So, Blogging Daily Is Apparently NOT Anywhere Near the Cards

So, the last time I posted, Danny was a month old, I hadn't yet gone back to work, and it was probably daytime.

Now, it's ten of six in the morning and I've been up for going on two hours. Also? Danny had his three-month birthday this week. There were cupcakes.

What has life been like since the beginning of January?

My parents came, as did my brother and sister-in-law, to meet Danny and celebrate Christmas (well, epiphany anyway). There was vegetarian dining, king cake, and lots of oohing and aahing and snuggling and, well, colic. It looked a lot like this:


And this:



And this:

And this:



And it was shortly before and during that visit that I was coming to the conclusion that Danny was not going to be exclusively breastfed. When I started pumping to try to build up a supply of milk to feed him when I went back to work (my new semester started when he was six weeks old), I discovered that in a good session I could get almost an ounce, and usually, it was more like 1/2 - 2/3 oz. I held out some hope that I'd do better at work when I was pumping in place of nursing instead of in between nursing, but no. So, Danny started getting a small amount of breastmilk mixed with a larger amount of formula for three or so bottles a day, three days a week, and I dutifully tried and tried to pump and came home with about three ounces each workday, and then it was two ounces, and it was around that time that we noticed Danny was REALLY thin and we brought him to the doctor (now about 9 weeks old) and discovered that yes, the baby who had weighed 7 lbs 14 oz at his 2 week check-up now weighed 8 lbs 5 oz at 2 months -- that's right folks, 7 oz. in 7 weeks, or more likely, he gained more than that before he turned six weeks and as soon as I went back to work my milk supply tanked and we'd been starving him. No, I of the malfunctioning boobs was doing it. I was starving. Our son.

So we started supplementing with formula and two weeks later, at his regularly-scheduled 2 month check-up, he weighed 10 lbs 10 0z and as of today, a little over 13 weeks, he weighs 12 lbs 4 oz according to my digital bathroom scale. But of course, my milk has dried up completely, and except for the one, pathetic, not-even-one-ounce bag of milk in the freezer from my second-to-last day of pumping at work (the last day yielded no milk at all), my three-month-old is weaned. And of course, this kills me. I'm already going into more detail here than most folks probably wanted to hear, but I did try things. All those things you're supposed to try in order to nurse and work and keep up your milk supply? We tried them. There were books. There was AGONIZING over Danny's latch. There was low lighting and photos of the baby and meditation and massage in my office to stimulate let-down before pumping. We tried the things. But still, when Danny develops asthma or his IQ is ten points lower than someone thinks it ought to be or he doesn't get into advanced math class or he's sick all the time, it'll be the result of my failure as a breastfeeding mother.

Which is a lot for someone whose dissertation is about representations of food and mothering to handle.

So, anyway, somewhere in there, I went back to work and John went back to school and apart from nipple confusion and decreased milk supply and weight loss and formula formula formula, our whole alternate-stay-at-home-parenting plan is working out really well. And during Mardi Gras break, we went up to New York, where Danny met his dad's family for the first time and we brought my mom back down with us and she's been a HUGE help. She's been here for a week as of yesterday and now the dishes are getting done and the laundry is getting done and my students' essays are getting graded and John and I are presenting at conferences and not bringing the baby with us everywhere we go or else and it's been wonderful. When we're with Danny, we're interacting with him and he's all smiles and loving to exercise (as long as you don't -- for the love of all that his holy -- put him on his BELLY, you sadist! Who needs to crawl, anyway?) and sweet and wonderful and chubby! (Pictures of all this to follow, but they're still on the camera; life is still pretty hectic. In fact, the baby just woke up and is now sitting (sort of) next to me in bed while I finish this post.)

School is really good. I just returned my first batch of essays and collected my second and there are the usual bumps transitioning from Comp I where you're writing in the modes basically and Comp II where you're writing about literature and the forms and rules are suddenly VERY discipline-specific, but things are going pretty well. I'm calculating mid-term grades this week and they look like they're about where they should be, particularly if you look at all the classes together. Larger sample size is great to have for judging the consistency of your grading.

The dissertation is ... "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" as Yeats would have it. I'm delivering a paper this afternoon, if I can just stay awake until then, that will be a good chunk of my prospectus, so that should be enough to maybe eke me out a S for the semester.

And on that note, I think I'm about to cut this short and change a dirty diaper.

Yes, I Know It's Been Months

So, it's been months since I've written anything. Months during which I blew up like a balloon, and yet people were constantly telling me I "wasn't that big," which is really not an encouraging thing to say to a very pregnant woman. Just a general word of advice, the following are all terrible things to say to a pregnant woman: "You're still so small!" "You're enormous!" "You're really not very big!" "You must be due any minute!" These are all equally insulting, and equally likely to inspire another bout of the insecurities the mother-to-be is carrying around all the time because she owns a mirror and she knows she's not that big (or enormous, as the case may be).

Anyway, after 37 weeks of healthy pregnancy and one Thanksgiving of really tasty but not entirely healthy food, my blood pressure spiked at my 38 week check-up. It went from the neighborhood of 120/60 to more like 140/90, all of a sudden. So I went straight from my doctor's appointment to L&D with visions of preeclampsia dancing in my head (my OB's office is actually in a separate section of the hospital, so I didn't have far to go). Fortunately, John's afternoon class had been canceled that day so he'd joined me for the appointment. Unfortunately, we'd gotten a late start and missed lunch; we were planning to go to the mall across the street for Chinese food. So we didn't have anything to eat for a LONG time.

In L&D, I was put in a triage room, hooked up to a bunch of monitors, given an IV and given a fancy blood work-up. Then, John and I stayed there, with a TV we couldn't control that was too loud and showing a celebrity gossip marathon on VH-1. A nice lady came in and gave me a an ultrasound, which showed a healthy, vertex baby weighing about 7 lbs 3 oz. At 38 weeks -- two weeks before me due date and four before the baby would be considered postmature, with the possibility of gaining a half pound a week during each of those four weeks. That was the first sort of alarming thing.

Once all the testing came back, it was clear that I did not have preeclampsia, but I did have pregnancy-induced hypertension, which is like pre-preeclampsia. So, I was admitted and the plan was to induce me. But, to prevent me having hard labor during the night (and, I'm sure, to prevent my OB from having to deliver a baby in the middle of the night if it could be avoided), they didn't start the pitocin until around midnight. The good part of this was that I didn't have to stop eating and drinking until the pitocin started, so I got a tasty hospital dinner -- and John ran across the street and got us our mall chinese. All the other laboring women who could smell it and weren't allowed to eat were apparently pretty jealous. The bad part was that it's impossible to sleep when you're being treated in a hospital -- there's the IV, which can be uncomfortable, especially when it's my IV, which had to be changed and there was all kinds of PAIN and multiple hand-sticks before they got an IV to actually work, and when it wasn't working, it would beep every fifteen minutes, just to name one hassle.

Anyway, by noon the next day, I really wasn't having particularly strong contractions, so they broke my water. This is a very weird sensation on its own, and the contractions afterward are REALLY rough. My water was broken at about 1 PM and the baby was born at 6:43, so there were almost seven hours of ow, with the last couple hours being exceptionally difficult. Around four, I was ready to be done and getting pretty whiny (John denies this and says I was remarkably stoic and sensible; he's being nice). Right before the baby was born, his heart rate dropped and there were people standing by to resuscitate; it was also a shift change, so there were just a gillion nurses in there. But the heart rate came right back up. Other concerns were three areas on the back of the head where skin hadn't grown and a skin tag on the right ear. The skin has now grown in and the first hearing screening went well, so there will be follow-up hearing tests, but the bottom line is that we have a beautiful, healthy ...

... baby BOY, Daniel Patrick Bray, born at 6:43 PM on Wednesday, December 3rd, 19 1/2 inches long and weighing 7 lbs 5 oz.

Why I Regard my Social Networking Rant as On-Topic

So, it has occurred to me that my social networking rant just looks like me hating on people who can figure out who they are pretty easily. Here's the thing: they're people I really like and respect and that's part of what makes me really sad and also really angry about the whole thing.

I've been a grad student for sixish years now and am in my fourth year of college-level teaching. This isn't a lot of experience, but it's enough to make me "hireable" when I start looking for a tenure-track job, which suggests that I've been kicking around the system long enough to have learned some stuff.

What I've learned is this: even in the past four years, students' attitudes toward higher education have changed, but even when I was first teaching, the consumer model of higher ed had already started to take root.

I remember my second semester teaching, I forgot to bring stories I'd photocopied for a reading assignment to class, so I asked my students to find time at some point between immediately after class Friday and before class Monday to collect the packet off my office door and do the reading. Monday morning, there were still about twenty packets on my office door. So I did something I almost never do: a book check. I had everyone pull out the reading and then I threw out and marked absent everyone who didn't have it. They were FURIOUS! I had NO RIGHT to mark them absent, even though it said in the syllabus that I would mark absent anyone who was unprepared to participate in class. After all, it was MY FAULT that they couldn't do the reading because I didn't bring the copies to them! It's TOO MUCH to expect them to walk twenty steps across the quad to my office! And who cares about the five people that did the assignment and deserve to have a discussion of it in class without the energy suck from twenty entitlement-vampires. That was when I stopped doing students the courtesy of making copies. If I want them to read something that's not in the anthology, I have it copied by a service and make them overpay to buy their copies, or I put it on reserve at the library and make them copy it their own damn selves. You offer a courtesy, you get walked all over. My preference is to have a happy and courteous clasroom in which people show each other respect and acknowledge the kindnesses they're shown by others. I'm seeing a lot more of that in my current institution than I did in the northeast, but that could also be because I'm now less likely to go out of the way for my students to do something like make photocopies that really, they should be making and paying for, and therefore, they don't get spoiled and expect it of me.

And with that rant out of the way, I can explain the connection between it and the social networking rant, which is this: college students think that because they pay tuition, they own us. It's not just an attitude about buying grades anymore. Students are under the impression that when they pay for an education (and THAT'S what you're paying for, people; whether or not you choose to actually get one is up to you), they're actually buying the instituition at which they're paying tution. If they don't like something about the institution, it must change; they PAYED for it.

I've been affiliated with institutions where this attitude is indulged and students really believe that they should and do have the power to see anyone disciplined (usually with termination of employment) that rubs them the wrong way. This is unacceptable. I think in part because I currently teach at an institution that's INCREDIBLY supportive of its faculty, I'm particularly horrified that so many institutions aren't. I've heard so many stories about students complaining to deans and department chairs and the deans and chairs taking their word as gospel and reaming out faculty members without even confirming what may or may not have happened. It's absurd, and it confirms that all anyone who works at a university and doesn't see the inside of a classroom wants is tuition dollars. Give them their A's and promote them on through. When society crumbles because nobody learned what they were supposed to while doing their degrees and now nobody knows how to do his job, all the university administrators will be on beaches in the carribean. THEY, after all, get paid well.

(Tune in next time for another rant: Why Children Should Never Be Told They're Special!)

Ah, Personal Responsibility

So, here I am in the blogosphere talking about the stupidity of people in the semi-blogosphere (i.e., the world of the Myspace and Facebook note) not understanding that the world wide web is world wide.

Some undergraduate students on the social networking sites are openly glorying in having hounded a faculty member out of their department because they didn't like him. The guy's gone. He's got another job. They're starting a new semester with new faculty. But they can't let it go. At least once a month, there's a new note smearing the poor guy. When it's pointed out to them that anyone can stumble onto and read the notes and that these people could include prospective employers and grad schools, they say stupid shit about freedom of speech and people minding their own business. Sweetie, if I'm thinking about hiring you, YOU are my business, and if I discover that you're a bigoted, libelous whiner, lucky me; I just dodged a bullet. It won't matter to me if I don't know your whole sob story with the person you're publishing libel about; I have a STACK of applications on my desk.

I just wish people would THINK before they click the publish button (and yes, it's called the "publish" button because when you click it, you're sending your thoughts straight to the world). And I wish that people would take some responsibility for the shit with which they befoul the Interweb.

More of the Joys of Gustav

In a moment, I'm going to have to actually start prepping a lesson for Monday because none of the blogs I follow have posted anything new since yesterday and I'm running out of ways to procrastinate. I am, obviously, still enjoying the bountiful A/C and internet access at LSU, and my house (which, for some reason, I called an apartment in the last post) is still without power. According to Entergy's most recent outage map, our neighborhood should have power within the week instead of in 2-3 weeks, though, so that's good. And for some reason, the areas that WILL be without power for up to 3 weeks appear in large part to be affluent housing developments. Not quite sure why this is -- I'd guess low population density, but according to the outage map, their outages are pretty large, so maybe they're not near businesses or essential services that need power, maybe it's assumed they can afford to stay in a hotel for a couple weeks if they really feel the need, or maybe they're just conspicuous consumers whose non-energy-conserving ways are being kept off the grid until things are more stable. I (not-so-secretly) like to think it's that last one (I can't believe it took me so long to realize I'm a socialist).

And speaking of my socialist ways, my sour towels are still sour because The Cyclone Laundry & Internet Cafe on E. Boyd in Baton Rouge is price-gouging. Well, I'm not sure how much you have to jack up your prices in order for it to be officially considered price-gouging, but the prices on all their washers have gone up $0.70 per load since the storm, bringing the price for a standard-size washing machine up to $3.00 per load. As you might have noticed, the prices were already pretty high -- $2.30 - $6.30 per wash load depending on the capacity of the machine -- which presumably pays for amenities like free wireless internet, A/C, and coffee. John and I weren't thrilled by that, but we were willing to put up with it because, well, we needed to do our laundry SOMEWHERE, and it's nice to be able to do it in air conditioning and check your e-mail while you're doing it. But now, I don't know if I can go back, I'm so pissed about the opportunistic price hike. Of course, EVERY machine in the place was full -- which I've never seen before, even on a Saturday morning -- but with a completely different cilentele than we usually see. It appeared to be mostly affluent white people whose power is out so they can't use the washing machines they've bought and paid for in their homes. They can, of course, afford the price hikes, and may not even know the hikes have happened since they're not laundramat people, but they're still being taken advantage of, which isn't cool. And more upsetting to me, my patronage has been thrown over for that of a better class of customer. I hope Cyclone is okay with that decision when the rich folks get their power back and I've found somewhere else (dear God, PLEASE let it be my house!) to do my laundry.

Hurricane Gustav and Other Natural Disasters

So, Hurricane Gustave hit Baton Rouge Monday (and Tuesday and Wednesday). Entergy says that if all goes well, we SHOULD have our power back by SEPTEMBER 24TH! That's right, twenty-three days after the storm hit. In the meantime, the president was here (did he bring a saw? of course not!) and we've been declared a disaster area. Why? Because THE EYE OF A CATEGORY 2 HURRICANE PASSED DIRECTLY OVER THE STATE CAPITAL OF LOUISIANA LEAVING A MILLION AND A HALF PEOPLE WITHOUT POWER. Is this common knowledge? No, because it didn't happen to New Orleans, so the national news has decided it didn't happen at all.

We've been blessed in many ways. The death toll for Katrina numbered in the thousands (although counts and definitions of "hurricane-related" vary so the number is somewhere between 1,500 and 4,100); the last state-wide casualty number I heard for Gustav was 10. We were better prepared in a lot of ways, and people took the storm very seriously. (Except for the 1 of those 10 people whose hurricane-related death consisted of driving around drunk at 10 in the morning on Monday, running off the road, and hitting something (I saw this covered on the TV news and can now find no link to the story online -- even on the web site of the network where I saw the story).) John and I have been personally blessed in that while are yard is a pretty scary place, no trees fell on our house and in that we have a gas hot water heater so that although it's hot and we're living on deviled ham, we can SHOWER! Also, as of last (Thursday) evening, we can finally get off of our street safely to get access to hot food, groceries, and our bank. We can also get to John's office on the LSU campus, which has POWER -- as in A/C, a microwave, and even internet access! Our laundramat even has power, so we can wash our (VERY sour) towels tomorrow!

But I'll still be going home every night to my electricity-free apartment, where it's SUPERFUN to be 5 1/2 months pregnant and not have A/C!

Oh, and in other news, I fell in the bathtub yesterday. I am a loser whose pregnant body has no center of balance. Oye, my back hurts!

On Party Membership

So, John and I re-registered to vote in Baton Rouge today so that we wouldn't have to truck to Lafayette early in the morning on Election Day. Color us organized.

We also both took the opportunity to do something that I probably ought to have done before the first of December, 2004. We changed our party affiliation from "Democrat" to the party we actually support: the Party for Socialism and Liberation. (Note the shiny button below my archives links.)

Most people seem to regard our having done this -- and the paperwork is still in the MAIL, people! -- as a sign that we are lazy democrats who need our faith in the party revived. We are NOT democrats. I don't think we ever were. I've occasionally thought I might be a libertarian, but the sad truth of the matter is that I never was. We ARE socialists. We belive in universal health care, the universal right to a job that pays a living wage and is your key to services unless you are for whatever reason physically unable to work. I believe in twoish years of conscription upon reaching the age of majority (not sure John follows me down this road). We believe in living in a country that puts back into people what they put into it -- in terms of sweat equity. None of this "I generate billions of dollars in the oil business so let's just forget about those pesky taxes"; what's the average income tax of the people who work offshore on the billionaire's rigs? And what are their out-of-pocket health care costs compared to those of the billionaire?

Okay, that's a semi-tangent. The point I'm trying to make is that we've thought about this, we know what we're doing and why we're doing it, and it's insulting and a poor reflection on Democrats in general that when we talk about it, Democrats tend to talk to us like assholes talk to children trying to understand concepts that are too sophisticated for them. We don't need what John calls a "come to Jesus" talk. We've been cowed into voting Democrat before. We both voted for Kerry in 2004 because we were promised that if we did, W would lose. We were both so embarassed to have done it that we lied about it, and of course, it didn't actually work. Why would we do it again? Why would anyone vote for a candidate they don't wholeheartedly believe in when there are so VERY many to choose from?

The "lesser of two evils" argument is an insidious falsehood for two reasons. First, people trying to galvanize all the liberals (or all the conservatives although I don't think this has happened in recent memory) to vote AGAINST the lesser of two evils instead of FOR a solid candidate never succeed. Second, there are WAY more than two candidates to choose from in ANY major election in America and the only reason pepole don't understand this is that the "lesser of two evils" assholes are trying to keep it quiet. Only thirty-two of our forty-three presidents have been members of the United States Democrat or United States Republican parties. Of the remaining eleven, four were members of the Democrat-Republican party, four were Whigs, and one was a member of the Federalist party. George Washington had NO PARTY AFFILIATION. And one of the Whigs, John Tyler, was expelled from his party after a few months in office. Just because we've allowed our electoral process to stagnate into the bloated lump of two-virtually-indistinguishable-party evil that it is today doesn't mean it has to stay that way.

So, I quit. I'm not voting for any presidential candidate I don't actually want to see in the White House ever again. I think it's a good idea for everyone else to vote like this, too.