this will not stand ... man
Sunday, December 03, 2006
After a couple of vomit-free days, yesterday was a puke-o-rama, culminating in the pitiable spectacle of me drooling down the side of our battered (and now somewhat corroded) station wagon in the Countdown carpark – difficult to do while glancing nervously over one shoulder to make sure security guards aren't bearing down on you to arrest you for public drunkenness.
As of tomorrow I am fifteen weeks gone – as such, well into the second trimester and this pesky foetus needs to take the hint and stop making me sick already: I have grown him/her/it a placenta, what more does it want? Perhaps some sort of motivational sign is in order: Vomit-Free For [X] Days or similar. I could have it printed on a T-shirt, with velcro-on numbers.
We have a saying in this household: 'Don't piss off the pregnant.' (OK, not so much a saying as an edict.) Number one surefire way of accomplishing this: refraining from assuring me that throwing up for two months is 'a good sign', to which I can only reply, a good sign of what, exactly? That I have a heroic, not to mention hair-trigger, gag reflex? Useful, I'll grant you, when walking open-mouthed through areas densely populated with flying insects: less so when trying to maintain oral hygiene? Or indeed, perhaps it signals a bumper year for toothpaste manufacturers as I vainly attempt to prevent what's left of my tooth enamel from disappearing down the drain? This whole 'your suffering is a good thing' attitude is what I call vicarious forbearance – in other words, people being all 'up with your chinny-chin-chin' on your behalf because they don't think you are doing it properly, or enough. Smug bastards.
Watched The Big Lebowksi again the other night – on previous viewings I hadn't appreciated the extent to which it riffs on The Big Sleep: not only the crippled father but the two women – Julianne Moore as Maud Lebowski the older sister played by Katherine Hepburn rather than Lauren Bacall; the younger sister of Chandler's version becoming in the Coen's version Lebowski's trophy wife; drug-addled and blithely entangled with pornographers. And the hopeless, inarticulate, goofy Dude as the absolute anti-Philip Marlowe. I also love the fun the Coens had casting some of their usual suspects against type: Steve Buscemi the dopey bowling whizz who never gets to finish a sentence; John Turturro the creepy Banderas-wannabe, beneath the contempt of even the self-righteous Walter/John Goodman ('eight-year-olds, Dude') Cracking stuff. Plus it took my mind off vomiting for 117 blissful minutes.
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