This quote:

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

from this essay, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula LeGuin.

Recent cultural absorbtion...

film: Grave of the Fireflies.

I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it, exactly. At the end of watching it, my first thought was "that was like a Thomas Hardy novel, only without the laughs". But I find I keep thinking about it, and the more I think about it, the more I get out of it, and the more it affects me.

game: I'm still playing bloody Animal Crossing. I really wish I knew why...

...Casual acqaintances become incapable of talking to you about anything else!

I admit to being something of a social cripple, in that I'm terrible at smalltalk with people I barely know, but at least there used to be *some* variety in the range of topics people attempted before they gave up and let me go back to happily staring into space.

Now every half minute someone else is asking me how "you know, the pregnant thing" is going. "Are you excited?" is another classic. It's driving me nuts. I know people are just trying to be friendly, but honestly, I'm quite aware that it's just an easy conversation topic to break the silence, and that they don't actually *want* elaborate details of support bras/Braxton Hicks contractions/kick patterns, etc. And so I continue to reply in non-committal monosyllables, and we play a silly game of pretending-to-chase/refusing-to-give information.

Once they run out of pregnancy questions, most give up. A few persist, and sometimes we manage to actually find something interesting to talk about. Other times, they just get desperate, as in this slightly surreal exchange last week:

Him: [desperately casting eyes about for a topic] Are those chrysanthemums on your shoes?
[We both stare at the stylised flower print on my trainers for a few seconds.]
Me: I have no idea.
[silence]
Him: Do you like gardening?
Me: Um...
Him: I'm thinking of getting a window box. You know, herbs and things.
Me: That's nice...
[more silence]

I really should try to get better at this, but it's so hard when I'm NOT ALLOWED TO DRINK!!! :'(

Probably girls, anyway. Or so the scanner tech lady said.

These are from when they were 13 weeks. The one on the left is Neepy, the other is Bitey. Well, those were the names at the time, as we didn't know the sexes. (Don't ask.)



This is at 18 weeks. Before, they looked like babies, now they look like skeletons! All bones! Eep! Skeletons in my tummy! We're all skeletons under our skins! Aaargh!



Thing is, they keep moving around, and now I have no clue which is Bitey and which is Neepy any more. Or why it should make any difference at all - which I guess it doesn't. Anyway, I can feel them kicking on different sides now, so unless one has developed freakishly long legs since the last scan, I can sort of tell where they are. Just not which is which. But what do I mean, which is which?? Which what? Either of them is anything!!! It hardly matters which nickname I assign to them when they'll get proper names when they're born. At any rate, one is currently on the right, and the other is on the left. The left, or 'sinister' twin. :P

Another scan next Monday!

http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/05/boy_lollipop_in.html#more

Why can't we have ads like that here? Ones that make you happy, instead of making you want to tear out your brain and throw it at something. Like those PC/Mac ads, which inspire me to levels of hatred I previously only reserved for G------ M------. (name deleted to preserve my blood pressure should I reread it).