I was changing a twin’s diaper and treating a diaper rash and readying that rashy baby for bed, and as usual my mind was drifting to more interesting matters such as myself.

At first I was thinking that I am a demanding person who requires excessive stimulation to stay interested in life, but then I started thinking that actually I’m not. The original train of thought was because I realized I was all excited that Edward had a new pair of pants to wear for the first time tomorrow, and it occurred to me that I like for one twin or the other to have some new piece of clothing about once a week, and that that’s a lot. It isn’t that I gratify that desire, it’s just that that’s what I’d like best. Actually, if we’re using the term “like best,” what I’d probably like BEST is to have an entire new outfit for each twin every few days. But for pure maintenance of fun levels, one single item per week is plenty: it’s fun to do the laundry with that new item to process, and it’s fun to dress the baby using that item in different combinations with existing items.

Then I thought that I’m the same way with other things: I like to have a new hair product of some sort every couple of weeks, for example. A new conditioner, a new leave-in thing, something like that. If I have a new conditioner in the shower, I feel kind of happy and excited to face something I usually consider a time-stealing chore. New conditioner makes shower more fun; new baby pants makes baby care more fun. New things give me something to look forward to. Therefore, I’m someone who needs a lot of stimulation and change and variety in order to look forward to life.

But then I reconsidered. A pair of $5.58 pants (30% off at Target) makes me excited to do laundry, and then improves my moral when I’m dressing twins at 6:15 a.m.–and continues to do so the next five times the pants go through the laundry and back in the drawer? A $.68 bottle of Suave (after $1 coupon routinely given out by Target) “blonde highlight enhancing” conditioner makes me feel cheery in the shower for two weeks? That’s not a lot of excitement to ask for out of life. Some people have to pay $200 for lift tickets and ski rental. Or have to have affairs. Or have to go to parties and bars. Or have to meet new people all the time. Or have to go to new places all the time. I like to stay home in my own house, and I like to shop at familiar stores, and I like to stay with my current husband (though I’m not promising I’d say no right away to Seth Green, should he appear at my door begging for my company), and I like to read library books, and periodically I like to have an inexpensive new thing to restore my interest in household tasks. I think that counts as low-maintenance.

You read the icon right: I finished my 50,000-word NaNoWriMo novel. It is so, so bad. The writing is embarrassing. The plot is lame. The characters bear no resemblance to real living people, but instead walk around like paper dolls. The dialogue is not anything like the way people talk. But it is DONE. I FINISHED it. I was queasy, but I did it anyway, and lo a month has gone by like a snap.

Hi, visitors from Diary of a Playgroup Dropout!

See the entry below for a Chocolate-Crusted Pumpkin Cheesecake recipe that will BLOW YOUR LITTLE MINDS! It’s too late to make it for Thanksgiving dinner, but you can make it quickly today, eat a huge section, and them claim it’s leftover from Thanksgiving, and too bad you’ll have to finish it off. If I finish off my own leftover pan too soon, I plan to make another pan and say that one is the leftovers.

Thanksgiving was great. I ate my own weight in turkey and mashed potatoes, and then also had cherry pie, vanilla ice cream, and cheesecake. If I were a bear, I could now safely hibernate for the entire winter on my stored food supply.

“Ug, I hate small talk.” Not me. I love small talk. I’m introverted, socially awkward, I have trouble keeping up with conversations. Small talk saves me. I can talk about the weather, what a relief! Small talk gives me something to say (“It’s so pretty out!”), something to ask (“Have you heard what the weather’s supposed to be like this weekend?”).

Small talk leads naturally to bigger talk in a way I couldn’t have engineered myself. If I tried for big talk right away, I’d blurt out something that would make everyone feel uncomfortable. But with small talk, “Sure has been mild for this time of year!” leads casually to “Yeah, I even took the kids outside to play!,” which leads to, “Oh, how old are your kids?,” and before you know it we’re on comfortable ground: kids, schools, minivan brands, marriages, friends who are pregnant. Or maybe it leads to travel plans, trips taken, how travel has changed since September 11th, whether or not you can bring nail clippers now. Or maybe it leads to plans for the holidays, various family traditions, how crazy our in-laws drive us. We have material for hours if we need it.

Here’s what freezes me: NON-small talk. When someone comes up to me and says, “So, did you hear the giant sucking sound?” and I am like a rabbit in the headlights. Huh? What are we talking about? And it turns out we’re talking about jobs going to Mexico, a subject I know nothing about but can’t fake the way you can fake the weather (“I think it’s rainier than usual for November, isn’t it? Or maybe it just feels that way every November!”). Or when someone asks me a question about something I feel I ought to know about but don’t: “What’s this town’s crime rate like?” Me: “Um. Good? Oh! Rainy!”

I had an OB appointment today with The Cute Doctor. He’s my least favorite, because he’s too handsome for me to want to let him see my jiggly tummy. Also he’s my least favorite because he’s so clearly aware of his handsomeness. You can tell he’s used to pregnant women blushing and getting crushes on him. He has green eyes, and I notice he often wears green shirts.

I suspect him, too, of thinking of himself as “good with women.” Like, he’s explaining to me all the tests and screens I can have done, and I can almost see him thinking about how awesome he is for explaining all this just as if I’m his intellectual equal.

And this is the worst part. When he was done explaining, and he wanted to check for the baby’s heartbeat, I had to pull down the top of my pants–and my tummy, the aforementioned jiggly one I don’t want him to see, was all damp with sweat, and he prodded it a few times before putting on the gel, so I couldn’t even pretend the dampness was from the gel.

The OB offices are always SO HOT. They feel like they’re about 80 degrees, and then the little exam room door is closed so the air is stuffy. And then there’s a cute doctor talking to me, and I’m socially inept so I’m just barely grasping each “next appropriate thing to say” in time to say it, and whenever I talk to people I tend to get overheated and damp with nervousness, and also we’re talking about things that could be wrong with the baby, and all those things together make me a little sweaty. Which was bad enough when I was just painfully aware that my face was red and my forehead wet, but way way worse when I realized it was the jiggly loose much-stretchmarked skin of my stomach that was clammy, and there’s his hand coming towards it in prodding position. God.

I’m still working away at my NaNoWriMo novel. The month is half over, and I’m a little more than half done. Some days I feel like this is awesome and I am awesome for participating. Other days I feel like this is a colossal waste of time and energy.

Right now I’m stuck. My original idea for a plot was to have a woman pregnant with her fifth child—and, to make things more interesting than my life, have this fifth child be possibly the result of an uncharacteristic (and now ended) affair. I thought I could draw out the tension: is the baby her husband’s or her lover’s?—maybe until the end of the book. It turns out, I am not an interesting enough writer to make this tension last. I went ahead and revealed that it is her husband’s baby. And NOW what? It seems there is nothing left to say. It seems as if I should now just leave this family in peace to live their boring lives.

• That I will be washing a baby, and I will be so focused on washing the baby’s bottom half, I will not notice that the baby’s top half is under water.
• That I will be walking down the stairs carrying a baby, and I will trip, and I will save myself and not the baby.
• That the house will be on fire, and that after I get the children out I will have to decide if I want to risk going back in for the irreplaceable photo albums and baby journals, and that either way I will make the wrong choice.
• Things I don’t even want to type, involving the children being hurt or killed or in danger.
• Running into a guy who used to think I was hot stuff, and having him think “Oh my god, that was a lucky miss.”
• An emergency, and I don’t have my glasses. I feel so disoriented without my glasses on.
• Or not having my shoes. I wouldn’t feel right, running around frantically but with no shoes on.
• Dying while my children are still little.
• Wind storms.
• An emergency happening when we’re snowed in and can’t get help.
• Hearing emergency vehicles; seeing them all pulling in to the school parking lot.
• Any emergency where I can’t think fast enough of what to do, and I spend the entire rest of my life thinking, “If only I’d just…”
• When someone has started a fall from a tall place, and they’re still alive but they can’t be saved. They’re still alive, but they’re also already dead.
• The dark, especially if it’s cold.
• Spiders. Snakes. A dog suddenly going for my throat.
• Sociopaths. Knowing they’re all over the place, and they don’t care if they hurt us, and we can’t tell who they are.
• That I’ll completely by accident kill or permanently hurt someone else.
• I’ll be badly hurt, unconscious, in front of my children, and they’ll have to figure out by themselves how to deal with it.
• Carjackers who don’t care that there are children in the car.
• Being separated from my children in an emergency.
• Any noise at all coming from the basement. Having to figure out what to do if I hear one.

What are you scared of?

There are so many Hard Topics that are also Important Topics, and organ donation is one of them. I keep thinking I should write about it, but it’s so sad to think about, and it’s hard to write about. Also, I’m aware that there are some people who think that if their body loses any parts in this life, they won’t have those parts in their next life, and that’s a difficult thing to argue with–I mean, what do I know about what happens after we die?

I do know what will happen after I die: any of my organs that can be of any use to anyone are getting removed from my body that doesn’t need them any more, and given to someone’s body that does. If my children die, same thing: losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, and so I don’t know how I could withhold something that could keep another parent from going through the same thing. I’ll take my chances with the afterlife.

This whole topic is courtesy of Beth over at Diary of a Playgroup Dropout, who brought the subject up this morning. Rather than writing about it myself, I thought I’d just send you over to her:

Diary of a Playgroup Dropout, 11-13-2006, “Donate Life”