Author: Melanie

She didn’t care that she wasn’t off with some man from Peoria who wore suits and sold hairbrushes door-to-door.  She had the bug that afflicts every part of you, especially your reason.  It makes you dream of babies crying out for you in the night.
— from The Book of Ruth, by Jane Hamilton

Lately, I’ve had babies on the brain.  Like, dreaming about them practically every night, noticing pregnant women everywhere I go, reading blogs by women who are pregnant or who write about their children.  It’s bizarre.

Being a mother is the one thing I’ve always known, for sure, I wanted to be.  I watched my friends and my brother get married and have children, and I wondered when it might happen for me, but I never really felt the “clock ticking,” as it were, until recently.  I guess that’s what this is.

I long to be pregnant.  And longing is precisely the right word to describe the feeling, I think.  It’s nearly a physical yearning, and it floors me every time it hits.  I touch my stomach and imagine what I’d look like 8 months pregnant, how it would feel to have a  tiny human being growing inside there, how completely my life would change the second I heard that first cry.

But I worry, too.  I worry about what kind of mother I’ll be, whether I’ll mellow out between now and the time my kid is a juice-spilling, sticky tornado of energy, whether I’ll be able to let go of my control-freak tendencies and raise healthy, well-adjusted kids, whether they’ll be out-of-control teens, and if they’ll hate me.

I long to be pregnant, but the idea of actually caring for a tiny person who needs all of me — even with the man I love beside me — seems unbearable, undoable, impossible.  And that makes me wonder if I’ll ever really be ready, and the idea that I might never be scares me.

Of course, as usual, I’m WAY ahead of myself, so I’ll just run and double check that I took my birth control pill this morning and move on!

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear; some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever — which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes.
— from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins

Dear Young Man Beside Me on the Metro This Afternoon:

If I can hear your music, with my processor turned all the way down, over the noise of the train, and seeping out from your headphones, you may be listening to your music a tad too loud.  Just sayin’.

Love,

Mel

In the childhood memories of every good cook, there’s a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot, and a mom.
— Barbara Costikyan

When I came home from work today, the foyer of my building smelled like tuna casserole, which reminded me of a funny story.

When Nate and I were kids — probably 8 and 10 or so — we asked our parents if we could make dinner for them.  They agreed, and we made them promise not to come in the kitchen while we cooked.  We decided on tuna noodle casserole, which our mom had made us plenty of times before.

So we set about crafting our casserole: egg noodles, tuna (of course), peas (I think), something to make it creamy (cream of mushroom soup, maybe?), and — just for good measure — a dollop of peanut butter.  I kid you not.

We put the whole concoction in the oven to bake and proudly served it up to our parents a little while later.  They dug in, and all of a sudden: Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.

We didn’t know we were supposed to cook the noodles first.

To my parents’ credit, they both cleaned their plates, and we laugh about it to this day.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
— Roman Polanski

This is a list of the American Film Institutes Top 100 Movies of the last 100 years (compiled in 2007).  Here’s what you do: Copy and paste this list into your blog, and bold the ones you’ve seen, then invite others to do the same (I suppose you could “tag” other bloggers, but I’m making this strictly voluntary).

1. Citizen Kane (1941)
2. The Godfather (1972)
3. Casablanca (1942)
4. Raging Bull (1980)
5. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
6. Gone With the Wind (1939)
7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
8. Schindler’s List (1993) [I own this, and have seen most of it, but I just can’t get through it]
9. Vertigo (1958)
10. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
11. City Lights (1931)
12. The Searchers (1956)
13. Star Wars (1977)
14. Psycho (1960)
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
16. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
17. The Graduate (1967)
18. The General (1927)
19. On the Waterfront (1954)
20. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
21. Chinatown (1974)
22. Some Like It Hot (1959)
23. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
24. E.T. The Extra-terrestrial (1982)
25. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
27. High Noon (1952)
28. All About Eve (1950)
29. Double Indemnity (1944)
30. Apocalypse Now (1979)
31. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
32. The Godfather Part II (1974)
33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
35. Annie Hall (1977)
36. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
37. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
39. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
40. The Sound of Music (1964)
41. King Kong (1933)
42. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
43. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
44. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
45. Shane (1953)
46. It Happened One Night (1934)
47. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
48. Rear Window (1954)
49. Intolerance (1916)
50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
51. West Side Story (1961)
52. Taxi Driver (1976)
53. The Deer Hunter (1978)
54. M*A*S*H (1970)
55. North by Northwest (1959)
56. Jaws (1975)
57. Rocky (1976)
58. The Gold Rush (1925)
59. Nashville (1975)
60. Duck Soup (1933)
61. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
62. American Graffiti (1973)
63. Cabaret (1972)
64. Network (1976)
65. The African Queen (1951)
66. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
68. Unforgiven (1992)
69. Tootsie (1982)
70. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
71. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
72. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
74. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
75. In the Heat of the Night (1967)
76. Forrest Gump (1994)
77. All the President’s Men (1976)
78. Modern Times (1936)
79. The Wild Bunch (1969)
80. The Apartment (1960)
81. Spartacus (1960)
82. Sunrise (1927)
83. Titanic (1997)
84. Easy Rider (1969)
85. A Night at the Opera (1935)
86. Platoon (1986)
87. 12 Angry Men (1957)
88. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
89. The Sixth Sense (1999)
90. Swing Time (1936)
91. Sophie’s Choice (1982)
92. Goodfellas (1990)
93. The French Connection (1971)
94. Pulp Fiction (1994)
95. The Last Picture Show (1971)
96. Do the Right Thing (1989)
97. Blade Runner (1982)
98. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
99. Toy Story (1995)
100. Ben-Hur (1959)

Note: I’ve seen bits and pieces of nearly all of these movies, but I only counted the ones I’ve seen all the way through.

Marriage or cohabitation is often a shift from teenage grazing or cooking for one to establishing a family identity.  It brings together two independent food choice systems to be coupled as one joint system.
— Amelia Lake

This title comes from an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie moves in with her boyfriend and laments the lack of personal space and time.  She says she can’t engage in her secret single behavior anymore – you know, the stuff you did at home alone when you were single and living on your own.  In Carrie’s case, her SSB was eating crackers and jelly; Miranda’s was deep conditioning her hands while watching infomercials; Charlotte’s was examining her pores for an hour every night before she went to bed; Samantha claimed to have no secret single behaviors.

I sure did, though, and not all of them I’m willing to share with you, but here’s a few I’ve come up with:

• eating macaroni and cheese from a box – David loves Velveeta Shells and Cheese, but I don’t think I’ve had Kraft Mac and Cheese since we started dating, mostly because I can eat a whole box in one sitting, and no one needs to see that!

• watching marathons of whatever cheesy show is on TLC on the weekends – my favorite is Say Yes to the Dress

• watching the E! red carpet coverage – all of it, from noon to 6 – for every major awards show (except the Grammys).  Now I mostly just watch a half hour before hand and then the show itself

• buying Pillsbury raw cookie dough and eating it right out of the package

What about you?