Monday, December 27, 2010

Because it's Monday: Google Voice

This is icon for social networking website. Th...Image via WikipediaI set up Google Voice to transcribe my voicemail. I thought it was only going to transcribe messages left on my Google Voice number, but after my brother left a message on my regular phone, Google Voice sent me the transcription. Which was:

"Owner, or Christina okay. Yeah, Hi Bob on Thursday so if you are but also with the relation of course,so you know that I'm here or you assembly them either Wednesday saying that night because there ifyou're on, thinking about the silver blue through mailing address. Now. So, demand now, she. "


At first I was slightly confused. Then I realized... my brother left me a message in Spanish.


Poor Google Voice! It tried so hard...
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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

What's in a name?: Baby Edition

Naming another human being is weird.

I have four cats. I have not named any of them.

When I was little my siblings and I had cats and named them, but that was different. All names were approved by The Parents (whether explicitly or not), so it wasn't something I did ON MY OWN. I had approval from An Authority Figure.

Naming Troy Emmitt, the fetus, was like naming a character in a story. Because it wasn't real -- naming my fetus was like naming my GPS (her name is Gloria, by the way. She's very friendly, except when you go the wrong way and she has to recalculate... that irks her a bit. But I digress...)

Unless you count those community-chosen cat names when I was, what, twelve?, I'd never named another living being.

So, suddenly, I'm in charge of naming a baby? An actual PERSON? A person with his own thoughts and opinions?

That's scary.

Freddy and I didn't tell anyone Troy Emmitt's name until he was born. Freddy and I discussed the name, of course, but since we named the baby after his grandfathers, we chose the origin/tribute rather than the name, really (we didn't get to choose what baby's grandfathers' names were). And we -- Freddy and I -- decided baby'd go by his initials, instead of his first (or middle) name. So, really, we picked his nickname for him.

Um... I hope he likes it...?

Because of my freakouts during the pregnancy (Troy Emmitt was a bit of a diva; throughout the pregnancy he kept having scary test results or sonograms, even though there was NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. Ornery fetus), I asked Freddy to call Troy Emmitt by his fetus name, not his future baby name. So we didn't even use the name until after The Birth.

It was weird.

I called him "the baby" for the first few weeks. It took me time to get used to using his actual name.

AND WHAT IF HE DIDN'T LIKE HIS NAME??

What if we picked the wrong one?

Should we have gone with those names? What was he going to think of his Spanish middle name (my dad's name)? Should we have used the English equivalent of that name? Was he going to hate having to spell it out for people all the time? Do the names sound weird because one's in English and the other in Spanish? What about his first name -- we used Freddy's dad's first name, even though Freddy's dad went by his middle name. Should we have used that instead? Is he going to like going by his initials, or is he going to think that's too cheesy? HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS STUFF???

Kid was barely a few hours old and I'd already screwed up, scarred him for life.

Freddy and the grandmas used the baby's name so casually, so confidently. As if it were, like, his name; as if it was supposed to be his name, and there wasn't anything wrong with it.

So, after a while, I started using it, too.

He seems to like it. So far.

We'll see what he has to say about it, you know, once he starts talking and stuff...


And after all the hullabaloo about his real-life name, I had to figure out what to call the little booger here, on the blog. Freddy suggested Freddy, Jr., which I vetoed because WHAT ABOUT ME?? I thought about Criss, Jr., but that's not fair to Freddy, and Criss-Freddy Jr., is just silly.

I thought of Little Red, short for Little Red Cryin' Dude, also in honor of his carrot-top mop. Or Red Hulk, as my sister observed (srsly, you should see him change colors when he get mad), which is fitting considering how much radiation the guy got in utero thanks to all the extra sonograms he made us give him.

I came up with a few others, I think, but they were all equally not good.

So I'm going with MonkeyBoy. Which is what his daddy calls him. (It's what his daddy called the cat, but the cat's been demoted. Now the baby's MonkeyBoy. The cat's just plain ol' Gus now.)

(In case you're wondering, by the way, yes, we have called the baby by the cats' names. Both of us. More than once. More than one cat name. It's OK, though, I don't think the kid noticed. Or the cats.)

Monday, December 20, 2010

A Letter to Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann, by @misakyra #mooreandme

I've been enjoying my ignorant bliss under the excuse that my baby needs me (which is not really an "excuse" when I spend a large amount of my non-work, non-sleeping time with his little head attached to my boob, which does make it hard to hang out online and/or type stuff and such), so I've avoided reading up too much on certain current events. Sadly, sh!tty things keep happening out there in The World, even when I'm not there to read (or blog) about them.

But other people are out there, keeping up with all the sh!t that's happening, and writing things like this. Which is much better written than anything I could have done.

So, please, go read Cassy's Open Letter to Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann.


(But also take a moment to chew on this for a bit: the women in the Assange case are lucky. At least there is public outrage over what's happened to them, and the way the media has treated them. Because they're cis. When a trans woman is raped, we don't hear a peep, do we? Even if, somehow, the media bothered to report on a trans woman's rape and the media did to that woman what Olbermann and Moore are doing to these cis Swedish women, would the rest of the Internet notice? Would Salon and its cis feminist bloggers show anywhere near the same outrage?)
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Thursday, December 16, 2010

Thankful Thursday

I'm thankful for:
  • my beautiful, healthy baby boy who just turned two months old!
  • the breastfeeding-friendly hospital where I gave birth
  • my OB, who treated me like a person, respected my wishes about my birthing experience, and was open, honest, and compassionate throughout the pregnancy and birth
  • my Freddy, who's an awesome daddy
  • my mom, who took care of me and The Boy during those first weeks, even if she got no sleep and put a ridiculous amount of miles on her car driving from and to Austin...
  • my long-distance doula/pregnancy-and-birth guru, Marcy
  • Lacey, supernanny extraordinaire, for taking care of my sweet baby when I'm at work
  • my mom-in-law, another awesome babysitter. And so much more.
  • all the awesome #bfing and #clothdiapering moms on Twitter who answer all my ridiculous questions. IT TAKES A VILLAGE, people. And online villages rock.
  • my NaNoWriMo co-MLs, who picked up my slackery-slacker slack this November. (I was busy. Baby busy. I wrote a whopping 1,765 words. w00t.)

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Quick thoughts: On Being a Parent, On Being #Prochoice

The more I learn (first-hand, in this intensive long-term crash course) about parenting and what it really means to be responsible for another tiny, needy human being twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as you both shall live it takes, the more I'm convinced that anti-choicers have no clue whatsoever what "A BABY" actually means.

Either that, or they're angry, bitter people who really, really hate women.*


*(Yes, women can be misogynists too.)

Friday, December 03, 2010