28 September 2003

I am glad to wake up with cramps, when it means I won't have them next week at this time. I asked Mark if we could switch and he could be the girl for awhile. So far I'm still on girl duty, though, and I expect this to continue indefinitely.

We got a new cell phone yesterday, one that will hold charge through a full day of driving and beyond. While we were in the Sprint store, there was some dumb college girl who had bought a phone, not paid attention to how long she was talking or how much it cost per minute over her plan, and was alarmed that she'd run up nearly $300 of phone bill. She kept acting all surprised: "Forty-five cents a minute?!" Well, yes; that is what you signed up for. Honestly. I agree that 45 cents/minute is a lot, but...if you think so, don't talk that much. "I'm a chatty person," she told the clerk, as though he was going to say, "Oh, a chatty person? Well, why didn't you say so! We'll just take those charges off your account, then."

We also went into the Saturn dealership and said, "You know, we did have four hubcaps when we came in here yesterday, and it appears that we had three upon arriving home yesterday." They said, "Oh. Three. Yep. We'll call you. Come back soon. We should have a hubcap for you by, oh, Tuesday for sure. Call us if we haven't called by then." How useful: another item on the list.

Also we got supplies for Mark and a few for the week to come, and we talked to our mortgage being and will talk to her again this afternoon. Everything is fine. We have backup plans for if things don't arrive in time to sign remotely. We have choices. We get to do this. Of course we do.

Oh, and we picked up my prescription from the pharmacy, and I am annoyed. The pharmacist had said she'd get me two months, but the doctor's office would only approve a one-month extension, because, "You really need to get in for your yearly pelvic exam." First of all, I resent being treated like a child who has to be forced into doing the healthy thing just because I'm in the middle of a move. And second, when I went in just last year at around this time and had my pelvic exam, the doctor said I didn't actually need one according to my insurance; they only asked them of us biannually and it was really my choice. So I was a good kid and did it annually anyway, because I care about my reproductive health and blah blah blah. But now all of a sudden when I'm in the middle of a move, it's vital that I have another pelvic exam so very soon that I'm going to have to call a doctor's office from here to get either a quick exam once we get there or a refill if they're sensible or something. Or I'll end up at a women's clinic rather than my ordinary new doctor, because I had enough trouble finding a version of The Pill that didn't make my body vicious and awful -- I am not going to deal with going off it and back on again. And I'm definitely not getting pregnant earlier than planned because I couldn't get in to see a doctor in time and my old doctor was being a jerk. So. I'll call a doctor's office in the Cities and see what I can get them to agree to.

I still hold to the NyQuil standard for drugs: if the side effects are less severe than NyQuil's, the condition as easily diagnosable, and the possibility of addiction smaller, you shouldn't need a prescription. The Pill can have some nasty side effects, but they're on a par with NyQuil's, not worse. (Read the bottle. NyQuil is evil.) Condition diagnosable? Yep: I am female and have not gone through menopause. There, that was easy. And nobody gets addicted to the Pill, except perhaps in some psychological sense of being addicted to not having kids yet. (A habit it'll take about nine months to break...but anyway.) Why is this not available over the counter? Answer: to make my life more difficult, apparently.

Ah well. Somehow it seems like California is one of those places people don't get to move back from. There is no "go East, young man." Even Adam Duritz sang, "You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast." But he was wrong. Rachel and Ben already escaped. We're going to.

I dreamed of Jennifer Wu last night. Jenny was one of my best friends in grade school. We drifted when I moved to Kansas and moved back, but I think middle school probably would have been a dividing line anyway: we didn't have that much in common, and in the larger world of middle school we could each find friends with whom we shared more. Jenny moved to California, I don't remember when. Eighth grade? Ninth? I also dreamed of Tina Swoboda and Carrie Everson, whom I knew at about the same time, middle grade school. Tina was a good person to be friends with early in grade school, I informed my mom solemnly, because she wore Mary Janes and would kick people in the shins if they were mean to her friends. I don't know what she's up to now, but I'd be surprised if it didn't involve some well-placed shin-kicking, metaphorically speaking. Anyway, Jenny Wu came back to visit in high school once, and she was very California, in our Nebraska estimation. I barely said hi to her -- she spent her time with more recent friends, and I think we were both fine with that. It was high school.

It makes me wonder now, though, what made her seem California to us? I think she'd gone a little bit Valley, if I remember correctly. And I'm safe from that charge. I do wonder what'll be there for me, though, what people will think I picked up in California. I don't think Rachel has "gone California" significantly -- she's changed since college some, sure, but I think if someone gets married, goes through grad school, and generally lives a life for six years and doesn't change at all, that's probably a bad thing. And Michelle hasn't become "really D.C." as far as I can tell. Maybe it's just that I'm inexpert in the ways of my nation's capitol. But maybe there's hope for me yet, to be changed but not Californized. Maybe.

I don't know. I just know that it's time to go home. That a week from right now, I will hope to be somewhere around Davis, trying to figure out where to park the U-Haul while we're getting bagels. It seems faintly unreal still, even with all the boxes; it feels like there'll be a force field at the Nevada border. I keep thinking, "They'll really let me? Really really?" But they can't stop me now. I keep thinking, "I just want all this to be over." But then I keep thinking, "Wait, it almost is over."

Timprov and I were singing the Eight Days of U-Haul song. In place of "Fiiiiiive golden rings," we were singing, "Breaaaaakfast with Jen!" It was a good song. (They give us eight days of U-Haul included in the price. We probably won't use all eight, but it's still good to know.)

I was saying to David last week that I think one of the reasons it seems faintly unreal to me is that I don't have a major break in my work going on. Our last move, down here from Concord, was not major. Before that, I moved when I was about to become a grad student, and I moved at the beginnings and ends of summer programs and school years. Those weren't big breaks in my writing projects, but writing was not my major work then. I wasn't working on novels then, either, so the big breaks were less clear. It would have been nice if I'd been done with the Not The Moose, or with Reprogramming edits, or if I'd gotten some particularly happy piece of news. (There's still time on the news front...for any of you who may be contemplating buying my stories or books....) But it's not necessary. Just still feels a little strange.

So. I finished Kathe Koja's Skin (big fat meh), and I started John Whitbourn's The Royal Changeling, sent to me by Aet. It gets big points right away for choosing a non-Tudor, Rensaissance period of British history for its setting. There are good Tudor and pre-Renaissance fantasies, don't get me wrong. It's just that other interesting things happened, too. (Unfortunately, this means that I now have a Cromwellian fantasy novel poking around the back of my head with all the others. Stupid brain, always thinking about stuff.) I've got an agenda for today that involves blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, packing, and laundry. Also, work and reading. Also, packing. And then also, packing. I don't really feel like doing much of anything but curling up in a chair with tea and this fantasy novel, but I am told that You Can't Always Get What You Want. At least, not for a couple of weeks.