Ten Thousand Brain Cells--In Memoriam

Paraphrase: A Conversation with Squeaky

"Pregnant. Pregnant preg pregnant, nauseous pregnant pregnant, pregnant pregnant. Pregnant, preg pregnant, preggers preg preggo preg gestate. Pregnant? Tim's an asshole, pregnant pregnant, asshole not-enough-attention, pregnant pregnant, preg preg McBoobs-Hurt. Tim's an asshole. Preggo preg preggo, pregnant pregnant preggers, preg hungry nauseous nauseous, preg preggo pregnant Tim's an asshole Pregnant."

Seriously. Every single topic, from the time of day to the basketball scores, can SOMEHOW be brought back to the fact that she's expecting. It's like she's the only woman in the world who ever carried an embryo. If this was even HER first time, I'd have more empathy, but she has a 5-year old son (who lives with his father--because when the baby was born, Squeaky was a 15-year-old ward of the state and the dad was 27 and had a job. If I ran the world, any 27-year-old male who impregnated a 15-year-old DCFS kid? Would get custody of his own testicles in a jar of formaldehyde, not custody of the resulting BABY. But--again, to my everlasting dismay--I do NOT run the world. I do often wonder, though, assuming there is a God, whether or not he/she/it/they are paying attention.)

So, as I said, pregnancy is not entirely a new experience for Ms. Squeak; one would think, then, that she might be able to complete a sentence without referring to her gravid state. Alas--not so. Any sentence barely about to escape a pregnancy reference will immediately be used to hold a "Tim's an asshole" commentary. The combination of these two things--one in which I am interested only in passing, the other with which I have, if not complete disagreement, at least a conflict of interest--makes it really, REALLY hard to talk to Squeaky right about now.

And why, should you wonder, is Tim an asshole?

(Hey! I heard that! Stop listing reasons, over there. I'm serious--don't make me turn this blog post around and come back there.....)

No, dear visitors to Gladystopia, Tim has not been doing any of his usual asshole things. He has been drunk but once in my presence, recently; he's not spending all his time out of the apartment hanging out with his male and otherwise non-pregnant friends; really, in the past weeks, the most time he's intentionally been away from Squeaky is the past couple of days, when he was helping his friend move. So what could be wrong?

Apparently, Squeaky feels that every moment of his attention should be focused on herself and--to a lesser degree--the fetus. Instead, Tim has been doing--sit down, my friends, for the horror should not envelop you while in a standing position--OTHER STUFF. Watching SPORTS. Playing on the computer--talking on Facebook--playing Farm Town and YoVille. (I am ambivalent at best re: YoVille; Farm Town, on the other hand, is Teh Awsum, without a doubt.) In other words: not paying 100% attention to HER. Apparently, one of her pregnant friends has a hyper-attentive man--fluffs her pillows and massages her feet and brings her any strange pregnant-food concoction she desires. Personally I think this is a large bag of lies with a side order of "you CAN'T be serious", but That's Just Me--and regardless of its truth, Squeaky has embraced this fable as the ideal for her pregnancy.

Now, there are several reasons this sort of expectation is doomed to the annals of Epic Fail. One, Tim is nobody's ideal guy. I'm not talking about all the things you probably think I'm talking about--the joblessness, the drinking, the bouts of irresponsibility--that's not what I mean. That's the same Tim she got pregnant by--Tim the unemployed, irresponsible alcoholic--and if that wasn't what she expected then she should have thought about the Pill. No, what I mean is this: Tim is not--is not now, has never been in my experience--Mr. WarmFuzzy McCuddlePuss. It's not his way. He's matter-of-fact, alternately serious and goofy, with a skewed sense of humor, not a lot of patience, and a fierce sense of independence and his own personal space. When Tim doesn't want to interact, you don't interact with Tim, and everybody's happy. When Tim doesn't want to talk, he won't; all attempts at conversation will be met with monosyllables at best, grunts and mumbles at worst. I can live with this because I, in my more-depressive moods, am much the same.

Lately Tim has, for the most part, not wanted to talk. For one thing, he claims he's in a great deal of pain; his back and particularly his neck, he says, are killing him, and no amount of Advil or Tylenol or anything seems to help. I wonder how much of it is tension-based; he's confided to me that he's really nervous as to how everything is going to work out once there's a third mouth for them to feed. I have kept my commentary to myself, but he has good reason to be worried. The other thing--and one I understand--is his constant sense of inferiority and persecution by fate. Tim is one of those guys who feels like he cannot get a good break to save his life; while some of his attitude is pure paranoia, some of it actually seems plausible.

(Stopping here, since I'm not going to have much more time to post today...)