InnerTeub

The wheels have come off the pregnancy wagon, y’all. Things were going SO GREAT and then I started four weeks of work travel right at the beginning of the third trimester, and lo, it was stupid. I find work travel to be exhausting generally, but we’re now in a whole new stage of “Ok, but for real, this is really hard.” I’ve nursed a secret smug theory that a lot pregnancy aches and pains can be attributed to a lack of general activity – I mean, when not pregnant and I go from active to not active, I get back pain and hip and whatnot, so it made sense to me that if my activity level decreased because of pregnancy than I would have the same experience, therefore if I could stay active, then I would escape all the general complaints.

And you know, while I concede this is kind of smug first time pregnancy “Oh Just You Wait” theory, I’m still not convinced I’m wrong. I felt great up until a few weeks ago. In fact, if I found myself with a sore back or hips or whatever, I learned that a good swim workout would actually correct all those problems. It was all working out.

And then. THEN. Sigh. Then I just ran out of time to exercise, and found myself sitting on a lot of planes. (22 individual plane rides in four weeks, to be annoyingly precise.) And while I did what I could to hit the hotel treadmill or the pool when I was home, it just … starting…falling apart. I have knots in both shoulders that have pinched nerves and the act of sitting – be in a plane, a car or an office chair – aggravates them. I was apparently shifting and twitching so much on one plane ride that a flight attendant came up to me midflight and literally said “Can I do…anything? At all?” and I was all “What ever do you mean?” and then realized I was shifted almost horizontally in my seat with one armed raised over my head to try to reshift the knot in that one shoulder so it would Stop Fucking With Me Goddammit. At one point last night I looked at Mike with tears in my eyes because I could not comfortably position myself on the couch and therefore didn’t even WANT to watch TV and what kind of WORLD is this when I can’t even RELAX ON THE COUCH as God INTENDED for the LOVE.

I don’t have a point to this except to kind of generically complain. I am happily done with work travel – actually, all travel – and am trying to literally right myself as I get back into the swing of being home. I’m ready to nest and cook and snuggle into fall weather, and, as long as we’re complaining, I am taking it HIGHLY PERSONALLY that we’re not deep into fall weather consistently yet. It’s October, universe. I should be full time in scarves and boots, let’s get ON this, already.

And with that, I leave you with the opening paragraph of that age old classic from McSweeney’s, “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers”:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.