha, you're still pregnant! You haven't had the baby yet!" but it's so freaking frustrating. It's like, I know you're saying it because you think it's hilarious, but it's really not. It's not hilarious that I just sit at home and cry because I'm in pain and hormonally insane whenever I don't have to be in public.
My midwife says she won't even consider inducing me until the second week of May, which means 2 things -- a) I probably won't even be a mother by Mother's Day, even though I was due last week, and b) I'm going to miss my sister-in-laws wedding because the baby will be too small and weak to bring into a crowd, whereas if she had been so kind as to show up on her actual due date, she would have been okay.
I guess it doesn't matter to my midwife or anyone else that maybe I really just want to be done with this. I want my baby. Everyone else that I know that was pregnant, they all have their babies. Why can't I have mine?
Just please, everybody, I don't mean to sound mean but.... stop asking. When it happens, I'll let you know, but until then just let me be.
*** UPDATE *** I suppose I should specify that I'm really not taken aback or annoyed by people genuinely asking how I'm doing or feeling, stuff like that. It means a lot to me that people care and are concerned for Samantha and I, and Patrick too.
It's the people who make fun of me to my face, and tease me and laugh at me that get on my nerves. Like, when I'm in this much pain and this desperate to finally be able to look at and hold and cuddle the person I've been growing inside me for almost 10 months, laughing in my face and saying, "That baby's not coming out until August!" isn't as funny as you may think. In fact, it just makes me want to curl into a ball and cry. That's all. Those are the only people this post was addressed to. And they'll never see it, but it helps to vent a little.
Thanks to all our friends who've been calling and writing, etc. If I don't pick up the phone, it's because I'm asleep.
bitchy
aggravated
excited
breezy
indescribable
blessed
pleased