I Will Now Take a Few Questions ...

Jake recently coined the phrase "having a malaise attack" to explain the sensation we occasionally get, usually on Saturdays, when it's gray outside, we feel vaguely fatigued but unable to sleep, and our lives more or less become black holes of motivation and energy.

I'm having a malaise attack today.

Yeah, OK, so I've been having a malaise attack on and off for about five days now. Jake left me early Friday morning to go to a conference in Toronto. He'll be home tomorrow. So, that's six days (the longest we've been apart in five and a half years of marriage) of padding around the apartment, with no English classes to teach, battling my mounting malaise and self-loathing.

To be fair, I have done a few things, and some kind-hearted friends from church have invited me to a few activities. That's always good because, in addition to getting me out of the apartment, it helps me practice German and further hone the useful skills I've gained in Germany of being, what I like to call, a Labrador-retriever-style friend — meaning I'm loyal and obedient, I smile a lot and don't speak much, and although I don't understand a pretty large portion of what people say to me, I'm very attentive and relatively good at picking up on non-verbal cues. (All our kind German friends deserve medals for the patience they endlessly exhibit with me. And for managing to stick to German as much as possible when speaking to me although their English is light years ahead of my toddler-level German. They're all saints and entirely worthy of my Labrador-calliber loyalty.)

But I'm nearing the end now, and I'm dragging my feet. So, in an effort to do something other than eat Peanut M&Ms and watch YouTube, I'm going to answer a few reader questions (some expressed, others merely sensed).

Q. How is your mom?
A. She is doing so much better, and thanks again for everyone's thoughts and prayers. It has paid off. In one week she went from being unable to sit up, much less do anything else, without help and excruciating pain, to being able to get herself from her bed to her wheelchair and back all by herself. She also requested a decrease in her pain medications. Last weekend she started practicing getting around with a walker, and I just learned she's coming home today! (My dad, who returned to Idaho Falls without her and who has proven to be a truly miserable bachelor — and I quote: "All I eat is junk and I stay up too late" — couldn't be happier to have her back.)

Last weekend when my dad went back to Jackson to be with Mom, he brought a laptop and a webcam and set Mom up with Skype. We talked all weekend and she looks and sounds as chipper and cheerful as ever. Her message to AD readers: "Never go 10 days without having a bowel movement." I'll spare you the details she did not spare me. Suffice it to say, getting back on that horse is apparently a pretty harrowing experience.

Q. How is the pregnancy going?
A. Boy, thanks for asking! It's going great. The baby's moving around a lot and kicks hard enough now that if you put your hand on my belly, you can feel it. It's totally cool.

I went to a pregnancy information thing at the hospital last night with a friend and that was interesting. For starters, I felt like sort of like an unwed teenage mother. I was wearing dirty U2 T-shirt and hammered Nikes and surrounded by classy 30-year-old ladies in tasteful designer maternity wear and their glasses-wearing husbands in their slick just-got-off-work-from-my-upper-level-position-at-a-software-company duds. They all looked like they've had the baby room furnished for a year and read dozens of parenting books already. I'm sure they were all looking at me and thinking, "Oh, sweetie. Do you know what you're getting into?" I probably looked like the kind of person who'd bring the baby home from the hospital and put him to bed in a shoebox painstakingly lined with clean sweat socks.

Shockingly, I actually understood most of presentation and, during the tour, was able to stand without flinching next to all manner of horrifying-looking birthing contraptions. (I swear on my own grave, there were ropes hanging from the ceiling.) At one point, the nurse was explaining the birthing bathtub in one room and she flat out said that, although the warm water helps a lot with the pain, it's not really the tidiest method of birthing. She actually used the word "Schleim", which I'd never heard before, but was able to deduce immediately as "slime", and I totally busted a gut. And then noticed that no one else in the tour had cracked a smile.

Anyway, birth is going to be a riot. Can't hardly wait.

Q. How angry are you that Jake saw "The Dark Knight" in Toronto without you, considering you've been dying to see it for about two years and it doesn't open in Germany until Aug. 21 and even then you're going to have to go to Berlin to see it in English?
A. I'll be honest, at first I was a little peeved. But that was quickly replaced by overwhelming depression. Between you and me, though, if our positions were swapped, I totally would've done the same thing.

Q. On a scale of 1-10, after five days alone, how sick of yourself are you?
A. Excellent question. I'm going to go with 30.

Q. After reading this entry, we, your readers unanimously join you in that assertion.
A. Good to know.



JEM