That Cannot Even Make Sense....

What doesnt make sense ? This:

Just in the last week or so i have started to feel much heavier and quite ungainly at times - you know, like every other pregnant woman on the planet. However, i'm kind of worried that my bump is on the smallish side. As in, too small for my stage of pregnancy. Which is 22 weeks ( 23 on Monday ).

So how can it make sense that i feel heavier and awkward and ungainly - but i also feel too small ?

Good question, yea ? Answers anybody ? No, okay, maybe i'll just ask my obstetrician on Tuesday......

Boys and Forts

One of my favorite things as a boy was building “forts” in the woods with other boys. Not sure now why we called them forts because they were not fortified in any way. They were structures we liked to go into and just sit. If they were in trees, they were “tree forts.” If they were holes in the ground with boards over them covered with dirt, leaves and pine needles, they were “underground forts.” The ones we built in wintertime were “snow forts.” None of us ever thought to question the label.

I suspect we boys were biologically programmed to build forts and were happiest doing so, just as Labrador Retrievers are happiest when they’re retrieving. Sitting in classrooms with teachers trying to program us to be “nice” like the girls would make us crazy. Building forts was not the only thing we did and I’m not sure where the notion came from. It was usually around this time of year - when summer was ending and school was beginning. I suspect it was instinctual. Cold weather was approaching and we felt like building a shelter, so we did.

We’d use available tools and materials. In suburban Boston during the fifties and sixties lots of houses going up, so we would prowl job sites and ask carpenters if we could have their scrap wood and bent nails and they always obliged. It was great fun to straighten out the nails, carry materials into the woods and start building. Tools we borrowed from our fathers, with permission or without. Hammers and saws were all we used really and the fathers were off to work all day so we would raid their workbenches. I'd borrow a hammer and saw and return them to the workbench before my father got home from work. Sometimes I’d forget though and leave them at the “fort.” If he should go looking for his tools that night and not find them, I’d be in trouble.

The numerous forts usually ended up getting wrecked by groups of older, bigger boys or boys from neighborhoods on the other side of a thousand-acre swamp. We’d journey to the site one day and find it destroyed, speculate on who may have done it, and plot revenge. If it was the boys across the woods, we’d seek alliances with older boys in our neighborhood for protection or retaliation.

My sisters and their friends played house close to home while we were building forts in the woods. Sometimes they’d rake pine needles into rows outlining rooms and make beds for their dolls. They were obeying their instincts too and got satisfaction from playing out their fantasies day after day. Often they’d try to entice us to play with them and pretend to be fathers in their “houses” but we weren’t interested. We’d only agree to when they blackmailed us. We’d play house with them for a limited time if they promised not to tell on us for something we did that they found out about.

As I reflect on it now, we were all playing out our inherent inclinations and there are corollaries in the larger human story. A concise description of human history might outline, for example, a series of periods when we built things, interspersed with periods when we wrecked what we’d built. If we extended the building periods and shortened the wrecking periods, it could be considered a measure of civilizational progress. Men generally built villages and cities while women bred, nurtured and maintained households in them. Men fortified their towns and cities and defended them, successfully or unsuccessfully, against assaults by other groups from other regions. Sometimes the assaults were preemptive attacks on potential enemies. Sometimes they were naked grabs for wealth and power. There were also occasions when men would seek alliances with other groups for defensive or offensive purposes.

It was similar with us boys and our forts. After a while they didn’t get wrecked very often, and that was probably because we were becoming the bigger boys, and the ones who had been the destroyers had grown up to discover cars and girls. Not too many years later, they settled down to play house for real.

Eventually, so did we.

Another Weekend By The Numbers

3 - number of kicks felt during a storm on Friday. This is significant because these were the first baby kicks i've been able to feel on the outside of my belly. I've been able to feel little butterfly-ery movements inside for a few weeks now, but the first belly kick i can feel from the outside ? Very special.

1 - christening attended. For my neice, B. She was too cute in her little christening dress with her fluffy hair.

5 - number of hours spent sitting in the sun after the christening. I'd say sitting in the sun drinking, but i wasnt. Everyone else was though - its so weird being the only sober person at a bbq or party.

100 - number of dollars spent on groceries for the week. Mr Gil decided to experiment: we went to a local green grocery for our fruit, the local bulk meat centre for our meat and bought the " rest " at the supermarket, to see if all that running around was less expensive than buying all the groceries in one place ( ah, that being the supermarket ). And it was! Around $30 cheaper in fact.

1500 - number of dollars we could potentially save for the year if we do our groceries the grocer/butcher/supermarket way. Thats the cost of a holiday right there!

6 - pieces of French toast i ate for Fathers Day lunch. I made them, so i figure i deserved an extra piece or two. I had originally planed French toast for breakfast, but Mr Gil was one of those people who spent 5 hrs drinking - so McDonalds egg and bacon McMuffins were on the menu instead.

60 - pages left until i finish the book i've been reading. And by " been reading " i mean i read the first 2 chapters about 3 weeks ago and read three quarters of the rest of it yesterday. In case your wondering which book it is: " A Harp in the South " by Ruth Park. Its an Australian classic that i'm pretty sure i read for school once, but its turning out to be much better than i remember it.

Robot Nurses and the Schizophenics, I don't think so!

What a week. We have management consultants telling us 1 in 10 health care workers will need to lose their jobs if the NHS is to achieve a balanced budget. My old friend and mentor Professor Joel Richman had some choice words to say about the NHS spending enormous sums of money on management consultants. I think he would have turned in his grave this week hearing the debate. Interestingly, The Times, this weekend was absolutely in his camp, claiming such profligacy was on a par with the payment of bankers bonuses. I agree, and I do get depressed about such blatant ‘let’s see what the punters think’ attitude to managing policy.

The other depressing occurrence this week was the BBC, (unfailingly it seems) referring to Peter Bryant as a ‘schizophrenic’. I hate this way of describing anyone. Despite what he may have done, and in no way dismissing the distress his actions have caused to others, he is suffering from a serious mental illness. He is not a label, and affliction, a disease. He is a person, albeit very troubled. I feel someone at the BBC needs to ask the question why, as a major news organization, they continue to persistently see only the illness and not the person.

My Mum has booked her first holiday on-line. This is maybe not a particularly newsworthy item on its own. However, this is a great leap forward in using new technology. Media City it’s not but its interesting how on the edge of becoming dependent upon others my parents have suddenly got a new lease of life that is predicated upon being independent.

Independence and dependence are such interrelated dynamics. Its something I wondered about when I first heard about the new Japanese invention – the Robot Nurse – this weekend. Having been concerned that we are educating out the essential emotionally of nursing the notion of a robot nurse is an anathema. It certainly made me think again about the huge investment we have made in our high fidelity manikins. In any event, if we need robot nurse who was it that thought it would be a good thing to give it the face of a Teddy Bear?

Feature Friday: Insomniatic Musings Child of the Month

Name: Olive Hoover

Age : 7 years old

Hometown: Alberqueque, New Mexico

You Know Her From Where ?: The film " Little Miss Sunshine ".

Reason for featuring: Because she is one of my favourite child film characters of the last few years. For starters - look how cute she is with her little teeth, and her chubby cheeks and her huge glasses. Seriously, those glasses could rival the specs i wore as a child, so anyone who can wear those and look so gosh darn cute is a-ok with me. But what i really love about her is her self confidence. If you havent seen " Little Miss Sunshine " ( why not ? Go rent it now! ) little Olive wants to win a beauty pageant, and her whole dysfunctional family take a road trip in effort to help her achieve that dream. Her father is a motivational speaker who cant sell a damn thing; her brother has taken a vow of silence; her grandfather is hilariously funny, but addicted to drugs; her uncle is a suicidal gay scholar; and her mum is trying to hold everyone together. And Olive ? She's just this little kid that likes to dance and 80's throwback sweats.

What i love is that Olive has no real idea that her family is so dysfunctional, and neither does she think of herself as awkward ( even though the massive glasses would, stereotypically, suggest " nerd " ). Nope, Olive is just a sweet, chubby, little girl with a dream - and a an awesome pageant coach/ junkie Grandpa who encourages it. The whole final dance scene at the pageant, and Olives attitude in the face of pageant judgery ( is that a word? it is now... ) just melts my heart.

So here's to Olive Hoover - to her big glasses, her old school sweatbands, her awesome choice of music, and her dysnfunctional family. A worthy recipient of Insomniatic Musings Child of the Month.

Kennedy Worship Syndrome

I’m not mourning Ted Kennedy any more than I did Michael Jackson, even though the rest of the western world went into orgies of keening. Born a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat, I was raised with KWS (Kennedy Worship Syndrome) but, unlike most, I got over it many years ago.

Ted’s brother John was elected president when was in the fourth grade at St. William’s School in Tewksbury, Massachusetts - about twenty miles outside of Boston. My teacher, Sister Charles Paul, talked endlessly about Senator Kennedy - then President Kennedy - all year. Three years hence I was upstairs in seventh grade with Sister Maureen Catherine when JFK was shot by a communist organizer in Dallas. We watched the classroom TV as Walter Cronkite told us he was dead. The girls cried. I was in shock.
My father next to JFK at NAGE meeting

My father had worked with then-Senator John Kennedy in the fifties when WWII vets formed a union that later became NAGE - National Association of Government Employees - now a subsidiary of the notorious SIEU (Service Employees International Union) providing thugs to disrupt congressional town meetings.

Ted Kennedy ran for the US Senate in 1962 when I was in fifth grade. His campaign motorcade went by St. William’s School while we were out at recess and pulled over. He got out to press the flesh and I threw a football to him, which he caught and tossed back. I threw it again, but he had looked away to shake hands and the ball hit him in the head, messing up his hair.

In summer of 1967, I attended a very spirited party on Martha’s Vineyard with some of Robert Kennedy’s children. The following June, I was getting ready for school when my mother told me Robert Kennedy had died in Los Angeles after being shot by a Palestinian activist while running for president.

I’ve since read every major biography of the Kennedy family. Most are by authors suffering from KWS like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger. The three that infuenced me most, however, were The Kennedy Imprisonment by Garry Wills; Kennedys: An American Drama by Collier and Horowitz; and The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersch. These authors examined the family without glossing over the carbuncles, such as: Joseph P. Kennedy’s involvement with organized crime during Prohibition, his pro-Nazi sentiments as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, his obsessive philandering, his svengali-like control of his children, driving his sons to seek the presidency, fixing 1960 election results in Illinois, West Virginia and Louisiana, and so forth. Then there were JFK’s too-numerous-to-mention dalliances as congressman, senator and president. Hersch’s book was the most damning, depicting John and Robert as arrogant, brash, and playing fast and loose with civilization itself in their handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For those who insist all this lacks significance when measured against the political achievements of the Kennedys, there’s Chappaquiddick. Ted, like his father and brothers, frolicked with countless women. Unlike them, he had a problem with alcohol, which made him sloppier. It’s one thing to drunkenly drive off a bridge with a young woman not your wife in the car. It’s quite another to slink off and leave her to drown while you’re trying to cover up the incident to preserve your political career. If he’d reported the incident right away as the law required, Mary Jo Kopechne would be alive today according to investigators. Whatever was left in me of Kennedy Worship Syndrome, it was thoroughly eliminated after reading Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Coverup by Leo Damore. The Kennedy political machine, together with the Irish political mafia running Massachusetts at the time, gave Ted Kennedy a pass for what would have put anybody else in prison. Somehow kept his US Senate seat. Only in Massachusetts where KWS is epidemic could this have happened.

Hearing endlessly of Ted Kennedy’s legislative “achievements,” foremost in my mind is The 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the door for 20 million illegal immigrants now bankrupting our country. That was Ted’s baby. As I watch ordinary Americans revolt against socialized medicine, I think of Ted Kennedy.

When I hear of his “senatorial civility,” I remember how he baselessly savaged Robert Bork before the Senate Judiciary Committee declaring: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution.”

When I hear of his patriotism, I remember how he treasonously undercut President Reagan during the Cold War by offering a secret deal to Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov.

About the only positive thing about Ted Kennedy’s political career is when he ran in the primaries against an incumbent president from his own party, weakening Jimmy Carter and ushering in Ronald Reagan.

Now there’s talk of changing the law in Massachusetts to preserve the “Kennedy” senate seat by appointing nephew Joe Kennedy. You remember the former congressman who has been kissing up to Hugo Chavez the past few years? Joe calls them “our good friends in Venezuela.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but after last week, it’s pretty clear the mainstream media still suffers from KWS. As someone who recovered years ago, this Boston-Irish-Catholic-former Democrat had to get it out.

What Am I - A Ham Sandwich ?!?

Seriously - i'm about sick of my state manager, The Bell, pretending that i'm not here. That i dont exist. She must think that the more she ignores me, the sooner i'll go away.

And i will. On maternity leave. I just wont come back.

I know i'm raving a bit here, its just starting to become greatly annoying. I've never really liked The Bell anyway but the last few months of being given the cold shoulder is almost enough. Being that she's the state manager i had to inform her of my pregnancy and intention to take maternity leave. I did so when i was 10 weeks and she told me she would toss up a few ideas in regards to replacement staff and call me about the next week. That was 11 weeks ago and i havent heard dot from her since - unless of course i get in touch with her. She hasnt called me of her own volition at all. Consequently myself, J and the rest of our office colleagues are still in the dark about what will happen on my temporary leave.

I called The Bell again this past Friday, for probably the fourth time since our initial discussion, only to be told " Its arranged ". Literally - thats all she said. " Its arranged " and then she just kept on talking. She didnt elaborate on who was arranged, or what was arranged, or when it was arranged. Just arranged - and then she preceded to tell me i dont really need much time off before the baby arrives because all i do is sit down all day and besides she worked up until the Thursday and had her baby on the Friday. Good for you lady - seriously. It must make for a nice little story to tell about how brave you were and how hard you worked ( choke! ). I, on the other hand, would like a few weeks or a month to rest up, make it to all my doctors appointments without having to rush back to work, and to make all the last minute preparations for my little munchkin.

So - thats it. The Bell insists on telling me nothing but " its arranged ". Funnily enough our national sales manager ( remember, The Bell is only state manager ) has told J and myself that they will definately have someone or something in place and she will let us know when they've put it in place.

Which would suggest that The Bell is not only trying to ignore, but is also a liar aswell.