Um, yeah.

So Philip called me night before last to say that Corinna is pregnant! She's due in November. This announcement is simultaneously fantastic and terrifying. I'm really happy for them, and Corinna's been wanting a baby for a long time now. It's just the way that it affects me that's scary.

From the time I was a little girl, I've been wanting to be a mom. When other kids were thinking about potential careers, I was thinking more about my future children. I have never wondered about whether I wanted to have kids; I've always wanted them. So now I'm in this place in my life (married, financially stable, house, emotionally mature [more or less]) where I really am ready for babies.

But I have always kind of resisted change. Change is so scary for me. I guess it is for lots of people. But I keep thinking about the things I won't be able to do after we have kids. We won't be making as much money, so I won't be able to buy everything I want or to take trips. I won't have the time to devote to my hobbies. I won't be able to lounge around on Saturday morning or crash in front of the TV after work. I'll have to act like a grown up and keep my house clean and eat actual balanced meals. Big changes, in other words.

So I keep putting it off. I mean, I've only been married for nine months, but mentally, I keep moving the kid date out into the future. I have things I want to do: build a deck, pay off some debt, pave our driveway, go to Egypt, write a book, etc. Yet, when I look at any of these items, or even all of them together, would I trade having children for them? Of course not. I was born to be a mother. It's my calling.

On the other hand, do I have the patience? I mean, I freak out at the dog sometimes. Granted, it's when she comes up all affectionate and panting with cat litter on her muzzle and shit breath. Or it's when she stops and looks at me and doesn't come when I call her. But am I too harsh? Would I be that way with kids? I am very strict with the dog. I probably don't play with her often enough. I don't want to be that kind of mom. Of course, kids don't eat cat shit, do they?

I also feel that the longer I wait, the more likely it is that I won't be able to have children at all. This may not be a super rational belief. It's just that I'm 28 now. I want at least two children, and I'd really like to space them about three and a half years apart. And I might even want three kids (though Magnus does not seem keen on this idea). So the clock is ticking. Actually, it's more like that annoying alarm sound that makes your heart beat a little faster.

And I want my kids to play with Philip's kids. I really, really want that.

So what is the answer? I guess it's painfully obvious, really. Stop putting it off. Have kids soon.

It makes sense too. We make sacrifices for the people we love. That's part of loving someone sometimes. And I love my future children more than almost anything. I haven't even met them yet, but I can almost feel what it's like to hold them. And the sacrifices will begin before they are even born. But the sacrifices are small really, aren't they? Who needs a paved driveway when you can actually meet these people you've been waiting your whole life to love?

Wow – this is going to be really disjointed.  I probably shouldn't even write anything today, but I have to do something to stay awake.  I slept badly Sunday night, and then I slept really badly last night.  So now I'm just trying to make it through the day.

I am officially obsessed with Grey's Anatomy.  I'm on my third viewing of Season 1, which I borrowed from Rae.  It's just so cool.  The characters are great, and there isn't too much "medical drama" to it.  Like Rae told me when she talked me into watching it, it's more like a romantic comedy.  Actually, it's more like crack.  I think Patrick Dempsey's character is my new Colin Firth.  The man is not only very attractive, but he has that eye thing that Colin has.  Smoldering.  It's maybe not quite the same way that Colin does it, but you definitely get the feeling of passion burning beneath a calm exterior.  Somehow, there is nothing as hot and addictive as that.  The other characters and the story are awesome as well.  So yeah.  If you don't watch it, well, you should.

I have another vague idea for my novel.  I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother and the affect her aging has had on me.  She used to be someone I would talk to all the time.  When other teenagers were out doing teenager things, I was sitting in my grandmother's living room collecting stories about our family history or arguing politics.  Ahme was a formidable adversary when it came to debates.  She was a wealth of information when it came to "the olden days."  She was a valuable source of sound advice.  She was really not only a grandmother to me, but a friend too.  So it is torture to me to watch her losing her mental abilities.  Actually, the real torture is to know that she knows that she's not as sharp as she used to be.  I call her and visit her out of duty now, not out of a desire to see her and talk to her.  It hurts me.  I'm thinking that this change and this relationship could figure well into a novel.  I'm not the only person to experience this, though I imagine most people experience it with parents, rather than grandparents.  But I think those things that resonate with everyone are the things that make a novel popular (and publishable).  So that's a possibility.

In other news, Rae and Gus got engaged!  It's very exciting news.  I'm excited to start planning their wedding, since I so miss planning my own.

I was having this great email conversation with Mel about being INFPs and how that affect the expression of affection, and I thought I would share my thoughts on here as well.  I know I talk about Myers-Briggs all the time, but really, I feel it is such an important tool for understanding myself and other people.

I feel uncomfortable saying that I love people.  I don't mean that it's hard in those established ways (like at the end of a phone call); I mean I find it very difficult to express it when it is with sincerity (not that it is insincere after a phone call, but that's a whole other topic).  I also feel an aversion to hugging people, even people I really care about.  Don't even get me started on hugging people I hardly know!  <shudder>  I wonder if this is something inherent to being an INFP or if this is just something that is part of being me. 

Another interesting thing about being an INFP is that most of them feel like they were never accepted in their family of origin.  It's not that way at all for me; I feel that that was the only place I was accepted when I was growing up.  I think that's a huge part of why it was so hard for me to leave home.  I think the only person in my high school that really knew me was Philip.  College (aside from NMC) was the same way.  I could interact and be funny and entertaining (at best), but I was just fundamentally different than everyone else I met.  That meant that home took on a meaning for me that it doesn't have for other people.  Anyway….

So that got me to thinking about my role in my family growing up.  I felt that I was the one (in contrast to Rachel, mostly) who had to be logical and unreactive.  I had to be good in a crisis, and I had to be able to rapidly understand and assimilate new information without reacting emotionally (part of being good in a crisis, I guess).  That is in direct contrast with much of what it is to be an INFP, so I wonder if my difficulty hugging people or expressing emotion is related to my perceived need to be emotionally stable. 

On the other hand, it is more likely just part of my general social aversion, like the need to wait until everyone has left the ladies room before exiting the stall.  Hmm.

So the reason I haven't been posting much lately is that I've been waiting for a deep thought.  It hasn't come.    So…I'm going to write anyway.

We are kicking butt on doing things to the house.  Current financial situation has been amazingly good, so we are putting a lot into the house.  We bought a new leather chair at Hom Furniture, and that will be delivered June 20.  We also got a new coffee table at Ikea.  That's the fourth item from the Markor series in our living room!  And we finally got a new mattress, which is way cool.

I also get new kitchen counters, sink, and faucet.  I'm going with green laminate for the counters, a white cast iron sink, and a copper or bronze faucet.  Should be cool.  I'm very excited!

News other than our rampant consumerism?  Um.  We had Magnus's parents visiting last weekend, which was nice.  Going to visit my grandma in Iowa on Saturday.

Hard to believe it's only 12:30.  How sad is that?  Still another 3.5 hours left…. 

Sorry this entry sucks.  I promise to do a better one soon.

Okay, so yesterday, Magnus (and his entire team) got this message from a co-worker:

“I just wanted to say to everyone, ‘Have a wonderful Resurrection weekend and Sunday.’  If you will be in town this weekend, I’d like to extend an invite to all to visit my church, Moving On Up Church, in Brooklyn Center on Sunday morning at 10:30am.  After all, He died for all and was resurrected for all who believed in Him to have life and be able to live without fear of death:  He was/is our new testament Passover and is ever interceding for us.”

Dude follows with this PS:  “Celebrate his resurrection at some church, after all – none of us woke ourselves up this morning and it wasn’t Mother Nature or the Tooth Fairy.”

I’m sorry, but it was my freaking alarm clock that woke me up this morning!  So I could come to work!  Work!  Where people aren’t supposed to impose their religious beliefs on others!

Magnus sent that to me because he knew that it would infuriate me.  He said it was because I get pissed off at Christians, but this isn’t the case at all.  I just believe that one’s religious beliefs are private and that everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.  I would certainly never try to persuade a Christian person that my beliefs are superior to theirs.  How would I know?  But part of Christianity (for some people) is the concept of witnessing, converting people to that way of thinking. 

This led to a discussion that Magnus and I had about morality.  We don’t intend to raise our children in a church.  This caused him to ask an interesting question:  how do we instill proper morals in our children?  It shocked me to hear this.  It’s a completely foreign notion to me that he would have gotten his morals from outside his family!  People talk about the church and morality, but really, what does that mean? 

The best writers are taught to “show, don’t tell.”  I think the same is true with morals.  Demonstration of proper behavior and a sense for right and wrong is really far more powerful (I would think) than hearing about it from a pulpit.  So where else would you learn these things but in your own family?  Even if you’re hearing about it in church, you’re probably not really learning it there.  You’re learning it at home when you act and see the response to your actions.

So – where did you get your morality?  What are you doing for Easter?

So there is a law, designed orginally to protect contract workers, that requires anyone who works a contract position to take two months off every two years.  I am approaching the two-year mark here at my current job (October), and they are trying to get around this.  They think it is unlikely they will be able to avoid it, though. 

Anyway, we don't need the money to survive.  It would make things a bit tight for a while, but we could pay all our bills and still have enough to do some fun stuff.  It would be an inconvenience but not a huge problem, basically.

So anyway, I've been thinking about it.  It comes at a lame time.  It's not in the summer when I could get out and enjoy the weather (as if I really would).  It's not at Christmas when I could take time off to work on gifts and be in Michigan.  It's at that cold, sad time of the fall when everything is brown and wet.  Of course, it does include my birthday.

Well, I had an idea about it.  I am thinking about spending the time writing a novel.  It's perfect for that really.  There is nothing to distract me.  I won't have to deal with the drain of work.  I can put all my energy into writing.  I won't have children yet.  Magnus had a good point too.  He said that I could use it as a time to really try writing, to know for sure (more or less) whether I really could be a great writer.

Imagine if I could, though.  I would have a vocation I really loved.  It would be perfect for me.  I'm trying not to get my hopes up, though.  It has always been a challenge for me to sustain a story.  I can write great characters, but I have a very hard time with plot.  Anyone have any suggestions?

So Paris was wonderful.  The time with my mom was really great, and we saw some fabulous things.  I'll mention the highlights below.

Saint Chapelle was a spectacular sight.  It is a chapel that is built almost entirely of stained glass.  The windows extend to the ceiling, everything glows with this blue-tinged light.  During the occupation of France in WWII, the stained glass windows were removed and hidden in private homes for protection.  After the war, it was reassembled.

Another cool thing we saw was Versailles.  It was the royal residence during the reigns of Louis the XV and Louis the XVI (who was eventually subjected to the guillotine).  The opulance was really amazing.  There was a room for the dogs.  The dog room had a parquet floor, gilt carvings on the walls, a painted ceilings, and several painting featuring dogs.  That's just a small example of the excess.  It was beautiful, though.  Overwhelming, really.

After Versailles, we went to the Musee Marmatton (sp?), which is a museum in an old mansion.  It is mostly dedicated to the works of Monet, some of which are spectacularly beautiful.  I recommend it to anyone visiting Paris.  It was small enough that it was not overwhelming, and we were able to escape before museum fatigue set in.

This was not so with the Louvre, as anyone would expect.  We made a beeline for the Mona Lisa (which was pretty underwhelming) and then spent a great deal of time looking at the Egyptian Antiquities section.  That was unbelievable.  Napolean's soldiers brought back boatloads of artifacts when they invaded Egypt, and they now constitute the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside of Cairo.  They had entire columns from temples, and they even had an entire room with hieroglyphs.  It was almost like actually being there, which was spectacular.  Sad, in a way, though as well.

We also saw Notre Dame, of course, which I really enjoyed after seeing all the ruins of gothic architecture in Scotland and Ireland.  It was just amazing to think what those places would have been, had they remained intact. 

On our last night, we were supposed to go to the ballet.  My mom had bought tickets months in advance because the Opera Garnier (where the ballet was to be held) had been one of her favorite things when she lived in Paris.  It has a ceiling by Chagall, and she really wanted us to see it together.  On Thursday night, we got all dressed up and went to the Opera Garnier.  Mom handed them the tickets, and they said that the tickets were for the wrong night.  They were for Tuesday night instead.  Mom was so disappointed!  She started to cry.  I spoke to a guy who could speak English and asked if they had any seats left for that night.  He said they did not.  So we went to a cafe for a drink.  I briefly had the horror of imagining Mom getting completely drunk and forgetting all her French (leaving it up to me to get us home and communicate to a cab driver).  However, as we sat there at the cafe, she had the idea of going up in the Eiffel Tower.  We had planned only to drive by, but we decided that night to go up.  We took the Metro there and waited in the line for a long time.  Every hour, the whole tower would come to life in a glitter of randomly illuminated lights!  I count it among some of the prettiest things I have ever seen.  We took the elevator all the way to the top and looked out across the city.  We could see the Seine winding its way through the lights, like a black ribbon.  So the evening ended up being perfect, really.  I would rather have seen that than a topless (yes, really) modern ballet.  When we got home, we also found out that the ballet had been cancelled anyway due to the riots, so it all worked out perfectly in the end.

The last thing we did in Paris was on Friday morning before we left.  We went to the Cluny Museum, which is devoted to the middle ages.  It had lots of fascinating artifacts and ancient stained glass.  So many things were just beautifully preserved.  The best things there, though, were the famous tapestries, "The Lady and the Unicorn."  Mom and I had both read the Tracy Chevalier novel about them a few years ago, but they were even more amazing in person.  They were so full of complex allegory and intricate detail that you could look at them for hours without getting tired of it.  Another interesting thing about them is that they were restored with the wool dyed with chemical dyes.  The new parts (chemical dyes) actually faded rather quickly, leaving the original parts to stand out in all their bright, incredible beauty.

It was a great trip.  The best part, though, was just getting to spend the time with my mom.  We got along perfectly, and we both had a wonderful time.