14 Weeks

I had another appointment with my doctor today (Wednesday) and I decided that my husband was going to go with me this time because it would be our first time hearing the baby's heartbeat. This whole experience is still unreal to me; I feel like crap alot, and I happen to be one of the unlucky ones whose asthma gets worse throughout the pregnancy, but this is just something that I...well, I can't really describe how I feel about this. Even though I don't seem like it, I actually am really happy that I'm finally going to be a mother, but this also scares the crap out of me! I'm not sure I'm ready for this. Am I going to be a good mother? How will I handle things when he or she gets sick? I'm an emetophobe, so I'm probably going to need some help in conquering this problem or I'll be a complete mess the first time the child spits up. How will I be able to raise a child and go to school? Funny, that's the one thing I'm not too worried about. I know that I'll just go and do what needs to be done and not let anything get in the way. It also helps that I got into a department that has a number of grad students who are also parents, some who are even single parents (of whom I will be in awe), so I don't feel as if I'm not the only person who is crazy/stupid enough to do this.

One of the things that is going to help is that someone will always be home. I will work and take classes in the daytime, and my husband works nights. I'm not a person who gets a lot of sleep (allowing me to study and attend to the baby at night), although this pregnancy has changed that. I'm always tired; that should've been my first sign back in December, but I was just of the opinion that I wasn't pregnant and that I was just skipping again. I don't like being tired all the time. As it is, I need to go to bed, but I've still got to get some work in on my group's grant proposal and finish a book for class [Fat chance of that happening]. Dishes need to be done, I need to make a lunch...and my brain is shutting down.

I'll be honest; this whole thing is terrifying to me. While my husband is happily telling all and sundry about the baby, I'm developing anxiety and feeling a little alone. I am going to stop writing because I'm getting too tired to think straight.

I can't believe I heard the heartbeat today. That was something special.

2008: A Year I'll Never Forget

I've been offline since my grandmother's passing last month, and a lot has happened in the interim. As this has already turned out to be a banner year for me, I'm going to give you (read: the one or two people who might still read this) a breakdown of what's going on.

This is the year I am turning 30, meaning that I will have to change all of my blogs to stop saying that I'm in my late 20s, but it also means that I've got to hit my watershed year with style.

So far:
- My grandmother died unexpectedly on January 6th within hours of being admitted to the hospital.
- I found out that I was pregnant six days later. My grandmother really wanted to be a great-grandmother, so I had some mixed feelings about the pregnancy.
- I was informed by my professor that I was accepted into the Comparative Studies program for graduate school. I'm "auditing" the class and he told me "congratulations" as I entered the room. I said, with the dumbest look on my face, "for what?" and almost fell over in the middle of the room when I found out the good news. I'm still waiting to hear from the English department, but since I got into my first choice department, I'm very happy.
- I'm also in a mini-feud with some of the members of my family [In particular, my father, my step-mother, and two of my half-siblings] because my father stole my older brother's money over the course of two years and then moved to a new apartment which resulted in my brother being put out into the street. My "sister" allowed my brother to stay with her in her two-bedroom condo, but only for one night with her and her little brother "lecturing" him on how he should've saved his money to be able to afford his own place. My step-mother got into my father's head and convinced him that my brother was not being a real man even though he works very hard, pays child support for his son [something my father never did for me] and only brought home $300 bi-weekly, which my father would take for himself. Needless to say, my internet readers are finding out about my good news before they will.

See how my life is always interesting?

It makes me think of something that happened when I was a kid: There was a summer when I had absolutely nothing to do. My grandmother wasn't able to bring home a PC for the summer because the computers had gotten too old, so I ran around saying I was bored all summer. She promised me that I would never be bored again and made sure that I was signed up in programs and kept busy all the way through high school. I feel that the way things have turned out that her promise is still holding true.

But, to quote my 5-year-old cousin, "Heaven's had her long enough, I want her back."

I'm hoping to do more blogging as the quarter winds down. I'm writing the grant proposal for my group as we are trying to get a grant for The Dowd Center, a place for homeless children and families that does excellent work in helping students in all aspects of life, so that's going to keep me occupied until Wednesday. I'm also (most likely) writing our paper for the final project, so I've got a lot of work to do this weekend. My pregnancy keeps me under the weather; I don't get morning sickness (due to genetics and emetophobia) but I catch everything else and stay sick for a week at a time. I almost missed my Valentine's Day dinner because I couldn't eat solid foods for the better part of a week. And I have work that I need to get done, but still suffer from an inability to focus for more than 2 minutes on any one task.

It may seem like a lot, but I wanted to get some things off my chest before I log off. My baby is supposedly due August 28th, and I would start grad school a month after that.

Oh yeah, I'm still going to go to school. I'm not going to be stopped; I just have to adapt.

I hope my reader(s) fill clued in, and I hope to continue at some point.

Stay safe and warm, everyone.

Everything changes

I just got a call from my mother at 8 this morning telling me that my grandmother passed away. It was very sudden and unexpected, so I'm going up to Cleveland with my husband and I don't know when I'll be back. I have to pick up my older brother on the way, so we'll have to call him once we get close because I don't remember what highway exit he'll be on.

If you knew this woman, you would've been in awe as to the kind of strength she had. She was the person that I feared, loved, and most wanted to be like. She was a teacher, a mother of three, grandmother of three, great-grandmother of one [I never got to give her a great-grandchild, and that is going to weigh heavily on me.

This probably means that grad school is out of the question, but I'm not sure yet.

I don't know when I'll be back.

I no longer trust anyone

It is officially three days past the deadline for applying to graduate school. All of the materials I needed to turn in have been received by at least one department (the other department had nobody there through most of December, so I don't know what they have) and three of the people I asked to write letters of recommendation for me have let me know that the letters were sent. Even my GRE scores have arrived. What's missing (and can actually keep me out of grad school for another year)? One letter of recommendation for each department. I asked one of my library school professors to write two letters for me in early December. He said that he would be glad to do so, and I even delivered to him a packed of everything that needed to be filled out [forms, addressed stamped envelopes, background on what I want to study, etc.] and told him when the deadline was. He was the only person that I actually told face to face when the deadline was, and he assured me that he would get the letters done long before the deadline because he was retiring and moving back to Cincinnati.

If he was going to get this done, why is it that his is the only letter that never arrived? If anything, his letter should have been one of the first things they received [it is possible that the letter got there before my application went through and that they misplaced it; considering that they claim that they do not have my Kent transcripts when that was the first thing they received for me, that wouldn't surprise me]. I understand that retirement can make things crazy, and I probably would've thought twice on asking him if I had known he was retiring and if I could've found any other library school professor that I had had who could've done it [One professor quit before I graduated, and the other has been on sabbatical], but he was a good choice at the time.

Now it seems that my bid for graduate school may end because of one stupid letter.

One. Stupid. Fucking. Letter.

I e-mail this guy on both of his accounts. I even found his home number and left a message on his answering machine, but I can't reach him anywhere.

I can't believe my fate is going to be decided by something completely out of my control. I don't know what to do anymore.

I just know that I will never ask anyone to ever help me again. It's not worth it. If I'm going to have my life ruined, I'd at least like it to be my fault.

Not much left to do...

I took the GRE on Monday and while I managed to improve my score by 40 points in each category, it wasn't enough to get to the threshold that the English department set for the verbal. I'm still trying to figure out why my math score keeps improving with virtually no practice (only reviewing basic math concepts like integers, fractions, and decimals), but I can't complain about the test results. I have to wait on the verbal (which I worry won't be good enough), and I need to contact OSU to let them know that the scores are on the way...but may not make it there by the deadline.

All that's left now is to submit all of the writing statements and samples, and to make sure that all of the letters of recommendation have arrived at OSU safely.

I'm kind of tired and don't really want to do much these days, but I still have to write an autobiographical statement for English and pay another $40 for the second application.

At least the test is over. That's a good thing, so let's build on that to jazz myself up for the holidays.

It's Been Too Long

I've disappeared for almost two months, and I've been keeping busy. The Festival of Cartoon art was awesome! I got 18 autographs and I have several artists who have told me to keep in touch, including Ray Billingsley (the creator of Curtis). I'll write more when I have time...which may not be until January: I'm in the last stages of applying to grad school, so I don't really have the time to do much else but panic.

I was trying to get three people to write letters of recommendation for me, but one of the people I wanted to ask (my advisor from when I was an undergrad) had since retired and has been very ill, so I finally asked my supervisor and the VP in my department. One is writing a letter for the English department and the other is writing for the Comparative Studies department. Let's just hope all of the letters will be complimentary.

The Jewish Graphic Novels course wrapped up in November; just in time for the article about the group to be published in the New Standard. I'll provide a link later, but the quote from me actually makes me seem not as crazy as the whole interview process must have been for the author (who is the wife of one of my co-workers, if I haven't mentioned that already). I think I got a great deal out of the course, and I may have shown people a thing or two about life for non-Jewish people. When we discussed Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, I ended up opening up about my life and family back in Cleveland; revelations that I was surprised were being said to a group of strangers. That deserves a longer post, so we'll see.

In bigger news, I am scheduled to take the G.R.E. on December 17th, so I need to spend a lot of time studying for this exam that has me freaked out over the verbal (very important) and the math (important to only me), as I don't have a very large vocabulary, and it's been more than a decade since I've had to do the kind of math required for this exam. I just hope and pray that I can do well on this exam. I just want everything to come together so that I can have a shot at getting into grad school. I even worked with the Comparative Studies professor (who told at least one person that he really wants to be my advisor) to get my Statement of Purpose up to caliber. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that I did have it in me to write at the PhD level; coming up with terms like "cognitive empathy" and using phrases that sounded very scholarly but make no sense to me now seemed to do the trick.

All I have left now is to make sure my transcripts from Kent State make it to OSU safely, confirm (yet again) that my OSU transcripts will be gotten by the Grad School Application office without me having to pay for them, get all my letter writers to get their letters in ASAP, write the autobiographical statement for the English department, choose a stellar writing sample for both departments, and pass the exam. All that, and holding down my internship while changing my schedule drastically for the next three months so that I can audit a Comparative Studies class, and taking steps towards my first attempts at getting published in a scholarly journal. I'm very serious about what I want to study [Strong female characters in sequential art = super heroine comic characters from the U.S. and abroad] and I really want this. I'm not sure that I'll get it, and I'm in a panic for the first time ever about affording it, so I've got to give it my best from now to the end of the year.

I want to set up a schedule so that I can make regular posts to all of my different internet haunts, but I'm probably going to be gone again until at least after the exam. Please pray, wish me luck or whatever you're into, for me as I make one last push towards the end.

Let's see how this works out, so I can tell people what went on in the interim.

I mean, I haven't even gotten to talk about my department's move to the main building on campus, so I'd like to come back more often.

C-ya, peeps!

I feel sicky, oh so sicky...

...I feel sicky, and icky and blah, and I envy anyone who isn't sick today (la la la la la, la la, la la la).

In the grand tradition of throwing bad after good, I'm feeling like hell after finally making some progress towards my grad school applications. I get these really bad stomach pains that are intermittent and, at times, truly unbearable. It is the one thing that I can't handle; given the choice for a migraine-level headache (as I don't have migraines because I only exhibit some of the symptoms) and the stomach pains, I'd rather have the headache. Even the risk of vomiting [which is something that terrifies me to no end...choking on it a long time ago exacerbated the problem] is something that I'd prefer over these damn pains. I've been to doctors for this a number of times and nobody can figure out what is wrong with me. It's not ulcers, it's not gall stones and, after my last trip to the emergency room, it's not a "female problem" (even though, honestly, I have no idea why they thought it was), but it is usually attributed to a build up of gas that doesn't exit out of the two "normal" exit points, but rather tries to find its way out through a 'pocket' right above my stomach as if to breech the skin. It's unpleasant, misery-inducing, and is going to make this weekend completely and utterly terrible.

I'm going to the 2007 Festival of Cartoon Art this weekend, which looks to be a lot of fun (as well as educational, and building brownie points towards getting into grad school) but it requires that I miss a day of work (bummer) and that I be somewhere at 8am on Friday and Saturday (which actually sucks). I'm going to be doing this and going to a Halloween party on Friday, I still need to study for the GRE, and I need make more progress towards completing my grad school proposal write-ups. All this, and only one day off before I have my reading group on Monday. My house is a perennial mess, my husband has been minimally helpful (which is a step up from his usual, I-work-therefore-I-do-nothing-at-home position), and my clinical depression isn't getting better. Being sick just makes it so that eating is an adventure in culinary avoidance, and the distension that this causes makes it look like I've gained a considerable amount of weight.

In short, life sucks.

And, to top it all off, I feel incredibly guilty for complaining because there are so many people who have it worse that I can possibly imagine.

I don't know what my point was. I guess it was to let off some steam. I just hope I'm well enough to eat a little bit more than miso by Friday, or alcohol will be completely out of the question. Later.