Hi There

I’m now sufficiently annoyed with myself for abandoning my blog that I can force myself to go ahead and get things rolling again. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened in the last month-and-a-half to account for this hiatus. We put our heads down and bore through the end of that cold, long winter, and made it to spring. For some time I was too lazy to write plus quite preoccupied by Ruby’s present and future; at other times I was fantasizing about writing bigger things than SOFT SCIENCE, and the fantasies then weighed me down and paralyzed me. I had the opportunity to interview an inspiring advocate devoted to achieving major health care reform, a conversation I plan to write about soon.

I’ve felt a nagging anxiety about just when and how I will return to work as a nurse, what that will look like for our family; meanwhile I’ve become narcissistically contemplative of my present role as a housewife, reading Andre Dubus’ “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” — in which dishwashing and vacuuming, or their absence, bear heavy import in a classically frightening marriage — and watching the first season of Mad Men. I wondered if I was the first person to notice the best-ever use of a medical acronym as the character Roger Sterling is wheeled out of the office on a stretcher after having a heart attack while drunkenly cavorting with a random girl: He moans the girl’s name until Don Draper grips him by the hair and gives him a good smack in the face and says, “MONA! Your wife’s name is Mona,” which also happens to stand for Morphine, Oxygen, Nitroglycerin, and Aspirin, that is, as nurses and doctors learn in school, the immediate management for an acute myocardial infarction before hitting the cath lab.

Ruby visited my parents for spring break. She went to hip-hop camp at Imagination Stage, a lovely “inclusive” theater and camp in Bethesda that she has attended a few times before. I chose the hip-hop camp because for a while there letting her watch videos of hip-hop dancers like Les Twins, or Beyonce’s music videos, was the only way I could get her to sit on the toilet for long enough to pee. She has since begun to favor cooking videos.

Andrew and I thought about going on a little trip while Ruby was with my parents, but decided instead to stay home and revel in the joy of sleeping past six and staying out after dark. It was glorious.