Check check checking in...

I only have a minute. I am terrifyingly behind at work and trying to get everything approved before next Wednesday. I wanted to say that everyone at my house is feeling better; well, not the cat. He is still hot, fat, and tired. Brandon and I are feeling better in the head and heart, if I may dare speak for him. It was a dark week or so; I laid out of work playing the Sims, watching Intervention, and drinking rum. Oh yes, and feeling very sorry for myself.

However, the clouds are lifting because life has to go on, no matter what. You have to be somewhat philosophical about these things, and tell yourself that although you were happy and excited, it wasn't the right time. And the right time will come, right? As the Avett Brothers said, "To this awful news, try not to hold on / The day will come, the sun will rise, and we'll be fine."



Anyway, I also wanted to try and express to everyone some kind of thanks and gratitude for the overwhelming outpouring of love and affection we received from everybody. It's the terrible times that make you realize what a community is, how much care and concern means, and how important it is to be loved. People brought us booze and pie and hugs and showed us how sad they were for us in so many different ways. Thanks to all of y'all. You have no idea how much it meant, really & truly, all of the messages and comments and everything else.

however...

Inevitably there will be points in which humor arises from sadness. It was 95 degrees outside, and both my husband and I have been too stubborn up to this point to have retrieved the window unit AC from the basement. The cats lie around the house, desperate and dramatic.

One might say, "Spread out like dinner on the grounds."

Please do not call the ASPCA. I know that he is fat. I do not fill his bowl to the brim every day, we dole out carefully measured scoops. He just refuses to run and play, no matter the temperature.

Addendum: Air conditioner was set up, screwed in, plugged up today. Not the most efficient machine in the world, but I feel a little bit less like I'm going to die now. Cat continues to languish in drama.

sadness so great it has created stanzas (apparently)

disclaimer for disclaimer's sake... I was more than halfway drunk when I wrote this thursday night. I was all the way there, although I considerately washed my broken-out face and brushed my teeth before I went to bed. also, I never ever EVER write poetry. I don't even like poetry very much. I like about 2 poems a year, and I usually hear them on the Writer's Almanac.

in other words... you don't have to read this. It might be embarrassing. BUT I reckon it's authentic so I'm keeping it, goddammit.

halfway drunken thoughts composed at 9:38 pm when the husband's taken to bed (who's to blame him) and you're upset about something that seems to have no end...

shut the fuck up, bloggers
shut up about your ranch
shut up about your fresh fruit granita
and homesewn camisole panty duo
shut up about your trip to london... it's so unauthentic. why don't you go somewhere REAL, like India or Thailand or motherfucking Turkey, even?
shut the fuck up.

shut up about your baby
he's very cute i'm sure
but not everybody wants to hear about it right now
in a house
where it's hot
and the cats are all there is, anymore,
and they're itching and miserable from the greasy flea medicine they've been dosed with
that you've begged them not to lick off each other

why does sadness wake you up
shake you sober
make you get drunk
and then realize that you'll soon be back asleep
with everything still bullshit

shut up about healthcare
and guns
and thugs
and everything you have pretentious ideas about,
in memphis, tn, in your office, at 3 in the afternoon,
but can't actually fathom

i don't want to see the pictures of your trip to
arizona
the skate park
texarkana
gulf shores even (although I laugh about it, and avoid it myself)

this bleeping digital vessel is nothing
but somehow all i have
at 9:43
when i already finished my book today
and nothing waits but sleep and then
wakefulness
too early
too hot
too restless
too everything

You have to make decisions when you have a blog. You have to decide how much of yourself you want to expose, and how much you want to keep quiet and hidden. How personal you want things to get. Generally, "in real life," I am someone who is pretty frank with most personal things. But in the blogosphere, it can be different. If my husband and I are fighting, I don't post about that, probably mostly because I am kind of gross and crazy, and I want people to think our relationship is nearly perfect. If I am a little depressed, I don't really post, because have you ever read blogs by people who are depressed a lot, or only write when they are down? It's really boring. And a downer.

Inevitably, however, there come the things that you don't know how to say, but feel like you must anyway. Things like this: We went to the midwife on Tuesday, 6/16. The midwife couldn't find the heartbeat of the baby with the doppler. We decided to go to the ultrasound clinic. At the ultrasound clinic we found out that although I was 12 weeks pregnant, the baby had stopped growing at 8 weeks. We aren't pregnant anymore. We are just waiting for the inevitable to happen. The inevitable being the actual physical miscarriage.

This happens a lot, but, you know, it doesn't get talked about very much, unless you are involved in certain internet communities in which women congregate to spill their guts about their experiences with miscarriage, for the sake of catharsis, and sharing, and building a network of women who know exactly what it feels like and find commisseration helpful.

Does this seem very unemotional? I feel odd. We have both gone back and forth between feeling a lot and being very numb. It is hard to lose something you hardly had to begin with; it's easy to keep making yourself remember what you're not going to be experiencing. (This time around, anyway). In grief, I find that sometimes I seem to tend towards... emotionally torturing myself, a bit. Maybe that is an extreme characterization. After my father died, I kept reminding myself of all the weekends I had spent away from home, away from his sickness, getting drunk with my friends, wasting time satisfying myself, trying to have a good time while he was sick and suffering. The same thing happened Tuesday, back at the house that the midwives are using as their office; when we returned, there was a pregnant woman there with her five children, one of which was a baby girl who was maybe a year old. I kept looking at her little arms and hands, and reminding myself that it will be a long time before I have a baby to call me mama, and reach for me, and all that. It's pretty fucked, I guess. It is like sprinkling salt into a wound; when I'm upset I feel like I should make myself feel really really upset, or I'm not having an "authentic experience." Then when it starts it's gets out of control until I'm nearly sick with it.

So that's what happened to me on Tuesday. And I'm not pregnant anymore. And it feels pretty shitty.

A debate which will rage for months.

I'm making y'all crazy with my prolific-ness, ain't I? You can't believe it. This is a microblog.

We have been talking about baby names, a lot, of course. For some reason we talk about girls' names more than boys' names... it's like we think we are having a girl although there is no kind of evidence to back that up. Also, we don't plan on finding out the sex of the baby before it is born, so we're liable to go through this entire pregnancy with the idea at the back of our minds that we're having a girl, only to have it come out a boy. I don't know why I feel like it's a girl so much; maybe I just can't imagine that a penis growing inside me? Now that I bring it up... it is kind of odd.

That is not the point. The point is that Mr. Dill and I have a major difference in tastes as far as girls' names go. I tend towards more old-fashioned names, or nature-y names. I like flower names; I really like the name "Wren," but he is less than enthusiastic (he says it has something to do with the way my country-ass pronounces it). He likes spunky, boyish names; he has wanted a daughter named "Charlie" for as long as I can remember.

So we'll be having conversations about baby names; I'll sit with the laptop and browse baby name websites, and throw ideas that I like at him, and he'll do the same. Our exchanges often sound like this:

A: "What about Pearl? I kind of like it."
B: (Looking at me aghast) "Pearl is an old woman's name, Amanda."

B: "Roxanna, that's a good name. Roxanna."
A: (Studying his profile intently, while he plays a flash game) "Are you being serious?"
B: "Yeah, Roxanna. What do you think?"
A: "Brandon... Roxanna is a whore's name. We cannot give our daughter a whore's name."

Sometimes a name is declared both old and whorish.

I've just seen a face

I hope that you are ready for a mushy love post. Consider yourself warned.

Sunday was our first wedding anniversary. We spent most of the day at the same place where we were married, my mom's house. You know that already from yesterday's boring post. When I woke up Sunday morning, I told Brandon happy anniversary, and remarked that a year ago I had awoken at around 5:00 AM, completely filled with a superhuman energy that propelled me out into the yard, where I connected a complex series of extension cords that lit the orchard with pretty white lights; then I made and remade some flower arrangements, and spent most of the rest of the day paralyzed in the house because of a carefully arranged hairstyle that, despite a heavy shellac of hairspray, kept me immobilized with the fear that it could be destroyed.

I decided to post these pictures on this mushy entry, rather than any wedding pictures. These are pictures that were taken the day after our first date... so this is July 16, 2006. B had asked me out on a date a few weeks before but we weren't able to get together sooner because of his crazy work schedule. I was living at home with my parents and went to Nashville that weekend, stayed with Wendy and Mark in preparation for hanging out with Brandon. We hung out for the first time in Murfreesboro, in the hovel that B was living in, a terribly hot apartment on the second story of an old house on College St. He told me that he didn't have an air conditioner, little did I know that in fact, the AC unit was in the closet because he was determined not to use it that summer. This was a harbinger of B's extreme attitudes regarding heating and cooling that make my life hot in the summer, cold in the winter to this day.

We (maybe it's just me) look rough as fuck in these pictures because we were up all night the night before, and by the time we were ready to go to sleep, it was about 170 degrees in the hovel. We laid on the floor, too hot to touch one another, and watched Baraka, which was really awesome right up to the point where they chopped all the beaks off the baby chickens. Have you ever seen this film? My favorite part is the monkey in the hot springs, in the snowy mountains. You can see that at around 2:00, here, and I promise, you won't see any debeaked chicks.

God, look at my thigh. I swear to God my thigh was only that skinny for 18 hours, a gift from the Lord in order that the match of Amanda + Brandon could be made. That was the skinniest time of my life, probably due to all the depression and obsession and many nights of "drinking my dinner." I know that liquor is high in calories but when it's all you're consuming, eventually it makes you thin. I think.

I never really believed in soulmates before I met B. I mean, how can you possibly pronounce that in all the zillions of people in all the world, there is one person out there who is your perfect match? I still think this is bullshit. However... I definitely believe that there was a certain set of situations that occurred at the right time for both of us that set our relationship in motion. And, as cheesy as it sounds, I have to call it fate.

The other day I was writing an email to someone that I don't see or communicate with that often, and he had made a compliment to me about our relationship. In response, I told him that it wasn't always easy, but it is always worth it. I know that being together has changed the both of us in so many ways, the way we see ourselves, the way we see the world, and the way we see ourselves living the rest of our lives. We're at this stage of life in which the decisions we make are taking have more and more weight -- having a kid, deciding where we want to settle, and how we want to do it -- and it's really daunting sometimes, to have these decisions to make. But I try not to worry about it because you know, as long as we're together, we can make it all work out. That much has to be true.

"I give you my love, more precious than money
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?"

That's from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road, and we used it as our vows.

You don't move like no virgin.

We went to church with my mom this weekend, the church that I grew up going to. {Listen, are you ever typing a sentence and see that it is going to end in a preposition, try to stop the freight train explosion of a sentence ended in a preposition, but all the replacements you can come up with ALSO end in prepositions? God I hate that.}

Even though my feelings about organized religion, Christianity in particular, range from ambivalence to fits of violent annoyance, I really do love most of the people who go to church there. It is a tiny church in a white wooden building 15 minutes down the road from where my mom lives. My dad and paternal grandparents are buried there; I have known most of the people who go there since I was an itty bitty thing, and I have to say that a few of them really exemplify that Christians can be really good people who don't use their faith as an excuse for intolerance.

I haven't been to church with her in months because they have a new preacher who literally makes my skin crawl. He just makes me so so uncomfortable, and I find so many things about his personality completely objectionable. Now, for 15 years or so, they had a great preacher down there. He was a professor at a Methodist university in Jackson, and he was very kind and tolerant, obsessed with Apple computer products, and really talked more like a teacher, than a preacher. Not so with this new guy. I could make some kind of list of the things I don't like about him, but honestly a) I have to leave work in 15 minutes and b) the list would sound vague and petty because I have tried to block out any memories I created of him during his last 40 minute sermon. He says the word "God" just like Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire. GAHWD. I fucking love that movie.


"Devil, you gonna git a black eye today!"
"If I'm going to hell, I'm going there playing the piana."

In a week I will have heard the tiny whooshing heartbeat of my unborn child. Weird! Awesome! I. Cannot. Wait.

I'm yawning and snacking at the same time.

I have been pretty terrible at this as of late, huh? I will tell you something I hate more than anything, and that is the bullet list blog. You know, a list of this and that that has not been formatted into paragraphs? Disgusting. But I feel as though I need to do a list like that, because I have a lot to report.

3. We went to New Orleans for Memorial Day weekend. I didn't drink a drop (more on that later). There were a lot of really drunk people there, and not being one of them was... odd. I am pretty positive it saved us a pile of cash, the lack of bar hopping. All the root beer barrels we had at the Green Parrot in Key West really broke the bank on that trip. We did eat a lot, because we're gluttons from hell. We ate things like this, that made us very full and satisfied, while at the same time disgusted with ourselves.


Also, we met up with Megan and Shane, who are Memphis-Americans (I have robbed that term from Toby, by the way) that we have never met in Memphis; we rode the streetcar a lot, I lost $5 in a slot machine, Brandon found out too late that he could not order a sandwich at the Cafe Du Monde, we saw some nice jazz at the Rock and Bowl, went for walks in the Garden District and Audobon Park, and, yes, laid up in the hotel room watching cable, drinking gin (B) and napping (me).

2. We had a pretty fine potluck in which Brandon took some of the finest party pics I have seen in quite some time. The theme was "Summertime" and the food was very nice and Liz came, which made me very very happy!

1. Ok, on with the show. The big news: We are going to have a little baby Dilbro at the end of the year! Yep, that is right, we decided to make the big leap into parenthood. I think turning 28 made the tick tock of my clock go bang bang bang and I decided it was time to shit or get off the pot. We made the baby in the normal way, as in we took off our pants and looked each other in the eyes tenderly. I have to say that sex without a net for me was pretty mystical and now feels even moreso since I have the knowledge that everything went to work as it was intended and we created a teeny spark of mushy human life that is growing bigger everyday. According to Babycenter.com, it's now the size of a kumquat, which looks like this:

Crazy shit, huh? We are terribly excited and I am ready to get a nice round belly. I am 10 weeks along as of this weekend and I am already ready to meet this weird, tall person. However, I can wait, and in the meantime I am giving the little booger lots of water, veggies, cookies, fried chicken, yogurt, tofu, cheese, cereal, and fish oil capsules, which are apparently very good for its brain. Although my boobs are a size bigger and I have to take a nap 5 days a week when I get home, the whole thing is still just *brimming* with unreality, and in two weeks I will be very glad when we return to the midwife and get to hear the heartbeat for the first time.

Ok, now I have to do an interview and have a snack. I'm fucking starving.