Xiobhan: All About the X

It’s Christmas and I am fighting a case of the family and general bad news induced case of the blues. Since I had Beck I have had a greater sensitivity and sense of mortality. Things affect me more. Whereas before I would have watched the news of the tsunami with a morbid fascination and grim interest in the devastating power of an underwater earthquake in a faraway place, now I just can’t process the death and destruction without my own wave of tears. Update: Jesus.  Not only was I overtired and emotional I was terribly unoriginal.  I feel a bit better today.  Also, I got my period for the first time in, like, more than a year.  WTF!  Took me by surprse.  Felt like Carrie in the shower....

The husband is downstairs watching one of the Lord of the Rings and I am upstairs, in bed with a sleeping baby pressed up against the side of my thigh. I just needed to get away from the bad news and LOTR wasn’t exactly the break my overloaded senses needed.

I can’t/won’t talk about how my holiday has been because it consisted of too much family and too many old wounds. At least, I won’t talk about it in a forum as public as say the INTERNET. I’m not that dumb. I’ll complain about them to you all over the phone or email. You know, something I can deny.

In other bad news (and hey! Let’s see if I can even type this without crying!) My cousin Eileen has been diagnosed with colon cancer. Yes, the cousin that was just here Thanksgiving with her beautiful three-year old son and her husband with The Commitments Dublin accent. She has spent the last week at Sloan Kettering undergoing test after test. It’s in her liver too. Officially, we are all “optimistic” as they can “do so much these days” and “Age is on her side.” She’s 38. Unofficially? Not good. But what choice do we all have but to be optimistic? I’m sure every single person out there knows someone who has battled cancer. Whether they have won, lost or are still waging the war, you never think anything but a decisive victory. You can’t. When Eileen was here, when we weren’t sneaking smokes or I wasn’t taking her son out in the dark to say a Hail Mary to a driveway statue, (“Thanks for minding me!” he said, holding my hand on the way back) we were getting to know each other as adults. Being five years older than me isn’t a big deal now, but it was growing up. Five years is the difference between boys are dumb and dating. It’s the difference between prom and college mixers. It’s the difference between me wanting desperately to hang with her and her wanting desperately not to be seen with me. It was me spraying myself with her Jean Nate in hopes that I could be as old and cool as she with her sparkly head band and black eyeliner*

* Jersey girl. And I mean that in the very worst way no matter how much I love her. And yes, we have joked about this.

So please. Whatever hopes and prayers you are not sending to the poor souls burying their dead in Southeast Asia, think good thoughts for Eileen.

Here is Beck in his "My first Christmas" onesie.  A "pre-Beck me" would have made fun of a baby wearing one of these, but it was a gift from Eileen.  We wore it proudly.

I was just about to post this and there was in email from Eileen in the box:

I know this sounds horrible!  But really I am okay with it.  I am in the best care for this type of cancer- the Doctors at Sloan see this all the time and have a plan of action they are working together to get me through this.  I am young and a  fighter that's on my side. I  will get through this! Believe me it is not easy but this is the card I have been dealt and I will deal with it! Bring it on!

Ass cancer should know better than to go after a tough Irish girl from Jersey.  I actually sort of feel sorry for it.
 

My family makes me cry

In other news, Merry Christmas!

Ahh.....DC...

Nothing livens up a Tuesday morning like a robbery/hostage situation at the Rite Aid across the street.

And SEAN?  Don't I look gracious?

ROBBERY UPDATE:   This is so totally Dog Day Afternoon.

GREAT!  Now he's on the loose... I'm not leaving for lunch. Eff that.

Yes. Food and drnk were free.

We have just had our holiday party and I'm back at my desk trying to focus and get out a client documetn. Note: best email  subject line of the year I just got it:

Pls edit highlighted sentence...I'm drunk ;-(

I hate to be bitch, but my secret Santa gift was a footy sleeper for ages 6-9 months.  Am I never going to get a present for me ever again?  Is everything going to be for BEck? I acted all gracious but Shit!  ALl the other girls got stuff like books and soaps and candles and booze. I got a footy sleeper.  It so totally won't fit me.

I received a lovely gift for Beck today from an esteemed colleague.  There are lots of babies all over the world who don't have footy sleepers.  Beck and I are thankful. 

I bought this hat for my sister for Christmas but put it on my head when it arrived and now I need to get her something else. I haven't taken it off which pretty much makes me that kid from "About a Boy."  Funny thing is, my mother saw me wearing it and started hitting me*.  She had ordered the same hat for me and now has to send that one to my sister (with my name on it.). I have  done barely any shopping and the one gift I did buy I kept for myself.  How is everyone else doing?

* We hit because we love.

From Wonkette

I always thought I'd make a pretty good dominatrix but THIS is the best of both worlds!!!

Like There Is Anything But a Submissive Dem

Craigslist posting of the day, if not the year: Anyone up for some political sex play?

I'm a very good looking and intelligent white male looking for a Republican couple to dominate and humiliate me. Make me blow him while you tell me what a bunch of losers Democrats are. Make me clean her up after you're done with her while she tells me how much better Republicans are in the sack. I'm picky about who I play with and I expect you to be too. I'm very good looking, discreet, STD/HIV free, non-smoker, down to earth, and I'm for real -- YOU BE THE SAME. I will provide pictures and further description once I know you're for real. I promise you won't be disappointed. Male/Female couples only please -- and please be real Republicans. Phonies and trolls will be ignored.

You may think it's sick, but we're sort of turned on. Look, we've been getting fucked by Republicans for four years. Might as well take it some place beyond demolishing Social Security and curtailing our civil rights.

Sub Democrat seeks Dom Republican Couple for fun and games - m4mw - 38 [craigslist]

This is Beck in his new Maggie Simpson snowsuit.

This is Beck tipping over.

Thank you.  That is all.

Holy Mary, Mother of God

I never wrote anything about the Thanksgiving holiday.  And I think that’s a good thing.  I will, however, share the pre-holiday party that has been a tradition with the husband and his buddies for the past twenty-some years: they have a party the Wednesday night before thanksgiving and then they bundle up and play football the next morning. It’s a bad Zima commercial which is sort of redundant.

The first few years I knew him there were some girlfriends and they were included.  And then they were wives, and they played a bit too.  After a few more years the wives sat on the sidelines with the babies.  This year?  One kid was old enough to actually participate.  How’s that for a sign that you’re getting old?  We all realized some time ago that no one house could hold all the children that had been birthed over the past ten or so years, so we went to the Knights of Columbus which is a huge old stone farm house that has been converted into a bar and “meeting house.” The Knights have built a reception hall on the side where the annual Crab Pickin’ Fest is held and there is a pool of sorts out back surrounded by a chain link fence.   My father-in-law was Treasurer of the KoC through most of the seventies and eighties and he played cards and drank beer there every Friday night with gusto.  Some of the husband’s friends have picked up this torch and they too now play cards and drink beer sitting in the same captain’s chairs at the same square tables under acoustic tiled drop ceilings and fluorescent bulbs. (The preservationist in me weeps silently. Thank god the woodwork remains unpainted.)  Anyway.  Suffice to say that it was the perfect place for 12 adults and 56 kids under the age of 10.  Most of the children were tearing around with pieces of honey backed ham hanging out of their mouths and juice boxes in their sticky hands while a Gromitt video played in the next room largely unwatched. Beck hung safely from my front in his Baby Bjorn. (Safely that is, until a huge dollop of mustard squoozed out the back of my little ham roll and landed on top of his head.  I just happened to be leaning over to lick it off when my husband began introducing me to someone new girlfriend.  See? Babies don’t always smell good. Sometimes they smell like French’s.)   Most of the adults stood in another room across the hall passing pitchers of beer to refill plastic cups. After awhile I unloaded Beck on the husband and my cousin and I went out to the front porch.  She to sneak a smoke and me to, um, help her.

Well there is a long horseshoe shaped drive that leads up the house and in the center of the horseshoe is a statue of the Blessed Virgin tucked into a cement grotto.  There is also a stone bench on which the drunken old men can contemplate their sins or simply lie down and pass out. So the kids, who were playing tag on the front porch as I snuck a drag off Eileen’s smoke, started asking who was buried in the front yard.  I explained that the big stone and statue were for the Virgin Mary.  “The Virgin Mary is buried there?”  No, the Virgin Mary is not buried there.  It is a religious monument to the Virgin Mary.  So I took the kids, about seven of them, across the driveway to the center of the lawn to show them. I’d say I was a pied piper of sort but one who brings up the rear. Why, why do children run everywhere? What is your hurry, child? I guess you can run when you aren’t wearing high-heeled boots on damp soil.  Sure!  It’s easy to yell “Let’s race!” when you don’t have a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. God I paint a trashy picture. Anyway, after standing in front of the spotlights that illuminated the grotto, one of the young girls said, “Let’s all say the Hail Mary.”  So there we were, all kneeling in the grass and damp leaves on a cool November night saying a Hail Mary to a faded statuette. And for the first time in a long time my religion made me feel warm and fuzzy.  But maybe that was the beer.