life – 7 points

24Oct07

In real life the tiles click together and slide around until you close your fingers tight and pull them out. Beautiful, unexpectedly connected letters will probably go to waste if you decide to be strategic and land on the hot spots, garner points and get ahead. Dissect a word like ‘beige’ and extract the ironically unimpressive ‘big’ for the triple word score. If you want to win.

Life is like a bag of scrabble tiles. What you do with it usually ends up with a decision that needs to made between art and commerce. People can do both, I know. I just don’t know how they do it.

What if you don’t want to score big? I used to know that the numbers meant less to me than the letters, but now I’ve painted myself into a corner. A plan was formed even before I got married and I don’t know how to undo it. What I do for a living has now been overtaken by how much I do for a living. I’ve stopped protecting the creativity of chance that used to lure me into board rooms dominated by men in suits, construction sites buzzing with oversized, dusty laborers, and studios bursting with my ego-maniacal counterparts.

There’s a bottle of pre-natal vitamins in my bedroom that I’ve been neglecting to take. We’ve been talking about the next child. It’s tipped us into an unwelcome overdrive to put the apartment on the market. We put the apartment on a diet and purged a truckload, literally, of clothing and electronics donated to Housing Works. Our actor friend turned real estate agent is coaching us on how to stage the apartment to make it more marketable. Despite the new dishwasher, tub faucet, and hallway paint, we’ve been informed that we need to lose a little more apartment weight. A chair, a bookshelf, an ottoman.

Despite our shortcomings as an open-house worthy apartment, the mister and I fall in love with our newly svelte home. Rearranged a few things, finally put up that mobile in Max’s room, new rug in the office. The place looks hot. Everything looks so good that we decide to postpone the open house and think for a minute. Should we really do this?

To procrastinate, I play scrabble online with all sorts of whackos.

overlit

Not a very elegant or interesting word, but 60 points is aight.

I turned 38 last Thursday. In anticipation of my birthday, in the back of my mind, I was putting off the true beginning of our next phase of life, the what do you call it, the doing it all unprotected style to procreate. Again. I thought of the ridiculously expensive restaurant that we had gotten birthday reservations at, the wine that I wanted to drink without worrying about harming a tadpole wiggling around in utero. I thought to myself, “after the dinner, we’ll start.”

Instead of savoring every minute of an over the top, three-hour meal, we limped in, exhausted and anxious, and were seated at a primo best view in the house table. (thank you k.) Somehow, my friend, the big bird, the socialite dynamo, had convinced us that she truly did want to babysit Max. He was smitten as soon as he saw her big gorgeous eyes on top of her 5′ 11″ frame. To show off for her, his week long fever didn’t spike, his nose stopped gushing, and he smiled and flirted and cooed.

I texted her three times, worried that he was throwing up or throwing down, and each time she responded, “he’s great, shut up and eat”. Our sommelier very discreetly looked at me sideways and I finally stopped playing with my cell phone and put it away. The exquisite gastronomic experience of wanting to eventually throw up from eating too much delectable food was unparalleled.

In the end, they were overtly trying to kill me by overfeeding. The gold foil laced along the chocolate drizzles of one of the six desserts made me ask if it was edible. I think I knew that it was, but it looked so much like gold that I wanted to check my fuzzy facts. The waitress mumbled something that I couldn’t understand through the fog of 8 previous courses so I was still slightly in the dark, but pretended to have been enlightened.

If you eat the gold foil, can I look at your poop tomorrow?

I love my husband. But I did not allow any peeking the next day. gold – 6 points.

After we got home, Max stopped showing off and his fever topped 102, his breathing labored to the point that I considered strangling his pediatrician for yet another bad diagnosis. I slept not at all.

A kid in his daycare had been sent home with pneumonia, so of course, Max’s slurpy cough and snorkelling through snot sounds made me worry that he had gotten it too when they sent him home with a fever and a report of throwing up. By the time I turned 38, we had been doing the paranoia patrol at night for about 5 days. I was tired. Max was tired. The mister. Sick and tired.

The thought crossed my mind, We can barely handle one. What will two be like? The thought of moving, potty training, enrolling in pre-school, staying awake past Max’s bedtime while being pregnant made me shudder. terror – 6 points.

I stayed home a couple of days to take care of Max. He clung, and moaned, and whimpered, and fevered. Poor poor little baby. I was still a couple days away from a meltdown, but it was still a wonder to me that in the middle of all the feeling like crap, the mister’s new favorite chili peppers album started us bouncing up and down and throwing dice in his office. We three fools danced like idiots and I couldn’t have been happier. joyous – 16 points.

The little man is fever free, finally. I think he might sleep through the night like he almost did last night. I’ve gotten through all my mental hurdles about starting the next phase supposedly. Not all of them have been mentioned above, but I’m still hesitant. It can’t hurt to be prepared, or can it? I worry that we will be less adequate with two. We’ll never, ever have sex again. We just won’t be able to handle it.

I don’t know. The only thing I have to worry about for the moment is not getting fired and finding the top to the bottom of my black tie event ensemble. It’s been strongly suggested that I get my ass to the Waldorf in two days to kiss ass and poodle fake. dread – 7 points.

Maybe it’s time to ditch the plan and call the head hunters back. forfeit – 63 points.

Filed under: food, get smart, parenting, stop touching me   |  10 Comments